"IF I DIE NEXT WEEK FROM A BLOOD CLOT, YOU'LL BE THE LAST journalist to have seen me and talked to me," she says. "Think of how great that article will be: `I Was the Last Person To Interview Sandra Bullock!"' The actress delivers this in a joking, "you'll win the lottery!" way. But a trace of natural resentment is also detectable-as if, on some small level, Bullock believes you wouldn't mind being the last person to interview her. She's thinking my death=your career high: the next best thing to Elvis walking into this Austin diner, sitting his white, spangly suited butt down, and taking a bite out of your turkey sandwich. For a moment there, you almost felt sorry for her. Almost. "Sandra, whatever you do, don't give that line to another writer next week." She reaches across the Formica table and steals another sour-cream-and-onion chip. Chips she told you to buy. "Okay," she says, smiling. "You got it." The star drives a big black Range Rover-ish thing and wears big black Range Rover-ish sunglasses that she describes as "Jackie O meets The Fly." Bullock likes being nearsighted. Without glasses, she doesn't have to deal with the world at large. "It's great," she says. "I see only what's in front of me. I don't see people pointing or being mean." With the glasses on, "you can hide. It's a great barrier. Like, `Now I can do anything."' Even take a wrong turn. "Where am I going?" she asks herself. "I just did the stupid­est thing. Okay, I'm a retard." She doubles back, giving a celebrity tour of Austin's attractions. There's Amy's Ice Cream, where they "smash in anything you want." And Antone's, the club where Stevie Ray Vaughan got his start. Underneath that bridge in the distance thousands of bats hang out, waiting for sunset, when they swarm from beneath and black-cloud the sky. To the right is an old build­ing Bullock has just bought. She hopes to turn it into a film center of sorts, along with fellow Austin­based moviemakers Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused) and Robert Rodriguez (Desperado).

"Mia Hamm lives here," she says, ticking off the other local notables. "And Lance Armstrong!" And Matthew McConaughey, who was arrested last October after neighbours complained about loud music coming from his house. "I almost passed out at the wheel when I heard the news," Bullock says, recalling the incident. "But then I thought, `Wait a minute-why was he arrested? He was naked and playing bongos? But he's always nmning around naked!' ~hen you look like that, you should be en­titled to run around naked-until it starts sagging. And then I said, `I know! He refused to put on his clothes. On principle.' Then my sister called and said, `Let me read you the transcript of Matthews arrest: `Sir, you're going to have to put on your clothes.' `Fuck you.' " Bullock laughs, really hard.

"She called it!" McConaughey says. "I wouldn't put my clothes on. She said, `I knew it! They caught you being you!' " The brush with the law-even the discovery of a bong-only added to McConaugh­ey's good ol' boy appeal. "Everyone's got a sense of humour about it-Austin sure did," says the actor, who paid a $So fine for disturbing the peace. "I was the first one laughing. But I was also like, `Well, damn it, I don't want to be in jail. That's going to piss Mom off.' "

That attitude is just what Bullock loves about him. "He's such a guy," Bullock says with obvious affection, "He got arrested, and he had a good time!" After co-starring in 1996's A Time to Kill, the two began a romance that kept the press guessing. "I got a lot of flak," she says. "But Matthew was just coming into his own. I didn't want him to have that stigma of being my boyfriend. I never said, `We're just friends.' I said, `We're friends.' And we were friends! I never put a just in there, be­cause I didn't want to, like, really be lying." Dizzying semantics aside, now they truly are just friends-the very best of just friends.

"I've never been public about my relationships , ever," Bullock says. "I'd say 85 percent of what's out ­there is not even true. It's just someone with a typewriter needing a story. Katharine Hepburn said a great thing: `I don't care what people write about me as long as it's not true.'

"Capitol! Capitol! Capitol!" Bullock erupts one hand on the wheel, the other pointing urgently ­out the passenger window. She eases off the gas,' providing a slow motion sighting of the domed,' government building sitting between two long; rows of parallel city blocks. Now you see it, now you don't. A cameo appearance.

It's fast turning to dusk. Neon lights begin to ` hum on storefronts and bars. Bullock swaps her specs for a pair of small wire rims. "That's the first place I ever stayed when I got here. We call it the Penis Motel," she says, directing your attention to the big phallic sign that reads AUSTIN MOTEL. The accommodations look typically small-town and sad, but she sees it differently. "I wanted a place that was L-shaped and had a pool, because when I was little we always stayed in those motels."

She's quiet, thinking. A lunar eclipse has be­gun, the earth's shadow slowly edging across the full moon. A rare occurrence. "I wish I had a camera to get a picture of it," Bullock says. "I don't have the right kind." Use a flash? She ducks her head a bit to look out the wind­shield and up to the sky. "I used to think you could," she says wistfully. "But then a friend said, `How do you think the flash is going to make it to that place?"'

TWO THINGS SCARED SANDRA BUL­LOCK after reading-and loving-the script for 28 Days. She was afraid that it was sent to her because, as she puts it, "they wanted cutesy." And she was afraid she was going to have to turn it down if that's what they wanted. "I've been in enough films where the studio wanted that extra little cuteness to make it sell able," she says. "It destroyed what the film was, and the film bombed."

It's easy to see Bullock in the role of a party girl gossip columnist whose "I'll drink (too much) to that!" lifestyle escalates out of control. But the iffy part for any actor in a rehab movie is - the rehabbing. Playing drunk is easy. It's the hang over and recovery process that's hard to live through. Especially for the audience. "Here's the thing," di­rector Betty Thomas says. "I don't think it's that easy to make a com­edy drama out of this subject. So you need the girl next door, okay?

It's Sandy. She seems like the most normal woman in the world. Which means that everybody is sus­ceptible to this shit. You knock them for a loop."

Even after taking the part, Bullock says, she kept asking Thomas, "Are you sure you want me? Are you sure you know what you're doing?" To en­sure that she did, Thomas, whose credits include The Brady Bunch Movie and Dr. Dolittle, checked into the Sierra Tucson rehab center. "The first day I was, `Betty Thomas, visitor.' But the day after, I

Was, `Betty Thomas, WORKAHOLIC, FOOD ISSUES . . .' "

Then it was Bullock's turn. "It wasn't like it had been set up by a film company and you were pro­tected," the actress says. "I was there by myself. And it was sooo frightening. The other patients didn't want me to be there. I said, `Let me just tell you my history and my troubles. . . .' I just gave away everything in my life. And I sat there and said, `This will either come around and slap me some other time, or they're going to embrace it.' "

Bullock has made her fortune playing the on­screen equivalent of a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get-but you can count on it being sweet and making you feel good: Speed, While you were Sleeping, The Net, Hope Floats, even Forces of Nature. In Hollywood, "they have a tendency to compartmentalize people," says Joel Schumacher, who directed Bullock in A Time to Kill. "If you get stamped `the girl next door,' they want you to do that over and over and over again-until they don't need you anymore. It's a platinum cage."

Which is why, more and more of ten, you'll find Bullock listed in the credits as writer-director (the short Making Sandwiches), executive pro­ducer (Practical Magic, Hope Floats), and producer (Gun Shy). She's even the location scout for her next proj­ect, Miss Congeniality, a comedy that she describes as "my Dumb and Dumber." (She's also producing

, which means she'll have her choco­late and eat it too.)

The first rehearsal for z8 Days was a quiet, pivotal scene between Bullock's character and her sister played by Elizabeth Perkins. "They were just sitting on a couch, reading their lines," Thomas recalls, "and there wasn't a dry eye in the room. Once I saw that, I thought, Hol shit! This could work."

BUT SHE'S NOT THE GIRL NEXT DOOR. Sorry. There's been a mis­take. A misunderstanding. Or rather, a misconcep­tion. No arguments, please! Sir, sir, that includes you. Listen up, people! Thank you. Now, if every one would just take a seat, we'll get some experts in here to try and clear this whole thing up. Sir, please stop crying. If you can't calm down, you're going to be asked to leave.

All right. Our first speaker starred with Sandra in Demolition Man, Mr. Sylvester Stallone: "The first time I met Sandy, I had just come from the golf course, and I was using a tee for a toothpick, and she said, `You look like half a vampire.' I went, `That's pretty good for a girl that doesn't have a job yet. Let's start the relationship with a major insult and work our way down.' " Not exactly girlish, next-door behaviour. Shhh! Quiet everyone! Mr. Stallone, please continue: "Sandy's very deep. You think you've seen it all, but like a magician, there are a lot more tricks there. More sleight of hand. She's not the girl next door. No, no, no. She's the girl who you wished lived next door." Mmm hmm, very well put, Mr. Stallone.

Our next guest also worked with Sandra Bullock on Demolition Man and then starred with her in Two If by Sea, Mr. Denis Leary: "Unfortunately for Sandy, Girl Next Door was the easiest label they could put on her. If you're good at comedy, and you have a natural sense of timing-you're that. Same thing with SandraBullock." Good point, Mr. Leary.

The legendary low-budget producer Roger Corman cast Sandra early in her career, in Fire on the Amazon. Now he plans to re-release the movie, with a naughty sex scene restored. Would you care to elaborate, Mr. Corman? "Sandra and Craig Sheffer have won the trust of the Indians and they're given a liquid to drink out of a ceremonial gourd. The liquid is a hallucinogenic. We intercut the drinking of the liquid and the dancing of the Indians and the beating of the drums with them making love-he's behind her. It's a very beautiful and necessary scene." To be sure. But certainly not the kind of thing a girl next door would do.

Okay, now we have the actor who directed Sandra in Practical Magic and even attended a New Year's Eve party at her home in Austin-Mr. Griffin Dunne: "I love it when she speaks German. I keep waiting for her to put the rubber gloves on! And she'd do it too!" That's . . . lovely. Could someone please call an ambulance for the woman whose heart just stopped?

Moving on. Our last guest is the executive vice-president of Sandra's production company, Fortis Films, and someone who knows her very, very well . . . her younger sister, Gesine: "When I was really little, she was mean. Like, pincny. See! Not always nice.

Mr. Leary? You have something to add? "Yeah. Even though Sandy's the girl next door in everybody's eyes, I don't understand that. First of all, the girl next door to me, I just saw her over the holidays-this girl, Nancy-real kind of pretty, but tough-talking. If you say the wrong thing, she's, like, `I'll kick your ass!' " Thank you, Mr. Leary. Please put out your cigarette.

BULLOCK ENTERS A SUITE IN NEW YORK CITY'S ST.

Regis Hotel, wearing an ankle-length quilted = skirt, a sweater, boots fit for combat, and an air of let's-get-to-it-ness. She's been to this rodeo be­fore: meeting a journalist. "I feel hypocritical sometimes," Bullock admits, picking the raisins out of a so-so room-service cookie. "I was upstairs going, `I can't go down and do an interview about me. I'm only going to give away certain information that makes me seem boring, and makes me come across as the stereotypical Chick Who Lives Next Door.' " She pretty much delivers on her statement until Gesine, who has been in a Miss Congeniality meeting upstairs, stops by. Bullock, brightens at the intrusion. "We have a terrorist quandary with the script," Gesine says. "I want to go outside and walk around for a while. I'm tired of all the pastel." Not so fast, sister! Gesine gamely sits down next to Bullock, who says, teasingly, "Before she says anything, let me find that soft spot under her arm for pinching." Gesine, an attorney, says that working in the movie business is not so far removed from practicing law: "Holly wood is just one step up on Dante's rungs of hell."

Four and a half years older than her baby sister; Bullock remembers when Gesine was born. "I was horrible to her!" she says. "My grandmother swears I

tried to kill her." Then, turning to Gesine: "Apparently I tried to stab you with some scissors once. But I say you ran into them." Gesine exclaims, "We have video footage of you just smacking me around, going, `What month were you born! What month were you born!' "

The two spent much of their childhood Nuremberg, Germany, famous for its great opera companies. "It was like a fairy tale," Gesine says. Bullock nods, adding, "All castles and cafes and not a single car." Their mother, Helga, a star so- prano, was a German Maria Callas look-alike. Twelve years her senior, their father, John-who-works as Bullock's business adviser-was a Pentagon official and a voice coach. The children's per sonalities are rellected in their favorite operas. Gesine, shy and studious, loves La Boheme. Sandra. dramatic and daring, prefers Salome. The girls spent long hours in opera houses, " tucked in the audience or backstage where "we would huddle in the musty smells," Bullock recalls.

"Everything was large and colorful and really loud. Nap time they would stick us in the wardrobe room. And the wardrobe mistress would give us chocolates." But, the actress admits, "The last thing I wanted to do was sit through an opera. I wanted nothing more than to have the country­club parents, and the espadrilles and the mono­grams. I wanted my parents to be . . . It was just an odd upbringing."

And not all sweetness and light. When the Bul­locks settled in Virginia, I3 year-old Sandra was an ugly duckling. "And in junior high, the initiation is that you find certain people and just beat the tar out of them. And I was that person. People were kind of . . . They were a little abusive." Gesine vouches for this: "She got her ass kicked every day. Every day she came home crying."

"Kids can be cruel," Bullock says. "There were a lot of words used. Things thrown. It was horri­ble. And my mother wouldn't believe it: `Why would anyone want to hurt you?' Finally, my counsellor called: `They're terrorizing your daugh­ter!' " By the time Bullock enrolled in Arlington's Washington-Lee High School, she had grown into her beauty. She wore mono­grammed sweaters, had a letterman boyfriend and a pair of pom-poms. Her senior year, she was named Class Clown. "And what's funny is I cannot remember the last name of my best friend in high school " Bullock says evenly. "But I can re­member the first and last names of every single person that terrorized me in junior high." She shakes her head. "It taught me to be incredibly kind to people."

SHE NEEDS TO HAVE HER HEAD examined. Bullock left Manhattan and went snowboarding in Sun Val­ley before returning to Austin. "I pulled a really def power move on the double blue," she says, driving to her house in the woods. "And then I took this really heavy spill. I should have worn a helmet." She has just returned from the neurologist, who wants her to have an MRI tomorrow. "And I'm reading all these things on his wall. `Concussion, blood clot, brain damage' . . . What if he finds something else?" she says, anxiously. "That's the scary part." What some­thing else? "I don't know. The real reason I do what I do?"

The security wall glides open, re­vealing what McConaughey jokingly calls "that little shack castle" Bullock has been building for two years in the woods outside Austin. "This house is a weird combination of Southern and medieval," she says, turning the key. "Matthew came here and said, `You are a witch. But you're a good witch.' " A life-size antique statue of Saint Michael looks down from a second-floor alcove, wings spread. "What did he do?" Bullock asks, then answers her own question: "Saintly things." The ceilings are so high you could bungee-jump from the beams. She walks through the nearly finished work in progress, her footsteps echoing on the wooden floors. In the dining room hangs an oil of a large reclining naked lady, which is illuminated by a 1920's crystal chandelier from Paris. There are fireplaces upstairs, downstairs, even in the dining area of the kitchen. "This is the boudoir," Bullock says. Angels fly from the chandelier. Double French doors open to a small stone-walled court­yard with an outside fireplace and a Jacuzzi. Bullock designed her huge sleigh bed with rollers "so ­that I can roll it outside to sleep under the stars," she says, pushing it around.

There's a screening room, a gym, a darkroom, and a spiral staircase leading to the second floor, which has three bedrooms, including one with a Moroccan feel, lit by cande­labra, that Bullock predicts will be "a great room for sex." When it comes to photographs and art­work, Bullock is drawn to the

rovocative. There is an intense P

copper etching, entitled The Day Everything Got Into My Head. And a large, abstract Woman With Child. Pointing to the mother's tube­sock breasts, Bullock announces, "That's what our boobs are going to look like when we have kids."

Behind the house is a dark-blue tiled pool, and a hundred yards be­yond that, the lake. Bullock leads the winding way to the guest house, which was the original home on the property. The scent of jasmine and cedar fill the night air, as does the sound of deep, soulful chimes. A towheaded boy watches from the window. "He scares people," Bul­lock says, walking to him, patting his head. The child stands mute. Even up close the statue-a gift from a costume designer in England­looks real. Adding to the night gallery of occupants is an antique bronze carousel camel and a Bob's Big Boy. So this is where he lives.

Bullock moves into the kitchen and pushes a tape into the VCR. It's a music video for the Austin musician Bob Schneider that she produced for the Gun Shy soundtrack. Disney, the studio that released Gun Shy, was allegedly willing to spend $250,000 on a music video for Big Kenny-a Disney artist. But Bullock had promised one to Schneider. "She discovered him " says her friend Rosanna Arquette, who just hap­pens to be listening to Schneider's album when she calls. "He's so great." In the end, Disney made the Big Kennyvideo, and gave Bullock $10,000 to make one for Schneider's "Round & Round." She chipped in another $15,000 and hit up friends to work for free.

"Bob and I were trying to do his makeup like the patient in The Cabinet o. f 'Dr. Caligari," recalls pho­tographer Dan Winters, one of Bullock's oldest friends and the director of the video. "We had these huge black circles around his eyes. And Sandy said, `There's no way this is going to fly. It's the first time people are going to see him, and you're not going to know what he looks like! He looks like death!' And we got in this huge argument." Which is nothing new. "We love to fight," Winters says fondly. "She says she represents the voice of the mainstream, and I definitely try to buck it."

Watching "Round & Round," Bullock calls the shots. "That's the old Victrola my dad gave me for Christmas," she says, stroking the screen. "The opera singing you hear? My mother. There's me. . . ." Aren't she and Schneider friends-as in, she wouldn't put a just between are and friends? "Yep," she says, roses in her cheeks. Busted, Bullock shakes her head, smiling. "I'm not going to say anything." But she's not so tough: "Okay, it's fair to say I'm dating Bob Schneider."

When the couple first started coupling, Bul­lock had to suffer through such tabloid headlines as SANDRA BULLOCK STOLE MY MAN! (Schneider had been seeing another woman.) For a while it was "hugely devastating," Winters says. "Sandy had this funny thing on her refrigerator. A spoof on it that someone had made up: BOB SCHNEIDER STOLE MY MAN! It's exactly like an Enquirer piece, but it's Bob and these two guys, like, Brad and Bill. It was a whole, like, gay thing and it was hilarious. The intention of it was to lighten the air."

Saturday night Schneider is playing Antone's. He's been big on the Austin music scene a lot longer than he's been dating Sandra Bullock. Schneider's album, Lonelyland, is number one at the local music store, Waterloo Records. "He's enormously talented," Dunne says. "It's not like she's doing him a favour." Indeed. "How do you date Sandra Bullock?" Leary asks rhetorically. "I mean, think about it."

It's complicated. "I have a fear of saying the L- word," Bullock says. "Oh my God! I always feel like the minute I say it the sky will fall. I'm like, `I lllllllllloooooo . . .' Love is a bad, bad thing!" So she's forced to use code. "I've said `I adore you,' and that was my way of, like, saying . . . because it felt the same and I meant exactly that."

"One of the first times I met Sandy she told me she had a recurring nightmare that she's getting married, and the person she's supposed to marry is in the audience," says actor Tate Donovan, whom Bullock met while making Love Potion No. 9 and dated for four years. "She looks back, and she knows that she's married the wrong guy." Re­counting the dream, Bullock says she can still re­member "the sense of doom and sadness that would hit every time." So she's the runaway bride. "Yeah! That's me! A friend of mine says, `You're re­ally good at puttin' on the running shoes-you don't ever take them off.' Maybe instead of get­ting an MRI, I just need to go to a week of inten­sive therapy."

But after enough time has passed, she'll turn around and run back into a friendship. "You real ize the love you have is still there even if you're not intimate," she says. "I sometimes can't grasp it. I'm like, `It should be working out intimately!' But no, it's like having a girlfriend you really love who happens to have no breasts."

"We have a great sense of nostalgia," Donovan says. "You know why you fell in love and why you fell out of love, and yet you recognize what a great person each of you is." He adds, "We had a good relationship, but I think Sandy and Matthew Mc­Conaughey seemed perfect for each other."

Theirs was what Winters calls "big-time, big­ time" love. "It was amazing, exhilarating," Says

Winters, who knew McConaughey and Donovan before Bullock, and is close friends with them. "But you know what they say about timing." Ask McConaughey if he might be the guy in the dream who's sitting in the church audience, and he replies, "Maybe. Good Lord willing. We got a lot of years ahead of us. We'll see."

"We keep laughing about it, like, who knows where we'll end up?" Bullock says. McConaughey still uses the deodorant she talked him into trying. He can recall the conversation like it was yester day. "I'm like, `Sandy, it's my natural smell. It's the smell of me. It's the smell of man.' And she was like, `You know what, Matthew?' - this was after five years. She goes, `I agree with you. A little bit is good. A little bit is sexy. A little bit is nice. But, oh, boy, sometimes a lot can just be a bit much. Could you just use, maybe, like, the salt rock?' And sure as shittin' I put some on this morning."

And what about Bob? "He's fantastic," Dono­van says. "Awesome," Winters adds. "We give Bob the thumbs-up. They kinda fit. He's Texan via Germany. We all talk German all the time. I terribly funny." want," Bullock says good-naturedly. "I'm not talking about my love life until I get married." Speaking of which: "If you do anything other than the missionary position with your wife in this state,

it's against the law." This she discovered while do­ing legal research for A Time to Kill. Does Bullock break the Iaw? "Oh, yeah, baby!"

"CAN I HAVE YOUR AUTOGRAPH?" THE LITTLE GIRL asks shyly. Bullock is sitting at a long table in Güero's, a popular Mexican restaurant in Austin. She takes her pen and raises an eyebrow: "Can you say `Please?' " Even though she's sitting in the mid­dle of a group of some zo people (friends and friends of friends), she can't help but get discovered. Bul­lock hasn't even had a chance to order a margarita.

Tom Baroccio -"Mr. Flash"- is here tonight. A self-described "Mexican photographer with an Ital­ian name who's an American citizen with a Japanese camera," he'll take your Polaroid for five bucks and put it in a paper frame. Baroccio is a big, bespecta­cled man with an eye for talent. He circles. Bullock ignores. She's too busy talking girl talk and making eyes at the two Buddha babies drooling nearby.

On her way to the door, she makes his night. "Mr. Flash? Will you take our picture?" Bullock asks. What, are you kidding? He poses the partic­ipants and blast! Waiting for the picture to develop, he recites a poem called "The Key to a Lasting Re­lationship." "Do you know this one?" he asks Bul­lock. She shakes her head nervously. "What is the key to a lasting relationship?" he begins. "Touch up the proof, photographer / Take off that extra chin / Remove the moles and fill up the holes / And smooth my wrinkled skin. / Raise those bags underneath my eyes / Fix up my nose, I plead / And add some hair l I do not care / To look so much like me." Bullock laughs, thanking him.

She heads out to the car. Her friends want to go rock 'n' bowling, but she begs off. Bullock doesn't know it yet, but tomorrow the doctor will examine her head and tell her she has a hell of a lot longer than one week to live.

So don't believe anything you read. "I swear to God, nothing that has been printed about me in the last few years has been true," Bullock says. "But there's always, like, a quote or a semi-quote that you know you've said to somebody at some time-and that's what freaks you out. There's a smidgen of truth in there somewhere.

"I know my friends don't talk," she continues. "They're so great. They could have made a killing. Especially the ones who are out of work. A friend of mine has a picture where- I swear- I look pregnant. And I said, `Okay, if you ever need money, call me and tell me you're submitting it to someplace, saying that you work with me, I'm pregnant, and you got the picture.' I gave him per mission to do that." She smiles. "I look good pregnant. Hey, I don't care what they write. . . ." As long as it's not true.