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Dwayne Johnson in Rolling Stone Magazine...April 2002
The Rock Chows Down

Get ready, Mummy, your candy-ass is next


The Rock is throwing a party in his stomach. It happens only once a week. For the other six days, the Rock eats to create the body he wants and needs, as an athlete and a wrestler and an actor. On the seventh day, he eats whatever the hell he wants to. "Treat yourself, don't cheat yourself," says the man whose real name is Dwayne Johnson and who is both the main attraction of the World Wrestling Federation and, if his first starring movie role, in The Scorpion King, works out as he expects, Hollywood's new action hero. Still, on the one day in seven when the Rock rolls freely, and assuming he steers clear of Burger King ("Don't let me find a Burger King," he warns, and though you don't quite know what this warning means, you know to take it seriously), he has two constant desires.

(1) Pizza. Preferably from a mom-and-pop operation rather than a chain. His favorite toppings are pepperoni and ham-and-pineapple. But pizza pales against his passion for...

(2) Doughnuts. During such a day, the Rock will happily eat -- and he thinks there is nothing strange about this -- around eighteen doughnuts. "You've got to start off with a nice base of the glazed," he says of his Dunkin' Donuts fetish. "Then you can switch to the chocolate frosted and the chocolate-chocolate frosted, then the blueberry cake, then -- just for good measure -- you throw in a bear claw."

Just for good measure.

At the end of this particular week in March, the Rock will face Hulk Hogan at WrestleMania X8, the annual four-hour extravaganza ($39.95 on pay-per-view) that is wrestling's Super Bowl (or whatever the appropriate comparison is when you're not presenting sporting competition but "sports entertainment," in which predetermined conflicts are acted out with every furious, absurd and heroic flourish the wrestlers and their writers can dream up). Now it's the Rock vs. Hulk Hogan -- who was wrestling's biggest name in its first boom period, in the Eighties, but had until recently been in a rival wrestling organization. The match is a very big deal for the WWF, where the Rock has risen in six years from nobody to its star. "It's two iconic figures," says the Rock of the fight to come. In the past few weeks they have been goading each other on TV. Hogan has supposedly injured the Rock by hitting him with a hammer and then, taking the wheel of a semi, ramming the ambulance in which the Rock was taken away. "In two weeks he has done more to me than anyone has ever done to the Rock in five years," says the Rock. The moment of truth is near.

The Rock's victory at WrestleMania is now history. But today, in Detroit, they will film wrestling's Monday-night cable show, RAW. Tomorrow, in Cleveland, they will tape wrestling's Thursday-night network show, SmackDown! This morning, however, the Rock needs a guitar string. Last night he was sitting alone in his hotel room, strumming Willie Nelson's "Crazy," when his lower E string snapped. He has spent the morning looking for a replacement. When he picks me up, in the back of his car is the guitar and a book, The New Essential Contemporary Blues Guitar.

Inside Detroit's Joe Louis Arena, he checks with the merchandiser about how his new T-shirts fared in San Antonio. (These say get ready on the front; your candy-ass is next on the back.) They sold out. "We did $13.47 a head," the Rock is told, and he nods approvingly.

The Rock is ushered into a locker room to record an interview that will be used in the opener for WrestleMania. I sit out of the way, ready to be introduced.

"Chris is from Blue Boy magazine," the Rock says earnestly. "It's the premier gay magazine in the country. He's doing a report on us, and I told him this was the room where he could get most of his vibe." I ask the WWF crew whether they'll be keeping their clothes on much longer, and there is a nervous pause before they laugh; then the Rock reintroduces me.

In this world, truth and fantasy wriggle in and out of each other on a number of levels. For most of this interview, the Rock hypes up the coming match, but he's not comfortable with a question about whether it eats him up that he's never won at WrestleMania.

"No," he says, "because our business is a work, so it doesn't matter to me whether I win or lose."

The wrestlers seem a little taken aback. A "work" is the behind-the-scenes wrestling term for something that is scripted or acted. "It's one of those tricky questions," the Rock says. "It's like asking Tom Cruise, 'Did you get upset when Iceman was shooting at you?' What the fuck are you talking about?"

Three drinks of which Dwayne Johnson is fond:
(1) Jack Daniel's with sweet tea.
(2) Apple martinis.
(3) The Brown Bedina.

Possibly you are not familiar with the third of these. It is a cocktail of his own invention. "Let me tell you, my friend," he says. "First off, Kahlua. Then vanilla Stoli and then diet Dr. Pepper."

I express my reservations.

"Tastes great," he says, "and it's good for the palate."

The Rock drives to a powerhouse gym in a Detroit mall for his daily thirty-minute workout. He works a different body part each day. To focus, he listens to music. It's always rap when he's in the gym.

The Rock, who lives in Florida but spends more than 200 days a year on the road, had two days off a while back. His wife, Dany Garcia, who was then an associate vice president at Merrill Lynch (she is now CEO of a private hedge fund), told him that she had to fly to Austin to pick up an award. Just two precious days off. But he figured he should go with her, support her, as she had done so many times for him.

The award was a ruse. Dany had arranged for him to hang out for the day with his hero, Willie Nelson. They even duetted a little. "I was so fucking excited," the Rock recalls. He has loved Willie for years. It was Willie on the cassette player when young Dwayne would accompany his father, wrestler Rocky Johnson, on road trips.

If you want to hear the Rock sing, and you missed his Elvis cameo on Saturday Night Live, you can find him on the album WWF: The Music Vol. 5, alongside Slick Rick, on a dazzlingly mediocre rap song called "Pie." Perhaps unnecessarily, he clarifies what pie means. "Pussy," he says. "Poontang pie."

I ask him whether his wife, who stays close to home with their eight-month-old daughter, Simone, enjoys that song.

"No," he says. "Not at all. No."

When I ask Dany, she says, "Whenever he sings it, his mom and I cringe. We're like, 'Oooh, Dwayne.' But it became a phenomenon for the wrestling fans, who loved it. Dwayne always gets very businesslike and says,' 'OK, let me tell you why we did this.'"

At the gym, after he grabs a bottle of ABB Diet Turbo Tea, the Rock talks about his childhood. He is half black (his father's side) and half Samoan (his mother's). Dwayne Johnson grew up speaking English and some Samoan. Dwayne's parents met in San Francisco, and that was where he spent his earliest childhood. After that they kept on the move. Because his father was often wrestling, his mother was the disciplinarian. (When I ask Dwayne later whether he did any acting as a kid, he says, "Yeah -- I used to act like I wasn't afraid of my mom's belt.") He'd threaten to call the police on her, but he didn't mean it. "They were well-deserved belt whuppings," he now says.

At school, he excelled at football and was accepted to play at the University of Miami. He thought he was going to make the NFL, but a back injury eventually derailed that career. There, he met wife-to-be Dany. "He had an extreme amount of confidence, this eighteen-year-old, punky football player," she recalls. "The other thing that I fell in love with is that he's a very black-and-white moral person when it comes to ethics and how to live his life."

At Miami, he studied criminology, and he considered going to work for the Secret Service. Or the FBI. Or the CIA. "I was always interested in doing undercover work," he says. "Probably because I spent so much time in police stations when I was young, getting arrested." He says he was arrested about six times, always for fighting in public. (Fighting in public . . . it starts as a hobby, ends up as a career.) The pronounced horizontal scar on the outside of his right arm just below the shoulder came from a glass wound received in such a fight when he was seventeen. "It was just one of those stupid things," he says.

A few questions, some vaguely impertinent.

What percentage of your success is based on having an unusually mobile eyebrow?

"Good question. [Considers for a while] A very small percentage. One percent. It's a nice little idiosyncrasy."

To get into the deep questions, what's with that Scorpion King hair? It's like Bo Derek on steroids, isn't it?

"I dug the look. Yeah. [Getting playful] And in a strange way it was exciting. . . . No, wait, I didn't mean that."

When did you last wear a dress?

"Two weeks ago, after six Brown Bedinas. On a full moon."

The Rock never pretends that wrestling is not prearranged -- he says that he's known about the Rock vs. Hogan story line since December -- but he still often talks about what is happening in the ring as an emotional drama. Backstage in the catering area in Detroit, he keenly watches a video in which beer cans are thrown into the ring as props for his bout with Stone Cold Steve Austin. "See?" he says, laughing. "Here I am playing fucking catch with these beer cans, obviously showing the reason why I didn't play receiver in college."

Austin is one of the two wrestlers, the other being Y2J, a.k.a. Chris Jericho, whom the Rock considers close friends. "Very, very few genuine friends," he mutters. "I think it's probably just the industry, and how my life is."

"I remember when he first broke in," says Austin. "He put this cocky, arrogant character out there, and people just hated his guts, and then that started flipping right back around for him, and the people started loving the hell out of him. When he's being the Rock he's just an amped-up version of himself, just like Stone Cold is for me."

Late in the afternoon, before the doors open, I sit in the empty arena as the Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Hulk Hogan, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash talk through tonight's encounter; it's the first time the five of them will have been in the ring together. They act out various moves without actually having much physical contact. "It was important we walked through it and understood tendencies," says the Rock. He's been around this kind of thing most of his life. He was eleven, hanging out at Madison Square Garden, when he first met Hogan. "He was on fire. I was in awe of him." Does the Rock remember what Hogan said to him? "I'll never forget it: 'How are you doing, kid?'"

Some domestic insights: when Dwayne Johnson is at home with his new daughter, he changes diapers. "It's a big process," he says, "like surgery, when I change a diaper."

"He's got this agreement with Simone," says Dany, "where she doesn't actually poop when she's with him. So he's dealing with wet diapers only. That's a different ballpark."

Thoughtfully, the Rock also brings home his used wrestling trunks and washes them himself. "I wouldn't subject anyone to that brutal stench of sweat and funk," he says. He uses Tide liquid ("Powders tend to cake," he explains), on the heavy-duty cold setting.

Any fabric softener?

"No, I'm not a fabric-softener type of guy."

Tonight we sit in the medical room of the Detroit Red Wings; in cupboards are bandages and painkillers. Some things can't be faked in wrestling -- the bodies really hit the ground hard. In public, the wrestlers may strut, but backstage, as they wander around with plates piled with chicken, you wouldn't believe the hobbling.

As a wrestler, the Rock has been lucky. He's had one knee surgery -- "a scope; they had to clean out some stuff." He prides himself on knowing when a little well-applied charisma is worth more than a dazzling physical move. "Our money in this industry is made right here" -- as he says this the Rock is framing his face with his hands.

Awful, real things have happened in wrestling rings. "Within the same year [1999], I lost two friends," the Rock says. Owen Hart died when his harness became detached and he fell from the ceiling of an auditorium. Darren Drozdov landed on top of his head and was paralyzed from the waist down.

Since then, the Rock has wrestled more safely. "Accidents happen," he says. But he avoids moves that place his feet over his head. "I think about those guys every single day," he says. "Every single day." It has left him with a particular superstition: Not only will he, like most decent citizens, not park in a handicapped-parking space, he won't even back into one to turn around.

If disgruntled democrats need a new scapegoat for 2000's election fiasco, the Rock will do nicely. He cast his vote for G.W. Bush in Florida. "It was my vote that made him president," the Rock says. In August 2000, the Rock spoke at the Republican convention. Dwayne Johnson had registered to vote just the previous day, and though Republicans kept congratulating him for sharing their creed, he had registered as an independent and was not yet committed. At the convention, he sat with Barbara and George Bush Sr. "They were very nice," he says. "Big fans." You seriously think, I ask, that George Bush Sr. sits down and watches the WWF?

"From what I'm told," says the Rock, "his office had called us and requested the entire set of WrestleMania for his grandkids. So whether he watches the entire show... maybe he's a Scorpion King fan."

The Rock mentions that he recently met two of those grandkids -- Dubya's daughters -- at a Los Angeles party. One of his publicists nearly shooed the overeager girls away -- "Excuse me! You can't put your hands on him!" -- until the Rock stepped in. "They said, 'We're all such big fans, we watch you all the time, and you spoke on my dad's behalf...'"

In fact, the Rock made himself equally available to the Democratic convention. He watched a couple of the debates but decided he felt comfortable with Bush. He also liked the fact that, just as the Rock came from a line of wrestlers, Bush's dad had been president. Another incident during the campaign strangely colored his view of Bush's opponent. The Rock was arriving somewhere in a helicopter, in a hurry, and there were all these cop cars below, and limos and a big plane where they were supposed to land. The Rock told the pilot to land anyway. People in flak jackets ran toward them, and they only calmed down when he explained that he was the Rock. (In a crisis, nothing calms like celebrity.) He discovered that his landing had disrupted Al Gore's departure.

"And," he says, not entirely seriously but, I think, not entirely flippantly either, "I think, 'OK, I was able to land my helicopter next to your plane -- I'm voting for the other guy.' That thing should've been shot down, if you think about it."

Oh, I say, I'm sure Bush would have shot you down.

"Right," says the Rock. "Exactly."

But, I ask, it's not a given that you'll vote Republican again?

"No. My vote's in play." Now he's simply having fun. "And what sways my decisions are obviously the important things: whether or not my helicopter can land, what pizza he likes..."

After the night's wrestling goes as planned, the Rock puts Hawaiian singer Big Iz in the car CD player ("No Ludacris at this time of night") and drives me the wrong way down several one-way streets to my hotel before disappearing to his own hotel with his guitar.

The next day, I read the Rock a passage from his best seller, The Rock Says..., describing the wrestler's life on the road: "A world in which aching joints are anesthetized by the roar of a crowd, and the loneliness of life on the road is soothed by the sweetness of alcohol and drugs and the touch of strange flesh."

The Rock laughs for quite a while -- long enough, perhaps, to gather his thoughts. "That was my writer taking liberties," he says. "I didn't say those exact words verbatim. I'm not big on strip clubs. I might have dropped a dollar or two in a thong every now and then, but I'm really not big on going out." (I ask whether he has his wife's permission to drop the occasional dollar in this manner. "Absolutely... unequivocally . . . not," he says.)

Most nights on the road, the Rock likes to go back to his room, eat and sit alone, playing guitar, unwinding until sleep claims him, about three in the morning. When he can, he prefers to drive to the next destination. "I'm pretty much a loner on the road," he says.

The next day we meet at a restaurant near his hotel. The Rock orders something to get himself going: "Ten egg whites, scrambled, biscuits... To start off with, I'll have some bananas and cottage cheese... Also, I'll have some cinnamon pancakes, three..." The Rock tries to eat between 250 and 275 grams of protein a day and between 100 and 300 grams of carbohydrates, principally complex (pasta, potatoes) and fibrous (broccoli, asparagus). He also agrees to speak with the waitress' son on the phone. "The Rock says, you keep doing good," says the Rock.

Today there will be just the two of us in the car, driving from Detroit to Cleveland, talking as we go. I ask him about his temper. The Rock Says . . . describes a number of youthful rages, culminating in the time when, as a member of the Miami Hurricanes, he got in a locker-room fight with a teammate and tried, literally, to rip out his tongue.

"It was justifiable, though," he says.

I suggest that, possibly, trying to rip someone's tongue out is never justified.

"That's what happens when you talk shit," he says. "But the tongue was slippery -- I couldn't quite get a grasp of it."

I ask him where that temper has gone -- I can't detect it, nor, indeed, any signs of its repression, unless he sublimates an inner anger by bingeing on doughnuts -- and he says he's become more grown-up, but that it probably still lurks somewhere: "Recognizing that I'm a bigger and better person than that disingenuous asshole who's standing beside me replaces knocking somebody's head off." Arriving in Cleveland, he only needs a single one-way-street violation to find the arena. Inside, he sits down in the catering area for a serious discussion with Vince McMahon, the despotic patriarch who runs the WWF. "I need to take care of business," the Rock says, apologizing to me. Later, they are joined by the Rock's supposed archenemy, Hogan, who sits down with five portions of chicken and a generous helping of meatloaf. At another table, Nash is having hair dye and foil strips tied into his hair. It is not a side of wrestling one is normally allowed to see. As I walk behind the Rock back down the corridor, Hulk Hogan puts a hand on my shoulder. "Don't believe a word the Rock tells you," he says. Then the Rock is led off to meet some Make-A-Wish children with terminal illnesses, who are, he is horrified to learn, waiting in a corridor. He sweetly brings the kids out of themselves. Afterward the Rock calmly roasts the WWF representative who led him there. "We can't have Make-A-Wish people standing in the hallway," he says, fuming. "These kids are dying, and they're standing in the fucking hallway." He meets a lot of these kids. "I was sensitive before, but now I have a kid... I know I'd do anything to make my kid happy."

A further domestic insight: The Rock loves to cook chocolate-chip cookies. "I'm one of the best chocolate-chip-cookie makers in the world," he brags. "Man, I used to do that when I was eight years old. I'd put them on top of each other. Not that they're all gooey, but you've got to kind of peel them off each other slowly." You like a taste explosion, don't you?

"Exactly. I'm not afraid to put some peanut butter on some sushi."

You tried that?

"Yes. It tastes like shit. I'll never do it again. To all the readers: Don't do that."

The Rock's first acting role was as an undercover agent infiltrating underground wrestling on the short-lived TV show The Net. "My work wasn't Oscar caliber," he says. He then appeared on That '70s Show playing his own father, with an Afro and a mustache, and as a Pendari alien on Star Trek Voyager. He also baked cookies with Martha Stewart, though, as you would expect, he had to pretend not to know so well what to do so that Stewart could be seen showing him.

"The Rock acquiesced and said, 'OK, Martha, show the Rock,'" he says. "Martha's a very nice woman."

You think she's hot? I ask.

"Hot! I didn't say she was hot!" He considers this. "Oddly enough, a lot of men think she's hot. Her show is replayed at three in the morning, and the guys may have had one too many, and they might be getting a little horny, and it's that whole freaky older-woman-cooking-in-the-kitchen thing..."

Though he filmed for only two days and appeared only briefly in his first movie, The Mummy Returns, the attention his role got (and its supposed effect on the box office) put him in demand. For The Scorpion King (in which he plays an earlier version of the same character as in The Mummy Returns), the Rock was paid a reported $5.5 million.

The Scorpion King's director, Chuck Russell (The Mask, Eraser), says, "He's the real deal." Dialogue, Russell admits, is trickier. "I've learned that you don't give exposition to the leading man in an action film. But give him the great line, and he'll nail it." The Rock has just seen a nearly completed version of The Scorpion King, and his consequent attempts to hype the movie to me ("Have you heard about The Scorpion King -- the greatest movie ever made?") become a light joke between us. Dany has yet to see the film or her husband's love scenes with co-star Kelly Hu. As such, she has requested a screening before the film's premiere. "I told Dwayne, 'You know what? I'm a mature woman, but let's see it privately in case I have to smack you in the head.'"

Dinner after the wrestling is at the Rock's favorite restaurant, Morton's. Marty Adelstein, who signed the Rock to his agency, Endeavour, and the Rock's day-to-day agent, Darren Statt, order the forty-eight-ounce porterhouse for two. The Rock orders another forty-eight-ounce porterhouse for himself. When he is finished, he says, "Let's go to spring break, fellas."

After midnight, a private jet takes us to Cancœn, Mexico. Tomorrow the Rock will host MTV's Top Ten Most Outrageous Spring Break Moments. Dwayne Johnson, who will turn thirty on May 2nd, shows me his passport photo. Taken six years ago, it reveals a few tight curls, which grow if his hair is not clipped tight. He says that left unattended his hair blossoms into a huge Afro.

The steward on the jet says that there is dinner on board and asks if we'd like to eat beef or chicken. Naturally, we refuse. About an hour into the flight, the Rock asks, "How's that chicken?"

This is the Rock's first time in Mexico. A van drives us to the hotel, where the Rock gets about five hours of sleep. When he wakes up he orders some egg whites and pancakes. He wonders about his name: first name, The, second name, Rock. He's not sure whether he should be trying to wean audiences into calling him by his real name. There is another issue. Not only is the Rock not his name, the Rock is not his name. It belongs to the WWF. He expects to stay involved in wrestling (his current contract has a few more years to run), but in a reduced way if his acting career blooms. The WWF and McMahon also earn money from the Rock's movie career. "I get my money, and he gets his," the Rock says. "It's like paying Don Corleone."

In the Mexican morning, the Rock takes the minibus down to the MTV beach set. It's hot by the pool where MTV will be filming, and there is a debate in the Rock camp as to whether it could be cheesy if he filmed all this without his shirt on. The shirt comes off.

For the first shot, he stands on a bridge with six swimsuited babes, hordes more hollering in the water.

"I want to smackdown on that, baby," hollers one woman in the water.

"I want a Rock bottom," screams another.

These interruptions aside, the Rock sails through his lines. Afterward, back at the hotel, the Rock snatches a light late lunch (two shrimp cocktails, pasta Bolognese, a steak and two cheeseburgers without the buns). I ask him how good an actor he is. "Um... decent," he says, "but I still need a lot of help." For his next movie, his handlers are looking for a contemporary vehicle with a co-star, maybe Chris Tucker, with whom he has established a double act presenting at the NAACP awards. I ask him what his talent is, and he says, "The ability to entertain." One more thing: "I can kick ass better than anybody."

Tonight the Rock flies home to Florida for a few days with his wife and baby before facing Hulk Hogan at WrestleMania. We are deep in conversation as the jet gathers speed along the Cancun runway. Abruptly, the Rock calls for silence. "I always got to look at the window, right before we take off," he says. "It's a superstition I have."

Once we're in the air, the Rock inquires whether they have any more of that chicken. On his right arm, there is a tattoo of a bull, which has become a signature logo for the Rock. He had it done four years ago. He is a Taurus. "It's really become iconistic of me," he says. He's considering another tattoo now, something scorpion-related in celebration of his new career.

I ask him, quite innocently, where he would put it.

"I have no idea," he says, laughing.

I wonder aloud why this is amusing.

"Because immediately I go to something funny," he says.

I point out that it's not like I said, "Are you going to get a scorpion tattooed on your penis?"

The Rock shouts over to Statt. "Now I'm talking about tattoos on my dick."

"I was never on the plane," sighs Statt.

The jet's nose dips down toward Florida. "Tomorrow is my day," the Rock says. "The anything-I-want day, from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed. Tomorrow the Rock may well bake cookies." The Rock has plans, and it is for none of us to get in his way. "I'll be at the Dunkin' Donuts drive-through at 8 a.m.," he announces. "Yes I will."

What's in Dwayne's CD Player
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