Escape From the '80s
Unlike so may '80s teen icons (R.I.P., Brat Pack), John Cusack grew up
without selling out or freaking out, and his audience has followed him well
into the '90s, where he remains the standard-bearer of an uneasy generation.
By Allison Glock
as printed in GQ, December 1997
"Twelve bucks says I par this hole."
John Cusack is playing golf at the Mirage Country Club in Port Douglas,
Queensland. He is here shooting The Thin Red Line, the much-salivated-over
Terrance Malick WWII epic filming in Australia. Malick-who, after writing
and directing two seminal '70s films, Badlands and Days of Heaven,
evaporated like sweat in Vegas and stayed gone for almost twenty years,
until now-picked Cusack to play the heroic commander who leads an American
troop to victory over the Japanese at Guadalcanal. Also onboard is
virtually every other actor (John Travolta, George Clooney, Sean Penn, Woody
Harrelson, Nick Nolte) in Hollywood, taking a pay cut just to be a part of
Malick history.
Today is Cusack's day off, so he is doing what men do on their days off: He
is whacking the week's frustrations into the great green beyond. He tees up
and surveys hole ten. It's a potent analgesic of a hole, 456 meters
stretching ever forward into the blight white of the Australian outback.
Cusack squints, but he can't see the flag. He shrugs. Armed with a driver,
his least favorite club, he assumes a relaxed stance behind the ball, stares
it down, then lets Big Bertha fly.
The swing is a pretty thing, smooth and graceful, with a nice finish, his
lean six-foot-two inch frame a natural marriage with the club. The result
is less photogenic. The ball is topped and rolls slowly, limply to the
immediate right of the women's tee.
"Fu-uck me," he says, immediately turning to a friend, raising his hand and
uttering what will become the day's mantra: "Ball".
Cusack on the golf course is a little like Tim Conway in "Dorf on Golf",
only less amusing. To start, he often offers unsolicited advice. ("A little
to the right, Doug. You're lined up wrong".) He is also loose with
etiquette. The day we play, Cusack rides to the green, leaving me behind
with no clubs. He then chips on the dance floor, while everyone else is
forced to wait for him to lope out of the way. He rarely, and only
begrudgingly, lets others play through. He pouts. He never, ever replaces
his divots.
Of course, being Cusack, master of the vulnerable shtick, unceasingly
besieged by life, is instantly forgiven. Instead of getting ticked, his
pals grin. They nudge one another. "Look at her", they say. The "her"
part is a joke, a testament to their understanding. And they stare at his
goofy form struggling in the distance with his wedge, hacking another ditch
into the grass, and they laugh.
I do not laugh, but then again, I am the one being forced to walk and hit
every shot with my three wood.
"I watch sometimes how people react to him," explains Nick Gillie, an actor
and close friend and golfing partner of Cusack's, as Cusack zips along the
fairway.
"It's interesting, because especially in his generation-35 to 20
year-old-white people-there's a great sense of 'I know him', as opposed to
Brad Pitt or something, where you might say, 'Oh, I love him'. With John,
the secretaries will whisper, 'He's like my son'. There's something
personal-they relate to him; they get something from him. It's weird. With
John, there's always a relationship.
Today Cusack's relationship has been with the rough, and by the time we
reach the eighteenth fairway, more than twenty-five Titleists have been
lost. So many, in fact, that there are only three balls left for four
players. Cusack slumps in his cart. He has spent the last two hours
tromping through palm and dale, refusing to believe that he has shanked yet
another lousy shot, loath to incur yet another penalty. Strident about
rules (he may lack decorum, but he does have honor), Cusack ticks off every
stroke, diligently recording his sevens, eights and nines. And now, at the
last hole, neutered by his own inadequacy, he can't even hit. Which means I
will win our bet, which means I have $12 and a night of bragging rights
headed my way. It also means that he lost to a girl.
"Fuck me", he mutters, hunching down in his cart, his shoulders buckling
like damp cardboard.
"Maybe", he says dryly, weakly, as he stares into my pupils, "I should take
a lesson."
And then it happens. I stare back; I look at his sad eyes, pinched at the
corners and framed by dense black brows, imploring. His bow-tie mouth
sucked in slightly, a hard-candy smirk. His forehead an agitated purl. And
I cave. Like the others, I forgive him, because oddly enough, Cusack is
best like this. Dogged by his demons, beaten down enough to look up but not
enough to wallow.
Where others may appear childish or self-indulgent, Cusack seems only human,
more likely to generate empathetic "ahhs" than the finger. The munificence
he inspires happens in no small part because of his face, which is open and
accessible, long and soft, with a chin suitable for pinching. It's a face
that mirrors his persona perfectly-a performer riding midway between
character actor and leading man, a rock, paper, scissors kind of guy, Jimmy
Stewart in a Fishbone T-shirt, Jimmy Stewart with a crappy short game.
We all cherished him, what we thought was him, back in the day when we were
stoned and listless. When we would have been angry, but the empty pop and
blinding sheen of the '80s wouldn't let us. When we were smoking cloves,
pounding Mickeys and cruising culs-de-sac in our pathetic Eurotrash cars,
wearing parachute pants and blaring Bow Wow Wow loud enough to make the
seats hum.
We cherish him because in his early movies, he refined unrefinement, took
verbal trepidation and dread and mad them more charming than any smooth-ass,
class-president jive. Always the outsider, he was never too cool or too
jocky, not a loser, but not a stud either. Just the bright guy on the
periphery, the one who seemed real, the one who made you curious. And so he
became the guy guys wanted to be, felt they could be. (Just as girls
dressed like Pat Benetar and affected a sneer, there were boys in overcoats,
slinking about, tilting their heads like caribou, trying to replicate that
phlegmatic voice and spitfire elocution.) He was also the guy girls wanted
as their best friend or the their boyfriend or-and this could happen with
him-both.
We first noticed him, appropriately enough, in a John Hughes vehicle, 1984s
Sixteen Candles, where Cusack portrayed a snuffling dork who was even less
cool than the leader of the dorks, Anthony Michael Hall. From there he went
on to play a series of ardent goofs in someone's-gonna-end-up-in-the-pool
comedies (Better Off Dead, One Crazy Summer, The Sure Thing) no one would
remember if not for his coercive charisma. It made him a touchstone for a
whole generation of Clash-loving, hair-dyeing, soul-starved New Wave
teenbeaters ravenous for a glimpse of themselves.
It was the coruscating '80s after all, and if you weren't old enough
to be snorting coke off a Ziggy mirror or young enough to go hot-air
ballooning on Daddy's bonus, if you were a teen, a postboomer, a pre-X-er,
you were nowhere, nothing, and you felt it in your belly. And so we went to
the movies to find our Moses, to be led, and we were not disappointed,
because there was Cusack (and Lowe, Spader, McCarthy and Ringwald, but
mostly him), as thunderstruck and appalled and pink cheeked as we were.
Christ, he was even the same age. He lived in real time. He didn't
just play a horny teen gawking at the world's insanity; he was a horny teen,
born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1966, the fourth of five kids, a puerile boy
with jagged hair, reedy legs and the occasional pimple. He was also,
despite his angsty soul, intrinsically funny. So we adopted him, we '80s
kids. He became ours, became us.
Never more so than in Cameron Crowe's 1989 Say Anything..., where
Cusack's ungainly Lloyd Dobler won the beautiful, brainy straight-arrow babe
played by Ione Skye. Of all his characters, says Cusack, Lloyd Dobler
remains the one most like him, the one he most likes.
"I tried to express what was in the heart of a young person," he
explains. "Some of these films treated teenagers like these glib,
45-year-old versions of teenagers. I was in films like that. But there was
so much more to be expressed, deeper places to go".
So he went deep. As the trench coat-clad Dobler, Cusack vibrated
with naked desire. His hair was a crested mess, his body grub pale. His
was an endearment born of smarts and insecurity, self-effacement combined
with clear intent, a style built on compulsive honesty and hinged on
delivery-an effervescent, rapid-fire, soul-purging expulsion of thought and
emotion, pointless yet compelling, like shoveling sand against the tide.
Grasping for his identity-"I don't want to sell anything, buy
anything or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything
bought or processed or buy anything sold or processed or process anything
sold, bought or processed"-Cusack bored far enough into our collective
cerebellum to become a legend, a teen icon of the '80s, a pipeline to the
gut of the burbs. A character who inhabits the mind of every young
thirtysomething, a fun-house reflection of himself, back in the day when he
was still innocent and geeky enough to care.
Of course, John Cusack the man-and he is a man now, 31 years old, a
heavy smoker with a creased brow and thinner hair-is not John Cusack, teen
touchstone. He's traveled far since those Bananarama days. He's evolved.
He's become a seriously regarded, sought-after adult actor, laden with work.
He's currently adapting Nick Hornby's High Fidelity and working on a
film about the NFL and has signed a first-look deal with Castle Rock. This
month he is costarring with Kevin Spacey in Clint Eastwood's much
anticipated Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. All of which makes
Cusack the only Brat Packer (save the odious Demi Moore) to survive and
prosper, the only Brat Packer who (magically, miraculously) hasn't morphed
into a putz.
Cusack is driving the rental Jeep as we approach the Sheraton security gate
that guards his temporary home. He must identify himself to the guard via a
camera and a microphone to be allowed passage, sort of like tossing change
into a toll basket. Only Cusack refuses to ante up.
"Leonard Part Six, part two," he says cheekily into the mini camera.
"Sorry?" a tinny voice asks from the doughnut-size speaker.
"Leonard Part Six, part two," he repeats, a little louder, more
firmly.
"Uh. OK," the speaker answers, tentatively. "Thank you".
It's a game he plays every time, aware that even though he is
probably despised by the poor schmucks manning the gate, it is just too
ridiculous to resist. Cusack is a sucker for the winning line, the
razor-sharp jab, the extended hoo-haw. He is also used to being indulged.
When I ask him if he's going to be made into a doll for his role in
20th Century Fox's animated Anastasia, he barely pauses before answering,
"No, but I will for The Thin Red Line. It's a Congressional Medal of Honor
doll, and when you pull my Purple Heart, it says 'Kill! Kill!' Perfect for
children."
Like most funny men, he rarely laughs at himself.
Back at his condo, he pulls food out of the kitchen. A roast
chicken, salsa, a basket of chips. "You hungry? I've got stuff," he says,
his head deeper in the fridge. This is his least favorite part of
filmmaking, the sit-down with the reporter, the whirring tape recorder, the
petty intrusion into his habits. He has resisted admirably, never even
appearing on Letterman until this year, and then only to promote his
auteuristic foray, Grosse Pointe Blank, which he starred in, cowrote and
coproduced.
"If I'm having a conversation with an intelligent person, that's one
thing," he says, shoveling chips into his mouth, smacking loudly. "So long
as I don't have to tell you what I had for breakfast."
Luckily for him, it seems fans don't want to know about what he eats
and drinks (even his rumored romance with actress Minnie Driver and his
relationship with girlfriend Claire Forlani have skated beneath the ET
radar). They only want to know that he is, that he exists. Because if he
exists, then they do, too. He is, as his writing partner and friend of
fourteen years Steve Pink says, "somehow able to escape being a celebrity.
He's a good actor. But he's also fundamentally sincere. He's honest. He
doesn't run games. He's no Hollywood Bob."
Cusack has always maintained a grip, maybe because he is aware of
his luck. "I was never popular in high school," he says. "Then I started
making movies, and I became this Gatsby figure. It was weird. I was a
bullshit white suburban punk. All I wanted to do was skip school, and then
I'm getting paid to skip school and be on the set with Jacqueline Bisset. I
was living the dream."
He notices my scribbling.
"What are you writing down now? Jesus, you're not going to tell
people what I'm wearing are you?"
Khakis. Loose-fitting button-down shirt, black. Nike sneakers.
Maybe a little hair gel.
"You're not going to make me look like a jerk, are you?"
It's not the first time he's asked. A curious obsession given that
(1) he has cultivated an image based on the complete and utter absence of
jerkiness and (2) no reporter to date has ever even alluded to jerky
tendencies.
"What's your angle. Don't lie. All reporters come with an angle,
and then they fish until they find the thing that reinforces their
theories."
His paranoia is puzzling. I jokingly suggest he may have "control
issues", a charge he immediately denies. When I later ask Cusack's friends
about his apparent need to steer the boat, they burst out laughing.
"I think his lack of comfort with the press comes more from humility
and insecurity than anything else," his assistant, Doug Dearth, offers
diplomatically. "I think he feels like he doesn't deserve the attention."
Escape From the '80s-Part II
By Allison Glock
as printed in GQ, December 1997
There is a scene in Grosse Pointe Blank where Cusack's character, a
depressed hit man with commitment problems, embraces a baby. It's a tired
image, really. We've all seen it before in soap ads-impossibly handsome man
humanized by gurgling infant, usually to some resonant background song.
In Grosse Pointe Blank, the tune is David Bowie and Queen's "Under
Pressure" (Freddie Mercury wailing in his goosey, poignant way about love)
and the man is Cusack, sitting silently, cradling the infant like an egg.
And you want to say, "Enough already with this trite emotion-milker. Bring
on Shirley MacLaine, why don't you? I mean, life is short. We get it."
But you don't say that. You don't even really think it. Something
happens on the way to the reflexive dismissal. A glitch in your chest, like
a gear catching. And, instead, you weep. (Even Clint Eastwood misted.) You
well up, and your brow sweats, and you think all those innard-twisting
thoughts about regret and potential and what can be, the joy of a child, the
loss of time, the soul-racing urgency of life. You swallow it whole, you
curl up inside, and you blow your nose into your popcorn napkin.
You do this because this is still Cusack's gift, to deliver the
perfect moment, to screw up his hangdog mien with confusion, to crinkle his
tight marble eyes, slacken his jaw and mirror the bewilderment of a nation.
"John has a lot of humor," explains Nick Gillie. "He's able to be
sensitive without indulging in it. He never falls into the trap of trying
to show how much pain he's in or being fascinated by how angry he is."
Like Harrison Ford, Cusack never makes you sorry you watched. You
can trust him not to leave you feeling cheap.
"I've done maybe a few good performances when the film was actually
good and I was OK in it, and it has to do with letting stuff out that's
personal," he says, when asked to explain his appeal. "People see it and
relate to it and feel like they know you. And in a way, they do."
The jungle valley outside Port Douglas is scalding hot and windy enough to
beget Chaplin imitations. The morning before, a six-foot python was
discovered on the set, a chunk of blue-green plateau appropriated by The
Thin Red Line.
Today Cusack is lying flat in the dirt, deep in python territory,
waiting for his call. He is dressed in a WWII uniform, complete with a
flapped hat that rustles comically in the breeze. Terrence Malick is
shouting direction through a dust mask. "I feel more like a miner than a
director," he fusses good-naturedly, alluding to the silt that blows up,
twisterlike, and coats every surface and retina with a red film. Cusack
tries to light a cigarette, but that wind. Explosives are rigged, while a
translator apprises some Japanese extras of their next scene. The cigarette
ignites finally, and Cusack lets out a lung-emptying sigh.
"It's beautiful here, but try being in it every day for a month,"
he says, exhaling again. Whoosh. Suck. Whoosh.
"I wouldn't trade it for anything, though. A chance to work with
Terry Malick? Badlands was such a big movie for me. The whole exploration
of fame and identity and needing to be seen. It made me love Malick and
Martin Sheen."
As for his own need to be seen, Cusack says curtly, "It's an
infantile need for attention." Then he softens, considers the question. "I
think you have so much you want to express all the time. Like an athlete
who needs to move, to play. You need to flex your imagination. Acting is
like figuring out an emotional jigsaw puzzle. Time quickens. You don't
know what you're doing when you do it." Whoosh. Suck. Whoosh. I go watch
my movies sometimes in the theater to see how people react."
It's a holdover from his years onstage in Chicago, at the Piven
Theatre Workshop. "I'd like to say that Johnny's a greedy, hateful,
self-obsessed simian, but he's not," says Pink, also a Piven alum. "He's
incredibly generous and grounded. He made that choice to come back to
theatre, to work impossibly hard for no money. To wait around at 2 a.m. for
stage enamel to dry so you can rehearse. You can't have a big ego when you
spend
your days figuring out how much Luan to buy."
Cusack's career has aged gracefully, going seamlessly from
adolescent antistud to grown-up ensemble player in well-respected films such
as Eight Men Out, Fat Man and Little Boy, The Grifters, True Colors, Bullets
Over Broadway and City Hall. He made wise choices. His acting improved.
His snarkiness ebbed. Even in the soul-curdling glare of fame, he's managed
to stay a gentlemen, to remember that other people exist. On the set, he
fetches his own coffee. He asks other actors if they need anything. He
shares his sunscreen, his smokes, his water, his hat. Off the set, he
quietly picks up every meal check, greens fee, bar tab. He tips well. When
he loses a bet, which is often, he pays up immediately.
It helps that the boy was well-bred, Irish Catholic, the progeny of
a screenwriter father and a math-teacher mother living in a house that
encouraged self-reliance and emphasized consequences. Which perhaps
illuminates why, unlike his compeers, Cusack has not, to date, married a
stripper, filmed himself humping, published gag-induced poetry or bitten
anyone in the rib cage.
"I've had epiphanies about the nature of friendship, about who you
love, the way you interact with the world," he explains. "You can't take
people for granted. A good friendship requires work; you have to stay
present."
He has also wised up about work. "I used to think there were
certain things you do that were technique, but as I get older, they seem
more like superstition, like a ball player crossing himself when he gets to
the plate," he says. "Now I let things happen. It's scary, but you need to
experiment, you need to have the guts to let go of old habits, to keep
growing."
Cusack's evolution is best seen in Grosse Pointe Blank, where he
shed his old, bumbly self for the new model, another lost romantic, only one
swankily dressed and wielding a machine gun. The movie is his signature
product-he produced, wrote, starred and even picked the music. It was the
first time since Lloyd Dobler that he carried a film, and not only was the
result witty, subversive, uncompromised and sharp but nobody fell into the
pool.
"I'm sure I went through a dick phase," he admits, lighting up
another butt. "Feeling self-important, definitely. I ran hard for a few
years. I went to extremes. But you get older, you get your shit together.
I'm not like that anymore. I have a master plan now." He pauses, mugs a
little, whooshes, sucks. "Of course, I can't tell you what it is".
The phase du jour is search and define. "I feel like I've been
seeking for a long time now. I think you make slow progress and have
epiphanies along the way."
To that end, he sees a therapist. He is deliberate, taking care to
be precise. "I like smoking; I don't love smoking. I'm not addicted." He
dissects everything, every question, observation, interaction, with the
earnestness of a Harvard philosophy major.
"Would you rather be a master of your own craft, or an inventor of a
new craft?" I ask.
"What do you mean?"
"You know, would you rather invent or be seen as a virtuoso?"
"Define your terms."
"OK, say Freud was an inventor and Mozart was a master."
"Can't you be both?"
"Well, maybe, but just for the sake of-"
"Aren't inventors always masters?"
"Not exactly."
"What defines a master, really? I mean who gets to say?"
"Come on. OK, history says. Peers say."
"History changes."
"Forget it. It's a dumb question."
"What would you rather be?"
"This isn't about me."
"Ask me something else."
He is like this with everyone-waitresses, buddies, barkeeps. He
likes the cerebral volley of conversation, issuing opinions about Tyson ("an
epic, Shakespearean fall"), about love ("People equate emotion with being
alive, and the most convenient emotion is pain. Some people need drama in
their relationships. I don't want it for ten minutes"), about family ("[My
sister] Joanie is a wild, magical abstraction"), about Norman Mailer ("He
set liberalism back fifty years"), about food ("My mother made this
pineapple-ham-tuna-mayo thing I call 'Catholic goulash.' I'm astounded that
my love for her remains strong"), about pain ("I like kickboxing, being
hit"), about fear ("I'm afraid of most everything. Wasting my life, not
realizing my potential, existential stuff. Big ledges").
Success? Well, no. Not anymore. Cusack has grown up, bagged his
share of starlets, learned how to do the herky, jerky dance of Hollywood.
He has bought, processed and sold.
"Yeah, I play with the system a little more. It seems to make a
difference whether or not you're willing to play ball. When I was younger,
I used to be more rebellious, more militant about what I liked and didn't
like."
Not that he's a player. Cusack remains more passionate than slick,
a contumacious maverick, the conversations still gushing forth in disarming
floods from his brain, like when he's asked about Bill Clinton.
"I sort of feel for the guy, because I think to maintain your
position of power, to do any good, you have to compromise and make deals,"
he says rapidly, Dobleresque cadences. "But if you look at it, he's wildly
compromising the Democratic platform. He's more like an Eisenhower
Republican, which is a lot better than Reagan or Bush, don't get me wrong."
The Iron Bar in Port Douglas is thick with locals-men with burnished skin
and thick forearms, women flush and svelte. Everyone is smiling, laid-back,
drinking and chatting. There is not a wrinkle in sight.
At the bar, waiting to order his Diet Coke, Cusack meets a young
blonde woman wearing jeans and a bare midriff. She wants to show him her
bracelet, a playing card with a rubber band around the middle. There, in
the center of the card, is a well-oiled man, hair greased, stripped naked,
his hand gripping his penis, which appears to be the approximate size and
rigidity of a fire hydrant.
Cusack chuckles and whispers something in her ear, which sends the
girl screaming with laughter to the next fellow in line, her wrist extended.
Diet Coke in hand, Cusack settles in a nearby booth and watches. He likes
to watch. He is a keen observer, picking out details, guessing at motives.
He is not afraid to stare.
Now he is staring at the band, a terrible trio called Funk It! That
makes Madonna seem soulful.
"The Bradys," he says smiling as they slaughter an Aretha Franklin
song. The interview is over.
"See, this wasn't so bad," I say.
"It never was," he answers, snuffing out his smoke. Soon his head
starts lurching in a mocking, hilarious, spasmodic dance. His eyes look
vacant. His expression is pure cheese, planed flat and frat-boy drunk. All
that's missing is the overbite. Then he laughs. Loud and proud and a far
cry from the censored, sputtering eviction he usually offers.
The laugh tapers into a smile, and he is for a minute freed up,
unburdened, a white boy making fun of white boys. A fun-house reflection of
himself back in the days when he was still innocent and geeky enough to
care.
