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Sunday Magazine |
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Drew Barrymore was just a mop-haired
7-year-old when her performance in ET: The Extra Terrestrial
turned her into a movie star. Her mother, you would think, must have
been so proud. In fact, Jaid Barrymore, herself an actor, was jealous.
"The film wan't supposed to be a big deal," Jaid says. "I
wasn't pushing Drew, I was the exact opposite. I didn't want her to act.
I was going to be the star - not her!"
Nevertheless, Drew became the most famous
little girl in the world and one of the hottest talents in Hollywood.
But within a few, short years her life was in tatters. After taking up a
movie-star lifestyle: she started drinking at 8, smoked marijuana at 10,
took cocaine at twelve, and by the age of 13 was in rehab.
The blame for Drew's downfall was placed
firmly on the shoulders of Jaid, who had dragged her young daughter
around sleazy nightclubs and subjected her to the full glare of
publicity. When she was 15, aware that her mother was not providing the
stability she needed, Drew filed for legal emancipation from her mother.
"Of course, she blamed me for her
troubles," Jaid says. "I put her into rehab because it was
what i had to do. I helped save her career. I got her jobs when no one
wanted to hire her. But someone's gotten hold of her in the past few
years and told her to say all this bad stuff about how I abandoned her,
because she comes out of it smelling like roses."
The pair barely spoke for six years and
were breifly reconciled before Drew cut off all contact four years ago.
Today, they are estranged. Drew, 25, has slowly picked up the pieces of
her life and career, and commands $5 million a movie after starring in
such films as The Wedding Singer, Batman Forever and Scream.She
is about to start shooting the remake of Charlie's Angels
alongside Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu (which Drew will also produce) and
runs her own production company, Flower Films.
Jaid, on the other hand, rents a tiny New
York apartment and cuts a sad and onlely figure as she brags about an
off-Broadway play in which she "starred". Now 53, Jaid is
still capitalising on her daughter's famous name. In November last year
she attempted to sell off some of Drew's baby clothes and priceless ET
memorabilia via an Internet auction. The most expensive item, which had
a tag of $60,000, was the miniature red cowboy hat Drew wore in the 1982
blockbuster. Other items included a Christmas card signed by Jack
Nicholson, Kathleen Turner and Drew, and a childhood scrapbook made
during the 1984 movie Irreconcilable Differences. (After 10 days
on the Internet, all lots failed to draw even their reserve prices.)
Worse still, Jaid is currently writing a
tell-all book about her life, which is destined to heap further
embarrassment on her daughter. (Her first book was Secrets of
World-Class Lovers: Erotic Tips & Sensual Stories for a Lifetime of
Sexual Fulfilment.) Privately, Drew has told friends that she is
"devastated" by what she views as her mothers ultimate
betrayal
But Jaid remains unrepentant. As she sits
in the corner of a New York restaurant, she trembles as she talks about
being cut out of her daughter's life, and fortune, but never once
assumes any blame for Drew's chequered past.
Physically, mother and daughter could not
be more dissimilar. While Drew is large boned, blonde and has reinvented
herself as the wholesome girl next door, Jaid is wafer thin, with
tumbling, brown curls, huge, bee-stung lips and giant brown eyes. It is
a captivating combination, even at 53, which she uses to full effect on
the men around us. (In 1995 she posed naked for Playboy under the
headline: "Drew Barrymore's Mom Gets a Pictorial All Her Own",
just months after Drew featured in the same magazine.)The restaurant
owner is treated to what Jaid calls her "full-on, movie-star
eyelash flutter", followed by 5 minutes of gushing compliments
about the food to the decor to the colour of his sweater.
Jaid is childish in her words and
demeanor. She talks at a million miles an hour, often in her own
vocabulary. Going to the theatre she describes as "concertising",
the food is "yum yum delishy", and when she spies a fellow
guest with a handlebar moustache, she squeals: "Wouldn't you just
love to go over there and twirl that thing between your fingers?"
All her sentences seem to centre around "me". She frequently
bursts into tears and explains by saying: "I'm just too theatrical
for my own good."
> Like her daughter, Jaid had a
troubled childhood. She was born to Hungarian parents who met in a
displaced persons' camp in Munich at the end of World War II. Her mother
was only 15 when she fell pregnant. "Everyone in the camp was
waiting for paperwork to go to other countries," Jaid says. "I
was born out of wedlock and then my parents went through this sham
marriage to get to America. It was terrible. I was starving. I had to
literally fight for a potato. Fight!
"My mother didn't want me at all. She
would leave me for hours on a second-floor balcony where there was no
railing, I would be wrapped in a blanket to stop me moving. I would pee
in that blanket."
Jaid's parents moved to the United States
in 1950 when she was three. Her father immediately ran off with another
woman, and Jaid and her mother rented a tiny room above a petrol station
in Pennsylvania. "My mother was determined to marry a rich guy. She
wanted money. I would watch her walk off down the street as she went out
looking for men. Our relationship was non-existant. When she finally
married again, I became even less significant. I wanted to get away as
soon as possible and make something of my life."
At 18, Jaid left the family home in
Pennsylvania for New York, took a job in a nightclub and began living a
"Bohemian" life. "I was a living, breathing doll,"
she says. "Men loved me."
Among those attracted to this newly freed
spirit was Jim Morrison of The Doors. "I had the most incredible
relationship with Jim," Jaid says. "He came into my life when
the pain of childhood was still raw. We had a very deep relationship. I
was a meeting of minds. There are two very juicy chapters on Jim in my
new book."
The, sounding like a bad pulp-fiction
writer, she starts to describe him: "Sensuality dripped from his
glistening skin and at that moment the world was his. He could have
whatever and whoever he wanted. And he wanted me..."
Morrison left for Paris shortly after
their brief affair and Jaid moved to Los Angeles to work at Sunset
Strip's notorious Troubadour Club, where she mingled with rock stars and
screen idols.
"I met everyone," she recalls.
"The Stones, The Eagles, The Byrds, John Lennon ... I was a
cornucopia of stars. Then, one day, John Drew Barrymore walked in. He
had white hair cascading over his shoulders and was the most beautiful
man I'd ever seen. He had ice-blue eyes and this incredible Barrymore
profile."
Barrmore was a scion of America's most
famous acting dynasty. His father was stage-and-screen legend John
Barrymore, his aunt and great uncle were Ethel and Lionel (It's a
Wonderful Life). His family was blessed by striking good looks, but
a predisposition to addiction.
"John had women crawling out of his
armpits. He told me" 'You are the brood mare I have spent my entire
life looking for, to infuse the intelligence, the determination, the
drive and the strength into the Barrymore genes that was never there
before.' You see," she explains in all seriousness, "they had
beauty, but not brains. I was that. He saw my fearsome
intelligence."
Their relationship was doomed. By the time
Drew was born in February 1975, her parents had split. "John was an
alcoholic and a drug addict. He never accomplished anything. He was a
spoilt brat. Once I got pregnant I had to leave him, because I couldnt
deal with the demands of being with John and be a mother."
Drew, however, has always sought the
affection of her father, who has spent his life in and out of rehab and
lived for a time in the grounds of her house off Sunset Boulevard in Los
Angeles. "He is an addict who has lived on the streets, but Drew
loves him. She took him in last year and tried to sort him out, but he's
back on the streets now. It's ironic, she looks after him because she
knows he can't survive on his own. With me, she knows I'm a survivor.
But there's no way she can fix her father. He's unsaveable."
Jaid went back to work just three weeks
after Drew was born. Then, when Drew was just 11 months old, a friend
suggested Jaid take her to an audition for a puppy food advert.
"I had no intention of Drew becoming
a star," Jaid says. "I'd worked too hard trying to make it as
an actress myself. I lost the chance to read for the part of Princess
Leia in Star Wars because I couldn't find a babysitter for Drew.
"It was a madhouse. There were 300
babies at the audition, every baby on the West Coast, and they all
looked like Winston Churchill. Except Drew. She was angelic. They took
her in, sat her on this cloth in front of 25 people and, all of a
sudden, 10 puppies ran in and one bit her nose. The producer must have
been thinking, 'Lawsuit'. But Drew just giggles. They hired her on the
spot. That was the start of her career. And the end of mine."
Everybody at the audition clapped, but as
Jaid watched her baby "absorb the applause" envy started to
build within her. Jaid had been going to auditions all her life and her
daughter was hired at her first attempt. She earned $2500.
At two, Drew landed her first film role in
Suddenly, Love. Originally, Jaid had only agreed for Drew to take
part if there was "something in it for me". There wasn't, but
Jaid relented. "Drew got all the attention. At two years old, she
was perfect. It was so disgusting. It came so easy to her."
Desperate to kick-start her own career,
Jaid "retired" her daughter from Hollywood, at two, and
concentrated on finding acting work for herself. She got a small role on
the long running TV sitcom Diff'rent Strokes, but the job didnt
last long. Again, Jaid blames Drew.
"Then morning of the shoot, Drew got
sick. The babysitter wouldn't take a sick child, so I took her from one
place to another, I knew I couldn't show up on the set with a sick baby.
Finally, a friend took her. I turned up late for work. They never hired
me again."
Though it's a problem that would resonate
with any single mother, Jaid seems particularly resentful that her
daughter might have been holding her back, somehow stopping her from
getting the parts she deserved. But a bigger shock, and more
disappointment, lay just around the corner.
"When Drew was four, I was doing this
play and I was also waitressing. One day, she said to me, 'Mummy, I have
to tell you something very important. I know what I want to do.'
I told her: 'You want to behave yourself
so that Mummy can go off and do her play'. But she just looked at me
with those big eyes of hers and said: 'I've decided I want to be an
actress.' It was like something out of an Omen movie. She was
only four years old, but she knew what she wanted to be. I told her it
was too hard. She said: 'I know it's hard, that's why I have to do
it.'"
Others might have shrugged it off. But
Jaid took her daughter seriously and arranged an appointment with an
agent. The agent sent Drew to an audition and she got the part. Then she
got another, and another.
"I'd been through audition after
audition of being rejected," Jaid says. "Drew never suffered
like that."
Next, Drew went to a casting for a Ken
Russell film, Altered States. "He fell in love with Drew, of
course," Jaid says. "William Hurt was in it. SHe was
perfect."
Then came the call for "an obscure
little sci-fi film", ET: The Extra Terrestrial. "Drew
fell in love with Steven and he fell in love with her. (Spielburg is
Drew's godfather.) That was the first time I remember disappointing her.
She wanted me to fall in love with Spielburg, because he became this
father figure she'd never had. But we just didn't have the spark. It
wasn't meant to be."
The waiter backs away from the table as
Jaid, now sobbing loudly, says: "Steven was Drew's surrogate dad.
She wanted so much for us to be a family. And she never forgave
me."
After her daughter's huge success with ET,
Jaid took a part in the Micheal Keaton film Night Shift, and was
away filming for two-and-a-half months. It put an enourmous strain on
their relationship. "I never saw Drew. She went crazy. Different
sitters looked after her. She got sick and she got angry. She said:
'Mom, when I work we get to be together; when you work, I never see
you'. So from that point on, I gave up my career and concentrated on
hers."
As mother-manager of the biggest child
star in Hollywood, Jaid was invited to numerous parties. Drew went, too.
In her twisted logic, Jaid explains that being deserted by her own
mother led her to expose her young child to this adult arena of sex,
drugs and drinking.
"My mother abandoned me. I couldn't
understand how a mother could not love her child. I wanted Drew with me
24 hours a day, seven days a week. I loved her so completely that I took
her with me everywhere. I blame others for her addiction problems. Drew
would go to sleepovers at the houses of other kids in Hollywood and they
would smoke and drink and do drugs, and then she would come home and
mask the smell on her breath with toothpaste or gum. All the kids at the
private schools did it. If Sally Schmutlich took drugs, what kind of a
headline would that make? No, Drew Barrymore, America's sweetheart, was
doing it, so that's why her problems made the headlines."
In her shocking autobiography, Little
Girl Lost, which she wrote at the age of 14, Drew admitted that she
took cocaine and drank alcohol until she passed out, on a nightly basis.
"I never saw her do that," Jaid says. "I was spinning
every plate and wearing every hat. I was her mummy, her agent, her
publicist, her best friend. I wanted to be the best of the best for
Drew. When I found out about the drugs, I was the one who insisted that
she went to rehab. I saved her life."
A decade later, the mother-daughter
relationship is again at a low ebb. Repeated attempts by Jaid to contact
Drew have failed and the Internet auction can't have helped her cause.
Jaid continues to see her daughter's films, but describes it as
"pain-filled joy".
The last time we were together here in New
York, Drew said: 'You know what, mom? When I'm with you, I do you, I
become you. I steal all of your lines!' I laughed and said: 'That's
great. But don't steal everything.' That was the last time I saw her
"It's hard. I desperately want her to
be a part of my life and I know it will happen. I hope Drew finds
happiness. I know when she has a child of her own, she will view me
differently. Perhaps then she will understand why I acted as I did. I
did everything for Drew. She didn't magically become a star. I did
it."
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Transcribed by Esther of DrewDevotion.
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