[from Mademoiselle, 4/98]

LOS ANGELES IS A WEIRD PLACE - A one-company town (the company being Fame, Inc.) where fancy faux-Asian restaurants are frequented by frenetically glad-handling Spice Girls-with-huge-entourage. Then there's Jennifer Aniston, whom I met for drinks at her favorite Mexican dive, a dark cave where the red banquettes are worn, the Spanish grillwork dusty and the chips and salsa (her weakness). Mmm-mmm good.

Not that Aniston's bland. But she isn't neurotic (that
would be Monica) or ditsy (that would Phoebe) or plastic (she takes special exception to tabloid rumblings about her purported breast implants). She talks in a low, even voice-no actressy melodrama -gesturing like the kind of girl you might have gone to highschool with. She's normal...as normal as you can be in Hollywood, anyway. Her black crewneck sweater is Prada (but it looks fished out of a Salvation Army bin); she wears gray snakeskin Freelance boots (when she can certainly afford Manolo Blahnik) and annoyingly well-fitting jeans. She says she used to be about 20 pounds heavier, but dropped the weight. The hard, normal way. Diet. Exercise.

So does that mean she believes thin equals happiness? Well, no. Aniston admits she feels bad about unintentionally reinforcing our national obsession with weight loss and beauty: "I know what goes into photos and that they airbrush. Yet you still look at these pictures and go, ' Wow! God, look at that! She's perfect!' And you go, ' Ugh'-you're having a bad day, or whatever." Aniston probably knows what that feels like: The daughter of a former model, Aniston felt pressure about her looks while growing up in Sherman Oaks, California, then New York City. "My mother would always tell me to put makeup on," she says, adding ironically, "she was a really big confidence-booster in the physical area. 'Put your eyes on, for God's sake!' she would say. Lips, eyes, anything. 'Put your eyes on!' I thought I had my eyes on, Mother!"

Jennifer vs. Rachel - Battle of the Friends

In case Mom's wondering, Aniston's eyes are on at the moment; her makeup is low-key. On the whole, she's more of a regular girl than Rachel, her TV alter ego. But what of the similarities?

RACHEL: Pampered-from-birth princess.
JENNIFER: Pampered as career perk, but generous. (A few years ago, she gave her older assistant-director brother a "cool Bronco - he's a cool guy.")

RACHEL: Former waitress at coffee shop; current Bloomie's assistant buyer.
JENNIFER: Former waitress at burger joint; current (The difference being that Aniston "loved waiting tables! I was having a good time. I was pretty much convinced I was going to be a professional waitress who just auditioned on the side. Because I couldn't get hired. Not even for a commercial. For ten years. Then came Bob's Big Boy-I was the joke waitress in the joke restaurant that wasn't as good as Bob's.")

RACHEL: Ambivalent about ambition.
JENNIFER: Ambivalent about ambition. (Aniston looks embarrassed - she says a friend wrote it-when reminded that she once filled in an on-line questionaire like this: "I'M BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE AT: Putting on makeup." Now she says she's ambitious, but won't talk about her goals "because that falls into the jinxing category."

RACHEL: The Girlfriend. The NBC sitcom focuses more on her love life than any other character's.
JENNIFER: A good girlfriend. Proof: She's maintained contact with half of her exes ("You have to really want to remain friends-have a kind breakup, be an adult, make the effort and let time pass before the friendship can reignite") - which isn't too hard, considering that she says she's had only two relationships prior to the much-reported-on current one with 34-year-old actor Tate Donovan, also known as an ex-boyfriend of Sandra Bullock.

Mad about each other?

You don't have to spend time in someone's home, car or, God forbid, bedroom to guess whether she and her boyfriend are happy. When Donovan joins Aniston for dinner after the interview, their body language seems easy; their greetings geniunely loving; their patter overlapping; the attention paid to each other more or less equal. (Now's a good time to roll your eyes.)

Aniston says she doesn't want to talk about their
over-two-years relationship (first thing she says to him: "Okay, you're not sitting here"). Donovan, on the other hand, has no problem talking about a shared experience: "We were isolated, totally in the middle of nowhere, and this car pulled up in the middle of the night. These people stopped and pointed their headlights at us for, like, a half an hour. Then they crept up to us. We thought they were going to murder us!" No, he's not talking about stalkerazzi. He's describing their most recent camping trip. Says Aniston, laughing: "It turned out they were just really sweet German tourists, looking for a spot."

Pretty normal, yes? Mad about each other. Not snotty.
Successful. Problem is, Aniston is a lot more successful: He's the voice of Hercules and was Ally McBeal's love interest for two episodes. She's a major TV actress who reportedly makes $85,000 per Friends episode and is the big-marquee name in this month's 'The Object Of My Affection', a bittersweet and lovely romantic drama about the love between a single woman (Aniston) and her best friend and gay roomate (Clueless's Paul Rudd).

I'm trying to get around to the subject of couples with
unequal fame and wealth, so I bring up a profile of one apparently loose-cannon actress (who describes her husband as someone who's "living in a house I mostly paid for"). Aniston has heard of the article, and is quick, crisp and articulate: "Damn, girl! Even if you think it, don't talk about it!" She adds: "It's not taking into consideration the man's ego. It's not respectful." But when I broach the question as it affects her and Donovan (I'm chicken, so I ask these questions before he arrives), Aniston seems flustered: "No, I don't look at it that way. I mean, it's a rare case, um, it's not the norm... I don't want to sound..." She stumbles on: "It's not an issue. No, I mean, yeah, sure, somewhere in there - I don't know, maybe. No, it doesn't affect us in that way."

Uh, next subject. At least it's one we can both laugh
about: a tabloid tale that her and Sandra Bullock in a slamming, screaming public catfight over Donovan. As a joke, Aniston sent Bullock flowers with a note that said: "I'm sorry for all the damages-send me the bill." (Bullock sent flowers back.) True, the celeb dating pool for twentysomethings can seem small-before Donovan, Aniston briefly went out with Counting Crows' Adam Duritz, who used to be the beau of fellow Friend Courtney Cox-but "it's not like there's swinging going on. I met Tate a long time after he was dating Sandra." The media tries to tell a good story, Aniston says. Ironically, "nothing as exciting as that story happens in our lives: We go to work and we go home."

On the Topic of Rumors about Friends

Aniston looks geniunely baffled when the subject of backlash comes up. She doesn't want to give it the time of day, or acknowledge that bad PR - stemming from last year's reports on salary negotiations, poor box-office performance of some Friends' film projects and Mathew Perry's former painkiller addiction-almost always plays a part in the rise and fall of pop-culture hits.

"At a press conference, they were trying to make it out like we're competing against each other, that one person's gain is somebody else's loss," she says indignantly. "'How do you feel about Courtney's success in Scream?' Well, I'm happy for her!" What about this quote from an Aniston profile on E! on-line, attributed to David Schwimmer, on the subject of conflicting filming schedules: "No one can convince me that it doesn't harm the quality for the show that people have to fly on Friday to New York to shoot for two days and come back late Sunday night to be back at work Monday"? Aniston looks bewildered. "I never heard him say that. Who was he referring to, LeBlanc?"

I don't think she's being fake-naive. Aniston is no
innocent, but she's determined not to embrace nastiness, in herself or others: "The main thing is not to become a bitch. Your biggest fear is becoming that, you know?" Her New Year's resolution for 1998 was to try not to use the word hate casually. And she works so hard at being a good friend ("I worry that I don't get back quicker to friends who call") that she once thought about becoming a shrink: "I was always the one everyone would seek out to bitch about So-and-So. I like to talk to people and fix things. I still do that, sometimes too much."

One attempt to be a bad girl bombed miserably: "I was
fourteen or fifteen and I was dating a guy who lived in the East Village," says Aniston. "I shaved my hair just above my ears and had all these earrings and rubber bracelets. I was just the ugliest thing. But I could never be a punk rocker-I didn't even like punk music!" says Aniston, a Van Morrison and Aerosmith fan-a more classic-rock girl you couldn't find. "I was just a big poseur-a big, fat poseur."

Aniston, in short, is one of us-the way most people would
want to be if they lucked into fame and fortune: not bitchy, but not a pushover, either (her assistant, a no-nonsense blonde, looked too eager to get home to be working for a wussy boss). Pretty, but not drop-dead beautiful (the easier for millions to identify with, my dear). Call Aniston the anti-Spice Girl, who believes that Nice will triumph over Nasty. And in her case, she'd be absolutely right.