She’s big on the underground, what’s the point in knocking her down? From cults to covens, Marilyn Manson to Gregg Araki, Rose McGowan has lived a pretty Charmed life – geddit? Taking the lead in Grindhouse, the new Tarantino and Rodriguez’s double bill, she looks set to seal her rep as THE indie pin-up, scream queen… with a machine gun for a leg – RATATATAT!

John Forde once asked Ava Gardner what she saw in the “120-lb runt”
Frank Sinatra, whom she was married to at the time. She replied, “Well,
there’s ten pounds of Frank and one hundred and ten pounds of cock.” To
paraphrase Snowdrop, to whom she is compared by Quentin Tarantino in his
cameo role Grindhouse, Rose McGowan is a whole lotta hot. Really fucking hot -
’50s bombshell pin-up hot.If you didn’t already know, if you’re not one of
the droves of devout fans worldwide of the late supernatural soap
Charmed (who know her as the good witch Paige), and weren’t savvy to the half
dozen star tunrs she pulled throughout the ’90s in a host of indie and slasher
pics (including Scream, Doom Generation and Jawbreaker), and know
her only as the glam vamp once engaged to Marilyn Manson, you’re about to
recognise.Because when the frenzied anticipation breaks and geeked-up
gorefest that is Grindhouse splashed its blood, guts, tits and ass all over UK
screens in June, carving into the cultural landscape as only a Quentin Trantino
project can, Rose McGowan will be riding atop its crest – surfing it, looking
diggidy dang hot and armed with a machinge gun for a leg. Wowzer. The
opening scene of Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror – the first segment in the double
feature collaboration with Tarantino – is a sultry striptease by McGowan as
Cherry Darling, the crestfallen go-go dancer which right away sets the pervy
tone for the movie and introduces a force to be reckoned with. The camera
gets downright personal with Cherry (in a tasselled mini dress which may
become an icon of testosterone cinema), her pillowy lips, that sculpted figure,
those bodacious lungs… so close you can see that like her favourite former pin-up
girl clara Bow, Rose McGowan has ‘it’ in abundance.

And ‘it’ is certainly celebrated in the movie, a schlock-and-awe
homage to slimy sexploitation flicks of the ’70s by two talented directors doing
their darnedest to titillate and terrify us into becoming the giggling
degenerates they are (succesfully, as it turns out). McGowan appears in both
installments starring as, “basically a loser who becomes a bad-ass” to fight off a
hoard of cannibal zombies in Planet Terror before reappearing as the naive
blonde Pam in Tarantino’s Death Proof. But the movies show off more than just
her curves.The witty, self-deprecating Cherry gives us a window into the
undeniable charisma and funnybone lodged deep in the real life Rose. Indeed, the
most charming bits – her aspirations to become a stand up comedian, and
the ongoing list of “useless talents” she possesses – were culled from her
real life experiences. And of course she gets to slaughter zombies, blow shit
up and save the world.
Pam, on the other hand, is a quirky and disarmingly vulnerable girl
whose bad story, hazed at the hands of popular Amazon Woman, Jungle Julia
(Sydney Tamiia Poitier), bears striking similarity to Mcgowan’s own, “I went to
ten schools in eleven years. In the first week I would be sorrounded by all
the tough girls and accused of stealing their boyfriends. I hadn’t even met
anyone yet. What can you say? It’s just jealousy.”
With the expectaction surrounding a Tarantino/Rodriguez smocking
double barrel and the Weinstein brothers sparing no expense in promotion,
Grindhouse – whether released as two separate films or as the
originally intended all night fraganza – is an event and McGowan its main
attraction. Just liked when Tarantino cast John Travolta and Pam Grier
during a lull in their career, and made Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu and Chiaki
Kuriyama impossibly cool no matter what roles they take next, on the paper
Grindhouse looks set to be a career defining role for Rose. For more than a
minute, she has rocked on the edge of being a massive star, but with a kick up
the butt from Tarantino and Rodriguez, it looks like she’s gonna fall face first
into be immortalised (with her machine gun leg), on posters gracing the
wallks of student dorms forever and ever. Amen. Rose may not feel it yet but
the ground is swelling up pretty darn good right now. “I know.People are
really gonna get into this. And although it’s not like i’m Julia Roberts or
something yeah, I am totally one of the hunted.”

Rose has also learned that when you’re a celebrity you can’t expect
your sex life to be secret, the salacious tidbits are too sacred to water cooler
roundtables. Witness the New York Post’s gossip page just days
before our meeting reporting that Rose and director Rodriguez began an affair
during the filming of Planet Terror, that their lunchtime trysts were, “the worst
kept secret on set”, and that the affair broke up Rodriguez’s 16-year marriage to
the mother of his 5 children. Did she heed Ava Gardner’s sole role of
acting to “trust the director and give him heart and soul?”
“Well, the funniest kept secret is that I basically would cry at least
once a day from exhaustion and the idea that I had time for this love affair is just
funny” Was that a patent denial? What of the pictures of the pair dining
together in New York recently? The insider gossip? The reports they are secretely
engaged? Hmn… We’ll never know because a split second later, we’re talking
about David Niven, then Preston Sturges. She feels a special kinship with
Sturges who, at the age of the, declared his nother’s lover Aleister Crowley to
be a sham and a charlatan. At about the same age little Rose and her
parents fled the Children Of God commune in Florence, Italy where she’s been born and raised. “it was really filmic – running through a cornfield in the
middle of the night. Lightning and rain. Running away with nothing really. And they
send people after you. They weren’t tolerant of people on the loose.” Oscar
nominees Joaquin and the late River Phoenix were also raised by
members of the evangelical, end-time group. Has she ever compared notes with
joaquin? “I ran into one of his sisters and we sort of acknowledged it for a
nanosecond, but then I do remember reading an article about River that said he’d
had sex at like age 9 or something. Obviously everyone’s experiences are
totally different. Of course everyone today is so sexualised at an early age.
These girls, if they aren’t dry humping the stage at age three there is
something wrong with them. Look at JonBenet, you know? (The 6-year old Beauty
Pageant Queen found murdered in her parents home) i think my father
really shielded us from that.” But what of any lasting side effects? “I
remember everything from the age of 3 but none of their doctrine. I remember
burning a lot of Bibles so I must not have liked it. But really what I got from it
was that you aren’t allowed to be imperfect. When I was really little i had this
wart on my hand and someone took an X-acto blade to it, splling blood
everywhere, and then sent me toddling off. I used to pray, ‘ dear God, please don’t
give me misaligned features’. I knew it wouldn’t be tolerated. I forgot to ask to
be tall. But i think I turned out all tight.”

COG had some clearly defined positions on sex within the community:
Women were encouraged to spread their love to any and all of the ‘family’ (the
group later changed its name to Family O Love) and while male
homosexuality was viewed as a sin, women were permitted same sex contact so long as a
man was getting in on it. “Flirty fishing, shich sounds so creepy, just gross,
like something in a Hooters bar,” was their practice of sleeping with
potential converts in hopes of greasing the rails. “That was not in my world,
thank God.” I ask her about the sect’s infamous advocacy of… “Adult-child sex?
Yeah, that was pretty much the reason we got out. Yeah. My parents saw that it was
gonna happen.” happen to her? “I think it would have been any minute which is
why we high-tailed it out of here.” Graceful partings with the group were
not the norm, however. “If someone was thinking about leaving, one of their
children would just disappear, as a leverage.” Thus the cinematic escape. The first
step in a journey which would take Rose all the way to Seattle and then
ultimately, Hollywood. She lageally emancipated herself from her parents at age
of 15 but says recently those ties have been rebounded. “We’re good. Everything
takes a long time, but we’re good. I actually had a long talk with my father last
night, pleading with him to get an unlisted number. Because a reporter will
call him and he’ll just talk, talk, talk and get upset when things he said are
printed. You know, they’re not just calling you out of the blue to be your
friend.” Perhaps her father can tell us more about her journey through life, the
cult, Marilyn Manson and mega stardom, but methinks there are too many
McGowans in the phone book to bother. To the source then: “I was
changing so rapidly then. Every six months I’d be a completely different person.
A lot of the people I was with were a lot older than me but then I’d outgrow
them. I don’t know. I’ve lived my life at times to avoid people judging me
but if you don’t go to a restaurant because you don’t want people talking about
your dress you’ll never eat. So I have made some pretty drastic 180s. The
week I was born is called the week of enigma. I think that answers a lot. And
my sisters calls me prissy which is quite funny. She’s called ne that my entire life and there is a certain amount of truth to that. Like an old
lady-ness. And I should be an old lady right now because I should have been young
some other time.”