Mad, bad and dangerous to know. From growing up in a cult to getting engaged to Marilyn Manson, Rose McGowan’s life is like a sleazy, sexy B-movie. But is she ready for her biggest roe yet: Hollywood heroine?
When I ring the doorbell of Rose McGowan’s appropriately grand, 1920s, Spanish-style house in Los Feliz, just east of Hollywood, I heard dogs barking and the clip-clap of the high-heeled shoes coming across a tiled floor. McGowan swings open the door and, as she bends down to hold one of her dogs back, she offers me an unexpected glimpse of what must be the most impressive – and impressively real – décolletage in Hollywood today. Before I can regain my composure, she’s suddenly leading me upstairs.
To be within Rose McGowan’s orbit, I quickly realize, involves a complete surrender of will; it’s impossible not be sucked into the seductive maelstrom of her enigmatic psyche, where anything might happen, and most certainly will, often with shattering intensity. So it’s really no surprise that, less than two minutes after meeting her, somewhat flushed, I find I’m kneeling beside her bed and she’s kneeling next to me.
Are we praying? No, thank God. That would be so insanely weird, such an unforgettably unholy, uber-Freudian melange of the religious and the erotic, the sacred and the profane, that I’d be spoiled from ever having sex again outside a nunnery.
The truth is a bit more banal. I can’t really remember but I’ve apparently agreed to set up her Apple Airport. I’m testing the connection of her Powerbook, which is on her bed. Amazingly, I get it working. And she’s thrilled. Just then, out of nowhere, my mind imagines one of those cheesy soft-core flicks from the 1980s where some random workman (plumber, electrician) turns up at the hot chick’s pad and, within two minutes, after quickly fixing her leaking sink… I know. Bad, very bad.
I’ve never met anyone who oozed more raw Hollywood star power than Rose McGowan. She exudes the intoxicating allure that seemed to have disappeared with the great female stars of yesteryear. “I’m completely in the wrong time,” she admits, sitting on the balcony of her bedroom in the shadow of the Hollywood hills. “Even my body. When I find clothes from the 1930s they fit me like a glove. Long legs, a short waist and boobs.” Like Clara Bow, Ava Gardner or Lana Turner, she embodies that combustible Hollywood cocktail of the dangerously erotic and the impossibly tragic.
In fact, McGowan has such a sense of old-fashioned grandeur that she thinks nothing of tottering around her own house in impossibly high gold heels, trailed by her two Bristol terriers (basically outsized pugs), Bug and Fester. Her baby-round face – punctuated by full lips painted so ruby red that if you kissed them you’d surely turned into a frog – is so pale you wonder if she sleeps in a coffin, during the day. At the same time, McGowan is earthy and relaxed and very now in light-brown slacks and a low-cut, black wife-beater that works its magic most exquisitely when she leans forward, puts her hands on her knees and squeezes her breasts between her elbows. Yes, sir, McGowan is one deliciously strange woman. And one day her bizarre journey from childhood in a weird Christian cult to here will surely become the stuff of Hollywood legend. Although, for McGowan, the weirdest part of the journey may just be getting going.
McGowan is understandably thrilled that, at the age of 33, she is finally becoming a major Hollywood name. Her starring roles in both parts of Grindhouse – Death Proof from Quentin Tarantino and Planet Terror from Robert Rodriguez, a double-barreled tribute to the sexy, sleazy, bloody exploitation movies of the 1970s that hits UK cinemas this autumn – have boosted her into an orbit that would have seemed unimaginable even a few months ago. Until then McGowan had a string of mainly forgettable B-movies under her own belt, the biggest of which was the horror spoof Scream a decade ago, and a starring role on the long-running TV series Charmed, which was charming mainly to foreign adolescents. She was best-known as the one-time paramour of shock-rocker Marilyn Manson.
But what’s so intriguing about McGowan is that her excitement is tempered by obsessive morbidity. As she prepares to assure her place within the Hollywood pantheon, she is racked with gnawing fears and numbing anxieties. She has always been horribly accident-prone and thinks of herself as so unlucky that she calls herself ‘Two-Leaf’ (as in two-leaf clover). So at the very moment when her dreams may finally be realized, McGowan can’t help reminding herself how many of Hollywood’s starlets have ended their days utterly forgotten or worse. She’s an encyclopedia of fabulously dark tales about the awful fates that awaited so many of them.
“I have a couple of 8″ x 10″ publicity photos of Jane Greer from near the end of her career,” says McGowan, whose words rumble out in a deep, rich stream. Greer starred with Robert Mitchum in the noir thriller Out of the Past, one of McGowan’s favorite films. “They are signed, ‘Thanks for remembering me,’” she says. “Aagghh, that puts a little stake through your heart. ‘Thanks for remembering me.’ I see my own future there.”
She tells me the story of Peg Entwistle, a Welsh actress who cam to Hollywood in the 1920s.
“She wasn’t getting anywhere in Hollywood, and she had gone on an audition and thought it went horribly,” McGowan recounts with relish. “So she went up to the ‘O’ in Hollywood sign, and hung herself! Later that evening she got cast in the part, but of course they couldn’t find her as she was swinging from the ‘O’. I can understand that, although I always figure I wouldn’t kill myself over work. It would have to be something of a deeply personal nature.”
In fact, I hate discover, when I look up the story, Entwistle died by jumping from the ‘H’ of the Hollywood sign. But I prefer McGowan’s mythology: “swinging from the ‘O’” is undeniably more tragic.
At the moment McGowan is fascinated by the murder trial of Phil Spector, though hr feelings about him would get her tossed from any jury. “Disgusting man,” she snorts. What particularly unnerves her, I realize, is that it was an actress Spector is alleged to have murdered. Lana Clarkson, who, like McGowan, had done her share of forgettable B-movies. Clarkson ended up shot in the mouth at four in the morning in a faux-Spanish mansion in a nondescript suburb called Alhambra owned by an aging music producer wearing a blonde Afro wig – the kind of tragic fate Rose can too easily conjure for herself in the darkest moments. Yes, McGowan is the kind of woman who, when she’s alone at night, which I suspect is not very often, likes to lull herself to sleep by watching true-crime shows on TV. Is it any wonder that one of her dogs is named Fester? You know, The Addams Family?
Family. Where it all begins. McGowan was born in Italy. Her parents – hr mother’s French, her father’s Irish – were members of the Children of God cult and they raised their six kids in a commune. This induced a heightened awareness of the imminence of evil in the young McGowan; she says she read Edgar Alan Poe’s The Raven when she was six, was beset by nightmares and often found sleepwalking. It also have her a lifelong loathing for anything reminiscent of communes or hippies, from unshaved legs to the Grateful Dead.
When her father left her mother for their nanny when Rose was 10, mum moved back to the US, to Oregon, but left the Children of God when she realized the local chapter of the cult believed it was OK to have sex with children. Rose hated Oregon and during her adolescence she and her siblings were bounced back and forth between their parents. When she was 14 her mother had her locked up in a drug-rehab clinic even though she wasn’t doing drugs. When she got out she refused to go home and ended up homeless, roaming all over the state, before moving to Portland where she started hanging out in gay clubs. She still prefers gay clubs today.
“In straight clubs you will have two dudes that will sandwich you and start grinding,” she says. “I do not want to be sandwiched, or ground upon.”
When I tell hr I’m surprised she came through so tumultuous an adolescence relatively unscathed, she says she’s even more amazed at how well her brothers and sisters have done.
“Five or six of us ran away from home before the age of 16,” she says. “My youngest brother was a heroin addict at the age of 12. People were always saying to me, ‘You make so much money as an actress.’ But I was spending all that money on lawyer’s fees to keep my brother from going to jail. I actually became friends with somebody named ‘Benny the bail bondsman’. I’d do some movies to pay my rent and him. Bio-Dome [one unmemorable early McGowan movie] was to pay Benny.”
McGowan admits she’s made a lot of rubbish. “But people never understand the reasons,” she says. “They think you’re just going around picking and choosing. ‘Well there’s this great Scorsese movie coming up, but I think I will do Bio-Dome.’”
Rose first came to Los Angeles when she was 19, and ended up getting a small part in the awful Pauly Shore comedy Encino Man. She didn’t have any strong ambitions to act again, but happened to be standing outside a gym when a good friend of director Gregg Araki saw her. The next thing she knew she was starring in Araki’s tough film about teenage sex and angst, The Doom Generation. Her performance is memorable – and she won Best Newcomer at the 1996 Independent Spirit Awards – because of the rage that fuels her portrayal of Amy, which McGowan says came from her unchanneled anger about what had happened to her during her adolescence, and because her boyfriend died just before she started shooting the film.
Next came Scream, the spoof horror, in which she dies a suitably unpleasant death under a garage door. Her best work from those years was Jawbreaker, in which she plays a high-schooler who covers up a murder of a classmate. After that McGowan couldn’t seem to find roles that really suited or challenged her. Part of the problem, she says, is that like many actresses she became a typecast.
“Everyone jokes about how many strippers and whores are written about in Hollywood,” she says, “but I’ve got to say, the percentage is pretty high, certainly in scripts I see. I was reading this script last night and I was thinking, ‘This is a really good script and the character is not a hooker.’ But then, 10 pages later, she became a hooker. I thought, ‘For Chrissakes, why can’t she juts be a person with OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] who has to rub all the doorknobs 75 times, or somebody with agoraphobia?’” Both of which, incidentally, are psychological disorders that have affected McGowan herself. She also has a terror of fish, of all things – she won’t eat them and she can’t swim because she’s so petrified a fish may burst against her.
Even when she wasn’t getting great parts, McGowan was always able to make a good living, appearing in a lot of music videos, and was the face of fashion line Bebe in the late 1990s. But most of McGowan’s energy around that time went into her sometimes scandalous relationship with ghoulish metaller Marilyn Manson. They’d met at a movie premiere in late 1997, shortly after Manson had moved to Los Angeles. Manson had apparently had a big crush on McGowan since seeing her in The Doom Generation. Somehow the paring seemed very apt. “We’re crazy as each other, so we’re perfectly compatible,” she said at the time. Manson said he fell for her when “we went to this bar and she started dancing really sexily to Iron Maiden. I thought, ‘If a girl can dance to Iron Maiden, this is the girl that I want to be with forever.’”
It also helped that, according to Manson, McGowan “is probably the most peculiar person I know.” Which coming from a man who has allegedly allowed himself to be fellated on stage and previously been charged with sexually assaulting a security guard is quite a compliment. “There’s something very tragic and classic about her, in a Marilyn Monroe sort of way, that just captured me,” he said. “I think we have a great relationship, but is still has a sense of tragedy to it.” McGowan stopped acting for the best part of a year to go on tour with him. They were together for nearly four years and engaged for two, braking up at the end of 2000.
These days McGowan is wary talking about Manson, partly because it now seems like a long time ago, but also because he was furious that she claimed to have broken up with him because she “couldn’t take his lifestyle. The drugs – it was more than you could imagine. I realized it wasn’t a lifestyle I wanted to be married to.” He fired back that he’d get his father to throw her out of their house when the relationship ended. Who knows?
Since then McGowan has had various relationships, most notably with Ahmet Zappa, son of rock legend Frank Zappa, and with David Zinczenko, editor of the US edition of Men’s Health magazine.
More recently she has been linked to Robert Rodriguez, who directed her in Planet Terror. There have been rumors in both the tabloids and the film-trade press that the couple began a steamy relationship while shooting the film in Texas last year. Although McGowan and Rodriguez have denied this, it’s taken as a given in Hollywood, where the pair have been sighted around town looking pretty wrapped up in each other. The problem is that the relationship started around the time Rodriguez was ending his 16-year marriage. He and Elizabeth Avellan, his wife and business partner, have five children and tried to quash rumors that whatever may (or may not) have happened on set caused the production to be shut down for a month.
“Elizabeth Avellan and Robert Rodriguez were separated long before the Grindhouse production began,” said a statement from their production company. “Their separation and subsequent divorce were very amicable and they opted to continue as planned, and to produce the film together.” Once again, who really knows?
McGowan says she and Rodriguez did first meet at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005, when they ended up talking for much of the night. Rodriguez was so evidently taken with McGowan that he couldn’t figure out what happened to her since he’d seen her in her Nineties movies. If he’d spent more time watching television, he’d have known she spent five years on the TV series Charmed, about three sisters who also happen to be witches. McGowan, who replaced former Beverly Hills 90210 star Shannen Doherty, had expected to do the show for no more than tow years. Now Charmed is over, she admits she was distraught when it was so successful with her in the cast that she ended up having to fulfill her contract for the full five years until the show ended last year.
“Every year it would get picked up and every year I would cry,” she says. Which wasn’t just about the show. McGowan finds it hard to commit herself to anything or anyone for more than a couple of years. “I had to see a hypnotherapist because I was having these really bad panic attacks,” she says. “We shot Charmed in this place called Woodland Hills, but when we were on hiatus, if I saw the word ‘wood’ in a sign, I would start having an anxiety attack. I felt that I was flipping out. I just wanted to jump out of my skin and run.” She has the same pattern with boyfriends. Around the three-year mark she’s usually over it. And then, she says, she dumps them like a man. “OK. I’m done with you. You have to leave. Now!”
Her innate feeling that she is, in fact, “a man with really great boobs” triggered much of that auspicious late-night Cannes conversation with Rodriguez, and her subsequent starring role in his film Planet Terror. She plays Cherry Darling, a go-go dancer with lesbian tendencies who wants to be a stand-up comedian and ends up with machine gun attached to her amputated leg with which she mows hundreds of zombies. As you do.
“I was saying that I couldn’t understand why in movies the guy can’t be the girl, or why the girl can’t be the guy,” she recalls. Whatever she said or did that night, she obviously made a huge impression on Rodriguez. “She really just caught me off guard,” he later said. “When you meet somebody like that, who has a personality that’s so strong in person, you know that if you can blow it up 50 times on screen it’s going to be amazing.” Not long afterwards, he called her and told her he was going to put her in his film and change her life. The part he wrote for her in Planet Terror was, he admits, pretty much tailored to the woman her met for the first time that night in Cannes. It was the male hero’s role. The name, though, was pure McGowan.
“Well, it came from one of many topics of conversation we covered that night,” she recalls. “I told him if I had a daughter I would want to name her Cherry Darling, but you can’t name a girl Cherry because she’d be tortured in the schoolyard, so that was how I ended up with that name.”
In Tarantino’s part of the double bill, Death Proof, McGowan plays Pam: blonde, sweet and a bit of a hippie. Which is, a Tarantino knew, about as far as it’s possible to get from McGowan’s own personality. As well as switching between two very dissimilar characters on those films, she was also finishing off the final season of Charmed. For months that meant shooting the TV series during the week and flying to Texas over the weekend. “Nine months in Texas, all at night,” she recalls. “That can make your brain wrap.”
Spending time with McGowan is as much of a thrill ride as any Rodriguez/Tarantino spectacular. She has an inexhaustible collection of stories about herself and the terrible things that have befallen her. For most people, their homes are sanctuaries; for McGowan they’re psychic battle grounds. Her last house, built in 1923 in the Hollywood Hills, was apparently inhabited by “some sort of entity that tried to kill me. Well, I don’t think it was me specifically, I think there was just something. It was beyond bizarre.” She also “had a psychotic neighbor. She would just invent things that I did all day long. She measured everybody’s bushes.” Now she’s moved she has “Republican Mormons next door. I have an offer on their house. I want to bulldoze it.”
Even holidays offer McGowan no respite. She recalls how she ended up on an island off the coast of Turkey recently, staying in what was supposed to be a new five-star hotel. “It was a total nightmare,” she says. “People were trapped in the elevators every day. They ran out of food.” Worse, when she was on the beach a woman who had been stung by a jellyfish expired in her arms. McGowan knows that kind of thing could only happen to her.
So what next for LA’s favorite new pin-up? She’s to star as Hollywood actress Susan Cabot in a biopic called Black Oasis, directed by Stephan Elliott, who made The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
“Susan was in a bunch of Roger Corman films in the Fifties,” says McGowan. “She was about 4’10″, and obsessed with her life not going the way she wanted because of her height. She was engaged to King Hussein [of Jordan] but he found out her real name was Harriet Shapiro and she was Jewish, so he dumped her. Then she had a baby and made it seem as if it was Hussein’s. She thought this kid was going to be tall, strong and her saving grace, but he was born with dwarfism. So as she got older she subjected him to this experimental therapy: 40 hormone shots a day, ands breaking and stretching his legs. She was determined he was not going to be a dwarf. He ended up being around 5’2″ but because of all the hormones he was very feminine looking. He became this mini-weightlifter and was obsessed with Bruce Lee. Finally, he went nuts and killed her with nunchucks.”
It’s a role so absolutely perfect for Rose McGowan it’s downright scary. I can’t wait.
