US Magazine (February 97)

Here is a recent dream from the mind of Miss Bullock: She is in a Range Rover. In the front are 2 friends. In the back, she is sitting with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. The car pulls up at this really trendy restaurant. Sandra doesn't want to be there- she doesn't like the kind of restaurant where everyone looks at one another- but her friends say it is going to be great. Inside it's huge and everyone is dressed in leather vests and gold chains and jeans. Really Melrose, she thinks. For some reason, Warren, Annette, and one of Bullock's friends stay in the car. The other friend goes to the restaurant's bathroom. Bullock sits there and sits there and sits there. Sweating. Freaking out. Two hours later she goes into the bathroom to find her friend, but the friend is gone. They've all left her there.

"What do you think that means?" Bullock asks. "The Range Rover, the very famous talented couple, the trendy restaurant, fear, sweating, alone, bathroom? Help me."
Did you order any food?
No. I was really angry and I left the restaurant. I went in the parking lot and they weren't there. Therapy, yes?
Well, the most obvious, pat explanation would be that you're worried that Hollywood will pick you up and then abandon you, will leave you lonely at it's silly restaurant.
(Overly melodramatic voice) Oh, my God, you're right! In a Range Rover!
Hollywood picks you up in it's car, then leaves you sad, old and unhappy.
That's it! You're so right.
Actually, I don't think it means that at all. It's too obvious.
No, but I tend to go for the obvious.

This month Sandra Bullock appears opposite Chris O'Donnell as Ernest Hemingway's First World War nurse and lover in Lord Richard Attenborough's In Love and War. In an era when any actress who makes her mark in light comedy or fun action roles tends to feel trapped, this part is exactly the sort of scary challenge for which she hankers.

"The film," says Bullock, "was one big bucket of fear." She wanted to discover how to communicate in a different way. She needed to eliminate her cozy, sinuous, '90's body language: "A friend of mine always says that she went to Europe and she learned how to sit still," she says. Bullock had to learn "what it is to communicate in silences and let the inner life take over rather than relying on everything outward. Because that's what I relied on all my life, sort of as a comfort mechanism. I wanted to remove all the things that were comfortable for me." Bullock asked the director to intervene if he ever caught her taking the easy way out and relying on her old habits. And he did. "I've never heard a man who speaks so eloquently call me an idiot more often," she recalls.

To give her performance the appropriate Method sparkle, Bullock, 31, also needed to learn first aid the World War One way. She was given a 1918 Red Cross nurse's handbook. Things were different then.

"Not only do they have to know how to bandage a severed leg," she relates, "but they also show you how to make egg creams and waffles. There's a little cookbook section in there. I was like, 'Next to the severed hand is the egg-cream recipe?' "
So that Bullock would appreciate the exact function of any instrument she picked up, she attended the obligatory series of operations. "I watched people's intestines being taken out," she says. "We were holding people's bowels." One day she found in her hands the just-removed cancerous uterus of a young woman. "It bothered me," she says evenly,"because it didn't bother me."

So if my stomach spills open later on, you'll be able to handle it?

No. I'll be able to tell you which organ was what, and I could probably stop the bleeding for a little while.

And you could whip me up a tasty waffle?

Yeah. A nice egg cream while you wait for the ambulance.
For unintentional added authenticity, Bullock claims to have never really gotten over her jet lag throughout In Love and War's European shoot. "My face resembles the war part," she says. "The love part is the beauty of Chris." She gushes with praise for her co-star but is delighted that US magazine has exposed his retrogressive attitude toward armpit hair. She had already taken her own personal steps to shake him out of it: "Out of spite; me and my girlfriend Pamela, who does make-up, grew armpit hair just to get a rise out of him."

Sandra Bullock's rented house on the island of St. Martin is on a hill overlooking the Caribbean. She is here to film Speed 2. This time it's on water, and most of the filming is done 4 miles out to sea, on or near a cruise ship called the Seabourn Legend.
We first sit at the dining table, then next door in the living room. (Bullock is not here at the house much- she tends to sleep on the boat- so she figures she should use as many of the rooms as possible.)
On either side of an archway between the rooms, 2 medical rubber gloves are hung- they're from a friend's care package, Bullock offers by way of explanation. "I didn't want to throw them away," she says,"in case somebody could do something fun with them." (Like? "Well, you can blow them up and make thanksgiving turkeys out of them," she says. I look doubtful. "You've got to be around children a lot," she explains.)
She shows me the pool and says she can skinny-dip in it only at night. She's worried that someone will get her with a camera. (The film bosses are doing their best to accomadate her. They have warned the 5 known paparazzi on the island and have had the airspace over Bullock's house restricted.) Still, some of those who would like to imagine Bullock naked are already finding some strange satisfaction.
Her father found some nude photos of her recently on the Internet. The only thing is, they're fakes. "They've placed my head on this incredibly great set of breasts," she says. "Which to me is not offensive because I look great." When her father discovered his fraudulently unclothed daughter, he printed out the photo and left it in her office with a message: "Do you want to send the guy a thank-you note?"

After the sun sets completely, Bullock fetches me a Mexican beer, carefully cutting a lime. She grabs herself a Bud Light. Ker-chink. "Here's to half a brain but a lot of personality," she toasts. Soon she will boast of feeling quite tipsy. "I'm a big lightweight," she says."My friends will tell you, I'm a 2-beer max." So I ask some questions:

Are you getting itchy to have children?

I've always been itchy for it, and I've always known from a very young age that I belong around a bunch of kids. I love kids so much. There was a time when I could say, "Oh, I can have a child without a husband." That's given way to that I would like to believe in the premise of trying to start out a partnership, and all the good that we can bring, then pass it on to the child. The dilemma is: Am I being fair, bringing a child into this world? Do I feel that what I have to teach them is going to help them survive and change the world for the better? I could have had kids at 17. Except for the fact that I wasn't doing anything to have the children.

Are you more likely to split up with someone than let them split up with you?

I don't know. I think now I'm incredibly more in tune with what I want and not afraid to voice it. I have always worried about other people and stayed in things long past their time, making sure they were OK, even though it meant taking away your soul for another 2 years.

How would the new you typically announce you wanted to go out with someone?

Oh, my God. I'm the worst person for that, because if their is somebody I like, they are the last person in the world to know it. I can't talk to them, I cannot look at them, I cannot flirt with them. Flirting to me is shutting down and becoming very comatose. I think I would need someone to say they want to go out with me.
Well, so much for the new assertiveness.
I know. It's like I'm a walking contradiction.

What should a man never do on a date with you?

(Laughs) It's been a long time. I don't like it when people curb their spontaneity. I'm one of those people you can pretty much say and do anything around. And I like people who are very direct. No beating around the bush. And talk about what you do, but don't talk about what you have as a result of what you do.

Do you remember the first time you kissed a boy?

Yes, I do. He became my boyfriend. The most beautiful boy in the whole wide world. Blond hair. Bowl cut. Slender. He asked me to go steady with him. For Christmas, we met in the stairwell at my elementary school, and he gave me a box of chocolates and I gave him a hat. Then a friend had a party where our parents dropped us off. We sat on the couch, and I think I kissed him for about an hour; your lips are numb but you don't stop. He was the first boyfriend, the great love. I drove past his old house recently. He committed suicide. It could have been a mistake, but it was one of those car-in-the-garage. It was very sad. He was beautiful.

Did he break your heart, or did you break his?

Big time, he broke my heart. He left me for a girl who had big breasts, in the 6th grade (laughs).

Can you remember what you thought about sex before you did it?

Oh, yeah. My parents had a book, The Joy of Sex. Me and my girlfriend Lydia found it. They're going to love me for saying this; they had no idea we found it. I'm sure everyone thought I was going to be a wild child, but I was also aware of my boundaries. If anything, I was a late bloomer. I was already in college. I think back on it fondly (soft laugh), so it was all right.

The young Sandra's earliest talent, sadly long lost, was for projectile vomiting. "I wish I could explain it," she says. "You cannot keep anything down. But the distance you achieve is apparently wonderful." Her earliest ambition was to kill her younger sister, Gesine. "At 5, I was obsessed with this new child, and I wanted her dead. They said I was a horrible, horrible older sister."

The Bullock children grew up in both America and Germany. Her mother, an opera singer, spent the performing season in Europe, and Bullock would get bit parts as "the token gypsy child." Her father, a civilian who worked at the Pentagon, would visit, but he would also leave. "That's why I don't cry at airports anymore," Bullock says, "because I remember, as a kid, my dad's leaving was the most devastating day."

When Bullock was about 5, her mother bought a book about how to turn your child into a genius. What did it teach Bullock? "I forget," she says. A self-deprecating chortle. "Obviously not much."

Her mother determined that Bullock was on drugs when she was 12. She would usually hide her diaries and notes- about the people she was madly in love with and the people who weren't madly in love with her and about how she so wanted to die because of it all- in the carved canopy bed her father had made, based on one she'd seen and loved in the film Cleopatra. Because Bullock was going through a particularly uncommunicative, brooding phase, Mom suspected something untoward was going on and began to search for evidence. She found a note in the back pocket of her daughter's pants. Something about a boy and then- God help us! Were we really such bad parents to deserve this?- the mysterious letters WBS. Quite obviously, Mrs. Bullock concluded, it was code for drugs.

The crisis abated only when Bullock offered up a less fanciful (and, in fact, truthful) interpretation of the 3 scary letters. Teenagers have other needs for codes and other things to hide: Write back soon.
After that, things were OK again.

"What it really meant," Bullock now japes, "is 'Will bring stash.' "

Bullock was sitting by a hospital bed for 2 days, waiting for someone to wake up ("I don't think they would want me to talk about it," she demurs), when she wrote the script for Making Sandwiches, a 40-minute short film that she directed and performed in last year. "It could be a piece of garbage," she says. "I have no idea. But it just meant something to me."
The story focuses on a couple (Bullock plays the wife) who live in a small town and work in a sandwich shop. Their lives are straight forward, ritualistic and safe. Then their livelihood is threatened by circumstances they don't understand. The wife feels that if they lose the business, it will break her husband, so she introduces fancier foodstuffs to the menu. The husband takes this as a sign that she is changing and that she doesn't love, or appreciate, her old life. The crunch comes when she recklessly introduces pocket pita bread. "To him, metaphorically, their sandwich shop represented their relationship: 2 slices of bread," Bullock says. "Pocket pita was just one slice. He thought that what they had wasn't good enough and she didn't care for him anymore."
There's something very true to the core of Bullock about a story like this. Sandwiches are a very Sandra Bullock metaphor. "It was sort of my philosophy on relationships," she says.

Her husband in Making Sandwiches is played by Matthew McConaughey, Bullock's A Time To Kill co-star, the man whom she met through the parents of her godchild a few years back, the new star of the moment whom the world's gossipmongers have paired off with the actress. Let's ask.

Acording to the world's tabloids-

The tabloids have had me with seveeral wonderful men. I'm telling you, I've had a very extensive dating life. I was apparently paired up with Keanu (Reeves) when I went to see his band. I walked in, and so I guess we're dating.

Then there was the Chris O'Donnell "canoodling" thing.

Who knew what canoodling was? I thought we were dancing. I thought we were having a hug and there were 20 other people around , and the next thing we know, it's a canoodle. I was also paired with Troy Aikman, the football player, and I didn't even know who he was. We met at a function, and there we were, the happy couple.

And in the tabloid world it is now accepted as fact that you are dating Matthew McConaughey.

I know. It's wonderful, isn't it?

Any semblance of truth?

Matthew's one of my closest friends. I adore Matthew. And on my priority list of friends, he's up there with the top three. I don't mind being paired with Matthew because I've finally gotten used to it. I'm at the point where I'm like, if you can't beat it, join it. Matthew and I were apparently married when I was in England.

Congratulations.

(In a silly, girly voice) Thank you very much. If there's gonna be anybody to pair me up with, I don't mind being paired with Matthew because his values and morality and his friendship mean the world to me. We're cut from the same cloth.

So what can we say about your relationship?

You can tell everyone that Matthew and I are very close friends. You can say that. (Giggles)

I read in the British press that you were supposed to have piled on the pounds because of Matthew's fine cooking.

(Bemused) To my knowledge, Matthew doesn't do more than throw a bunch of steaks on the grill. (Pause) Not true; there was a chicken once. I don't think I've ever seen him sit down and cook a full meal. But I love that. That's so great. (As if addressing McConaughey) Matthew, you're touted as the new chef! Not only are you a hot new young actor, but you're a chef!

If there is one thing that Bullock wants me to understand, it is that she has changed. She has made a discovery common enough among those who achieve the success they once dreamed of: that you don't luxuriate in the simple pleasure of such achievement for long. When you are struggling, the question is a simple one: How can I make it? The questions success asks are trickier. "I came to a point where I'd stopped and said, 'That's it,' " Bullock says. "I had finished doing what came easy to me. I had pushed it as far as I could, and I realized I was evolving into a corner. I just felt that I had been emptied. I didn't have anything else to discuss or share or contribute or anything. I just felt like I was finished with a certain era of my life."

Thus, Bullock's first post-success failure, last year's Two If By Sea, was, although a dissapointment, something of a relief in the way it burst her bubble of cheery invincibility. "It took the pressure off," she reflects. "You think to yourself: People are being too kind, and I'm just afraid of this kindness, because I will let someone down. And I wanted to do it as quickly as possible, so I could be on a level where I wasn't panicked all the time for messing up. The film didn't do well, and all of a sudden you feel, nobody cares. The oddest feeling just lifted. It felt so good."

In March 1996, she parted company with her manager and her lawyer. Much of the weight of managing her career has subsequently been assumed by her family. (This is generally the point in a career when people gently edge their family out of their business life, not usher them in.) Bullock's father, who was working in Washington, D.C., as a vocal teacher, started helping her out about 2 years ago. The impression she gives is that, in trying to control her business life, she had been overwhelmed by the responsibilities but was unwilling to delegate them to outsiders. Eventually, her father gave up his teaching. "A lot of his students," she says, "really hate me right now." Her sister, a law student, also helps out (and, in fact, worked out many of the practical arrangements for this story).

Another example, Bullock says, of something that has changed in the last 2 years: "If I want to take off and travel, go to New Orleans and go dancing for the whole weekend, I do it. I get on a plane. I used to make excuses about why I shouldn't enjoy myself, because I felt it went against the work. And it showed. I think it showed in a stiffness and a falseness."

Bullock tells me about how she felt grown-up for the first time only last week. She talks about the mountain having moved. "I feel like I've blossomed," she says. "Flowered."

Of course, she is aware of the irony that amid all this talk of the new, more rarified Sandra Bullock, she is filming Speed 2. "The last 2 films were very heady and internal," she says, "and I wanted to do something that was fun and physical to balance things out." Nonetheless, she says, "this is the last time I'll do something like this."
Ever?
"Ever," she replies. "Probably."

Looking for clues, I phone a couple of witnesses. Director Peter Bogdanovich cast an unknown Bullock, against the film studio's wishes, in 1993's The Thing Called Love. She played a ditsy Southern songwriter wannabe- her character's marvelously bad featured song, "Heaven Knocked on My Door," was written by Bullock herself- who eventually decides that she wants to go to New York to be an actress. (Her final, prophetic catch phrase: "Comedy is a part of serious acting, Billy!")

"A real natural, a natural-born comedian," says Bogdanovich of Bullock. The secret of her appeal is, he claims, frightfully simple: "She has this likable quality. It's impossible to make Sandy look phony. It's like that thing Hemingway used to say about writers: She has a built-in crap detector. She's intrinsically believable." And she's funny off camera too. "She makes you laugh, even when you're not in the mood. She used to walk on the set and slap me on the butt- 'How ya doing, Pete?' " And? "I liked it, actually. I thought, do that again."

Denis Leary first met Bullock on the set of Demoliton Man, 1993's passable Sylvester Stallone-Wesley Snipes futuristic romp, and their friendship survived the trauma of Two If By Sea. (Her story is that Leary discovered the phone in her trailer and ran up a huge bill.) "She is what she is; it's not fake," Leary says. "She's very trusting and open, and I think that's what people respond to. The great thing now is that she hasn't actually lost that." I ask Leary what he thinks Bullock wants from all this.
"Money," he replies. "She's in it for the money. Just pure, unadulterated greed. I hate to break that news to America, but I think she's stockpiling the money with the idea of buying some nuclear weapons eventually and an island someplace." Quite. Any last thoughts? "You've probably got a copy of the prison record; it's common knowledge. And beyond the secret marriage to Jan-Michael Vincent in the '70's, I don't think there's anything else you need to know."

A slow tender shuttles between the Seabourn and shore all day. I go out to sea at the crack of dawn. Bullock appears from her cabin around 9 a.m., bouncing down the corridor, carrying her laptop. This morning's chosen subject: the unflappably cheery Sandra Bullock's purported but elusive dark side. "Oh," she claims, "it's pretty morbid. I think you find- (with) anybody that's so outwardly obnoxious and clownlike- they're bound to have dark recesses that they're hiding and balancing out. Don't you think?" She doesn't seem entirely sure. "I can't be fun and games all the time. Or maybe I am and I'm just trying to find something."

Michael, Bullock's bodyguard, passes by.
"Michael!" Bullock shouts. "Do I have a dark side?"
"Yes," he answers immediately.
"Wow," says Lara, Bullock's assistant. "No hesitation on that."
"The tape recorder's on," Bullock tells Michael.
He pauses. "No," he says. "Actually, no dark side at all."

The cruise ship is surrounded by a perpetual flotilla of 5 or 6 other boats used for filming and for ferrying to and from shore. Bullock decides to commandeer one of the speedboats for more flippant purposes. "Blast around the ship really fast," she instructs the pilot. "Just make it exciting." And it is: flying over waves fast enough to fill our faces with spray, fast enough that we have to hold on tight as the boat jumps right out of the water, fast enough for someone to radio from the cruise ship and tell us to behave.
An hour later, Bullock borrows another boat and persuades the pilot to let her take the controls. "OK," she says, "throttle, baby." This is faster and rougher. When she bounces clear of 3 or 4 waves in a row, I lose my balance, ending up in a heap around her ankles. Back on the ship, she will boast that she nearly killed me.

Filming takes months. You get bored. One morning, as the tender approached the Seabourn, all 30 passengers- ages 14 to 70- turned around, lowered their pants and mooned the master ship. Bullock was one of them. Perhaps she was even the ringleader. On board the main ship, one of the cameramen filmed the action. Before Bullock saw the footage, she imagined that you could see nothing more than the cheerful waving of many distant unidentifiable cheeks. But, she says, it's not like that.
They panned across?
"More like zoomed in," she says.
And?
"I'm glad I've been working out."

This is how Bullock sees it (gender issues): "We're equal on a lot of levels, but obviously when you get right down to it, there are just innate differences that should be embraced and appreciated. I went against it for so long, being so independent, saying I have to take care of myself, forge my own path, not depend on a man, open my own doors, pay for my own bills, blah blah blah. I know I'm capable of taking care of myself until I'm 100. But the simple things, like if it makes a man feel good to protect you or, if he senses danger, to push you aside, or if you're walking in a room and he puts his hand on your back- it's not a sexual thing, it's chivalry."

When Bullock was young she was afraid of other women. "I was such a tomboy," she recalls. "You'd just go and play football and run around with the boys, and I understood that." Later she found herself yearning for female friendships. Now she has a posse of female soulmates. "We're starting to dress alike," she says, " which is nice because we can buy one outfit and all wear it."

And the Bullock-buddy dress code is?

Bare feet, T-shirt, overalls. And a pair of these (points to frayed denim cutoffs hanging over a chair) are a must. It's always better if someone breaks them in, preferably a guy. The guy's butt somehow stretches them out at the bottom, gives them that nice saggy thing. And you look for sagginess there; they have to not fit tightly, they have to be schleppy, where they almost look like their going to fall off, so you look like a prepubescent, 12-year-old boy.

It's nice to know that men's useful role in society is to give jeans sagginess in the bum area.

They have to have a nice pert bottom to actually push it out. And then we put them on, and we're shaped differently, so it sags. You provide good sagginess.

The other night, Bullock was sitting with some girlfriends at her rented house and she had a thought: We should take of all our clothes and jump into the pool. So they did. They undressed, jumped, and there they were: naked, wet, floating.

Then she had another thought: What are we supposed to do now? And she couldn't think of an answer. There was no one to watch them, or to hide from, or to disobey, and their watery nakedness in itself was not enough. It all seemed a bit......pointless.

Maybe Bullock is growing up. Maybe she is just growing. Life's real changes do not announce themselves; they show themselves sneakily. The first signs are not when you find yourself doing different things but when you find yourself doing the same things and notice that they feel different. Anyway, that night she didn't float for long. She thought: Oh, that was fun. Then she climbed out and got dressed.

Today, tired of cheap, wake-jumping, sea-galloping thrills, she heads the commandeered speedboat and its four passengers away from everything. Straight out to sea. After a few minutes, she eases off the throttle. We woosh and slide to a stop. Out here it's quiet.
Time for a swim, she announces, and seconds later- still in her skimpy lace Speed 2 outfit- she slips into the water. "Come in!" she hollers. We float, treading waters in a close square, facing one another, the sunshine lighting up our limbs with shimmering golds and blues and greens. We chat about whether there are sharks in this sea, but even though there may be, I don't think we care.
I could have floated there all day: miles from land- the Caribbean, a speedboat, a movie star to interrogate. But I don't know any better. It is Bullock who leans her head to the sun and says, "Life is good right now," but it is also Bullock who is first to break formation and strike out for the boat.

© 1997 by US Magazine