Rolling Stone, 10 March 1994

Winona Ryder thinks reading me her diaries is a dreadful idea. I beg her in the name of science, medicine and anything else I can think of. We talk it over. And over. I tell her she would be giving a gift to the readers - something pure, unfiltered, straight from the mountain spring. She tells me that hauling out those spiral notebooks would be "the cheesiest, tackiest thing in the world." Still, she mulls it over. For weeks, she says neither yes nor no. Instead, I get the message you occasionally get from those old Magic 8 balls: Reply Hazy, Try again.

On New Year's Day, Ryder calls from her place in New York, and this time the Magic 8 Ball says, incredibly SIGNS POINT TO YES. The 22-year-old actress lives in a gorgeous, stately apartment building in Manhattan - an ocean liner drifting through a gray and dingy neighborhood. Tonight, Ryder's friend Kevin Haley and her boyfriend, Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum, are downstairs cooking dinner. The actress is in her bedroom, sipping tea with honey. She's a friend among friends, a homebody at home. And there's a stack of diaries on her bed. "I can hardly read my writing," she says. But she does. Ryder reads an entry, from April Fool's Day 1993, which she wrote while in Portugal, shooting Bille August's muddled epic The House of the Spirits. At the time, she was tumbling toward the end of along-standing relationships with insomnia (five years) and Johnny Depp (four). So the first entry is as follows: "Lisbon. Yikes. Weirdness."

And we're off,

"I can't believe I did that," Ryder says, laughing, 15 minutes later. "I can't believe I read you my journals. That's so lame. Oh, God. Are you totally going to have a heyday with me? Are you going to crush me?"

LIVE AND IN PERSON, Ryder is 5 feet 4 inches and weighs 103 pounds. In a corset, her wrist measures 17 inches. Joanne Gardner, media coordinator for the Polly Klaas Foundation, calls Ryder "teeny- tiny." Martin Scorcese, who directed Ryder's revelatory turn in The Age of Innocence,refers to her as "a person of that stature." Janeane Garafalo, who plays her roommate in Ben Stiller's dead-on Generation X comedy Reality Bites, puts it this way: "She's so small! I mean, she's like a little figurine for the coffee table!"

Upon acquaintance, Ryder will charm you within an inch of your life. She'll be geeky ("I don't think I'd be good at trashing dressing rooms. I'd be like 'Ouch!' "), censorious ("I can't believe you liked that movie. I'm surprised, and I'm disappointed. I really am. I'm not kidding."), indignant ("They offered me that movie, by the way, and I wrote a very nasty letter saying, 'How dareyou?' "), then geeky once more ("I never sent it."). Still, your first impression of Ryder is simply that she is lovely and small;. With her knees drawn up to her chest and her head hung low, she is a ball that could roll away at any minute. Ryder's size clearly makes her feel vulnerable - outdoors, she walks with hunched, defensive posture - but often she makes light of it. One afternoon, walking barefoot through the cast chandeliered lobby of her apartment building, she turns to me and says: "All the famous models live here. I feel like a midget fuckin' freak."

Interview No. 1 falls on a blank, gray day, shortly before Christmas. Ryder has just returned from memorial service for Polly Klaas, the 12-year-old girl who was abducted last October in the actress's hometown, Petaluma, Calif., and found murdered two months later. Ryder arrives at the restaurant precisely on time and kisses Pirner goodbye in the street. (Later, I'll ask if I can meet with him, and the magic 8 Ball will deliberate for weeks.) Once inside, she sits in a corner and removes her "Holden Caulfield hat": a plaid hunting cap with fur-lined earflaps. Her hair is startlingly short. "My mom cut my hair off," she says. "It wasn't my natural color, and she was like 'Oh, honey, letme.' Now my ears are always freezing." She gestures at her hat. "So I need earflaps." Ryder seems relaxed and settled in, but the moment I turn on the tape recorder, she stares at it as if looking into oncoming headlights. Anyone about to subjected to weeks' worth of questions is entitled to a case of the jitters - Truman Capote referred to the movie star and the reporter as "The nervous hummingbird and it's would-be captor." And for a while, Ryder gets smaller and smaller, threatening to vanish. "I get nervous," she says, "and when I get nervous, I get inarticulate." She orders herbal tea and chicken soup. I ask if she remembers the first time she ever had insomnia. She looks at the tape recorder again, then takes the leap.

"I was in Memphis doing Great Balls of Fire!," she says. "I was 16. I was sick, so I was kind of delirious, and I remember doing the weirdest thing. I took a bunch of grapefruits ... You know when you're sick, and you have a fever? And you pick up an orange or a grapefruit, and they're comforting because they're cold, so you put them on your face? [X singer] John Doe was playing my dad in the movie, and he brought over a bunch of grapefruits. For vitamin C and stuff. So I put the grapefruits all over, like surrounding me in the bend. And I just laid there and tried to sleep."

Was this Doe's idea?

Ryder laughs. "No, no, no. It was my idea. I mean, you get bored. I remember just panicking. And the digital clock was going: 34:30! 4:30 5:30! I stayed up the whole night. I remember - as it got light - it was just the saddest thing to me. I thought I was going to die or something. And from that night on ... because I knew it could happen, it did happen."
Weeks later, I remind Ryder of the tale of grapefruits. "Oh, God," she groans. "Why did I tell you that story? What was my point? Hey, maybe the grapefruits gave me insomnia for five year."

Over the next couple of weeks, Ryder will occasionally retreat into the nervous-hummingbird routine. This will take some explaining. With Heathers,which she narrated via her character's journal's, Ryder entered her generation's circulatory system. Teen-age life was twisted, and Ryder, more than any other actor or actress, was in on the joke. Since Heather , movies like The Age of Innocence- and even Francis Ford Coppola's overripe Bram Stoker's Dracula- have made Ryder something more than the doyenne of Generation X. They've made her a movie star. Stiller says : "It's funny - girls really like her, and guys really like her. Every guy I've ever talked to has a crush on her." Garofalo says, "I've noticed that even little, little kids like her, " adding, "I think Winona's the poster girl of every Trekkie, every computer nerd, every information-superhighway addict, every comedyhead and every comic-book collector. And athletes, too. You know? She's so gorgeous that she crosses over."

Ryder has already won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for The Age of Innocence, and this March she could win the Oscar ("Oh, shut up!"). Rumor has it that she's being offered as much as $4 million a picture. The actress loves a period piece: In House of the Spirits, a political saga spanning four generations, she plays the defiant daughter of a conservative Latin American statesman (Jeremy Irons), and soon she'll begin work on a new adaption of one of Polly Klaas' favorite books, Little Women. But Ryder's not ditching her core audience: In the wickedly satiric Reality Bites, she plays a young, unemployable filmmaker whose young, unemployable love interest (Ethan Hawke) threatens to turn her apartment into "a den of slack." Says Ryder, "My agent said, 'I think you're going to like this movie, because you can wear jeans in it.' "

The one thing Ryder seems not to have learned on the way to becoming a movie star is how to lie. Hence the nervous hummingbird. She thinks things through. Is she being honest? Is she being fair? Is she being defensive or tacky? If insomnia didn't exist, Ryder would have invented it. One night, she calls with a small hard sound in her voice and blurts, apropos of her diaries, "If you're only pretending to like me, and you write a really mean article, I'm going to hate myself for giving you fuel." I stammer assurances. Ryder wants to know how I'll use the diaries. I tell her I'll just stick them in somewhere. Now she's laughing: "What, in the middle of the article?"

April 8, 1991

I wish I could write in this fucking thing without fear of it being read or fucking published some day. Hell, I'm not that famous. Who the fuck cares anyway? I'll probably be dead by then, so it won't really matter. Unless my kids find this shit embarrassing ..

I wish I were in San Francisco, in the Sunset district, I remember going there once with G. I got so much sand in my shoes. He had a skateboard, and we were walking on the beach. I felt so much older than him, but part of me didn't. . . .Boy, did I blow him off. I remember he was so poor, as poor as I used to be. He was so dirty. He was so sweet. I didn't like him, though - not like that. Maybe for a minute, but it went away. Right now I wish I had a little apartment in San Francisco. I wish I wasn't doing what I was doing. No, that's wrong. I like doing what I'm doing - I just don't like parts of it. Classic, huh? This sounds so classic: actors bitching and moaning about wanting to be like everybody else. But if they were, they'd just want to be movie stars. I can live how I want. That's that. No one put this wall up. No one else knelt down around me and laid the bricks. I did it myself. That's why I'm so exhausted. Or is it just jet lag?

I love this line in Tom Waits' "San Diego Serenade": "Never felt my heart strings till I nearly went insane." I'm having a beer. Oh, fucking boy! Isn't that exciting? It actually is, if you think about it. For me, at least. These are things I never do because I think too much. I think ahead. I think behind. I think sideways. I think it all. If it exists, I've fucking thought of it.

Ryder wrote that three years ago on a plane from London to Los Angeles. She'd had half a beer and was already tipsy. Ryder is the product of a bohemian, countercultural childhood, although strangely so. Her parents once wrote a scholarly, feminist book called Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady, which identified them as the directors of "the only library in the world exclusively devoted to the literature of mind-altering drugs." Ryder once wrote a journal entry in which she joked about her "fear of marijuana." Her parents took the kids to splash around naked in waterfalls. Ryder now says of nudity in movies: "I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't. No matter what. I just couldn't."

Today, Ryder's father deals in 60's-related books, and her mother has a tiny production company that specializes in the filming of births. The actress frequently reminisces about Petaluma - the sentence I miss my familyis murmured like a mantra though her journals. Ryder has a half sister, Sunyata, 25, and a half brother, Jubal, 24, from her mother's previous marriage, as well as a younger brother, Yuri, who is named after the first Russian in space. In her stories, the clan sees sweet, funny, infinitely gentle. Grapefruit clearly didn't give Ryder insomnia. More likely, it t had to do with spending her adolescence on set and in hotel rooms. It had to do with pining for Petaluma and with trying to think sideways.

"For a long time, I was almost ashamed of being an actress," Ryder says. "I felt like it was a shallow occupation. I'd go to see a band with friends from school, and people would be watching every move I made. They' be judging me: 'Look at her shoes! I bet those cost $400!' That affected me. I grew up with no money. My parents did what they were passionate about, and they didn't make money. And there were a lot of kids, so we lived with no electricity, no running water, and no heating, except for a stove. Every week my dad would get a pint of Haagen Dazs, and that was out big, exciting reward. My parents compensated with amazing amounts of love and support, so I don't regret any of it. But my point is that when people look at me like I'm this really rich, pampered, privileged person - I am. I am right now. But it wasn't always like that. Sometimes people think I was born on the screen and that I kind of walked into the world. Sometimes I'll meet people, and they'll be like 'Oh, I'm really sorry about my car. It's really dirty.' I mean, we had moss and mushrooms growing in our car. If we had a car."

Ryder often beats me to the next question.

"Why am I so defensive? I'm defensive because it offends me so much when ... OK, I don't want to fuck this up ... I knew a lot of young actors who lie in these dumps. They have their books scattered, and their mattress is on the floor - and they're millionaires. That's fine. That's their way of living. But the reason they're doing it is that they're ashamed. And I've talked to them about it. You just want to say, 'Don't live this way to show people that you're real and you're deep.' It offends me, because I know what it's like to be in poverty, and it's not fun, and it's not romantic, and it's not cool."

Last year, Ryder wrote in a diary: "I feel like it's OK to be who I am. It's OK to be a fucking movie star. It's OK to live in a nice house."

Ryder lives in a nice house. And she can sleep - in a bed, on a plane, anywhere. One Sunday, I'm sitting in her lobby, waiting for her to make it out of bed. Soon, she comes whispering down the hall. In a striped shirt and overalls, she has the warm, disheveled look of someone who has just woken up and isn't quite sure where she is. She apologizes for running late. She says to the concierge, "Any mail?" The concierge says: "No, Miss Ryder. No mail on Sundays." And she laughs at herself: "I forgot it was Sunday."

Back in her apartment, Ryder gives me a shy, offhand tour. Hers is a sparse, modern place: high white ceilings, lots of light. In the living room, there's a grand piano and an acoustic guitar leaning against a couch. And there's an ink stain in the middle of the beige carpet: Last night, Pirner was writing Christmas cards. (I've again asked to meet the singer, but I may have blown it by saying, "What's up with his hard?" To which Ryder replied: "Aww. His hair is fine. He just hasn't brushed it in 10 years.") Elsewhere: an issue of the Missing Children Report and a photo album from The Age of Innocence, in which Scorcese has written, "To Winona: You 'became' May Welland by incorporating all the delight, beauty and strength that you already posses." Ryder is just settling in to this apartment. Her first editions (Jane Austen, E. M. Forster) and original letters (Albert Einstein, Oscar Wilde) are back in Los Angeles. Separated from her worldly possessions, she seems frustrated: "I wish I had more things that reveal character."

Here's the thing about Ryder - she reveals her character in stages. It's no coincidence that she played the hell out of Welland, who begins Age of Innocence as a giddy bride-to-be and ends it a shrew, willful wife. After leaving her apartment, Ryder and I browse for an hour and a half in Tower Books - she agrees to leave only when I promise we'll go to another bookstore later - then settle in at a bright, clinking coffee shop. The actress is in top form: funny, feisty, unafraid of the tape recorder. I would like to discuss the foolish, oversexed Dracula, but when I broached the subject during an earlier interview, the hummingbird and I had the following exchange:

Q: Let's talk about Dracula.

A: OK, I felt really connected to Age of Innocence because ...

Q: Wait. I'm not letting you off the hook that easily.

A: I don't know what to say about it that's ...

Q: Let's talk about it's amazing similarity to the new Meat Loaf video. Have you seen that?

A: Yeah. [Extremely nervous laugh] Yeah.
. Here's what I mean about Ryder revealing herself in stages. Today I remind her of a Premiere article about the making of Dracula. The story opened with Coppola goading Ryder through a scene by shouting from off camera, "You whore! You fucking whore!" The writer of the article described this as "just the push Ryder needs." I ask her if it was.
. Ryder cranks up the sarcasm: "Oh, yeah, it was really great. I love being called a bitch and a shore. It's completely silly technique, and it does not work." She pauses. "I would never have bad-mouthed Dracula at the time. Luckily, now I don't need to be Francis Coppola's favorite actress to have a good career. Now I know I can have my opinion and still be respected. But before, I was scared, because he was just so intimidating. I thought if I spoke out, people would think I was insane."

. Two things have given Ryder the courage of her conviction and finally made her realize it's OK to be a "fucking movie star." The first, very simply, was The Age of Innocence. Heathers is Ryder's best friend, but Age is the man she wants to marry. "It was the first time I ever felt proud of myself as an actress," she says. "And it really made it hard for me because nothing compares." Says Scorcese: "I think she's reacting to being part of a labor of love. We had a very good time. Winona has a good sense of humor, and her energy is boundless. It was like having rampant youth on the set. She'd be jumping up and down, but then when you said, 'Action,' she froze into position. All that energy was put behind her eyes, and I found that really fascinating."
. Ryder's second rite of passage was more complicated and far darker. It was the search for Klaas. The actress holed up with Klaas' family, helped scour the fields and man the hot line. And according to Polly's father, Marc, "She single-handedly put the story back on the front pages" by offering a $200,000 reward. "To me, it really wasn't a cause," says Ryder, now on the Klaas Foundation's board of directors. "It was like 'This is an outrage, and it's outrageous that more people aren't outraged.' When something happens to a child, the world should stand still." Ryder found a noble use for something she'd previously been ashamed of: 'my celebrityism, or whatever you call it." And she sorted through some of her own fears, past and present. After all, here is a woman not much bigger than a girl. A woman who has been stalked, though she has been advised not to discuss it. A woman who on New Year's Eve was grabbed by a drunk shouting, "Winona!" - and experience so unnerving that she returned to her great fortress of a home.
. Ryder worries that people might dismiss her involvement in the Klaas case as a Hollywood photo op, but clearly it was no such thing, Joanne Gardner of the Klaas Foundation remembers the actress's first phone call: "She was in a hotel lobby in Los Angeles, sobbing. She said, 'This is my town. This is my junior high. What can I do? Do you need money?' We talked for an hour and a half. Winona had an awful lot of experience, because she'd had some horrible experiences of her own - being stalked and all that. She had some psychologists that she knew> She had some FBI people that she knew> I mean, this woman ... I've always been a fan, and she's a lovely little creature, but she astonished me with her grasp of the situation. This is not let's-go-open-a-shopping-mall kind of stuff. This is life-in-the-balance kind of stuff."

. Just after New Year's, Ryder and I are scheduled to have dinner, and she asks if I would mind eating at her place: She doesn't feel up to going out. I ask if anyone will be joining us, and against all odds, signs point to Pirner. This is the Magic 8 Ball's bravest hour - if you can't go to a bar without a drunk screaming your name, then whatever privacy you do have triples in value. Which reminds me of what Ryder says about Johnny Depp: not a whole hell of a lot. She never makes an unkind remark about him, on or off the record. Perhaps to aid in her never-ending quest to be gracious, she doesn't read Depp's press and hasn't seen Benny and Joon or What's Eating Gilbert Grape. I ask her to free-associate on Winona forever. . Q: Do you ever think about Johnny's tattoo?
. A: No.
. Q: When you were breaking up, did you think about the tattoo?
. A: No.
. Q: Well, not that you're thinking about the tattoo ...
. A: What do you want me to say? It's like 'It's there. Oh, well.' If I hated him, I'd probably say something mean. If I was still in love with him, I'd probably say something poignant. He's a great guy, but I really don't think about it.
. That didn't yield much. I ask Ryder about the life of a celebrity couple, and she's more expansive: "I remember us desperately hating being hounded. It was horrible, and it certainly took its toll on our relationship. Every day we heard that we were either cheating on each other or that we were broken up, when we weren't. It was like this constant mosquito buzzing around us ... Now, I feel like I have an identity, whereas before I was so used to people telling me who I was. I was Winona! I was precocious! I was adorable! I was sexy! These labels were being slapped on me, and I didn't have any life outside of it, except when I went back to Petaluma."
. Ryder would like to protect her relationship with Pirner from the media, insofar as it's possible. She's deliberately low-key about what she refers to as, simply, "a nice thing that's evolving." "Our relationship is different than any one I've ever had," she says. "It's just more casual. It's more of a friendship, really." She pauses, fishing for words. "What I'm, basically saying is that it's not full of drama, which is really nice."
. Ryder met Pirner at Soul Asylum's MTV Unplugged concert last spring. Jeneane Garofalo remembers her waxing poetic about her new boyfriend: "I told her I couldn't take it anymore. She definitely exceeded her Pirner limit." In person, the singer, like his girlfriend, charms most everyone. Says Garofalo: "I thought he was really funny and cute and sweet. I have a crush on him." Still, the couple has inspired some cynicism. Courtney Love, who's never at a loss for words, blurted to a crowd, "Kurt is leaving me for Winona." Spin gave Ryder it's I'm With the Band award. A reporter for Sassy asked some alternative rockers if they would go out with her, explaining, "It's my theory that boys start bands so they can get famous enough to attract Winona Ryder." I ask the actress if any of this upsets her. She smiles and quotes her brother Yuri, who's fond of moaning, "Aww, why can't we all just get along?"

New Woman, April 1994

Ryder...says she was "maybe sixteen or seventeen" the first time she heard about the Spirits script and tested for the role of Blanca, Esteban's rebellious daughter. She didn't get it. But five years later, when Pernilla August bowed out due to pregnancy, Ryder finally did.

And Ryder, who showed up on the set after shooting had begun, happily reports, "Everyone made me feel comfortable immediately. Honestly, it doesn't usually happen like that. I mean I usually lie to journalists and say 'Oh, yeah, they were so nice.' But this time I really mean it - especially Glenn and Meryl. They have kids, they have daughters, so they have this real maternal way about them that makes you feel very comfortable."

Ryder, 22, is single but involved with Dave Pirner of the alternative rock band Soul Asylum and has no plans to settle down right now. Formerly engaged to actor Johnny Depp and the survivor of a brief romance with Christian Slater ("He broke my heart"), she says, "The institution of marriage is something I question for people my age."

Ryder, who has made 13 films in her nine years in the business, has also experienced this inequity in pay between male and female actors