By Susan Littwin.
So far everything fits. This mock Tudor is a proper house
for a rising star, and that blue BNW parked in the driveway is
the right car. It’s what you'd expect if you’ve
pigeonholed Courteney Cox as a sweet young thing, a beauty-pageant-pretty
young woman from the deep South who got her start as a model and
then landed nice-girl roles as Lauren, Alex’s college-student
girlfriend on Family Ties, and a scientist who turns soft
inside in "Cocoon: The Return." But what’s that
Honda Rebel doing there, parked at an angle under the tree? Is
some guy over for a visit? The motorcycle’s hers the first
sign that Cox is hard to pigeonhole, So are the two big dogs who
come bounding out to say hello, ready to paw and lick any
intruder to death. A few minutes later, Cox pads down the stairs
barefoot, in oversized jeans that look like they might belong to
the same boyfriend who ought to own the motorcycle. Her dark hair
tumbles to her shoulders, lustrous but lank, untamed by any
hairstyling procedures. She wears no makeup-but then again, she
has that fine-china skin and eyes so startlingly blue they seem
almost synthetic. "Calm down, you guys," she scolds the
dogs. The dogs bound off, unsubdued,and Cox takes a deep breath.
She has just returned from England, where she weeks filming
"Till We Meet Again," the CBS movie based on a Judith
Krantz’s novel. In this chronicle of three woman caught up
in history between 1913 and 1956, she plays Freddy, the flame-haired
tomboy daughter who flies planes during wartime. The fiery,
independent Freddy is an easy-to-admire heroine. Coster Mia Sara-who
become friends whit Cox in the course of filming-saw her buddy as
a natural for the role. "She’s very adventurous, open
independent." But before she began work on this role-before Family
Ties had even wrapped- Cox had slipped off to Florida to play
the less admirable Jecquie Kimberly, Roxanne Pulitzer’s
amoral best friend in NBC’s "Roxanne: The Prize
Pulitzer." "I did Jacquie because she was completely
different from Lauren (on Family Ties). I like change."
She means it, If any one word sums up Courteney Cox, it is change.
She changes constantly, sometime midthought. For example: she
offers a tour of the house, which she decorated herself in
cheerful country style. "I bought everything at flea
markets," she says, "except for the couch, which
somebody gave me. American country is my favorite style,"
Then she pauses to reflect. "Actually, if I could afford it,
I’d buy country French. That’s really my favorite. No I
think English." She curls up on the hand-me-down couch in a
den that looks out over a canyon. "When I saw this house, I
called my business manager and told him I had found my dream
house," she says. This is her third residence in Los Angeles.
her first was an apartment in town. "I bought all new
laquered Italian modern furniture. I hated it. I lived there for
a year, and when I moved I just left it behind whit the landlord.
I moved to a cottage in Sherman Oaks, and then this house. I'll
probably sell this one in a few years." But didn’t she
just say it was her dream house? "Well, yes," she says,
unruffled. "But I’ll probably find another dream house."
She leans back and fingers her glossy, dark hair, which had been
red until a few days ago-ruthlessly stripped down twice by
powerful bleaches and colored and retouched every two weeks
during the three months of filming. "It’s nice to have
my own hair color back, but actually I started to like myself as
a redhead. It made me feel fiery and sort of bad," she
muses, playing whit the idea. Her willingness to play whit ideas
earned admiration on the set of "Till We Meet Again."
Costar Barry Bostwick, who plays her first love (Bruce Boxleitner
plays her "true love") had doubts about a scene in
which his character-a burned-out stunt pilot who taught Freddy to
fly-becomes upset at her daredevil flying. "How violent, how
angry would he get?" Bostwick wondered. "What could
have been a polite scene heated up in the rehearsal process and
ended up whit our having the freedom to go as far as we wanted.
The scene could play completely out of control. I literally yank
her out of the plane and throw her on ground. It took great trust
on Courteney’s part. She was open, receptive, willing to
experiment to find the right pitch." Her openness to change
may have come from growing up whit options. Now 25, she is the
youngest of four children in an outwardly conventional
Birmingham, Ala, country-club family. But as she explains, "My
parents were complete opposites, Mom was a conventional Southern
belle-conservative, reserved. She liked security. Dad liked
adventure, excitement. "Spend it now" was his
philosophy. He could decide to fly us all to Florida for the
weekend. He was a contractor, and we were always okay
financially, but insecure," When she was 11, her parents
divorced, and each has since remarried "to their own types.
I’m a mix of both. I look like my mother, but I wish I had
her full mouth and lips." In a recent article in Southern
Style magazine, a friend of Cox’s says "She wasn’t
the best-looking girl in high school or anything like that,"
It is hard to imagine a high school in which Courteney Cox isn’t
even anything like the best-looking girl, but Cox seems to
understand the remark. "I wasn’t the most popular girl,
not by a long shot. I wasn’t interested in high-school
social life." She was out of school every day by noon so
that she could get to her 40-hour-a-week job. "I wanted to
make money. I wanted a car and clothes. I like things," she
says frankly. She spent a year at Mount Vernon College, her
mother’s school, and then went to New York for the summer to
earn money as a model. She liked it and decided not to go back to
school. The modeling led to commercials, the commercials to
acting. "I got really serious about acting. I took coaching
at NYU to lose my Southern accent. Now directors keep telling me
I have a New York accent." Then she got picked out of the
crowd to be the girl Bruce Springsteen dances whit in his "Dancing
in the dark" video. A role in the ill-fated series Misfits
of Science brought her to L.A. And then she got picked out of
another crowd of young actresses for the Family Ties role.
"I enjoyed that show. I was worried at first about joining a
little group that had been together for five years. I mean, we (semi-regulars)
were B-team. But if you made the first move and showed you were
willing to fool around, they were glad to have new faces."
Now, having crammed two TV-movies plus her appearances on Family
Ties into half a year, she explains that she longs to be at
home whit her dogs and her flea-marked antiques. "I hate to
go out. When I’m in L.A., that is. On location, I go out
every night. "She is a good cook, but her food is Southern
and rich, stewed clean-to-regs in bacon fat. "My idea of a
diet," she says "is I don’t eat dinner for a week."
She has no health or beauty regimens. "For exercise, I walk
the dogs and go up and down the stairs. I’ve joined every
gym in L.A., and I go for six weeks then forget about it. I hate
having people watch me." She used to spend evenings at home
whit Paul Brown, a man who works in the fashion industry, but now
she is evasive when his name comes up. "I’m not in a
relationship right now. He’s my special friend, my friend
for life. But I was gone for two months, and he’s very
involved whit his own work, and I’m involved whit mine. I’m
not sure you ought to mention him. By the time this comes out. .
." By the time this comes out, she will probably have made a
few more changes. She might be playing a nun, or maybe she’ll
be a redhead again.
