I mean this as a compliment: I can see why drag queens love Kathleen Turner. Unlike the interchangeable blandettes who decorate today's movies, Turner has texture. She has grit and class, she's sexy and regal, she's no-nonsense and divalicious. She's a dame and a Grand Dame. It has nothing to do with the severe rheumatoid arthritis that's roughed her up a bit in the last decade, or the meds that deepened her whisky-hued voice. As she would say, it's about attitude, baby. Turner has attitude to burn.
In Toronto last week to promote her autobiography, Send Yourself Roses, Turner strolled off the elevator at the Four Seasons Hotel and took charge. "I'd like an iced tea, let's go to the lounge," she commanded, and had us seated and sated before her PR girls knew she'd left the lobby. "It's so funny to me, I'm at least twice as old as these young women who are babysitting me," she said. "I was just in my room trying to get a humidifier. I always have one; it's common sense. But what they gave me was a box of water with a fan. I had to go through this whole thing: 'This is not a humidifier.' Anyway, I got one."
A big one, I'd bet. Turner is 53 now, no longer the svelte tigress who prowled through Body Heat, Crimes of Passion, Prizzi's Honor and The War of the Roses, devouring men. She wore a simple black V-necked sweater and slacks; her blond hair was shoulder-length and slightly shellacked; and her strong blue eyes and frank manner drew me in. She looks more and more like Lauren Bacall, with whom she's often compared. I imagine she's a great girlfriend, dishing dirt and dispensing advice.
That's the tone of her autobiography, too. Turner sprinkles in sentences about her directors and co-stars - she calls Michael Douglas, with whom she starred in three films, "a wonderful friend and a terrible enemy;" says Steve Martin, her co-star in 1983's The Man with Two Brains, "wasn't standoffish, but he certainly wasn't warm;" and casts aspersions on her Peggy Sue Got Married co-star Nicolas Cage (he's filed a libel suit in England). But the book is more self-affirmation than tell-all, with chapter heads such as "See Your Moment and Seize It, Honey" and "If You Feel Sexy, So You Are."
Turner gives herself a shout-out or three. She deems herself a "serial risk-taker" and her roles "groundbreaking," and writes, "When The Virgin Suicides came out in London I was there doing The Graduate," which featured her infamous moment of full-frontal nudity. "Two blocks away from each other on Shaftesbury Avenue, I was the lifeless Mrs. Lisbon in one place and the randy Mrs. Robinson in the other. And I thought, 'Now that's range. Now we're talking range, guys. Anybody wonder about my range as an actress? Take a look on Shaftesbury Avenue.' "
The autobiography was hatched by Turner's co-writer, Gloria Feldt, a former president of Planned Parenthood, which Turner has long supported. "At first I thought, "That is so egotistical,' " Turner said. "I don't know how many stupid autobiographies you've seen over the years. I usually avoided them myself."
But she agreed after realizing that she was perched on one of life's pivot points. "I was playing Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which is a role I'd dreamed of doing throughout my professional life. Being this power on stage, this accomplished actress," Turner said. "And there I was turning 50, and really thinking about women and age. My daughter [Rachel]had just gone to college, she's a sophomore now. So there was none of that everyday stuff - Is there milk in the fridge? Has the laundry come back? - that consumes you, I don't care how much of a career woman you are. I got to thinking that we are the first generation of financially independent women, and about the power that gives us, which society hasn't caught up to at all. And I got divorced [in 2006 from her husband of 22 years, real-estate mogul Jay Weiss] I read somewhere that most divorces of people over 50 are instigated by women. I thought, 'Ugh, am I so typical?' "
So she took a break from her native Manhattan and jetted off for a spa, "where I talked and talked and talked and talked. And then Gloria had to put it into some kind of shape," Turner said. "I've always heard, 'You're too big, you're too forceful, your voice is too strong.' I was always being told to get smaller. Affirming my worth is a battle I've been fighting my entire life."
She seems to be winning. Turner calls her divorce "a happy experience. My husband and I are great friends - just happier apart. At first I felt relieved. The peace of my own place. I started painting colourful rooms, one green, one terracotta, all these colours that he would have minded." She created what she calls "my nest," a daybed covered in pillows under a wall of windows overlooking the Hudson.
"So all of that was rather wonderful," Turner continued. "Then I started to grieve. Thoughts would come into my head, 'Nobody knows where I am right now.' Always, for twenty-some years, Jay knew where I was. I told him in an e-mail that I missed that sense of companionship, and he said, 'Call me any time and tell me what you're doing.' I think I'm coming out of that grieving period now."
She's certainly busy: There's the book tour, and the acting master class she teaches at New York University, which she will also teach in Italy for a month this summer. She's shopping in Spain for a second home. She just directed her first play, an off-Broadway revival of Crimes of the Heart, which earned good reviews. "It was fascinating, I felt like I was acting all six roles," she said. "My agent tells me offers to direct are pouring in." And she's dating a younger man, "a geneticist in his late 30s. I find him very interesting and well educated. But he's so young. It would be nice to find a man closer to my age, who has as much life experience. I wouldn't mind somebody taking care of me for a bit."
But mostly, after selling out her runs of The Graduate and Virginia Woolf, Turner wants to get back on Broadway this fall. "I can pretty much write my own ticket, so I'd like to do a comedy," she said. "Nothing will ever satisfy me [professionally]as much as acting. It's a kind of heightened, heightened, heightened living. I'm going to be Helen Hayes, God willing." Only a fool would try to stop her.
Johanna Schneller