Screaming Mimi!

Writers must be willing to go anywhere and do anything to get a story. Where I am, at the moment, is under a table in a Los Angeles sushi bar, surveying Mimi Rogers' lower half. Wouldn't you, if you had the chance? "What are you looking for, a potbelly?" Mimi's voice comes from up above, a retrograde drawl, slinky and unflexed, like a hand dangled in the water beside a rowboat. We've been swapping life stories. Hers is the more interesting of the two, composed of some great movie work (The Rapture, notably), hilarious turns on TV (her flirtatious guest shot on HBO's The Larry Sanders Show) and a tumble through the gossip mags as Mrs. Tom Cruise. Anyway, there I am with my head under the table. (I am a gentleman and wouldn't have done it had she not been wearing jeans.) I had gone below, I suppose, because I sensed the presence of a secret weapon--face it, she has an arsenal. Although I didn't really expect to find the weapon under the table, there's no harm in looking. When I am topside again, Mimi has me in her cross hairs. "How much do you really know about me?" she asks with a smile that could draw rivets from the Golden Gate Bridge. "Let's talk honestly about preconceptions. Tell me what you expected." All right. The Mimi I envisioned was the one who shared a bed with Tom Berenger in the 1987 suspense thriller Someone to Watch Over Me. In that film, she is a static beauty, cool and detached, icy and mannered, elegant and stoic. Her emotional access is metered, her sophistication imposing, having been cured by the lazy smoke of privilege, liberated from the heartbreaking associations the rest of us have to make. While she shares the same startling eyes, pupils suspended in pearly angel's plasma, the Mimi presently dangling tempura over her mouth is none of the above. "After that film, there was a widespread idea that that was who I was," Mimi says. "And other movie roles would come up and directors would pass over me as being too aloof, too patrician. It was terribly frustrating, because I was acting, for God's sake." She changes gears. "But you never answered me. Come on, how much do you know about me? Tell me some stories about me." The fact is, my misconceptions of Mimi are anemic next to the Rogers folklore coursing through the Hollywood circulatory system. When she laments that she was acting, for God's sake, there are those who would say, Exactly: Mimi is not what she appears to be. Along those lines, there is the "Mimi Rogers, militant scientologist" rumor. Rogers calmly addresses this aspect of her past: "This is the philosophy I grew up with. My parents were scientologists. It was a religious philosophy that I was shaped and formed by, part of my education. So, in that sense, it will always be there." For those fixated on the image of Rogers as a breast-beating Dianetics thumper, I suggest a screening of Michael Tolkin's brilliant 1991 film, The Rapture. In a rendering remarkable by anyone's standards, Mimi plays a hedonist prowling for group sex who becomes disenchanted and begins (text continued on page 161)Mimi Rogers(continued from page 75) experiencing religious premonitions. Her subsequent conversion to evangelical Christianity is complete, to the point where she redeems a former lover. The two marry, have a daughter and live quiet, pious lives until the murder of her husband by a disgruntled former employee triggers a series of catastrophic events. Certainly an individual consumed by religious fervor would find it difficult to embrace such a role.

To Mimi, it was "my best work, the greatest challenge I have had professionally. Making The Rapture was a remarkable culmination of timing, events and material, as well as the connection that Michael Tolkin and I had established. It was possibly a once-in-a-life-time experience."

Hollywood rumor number two comes in two versions. According to the first, being defined as Mrs. Tom Cruise hastened the end of Rogers' three-year marriage to Cruise, who saw his star appeal take on corporate dimensions. The second scenario has Rogers stricken by glamour ennui. Cruise, who, by his own admission, is retiring and steadfastly private, allegedly proved less than stimulating to Rogers, who was known to roam the clubs in West Hollywood with a pack of like-minded party animals.

"Is that the story?" Mimi questions, squinting into the legend. "That I was bored with that child and threw him over, chewed him up and spit him out? Shall we let that be the story? Because here's the real story: Tom was seriously thinking of becoming a monk. At least for that period of time, it looked as though marriage wouldn't fit into his overall spiritual need. And he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument. Therefore, it became obvious that we had to split."

"What about your instrument?"

"Oh, my instrument needed tuning."

But if Rogers can make light of it now, there are still hints at her consequential emotional loss.

"Finances aside, divorce just sucks," she avers, then rallies, recalling the tabloid play-by-play of her breakup with Cruise. "I thought as part of our settlement I would get my age back. See, when Tom and I got together, we didn't have a big enough age gap for the National Enquirer. So every six months we were together, they would add on a year. According to the Enquirer, I think I'm forty now."

Ah, yes, the tabloids. They do have fun with Mimi. Some time ago a Star headline read Kirstie Alley: I Lured Men by Promising 3-In-a-Bed with Mimi Rogers. Which leads us to rumor number three: Mimi Rogers is bisexual.

"Kirstie and I used to hang out quite a lot together," says Mimi. "We were the wild and crazy single girls. But it was all talk and no action. Both of us would get completely smashed on one drink. And we would flirt outrageously and we would hold hands and make people think we were lesbians, or dykes, or bisexual, or whatever, and give this wild appearance that was completely bogus.

"But let's get serious," she continues. "These rumors circulate because it's every male's fantasy. Look up 'sexual clichés--male' in the encyclopedia and you find two beautiful babes doing it. So if you have attractive actresses and men fantasize about them, then part of the fantasy is that they do other chicks, and maybe, if the guy's real lucky, they will do other chicks with the guy."

The waiter has arrived with more food. Inspired, perhaps, by the spectacle of our eel sushi, we have ventured into the realm of on-screen male nudity.

"Let's face it," Mimi says. "Unless the actor's showing his dick, nobody really cares. Male nudity? What, we see his buns?" Mimi scoffs, pinching her eel with splayed chopsticks. "So unless we see a dick, there's nothing to get into a lather about. And in a sexual context, it's really silly to see a dick on-screen because the dick is never doing the right thing. It's limp. The great thing about being a woman is we can hide it when we're aroused, or when we're not."

As she shakes some life into her hair, there's something about Mimi's face that catches my eye. Is this the secret weapon that stops the otherwise cold of heart dead in their tracks? Here is a face that, seen from one angle, is dark and sensual; seen from another perspective, she couldn't pass for her own sister. She is full and fair, DAR material, a kind of surfer That Girl.

"I have a completely irregular face," says Mimi between sips of Japanese beer. "My mother was a totally gorgeous blonde Southern babe from North Carolina, and my father was a Jew from Detroit. My features are completely out of whack. I need a front-end alignment."

Perhaps, but until then, she's still getting plenty of work, and no one's asking her to wear a mask. Recent cable TV appearances include Tales from the Crypt, Dream On and The Larry Sanders Show. Shooting is about to begin for The Ninja Murders, an NBC miniseries based on the account of two brothers who had their wealthy parents murdered in order to gain control of the family estate.

"It has eighty-two costume changes," says Mimi, speaking of her role as the wife of one of the brothers. "So I'll dress really well. And we keep whatever we can. Most of my wardrobe is made up from the movies I've done. One of the bonuses of being an actress is it cuts down on your shopping."

In Hollywood, most actresses would trade a closetful of Isaac Mizrahi creations for a big-screen role of some substance. No one knows that better than Rogers, who's still looking for her next Rapture.

"Well, I'm not on the A-list as an actress," she says. "I'm not one of the five or six: Meryl, Demi, Annette, Kim, Michelle. I get a lot of offers, but I'd say eighty percent of them I can't do because they're so bad. Of the twenty percent I can do, half are the audition-bust-your-ass offers. The problem these days is a lot of projects have become cast-contingent. They'll offer the lead role to four actresses, for example, and if none of them take it, they'll just scrap the project."

As we meander to the street, caramel-coated by the kind of L.A. sunset that makes the specter of earthquakes seem a little more remote, Mimi scoops up my hand and places it against her cheek, which is as hot as a Sinatra retrospective.

"Feel how warm my face is from half a beer," she murmurs, the lilt of her voice evoking the languid undertow of Saturday-afternoon wedding receptions.

She can be disingenuous, revelatory, teasing and truehearted. While she's speaking her mind, she won't bother trying to read yours. This, indeed, is her secret weapon. Her happiness appears to be free from dependent clauses.

"Hey," Mimi winks, "I'm just trying my hardest to be a groovy and happening chick."