Fast Starter

She Just turned 19, but Melanie Griffith already has a past she wishes the world would forget while she tries to handle the challenges of her future. Despite widespread agreement that she's destined to become a star, this child-woman doesn't quite look the part. Her Pollyanna grin more readily suggests a country girl who learned about life from the birds and the bees. Melanie, however, grew up--fast--in New York and Hollywood. The daughter of actress Tippi Hedren--Alfred Hitchcock's Grace Kelly-type discovery who starred in The Birds--Melanie has been a voluptuous bundle of contradictions since she first assumed the prerogatives of a consenting adult, at an age usually viewed as a no man's land somewhere between junior miss and jail bait. Many an otherwise sensible journalist has clucked over Melanie's morals as if she were a stray chick from Hollywood-Babylon, where the game of boy meets girl is rumored to be, at best, a low-stakes one with constantly changing partners. But Romeo and Juliet were mere teenagers, remember, when they met and mated in an avalanche of headlong passion that's been big box office for centuries; the mixed-up, off-again, on-again love story of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, though, has yet to attract a Shakespeare, despite the imminent prospect of an unhappy ending. But that is a scene from the last act.

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Melanie introduced herself to Playboy, and skipped blithely through the colorful opening sequences of the Griffith-Johnson saga, at the bar of New (continued on page 192) Fast Starter (continued from page 102) York's St. Regis-Sheraton Hotel in 1975. She was 17 then, making a publicity junket for Warner Bros. to plug her movie debut as the runaway minx in Night Moves, opposite Gene Hackman. Within the year, Melanie would have two more major films in release: Smile, in which she was one of the teenaged beauty contestants getting the eagle eye from Bruce Dern; and The Drowning Pool, which featured her as a murderous little trollop on the make for Paul Newman.

That day, between formal interviews, Melanie was furious as she squeezed into a booth beside Don, who had tagged along on the junket at her insistence and been quickly invited by nervous publicrelations people to do a disappearing act. Her blue-green eyes dark with rage, Melanie seemed to recoil from the faint odor of hypocrisy that implied. "When I asked them in L.A. about Don coming to New York, they said fine. But when we got here, there were two separate rooms with twin beds in each room. Then, when I said I wanted Don to go on interviews with me, they told me to go home. They're afraid everyone will find out we've been fucking since I was 14."

Everyone did find out. People magazine headlined the scoop: "For ... Thoroughly Modern Melanie, Life With Don Johnson Began At 14." Everyone wondered what her mother thought, of course, and Tippi was dutifully quoted: "No two people were ever more in love. ... Melanie was always ahead of the other kids her own age."

As the publicity blitz gained momentum, even Warner Bros. did an abrupt turnaround. Says Melanie, "Earl Wilson took me to lunch and asked what I thought about nudity. Pretty soon the studio was saying: 'Hey, gee, we think it might be good if Don went on some interviews with you.' "

The giddy press coverage ultimately backfired; Melanie's and Don's notoriety as sex symbols began to upstage every other aspect of their careers, creating resentment. After her triple-play 1975 debut, Melanie went back to modeling and has yet to make another film. As for Don, he's a lithe, cleanly handsome Hollywood comer with a couple of box-office hits (Return to Macon County and, more recently, the lead in A Boy and His Dog, a sci-fi shocker with Jason Robards) to his credit who has moved on to television.

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On January 8, 1976, less than six months after Melanie's 18th birthday--and only a few days after they had quarreled and decided it was time to break up for good--Melanie and Don, on impulse, flew to Las Vegas and got married.

By spring, they were snugly ensconced in a shabby but comfy hillside house, in the Laurel Canyon district, that was mostly filled by a pair of rangy Russian wolfhounds named Goldie and Colorado. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson had also raised a lion cub, they revealed in the course of an open-ended discussion of their courtship, careers, families, fights and future prospects. The lion was a foster cub from the game ranch owned by Tippi and her second husband, film producer Noel Marshall, who was planning to make a lion movie in Africa that Melanie and Don might do.

They seemed like any other young marrieds named Johnson, give or take a few of those God-given natural attributes that certify one's membership in the company of Beautiful People.

Explaining how they met, Melanie and Don went into a kind of Pat-and-Mike routine, pure bravura, that must have taken practice. "Don was making The Harrad Experiment with my mother," Melanie would begin. "I fell madly in love with him and wanted to do it--"

"Girls always want to do it at that age," Don came in on cue.

"I was 14, but all my girlfriends had already done it, and the boys I knew were jerks. I'd never met anybody who even came close to giving me that kind of feeling before Don."

"I was 22 and scared to death of her, because 20 years in prison was not my idea of a good time. Finally, it just happened rather naturally--Melanie raped me."

"No. Don's a sex maniac," Melanie responded.

"Only for you. dear."

"Don't listen to him, he'll say anything. Let's not talk about this anymore right now, OK?" Suddenly cool, Melanie had become embarrassed by the game. She didn't mind so much talking about her parents' warmth and understanding, followed by their gradual acceptance of the situation. It had been especially tough for her real father, who, ironically, lives in the Virgin Islands.

Speaking solo later on, Melanie dropped the facade of latter-day Lolita armed with sexy, self-deprecating wisecracks. "Things we've said before, or things that have been written about us, have hurt my family, hurt a lot of people. I feel now that something very special, which should have stayed private, has been taken away from me. I really believe in what I did. I was able to make love at 14, not just physically but mentally and spiritually, too. It seemed a completely normal thing. I'm not going to describe it anymore for people who think: Oh, my God, how terrible. First they freak out and don't want to talk to me; then they freak out again and have to hear everything. But I don't like being judged by people who don't even know me. So I was 14, big fucking deal.

"My God, I hate being called a nymphet, or Lolita. I'm not that way at all. Someone called me a while back to go in and read for this really sexy role--a girl who just hangs all over a guy--and I started to laugh and couldn't do it. I told them: 'I'm sorry, I just can't ... I'm not the type."'

About the doldrums in which her career seems to be becalmed, she was philosophical: "I'm not so anxious about getting parts, anyway, because I want to think about becoming a fuller person. I went out to a hamburger place the other day, where this kid kept looking at me and finally said: 'Hey, aren't you the girl who was in Smile and The Drowning Pool?' I told him yes and he said: 'You were pretty hot for a while, there, weren't you?' Yet I know there's still so much ahead of me that a silly thing like that doesn't matter. I mean, Don and I are both really young. I don't feel any difference between us in age; in fact, sometimes I think I'm years and years older than he is." Melanie paused, her bright child's eyes lit with preternatural wisdom. "To tell you the truth, I'm not sure this relationship is going to last."

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Only a few weeks later, a cryptic column item in The Hollywood Reporter corroborated her prognosis: "Melanie Griffith (Tippi Hedren's daughter) is splitting from actor-hubby Don Johnson after but three months of marriage. ..."

Checking out the story with Melanie--and rechecking as spring blossomed into summer--leaves little room to doubt that a fine romance is fini. While deciding about a divorce, they have divided custody of the dogs. "I've got Goldie and Don's got Colorado. Goldie seems very happy. And I'm much happier. I have a new lover, and I don't mean a boyfriend. He's a lover."

It took only a few more weeks for Melanie to decide that her new love wasn't the answer, either. "I've had the Hollywood bullshit. These people out here are fun to be with, but they're very shallow. I respect myself too much to be passed around like a piece of meat."

Melanie's summer-fall plans seemed to allow little time for further romantic complications. "First I'm going to Hawaii to do some modeling for Jantzen bathing suits. Then we're going to Africa to start the lion movie, which will be called Roar. My stepfather's doing it. with my mother, my two stepbrothers and me in the cast. I may stay in Africa awhile. I want to travel. You know, I quit college to make The Drowning Pool. There's so much to learn; I've been reading a lot." She's also getting into mime and yoga. "Not meditation. I don't meditate. I do deep breathing." She's considering a couple of other film offers and has talked to Warren Beatty about a projected feature titled Hard Core. "If I do it, I'll play a girl who works in porno movies. I'm free now, very interested in my career, feeling more secure about myself than I've ever felt before. Nothing bugs me." Young, free, famous, one of the happiest has-beens in Hollywood. What more could a girl want, unless she suddenly decides she wants another try at marriage with Don before their split is filed and final? But don't bet on that. At 19 going on ageless, Melanie seems to have grown up a lot between takes, the way cute kids do--at least in the movies. It's magic.