Checking In

[Q] Playboy: Do men like to listen in when women talk?

[A] Kidder: Absolutely. The few times I've had a man around while my girlfriends and I were talking "girl talk," he's loved it: "God, I never heard that! You girls really think about that?" I remember telling a friend, a New York playwright, how I knew I was really excited about a guy when I shaved my legs the night before I would be seeing him. It means maybe I'm going to go to bed with him. Otherwise--ugh--forget it.

Men are afraid of women's talking to each other, because they think we sit and say terrible things about them. In fact, we say terrible things about ourselves and talk about how scared we are.

[Q] Playboy: Do men talk to each other in the same way?

[A] Kidder: No, and they should, because it's a great release. I knew a tight-knit group of successful male writers and artists. They loved one another dearly. I'd cook dinner, and they'd talk: "Oh, I'm gonna get myself some of Grandma's homemade crack pie tonight ... huh-huh-huh," or, "That little shrimp, I'll give her a hot beef injection...." Then they'd slap one another on the back--whap! whap! "Let's go fishing." Whap!

I got to know them one by one over the years, and they would confide in me with things like, "Oh, God! I know she doesn't love me." You idiots, I kept thinking, why don't you say that to each other? In that way, men's relationships are strangely more romantic than women's. There's this unspoken thing: "Let's go out and conquer the wilderness together.... Let's go shoot a grouse. That will show we love each other."

[Q] Playboy: Did Superman change the way men related to you?

[A] Kidder: It changed the way the business related to me, because I was at last in a hit movie. But in terms of my personal life, I've always been one of those women who went after the guy. I never sat around and waited for the guy to phone. I was never hard to get if I wanted to be gotten. If I didn't want to be gotten, there was no way I could be.

[Q] Playboy: Before you met novelist/screenwriter Tom McGuane, you had lived with several men but were adamantly against marriage. What kind of man did it take to change that conviction?

[A] Kidder: I'm sure it was my feminine masochism. The marriage certainly didn't work. It was like the lapsed feminist and Ernest Hemingway the Second. A disaster. But McGuane is a handsome, strong, bright, fun, funny, sexual person who was, to me, absolutely irresistible. Two weeks after we met, we decided we had to make a baby. Our daughter, Maggie, is now five years old. When Maggie was nine months old, we got married [McGuane and Kidder divorced ten months later]. The masochism that ensued was my own fault, in that I became less sure of myself--he'll hate me for telling all this--I just simply lost my identity completely. I remember looking out the kitchen window in Montana, washing dishes and thinking, I'm 27 and it's all over. Ultimately, I came out of it. I swore I would never lose myself in a man again.

[Q] Playboy: You've had several serious, nonmarital relationships with men. You lived with director Brian De Palma before you married McGuane, didn't you?

[A] Kidder: Yes. Brian and I were friends and still like each other a lot, but we did not have complete communication. I always had my own room when I lived with men. With McGuane, it was a bunk-house. I have to have my privacy and my secrets.

[Q] Playboy: What secrets?

[A] Kidder: It's always been very difficult for me to really open up or give myself over to a man out of fear of being hurt. I'm a real con artist. I come on as Miss Open, and maybe I can go farther than other people, but I can only go to Y, I can't go to Z. There are very few people in my life who know me to Z, or even to Y. For many women--for me--it's the man who pinpoints you on that vulnerability who has won you. He is the one who found it.

[Q] Playboy: You married actor John Heard, star of Head Over Heels and Heart Beat, and filed for divorce six weeks later. What happened?

[A] Kidder: I won't talk about it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have male friends?

[A] Kidder: Lots of them. I have three male friends who are like girlfriends to me. I tell them my love problems. The few times I've slept with male friends, it has really ruined the friendships.

[Q] Playboy: Are you able to manage male friendships with current love interests, or does it cause jealousy?

[A] Kidder: Sometimes. That's tricky. I refuse to give up certain people in my life. But if there were lovers, and someone's jealous, I have to be sympathetic to the jealousy.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever lie? Do you say, "No, I never slept with that person"?

[A] Kidder: No. I could never go that route.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about monogamy at this point?

[A] Kidder: I'd tend to bash someone in the head with a baseball bat if I fell in love with him and found out he was cheating.

[Q] Playboy: So you're for monogamy.

[A] Kidder: I guess in my deepest heart I must, ashamed and unliberatedly, admit that I am. I don't believe that any other way really works. At one point in my life, making love was no more than shaking hands. I used to feel guilty if I didn't sleep with somebody, because I thought: What's the matter? You're too good for him? It's only recently that I've realized making love is something special.

[Q] Playboy: How do you cope with a man who doesn't live up to your emotional expectations--one who falls apart, for example?

[A] Kidder: Well, one guy finally said to me, "Hey, this isn't fair." He was looking after me all the time. And when I fell apart, he was supposed to be there to pick me up. But, on the other hand, a fast way to make a woman angry is for a guy to be irrationally jealous. I can't stand it. I get so angry I can't speak. I've slugged guys in the jaw. When they fight back, I yell, "Wife beater!"

[Q] Playboy: In the Playboy article [Margot, March 1975], you wrote that you felt so awkward as a teenager you thought you would never grow up and sleep with Warren Beatty. Was sleeping with Warren Beatty a childhood goal of yours?

[A] Kidder: [Grinning broadly] No. At the time, he served as a metaphor for "the one." And I'm not going to answer your next question.

[Q] Playboy: OK, then, do you ever have sexual feelings toward your Superman co-star, Chris Reeve?

[A] Kidder: No. We know each other real well at this point, so we laugh when we do love scenes. We can kiss, but in general I think it would be easier to close my eyes and have someone have sex with me than to be kissing him. Which men cannot understand. Maybe I'm a whore; they say that's how whores feel.