Timothy Hutton has Growing Pains

Timothy Hutton is a honey bunch.

The reedy 6'1" actor with the clear, urgent blue eyes is 22--just two years older than my own son--and I am, give or take a year, the age of his mother; so there is almost certainly no lack of propriety, and absolutely no danger to either of us, in my rubbing his stiff neck and his bronchialsore back while he reclines in his suite at The Sherry-Netherland. I have a feeling that the girl in his bedroom, a starlet named Joyce, may not agree. She answers the phone, which rings incessantly, in a sharp, vexed voice while Tim tells me his holiday plans: It is December 16 and there is a 12-foot-tall Christmas tree, as yet undecorated, in the living room of the suite. Strewn all over are Joyce's suitcases, from which spill roller skates, ice skates, a child's stuffed animals, red heart-shaped satin pillows, campy thrift-shop clothes. Tim's holiday plans include Joyce and, "Oh, boy, eggnog" and long walks in the city; and, tonight--bronchitis or no bronchitis--a special screening of Airplane II for his pals.

This is my last visit with him, a preholiday hail and farewell; we exchange tokens. Joyce smiles at me tepidly, definitely a pro forma smile; she gives Tim a fiercely proprietorial glance. He is dressed in jeans and a denim work shirt and might be just any (continued on page 172)Hutton(continued from page 109) good-looking kid--except that he isn't, and even the way he holds his body tells you that he isn't. She is dressed all in black leather; a patterned bandanna is wrapped around one black boot. She might be just any other groupie, except that right now (for who knows how long?) she is Tim's girl. She is a small, slim, fashionably tangle-haired brunette with a pretty, pouty face; her dark-brown eyes regard Tim with a kind of tense voracity. She is 32. She is also, according to a source who is protective of Tim and whose business it is to worry about him, "a tough New York cookie." A tough New York cookie who lived with Bruce Springsteen and who is--between his phone calls from his agent, Sue Mengers, and from his friends, of whom he appears to have hundreds--conducting whispered conversations with Tim about whether or not to accept a role that requires her to be nude. ("No!" says Tim, not in a whisper. Then, gently, "Please don't do it--for my sake. Such a nice girl," he says. "I've known her for years. ... Joyce! Get the damn phone! Please?")

Timothy Hutton is not made of soft fiber--if he were, he could hardly have survived the death of his actor father, Jim Hutton, and his own amazing success and subsequent loss of anonymity, the tickles and the tortures of celebrity. But he's not what you'd call a tough cookie. He's what you'd call adorable; thousands do. His mother, Maryline, with whom he lived from the time he was two to the time he was 16, calls him fearless.

Intrepid, earnest, clownish, intense, alternately puppylike in his affections and severe in his judgments, opinionated, searching, sarcastic, tender, sometimes boorish, more often kind, funny, solemn, self-effacing, swaggering, self-absorbed, curious, analytic, spontaneous; add rich and famous and throw in Academy Award-winning (at the age of 20) for his stunning performance as the vulnerable and despairing Conrad Jarrett in Ordinary People, and it's easy to see why girls and women--maternal and predatory, innocent and sophisticated--cling to his company and why thousands more would like to. A person still in the process of creating himself ("Jeez!" he says. "Are you going to print all the stuff I say? I never even knew I had these opinions before I said them. I'm thinking out loud--isn't it great?"), he has so many warring characteristics, and so many shifting moods, that he amounts to a blank slate. The harder he tries to define himself (what 22-year-old can define himself; and why, after all, should he be obliged to?), the more elusive he becomes. A lot of women like blank slates: They can read whatever they like into Timothy Hutton's behavior; it's easy to fall in love with a creature of your own imagining.

•

Like most moviegoers, I tend, without thinking, to associate actors with the role or the roles for which they are best known; so I am not quite prepared for the sonic boom of Tim's "Hi!" when I first meet him at New York's Parker Meridien Hotel. I suppose, unconsciously, I am expecting the quivering sensibilities of Conrad Jarrett. Tim (he doesn't like to be called Timothy) is accustomed to being thought of as a cross between Holden Caulfield and James Dean, a rebel even the rebelled against can love, so occasionally, to flummox fans and interviewers and, no doubt, to amuse himself, he trots out a belching, farting hard-boiled-kid persona--an I-dare-you-to-categorize-or-to-like-me persona--which makes his PR woman nervous. She never knows which Timothy Hutton will show up.

The night I am to meet him, she is awfully nervous on his behalf--she has told me that when he's working, he often goes brittle, cold, introverted. But Tim's not nervous at all. He is affable, warm, pleasant, forthcoming. Restless, perhaps: He prowls, he paces; then he sits so still and quiet, with such a steady and fixed regard, that you're sure he thinks you're the most important person in the world--or that he is. ("Living in the moment" is what he calls it, or--well, he does come from California--"communicating.") Prowling or communicating, he is a pretty sight--a graceful young animal. He has been filming Daniel, from E. L. Doctorow's novel The Book of Daniel, based loosely on the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of giving atomic secrets to the Soviets and were electrocuted. The movie, in which Tim plays Daniel, the orphaned son of the spies, is going well.

It is, in fact, all he wants to talk about. Swigging down Tab, chain-smoking Carltons and Barclays and Marlboro Lights and Silk Cuts, he dispenses with formalities and preliminaries. This is a meeting called to break the ice, but Tim's on fire with his role as a man in search of his legitimate past, and there is no ice to break. He talks and talks and talks about Daniel.

He has never taken an acting lesson. He didn't finish high school, either, though his father insisted on his getting a high school equivalency degree. An instinctive actor, he is academically undereducated; but the way he prepares for a role ensures that he will always have a wide assortment of facts and sometimes tentative, though firmly declared, opinions: When he made Ordinary People, he spent time in a mental hospital in order to understand his character's depression. When he made Taps (a self-indulgent, incoherent movie that was a box-office success in spite of rotten reviews--largely because of Tim's portrayal of a rebellious military cadet with a misplaced sense of honor), he lived and rehearsed for four weeks at the Valley Forge Military Academy and Junior College; he also read Melville's Billy Budd, as well as biographies of Generals MacArthur and Patton. Some actors say they act in order to understand themselves. Tim learns about slices of the world when he learns roles--a new slice for every part.

For Daniel, he went to "every synagogue in Brooklyn" (he liked davening; it came to him as news that women sit apart from men in Orthodox shuls); he read Victor Navasky's book about black-listing in Hollywood, Naming Names (he speaks with intimate loathing of Roy Cohn); he learned all there is to learn about Paul Robeson and listened to tapes of his singing all through the shooting of Daniel; he hung out at the Garden Cafeteria, Lower East Side home away from home for many bourgeois living-room Communists during the Thirties; he read, he says, all of Marx.

"Hey!" he says, "I found this sentence in Marx--I wrote it down. It says everything: 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.' Isn't that great?" (One doesn't like to disturb his enthusiasm by telling him that that is the one sentence of Marx that everybody knows; reading all of Marx in order to get it is like reading all of The Oxford English Dictionary to find out how to spell cat.)

"Did you know Ethel Rosenberg had to be killed two times? The first jolt of electricity didn't kill her. Shit! Some guy with a camera strapped to his leg--you weren't supposed to take pictures of an electrocution--peed in his pants, man, when he saw that. Ruined his film. ...

"All those guys, those Communists, they weren't violent; they just wanted the world to be good. I can dig that. I was only 14 when I went to Berkeley, but I remember all the protests, the sleeping bags, the candles--man, it was great! ... You know what Abbie Hoffman told me the other night? He said, 'Too bad the poisoned Tylenol capsules weren't suppositories, because then half the assholes in the world could have been killed.' ...

"Your daughter's in Nicaragua, huh? What does she think of the revolution? Is she being careful? You sure? Let's call her. My sister, Heidi, is in Brixton--that's the working-class part of London, where the riots were--and, man, is she revolutionary. Likes the I.R.A. I was at a bar with Richard Harris and he had a fight with a guy in a suit about the I.R.A. I can dig Arafat, ya know, walking around like an Arab dude with all those funny men in suits. ... Did you know Truman Capote called me one of the worst-dressed men in the world? Because I was at a party with jeans that had a hole in them. He said I looked like I was on my way to prison. Whaddaya think of that? I went to see my grandma in Connecticut the other day and she yelled at me for wearing jeans with a hole in them. I told her I didn't expect to see all of her friends when I came to see her--she had people driving up in cars, man, like I was the Washington Monument. What a world! Friend of mine had a kid the other day. Man, that's some heavy shit. What a world to bring a kid up in! What a world! I'm registered for the draft, but I wouldn't fight. Here, look. ..."

He shows me pictures he's drawn, pen, pencil, charcoal, Winsor & Newton water colors his mother sent him: studied self-portraits, a quick, glib, competent sketch of a man he saw on a plane--and pencil drawings of a woman being executed, a woman hanged, a woman drawn and quartered, a woman strangled, a woman in an electric chair. Ethel Rosenberg.

"What a world!" he says; and when he reaches for my hands in farewell, his own are cold and sweaty.

"You didn't ask me the three dumb questions," he says. "'Why are you an actor?'--shit!--and 'What are you going to be doing five years from now?' Man, five years is a long time. And 'Who is Timothy Hutton?' That's the worst. I like you," he says. "I really like you. Let's go for a walk in the park tomorrow. Let's go to Sotheby's next week. I want to bid on a couple of Picasso drawings. I have two lithographs. ... We talked about some real stuff, didn't we? Don't you think we did? What a world!"

•

One might expect the world to look pretty rosy for Tim Hutton. He has made $1,000,000 per picture (hence the Picassos, also the Warhol, also the Calder and the Stella, a Dali, a Magritte, a James Wyeth); he is very much in demand, with three more pictures already lined up. It's tempting to see him as Truman Capote saw the young Brando: sitting on a pile of candy.

But he doesn't owe all of his intensity to happiness.

He was two years old when his father and his mother divorced. Maryline told the Santa Monica Superior Court that her husband didn't want to be married anymore because his wife and family were standing in the way of his career. Jim was required to pay $150 a month for alimony and child support, even in 1963 not a king's ransom. Maryline, a woman of strong purpose and a multitude of accomplishments, took her kids and moved--first to Cambridge and then to her home town, Harwinton, Connecticut. Tim saw his father infrequently. When he was 14 and Heidi was 15, the family moved to Berkeley. Tim entered Los Angeles' Fair-fax High School and moved into his father's L.A. home when he was 16, with his mother's blessing. Less than three years later, Jim, to whom Tim bears a startling resemblance, died of liver cancer. He was 45. He had prepared his son for his death, if there can be said to be any such thing as being prepared for the death of a parent in the prime of his life: He had told Tim, after his disease was diagnosed, that he had six months to a year to live. Tim never had a chance to get used to the idea. Jim died less than two months after the last tennis workout he had with his son, when he felt something "burst" in his body; four weeks and one day after the diagnosis, four months before the filming of Ordinary People.

It's impossible not to ask Tim whether or not, for the role of Conrad Jarrett, he drew upon the pain he felt when his father died. (You'll remember that Conrad's older brother, Buck, died in a sailing accident that Conrad survived--and that Conrad felt the rage and the guilt of the survivor.) He answers obliquely and with a quavering voice. A film of tears covers his eyes.

"People ask me if I'm Conrad. I tell them we look alike. I really liked Conrad. I thought he was a great guy. I lived in isolation when I was playing him because he lived in isolation. At the end of the day, I'd go back to the hotel room, put on music and just walk around and think about the day and about the next day and the day after that. I was Conrad for the three months. I mean, it didn't get so crazy that when my mom called, I'd say, 'Who are you? You're not my mother.' But when she called, she'd be talking to this very sensitive, very wounded boy, a lonely, needy, introverted person. But a guy with a sense of humor, too. That was the beautiful thing about Conrad. He could say, 'Boy, do I sound like a jerk!' God! I've never told this to anybody before, but there were times when I would call my mother and say, 'I'm gonna go down to the lobby right now and I'm gonna go to O'Hare Airport and I'm gonna go somewhere; I can't take this. I can't take this.' I wanted to escape it, I really did, because it was such a devastating experience getting in touch with Conrad and playing that out every day. If you'd met me during Ordinary People, I wouldn't be saying a lot. I'd be very quiet. I wouldn't trust you at all." His eyes narrow, become wary and opaque. He holds his body with the utmost reserve, daring me to intrude upon his psyche. "I wouldn't be smoking with you. If I did talk, I wouldn't look at you." He starts to stutter. "I wouldn't let you look at me looking out the window. Right now, I can feel your eyes on me; I wouldn't have let you have that then. I'd be saying, 'Wow! Can't I just look out the window in peace?'

"OK. There are parallels. My father had died. Yeah. We had a shared sense of loss, Conrad and I, that's true. But if I--Conrad--started to think about the death of Buck, I wouldn't start thinking of my father in order to have the same emotions Conrad had toward his brother. I never--I'm trying to be honest--I never brought my specific feelings about what had happened to me into Conrad. No way. No way. Look: I have to believe that if I hadn't experienced that loss, I could have done that role. I think so. Yeah. I just told myself, 'OK, while I'm playing this role, I'm gonna feel everything--I'm gonna feel everything. I'm gonna be like an open wound and just soak everything in.' And I did. Sometimes, I'd sit in a chair in front of a wall, just staring into blankness. Like this. ..."

I remember Jim Hutton for his endearingly dopey TV portrayal of Ellery Queen--a sleuth who got his man by charming inadvertence. The elder Hutton's career never took on the luster his son's has already acquired--as witness the names of the movies in which he acted: The Horizontal Lieutenant, Where the Boys Are, The Honeymoon Machine. Tim, who toured with his father in Harvey one summer, has acted in creaky vehicles, too--notably, a TV movie called Zuma Beach, with Suzanne Somers. But ever since he performed in Friendly Fire, with Carol Burnett, he's been a force to contend with. I ask the inevitable--and, perhaps, unforgivable--question: How does it feel to have outstripped your father? It's as if a shutter has been drawn across Tim's face.

"I never thought about it in those terms. I really never, ever ... ever. ... I couldn't begin to comment on that, because I just don't feel that. It's not my reality." His voice drops to a whisper. "When I think of my father, I don't think of 'an actor.' I think of this wonderful man who made me laugh, who introduced me to so many things about life. Boy, did he live! Did he know how to live! I've never thought to myself, He was an actor, and I've done this and he did that. Never. He was an amazing guy, he really was, and if I could have half the intelligence and humor and life he had, I'll be all right ... I'll be all right."

•

This is the day we were supposed to have walked in the park, the day I was supposed to have introduced Tim to Navasky, whose book he very much admires. It's 1:30 and Tim has just ordered breakfast: "Didn't get to bed till four A.M. My sister's having marital problems--she called from London."

He ordered two eight-ounce glasses of orange juice, two pots of coffee, cantaloupe, grapefruit, grapes, orange slices. He calls his mother to chat. She calls him back. He calls her again in Berkeley. His mother, who, among her other accomplishments, prints miniature books, has made miniature copies of the script of Daniel, bound in leather with marbled end papers, hand-glued and hand-sewn, for presentation to Tim's colleagues. With enormous pride, he shows me the colophon page: This Book is One of 15 Presented to Timothy Hutton and Comrades. November 1982. "Do you think Ed Doctorow will like it?" With equal pride, he shows me an autographed copy of Doctorow's book--"First edition; he gave it to me. Look at the inscription."

Tim plays a cassette of a Paul Robeson spiritual used in Daniel: "God's perfect plan I cannot see,/But someday I'll understand,/Someday He'll make it plain to me. .../Someday from tears I shall be free."

He sings along: "'Someday from tears I shall be free.'"

He's been thinking about what he said last night--about his being Conrad when he played him. He is evolving a theory of acting:

"I've been thinking about how you separate yourself from a role. Now, with Daniel, I feel it's important not to stay with the character. I stayed with Conrad for three months, four months. In work, unlike real life, you're asked to explore all the levels of a life--to understand what every shading means, every confrontation. If you did that in real life, you'd be taking things too seriously; you'd always be misreading things and people. With Daniel, it seems to me, the most effective way to go about the role is to keep a distance--not to be too familiar with him. Daniel always feels like moving on, going on to the next person, finding answers there. I'm hangin' loose, like he did. It's a tricky existence, because when this movie is over, I'm gonna go skiing with all my friends and I won't be thinking about Daniel anymore. Then I'll have to start thinking about him again when it comes out. ...

"I've got a tough scene to do next week. I won't look at the script, I won't think about it--I'll just show up--and the reason for that is we've worked long and hard enough that I know the rhythm and the progression of it. It's gonna fall into place and just be there, and I'll be more surprised by it than if I do study. You want to come fresh to it. ...

"I just realized in the bathroom--I'm speaking out loud, it's a wonderful feeling; I'm asking myself questions, none of this stuff about acting is thought out; it's interesting, it's fun, it's unusual for me--I was just thinking about Daniel, why I haven't lived the character, why it's not with me the way Conrad was all the time. It has to do with the two people. Conrad, he never had any hope, he was always thinking, thinking about the situation, he'd just"--he slips into the role as if it's a costume he's accustomed to wearing, and again I'm with Conrad for a few moments--"'God, I don't want to see my shrink tomorrow; if I could just be in this room for two weeks with no sounds. I don't want my father to call me Connie ... please ... my mother. ...' I've had that. Now, with Daniel, he goes into each situation with so much hope and he's searching and he's the initiator, he's the one going out, finding answers--and so, because of that, it's almost like I know that Daniel is going out and doing the work for me.

"With Ordinary People, I didn't get to know Mary [Tyler Moore, who played his mother] or Don [Donald Sutherland, who played his father] till filming was over--because Conrad didn't know Mary and Don. Now we're friends. I got to know Liz McGovern, who played my girl, yeah. And Judd Hirsch, who played my doctor, I got to know him. We hung out and played ping-pong and tennis, yeah. What I'm saying is, actors do start relating to other people the way their characters would--consciously or not. And it serves the film. The isolation I felt during the first couple of weeks of Ordinary People, being all alone--that was perfect.

"I got no feedback from Redford when he was directing me--none. Finally, I had to say to him, 'Well, how do you feel? I mean, how do you feel?' I didn't want to come out and say, like a kid, 'Am I OK?' I wanted to find out if he was happy with what I was doing. It was killing me, you know? I needed to know. I remember going into his office at the end of the day, and I'd say, 'So how you doing?' He'd say, 'Fine, fine, how are you?' I'd say, 'Great, great, great; you feel good?'"

With subtle changes of voice and body language, Tim is now playing himself and Redford:

Redford: You feel good?

Hutton: Yeah, great, great.

Redford: Good day, today, huh?

Hutton: Yeah. Good day for you?

Redford: Yeah.

Hutton: Just OK?

Redford: No, no. Great. It was all right.

Hutton: But, I mean, is it what you wanted?

Redford: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

"Finally, I said, 'I just want to do well in this role and I hope that I am. Am I?' Redford took a long beat. Sighed: 'Yeah, you are. But sometimes it's not good for you to know that.'

"That day, I realized that the wonderful thing about working in films is that all this happens for a reason. The best possible working experience is when people are dealing with one another the way they're supposed to, the way their characters would be dealing with one another. I'm not saying that Redford did it consciously.

"It's funny who gets close, who doesn't. You go out to dinner with some people, not with others--and not because you don't like them. In Daniel, I didn't get to know the people who are playing my foster parents. I'd always feel preoccupied around them; I couldn't focus in. Like at lunch or something, we'd all be sitting around talking, and I always felt I shouldn't be sitting around, I should be doing something else--maybe studying the script or thinking about something else. Then I realized that Daniel never really felt comfortable with those people--he always felt he should be somewhere else, because those weren't his parents and that wasn't his home.

"With Amanda Plummer, who plays my sister in Daniel, I feel so close, so comfortable. We talk for hours about everything.

"And to see Sidney Lumet [director of Daniel] orchestrate all the stuff I'm talking about, all the subconscious games and attitudes that are thrown out, is wonderful. Some people he greets with 'Good morning,' some with a kiss, some with a hug--and it's all based on whom they're playing. The danger is that you'll think everybody is being mind fucked, but it's not that at all. I'm not saying that if at the end of the movie my character kills you, I'm gonna try to attempt murder--not that at all. It's just that you've got to trust what's happening. And then you're home free. Like, when I'm playing a scene with Amanda, I'll look at her in a different way than I look at John Rubinstein, who's playing my foster father, and my body language will be different--even when the scene's over. I'm very physical with her. I hold my eyes different; everything's different, down to ... well. See, it's not like the night before a scene I'll say, 'OK, I'll hold my right eye at three quarters and my left eye at half-mast'; it happens naturally. And it keeps happening. In real life, the same thing happens--after all, we're trying to make real life on film, trying to create as much real life as we possibly can. That's what separates something good from something that's less than good. It's the difference between some formula pop group that plays hits and always ends up the same way, the way they did on the record--the difference between that and going to a jazz club and seeing those good guys playing the same song for maybe two hours. I'm talking about going to hear Dave Brubeck doing Take Five: One night, maybe he'll do it for five minutes; the next night, maybe for two hours with Gerry Mulligan. I'm talking about getting into that inner groove. It may be acting, but there's something real there."

The phone rings and it is Plummer. Tim's voice caresses: "We were just talking about you. No. About us professionally. ..." But, of course, life and art overlap so much in Tim's case--if they didn't, he wouldn't need to talk so strenuously about the separation between himself and his characters--that it's hard to know, one would be hard put to say, whether his remarks about Amanda were of a professional or a personal nature. Perhaps he doesn't know. "I thought maybe we'd see Taxi Driver on television tonight, 'Manda. ..."

Tim's name has been linked to hers romantically. It's been linked to those of Liz McGovern and Patti Davis, too, and to Kristy McNichol's. ("I'd like to know who planted that item about me and Kristy McNichol going to Hawaii together. Nothing happened, man. Nothing could happen with Kristy." Informed conjecture is that McNichol planted the item.) But Tim doesn't want to talk about girls. ("Maybe I'll never get married; maybe I'll have six kids. Who knows? God," says the young man who saw his father summers and Christmastime when he was a kid, "if I have kids, I want to be there for them. One hundred percent.") He wants to talk about acting--and the games people play at auditions.

"When I was going up for auditions, I thought it was important to do something just a little bit different--to have some kind of subtext going that would cause a subliminal reaction. It's very hard to explain, but if there are four people in a room that you've never met before and you really want to play a part, you can walk in and sit on a chair and go through all the hello-how-are-you-tell-me-what-you've-done stuff--you never get their names; it's part of their power game--or you can do something different. There are four chairs together and one single, solitary chair in the middle of the room, and it's clear when you walk in that that's the hot seat. And you're in it. So you can go through their number, read three pages of a script you've never seen and then hear them say, 'Thank you very much, we'll be in touch.' Or you can do something else. A few times, I've said, 'Hey, can I shut the curtains? It's a little bright in here.' That's a way of freezing time, of changing the rhythm. You're on your own rhythm. On that day, you're going in to do this once. They're seeing 40 people doing the exact same thing, reading from the exact same script--so if you can't somehow break the rhythm, you're lost.

"I never planned to act this way. It's only now, looking back, that I realize why my instincts made me do it and why it was an effective way of going about it. Some people will bring a dead pigeon with them to an audition and say 'Hey!' or they'll trip over furniture or wear very weird clothing. I never sat back and thought. Maybe I'll tie my shoelaces and break one and ask one of the guys to lend me one--it was never that. It was feeling the room and feeling the impatience of the people, feeling whatever was going on. It is your moment, it may not happen again; this is your moment, your time, and you're trying to do the best you can."

Tim didn't, out of choice, work for a year after Ordinary People and Taps, and he is now very much sought after (bankable is the term). But that doesn't preclude his having to audition, Academy Award or no Academy Award. Dino De Laurentiis auditioned him for a role in an epic film, kept him waiting, kept him guessing, kept him hoping; and then, when Tim signed up to shoot a movie with a young Australian director in Alaska ("Sixteen weeks in Alaska, which means 16 new romances," says a friend of his), De Laurentiis, who plays very close to his chest, immediately announced that he would postpone the film until Hutton, to whom he had been extremely cool, was available--on the strength of which Tim does a very poor imitation of a very crazy Italian.

"For Ordinary People, though, Redford made it so comfortable for the actor who came in; he put every actor so much at ease," Tim says. "I just remember going in and being locked into wanting to do the reading--no games--because I could feel the passion and the warmth from him. I could feel that he wasn't just trying to cast this movie and get it over with. There was just such care taken. He's so beautiful that way. ...

"You have to have all your antennae out and adjust to the situation. Just like real life.

"I'm not playing any games now, in this room, with you. I don't have to. Do I?"

•

It is five P.M. and Tim is hungry again. He orders two bowls of onion soup (which he doesn't eat), two bagels with cream cheese, two club sandwiches and tea. Room service says it has no cream cheese. Tim says, "Hey, I'm really hungry. I need cream cheese." The cream cheese arrives, along with a blushing waitress, whom he flirts with, flirting to him being second nature.

Now he wants to set the record straight. All this talk about games has made him nervous:

"Actors are accused of being phony, of playing a role all the time. But if they are, it's because there's a demand on them to be the person who touched someone through a role. That's what destroys some actors. Like, after Ordinary People, if I wasn't sensitive or vulnerable, it would blow people's minds. So then, all of a sudden, you have a fight: Your inner mind is saying, 'God, you have to break away from that; you're not Conrad at all.' Being honest ought to be the easiest thing in the world, for an actor, it's the hardest. You can't ever be afraid of using everything that's in you. Everything.

"I think I'm honest. I try. I really do. Can't you tell?

"It does hurt if you've done an interview and then the guy says, 'Seems to be this, seems to be that.' I mean, I know you have to draw conclusions from what I say, but why can't I just say it? See, the alternative is to develop a rap, to hide under a speech and to make that same rap over and over again and not to let them get at you at all. I could never develop a rap. An interview is really a false situation. It's not two people sitting down and talking, it's one person talking to hundreds or thousands of people he doesn't know and telling them how he feels about everything. There are thousands of people in this room right now, and it's hard, being exposed like that.

"I could never develop a rap. If that ever happened, I really wouldn't want to do this. I really couldn't do this. There is something quite amazing about somebody asking questions and you having the opportunity to talk about the way you feel. That doesn't happen in real life. Your girlfriend doesn't say to you, 'So how do you feel about this, how do you feel about that?' And I'm not the kind of person who'll talk about myself; so to have the opportunity to talk about important things--life, art--can be exhausting if it's not working, if it's not happening, if you're misunderstood or if the person comes to the door with the piece already written and just needs the necessary quotes. That's happened. Hell. Phew.

"Maybe at times I'm not as sensitive as Conrad; maybe I'm not the loner, the isolated figure no one understands. Maybe I'm not that, but if people want me to be that, it's fine--but not for more than five minutes. I'm not gonna re-create the role for them.

"I'm not being an actor today. I'm being me. Do you get it?"

What I get is that Tim, at the tender age of 22, is trying to forge difficult connections between life and art, contrivance and reality--and is being honest.

As he is when he talks about money (and an honest incoherence emerges):

"You're bopping around the city with some pals--sure, money makes a difference to friendship--and you say, 'Hey! Let's go there.' And they say, 'I can't afford to do that.' So then an interesting thing happens. You say, 'Don't worry about it; I'll pay.' And then the person says, 'No, I don't want you to pay.' I don't know. I lost a real good friend by lending him money. This was a kid I grew up with, my best friend. I said, 'Oh, come on, man, it wouldn't be good, man, believe me, it wouldn't be right, it would get in the way of our friendship.' He said, 'Aw, now, what are you talking about?' So I gave him the money and I haven't heard from him since. I can understand that, because he probably can't pay me back--which is something I never expected him to do. I mean, I hoped he would, but there was no way I'd wake up in the morning and say, 'Maybe today I'll get the check.' He can't make that phone call--the one that acknowledges that I was able to lend him money and that he can't pay me back."

Why can't Tim Hutton make that phone call himself? Some protective instinct prevents me from asking.

"My sister says she thinks my working so much is awful: 'There are actors out there your age that haven't had the opportunities you've had. It ought to be more fair; everybody should work.' I tell her, 'Heidi, I agree with you, everyone should work, but it's not set up that way.' It's a business. That's the way it is. 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,' yeah. But if Ordinary People had come down to me and another chap who'd never, ever done anything--I'd done a couple of television shows and stuff--what should I have said to Redford, 'Give it to the other guy'?

"OK, a lot of it doesn't make sense. There are so many people who don't get work. People say to me, 'You never paid your dues.' I think I did. People say, 'It happened so quickly, blah, blah, blah.' OK, it's scary. Steve Martin put it into perspective for me. He said, 'Just think, you're 22; you could have a five-year slump and still be only 27.' I'm still not used to it. It happened so fast. When things come slowly, when I'm not working, I think, Maybe that's all there was. Maybe that was just something that happened when I was young. Maybe I'm not going to work anymore. When finally all the intensity of Ordinary People wound down, and the Oscars, the this, the that, I said to myself, 'My God, I went through that? And I'm only 21.' Oh, boy. Lots of times, you're expected to act like you were 40 or something. There were times when I wanted to do so much so soon. Then I realized, if I did it all in the next three years, what would be left? Not me. I'm young. Twenty years from now, I'll be 42. I got 20 years before I'm 42.

"Someone once said that money is jive, but what you can do with it isn't. Salaries in the entertainment world are pretty crazy. Quite crazy, really; but the thing about it is, I don't know how long this is going to go on. I don't know if I'll always be accepted. I don't know if I'll always get parts. I know right now I've locked into something. I don't know if I'll still be successful at this when I'm 30. I don't know. For that lack of security, it's nice to be paid the kind of money I'm paid, because then you've got it, you've got it no matter what. I don't know.

"When I came back from Taps, I went down to Malibu to see the real-estate person, looked at a couple of houses--there was a great one, right on the beach, four bedrooms--man, walk out the back door and you're on the beach, you've got a deck, you've got all this property, it's a cool house, it's a house, man, and the rent for it is outrageous. Outrageous. I remember going through all kinds of trips--saying, 'Man, I really would like to go for this, I really would like to spend a year down here at the beach, I'd really love to do that.' And I remember thinking, God, I'm so young, I know it's crazy, ugh, it's gross, all that money ... and then I'm thinking, Wait a minute--I have the opportunity to do that right now. I might not have that opportunity again. I want to go for it. And I went for it. Man, I had the best year down there. It was outrageous to be doing that, right? Ask Heidi. But I'll never forget it; it was the best year."

And the standard actor's disclaimer: "See, I'm not in touch with the money. The money goes to some business manager and it gets holed up in a bank somewhere. So it's not like I'm in touch with the money I've earned in a direct way. I get a check every week, like an allowance, from the bank--I got a couple of credit cards, things like that. I don't know."

Things like that and a red Porsche 924. What jive money will buy! Mobility, for one thing. Tim has a less outrageously expensive house in Malibu now; but neither coast is a stranger to him. With his mouth full of a club sandwich and the music of the Stones in the background, he says, "These days, I travel light. Shit, I don't think bicoastal. Bicoastal is an annoying word. When I think of bicoastal, I think of a person who has a buttondown-collar shirt with a little Polo thing on it, sunglasses, short hair, real thin and white pants with a pleat all the way down the middle and pink socks and he's looking around all the time, looking nervous. He's shouting, 'Bicoastal! I'm bicoastal! When's the plane leave? I gotta get back to the other coast.' Frantic, dumb."

Tim doesn't think of himself as being rooted in a place. He thinks of himself as being rooted in people, especially his mother. "The most incredible woman. You wouldn't believe the things she's done in her life. She took up the harp about three years ago, plays it beautifully, plays the piano, plays the flute. She makes these miniature books and these miniature villages out of balsawood and stuff, she paints, has a great old-fashioned doll collection, she was a schoolteacher for a long time, she worked with autistic kids for a while. An incredible mother. God. I mean, my sister and I are both real independent. For the most part, we trust people--and all that comes from my mother. She's different from other moms. ...

"This is hard. It's really hard for me to have to define myself. 'Who is Timothy Hutton?' Shit. How the hell do I know? I can't. I know how I feel about things. I'm honest about how I feel. Isn't that enough? Shouldn't that be enough?"

•

Sidney Lumet has called an unscheduled shooting of Daniel today, and Tim wants me on the set, which is a closed one. Publicist Andrea Jaffe is afraid that either Lumet will take it into his head to throw me out if the shooting goes badly or Tim will have a temper tantrum--to which, she insists, he is given when he's filming.

There is, in fact, a great deal of tension on the set--but it's intrinsic to the scene that has just been shot: When I arrive, the air is filled with acrid smoke; an electrocution has just been simulated, and the "executed" actor buckled so hard in the electric chair that he broke it. It's that kind of movie--let's pretend with a vengeance.

When Tim greets me with a bear hug, I can feel the tension in his body: He's on. "They liked Mom's miniature books," he says, but his eyes, wary and caged, are at odds with his easy words. He is, however, as friendly and as pleasant as can be, given the circumstances, which are that he is shooting a crucial scene: Daniel is tracking down the man who turned his father in to the Government. He prowls and paces while Lumet prepares for the shooting.

His acting is a kind of revelation--to Doctorow, who keeps beaming and muttering "Fantastic!" and even to jaded members of the crew, Teamsters who have seen it all. They all but break into applause. Tim is so intense--so indivisible from his role--that the other actors, pale by comparison, have trouble remembering the simplest lines. He wipes them all out. I forget for very long moments that he is Timothy Hutton. He is Daniel. Not Conrad, not a wounded introvert; Daniel--a wounded, angry searcher after truth.

"What's all this about Tim's being difficult on the set?" I ask. "He's a piece of cake."

"You should have seen him two years ago," someone volunteers. "He was a spoiled, demanding baby--and he's still fierce if someone rubs him the wrong way."

"You bet your ass," says a publicist who has rubbed him the wrong way.

After the shooting, Tim bounds up the stairs to his dressing room, which once belonged to Buster Keaton. Everything in it is fake--the curtains are tacked to the walls like curtains in a dollhouse; the fireplace has a water drain in it. Tim's presence emphasizes the fakeness; his energy bounces off the walls.

"That was great, what we talked about last night," he says. "I had a good time. Did you? Really? Wasn't it great?" He paces. He makes an obvious effort to shake himself out of his role. Then he stretches out on the couch and says, in a measured, almost hypnotic voice: "For the first time in a long time, I feel like I'm sitting back in the chair instead of leaning forward. I feel as close to being comfortable with what I do and how I feel and who I am as I ever have. It's real smooth. A few years ago, you wouldn't have felt restful with me; you'd have felt wired. There's not the urgency, now, that I had before about what's going to happen next. I don't need to have a plan. I just play it by ear. It really feels nice. Two years ago, I was angry, moody, cynical, sarcastic--not pleasant to be around. If people were nice to me, I wouldn't trust them. Anger was a way to deal with success--it was a shell: Nobody's getting in; nobody really knows me; ha, ha, ha. It was a confusing time. All those things that people would say to me when all the success happened, like, 'Be careful about this, about that, blah, blah, blah'--bad. I feel like I've returned to something, to a nice place. You know what it is? I finally realized that it's ok to be a good person; it's really beautiful. It's ok to say to yourself, 'You're a good person, you like people, you like life, things move you, things are beautiful to you, you're sensitive. And it's ok to be all those things.' No shrinks. That's a nice feeling. I never wanted or needed a shrink. For a while, you can kind of get off on being complex and broody; it's cool. But, boy, I don't believe that anymore. That's what can destroy you. I'm in slow motion, now--everything is a breeze. ...

"We've got an auction to go to tomorrow, remember?"

"Tim is accustomed to being thought of as a cross between Holden Caulfield and James Dean."