The Gere hunter

He's got a great new movie to promote and he's getting married in the morning... So, surely the perfect time to interview Richard Gere? Well, not exactly. Harriet Lane is left searching for clues

How tiresome was Richard Gere? Oh, very. He's not known for his relaxed attitude to the press, and indeed has a history of trying to manipulate it (remember the statement he and his then-wife Cindy Crawford put in The Times declaring their marriage to be rock-solid, a few months before they separated?), and yet the degree of his hostility took me by surprise. It was almost shocking.

  1. Chicago
  2. Production year: 2002
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): 12A
  5. Runtime: 113 mins
  6. Directors: Rob Marshall
  7. Cast: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renee Zellweger, Richard Gere
  8. More on this film

I didn't mind that his people had stacked up press in a holding pattern, so that when our meeting was scheduled to start, he was in fact midway through a New York Times shoot, with their interview to follow, and then had a TV crew hovering in the wings. I didn't mind that though lunchtime came and went, no one had thought to provide any sandwiches. But I did mind it, a great deal, when he refused to participate in the interview. Oh, he was there all right, in his black jersey and jeans and rimless spectacles, sitting opposite me, staring at me with distaste, or casting incredulous, help-me glances at the film publicist who was acting as his babysitter, poised for trouble in the corner (indeed, when things had got really bad, he was whisked out of the room 20 minutes early. Wuss!).

The interesting thing about Gere is that though he has been giving interviews for over half his life (he's 53), he's still so bad at it. He has absolutely no sense of humour (a fact which someone who worked with him closely a few years back attests to) and doesn't seem to understand the bartering nature of the process - or simply feels it's beneath him. Never mind the fact that he has just made a film which needs an audience. If he dislikes a question, and you can be sure he will, he won't even try to take it somewhere else: the natural response of most intelligent people when asked a question they don't want to answer. Why should he? Hey, he's the star!

Let me give you an example. I've read that he is based in New York. So I ask, towards the end of the interview, if he lives in Manhattan, or upstate, or wherever. Gere rolls his eyes. 'I'm around,' he mutters.

Well, where's your son based, and your wife?

'We're around.' I make a face. I too am bored. It's like swimming in cement. Gere glances briefly at the publicist, alerting her to the fact that, yet again, I am way out of line. 'You expect me to tell you [incredulous laughter] where I live?'

Well, I suggest, perhaps you could say that you live in the city, or the country.

'I'm around, I'm around, I'm around.'

Naturally, stuff like this makes you reckless. If a question about where he lives can cause such offence - after all, I'm not after his soul, just a bit of conversation - why not ask him to confirm or deny the famous story that he once waved his dick around in front of the reporter from the Ladies' Home Journal when asked whether he considered himself a sex symbol? (The interview was cauterised before I could get around to the gerbils.)

'It's probably apocryphal,' barks Gere, looking daggers, 'but it's so long ago, who can remember?'

You must be able to remember if you flashed her or not. Did you?

'I honestly don't remember. So long ago.'

Doesn't it perhaps strike you as comical, that you might have done something like that?

There is a long, infinitely pained exhalation: a sound that gives me tremendous pleasure. 'It's... it's so long ago. It doesn't matter.'

I'm not saying it matters, I'm saying it's interesting.

'It obviously matters to you.'

Isn't it interesting that you won't even address it?

'Honestly. That would be 25 years ago at this point. I remember very little from 25 years ago.'

A deal's a deal, so at this point here's the name of the movie he is promoting: Chicago. We have been put in a room together because he is meant to be selling it, and to be fair, for a short while he does manage to do this without wincing or shooting me dirty looks. It's a movie version of the Fosse musical in which two murderesses, dressed at all times in scanties apparently from Agent Provocateur, dazzle the press and engineer their own celebrity, and it is jolly good entertainment.

Catherine Zeta Jones, who hoofed it on 42nd Street long, long before The Darling Buds of May, is sensational in a hot, steamy sort of way; and Renée Zellweger, a newcomer to musicals, turns out to be cool and wanton and rather fascinating to watch. Gere, a man badly in need of a hit film, plays Billy Flynn, their hardboiled lawyer - the sort of role to which his face nowadays seems best suited. He does a bit of singing and a bit of tap, and though there are lots of cutaways during the dance scene, Gere says it was all him.

He has a musical background (as a boy, played trumpet and piano; in his early twenties, took the role of Danny in Grease on Drury Lane) and he won a gymnastics scholarship to college, so his appearance in this all-singing, all-dancing spectacular isn't as surprising as it first sounds. No, he wasn't too worried before he committed to the project, though he concedes the tap took some application.

'I'd been through enough things where I had to learn skills to know that I'd give it a good enough shot. If I worked hard, I probably could do it. But it was not easy. It was extremely frustrating,' he says. He often talks in these very short, bald sentences, as if he's learned them from a phrase book called How To Speak Human Being.

'The problem was having to concentrate. It was like doing a boxer's workout. Within five minutes, I'd be soaked. Nothing could happen without me consciously making it happen. And if you're a dancer, or a swordsman, it's got to happen pretty much on its own, while you're thinking about something else. It took months before a simple step could be repeated without me focusing on it.'

I think this could also be applied to Gere's attitude to conversation. It's poignant that a man of 53 should be this uptight, this inhibited. Either he's rationing out his words, making sure they're ones he has used in interviews before, or he's quoting Billy Flynn, rather as if he's borrowing a personality. Perhaps he's throwing me off the scent, or perhaps there isn't one to start with.

I start to ask a question about celebrity, and Gere says impatiently, as if he is talking to an idiot, 'It's front and centre of what the piece is. My character, Billy Flynn, is very aware of it. He says: "This is a circus, the whole thing is a circus. It's showbiz." My character gets the high irony of all of it. He's a puppeteer.' (I've run these quotes together, but each one had to be individually extracted, as if with pliers.)

Do you feel in charge of your celebrity?

'I can be in charge of how I feel about it. That's about it. Once I'm in the game, I'm in the game.'

Has your relationship to it changed?

'Of course. I mean, everything changes, hopefully.' He won't elaborate.

There's a long silence. OK. He's going to make me beg. So I ask how he feels about his celebrity now.

'It's just as ludicrous now as it was 30 years ago.' And stops.

It's a nightmare, like interviewing the 43 bus. I try another tack. I wonder whether he, as someone people are intensely curious about, can understand this. Is he curious about other people? Sure he is, he tells me. What other reason is there to be alive? So I ask on what level he is interested in them. Is he curious, for instance, about the trivia of their lives, what they had for breakfast?

'I'm curious about if they're suffering,' says Gere, sternly, 'and what they're suffering, and how they can get out of it. Same as myself.'

Does the breakfast thing just not interest you?

'I can't say I'm real interested in what you had for breakfast. Sorry.'

Point taken. But the detail of people's lives, what makes them tick, what about that?

'Well, yeah, as it relates to the degree that they can achieve what it is they want to achieve, ultimately happiness. People don't understand what happiness is, so they have an idea of what will make them happy, but it never does. The drive for happiness is vital, it's what keeps us in motion.

'To have a deeper understanding of what real happiness is, and how to get there, is something else. That takes a lot of work.'

Gere is a Buddhist. The Buddhist with the baddest karma I've ever encountered, but still, no one can argue with the fact that he has done great things in support of the Tibetan cause (and that of HIV charities, and Survival International). He seems to use the vernacular of Buddhism in the same way that he uses the lines spoken by the characters he plays on screen: like lagging on a boiler. It keeps me out, it keeps him in.

When he finally begins to expand a little on why he found interviews so appalling when he was starting out, I begin to understand why Buddhism suited him so well. It filled the void. 'Well, the irony is that they [journalists] are asking about you when you don't have a clue about you. Why should I know about me?

'I certainly know more about myself as a 53-year-old than I did at 22, but the assumption that someone knows about themselves is pretty ludicrous.'

Could you explain that to me?

'No, I answered your question.'

Well, even by 22, most people have quite a strong sense of self.

Gere says decisively: 'It takes a lifetime to know about yourself. Very few people get there. Know themselves. You may sort of know yourself, but very few people know themselves.'

Right. So how close are you.

'I'm just on a path,' he says, talking v-e-r-y slowly (again, I'm running his quotes together), as if addressing a remedial class. 'I'm crawling on my belly like everyone else. I think life is self-examination. Certainly the voyage that one takes.

'I'm assuming you were the same sort of teenager everybody is, myself included. You're confused and you don't know what the confusion is. And the confusion, basically, from my point of view, was that you've been brought up with certain conditioning, certain assumptions, but there's something else that's telling you it's not true, there's another way of seeing things, that may be a reality that may be more life-giving than this set of conventions. And then there's another thing that starts to happen later on, a deeper voice inside of you that says even that possibility is not the whole story. There's another story outside all the stories.'

A lengthy pause. At this point, I can't help it, I know I'm on the edge of giggling. Gere continues, 'Now, that's the voyage.' Then he stops and says, irritated, 'We haven't totally clicked into it.'

I say he's making me feel a bit stupid for not entirely following everything he's saying.

Gere says, with heavy patience, 'You don't have to. All I'm really talking about is how to go toward happiness. If you're fully happy, then there's no issue. But I tend to think you're not fully happy. I know I'm not. Do I have a good life? Yeah. I've got a lot of opportunities, a lot of love in my life, a lot of things going for me. Still, it's not complete. I know this is not the whole thing. There's much more.'

But is it healthy to keep striving? Isn't it better sometimes just to accept that your life is good enough?

Gere is shocked. 'But why? If you can actually be ultimately happy? Why settle? I'm amazed you even consider the question. "It's not great, but it's good enough." That's wasting a life.'

Gere grew up in Syracuse, New York, the second of five children born to an insurance salesman and a housewife. The Geres - musical, Methodists - were a pretty regular family, and his childhood was apparently uneventful, peaceable. Gere dropped out of the University of Massachussetts, where he was a philosophy major, to do rep in Seattle, though he says acting in itself was not a goal so much as 'doing something creative'.

In his breakthrough roles (Looking for Mr Goodbar, American Gigolo) in the late 70s, he specialised in narcissism, heartlessness - a sort of empty, decadent gorgeousness. An Officer and A Gentleman gave him another dimension, passion, but then he picked some donkeys (King David, Power, Miles From Home) and spent the 80s in the doldrums. It took that most injection-moulded of fairy tales, Pretty Woman, to catapult him back up to leading-man status, but recently his career has levelled out again (what was the last decent film you saw him in?).

Gere denies that he will always be best remembered for playing morally ambivalent characters, though whenever I think of him on screen, I see him looking shifty, uneasy, predatory - and yes, immaculately dressed.

He tells me off for generalising about it, but finally concedes that his CV contains a fair load of 'extremely vulnerable characters. They have a lot of masks. But what makes them interesting, I think, and why I've liked playing them, is that they appear to be that [amoral]. And then they reveal how sensitive and hurt they are.'

There is a theory (one he rubbishes, naturally) that he keeps Hollywood at arm's length. However, he does tend to spend more time in Dharmsala, India, where he is 'kind of the mayor', than in Beverly Hills.

For the past 'six, seven, eight years' (they got together in 1996), his partner has been Carey Lowell, a one-time model and Bond girl turned actress, who is a Buddhist. They got married the day after I met him, by the way, and of course he had denied they had any plans to do so. The witnesses were Hannah, Lowell's daughter, and Homer Gere, just short of three, who is named for his paternal grandfather.

Homer is 'the joy of my life. Loves music, very fast runner, very smart. Very funny. Pretty quick he learned irony, which is a wonderful quality for any human being.' (Where could he have got that from?)

Though Cindy Crawford blamed their split on his reluctance to have children, and though Gere was quoted at the time saying he wasn't mad on the idea since he was just a big kid himself, he now states he was always keen to become a father, and that the kid remark was 'a cliché we all use'. It seems Gere is not immune to the convenience of the generalisation.

One of the biggest obstacles to our meeting, I realise, is that I am not deferential enough. It's pretty obvious Gere is not used to spending time with people who aren't simply gratified by his proximity.

A famous person (it was Barry Manilow, fact fans) once told me that the real problem with fame is that it cuts you off from the hundreds of tiny informal interactions that you and I take for granted every day. He said he was aware that every time he got in a lift, everyone else in it would freeze, and this was awkward for all of them.

I ask Gere if he recognises this, and he snorts, and asks me how many interesting conversations I've ever had with a stranger in a lift. Quite a few, I say, but I know he doesn't believe me. And at that moment I realise that fame suits Gere - an earnest and neurotic individual who has no real ability to make casual connections - very well indeed.

Celebrity for him is not a cage; it is a shell that keeps the messy, noisy, uncontrollable world at bay. And God knows, it's welcome to him.

· Chicago opens on 27 December.

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