AT FIRST, IT S A LITTLE DISCONCERTING
HANGING OUT WITH OWEN WILson and Vince Vaughn at Dodger Stadium, in
"What exactly does the word 'circa'
mean, do you think?" Vince says to Owen, apropos of nothing, really.
"It means 'around,'" Owen says
to Vince.
"Right. But what exactly does it
mean?"
"It's just a bullshit kind of thing
to say to sound kind of smart. 'Presupposes' is another."
"'Presupposes.'"
"And 'Cite your sources.'"
"'Cite your sources.'"
Then Vince offers up an example of his
own. "'Parenthetically speaking.'"
"Oh, yeah," says Owen,
savoring the phrase. "That's a good one."
Briefly, both are silent. But then,
suddenly, Vince erupts with another random query: "Who was the president
of the Confederacy?"
Owen: "Jefferson Davis. Who
wouldn't know that?"
This is all very well and good, but it
isn't exactly what you want to hear from these two, especially since they've
got a movie coming out called Wedding Crashers, about a pair of pickup artists
who specialize in hooking up at weddings. Skip the history lesson. Let's talk
chicks. But that would be so crass, so expected. So, the conversation veers off
in any number of different directions.
They both firmly deny that they, along
with Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Will Ferrell and Owen's actor-brother Luke, are
part of some highly organized, tightknit, power-consolidating, new-order comedy
mafia, as recently postulated by the thinking heads at the New York Times.
Getting back to the game, they both say
I that as kids they stunk at baseball.
"I just wasn't any good," Owen
says, looking a bit down. "I'm afraid of the ball."
Licking nacho goo off his fingers, Vince
says, "On my team, they called me Eagle Eye. At first, I was excited, like,
'Hey, Dad, they love my eye!' And then, when I'm at bat, they tell me, 'Come
on, Eagle Eye. A walk's as good as a hit.' And then I sort of j figure it out:
'Hey, wait a minute. They're not cheering me on to swing but to not swing!' It
-wasn't exactly flattering."
Owen is about to add more of his two
cents when out of the blue a dolled-up, exceedingly top-heavy brunette makes an
! appearance a few rows away. All talk of childhood traumas comes to an end.
Vince checks her out. "There'll be
no babies starving on her shift!" he says.
Owen grins.
And suddenly all is right with the world
again.
OWEN WILSON IS MOST OFTEN SEEN AROUND
L.A. wearing jeans and a T-shirt, chewing peppermint Altoids gum, maybe sitting
on the lap of some Playboy Bunny or other, his blunted, twice-broken nose not
holding him back any, flopsy-mopsy blond hair looking beach-boy-slacker
perfect. On the Internet,
Vince Vaughn is staggeringly tall and
pretty beefy, with a sometimes puffy-looking face and an odd penchant for
wearing fatherly wingtip shoes. Whereas
In the past,
ON THE LUSH GREEN GROUNDS OF THE GETTY
Museum, in
As it turns out, this overall general
attitude of his recently made the news, in a half-blind item in the New York
Post, as follows: "Which blond stud, nicknamed the 'Butterscotch
Stallion,' has a perverse sexual bent? He recently picked up a girl at a
wedding [!], and the two went back to his hotel room. When the woman asked if
he had a condom, the actor replied, 'I don't want to have sex with you, but I
do want to do something else' — and proceeded to lick her buttocks for 'over
two hours.'"
OK, so
"It's like, "Who cares?'"
he says. "I play it as it lays. OK, so I may not be the greatest lover in
the world. Well, let's make that angle work. There's lots of different paths to
the waterfall. You don't have to be Don Juan. And wasn't it Gloria Steinem who
said that women have to be responsible for their own orgasms? Well, I take her
at her word. I'll do my best, OK, but at a certain point you've got to, like,
you know…."
He takes another bite of his Treat and
goes on to tell other stories that might not reflect so well on him as a
ladies' man.
"The last time I visited the Museum
of Modern Art in New York, the whole time all I'm thinking about is what girl I'm
going to call when I leave to tell her I was there," he says, laughing his
honk-honk laugh. "And, oh — I once worked at a soup kitchen in Venice
Beach and lasted only three days, but I would finish up and immediately call a
girl and be like, 'Ahh, tired,' and she'd say, "Why?' and I'd say, 'Oh,
I've just finished working at this soup kitchen….' I mean, you're supposed to
do it anonymously, but I could not not tell people what I was doing."
There is, of course, something instantly
engaging about these revelations and how he spins them out, with his
slow-moving, reedy Texas drawl. His mind is always moving forward, toward
unannounced, off-slant destinations. Pretty soon, he's talking about a
letter-to-the-editor he recently had published in The New Yorker, defending his
pal (and Zoolander co-star) Ben Stiller against some unkind words from New
Yorker movie critic David Denby. Shortly after the letter's publication, he was
cruising through Central Park on a bike, taking in the Christo
"Gates" event, when it suddenly occurred to him that he ought to
write a Christo-themed "Talk of the Town" piece for the magazine.
"I'll write a bunch of shit for The New former now;" he thought, so
he pulled out his cell phone, called the magazine and was put through to editor
David Remnick's office, where some woman answered.
"This is Owen Wilson. I just maybe
had an idea."
"How can I help you?" she
said.
"Well, I recently had this letter
published, and — "
"Yes. I know."
"Well, I have something maybe I
could do on Christo, and — "
"We did something nine months
ago."
"Well, I was thinking this'd be a
little bit funnier, and — "
And so it went, nowhere.
"She really shot me down and was
kind of mean," he says. "It was really stupid. It might not have been
great, but why not get me to write it and see?" He pauses and looks out
over the magnificently green expanse of the Getty's lawns. "You know, one
word I object to is the word 'cool.' To me, being cool is just the opposite of
living. It's about not getting too worked up about anything, by being 'Nyah,
nyah, nyah,' and no big deal. I can't stand that. It's such a jaded, clichéd
posture to take. I get real enthusiastic about stuff. It's what I think is
life-affirming,"
And in a sense that's what the point of
being Wilson really is, to get totally revved up about stuff and then damn the
torpedoes, full speed ahead. He develops an interest in World War II, so he
reads everything he can about it. Foosball seems like fun, he buys a foosball
table and turns himself into quite the foosball player. And let's not even
bring up pingpong. He's a fanatic about it. "You don't want to play me in
pingpong," he says to visitors to his house, levelly.
He grew up in mellow, middle-class North
Dallas, where he was a mischief-maker of some renown. He got expelled from prep
school for cheating in geometry, graduated instead from the New Mexico Military
Institute and from there shipped himself off to the University of Texas at
Austin and his fateful intersection with Wes Anderson. The fruit of their union
was a twelve-minute short called Bottle Rocket that was later turned into a
full-length feature. Anderson couldn't find an actor to play the lead, a wildly
optimistic and inept bank robber, so he forced Wilson to take the part.
Released in 1996 to zero box office, it got lots of great reviews. After that,
Wilson found himself swallowed up in Anaconda but in short order went on to
make a name for himself as the finest stoner-slacker-laze-about actor of his
generation, even though he says he's hardly any of that, or at least not a
stoner.
He's thirty-six years old now, no longer
a spring chicken, and claims to sometimes think about having a wife, and kids,
and all that adult stuff, which would of course mean he'd have to move his
foosball table, hide his collection of electric skateboards and start eating at
home sometimes, instead of heading for Baja Fresh every night for tacos.
"Actually, to be honest, a shotgun
wed' ding might be the way it works for me," he says. "You can't stay
at the party forever. At some point you have to take stock and ask yourself,
"What am I doing here?'"
He starts on a Getty-acreage stroll,
by-passing a NO TRESPASSING sign and heading deep into off-limits territory,
down a hill, between some bushes and around a private-looking swimming pool.
Along the way, he says, "I've
started to notice that, as you get older, mental health is as fragile as
physical health. I've never had a breakdown, but you can really get sideswiped
by stuff like depression. I'm an up-and-down person. That's one thing that
girlfriends would complain about. I'm inconsistent, not romantic enough."
Suddenly, a guard appears, bearing down,
but before he can open his mouth, Wilson jumps up and pre-empts him with some
pretty slick deflective palaver.
"Is this somebody's house?" he
says.
"This is the trustee's house,"
the guard says darkly.
"And he lives here? Wow. I mean,
can you imagine having this as your view?" The guard says nothing, so
Wilson takes the lead again, this time affecting a guilty-as-charged stammer.
"Wuh, wuh, wuh, we hopped the fence there, so we probably aren't supposed
to be here. Buh, buh, buh, but, um, well, we're going to head back over
there."
The guard is still eyeballing Wilson,
but then he cocks his head and starts to smile.
"Hey — you're the one who made
Starsky and Hutch?"
"Yeah!"
"Yeah! I said to myself, 'I know I
seen him in the movies!'"
And suddenly all is cool.
Later, Wilson says, "Basically,
that was my entire high school experience, except at the time I hadn't starred
in Starsky and Hutch, so it didn't have the happy ending we have here today. I
know it's more fashionable to talk about what a pain it is, being recognized,
but it's really kind of nice. Usually people are really happy to see you. And
I'm sure it helps to be recognized when meeting girls. Without that, girls are
like, 'Jeez, why is that guy staring at me?' And obviously if they recognize
you, that's huge."
He grins and about this says no more.
"God," he says, strolling on,
blue eyes up and shining. "Isn't this grass incredible?"
BLONDES?
"Sure!" Vince Vaughn says.
Brunettes?
"Sure!" he says.
Big boobs?
"Yes!"
Small boobs?
"Absolutely!" He goes on,
"I don't really
care. When you're younger, boobs are a
bigger deal, but as you get older, you bat them around, they're nice to have, but
after a while you get bored of them. And fake boobs well, there ain't nothing
like the real thing."
Today, he's in Chicago, working on a
movie called The Break Up, co-starring Jennifer Aniston, and demonstrating that
he's not quite Wilson's equal in the deflective-palaver department. It's been
rumored recently that he and Aniston are an item and that Aniston has had a
crush on him.
That crush thing — true?
Vaughn gurgles — "Yeoun-yuhn"
is what it sounds like — and then buttons his lip and stares straight ahead,
blinking.
As a producer and star of The Break Up,
he's raking in his biggest payday ever, $12 million, or as he puts it, "a
ridiculous amount of money for a lot of services, which will then maybe carry
over to other acting stuff, which is good." In many ways, it's a great
time to be him. He recently kicked his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit. Not long
ago, he soundly thrashed Wilson at backgammon (but only after Wilson schooled
him in pingpong). Best of all, in his last starring-role movie, DodgeBall, he
got most of the credit for its surprising success, not his pal Stiller. He's a
big guy, with an increasingly substantial gut, who laughs a lot, smiles a lot
and seems to not even really care that his girlfriends never seem to stick
around for long.
"I've had three or four
relationships that've gone longer than a year, ten or so that've gone three or
four months, and then a lot that don't go very long at all," he says
breezily, which is how he says most things. "I mean, I'm not that good at
giving myself over completely to a relationship. I just like to hang out, have
fun and not make too big a deal out of it. But I've never been big on having to
go home with a girl every night. I've had spurts like anybody has, but I've
always been more focused on my career and acting than sleeping-with
everyone."
In a way, this makes perfect sense. He
was brought up the son of a hard-working, self-made businessman and a savvy
real-estate-agent mom and spent his upper-crusty Lake Forest, Illinois,
childhood watching TV shows like 'What's Happening!!, Good Times and Sanford
and Son; doing real bad in school while trying to cope with a case of ADD;
acting in community theater and school plays from the age of seven on;
developing a taste for beer at the age of fourteen; and making a national
appearance in a sappy "Heartbeat of America" Chevrolet ad during the
1988 Super Bowl. In contrast to Wilson, who lost his virginity at the age of
fourteen. Vaughn, 35, didn't lose his until he was eighteen. Nearing the end of
high school, he knew he didn't have the grades to graduate; figuring the school
would never fail the class president, and like so many potential lifetime
losers before him, he ran for higher office. He had to write a statement about
his candidacy. He wrote, "My name's Vince, and I'm a swell kid and a
peachy dancer…." He won by a landslide and walked away with his diploma.
He spent the next seven years striking
out as an actor in Hollywood, then won a small part in the 1993 film Rudy,
where he befriended fellow actor Jon Favreau. They hung out in Hollywood's
retro-swing club scene, and one day Favreau handed him a script he'd written
about that scene, called Swingers, and the next thing you know "You're so
money, baby" is a national catchphrase. Personally, Vaughn has had some
tough times since then. In 2001, while filming Domestic Disturbance in North
Carolina, he and co-star Steve Buscemi got in a barroom brawl with some locals
that led to stab wounds for Buscemi and an arrest for Vaughn (who later had all
charges dropped). And, outside an L.A. club on his thirty-third birthday, he
got sucker-punched in the face. But other than that he seems to have kept his
nose pretty clean, with no one ever accusing him of being a buttocks fetishist
or the like. In that regard, he seems like a pretty regular guy.
He's got a lot of pretty regular-guy
habits, too. He enjoys playing Texas Hold 'em and the occasional game of
miniature golf. He's actually not a big dancer and says, "If you look at
the great men of history, they never danced. Winston Churchill never
danced." And, like most other guys, he's not so big on post-pee
hand-washing. "All day you're coming into contact with things — other
hands, elevator buttons, escalator handrails — and your member has been inside
your pants all day. It's hanging there. It's protectively clothed. Now, if I
dribbled on myself, obviously I'd wash, but otherwise — no!"
A while later, he's out at a Chicago
pizza joint, ordering a stuffed pepperoni pizza., a small green salad
("just to have something healthy") and mozzarella sticks. He's much
in demand by fellow pizza, eaters, who come up to him almost constantly to say
a few words. "Excuse me," one guy says. "I'm sorry, and I don't
want to be a douche bag, but I've just got to tell you — you're Vince Vaughn,
right? You're hilarious!"
After that, conversation turns to the
Wedding Crashers-related art of picking up girls. Lots of guys use canned
opening lines to meet girls — neutral-opinion openers like "Who lies more,
men or women?" are one good way to start out — but that's not the Vaughn
method, he says, and not simply because he's a star and doesn't need them. It
goes deeper than that.
Just then, two sweet-looking young girls
show up at the table.
"Who lies more, men or women?"
Vaughn says to them.
"Wha-?" the girls say,
momentarily baffled. Then they quickly plow forward. "Hey, anyway, we're
going to Second City tonight, and we'd be honored to pay for your ticket if
you'd like to join us."
There's a moment of silence.
"You guys are so sweet," says
Vaughn. "No, I can't go tonight. How old are y'all?"
"Twenty-two — I only look like I'm
fifteen," says one.
"I'm old enough to be your
father!" Vaughn shouts.
The girls shuffle their feet. "Oh,
wow," the one finally says. "This is awkward."
Vaughn starts laughing. "Not at
all!" he says. "You guys are great. Come on over here and give me a
hug."
And so they do, falling into his lap,
all three of them giggling and carrying on.
Later, Vaughn says, "See, that's my
line: 'Get your asses in here. Get your arms on me.' If you feel the need to be
deceitful or present yourself as something you're not, then you're ultimately
saying you don't have any value. For me, it's less about an angle, pool shot or
card flop than it is about connecting and feeling that connection. I mean, if
you're not connected, there's no point. At the same time, though, you can drink
a lot of girls pretty."
One-night stands — adverse?
"No, not at all," he says
blithely. "There are no rules. Sometimes it can really be fun. But it can
also be awful, like if you drank a lot and found yourself at home with a girl,
you don't even know why. You just go through the motions of it: 'Oh, Jesus, OK,
here we go, all right.' And sometimes you pass out and don't even get to the
main action and still get the uncomfortableness of the next day. But it's never
really that bad. I mean, you're still sleeping with somebody, right?"