Beginner’s Luck

It’s late and Elle Macpherson is starving. “Would you like to stay for dinner?” she asks. It is a gallant invitation; I know she’d rather have me leave. She has to pack for a monthlong European vacation that starts the following day. She has to give a press conference, just hours before she gets on the plane, to answer unpleasant questions about two men who allegedly robbed her home of money, jewelry and photographs and tried to extort money from her. And she’s already spent most of the afternoon and early evening answering scores of questions about her personal life, modeling and her burgeoning movie career.

But longtime manager Stuart Cameron, a cheerful Australian who’s been hovering about discreetly all day, is in the kitchen whipping up a little something. Macpherson clearly wants to be gracious--and, like, I’m gonna say no?

Cameron offers up slabs of breaded veal, surfing in a pan of oil, accompanied by Brussels sprouts slathered in butter and a big bowl of fluffy mashed potatoes. “Mashies,” Macpherson says hungrily, ladling up a mound on her plate.

I break every dietary rule I have--no butter, no oil, no breading, no eating of little veal calves--to dine with her. But Elle Macpherson--possessed of a body so extraordinary it sold three calendars, graced the cover of four Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions and won her an audition for her first major movie role--doesn’t give it a second thought. She plops her plate on her lap and dives in.

Of all the adjectives that describe Macpherson--beautiful, hard-working, pragmatic, multinational--neurotic is not one of them. Certainly not where food is concerned. Of course, there’s something other than a remarkable metabolism that might account for her appetite. On this hot summer night, she is two months pregnant, a condition she hides beautifully, even in jeans. (“It’s like the food police,” she grumbles a few weeks later when asked why she ate so much. “What is it with American women? That’s pretty much how I eat.”)

Whether she’s modeling or telling you her age (33)--or appearing nude in her first major film role (“Sirens”), Macpherson appears to approach the task at hand without torment. That’s not to say she hasn’t thrown up out of anxiety right before shooting a movie scene. (She did--several times--during the filming of “Sirens.”) Or that she hasn’t obsessed over how to create a full personality for a character who’s on screen maybe 15 minutes total (that’s her lot in the upcoming movie “The Edge,” scheduled for release Sept. 26. It’s not as if she hasn’t bossed around a photographer, suggesting camera angles to capture her at her best.

No, it’s more that Elle Macpherson has all the confidence of someone who left her native Australia at 17 for a two-week vacation in the United States and emerged, in just a few years later, as an icon of contemporary beauty, revered by boys and men the world over. By age 30, she was a multimillionaire. Today, she’s a poster girl for diversification; she thinks of herself as a successful businesswoman plugged into various enterprises--acting, modeling, hawking a lingerie line, engaging in high-profile investing with other famous models in the Fashion Cafe restaurant chain.

There’s just no need for free-floating neuroses. “I thought everybody in the movie business was crazy,” she explains. “I thought unless you were neurotic, you would never be a good actor. I thought actors were people who were not comfortable with themselves and had to escape from themselves by playing other characters. And I thought, ‘I’m very comfortable with myself. I’ve created this character, this kind of product that I sell called Elle Macpherson.’ But you know what? I got bored. And I started to want to escape from myself, and I escaped from myself in other characters. And that’s where the passion came for acting.”

She’s been modeling less, taking a six-figure job in Europe every now and then for the money, weaning salivating clients like “Victoria’s Secret” down to an occasional catalog. As an actress, she has good-naturedly worked her way through a string of roles as The Beautiful Woman, doing a respectable job and winning the affection of high-powered colleagues.

“She’s very natural as an actor,” says Anthony Hopkins, who, with Alec Baldwin, stars in “The Edge.” “She’s not at all ponderous.”

In fact, in the movie business, where supermodels are expected to embarrass themselves when they try to act and the bar of expectation seems to be set lower for them, people talk about Macpherson as if she’s practically brilliant. Her buzz is better than her reality.

When asked to rate herself, Macpherson is blunt. “Beginner. Just a beginner.” What she is, is a pragmatist. While other beautiful women rail at being cast as The Beautiful Woman, she does what she can with the parts, then moves on to the next project, seeing her acting roles less as installments of some great oeuvre she’s building and more as offshoots of the Entity That is Elle. Besides, she’d sooner talk about the next big thing on her wish list--a documentary on the history of lingerie that she would produce and narrate. And model. Maybe.

“It’s a weird thing but there’s minimal effort,” she says about her acting career. “I have to work, but it’s not like I have to sit down and be very constructive about where I want to go in the future. It’s kind of made up its mind for itself. Opportunities come and you take them, and then they don’t come, you know? I don’t have a master plan.”

If she did, nothing would have thrown it off course more than her surprise pregnancy. “It was a happy surprise,” she says. “It was bound to happen at some stage.”

Macpherson, who was married and divorced by the time she was 27, has been dating 34-year-old French financier Arpade Busson--better known as Arki--for more than a year. Busson lives in London--much of the time with Macpherson, who is an Australian citizen and a United Kingdom resident. Macpherson rents a rambling house in Los Angeles where she stayed much of this year. But now that she’s pregnant, she plans to spend most of the remaining year--her baby is due in February--in London with Busson.

She doesn’t know whether they will marry, but the father-to-be is “over the moon. He’s supportive and happy. He’s almost more delighted than I am.”

Macpherson is the oldest of four children--a sister is 30, her brother is 27, the youngest is a girl of 14--and the first to give birth. “I said to my mother, ‘Mom, Arki and I are pregnant.’ She said, ‘Thank God. I’m tired of waiting to be a grandmother.’ I said, ‘Mom, I know you might be concerned that I’m not married,’ and she said, ‘Oh, grow up, girl, this is the ‘90s. I’m not going to tell you whether or not you should be married.’ ”

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Her Los Angeles house sits high on a hill in a tree-shrouded clutch of properties hidden behind an automatic gate that swings open slowly. She has spent part of her afternoon indoors, being prepped for the photo shoot. When I first arrive, Macpherson sits facing a mirror in a corner of her airy living room while a stylist blow-dries her hair. She extends a hand over her head for a greeting and guides me to the chair next to hers through a jumble of paraphernalia on the floor.

She has just finished shooting a film called “Mom’s Up on the Roof” in which she plays a woman desperate to be part of a family. In some scenes, Macpherson wore padding because her character is--how’s this for irony?--pregnant. It was a difficult shoot.

“I was pregnant from day one. I was tired. My wardrobe was not fitting right.” But it was a part with some psychic heft as well. “I liked this character a lot. The more I have to do, the better I perform. I’m not very good at standing around and reacting--which I seem to have done quite a bit of.”

In “The Edge,” directed by New Zealander Lee Tamahori, she is--what else?--the beautiful young fashion-model wife of a brilliant, bookish and wealthy older man, played by Anthony Hopkins. When her husband and a photographer with whom she works (Baldwin) survive a plane crash in a remote Canadian wilderness, the two men not only grapple with the elements but also with other.

If you count her one line in Woody Allen’s 1990 film, “Alice,” “The Edge” is her seventh film. (“Mom’s Up on the Roof” will be her eighth.) It’s not a big part by any means--Baldwin and Hopkins get most of the screen time. Nonetheless, the audience must get a sense of the woman who has captivated both men. On screen, she is warm and affectionate and relaxed with Hopkins--and, of course, she is stunning.

“Well, it was written by David Mamet, and Mamet is not by nature somebody who spends a lot of time developing his female characters,” Macpherson says with a little sigh. “I knew that going into the film.”

Her hair is sleek and dark gold with spiky short ends near her face, the result of hair breakage from too much handling and styling. The hair stylist slips in a string of hair additions, anchored to the crown, to give the illusion of fuller hair for the photographs. She describes her hair as “overworked and underpaid--like I am,” she laughs. “Life changes when you’re used to earning the kind of money you can make in modeling [compared with] the kind of money you make as a beginning actor. It’s a big change.”

It’s not that she’s making regional theater wages in Hollywood. It’s that she’s accustomed to the financial stratosphere of supermodels. Forbes magazine estimated Macpherson’s 1994 income at $3 million.

“I certainly don’t like to speak in figure terms,” she says about modeling jobs in general, “but it’s not unusual to earn $100,000 for a day’s work.” Macpherson insists she doesn’t remember how much money she made for several weeks of labor on “The Edge.” “I would say it was between $50,000 and $150,000,” but she offers this addendum: “I know exactly what I make in business, but I don’t care about the money I made on the movie. It’s art. I made the movie to make the movie.”

In addition to the calendars she adorned in the early ‘90s, she starred in a workout video and signed a cosmetic contract in Europe with a company called Biotherm. “I didn’t renew it because I found it very constricting,” she says. “I’m not a big contract person.” Her biggest business venture is her 7-year-old lingerie line, Elle Macpherson Intimates, which is sold and advertised only in Australia and New Zealand--a part of the world where she is a cult figure. The line is a division of Bendon, the New Zealand-based men’s and women’s underwear manufacturer. Macpherson models for print and television ads, offers creative advice and attends company meetings. Sometimes the meetings come to her. “She doesn’t cut patterns,” says Annabel Blackett, whose Australian firm handles the advertising for the lingerie line, “but absolutely nothing is made without her approval.”

Macpherson doesn’t model as much as she once did, but she lives a very supermodel-ish life. In addition to her manager, she has a publicist, a theatrical agent, a model agent and a battery of lawyers. She rents a $6,000 a month house in Los Angeles, owns a home in London and is trying to unload an apartment in New York City.

Boyfriends give her cars. (Her silver Aston-Martin is a gift from Busson.)

She eschews airplane food except for caviar. “I know it sounds pretentious, but if they have caviar, I’ll eat that, because it’s already packaged and I know they didn’t put any preservatives in it.” She vacations on yachts. In one room of her house is a framed picture of her smiling on the deck of a boat with an exotic rock outcropping in the background. And the photo was taken where?

“Spain,” she says, then corrects herself. “Greece. Spain. I don’t know exactly where we were on that day.”

As photographers set lights and Macpherson looks for clothes to wear, her boyfriend calls.

She greets him liltingly. “Bonjour, mon amour . . . oui . . . oui . . . d’accord . . . d’accord . . . love you.”

Her house bears reminders of their relationship. A photograph on her coffee table shows Busson, in hunting tweeds and boots with a rifle, looking every bit the English gentleman. (Actually the picture was taken on a private island off the East Coast.) In the living room, three bongo drums stand like sentinels near the piano. “Arki plays the bongos,” Macpherson explains. They met through friends several years ago, when she had a boyfriend and he had a wife, but they didn’t start dating until each was free and clear.

People think he’s a European playboy. But he’s one of the most serious people you could meet.” She chuckles ruefully at the thought of all that unwanted scrutiny. “Just because he’s going out with me, the poor guy.”

The point of modeling was to raise money to go to a university to become a lawyer--like her “highly intellectual” stepfather, who raised her. At the end of high school, Macpherson had been accepted by two universities. “I took a year off because I worked really hard to get those grades,” she says. She worked odd jobs “to get money to buy books” and deferred her enrollment.

When a school friend who was modeling suggested that Macpherson talk to her agent, she did-- and began to work in Sydney. A photograph of Macpherson in an Australian hairdresser’s portfolio made its way to New York and caught the eye of modeling agents who wanted to meet her. She took a vacation to the United States, expecting to ski in Aspen, talk to some modeling agents in New York and fly back.

“I just never came home,” she says.

It was difficult at first--and expensive. There were clothes to buy, rent to pay, the cost of getting around New York. “I didn’t earn any money for years. I lived on trail mix.”

She was a bit unsophisticated as well. When her agency asked her to go on a shoot in St. Barthelemy she first declined, saying she couldn’t afford the air fare. No, she was told, the client pays the air fare. “When I was there, I didn’t eat, because I didn’t know if they paid for your food, too. When I found out they did, I ordered five chocolate mousses.”

A booking on a modeling trip to Tahiti for the French magazine that happens to share her name--”Elle”--led to her first meeting with Elle magazine’s prolific photographer, Gilles Bensimon. The trip got off to an odd start. He ignored her the whole time they were in Tahiti, barely using her in any shots. But on the plane back to Los Angeles, he invited her up to his first-class seat “to sit on his lap.”

Eventually he won her over. She was 19; he was 40. They married when she was 21, and she thrived. She studied French and learned about opera and photography. The marriage provided a haven from the peripatetic, drug-tinged modeling life. Her career blossomed, first with French Elle and then with American Elle, which was being formed under Bensimon’s guidance. (He is the creative director of the magazine now.)

But the marriage wilted, and they separated in 1989, when she was 25. The divorce came two years later. Why? “Oh, why does any relationship break up?” she responds evasively.

Elle--a single name was enough during the height of her modeling career--was never modeling royalty. While other supermodels of the late ‘80s graced the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and sashayed down the catwalks of Versace and Chanel, Elle was doing “Sports Illustrated” and catalogs for J. Crew and Victoria’s Secret. But she got just as rich--if not richer--and just as famous, if not more so, than the competition.

Sports Illustrated made her a household name and an international lust object. She was beautiful and athletic, golden of hair and skin. Where most fashion models projected haughtiness and aloofness, she was friendly, not distant. And Macpherson worked it like a Miss America title.

“When I did the cover, I used to go all over America,” she says. “I’d have lunches--huge lunches--for 1,500 people and have to sign autographs and take photographs with people, executives and heads of car companies. I learned so much about public relations and how to deal with Middle America. These were the bread and butter people. These were my fans. And I had a real following from that . . . far greater than a fashion magazine could give you.”

For the photos, she’s changed into a tight white shirt and jeans. “I’m heavy now,” she says matter-of-factly, munching on some potato chips.

“When I’m really thin, I weigh 129, 130. Now I’m probably 135, 137.” She sticks a potato chip in her mouth--”138,” she chuckles. She’s just a half inch short of 6 feet tall, and she runs every day. Whatever bloat pregnancy has wrought is not visible. Macpherson may say she’s not beautiful--”I can be quite plain looking”--but even she doesn’t deny that she was born with a phenomenal body. Broad shoulders, slim waist and hips, long legs. She could gain 25 pounds and she’d still look incredible.

In fact, she gained 15 pounds to play Sheela, the mischievous muse in 1994’s “Sirens.” The movie was inspired by the life of the controversial Australian painter Norman Lindsay, who painted live nudes in the 1930s. Macpherson figured that models of that era wouldn’t be quite as lean as the stick figures of the ‘90s, so she gained the weight. She also hoped that maybe moviegoers would somehow forget it was Elle, the model. (Mission not accomplished.)

Macpherson has been remarkably adept at avoiding bad movies. In 1996, she had a small turn as the snobby Blanche Ingram in Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jane Eyre” with William Hurt (1996), an equally small part as a sexy woman going after Jeff Bridges in “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” and a role as a woman coveted through a window by a man who eventually starts a relationship with her in the romantic comedy “If Lucy Fell.” Last summer she played the girlfriend to George Clooney’s Bruce Wayne in “Batman and Robin”. For that one, she never even had to audition; director Joel Schumacher handed her the part. But she has yet to deal with a substantial role that tests her talent.

“Sirens,” Macpherson’s first real acting job, has been her most demanding role; she had to be funny, knowing and, on several occasions, naked. “I’m extremely at ease with my body,” she says. “I could stand here naked like this and look at you--” she stands squarely in front of me, hip cocked to one side, face almost bored--”the same as if I was dressed, [but] I would never stand here naked and--” she flashes a provocative stare--”sell it.”

She professes surprise that just a few minutes of nudity in “Sirens” caused a stir. Still, in the wake of the that film, she decided to do an extensive nude layout--shot by fashion and portrait photographer Herb Ritts--that ran in Playboy. She was paid somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000 for the layout.

“I bought my mother a house,” she says.

Dusk is falling, the photographer and hair stylist have left and Macpherson has changed into a long black slip-dress and sweater. She walks around the living room lighting candles in giant brass holders. The room, bathed in buttery light, looks as cozy and luxurious as a mountaintop chalet.

The house had been a cocoon of safety--until burglars breached that security last spring, breaking and entering several times to steal jewelry, money and about 30 personal photos, some of them depicting Macpherson topless. The thieves, she says, tried to blackmail her into giving them money in exchange for not posting the pictures on the Internet. Two men have since been arrested and are in jail awaiting trial.

In a bizarre twist, a lawyer representing one of the men quoted his client as being upset because Macpherson had dated and discarded him like “a boy toy.” (Macpherson would later say she had never met the man and sued the lawyer for defamation.

Macpherson says she took most of the stolen photos herself. “They were part of a series of photographs I was doing for a book concept I had. As someone who has always been photographed by someone else, I get to be seen through my own eyes.”

One photograph was of two women--Macpherson and a friend, who is, she says, well-known. The pictures, she says, “were absolutely not sordid.”

After the break-ins and before the arrests, Macpherson wouldn’t stay in the house. But now she’s back--though rarely alone. The home is [but] one of her extravagances. --”I’ll open a $100 bottle of wine for myself,” she says. But not on this night. Her pregnancy has placed alcohol off-limits; she’s also given up smoking.

She muses about what motherhood will do to her acting career. “It could make me better in my work, because I’ll have more personal experience to draw on,” she says. “Or it might distract me.”

At this point, she knows she has neither clout nor experience to pluck the meaty, quirky roles she admires from afar.

“But I think there are some great roles for women around. I’m a woman who has always embraced my sensuality--or my femininity, rather. I don’t mind roles where girls are girls and men are action heroes. I don’t mind roles where we’re talking about the wife behind the man. But that’s the way I see life. I’m not a feminist.”

It strains the imagination to consider a late 20th century thirtysomething, soon-to-be single mother who’s a multimillionaire not a feminist.

But she continues: “I don’t think men and women are the same or should behave the same--or be treated the same,” she says.

How do women and men behave differently? She laughs darkly, deliciously. “Oh, that’s something that needs a long conversation and a few glasses of wine.”