She’s Just Playing De Vil’s Advocate

When word comes that Glenn Close has a new puppy in her life--her real life as opposed to her reel life--you can’t help hoping that she’ll have it with her, and not because you need reassurance that she isn’t, in fact, a dog skinner. We all understand the difference between reality and film fantasy, so we trust that she is, in actuality, the furthest thing from the sort who would plot to make a fur coat from the pelts of tiny spotted canines, as she did in 1996’s “101 Dalmatians” and does again in the sequel, “102 Dalmatians.”

Yet there is something about her ability to play such a villainess that invites further inquiry, even if it defies explanation in the end. No actress plays evil better. None is--pardon the pun--close.

So how did she get from here to there? Point A is her upbringing amid the WASPish wealth of Greenwich, Conn., her teenage start in show biz with the incredibly bouncy Up With People--the evangelical singing troupe launched in the ‘60s--and her emergence in films portraying sweet innocence. Point B is where she winds up, at 53, as Hollywood’s most accomplished oracle of darkness.

Her first three Oscar nominations: playing paragons of virtue in “The World According to Garp,” “The Big Chill” and “The Natural,” serving as Robert Redford’s haloed vision in that one.

Her last two nominated roles: as the obsessive Alex Forrest in “Fatal Attraction,” boiling Michael Douglas’ pet rabbit in a pot, and as the Marquise de Merteuil in “Dangerous Liaisons,” plotting with--and against--John Malkovich.

You can’t push this inquiry too far, because her new movie, opening Nov. 22, is, after all, a Disney romp for kids, another playful animal story that youngsters may well watch, like the first, as many times as there are Dalmatians. They’ll likely squeal with delight, again, when the puppies get their revenge, again, on the aptly named Cruella De Vil. And while Cruella may be the Devil, she’s more about over-the-top costumes and hairstyles (see story, page 46), than any serious take on good and evil.

Yet it’s tempting to dip a toe into those waters, with a simple question, when you see that Close has indeed brought along her tiny dog, Petey.

His full name is Petey Petit, and he’s a papillon, meaning he has a toy-dog body with big furry ears that look--thus the name--like butterfly wings. He’s not any old papillon, either. He’s the son of the great Kirby, who won best of show at Westminster. Close picked him up from the breeder a few days ago after deciding she was ready to replace her beloved Gaby, a white Coton de Tulear who was her road companion before she died, at 12, in February.

“I just miss her,” Close says. “I thought if I have another little dog companion when I’m away from home, I won’t be quite so homesick. I wanted a little dog I could carry on the airplane, so I wouldn’t have to put him in a crate.”

Petey is resting regally on a red-and-black checkerboard blanket atop the sofa in the living room of the Greenwich Village duplex that serves as a city crash pad for his mistress. Her main spread, in the countryside of New York’s northern Westchester County, has other dogs and cats and fish. Horses too, though her Morgan mare, Rosie, is in an animal hospital down in Pennsylvania, undergoing surgery this morning to save her life.

When the phone rings, it’s a friend eager for an update. “She came through like a trooper,” Close reports, much relieved.

Rosie had a degenerative hoof disease, leaving the actress with two choices, “either put her down, or try the hospital.” She didn’t give it a second thought, whatever the cost. Rosie has been with her nine years, since her daughter, Annie, was 3. Though hot-blooded by nature, she’d make like a gentle plow horse whenever Close hoisted her daughter on top for a ride.

“She hadn’t given up, and if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t,” Close says of the hospitalized mare.

*

So here we are, firmly at Point A, awash in mushy animal-lover talk of Peteys and Gabys and Rosies. Close is curled up next to Petey, displaying a fluency about pure dog breeds and horsemanship worthy of a refined Greenwich matron.

Yet images of Cruella peer down from the walls. They’re her keepsakes from the filming of “102” in London. There’s a portrait of Cruella in her trademark spiked hair, half black and half white. Another shows one of the “ancestors” Cruella has been given for the sequel, modeled after a famous portrait of Queen Elizabeth I in a frilled-collar dress--except the face looks like you-know-who, complete with two-tone hair. There’s also a rendering of the set designed by Assheton Gorton as Cruella’s palace.

“This is modeled after a private museum in London. Look at that staircase!” Close says, and she’s right, it’s worthy of Scarlett O’Hara.

As she rises from the sofa to point out the details, her assistant hurries off to a nearby Mexican restaurant for chips and guacamole.

It’s behind one of the portraits on the set, Close confides, that Cruella has “this vast secret room” where she stashes all her furs “when I first come back and I’ve been cured of my fetish.”

Yes, the plot: Fashion mogul Cruella De Vil, having been hauled off to the clink at the end of “101”--after the Dalmatian pups and their animal friends foil her bid to turn them into a garment--is released from custody when aversion therapy, conducted by a Dr. Pavlov, seemingly lifts her craving for fur. She gives money to an animal shelter. Her faithful butler, Alonso, gives her a dog of her own, “Fluffy,” a hairless Chinese Crested.

The cute creature later turns on her, though--jumping up to open her secret vault for all the dogs to see, and Cruella . . . well, she regresses. Her hair boinks up again and she sets out to make another Dalmatian coat, this time enlisting the help of French designer Jean Pierre Le Pelt, played by Gerard Depardieu.

“I am back to my old evil ways,” Close says. “Really bad. So kids get sincerely frightened by her, and then they love it when the puppies start doing her in.”

This time, the counterattack is led not only by the adult Dalmatians, looking for their pups, but by a motley trio from the shelter, a bull mastiff, a borzoi and a border terrier. There’s also a bird, a macaw, who thinks he’s a dog. Their cat-and-mouse game with Cruella and her henchmen ends at a huge bakery.

“How bad is she?” Close asks. “There’s a point I think they’re going to keep in the movie--I hope so--where I’m this dripping witch in the bakery and I get the puppy, and these choppers come down and I throw the puppy into the choppers. Luckily, it only lasts for a couple of seconds; you think the puppy’s been chopped, then it pops up. But it’s a horrible thing to do. If I was a kid, that would be the scariest moment, throwing something like this into the chopper.”

With that, she reaches to her left and pats Petey’s head. Then she laughs--not some put-on stage cackle, but her own Glenn Close cackle.

We’re off Point A, clearly. It’s time to pose our dog question:

When Petey comes up and licks her face, is that a kiss or a taste?

“Ah,” she says.

Kiss or taste? Look at it as a parlor game, if you will, or as a Rorschach test. It happens to be my favorite way--however screwball--of gauging someone’s world view. Think of it as a variation on yin-yang, or nature-nurture, or right brain-left brain. It doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about a person, but it’s a start. Is that little animal offering its love or ingesting the salt in your sweat? Is the world a benevolent place or predatory?

When you later ask Glenn Close’s PR man to guess how she answered, he says, no question--”a kiss.” It’s a fair guess that those sweet characters that earned her first three Oscar nominations would see it the same, as a kiss.

What Close says is, “Probably, it’s a taste. And a smell. I don’t know. No, definitely. Dogs don’t know about kissing. I think it’s definitely a taste.”

She leads Petey to the sliding glass door to her patio. “You wanna go out? Go on, check it out, Petey.”

Petey sticks his nose out the door. There’s a cool breeze blowing through the Village. Before Close can slide the door shut, he scurries back into the warm living room.

*

A Los Angeles friend of mine was one of the founding core of Up With People, which began sending troupes of fresh-faced singers around the land in 1965, their bubbly songs a stark contrast to the scruffy counterculture and protest movements then brewing.

It was an offshoot of an organization called Moral Re-Armament, whose goal was nothing less than “to bring about heaven on Earth through spiritual change among leaders of the world,” recalls my friend, whose uncle used to travel to Asia and Africa to pursue the mission. So did Close’s father, a prominent New York surgeon who, when she was 13, ran a clinic in the then Belgian Congo. She was enrolled in the private Rosemary Hall school in Greenwich, a town her (real) ancestors helped found. At 17, she was sent not to college, but to Up With People, where she became part of an act known as the Green-Glenn Singers, paired with the daughter of composer-conductor Johnnie Green, who won five Oscars as the music director for MGM films.

My friend recalls the blond girl from Connecticut as “Glennie, the quiet one--very innocent, pure, clean, straight. Very beautiful, classically so, and talented. Onstage, incredible.”

What Close herself recalls of that time is, “I didn’t go into it by choice. I was 17”--she whispers this--”and it was five years of my life.”

When most kids her age were graduating college, she was beginning it, at William & Mary, married by then to a guitar player from the group. That’s one reason she got a late start in show business, first in theater, then film. She was 35 when “Garp” hit the screen.

If many of their peers saw the kids in Up With People as naively smiley-faced, that’s not Close’s take. Theirs was not a rose-colored view of the world, she says, but a feeling that “there was so much evil that you had to belong to a group like that, you had to be regimented, in order to combat it.”

“Are bouncy people really bouncy people?” she asks. Then she laughs. “Maybe they were. Maybe it was just me.”

*

It’s often been told how Close became furious when the original ending of “Fatal Attraction” was changed. As first written, her character kills herself after she can’t get Michael Douglas to abandon his wife, but makes it look like he murdered her--so he too pays for his sins. The problem was, test audiences hated seeing the errant husband arrested. They wanted the evil Alex to be totally vanquished. Thus the change: She’s shot dead by the faithful wife. The family is saved.

By the time she did “101 Dalmatians,” nine years later, Close had the clout that comes with being The Star. So she insisted that Cruella get better treatment than Alex.

“They wanted her to be really humiliated in the end. To make her pathetic. I said, ‘I won’t do that.’ I don’t think it’s funny. She deserves some kind of respect,” Close says.

“What I like about her is that she will rise again. She’s invincible. Evil’s never really conquered, is it? I don’t think so. You just have to watch out for it.”

She agrees, of course, that Cruella deserves “everything she gets” for trying to skin those puppies. And she gets plenty again, in “102,” when the animals catch up with her in that bakery and the conveyor belt carries her toward the oven.

But how to make it clear that Cruella may, indeed, rise again? Close had Disney get some expensive (though uncredited) script polishing from a friend of hers, Tom Stoppard.

Only in Hollywood: the great modern playwright, fresh off his Oscar-winning work on “Shakespeare in Love,” tried to come up with, among other things, an exit line for Cruella De Vil.

Depardieu’s character comes up to her, maniacally upset, screaming, “Everything’s ruined! Ruined! How will we get out of this mess?”

Don’t tell the kids, but what Cruella says is, “Piece of cake.”

It’s time for our own exit line, as she carries the leftover Mexican food to the kitchen. Petey the dog jumps at her legs, eager for attention. She kneels down toward him. Out comes his tongue for a big fat lick that could be a kiss or a taste, depending on how you look at it.

Close’s verdict: “Must be the guacamole.”