Kevin Spacey is smoking like a fiend, but why aren't there little beads of sweat on his forehead, too? Yes, the temperature of the suite at the Fairmont is perfectly cool, and the star looks comfortably put together in his conservative business attire: white shirt, plain tie, sensible black shoes like a Utah congressman's. Still, he's got to be feeling the heat under that crisp collar, doesn't he?
"Beyond the Sea," his $25 million biopic based on the life of Bobby Darin, is about to be released nationwide, and as pet projects go, this one is the equivalent of two Great Danes, an English sheepdog and a pony all in one. Dedicated to his late mother, an adoring fan of the singer, the movie features so many Spacey credits -- directed by, written by, produced by, star turn performed by, songs all sung by -- that it's a wonder his jobs on the Berlin set didn't include rewinding the extension cords and dishing out the Wiener schnitzel.
"If this is the Oscar curse, fantastic," two-time Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey says. "I just got to make the movie of my dreams."
(Ann Johansson -- AP)
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Oh yeah: And while he's been out promoting the film (not only in standard-issue hotel-room sitdowns with reporters, but also in a series of concerts in which he re-creates Darin's hits), there's the small matter over in London of his first season running a theater. The Old Vic, the legendary playhouse in which Laurence Olivier launched the National Theatre, is now in Spacey's hands, a turn of events that has the British press alternately agog and appalled. An innocent bit of carping to the BBC about the oafs who brandish cell phones and crinkle candy wrappers in theaters got him branded an audience-hater and snob by the London papers, not well known for their tolerance of American movie stars who complain about local custom.
So here is Spacey, with so much on his plate, so much on the line, and he's so placidly accommodating, it's as if he had no more pressing concern than finding his way to the Spy Museum. Could he actually be savoring this moment in his professional life? Since he won his second Oscar, for "American Beauty" (1999), all of his pictures, including "Pay It Forward" and "The Shipping News," have been box-office disappointments. "Cloaca," the inaugural play of his first Old Vic season, was savaged by reviewers. And the early notices in New York and London for "Beyond the Sea," which opens tomorrow in Washington and across the country, have been coldly dismissive. (The words "vanity production" have even been bandied about.)
None of this has come as a surprise to Spacey. He says he's prepared himself for a backlash ever since Academy Award No. 2. (No. 1 came for "The Usual Suspects.") After the second, he remarked to his agent and his manager, "Guys, it looks like a gravy train, but the truth is that the bar has been raised so high by 'American Beauty.' " Not that Spacey is griping about his twin statuettes.
"If this is the Oscar curse, fantastic," Spacey declares. "I just got to make the movie of my dreams."
The dream movie may be the most personal Spacey's ever made. This in itself is sort of weird, because he plays someone he never met, someone he knew only via celluloid and the stereo. Darin, who died in 1973 (when Spacey was 14; he's 45 now), was a major recording and nightclub star of the late '50s and early '60s, whose eclectic hits -- "Mack the Knife," "Splish Splash," "Beyond the Sea" -- established him as a crooning cousin to Sinatra. Unlike Sinatra's, though, Darin's luster has faded; middle-aged baby boomers generally know as little about him as they do about Jerry Vale or Vic Damone. The details of his brief but eventful life (his death at 37 was the result of a heart ailment developed in childhood) have receded, too. Few people recall that he was up for an Oscar himself, for the now-forgotten "Captain Newman, M.D."; that he was married to Sandra Dee, herself a box office sensation at the time; that the woman he'd long thought was his sister was actually his mother; or that he may have been one of the great lounge acts of all time.
"He was just one of a kind," Spacey argues. In the house in the San Fernando Valley where he grew up, Spacey heard Darin all the time. His voice, the actor says, was not as pure as Sinatra's, but "probably next to Sammy Davis," he was the most accomplished nightclub singer the country has produced. Why he is not more celebrated today has a lot to do with the arc of his trajectory, Spacey believes -- the fact that he died at a midpoint, not having lived long enough for a comeback, but too old for a youthful aura to have frozen him in myth.
"If he'd died at 22," Spacey says, "he would have been James Dean."
"Beyond the Sea" is a hybrid of a production -- part biographical drama, part movie musical -- that showcases Spacey's extraordinary gifts as a mimic. He sings all the Darin standards himself, and in the process of making it, he came to feel so completely at home in Darin's skin that people in the music business told him he had stopped doing an imitation of Darin. "So much of him was in my system," he says, "that I was doing a version of Bobby." By which he means his own version, a persona that he had the opportunity to create at his own pace, on a soundstage in Hollywood. A few years ago, when Universal was developing the project, the studio gave Spacey a big room, a computer and a large screen onto which he could punch up images of Darin, and a band with which he could practice being the singer. His proficiency became such that he soon recorded about 20 Darin numbers on a demo disc at Capitol Records.
Getting a movie made, however, proved treacherous. Spacey came into possession of the numerous scripts about the singer that had been written over the years, and he set about writing his own.
But the money was not forthcoming, and the project seemed to founder until some interest developed in Europe, with Spacey as the draw. "I got a call that Kevin has this project that was dear to him and would I take a look at it?" says Andy Paterson, a British film producer ("Girl With a Pearl Earring") who would eventually sign on.
What Paterson needed to know, he says, was whether Spacey could sing. He could, of course -- a talent he'd demonstrated early in a guest appearance on "L.A. Law" in which Spacey marched bizarrely in unison with a coterie of young women and burst into song for the lawyers. The actor had done musicals as a teenager in California and tried to pursue that interest in New York, where he was turned down for, among other things, a role in a hit 1992 revival of "Guys and Dolls" that propelled Nathan Lane to stardom.
On a trip to Los Angeles, the undecided Paterson was asked by Spacey to attend a scheduled exploratory read-through. When Paterson told Spacey he'd miss the reading by a day, the actor told him, "I'll switch it."
"Kevin Spacey is going to change the date of a read-through for me?" he recalls thinking. "To this day," he adds, "I don't know if it was a ploy or not."
To Paterson, a read-through means a very casual event, some actors around a table, maybe. "I open the door to a theater on La Cienega [Boulevard] and there are 300 people in the audience. At the appropriate point, the music is being fed in." Paterson was, well, sold. "I thought, 'Okay, this guy is astonishing.' "
Spacey has always seemed to know how to get to the right person, even if he's also known in the business as a bit eccentric. In the mid-'80s, according to the Broadway producer Emanuel Azenberg, a friend of Spacey's, the then-unknown actor wangled an audition for a production of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" (starring Jack Lemmon) by managing to accost the play's director, Jonathan Miller, at a reception.
He won the part over an established movie actor whose name Azenberg refuses to divulge. "He dealt with acting on a stage very seriously," Azenberg says of Spacey. "You never got a stiff performance." Still, he was hired with the tiniest trepidation. "When he came into the office, I said, 'You have a wacky reputation. We can't afford any screwing around.' And he was a pussycat." Spacey played the poisonous inebriate, James Tyrone Jr., to Peter Gallagher's Edmund, "probably the two greatest Tyrone brothers ever," Azenberg asserts.
Azenberg would work with Spacey on his two other great stage triumphs, "Lost in Yonkers," the Neil Simon play that in 1991 set him on the path to the majors, earning him a Tony, and another O'Neill play, "The Iceman Cometh" (1999), in which Spacey played the star part, Hickey, to practically universal acclaim.
To Hollywood, Spacey's eccentricities include his enduring affection for the stage, a love he has in a sense consummated with his marriage to the Old Vic, where he is now artistic director. This first season kicked off with the abysmally received "Cloaca," by a little-known Dutch playwright, Maria Goos; the current attraction, "Aladdin," is a holiday show with Ian McKellen, and still to come are two American plays in which Spacey will appear -- Philip Barry's classic "Philadelphia Story" and the more contemporary "National Anthems," by Dennis McIntyre.
Invited at first merely to serve on the Old Vic's board and to help pick someone to run the company, Spacey had an epiphany late one night when he took a taxi to the Royal National Theatre, the behemoth complex on the South Bank that is probably the most influential theatrical enterprise in the world. "I stood up and looked at the National, at what Olivier had done. It was one of those moments," he says. He thought about the Old Vic and said to himself, "This is what I'm meant to do."
A price of stardom, of getting the freedom to do what you think you're meant to, is running a gantlet of "Who do you think you are?" Just the other day, one of London's upscale papers, the Independent, ran a chart with a story about Spacey titled "A Star's Slip-Ups." Among the incidents recounted was a strange one last spring, in which the actor first reported being mugged in a London park in the wee hours while walking a dog, then altered his account, explaining he had merely tripped. Such is the level of scrutiny that he was even taken to task in the piece for some technical problems in the first performance of "Aladdin."
"With the criticism I've come under, they absolutely refuse to treat me as an artistic director," he says. "They treat me as a Hollywood actor." An interviewer asked him how different it was living in London as opposed to Hollywood. "I had to say, 'I've lived in New York since I was 20.' " It just so happens that one of the overarching thrusts of "Beyond the Sea" has to do with adjusting the perception of a misunderstood celebrity, with setting a record straight. Darin's survivors, who include his son, Dodd, apparently had hoped that a movie might recast Darin in the public imagination.
"The most emotional screenings have been showing the film to Dodd Darin," Spacey says. He hadn't set out to make a dark movie, he adds, and he's tickled by the idea that "Beyond the Sea" might constitute some sort of resurrection. "Dodd came out and he said, 'I can't thank you enough,' " Spacey recalls. " 'My dad will be immortal now.' "
Maybe that's why Spacey seems so remarkably untroubled on this morning in a hotel suite. The toughest part of making a movie about someone else's father is over.
