Sevigny, Taking Fate Into Her Own Hands

Some girls can go their whole lives without much happening to them. Not much that's really extraordinary, anyway.

They're born and go to school and get a job and maybe a husband. They have kids and friends and the occasional Florida vacation. Maybe they have an affair, or maybe they don't. Either way, they wake up bored as often as not. When their 15 minutes of fame arrive, it's in the form of a local news team looking for color quotes on the splendors to be had at the St. Stephen's 23rd Annual Garlic Festival.

Their obituaries are short and always include the word "devoted."

What they probably don't realize is that the extraordinary things that never happen to them are all happening, instead, to Chloe Sevigny.

She lingers by a Manhattan newsstand as a teenager and is asked to appear in a television broadcast. The broadcast's reporter happens to be a magazine editor who hires Sevigny to work as an intern and model. A couple of years later, when she moves to the city and starts going clubbing, a guy named Jay McInerney takes notice and proceeds to write a seven-page story in the New Yorker anointing her the Coolest Kid in the World. She skips college, becomes a skateboard groupie and finds herself in the same circle as Harmony Korine. He writes a parental heart attack of a flick called "Kids" and helps cast Sevigny, then with a nonexistent acting résumé, as the movie's HIV-infected heroine. Over the next decade, she becomes a thrift-store fashion muse, a reluctant hipster deity and performer of the world's second-most famous act of fellatio. (The first, of course, belonging to one M. Lewinsky.)

All of which makes us wonder about that most fateful of junctions, the one where luck sometimes, only sometimes, veers off into opportunity. The newsstand encounter begat fame. The garlic festival was a blip, just soggy pizza and a weekend of bad breath.

Do the gods just like her more?

Maybe.

"But I feel like I've also sought that out -- like it hasn't all just sort of fallen in my lap," Sevigny says from the Los Angeles set of "Big Love." She has 15 minutes to spare in service of the new movie "Zodiac" (see review on Page 32), while the "Big Love" costume folks make a tube top out of a pair of nylons, so it will look as if she's naked when she crawls back into bed with her polygamist husband (played by Bill Paxton) on the HBO drama.

"Like when I met certain people, not that I was using them or anything, but I knew that something was happening around them," she continues. "I don't think I just hung out with a bunch of pot-smoking losers. I was definitely seeking out people that were doing stuff or wanted to do stuff in their lives."

Based on the Sevigny model of success, the "who you know" cliche should be changed to "who you get to know."

Fame was by no means a foregone conclusion for the middle-class daughter of Darien, Conn. She didn't have any uber-connected showbiz parents, and hers isn't a face to launch a thousand ships. But when she fled suburbia at age 18, she did so with two qualities almost as rare and equally appealing: talent and an innate, unflagging sense of self.