Vanity Fair (September 97)

AMERICA'S SWEETHEART

After Speed and While You Were Sleeping,
Sandra Bullock's price soared, but her ego didn't.
Though she's poised to challenge
Julia Roberts as Hollywood's biggest box-office brunette,
Bullock had a long climb to stardom.
JENNET CONANT talks to the girl of the moment about
her true age, her lost love, and her ravenous
appetite for junk food and movie roles

Sandra Bullock is grossing out everyone on the set. She has just scarfed down a dozen red twizzlers and a handful of mini Nestle's Crunch bars and is polishing off her midmorning snack with a Fresca. She slurps the soda through a piece of the licorice, which she has turned into a straw by chewing off both ends. Standing in the doorway of the craft-services truck, brandishing the soda in one hand and her econo-pak of twizzlers in the other, America's new movie sweetheart sounds like every mother's nightmare.
"This is so great!" she swears, hopping down the steps of the truck, urging crew members to sample her concoction. "You gotta try it." Unsuprisingly, there are no immediate takers.
"Here, I'll make you one," she offers Todd Thaler, casting director of Two If By Sea, the movie Bullock has been shooting in Nova Scotia for 7 grueling weeks. Thaler shakes his head. "Aw, c'mon," she pleads. Bullock- who has a glowing Ivory Girl complexion, which no one who eats what she does has any right to- is wearing a ruby sweater set, orange flowered pedal pushers, and ruby sneakers. Technically she is in costume as Roz, a cashier from New York, though the $450 Moschino pants came from the depths of her own closet. She holds out a freshly gnawed piece of licorice and bats the lashes of her liquid brown eyes: "Just try it, puhleeze." Thaler relents and gingerly takes a sip of strawberry-flavored Fresca. When he grimaces in disgust, Bullock lets out a whoop of delight. It's impossible to avoid the thought that in the history of Hollywood movie shoots Two If By Sea must be the first marked by substance abuse of this variety.

Act II: A few hours later, Bullock is engineering another gastronomical disaster. She calls it lunch. "This is the best," she tells anyone who will listen while she layers potato chips on top of tuna salad and mayo. Bypassing lettuce and tomato, she slaps the whole mess between 2 doughy slices of bread and takes a big bite. "The best," she promises her co-star, comedian Denis Leary, between gulps of Orange Crush.
"You're getting to be more like Elvis every day," Leary replies with the trademark sneer that has made him an MTV icon. "That," he adds, eyeing her sandwich, "is dangerously close to the peanut-butter-and-fried-banana thing." Between feedings, you begin to wonder if it is possible that Sandy Bullock, with her cheerleader looks, buoyant manner, and junk-food habit, is really as frighteningly normal as she appears on-screen. You gather witnesses. Says Denis Leary, "If she has a skeleton in her closet, she probably put it there." Still, it is hard to know what to make of a movie star whom other actors and directors repeatedly describe as "fun to work with." When Irwin Winkler, who directed her new techno-thriller, The Net, recalls seeing her kiss everyone from grips to soundmen good-bye every night after shooting wrapped, you begin to think: Is this chick for real?
"The thing that is so endearing about Sandy is that she is normal," confirms Bill Bennett, director of Two If By Sea, in which Bullock plays the long-suffering girlfriend of a reluctant-to-marry two-bit thief. "Maybe it's her sense of ultimate security," says Bill Pullman, her co-star in While You Were Sleeping. "She's not a depressed, dark person. She hasn't got some spot that's going to be rubbed raw. She's not hiding anything. She just has a great personality. I think she's really enjoying herself and it shows."

This has been Bullock's year, a giddy, intoxicating 14 months in which the back-to-back successes of Speed and While You Were Sleeping have catapulted her past the constellation of more established actresses to become Hollywood's brightest new star. Studio executives rave about her "accessibility," the industry buzzword used to explain her boffo box-office returns. Fans- including swarms of gushing teenagers- carry on about her as the girl they'd most like to be, have as a best friend, adopt, or marry. Her asking price of $500,000 for Speed has recently increased more than tenfold to $6 million for her next project, the big-budget Joel Schumacher production of A Time To Kill, based on the John Grisham best-seller. She already has her own production company, which has purchased a script called Kate and Leopold, which Bullock intends to star in next year.

Don't think Julia Roberts, whose current asking price per picture is in the $12 million category, isn't looking over her shoulder. Bullock is clearly this year's Pretty Woman, give or take Pocahontas. Columbia moved up the premiere of The Net to the end of July, to get a jump on Robert's latest effort for Warner Bros., Something To Talk About, which opened August 4. Variety has already reported that studio executives are evaluating the actresses' respective box-office performances very carefully. "This is a business where people have to become stars at a very young age, and for actresses, that means they have to make it before they are 35," says Mark Gordon, who produced Speed.

Although Bullock appears to have come out of nowhere, here is not one of those discovered -at-Schwab's careers. She spent years slogging away in straight-to-video movies- When The Party's Over, The Vanishing, The Thing Called Love- and being turned down for better parts because she wasn't considered "conventionally beautiful enough" to play the leading lady. Her first big break, in the $70 million Sylvester Stallone picture Demolition Man, came when actress Lori Petty was fired a few days into shooting. Producer Joel Silver was scrambling to replace her when a young Warner Bros. executive named Lorenzo di Bonaventura mentioned his pal Sandy. Silver was impressed by Bullock's audition tape and, after a brief meeting, hired her on the spot. Even though Demolition Man misfired at the box office (it has become a camp classic on video), Silver recommended Bullock to Jan De Bont, the director of Speed, who had to fight for her tooth and nail over studio's objections. "Up until 2 days before I got the part, the studio was going, 'No, no, no,' and Jan was going, 'Yes, yes, yes.' " says Bullock, who isn't the least bit sensitive about admitting she wasn't the executives first choice. Talking in her trailer, she zeroes in on the subject of her career like a precision bomber. She's smart and exudes a kind of boundless enthusiasm that were she not so good-natured would seem like unalloyed ambition. "For years, my type was out of fashion," she says. "I was either too ethnic-looking or not ethnic enough. Not mainstream. Or too edgy. Or not ingenue enough. And I was like, 'Oh, my God, this is really not fun.' But I've got enough energy for a thousand people because I love what I do. And I liked the rejection, because it made me more competitive."

Bullock has always refused to take "no" for an answer. Even after the success of While You Were Sleeping, she didn't sit around waiting. A dedicated computer buff who cruises America Online, she was determined to star in The Net, which revolves around a young computer-program debugger who gets caught up in a criminal conspiracy to control the country's top-secret databases. Winkler wasn't sure he even wanted to make the picture when Bullock's agent contacted him about setting up a meeting. "When she walked into my office for the first time, she was wearing overalls, the chunkiest shoes you ever saw, and a baseball cap turned backwards," recalls Winkler, who was immediately captivated. "Most actresses would wear the highest heels, shortest skirt, and lowest blouse to meet the director, but that's not the way she is."
"There are huge pressures on women in this business to keep up a certain appearance," says actor Keifer Sutherland, who knows a thing or two about young starlets and has been a pal of Sandy's since they met on The Vanishing in 1991. "Sandy has never gotten caught up in that."

But the tremedous pressures of the business- and the press- can trigger suprisingly emotional reactions. Early this spring, an "overwhelmed" Bullock abruptly canceled a follow-up interview with US magazine, reportedly retreating to bed for the day and refusing to take any calls. The story, a portfolio of "Hollywood's Hottest Under 30," quotes Bullock as saying she is 28. But the young actress, who graduated from Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia, in the class of 1982, is probably closer to 31. A tabloid TV program recently nailed her in a segment about actresses who lie about their age. Bullock told me she was 29. When I asked if she had just celebrated a birthday, she quickly added that she had one coming up, "so I will be 30, which is fine with me."

Bullock is learning to play the game: in Hollywood, even an ingenue can't be too young. But, for the most part, what you see with Bullock is what you get. Her resume bears few of the fingerprints evident with more manufactured stars. Unlike many up-and-coming talents, she has yet to bolt for the gold-plated security of Michael Ovitz's CAA, and has stayed loyal to her young agent, Cynthia Shelton-Droke, at the relatively small talent agency UTA. Both her publicist and manager have been with her for years. She now has a personal assistant, Mark, who was her best friend and dance partner in college. She has no entourage, unless you count her younger sister, Gesine, 25, a law student at Southwestern, who often visits her on the set. Sitting in her trailer in Nova Scotia, alone with her work, Bullock says she's doing OK. But she admits that her celebrity, and diminished sense of privacy and control over her life, has been very hard. "I am such a privacy freak," she says, "and there are times I've seriously thought, Is this something that I can be strong enough to deal with?"

Bullock keeps having the same bad dream. The Doomed-Marriage Dream. "Down at the end of the aisle, there's the doorway. It's almost like The Graduate. You know, the doors open and there's this bright white light at the end of the tunnel. It's this little guy. He's a little guy. And I'm looking at him, and I'm going, 'That's who I am supposed to be married to?' "
But what do you expect when the best year of your career coincides with the worst in your personal life? Speed broke out just as Bullock's 4-year relationship with actor Tate Donovan broke up. She fell madly in love with Donovan while making the 1992 movie Love Potion No. 9 and admits she "chased him like a dog" until he finally had to notice her. She still sounds like a schoolgirl with a bad crush when his name comes up.
"I adored Tate so much," she says, her voice a trifle shaky, the words tumbling out a little too fast. "It's like they say, there's one person in your life, and Tate and I are closer than any 2 people I've ever experienced in my life. There's nobody that means more to me, and I know for a fact that I mean the most to him, in that certain way. I can't explain why things worked out the way they did. We both know why it happened."
What made it worse was that all every reporter wanted to know was what happened. "It's not that it was my favorite topic of conversation," she says with a pained expression, "and it drove Tate crazy. But when I did an interview, the last person I wanted to talk about was me, so I'd talk about him for, like, a good three hours." The only that got her through the next year was playing lovesick Lucy in While You Were Sleeping. Bullock, who was living in a rented town house in Chicago during filming, had never been so miserable. "This way I could grieve and do it in my work so I didn't feel like I was burdening anyone with it," she said at the time.
She shakes her head at the tabloid stories linking her with football star Troy Aikman and with a cameraman who is a close friend. "I don't want to put myself in the dating category," she says firmly. "It's going to be a long time before I can trust anyone again. I don't know anybody who'd want to get involved with me right now, and be put through all the strain, because I have no idea what all the repurcusions might be. I couldn't possibly imagine anybody wanting to be there unless they were a thrill seeker," she adds with a grim chuckle. "But if somebody does, and they're really secure with that, and they want to be in my life for the long haul, like a 12-year dating process before we start really seeing each other...."

Bullock admits she is reluctant to date another actor. "It's like casting agents are the perfect dating store. They put you together with someone who is beautiful, exceptionally charismatic..." she pauses, shaking her head. "I'm insecure enough, and secure enough, to say that really scares me. I don't want somebody to leave me for another great actress."

We are sitting around the kitchen table in her trailer, eating warm cinnamon buns. Comfort food. Bullock devours hers and starts in on mine. With her build, if her metabolism ever slows down, she's going to be in real trouble. And it's not as if she doesn't know any better. Her mother, a German opera singer, is a health nut, and the Bullock children were never permitted to eat junk food at home. It was a strict upbringing- she was never allowed to go on car dates either.

She credits her father with keeping her sane. A voice coach who held the family together while his wife toured Europe every season, he flew to Los Angeles during the break-up with Donovan and helped Bullock lovingly restore a 1936 Spanish stucco house she bought in one of the oldest canyon neighborhoods in Hollywood. When she was done, she was covered with bruises, but she was feeling more upbeat about life. Her younger sister has since moved in, and they have 3 dogs, so she is no longer as lonely.
Bullock's family is very close, though her childhood was anything but conventional. She spent the first 12 years of her life commuting back and forth across the Atlantic, dividing her time between Virginia and Vienna. When her mother was performing, Bullock, who is fluent in German, lived with her great aunt and grandmother in Nuremburg and attended the local school, studying English with a tutor in the afternoons. She caught the acting bug early, often appearing onstage with her mother. "There's always a dirty Gypsy shild in every opera, and that was me," she jokes, explaining that an opera company is the best free baby-sitting service. "I spent most of my time hanging out in the costume department. There was this wardrobe woman who was this big, buxom German in a white coat, who had a great sense of humor and who would smoke, and I'd be sitting amongst the clothes, or in her lap."

At Washington-Lee High School, Bullock was the most popular girl in her class and, according to her year book, was also voted "Class Clown." "But the thing that sets her apart from all the other pretty, talented girls was that she worked her butt off," recalls Scott Sowers, a close friend who is also an actor. "Whether it was a side job to make extra dough in school or preparing for an audition, she always went the extra mile. She had that German work ethic, and it's paid off."
Bullock majored in drama at East Carolina University, but was in too much of a hurry to earn her degree. She packed up her Honda and headed for the footlights a few credits shy of graduating. In New York, she went the traditional route, waiting tables, reading Backstage magazine, and going to open auditions. In one of her first Off Broadway roles, a small production of No Time Flat, New York magazine critic John Simon singled her out for praise. Unfortunately, he panned the play, and it closed after a short run. But, review in hand, Bullock got herself an agent and another job.
"Sandy is very aware of the essential fragility of the entire situation- of show business," says Peter Bogdanovich, who directed her in The Thing Called Love. "Her parents are in the business, and she has seen them struggle and never make it the way they would have liked to. She knows the ups and downs."

Bullock has built up a strong support network of friends that operates as her extended family in Los Angeles. The actress Samantha Mathis, whom she met on the set of The Thing Called Love, is one of her best friends. When Mathis's boyfriend, River Phoenix, died of an overdose 2 years ago, "it was one of the scariest experiences I've ever had," Bullock recalls. "My mom called and told me at 6 in the morning, and for 2 hours I just let the phone sit in my lap." The ordeal made Mathis and Bullock as close as sisters. "She saved me last year," says Mathis. "I was going through a hard time emotionally and wanted to stay under the covers, but she dragged me out. We'd go shopping. She'd call me up and say, 'I'll be there in 15 minutes.' " Another member of Bullock's inner circle is the modern artist Terrell Moore, whose Venice studio functions as a sort of continuous house party.

The constant upheavel she experienced in the early part of her life as the daughter of a performer has made Bullock focus on stability. Whatever free time she has has in Nova Scotia has been spent scouring the seaside for antiques and furniture for her house in Los Angeles. During a break from shooting, we steal away from the set for an hour to check out a carved oak table she has found in a shop nearby.
Though Bullock has put most of her earnings into the bank and high-yield bonds, she has allowed herself some indulgences- a Ford Explorer and plans for a luxurious Mexican vacation.
But all else pales in comparison to her passion for property. Bullock can spend hours talking architecture, acreage, and location. She is already in the market for another home, a quiet little hideaway, preferably somewhere with 4 seasons. "It's like basically what I realized is that I'm trying to plan places to have a home for the rest of my life, in case something should go wrong. I know that I've gotten prime real estate, and the best schools nearby, if I have kids," she says, getting ahead of herself. "I've got it all planned out."

If the price of fame gets too high, Bullock will have no trouble taking time off from Hollywood for a year or two. She has no intention of becoming an emotional basket case, another burned-out young actress. "I know how to disappear," she says simply. "My outlook seems to be OK so far. But who knows- in a year, I might be at the point when I need a break. So I will go away for a long time and do something else. I have a lot of other things I want to do that don't have anything to do with acting."
Bullock takes one of the Nestle's Crunch bars I have brought her and chews thoughtfully, sinking back into the corner of her trailer. On the table in front of her is a large box, a parting gift from Denis Leary. She decides to open it now rather than wait. Inside, there is a small folklore figurine of "the Juggler," with 4 balls deftly balanced in the air. The card from Leary reads, "I came, I saw, I laughed my balls off."
Bullock throws her head back and howls with delight, and when she looks up again she is wearing that old familiar grin. Something about that smile tells me the class clown of Washington Lee High School won't be packing it in anytime soon.

© 1995 by Vanity Fair