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Home > People Index Page > James Woods
Combustible Woods
An Incendiary Afternoon with Reformed Bad Boy James Woods
by Alysse Minkoff
The light-filled, newly finished kitchen in James Woods' Beverly
Hills home is aglow with warm woods and hand-embossed copper. The
six-burner cooktop stove rests in the granite center island. The
contents of the refrigerator and the cupboards are immaculately
arranged. The kitchen has clean lines, yet it looks as if it was also
designed to be messed up. Cooked in. Dined in. It is huge and homey.
James Woods grabs cans out of the cupboards and pulls the eggs and
butter out of the fridge. Like he does most days, he concocts a meal
that would make even uber-homemaker Martha Stewart green with envy,
all the while carrying on a rapid-fire monologue about the sorry state
of affairs between men and women at the close of the
millennium. Concentrating on slicing the onions for the home fries, he
takes a moment to fire up a Montecristo No. 2. Nattily dressed in a
pair of olive corduroy pants with a perfectly pressed Ralph Lauren
shirt (yes, he even does his own ironing)--James Woods seems like
the answer to every woman's dream. Why isn't this man married?
Then, as he discusses the contents of the morning's Los Angeles
Times editorial page, he opens a can of whole potatoes for the home
fries. Culinary Secrets of James Woods, Lesson One: Don't be afraid to
use canned food. As he scrambles the eggs, he wonders whether onions
and cheese would be a welcome addition. He sets the table with some
wonderful old dishes, talks about playing golf through back pain
during the previous week's Pebble Beach Open, and squeezes fresh
orange juice, all while watching over six pots on the stove, each one
at a critical point. And, of course, talking seven million miles a
minute.
Everything about the brunch is perfection--right down to the
crisply cooked bacon, gently wrapped in paper towels to soak up the
excess grease. Culinary Secrets of James Woods, Lesson Two: Pay
attention to details. Which brings us to the most important Culinary
Secret of James Woods: Stay in control. Complete control. And yet make
everything look easy. Effortless.
Perched on a bar stool amid the pots and the plates of food, Woods
muses over the "bad boy" perception that just about everyone seems to
have about him. "I don't get why people don't understand this about
me. I'm like the nicest guy on earth. I wasn't that bad to begin
with. I was just a little insecure. I was scary in movies, I wasn't
scary in real life. I was kind of a minor, minor, minor league little
troublemaker. I wasn't a big one like most of them.
"One of the reasons people think I'm tough is, when you're
insecure, you kind of compensate by being a little hysterical. I'd
kind of have little mini fits every once in a while. Little 'poo-poo
head in the schoolyard' fits. Now I realize that nobody's
interested. It doesn't work. It doesn't help me at all. So I decided
to kind of shut up and be an adult. To be a little bit less of an
asshole and a little bit more of a man. And given this moment right
now, I'm glad I finally did something with it. I'm glad I stopped the
bullshit that I wasted my time with for the past 20 years. And for the
first time in my life, I think I'm really, really happy. I guess I'm
finally sort of accepting things I can't control anymore."
A Zen philosopher once said that you can never step into the same
river twice. Well, the same holds true with the Woods. Yet he is
always engaging. Consistently enigmatic. Exasperating. Often brashly
charismatic. He is a man who possesses the appealing combination of
being seriously smart and dangerously funny. He is a gentleman of the
highest order, tempered by just enough of the rogue to keep you
constantly off balance. He is opinionated, strong willed and unafraid
to stand behind what he says, or what he has done.
Sure, he has made mistakes, many of them publicly, and has paid a
higher price than most--usually in the media. But he has learned from
all of them. The product of a loving family, he yearns for the
companionship of an as yet unnamed soul mate. And, at 50, his
biological clock is ticking. Loudly.
What distinguishes James Woods in an overcrowded con-stellation of
movie stars is a consummate talent: a rare set of gifts and skills
combined with passion, a creative fearlessness and a determination to
achieve his vision. This alchemizes into an unstoppable artistic force
that must always be reckoned with, offscreen as well as on.
"Actors of Jimmy's intensity and brilliance produce in the public
mind an image that spills over into real life," says Frank Pierson,
director of Woods in HBO's Citizen Cohn. "People tend to watch them
closely, hoping to see when they might slip over the edge and do
something really bad. So if they see him coming first, they can cross
over to the other side of the street. Truly, Woods walks upon life's
stage with the same white heat with which he acts. And nobody who
knows him can call him unopinionated."
Woods' opinions carry over to such everyday considerations as
cigar storage. He is unashamed to admit that, in spite of the elegant
Dunhill humidor that graces a shelf in his library, he stores most of
his prize cigars in a Tupperware container with a natural sponge and
some distilled water. With his trademark grin and a devilish gleam in
his eye, he says, "Aficionado, my ass. I just love to smoke cigars."
As he takes the lid off the box and proffers a Hoyo de Monterrey, he
adds, "The humidor is such a pain in the ass. I take them out and roll
them every once in a while, and if they sound right and they smell
right and they're not flaking, they are fine."
After he washes the dishes and finishes cleaning the kitchen,
Woods continues the conversation in the library. The design and
construction of his home, a seven-year undertaking, is nearing its
final phase. With a distinct Frank Lloyd Wright feel, the home was
built on the former site of violinist Jasha Heifitz's house. Woods
even went so far as to have Heifitz's Wright-designed practice studio
disassembled and reconstructed as a donation to the Colburn School of
Music in San Diego. An iron gazebo, following the same architectural
lines as the original studio, now stands in its former location.
"We spent four months sitting on this property on ladders,
imagining what the sun would do at different times of day so that we
could design the house," says Woods. "It's sort of like the Grand
Canyon in the sense that there is never a moment when it ever looks
the same as any other moment. The light is always different. It was a
matter of envisioning the house and then building it piece by piece. I
just wanted to see if I could create something that was beautiful and
something that reflected my needs. I love to read, I always wanted a
library--now I have one. I think it's a beautiful little library. I
wanted a bright kitchen where people could enjoy themselves. I love
gardens where I could sit and think. I said that I wanted it wide open
and yetI wanted to have little cloisters, hidden areas, pockets of
comfort that you find sort of out of nowhere where you can just
disappear for a while and be by yourself. It was kind of an odd
challenge. And finally I said, I want it to look like it was the
newest house on the block--if it were 1936. I was going for a degree
of difficulty here."
As he builds a fire in the fire-place and lights his cigar,
Woods thinks for a moment about what caused him to take stock of his
life and make the much-needed changes. In his case, the motivation for
change was a lot of pain. "You always think that you're going to avoid
a midlife crisis. But it just sneaks up and gets you no matter what. I
had mine with a lot of help from my second ex-wife. She was really
kind of a ship passing in the night; she just turned out to be the
Exxon Valdez. It was kind of a lesson about how horribly another human
being can treat you. You never really expect it. In my heart, I'm
really kind of an optimist about human nature. But there is always a
wonderful lesson out there with three sixes tattooed on its forehead
that will teach you otherwise. "And I'm kind of glad that it did. It
was kind of a purging experience because I've trusted the kindness
inside of me rather than running from it like I used to in the old
days."
Born on April 18, 1947, the eldest son of a military hero and a
preschool teacher, Woods and his brother, Michael, grew up in
Illinois, Virginia, Guam and Rhode Island. His father died when Woods
was 12 and his mother, Martha, raised her sons as a single parent,
while running a private school. "My parents loved each other," Woods
recalls. "I was raised in a house of total love and respect. My dad
worked very hard and my mother was incredibly devoted to him. I can
unequivocally, without any peradventure of doubt, tell you that I was
raised with the kind of love that we only dream of," Woods says. "My
mother and my father loved me and my brother like we love the air we
breathe--out of necessity. It was a necessity for them to love us in
some deep inner genetic calling in their hearts and minds and souls. I
have that as a standard."
His mother reports that as a young boy, Woods and his best friend
would open a dictionary, close their eyes and choose a word at
random. The pair would then use the word all week long--in school, at
home, even on the playground, most of the time to the bewilderment of
friends, playmates and teachers. "I was really bright as a kid and
tested well, and it was clear that I was going to get scholarships to
any schools I wanted. My dad always said I could be an engineer; at
that time it was the elite of society: steady job, working in science,
which was then the answer to every problem we had. It was kind of a
mandate. Kind of a dream he had for me."
Woods was first drawn to acting as a senior in high school in
Providence, Rhode Island. "I did 'Little Foxes' at Pilgrim High. I won
an acting award and I thought, 'This is a really cool thing to do.' "
But the desire to please his late father propelled his collegiate
career into a different direction. Woods was accepted into the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a full scholarship, majoring
not in the physical sciences, but in political science. He also
pursued acting, appearing in 36 plays at MIT, Harvard and the Theater
Company of Boston, and performed in summer stock at the Provincetown
Playhouse. He dropped out of MIT during his last year to move to New
York and pursue acting full-time. "It was a very wrenching and painful
decision for me--in my senior year at MIT, on high dean's list and
full scholarships--to decide that maybe I wanted to be an artist. I
think it is actually something that my father would
understand. Whether I'm making 30 grand a day or union scale, I have
found something that I truly love, and that is something he would have
admired."
Woods loves to act--whatever the medium. Trained as a theater
actor, he has made the successful transition from stage to film to
television and back again. He is comfortable in all three, and
understands the unique requirements of each discipline.
"I always have a rule that acting is acting and truth is truth and
you just go out there and you do it," he says. "But what happens in
each medium is that you have other responsibilities. The acting
remains the same, but each medium dictates assuming other halves to
make the acting work. When I'm working on a film, I just play the
absolute purity of the moments. I don't worry about the pacing,
because the pacing is going to be dictated by the director and the
editor. On the stage I have to give pacing to the play. As an actor,
you, in fact, become the editor of the piece, in terms of the
timing. You are required to engineer the pace yourself. In television,
everything is in so close, that you realize that most of what you do
has to register in your thought process."
While many actors snub the notion of working on television,
throughout his career Woods has found some of his biggest creative
challenges on the small screen. "A cardinal rule of being a movie
star, according to the agents and all the people who have wisdom, is
that you should be aloof, do very little press and you shouldn't ever
get on television. I don't think there is a piece of political film
making in the United States that is a good as, let alone better than,
Citizen Cohn. Let's assume that I am not even in the picture. I mean,
just the writer of the piece, David Franzoni. I look at Promise,
written by Richard Friendenberg and directed by Glenn Jordan, a
wonderful director. Forgetting that I am in it, just looking at the
material itself, My Name Is Bill W. would not have had the same impact
if it were a feature film; it would have come and gone. But on
television, 25 million people get to watch it all at the same time. So
television has a power all its own and it has an allure all its own,
and I think that television often deals with more meaningful subjects
than many feature films do."
Yet Woods always returns to film, because of the scope of the
medium. "I think Ghosts of Mississippi was a meaningful film and I
think Contact [due out this summer] will be another. In film, the
canvas is bigger, and you are in a big room with a lot of people
watching it."
Capturing the viewer's imagination is something Woods has always
been able to do. He first received notice as Barbra Streisand's guy
pal in The Way We Were. Over the years, his career has taken him from
the role as the amoral journalist Richard Boyle in Salvador, to the
icy H.R. Haldeman in 1995's Nixon, both for director Oliver Stone. He
has won an Emmy Award for portraying the schizophrenic "D.J." opposite
James Garner in the ABC movie Promise, and also was honored for his
role as the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous in My Name Is Bill W.,
also with Garner. (Woods gave up his profit participation on the
video sales so the movie could be donated to Alcoholics Anonymous
chapters.) He has gone from leading man as Sen. Joseph McCarthy
co-counsel Roy Cohn in Citizen Cohn to the scene-stealing cameo role
of Lester Diamond in Martin Scorcese's Casino. In the 1996 CBS
made-for-television movie The Summer of Ben Tyler, he played a man who
adopted a retarded black child in the 1940s. Woods said he took the
role to cleanse himself of the oppressive psychic weight of turning in
a haunting performance as the unrepentant racist Byron de la Beckwith
in Rob Reiner's Ghosts of Mississippi, a role that earlier this year
earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, his
first Oscar nomination since the 1986 film Salvador. Then there's his
tour de force in The Onion Fields, and his standout performances in
HBO's Indictment: The McMartin Trial, and the 1995 film The
Specialist. His résumé is as varied as the man himself.
Woods is clearly on a mission. "I'm now making up for an
incredible amount of lost time. You lose time when you haven't defined
what you want in your life. It is easy to achieve your goals--the
tough part is defining them. Now I make a point of defining them. I
said to my new agents at [International Creative Management], 'No more
shit. No more [Creative Artists Agency] pay-the-rent shit. I want to
work on the best scripts, with the best directors. I don't care about
the money. I don't care about the size of the part or the billing and
all that other stuff. But I want to do material that is great. With
directors and actors that are great.'
"You see, I have always wanted on my tombstone: 'He Played the
Part Better than Anybody Could Have'--whatever that part may have
been. I don't ever want to say that I'm the best actor in the
world. But I'd like to think that when I do a part, that people can't
imagine anybody else doing it after I have done it."
Pierson sums up working with Woods this way: "What is it like to
direct Jimmy Woods? I wouldn't know. You don't direct him. You surf
him. It's like surf-riding the biggest wave you ever saw. A moving
mountain of energy and inventiveness and intelligence. And if you stay
standing up, it's the biggest damn thrill of any director's lifetime."
Woods often makes surprising career choices, but there is a method
to his madness. "If you star in movies, which I predominantly do, most
agents would assume that you don't want to do a two-day part in a
movie," he says. "But when you read a script like Casino and you know
it is being directed by a genius like Martin Scorcese, you say, hey,
I'll be an extra in this movie. I'll do anything. I called up Marty
and said, 'Any part, anytime, anyplace, anywhere.' Because I want to
work in good scripts with good directors, and this was a great script
with a phenomenal director, it makes the choice really easy. We ended
up making a two-scene part into a 10-scene part. Which proves my
point. When you're working with great people and great material,
you're going to milk it. I have learned that you can't be a champion
unless you are in the championship zone. You can't win unless you're
in the zone, whatever winning might mean. Right now, maybe they are
not going to star me in a $100 million movie all by myself the way
they would some other actor, but if I'm in that championship zone, I
have got a shot."
Twice recently he has been in the zone, auditioning for and
winning the roles of H.R. Haldeman in Nixon and Byron de la Beckwith
in Ghosts of Mississippi. Unlike other actors of his level, Woods says
he is proud to have auditioned. "One of the things that was a
challenge for me [about Nixon] is that Oliver Stone did not want me to
play the part of Haldeman. He said, 'You're not right for this part,
Jimmy. This guy is very restrained, very cold, a very straight-edged,
square guy. You're a mercurial
artist. Impulsive. Passionate. Emotional.' And I said, 'Oliver, it's
the old joke--it's called acting. I think I can do it.' "
The proof is on the screen. And with it, a valuable lesson in his
own creative evolution. "I'm hoping that my inner life that is usually
expressed in an outer way, if I keep it inside, will make the dry
dimension of the character--the repressed dimension--more vital,
because you can smell the chaos and the drive and ambition underneath
the guy," he says, warming to his topic. "You can yell and scream all
the way through the movie and usually everybody thinks that's great
acting. The toughest part is to do all that--now lock it up and put it
inside and be as cool as you can be on the screen. You have to have
done all your work in the chaos department ahead of time and just have
it under there and parcel it out in tiny little flashes. That's the
hardest thing to do. Haldeman was one of the most difficult jobs of my
entire career, and one of the ones of which I'm the most proud. And
probably one of the ones that most people won't notice."
Oliver Stone, who has seen Woods on both sides of his personal
transformation, says, "In the old days, I used to want to strangle
Jimmy with my bare hands. But since that time Jimmy has mellowed
out. And perhaps I have, too. And now I love him deeply. He has grown,
actually, into a human being. And a fine one, too."
Characteristically, Woods steers away from the standard choices
when he speaks about actors whose work he admires. "Robert Redford
understands film acting better than anybody on the face on the earth,"
he declares. "You know how some carnivores get every bit of meat off
of a carcass they can? Well, there's nobody who gets as much blood out
of a moment as Redford. Within the range of his talent he knows how to
get every single note available, and he is a genius not only at
getting those notes but in making them fully accessible to his
audience. He is one of the few actors that can play three or four
emotions at the same time, and he is amazing; he truly understands the
subtlety of film acting."
Woods once did a play reading with Holly Hunter. "Holly is such a
fast, smart, wonderful actor. When we worked together, it was like a
hot knife through butter. It was like clockwork. I would love to do a
film with her."
He has just finished work on the film Contact, directed by Robert
Zemeckis, based on the book by Carl Sagan. Due for a July release,
Contact stars Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, with a stellar
cast of co-stars that includes Woods, John Hurt, Tom Skerrit, Rob Lowe
and Angela Bassett. Says Zemeckis of working with Woods: "Jimmy's
consummate talents are only exceeded by his boundless energy. I can't
remember when I've laughed so hard in my professional career. Working
with him is truly entertaining."
Woods excitedly shares the film's story: "Jodie Foster works in an
area of science devoted to contact with extraterrestrials, which is
sort of the 'lost stepchild' of the astronomy movement. And she
receives a transmission of prime numbers being broadcast from
somewhere in outer space, which, by definition, cannot be an
accident--and we're off and running. The movie, oddly enough, is about
faith. And God, in a strange way. Do we believe in what our senses
tell us or what we hope can be true?
"There are some amazingly clever things in the movie, and the
canvas is so complex and so large, and Robert does it all in his
head," Woods says. "He has a cutting-edge sense of this new medium of
computer-generated graphics. Robert loves to do things with computers
that can actually give emotions to the scene.
"My character's job is to provide national security for the United
States, which is, basically, to prepare for the worst. I'm basically
the guy who is the anti-touchy feely element in the piece, or the
voice of reason, depending on how you look at it. This role is sort of
my farewell to this stuff, in a way. I don't think I want to play any
more 'hard guys in suits,' only because I have done it enough. I want
to do different things."
Woods worked hard for his role in Ghosts of Mississippi. "I love
doing great material. And if you want to do great material, you must
devote yourself to it 24 hours a day and go out there and make it
happen. I sit here every night and I read scripts. I don't let
anything escape my purview. And most of the greatest experiences in my
life were things that I have found. There have been times when I have
honed in on something that I have really liked. When Ghosts of
Mississippi started, of course the agents were working on it, but they
were working on another part in the picture. It was a smaller part,
but they were working on it. And I saw the role of de la Beckwith and
I said, 'Wow, that part is great, but that's completely out of the
picture. Unless you're Jimmy Woods and you don't take no for an
answer.'
"So I started lobbying for it, and fought for it, and fought for
it. And I got it. Without a doubt that's the thing that nobody ever
thinks to do. It's all in the audition." He convinced Rob Reiner to
allow him to audition and do a makeup test for the role. The role was
one of the biggest challenges of his career, demanding that he play
white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith both as a young and an old man.
"This is where it really paid off. It was fun for me. Tremendously
challenging. I have a theory that Northern actors should never play
Southern characters. This is one of my cardinal rules. So I thought,
well, here I am breaking one of my rules. I spent literally three
months, every single day, working on the accent. And I had all of the
tapes of the real de la Beckwith memorized to the point where I could
do all of his speeches with him by rote. It was a matter of building
the character. The accent. The look. The makeup. You know, people
thought I wore a fat suit for the old stuff. I didn't. It was actually
all physical posture. The young makeup took an hour and a half. The
old makeup took almost four hours. And I think Ghosts of Mississippi
speaks for itself. I played a character, an actor's dream in terms of
the challenge and in terms of the degree of difficulty, and did it
with people that I enjoyed working with. I inhabited the skin of this
kind of horrible man for three months. It was tremendously
challenging."
Often drawn to unsympathetic characters, Woods feels that
memorable villains are integral to the storytelling process. "Film is
a dialectic. This is the thesis. This is the antithesis. And there is
the synthesis. You guys have your great protagonists and great
antagonists. It is a battle of wills. All great movies have that kind
of a mano a mano thing going. I never make judgments about the
character that I play. Never. I just play them. I mean, that's who he
his. This guy [de la Beckwith] is so evident in the interviews. He was
so evident in the press. I saw all of his subterfuge and all these
kinds of levels of bullshit. And how crafty he was. You know, I'd
admire the guy more if he said, 'Look, I just don't like people who
are different from me and I'd shoot them any chance that I get.' If
you can convince me of that, fine. At least I'd say, 'Well the guy's a
lunatic, but at least he has the balls to stand up for whatever lunacy
he believes in.' But on top of everything else, he was a coward and a
liar! I mean, he shot a guy in the back and then he lied about it!
"I liked doing the movie because I wanted people to see this guy,
to see the unbelievably naked, sort of hard edge of racism. It is so
ugly when it that naked and that raw. We all fall into the politics of
the piece. I'm so sick of all of this political correctness. Nobody
ever deals with things as they really are. They are always going to
deal with it as they think it should be--he's the villain of the
piece, she's the heroine, so he's the comic relief--so automatically
now they are falling into a mold of something that we've seen a
million times before, so it is never very refreshing or very
intriguing. I say, 'That's who the guy is. Period.' I don't make any
judgments. I don't editorialize. He's a very charming, kind of nutty
guy, and if you are a reasonable human being I have to believe that
the effect will be chilling. He is saying these horrible things and it
will be even more chilling against his kind of oddball charm."
With a career full of intense roles, Woods never seems to have
any trouble putting work aside. "I am one of those guys who could do
the most emotional scene and crack a joke instantly. I'm lucky. I'm
just like an idiot savant. I have one enormously enjoyable,
pleasurable--for me--talent, which is being able to act. I do it
without any confusion or restriction or ambivalence or hesitation, and
it just flows, almost as naturally as anything in my life. So I don't
have a big burden about it. I'm not one of those 'method' guys. I'm
tired of the Actors' Studio bullshit that has ruined movies for 40
years. All these guys running around pretending they are turnips or
whatever the hell they do. You just play the character as he really
is. As a loudmouth, blowhard, coward, shithead. You know, it's OK to
be just who the guy is.
"One of the reasons that I'm not very good about talking about the
process of acting is that so much of it requires you to be unconscious
[of it] when you do it. When you're aware of what you're doing, it's
never very good. If you just let go and you're in the scene, all of a
sudden, it's good. I can't act; I swear to you, I feel like I can't. I
dread it every time I do it. I feel like the more I do it, the less I
know. Which is a good thing."
Woods has often used cigars to help create and define a character,
beginning in 1984 with his role as a gangster in Once upon a Time in
America. But during filming of Ghosts of Mississippi, cigars posed a
slightly different challenge. "I'm torn between being an actor and a
cigar lover," Woods says. "In Ghosts, de la Beckwith smoked these long
thin cigars, which I hate. I like a thicker cigar with more draw. I
had to smoke these chicken-shit cigars during the entire shoot. And
they got these cheaper cigars, and the prop guy didn't know anything
about keeping them fresh. You'd crack them and they'd be dry and
flaky. It was like getting a titanium rod wrapped in some horrible
leaf. It wasn't even like a cigar; it was like smoking a cane or
something. But this particular cigar was a great prop, because de la
Beckwith is one of those nasty old guys who chews on some crappy old
cigar; yet it just lent a certain kind of aesthetic weight to the
character."
In June, Woods brings to life the role of Hades, Lord of the
Underworld, in Hercules, Disney's animated retelling of the tale. The
cigar smoking Hades character bears a striking physical resemblance to
Woods--although Woods' hair is rarely on fire. And though he has yet
to master Hades' trick of lighting his cigar with flaming fingertips,
knowing Woods, he is probably working on it.
Woods created the character over the course of several years
with famed Disney animator Nik Ranieri. It was a true creative
collaboration. "Hades is the Lord of the Underworld and he sounds like
a cross between a slick used car salesman and a Hollywood agent--a
really slick shmuck," Woods says. "And what's funny about it is he's
down there in Hell with five million dead stiffs, and there's not much
to do. It's kind of boring. So we gave him great stuff to do, like
eating worms and smoking a cigar." And what cigar does the Lord of the
Underworld smoke? Without missing a beat, Woods says, "He'd probably
smoke Montecristo No. 2s, because if I had my way, if I were the head
of my own dominion, that's all I'd ever smoke. They are the perfect
cigar."
Joining an elite cadre of Disney villains such as Cruella De Vil
and Captain Hook, Woods eagerly anticipates the impact of this
role. "I was in Roy Disney's office the other day and I thought, 'My
God, you may be creating what will be for this generation of children,
a character that will have the impact on them the way the Wicked Witch
in Snow White had an impact on you!' It's fabulous to think that
children are quite possibly going to relate to this character for the
rest of their lives."
The work that he did to bring this character to the screen led to
a new set of hurdles for him. "We gradually created this sort of
strange, bizarre, slick, very funny, fast-talking villain. And it was
an experience to create a character with my voice. It was difficult
because I'm not a really 'voicey' person. I always think of my acting
as more emotional and intellectual. I'm just not one of those actors
that can do a million things with my voice. For some reason I kind of
pulled it off, and it was an incredible challenge to do it."
Woods is a relative newcomer to the joys of a fine cigar and is
not afraid to admit that his first smoking experience was somewhat
lost on him. "I really started about four years ago. I had quit
smoking cigarettes, which I found to be tedious. It was just like a
job. And I found it was easy and pleasurable to smoke a cigar. I have
a rule: if it is something a normal person wouldn't whine about, but
just a feminist would, then, you know, it's all right. Cigar smoking
is the kind of thing a feminist would whine about: [doing his best
whiny feminist impression] 'Sure, you don't inhale them, but people
can smell them four miles away.' And that's a good thing, as far as
I'm concerned. Anything to piss off a feminist, he said with a
smile. Or a chuckle at any rate." It takes a few minutes for Woods to
stop laughing.
He straightens up in his chair, and takes a look at the cigar in
his hand. "I think the reason it is happening is that all of us
boomers are growing up. We don't eat fatty foods. We all try to be
healthy. In this day and age of safe sex and non-fattening foods, you
just have to have a little tiny something in you life where you feel
just a little bit naughty, or wicked, or indulgent, or spoiled. I know
how liberals whine about cigar smoking, and it's like, fine, I'm going
to have to listen to feminists on television all the time, too. There
are just some horrors in life that you cannot avoid. Getting hit by
the onslaught of the price of feminism is certainly worse for you than
smoking a cigar."
Woods truly enjoys the cigar experience, seeing cigars as a safe
haven from the modern intrusions that are part of a busy life. "Like
Freud said, if you don't smoke cigars, you miss out on one of the
great experiences of life. I love to sit down in my library at night
with the fire on and read. I light a cigar and I ruminate, which is
something very few people do anymore. It is a lost form. It's like
being a traveler or an adventurer rather than a tourist. Cigars are
like little vacations where I take stock. They are a respite from the
events of life and give you time to marinate the details and decisions
of your life.
"I accomplish more smoking a cigar, because I sit and I think," he
adds. "I like to take little journeys in my mind about everything. I
think it's kind of a male thing, it is something that we traditionally
used to do. Nowadays, you can sit in Antarctica with your PowerBook
and move the Hubbell Telescope on the Internet. I'm not so sure that
is such a great thing. I mean, life did get kind of tougher and
noisier, and needlessly so. I defy any human being to tell me that his
life has improved with the advent of fax machines, computers, e-mail
and beepers.
"My nightmare in life, my absolute fundamental, overwhelming,
egregious nightmare, is Bill Gates' vision of the future, where there
will be a video camera on every corner and every conversation will be
recorded. Man, I'd rather put a pitchfork in my eyes than live in a
world like that."
Instead of the pitchfork, Woods usually puts three espresso beans
in a little Sambuca, fires up a Punch Punch and curls up in front of
the fireplace by himself. Or, when he goes to the Cayman Islands with
his family, he and his brother, Michael, sit on the beach at twilight,
smoking cigars, with their mother, Martha, watching the tips of their
cigars glowing in the darkness from her hotel balcony. It is with
those shared moments that the Woods family reunites.
Whenever the two brothers pair up, trouble usually follows. Good
trouble. "Coming through customs," Woods recalls, "my golf bag had the
strangest lines to it, and the customs guy looked at me and said, 'So,
Mr. Woods, you're coming from a Caribbean island with a golf bag with
these big square corners sticking through the fabric and I know you're
a cigar smoker. Should I just tell you, sir, that I am your biggest
fan. And do you know how much it means that I am not going to ask you
any questions about what is in your golf bag?' Let me tell you--it was
the best fan letter that I ever had."
Woods' best friend, businessman Scott Sandler, feels that the
actor's decision to turn to cigars has been a positive step. "Smoking
cigars, playing golf with the guys and doing things other than being
involved in the sort of crazy relationships he used to be involved
with, saved his life to some degree," Sandler says. "And sure, he has
his ups and downs. But we spend numerous nights planning, strategizing
and scheming how we're going to obtain our beloved Monte No. 2s or our
Cohibas. But the greatest moments are having your best friend with you
and smoking a cigar. Somehow smoking a cigar is soothing for him. He
gets level. Calm."
Michael Woods, who introduced his brother to the high art of
combining golf and cigars, uses his cigar to balance out his
swing. Much to Michael's chagrin, Jimmy is forever putting his lit
cigar on the green while he takes a whack at the ball. Michael
recently gave his brother a Tee-Gar in hopes that he can break him of
that habit.
Although Jimmy Woods just finished playing in the Pebble Beach
Pro-Am, he is fairly modest about his golf game. "I'm a pretty good
duffer. Between the gambling and the handicap system and a great
cigar, it's the best five hours of your life. I'm not a great golfer,
I'm an avid golfer--there's a big difference. But there's room for me
in the game. I'll smoke a double corona or a Churchill when I golf. I
don't bring my Montes out in the morning, because it's a great evening
cigar. Golf is a good game for me because it requires a degree of
allowing it to happen. You line up your shot and you take a good swing
at it. And sometimes that kinda means letting go a little bit. It's
the same with acting."
One of Woods' little-known passions is photography. Thestunning
photograph on the cover of Bette Davis' autobiography, This and That,
was taken by him. Woods is an intuitive photographer who enjoys going
behind the lens almost as much as he enjoys being in front of
it. According to his friends and subjects, his portraits are
riveting. His sense of light, angle and visual choices creates a sense
of intimacy.
"I've never formally studied with anybody," Woods says, "but I've
always loved great photography. I like to shoot people. I always like
to get into faces when there is something happening. It comes from the
same motive as acting--which is wanting to understand how people think
and what they do. It feels exactly the same. You are observing human
nature. I'm doing one by recreating it on film and another by
capturing it on film. I just love studying human behavior.
"I like Henri Cartier-Bresson, because his stuff is of the moment;
he is the soul of photography. I love Eugene Smith's commitment to
what he did; to me, he was the heart of photography. He sort of did
photography the way I like to act, which is, you don't take any
prisoners. You go for everything. Ansel Adams and Mina Wright were
more of the brain of photography. "
As he approaches the end of his Montecristo No. 2, the
conversation turns to women. Woods is uncharacteristically quiet,
reflective, almost philosophical when he says, "I'd really love to get
married again. This is a softer, kinder, gentler version of my 'old
public persona.' But, in fact, I would just love to get married. The
biggest challenge in life is to find someone in your contemporary
world who can resonate both traditional values and that love for you,"
he says. "I think there are a lot of really good women out there. I
really do. But I think that women have really been pounded by this
feminist stuff. I think the mean-spiritedness of the feminist movement
has been very destructive to women's naturally kind instincts and I
think it has hurt all of us. I think we are finally starting to
realize, 'Hey, we've got to get over it and find a way back to each
other.'
"What nobody gets is that it's great that we're different. Women
tend to whine a little and guys tend to not want to talk about
anything. Women could reasonably argue that the reason they whine is
because 'you guys won't talk to us about anything important.' Like
relationships. My fervent hope is that if I ever get married again and
have children, that the marriage will stay together no matter what. I
have that as a standard, and I think that is one of the reasons that
it has been so difficult for me to find a wife."
The struggle to balance love and work, creativity and
commitment, Hollywood success and hearth and home, is apparent. "My
goal right now is to have a family. The thing I want more than
anything else is a wife and children. Work for me has been an ongoing
dialectic. Work is important for me--a basic, inbred part of me that
I, in the best sense, take for granted. To work and to love. I need
work; it's just a given, and I'm as excited about it every day as I
was in the beginning. And as for love," he wryly offers, "let me give
some advice to women--if you want a teddy bear, go to FAO Schwartz. If
you want a man, come over here, OK?"
In a new house that does indeed look like it has always been
there, in a cozy library surrounded by his books, his awards and the
American flag that was draped over his father's coffin, James Woods
shares his view of mid-life. "When you're 30, you want to make a lot
of money. When you're 40, you hope you're not going to die. When
you're 50, you start to realize: How do I make peace with all of this?
For the first time in my life, I'm starting to think about how many
films I have left in me. And I think, I'm turning 50. How old do you
think I will be when I'm teaching my kid to play golf? What will it be
like when all of those inevitable things that we dread happen to our
loved ones and to us?"
It isn't surprising that James Woods gets every last, savory puff
out of his cigar. When he is finished with it, there is almost nothing
left. He places the butt in the ashtray. "Sure, I tend to be a bit of
a worrier and a little obsessive, and my biggest fear is that I will
fuss and worry myself to death." Clearly, that's where cigars come
into the picture. "When you smoke a cigar, time stops. And you can
sort out your thoughts. Contemplate. You can just kind of hold it and
puff it and just drift down the stream of your thoughts for an hour or
so. Thank God for cigars. At least there is one place where I can be
quiet for a moment and actually be alone with my thoughts." He gazes
into the fire as if the answer to one of life's great questions is
encoded in the flames. And the mischief dances in his eyes. That
knowing grin that borders on a smirk reappears. And right now,
finally, James Woods looks ready to have it all. Because he just won't
settle for anything less.
Alysse Minkoff is a freelance writer living in Malibu,
California.
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