Originally appeared in April 2010 More

By Amy Wallace

Photographs spill out of big manila envelopes, making a mess of Dana Delany’s coffee table. There’s one of Dana at about age five, chubby and jubilant, a Mexican hat on her head and dish of M&M’s in her hand. There’s the actress at 16, with frosted hair, and another snap taken a few years later, after she opted for a perm. She grimaces, but fondly, as she appraises them: the head shots (doe-eyed ingenue, strong-jawed heroine, and one that she calls her Shannen Doherty look); the captured moments from her film, theater and TV work; the Polaroids from countless photo shoots and a pile of candids with her family and friends.

As she shows me a group portrait of her father, uncle and paternal grandfather (“I identify with all of them. We’re all Irishmen”), I start to divine a pattern, which continues to emerge as she offers up shots from her fiftieth birthday party four years ago, which was hosted by her best friend, who happens to be male. “I was his best man at his wedding,” she says, and I’m tempted to comment, but Delany beats me to it.

“The thing I notice is I’m hanging with the boys,” she says, fanning the photos in front of her. Only later will I realize she is leading up to the most surprising moment of our interview.

No conversation with Delany is dull, and during my time in her high-ceilinged modern house in West Los Angeles she will sound off about sex after 50, menopause and swimming with dolphins. She will discuss her ongoing spiritual search and talk about remaining unmarried while truly liking men. Still, I’m caught off guard when Delany reveals that in her dreams, she imagines being a man. And not just any man, but—wait for it—George Clooney.

“It might sound funny, but I wouldn’t mind being the female version of him,” she says, explaining that she doesn’t know Clooney, really, unless you count the time 23 years ago when he was on The Facts of Life and Delany was doing a sitcom called Sweet Surrender and they shared a makeup room. “I wish we shared a dressing room!” she jokes. “I can’t honestly say I know him, but I’ve watched him from afar, and I really admire what he does.”

It is clear, as she ticks off Clooney’s charitable works, his savvy acting choices, his reputation for being a great, loyal friend and, yes, the fact that “he honestly says, ‘I’m not getting married. It doesn’t interest me,’ ” that this perpetually single, politically active Emmy-winning actress has thought through the Delany/Clooney comparison. She has also thought about how it will sound.

“I know—people are going to say, ‘Oh, she wants to be a playgirl,’ ” she says. “But that’s not what I mean. I like him because he’s a responsible human being who loves his life. Who is totally true to himself.”

You don’t have to spend much time with people who know and love Delany to understand how precisely her description of Clooney also describes her. Delany is warm, open and supremely comfy in her own skin, her friends and colleagues say, and that gives her easy access to a generosity that can be uncommon in Hollywood.

“She’s just a doll,” says Marc Cherry, the creator of ABC’s Desperate Housewives, who considers Delany one of his five leading ladies despite the fact that she didn’t join the show until its fourth season. (Delany was his first choice for the role of Bree; she turned it down, three times. Now she plays Katherine Mayfair, a divorcée who this season was accidentally shot and spent time in a mental hospital.)

“Dana knows she’s talented, and that gives her an inner peace that a lot of people in this town don’t have,” Cherry continues. “She doesn’t take herself so seriously, and she’s genuinely interested in people’s lives. A lot of actresses can be narcissistic. Not so with our Dana.”

Los Angeles magazine, March 2010

» The Filmmaker’s Back Story

Noah Baumbach’s first movie was shot in Los Angeles, and you weren’t supposed to know it. The writer-director had wanted to set Kicking and Screaming, his 1995 film about a group of friends struggling to get moving after college, at his alma mater, Vassar. He made do with Occidental College but worked to make Eagle Rock evoke an upstate New York vibe. Since then the 40-year-old New Yorker has depicted ’80s Brooklyn (in his 2005 film, The Squid and the Whale, which nabbed him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay) and present-day Long Island (in 2007’s Margot at the Wedding).

In collaboration with his friend Wes Anderson, he has also imagined whimsical worlds (he and Anderson cowrote the scripts for 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and last year’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is up for a Best Animated Feature Oscar this month). Now Baumbach has made his first film about Los Angeles. In theaters March 26, Greenberg stars Ben Stiller as a former musician who has returned home to L.A. to recover from a breakdown after living for years in New York. The city on display in Greenberg is less iconic than familiar. It is the L.A. that Baumbach has gotten to know thanks to his wife, the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, who grew up here.

Baumbach and Leigh, who are expecting their first child this month, split their time between New York and L.A. “I would say we live in New York and have a house here. Jennifer would say something else,” he explains. “I think of it as, like, our country house in Los Angeles.”

-Amy Wallace

» Baumbach talks about Greenberg (as told to Amy Wallace)

I don’t know which came first—wanting to set a movie in L.A. or wanting to do a movie about a fortysomething guy who can’t get out of his own way. I had an idea of this character, Roger Greenberg. I wanted to tell a story about a guy who in these very particular ways is trapped in a false sense of himself. Someone who is still hung up on being perceived a certain way and is under the impression that people still care how he’s perceived. And the older he gets, the more this becomes an issue. It makes his life very hard to live.

I had wanted to do something for a while, too, that touches on a trend in a lot of American male novelists’ work: books about men at crisis points in their lives. Sometimes these novelists revisit these men over and over again, like in John Updike’s Rabbit series or Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series. I thought it’d be interesting to do a movie in that vein.

Greenberg grew up in L.A. but has lived in New York for years. He doesn’t drive. He can’t really swim. He can’t do the things that L.A. is ideal for. Even when he goes on a hike, when it’s hot, he wears his down vest. I mean, why would you come to a place where you can’t function? Setting the movie in L.A. enabled me to put the main character in a broader landscape. We shot the movie in wide-screen. Greenberg is so caught up in his own mythology that I liked the sense of putting him in a city that wouldn’t indulge that.

Before I met my wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, I had spent a lot of time in L.A., but I didn’t know the city at all. Through Jennifer I started to feel at home here. I started to see the city in the way she saw the city: as a place she’d grown up in, as a real city. So I just started to see the city differently, and I felt like it’d be great to do something here that approximated my and her experience of the place.

On Kicking and Screaming we were trying to hide L.A. I picked locations, but I didn’t know what any of the neighborhoods were. I still try to figure out where those locations are. While we were shooting Greenberg, the female lead—Florence, played by Greta Gerwig—goes with her friend to the Machine Project gallery in Echo Park. When we were shooting there, next door was a coffee shop where a lot of us would go between setups and hang out. And while I was sitting in the coffee shop I became convinced that it was the coffee shop that was in Kicking and Screaming. I don’t know if it’s true or not because they’d changed a lot of it, and I asked and nobody had been there long enough to know.

Originally appeared in More Magazine February, 2010

BY: Amy Wallace

Ground zero for Meg Whitman’s campaign for governor of California is a suite of rooms modestly tucked into a colorless cookie-cutter office park—all sprayed stucco walls and fluorescent lights. I’m ushered into a conference room so unadorned there is not even a campaign poster on the walls. Whitman sits at the head of a white meeting table, and as I sit down beside her, two handlers pull up chairs as well. The space offers no clues to Whitman’s personality, and she doesn’t reveal much herself. In her black suit and black-and-white sweater, the former CEO of eBay, now 53, is still the picture of a put-together corporate titan. And her approach is all business. Seeming energized by an earlier discussion of the state budget with her campaign staff, she tosses numbers around with confidence. When I ask where she’ll find the votes to win the race (the primary is in June, the general in November), she breaks down the research in a tone so self-assured that I can almost see a thought bubble forming over her head: Statistics may scare some women, but not me.

Over the months that I reported this article, I often heard the candidate and her staff say that they want people to know “the real Meg Whitman.” Jillian Manus, the chair of Whitman’s women’s coalition (dubbed MEGaWomen), told me, “Everyone knows what she’s done. I want to let people know who she is. To feel her, get her, touch her.” But Whitman is hard to know, much less touch. She’s quiet, understated and more wonky than ebullient after a career spent largely in Silicon Valley tech circles—in all, not the type that seems born to storm the political stage. Unlike Sarah Palin, Whitman doesn’t wink or quip or let go with unscripted rants; unlike George Bush, she doesn’t give people funny nicknames; and unlike Bill Clinton, when she tries to show she feels your pain, she sounds a bit wooden. Forget your pain; she seems at times not even to feel her own.

But with her high-level Republican connections (she counts Mitt Romney and John McCain as friends) and her jaw-dropping personal fortune ($1.2 billion, by a 2009 Los Angeles Times estimate), Whitman is a candidate no one can ignore. Having left her job at eBay in 2008, she is now pursuing politics as a second act and at this moment is in mid-leap—committed to her new calling but, with no experience running for elected office, uncertain of her odds. Her political future boils down to this: Will she persuade voters—especially women—that the talents she parlayed into a billion bucks can guide California through the recession’s perfect storm?

If only every voter Whitman is courting could meet her mother. While the candidate seems all discipline and reserve, Margaret Whitman, 89, does not, and the stories she tells about the young Meg hint at what lies beneath the candidate’s cool. “When she was little, she was extremely determined. Whatever she decided to do, she was going to do,” says Margaret, recalling that swim meets in particular brought out the competitor in her younger daughter. “Meg was a pretty good swimmer. But at meets, I had to be there, because if she wasn’t at least first or second, she’d be screaming with rage. There was no second best for her. She has always loved to win.”

During the summers, while Whitman’s father stayed behind at his financial services job on Long Island, her mother took the three kids—Whitman and her older sister and brother—on cross-continental adventures. They traversed the western U.S. one year and Alaska the next; on that trip, they drove the desolate, partially unpaved Alcan Highway. Whitman was only six, but the image of her mother lashing four spare tires to the roof of the family camper, just in case, stays with her. Whitman recounts how in the 1940s, before having kids, her mom volunteered to be a war mechanic in New Guinea. “She’d never looked under the hood of a car or fixed anything with a wrench,” Whitman says. “But she knew that’s where the critical need was and where she could make the biggest contribution. The learning curve didn’t stall her. In fact, it fueled her.” To Meg Whitman, the parallel is clear: “I am my mother’s daughter.”

Originally appeared in Elle February, 2010

BY: Amy Wallace

What, you were expecting peace and quiet,muchachas? Cesar Millan may be known as the Dog Whisperer, but in his kitchen on a recent afternoon, there is not a moment of silence. When Millan and his wife, Ilusion, aren’t taking turns bobbling a friend’s baby on their knees or admiring their youngest son’s new braces, they are talking excitedly. Often at the same time.

It’s a Latino thing, Cesar explains: “Everything is so loud.” Ilusion agrees: “I’m naturally a loud person. It can be a bit overpowering. I’m just sharing my feelings, you know?” Her husband, looking trim in a V-neck sage-colored T-shirt and faded jeans, continues, “I feel like I’m regulating the volume of my wife’s intensity. Like—”

“That’s so true,” interjects Ilusion, vibrant in a hot pink sleeveless turtleneck and pants ironed to a sharp crease. “He’s like, ‘Honey, okay, we understand. But there are neighbors!’ ”

Yes, that’s right: When the Dog Whisperer talks to the woman he says domesticated him—call her the Man Whisperer— he’s lucky to get a word in edgewise. “When we’re in a restaurant,” the D.W. says, “and she gets into that, you know, stage, I have to say, ‘I’m right here. Look! I can totally hear you.’ ”

The M.W. nods, smiling. “We’re both very animated,” she says.

“Let me tell the story,” the D.W. says in the same calm, assertive tone that he uses with the unruly dogs on his weekly hit TV show (now in its sixth season on the National Geographic Channel). And at first, the correction seems to take.

“I’m sorry, baby,” the M.W. responds, her voice warm like she means it. A beat later, though, that’s out the window. The M.W. has something she just has to say.

So it goes, for more than two hours: Cesar, 40, and Ilusion, 34, jabbing and parrying, cross-talking, even bickering. What other couples might see as exhausting, however, the Millans, perched side by side on tall stools, treat as a blessing—because there was a time they had trouble communicating at all. Today, more than 10 million viewers a week hear the D.W. repeat, mantralike, that he rehabilitates dogs and trains people. What few know is that before he became the Dog Whisperer, his wife rehabilitated him.

“She gave leadership to the relationship,” the D.W. says, recalling the dark day 15 years ago when Ilusion—fed up with her husband’s harsh indifference—moved out with their infant son.

“He was having a hard time loving me, because of his past, because he just wasn’t a people person,” Ilusion says, leaning forward so her knees almost touch her husband’s. “He was afraid to love anybody.”

“I didn’t do it with humans, that’s all,” Cesar says, matter-of-factly. “I was there in my heart, but my heart was blocked.”

When Cesar was growing up on a farm in Culiacán, Mexico, his affinity for canines earned him the nickname El Perrero, or “the dog man.” It also got him teased. He was that weird kid who related better to animals than to his own species. Plus, he was dirt-poor. So from early on, he believed that people could hurt you, but dogs—never! Determined to become the world’s best dog trainer, Cesar crossed the border illegally at age 21. Arriving in Los Angeles, he washed limousines while trying to build a clientele.

From the moment a 17-year-old Ilusion saw Cesar in a crowded ice rink, she says, “I knew this was the guy for me.” Cesar, then 23 and living in a one-room apartment with six dogs, wasn’t so sure. When a friend told him he could go to jail (and surely be deported) for dating an underage girl, he broke off their fledgling romance. He was blunt, Ilusion says. “I came to the door and pressed the bell, and he said, ‘I can’t see you anymore.’ It killed me.”

But it didn’t deter her. There was something about Cesar’s focus, his drive, that made her feel safe. The day she turned 18, she showed up at his door again, and soon they were inseparable. When, a few months later, she discovered she was pregnant, Cesar immediately proposed. Before their wedding, which he paid for, he washed the limousine they’d ride in himself.

Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine December, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

He has been nominated for an Oscar (for the 2007 mystery Eastern Promises) and was declared a bona fide sex symbol (after his turn in the 2005 crime drama A History of Violence). He’s starred in three of the biggest-grossing movies of all time (The Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2001, 2002, and 2003). But Viggo Mortensen has always been motivated more by collaboration than celebrity. His new film, The Road, is an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about survival in a postapocalyptic world of cannibalism and other unimaginable horrors. As “The Man,” Mortensen navigates this devastated landscape with his son (played by 11-year-old newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee). We exchanged e-mails with the actor, poet, publisher (of the L.A.-based Perceval Press), and polyglot (he speaks Danish and Spanish, among other languages) on the subjects of hope, endurance, and human nature.

Hi Viggo,

The Road is true to McCarthy’s novel in that the nature of the cataclysmic event that has ruined the planet is never explained. As you constructed your character of “The Man,” though, you must have filled in that blank for yourself. Was it a comet, or did humankind bring the end of the world upon itself?

It does not really matter, because the character cannot do anything about it. I think that numerous things happened—fires, floods, drought, earthquakes (which the book and movie refer to) as well as fighting that led to the destruction of the power grids. Once things went wrong, there was no more Internet, phone, TV, radio, so it was not possible to know what really had happened and was continuing to happen all over the place. As when we have had blackouts, big snowstorms, fires, floods like those following Hurricane Katrina, or even as a reaction to events like those of 11 September, 2001, in New York and Washington, D.C., many people tend to isolate. General ignorance and wild, paranoid speculation tend to take over.

You’ve had a lot of physically demanding roles, from sword fighting in the LOTR trilogy to horseback riding in Hidalgo to wrestling naked in Eastern Promises. But The Road seems to be in a class by itself. How much weight did you lose to play a man starving to death?

I am not exactly sure. Enough to be credible as the character. Maybe 30 pounds or so. It was a basic requirement of the story that I not look well fed, so I simply ate less. That was not the hardest part, though. Nor was the hardest part the physical endurance test Kodi and I took part in by working in the cold, wet environments. The hardest part for both of us was the emotional journey, being exposed on the inside.

How did you prepare yourself emotionally to imagine the end of the world?

I’ve always thought that the end of the world, the end of me, of anything, can happen at any time, just as the sun always goes down at some point each day. It is natural, and not something to fear so much as be aware of and, when possible and appropriate, struggle against.

This may sound odd, but The Road had unexpected echoes of WALL-E, last year’s animated movie about an Earth used up and left behind by humans. Though WALL-E was clearly aimed at a different audience, both movies highlight the tenacity of love and the importance of even small gestures of kindness. Did you see WALL-E?

Yes, I did. I get your point. Had not thought of that. Thanks!

Were there any other movies you thought about as you prepared for this role?

For inspiration with regard to my understanding of Kodi’s character and regarding the environment, I looked at some of Tarkovsky’s work—Ivan’s Childhood and Stalker, for example. I also had another look at Sokurov’s Mother and Son and Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc for the emotional truth of the performances and cinematography. I listened to certain music, looked at photographs, read certain kinds of poems. I also spoke with people who live in the street in different cities, when they were willing to speak with me.

Originally appeared in Details November, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

Paul Reubens is doing one of the things he does best: obsessing. “I am constantly hoping that, like, I’m still relevant at all,” he says in a voice—higher than most men’s, slightly nasal—that’s still familiar, even after all these years.

Wandering around the Hollywood Museum, just a few blocks from his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he has lingered over the red-and-white vintage bicycle that he rode in his 1985 movie Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. He has appraised the display containing the skinny gray suit (with red bow tie) that was his uniform on his Saturday-morning TV show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which aired on CBS from 1986 to 1991. But it’s not the Pee-wee Herman memorabilia, which sits near W.C. Fields’ top hat and Brendan Fraser’s George of the Jungle loincloth, that sets off Reubens’ OCD. Instead, the trigger is Bob Hope’s honorary Oscar. “When I was a kid, I’d always watch Bob Hope and go, like, ‘I know he must’ve been funny, but is he past his prime?’” Reubens says. “What I’m trying to prove now is that I still have it, I’m still around—I still am Pee-wee Herman, and Pee-wee Herman is still funny. So I’m feeling very Bob Hope—hoping I don’t see a parallel.”

Yes, that’s right: The 57-year-old actor, best known for embodying the oddball man-child with the puppet friends (and also for two tawdry scrapes with the law), is about to don the skinny suit again to perform as Pee-wee for the first time in 19 years. Starting in early January in Los Angeles, Reubens will star in an elaborate live show in which Pee-wee yearns to fly, gets his wish, and then gives it away. For anyone who likes allegories, as Reubens does, this one is a doozy.

Consider: Since the age of 5, when he asked his father to build him a stage in their Peekskill, New York, basement, Reubens wanted to entertain. After completing high school in south Florida, he went to art school in Los Angeles, where he joined the improvisational comedy troupe the Groundlings and developed a skit about a man-child who wanted to be a famous comic. He took the first name from Pee-wee-brand harmonicas. In a fit of pique, after he lost out on a role on Saturday Night Live—to Gilbert Gottfried, of all people—Reubens borrowed $5,000 from his parents to turn that skit into a stage show. It spawned an HBO special (The Pee-wee Herman Show), two feature films (Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Big Top Pee-wee), and ultimately the hit TV show. Then, while on a self-imposed hiatus from Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the once-high-flying Reubens fell to earth.