Rebel Belle
Rebel Belle
Ashley Judd speaks her mind about her larger-than-life mother and sister, her race car driver husband, and the woman she’s dying to kiss on the mouth
Last May, at a taping of The Oprah Winfrey Show, Ashley Judd found herself in an unusual position: seated in the audience. The 36 year old actress wasn’t there to reminisce about her six-month run on Broadway as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, of to promote her latest film, De-Lovely. Instead, she sat in a row with her mother, Naomi, while older sister Wynonna was in an oversize yellow yellow leather chair next to Oprah. they were in the midst of the second of several excruciating interviews dealing with some wrenching Judd family issues: Wynonna’s weight problems, her drunk driving arrest, and most of all the revelation the Wynonna and Ashley have different biological fathers– a fact the now 40 year old Wynonna didn’t learn until she was in ther 30s.
“It was intense,” says Judd now, still noticeably reticent even in her rememberance of the taping. “Oprah really reached out to Sister not only to help her shed the weight, but also to excavate the deep and profound reasons she has always carried the weight. Sister told me, ‘I can’t do this second episode without you.’ I said, ‘Of course,” but I told her it was really against my instincts and mature to be so publice in that way… Mom and Sister have such energy pouring off then about each other, I on the other hand, hold my space very well, and I keep my own counsel. and that, without a doubt, is what has preserved me.”
This self-preservation is just one of the traits that makes Ashley Judd a complex person rather than a single dimension caricature in a madcap Nashville soap opera. Sometimes she’s naive, sometimes knowing. Mostly gracious, yet occasionally cutting. Self-deprecating, then just as demanding of proper respect as a movie star (I was once her date to a Hollywood Oscar party a few years ago and have never seen a woman work a room like she did that night). Judd plays up her many-sided personality so much that some could mistake her every hand gesture and eyelash flicker as a calculated drama, and her fervent love of writers such as Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Flanery O’Connor as pretension. In fact, in her family having intellectual curiosity and a sense of cool elegance is a way of defining herself. As much as she loved her family, her whole life seems to have been about not being who they are.
You can’t get much farther away from a childhood in the deep South– or the glittery world of country music– than Scotland. I visit her at the home she shares with her husband, Scottish racecar driver, Dario Franchitti, and after a brisk walk one evening with her dogs, Buttermilk and Shug, we sit down on a bench on a windswept meadow behind the house. She has had a rough few days, as far as movie stars’ lives go. There was a bureaucratic snafu when her pets were shipoped from her farmhouse in Tennessee, and she had to beg and plead with Glaswegian officials to get her animals out of lockup. she wars not a speck of makeup, and there are bags beneath her tired eyes. Her unwashed hair has been pulled back into a makeshift ponytail with an old silk orchid stucj haphazardly into it. And yet she is still beautiful, still self-possessed.
Her choice to live in Scotland and Tennessee with Franchitti instead of Los Angeles or New York City is just the latest manifestation of Judd’s varied impulses. She may have come of age as part of the Judds (introducing her mother and sister– she doesn’t really sing), but she has become a high fashion fixture, walking the red carpet at premieres and benefits wearing couture by her good friends Giorgio Armani and Valentino. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Kentucky where she studied French, but her campus obsession was (and still is) the Kentucky Wildcats basketball team.
She smiles as her dogs romp around in the tall. damp grass. “Buttermilk once chewed up one of Dario’s stuffed animals out of jealousy,” she sys. “He’s never chewed anything before or since. It was Dario’s stuffed bear, Barnaby, that he travels with. It is ian image seared into my memory: Dario sitting crestfallen on the edge of our bed, stuffing the fuzz back into this gaping wound in Barnaby’s face with his finger.” That’s a sweet story, but even though he is five years Judd’s junior, Franchitti is still a little old to be carrying stuffed animals around with him, especially on the racing circuit. “Let’s put it this way,” says Judd, in the hoity-toity tone she uses when she’s half-teasing someone. “When I first came to visit him in that house back there I thought, What am I going to do? I can’t live here. The place was all cracked champagne glasses and dirty duvets,” she says. “But then I walked into his bedroom and saw this stuffed bear on the bed and said, ‘Just give me a ring right now.’ This sexy butch creature has a stuffed bear on his pillow? Love love love it.”
“Did you have to exorcise all the ghosts of girlfriends past from the house before you moved in?” I ask.
Fortunately that was not Dario’s gig,” she says. “He was only 24 when I met him. He didn’t have that history, shall we say, which was nice.” So Judd was the sexual mentor? “Yes,” she says without blushing. Has he been a good student? That halfway hoity-toity tone of hers gives way to a high school girl’s giggle. “Ohhh… yes…”
It’s suprising that an actress who has been in the public eye so long would be so open and honest about spousal bedroom activities. But Ashley Judd wants to tell the truth as often as possible. It’s why she took it upon herself to tell Wynonna the dark family secret about their paternity, a secret that Ashley had known for a long time and hated keeping from her sister. (Ashley’s father is Michael Ciminella, who married Naomi when she was just a teenager and pregnant by another man. Ciminella and Naomi divorced when Ashley was a small child.) “Mom’s decision not to tell Wynonna the truth was all about fear,” Judd says. “I think she thought the world would stop turning on its axis if she told the truth. So I went to Mom and said, “Supposedly we are a Judeo-Christian family, and we have a lot of faith, and we believe that the truth shall set you free.”
“Wait a minute. There are Jews in your family?” I ask.
Well, yeah, mu Aunt Margaret is a Jew, I love her for it. She live in Pennsylvania. At Thanksgiving after the presidential election, I said, ‘Fuck you people. I’m going to to visit my liberal Jewish aunt in a blue state. My family went, ‘You’re really going to leave us on Thanksgiving because of the election?’ I said, ‘You better believe it!”
This outspoken streak is not exactly a new development. “Ashley has always been up to exploring everything,” says Mary Tripp Reed, and economics instructor who has been best friends with Judd since they were Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority sisters at Kentucky . “She’s fearless. She was the first woman I’d ever seen who just marched into the men’s room because the line for the women’s room was too long. i was astonished then followed her in.”
Judd still has the capacity to astonish those who know her well. Take the pastor at the Evangelical church she attended in college. “This old preacher once was instructing us on how to fill out our forms for the membership directory at evening service. He went, ‘And don’t do that “Ms.” one. We don’t do that here.’ I shouted from my pew: “too late, preacher!’ He said, ‘Ashley, is that you?’ People might think I’m a bit nutty on this issue, but words are powerful. What we say and how we choose to say it is really important.”
Judd doesn’t really think she’s being confrontational when she expresses herself like that; she’s just being true to who she is. Her feminist beliefs, however, don’t preclude her from being comfortable in her Southern-belle skin. “I may come off as ‘feminine’ as you describe the term,” she says, “but I have never, ever been coy.” Such no-nonsense talk make Judd an interesting choice to represent American Beauty, a line of products for the Estee Lauder Companies, for which she’s reportedly receiving 5.5 million over three years. “Estee Lauder was discriminated against because of her sex and religion,” says Judd, as she scoots around the kitchen in her socks after our walk. She placed a pot of green tea on a tray next to a plate of ginger cookies and orange sections. “But she was too clever and ingenious. Her legacy so perfectly suits my outlook and beliefs,” she says, mentioning that American Beauty will furnish seed money for NutritionAid, an offshoot of Judd’s work with YouthAIDS, and organization that fights HIV infection in the developing world.
Judd, stepping carefully around all the male clutter, heads upstairs to her husband’s media room. He is in a Bahrain for a race, but his many colored racing helmets line the floor and the mantle above the fireplace. She rifles through her CDs, pulling out the one by k.d. lang. “She was my first same-gender crush,” Judd says of Lang. “I was 18. I loved her. It was so mixed with admiration and awe. I know we’re going to see her at some point, and I’ve already told Dario, ‘I’m going to kiss her on the mouth.’ I once made her a clover chain. That’s fairly pitiful, but sincere nonetheless.”
Judd’s brother-in-law Marino, also a racecar driver, arrives to take her to a concert by the Scottish rock band Travis, for an invited audience of 200 at a nearby estate. “Are you driving?” She asks. The look on Marino’s face signals her that was a dumb question. “Good,” she says. “I can have a drink then.” She opens the fridge beneath the bar in the media room and pulls out a bottle of beer and a half-eaten Cadbury chocolate bar. She attempts to open the been with her teeth. Marino tries not to look. Judd just laughs and finds a bottle opener.
Before she leaves, Judd tells me a story, with a mixture of irony and relish, that says everything one needs to konw about her. It’s about Paramount Studio’s ninetieth anniversary party a few years ago. “We had shot an Annie Leibovitz picture, all the Paramount stars had been assigned number for our place in the group shot. I carried the number with me to the dinner and thought it was my table assignment. I ended up sitting with my back to the room at a table next to an exit sign with a bunch of accountants from television syndication. I was trying to be a good sport and be gracious and listen to them talk about who didn’t clean the coffeemaker in the office,” she remembers, looking at a photo of herself from that night. “All the other stars were an acre and a half away. Sherry Lansing finally rescued me and put me at the right table where the action was, with Samuel L. Jackson and Liam Neeson and Andy Garcia and Jessica Lange and Angelica Huston and Tom Cruise and all those guys. I was restored to my proper place in the pantheon.”
This is pure Judd: naive, worldly, polite, grand, haughty, humble. And everything seems to fit, including the fact that she has been returned to her rightful spot in the celebrity universe with her best actress Golden Globe nomination for De-Lovely. But the role she’ll always play best is her own.
Allure 2005
