Ashley Judd’s San Francisco
ASHLEY JUDD’S SAN FRANCISCO
Join the beautiful star of the hit movie Someone Like You for a weekend in the city where she left her childhood heart.
Ashley Judd left her heart in San Francisco a long time ago. She spent part of grade school in the Bay Area with her mother, Naomi, and sister, Wynonna, who later became the dynamic country-singing duo known as The Judds. But it was her grandmother’s longtime house in the city’s beloved Pacific Heights area that made Ashley a spiritual San Franciscan. “I’ve spent an awful lot of time in her home, so I feel like it’s a second home,” she remembers. Judd is a rare combination of brains and beauty: a Phi Beta Kappa nominee and honors graduate of the University of Kentucky, with a major in French and four minors. But the city of San Francisco speaks more to her soul than her intellect. She returned to the city recently to film Someone Like You,a romantic comedy co-starring Greg Kinnear that premiered March 30. Judd plays a heartbroken TV producer turned celebrated sex columnist who compares the behavior of men to animals. Romantic comedy is something of a departure for Judd, who has starred in thrillers like Double Jeopardy,opposite Tommy Lee Jones, Eye of the Beholder,with Ewan McGregor, and Heat,alongside Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Val Kilmer. Judd’s informal acting training began in childhood. While her mother and sister put their energies into music, Ashley turned toward the world of books, spending her childhood playing the literary characters in her mind. She attended a dozen different schools in Kentucky, Tennessee, and California before The Judds became country and western superstars. After college, she set aside her dreams of joining the Peace Corps and followed her sister’s suggestion to move to L.A. to become an actress. After some mid-level TV fare, she entered the mainstream movie world with the hit independent film Ruby in Paradise.Later, she won an Emmy nomination for her role as the young Marilyn Monroe in HBO’s Norma Jean and Marilyn.Now engaged to race car driver Dario Franchitti, she lives in a 100-year-old Tennessee house. But here’s a weekend where a piece of Ashley’s heart will always remain, San Francisco.
FRIDAY
LODGING
“I love the El Drisco Hotel because it’s in Pacific Heights. There are majestic views of the Bay and the bridge and the hills of Marin County. Pacific Heights is terrific for getting some exercise. You can walk at a leisurely pace, or you can turn it up a notch when you go up and down those hills. Pacific Heights is aesthetically one of the most pleasing cosmopolitan neighborhoods in America, and the El Drisco is a great big wonderful old home that’s been converted into a luxury hotel. The prices are not prohibitively expensive. It’s very charming and very sweet and has this incredible bonus of being close to Fillmore and Union streets, which have my favorite poking-around shopping. Another really good hotel is the Renaissance Stanford Court. They really took great care of me. We were shooting at night and I needed to sleep during the day. It was quiet and room service was really delicious and very fast. They had great towels and slippers — all the stuff that you look for. It’s also within walking distance of all the nice shops.”
DINNER
“On a Friday night, I would go to Florio. It’s on Fillmore and it’s terrific French. Of course, they’ve got the required steak pommes frites,but my favorite thing on the menu is the baked creamed onions. They’re thin, almost like scalloped potatoes, and are served in a small individual casserole dish. They are exquisite. The people at Florio were always cool. They would let me sit in the window, which was not really part of the restaurant, so my pups could come in and lie on the floor. We would pretend to be in France.”
SATURDAY
BREAKFAST
“You can walk down to Union Street and go to Doidge’s for breakfast. Anyone who is familiar with San Francisco knows it’s not the most hip place. It’s an old standard, and it really can’t be improved upon. They have homemade egg dishes and pancakes. When I was there eating breakfast with a friend on a Sunday, the wonderful older gentleman who runs the place kept going outside to pet my dogs. He took them a treat and they weren’t interested in it, because they are quite snobby about their treats, and it became a personal mission for him to find a treat that they would enjoy.”
SIGHTS
“I love the Marina, which has free parking — another indication of what a terrific city San Francisco is. It’s so geared toward a genuinely easy quality of life. You just go down to the Marina and hop out of your car and you can join a spontaneous game of volleyball or touch football on the Marina Green. Or you can walk out to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge and you’ve got the beautiful city skyline behind you. Then, there are the hills of the Marina, with very little development. There’s Sausa-lito, where you can see a little bit of the Marina and can see some of the houses built on the hills in Tiburon. So much of that area is still untouched. It is constantly reminding us, I think, of the balance that we should strike between development and preserving our wide-open spaces. They’re doing a big restoration project at the moment on the Marina, where they are encouraging a healthier and stronger natural habitat. I love it down there.”
SHOPPING
“In the Fillmore area, I love to pop into Fillamento, which has a variety of home furnishings. Another little home furnishings store is Sue Fisher King. I bought a fantastic woven tote bag there, and it was only like 18 bucks. It’s in such a high-end neighborhood, but they are not absurd in their pricing. A place that gave me a lot of pleasure in San Francisco is called Ixia, which is a florist. I spoke with them on the telephone and I described what my apartment was like. They never saw the interior of it, and every single week they sent over arrangements that were perfectly suited to my style and taste. Union Square is great for shopping. We were shooting at night, I was sick, I didn’t have an assistant, and I still managed to get all my Christmas shopping done on Maiden Lane, which radiates out of Union Square. They have all the nice shops. I thought that the Prada store had a particularly good selection. A lot of Prada is ubiquitous, but they had stuff that I had never seen before, which is really saying something. Everybody is really down-to-earth in San Francisco. Nobody is snooty. Wilkes Bashford is a great store. They’ve got a terrific buyer — a very eclectic mix. It’s men’s and women’s.”
HIKING
“My entertainment consisted of hiking in John Muir Woods. It’s just unbelievable how accessible and beautiful everything is. One time I went into the bottom of Muir Woods, where they’ve built platforms because there are so many people who go there that it’s as populated as a shopping mall. But there was something wonderfully spirited about it because you knew that all these folks were going to be around these extraordinary old trees and breathe the fresh air. You can hike to the beach or you can do something more challenging by going up all the wonderfully marked and very educational trails. When you’re among those 1,000-year-old redwoods, you feel liberated and you feel a sense of awe. I think it definitely encourages a sense of responsibility to living more peacefully and less aggressively toward our resources.”
LUNCH
“If I could only eat one thing in San Francisco, it would be the fried-egg pizza at Rose’s Cafe. Rose’s has outdoor seating, and they have little dog treats on the menu. I always start with a little dish of olives because I love good black olives, and they make a polenta. It’s a little bit like a breakfast polenta with slightly spicy tomato sauce on top of it, so it’s like a cross between Cream of Wheat and a polenta dinner entree. But go for the fried-egg pizza. It’s a super-thin, wood-fired pizza with fontina cheese and fried eggs and strips of ham. And, of course, I have to pour olive oil all over the whole thing, too. For some reason when I’m there, I always want Coca-Cola. I do not drink soda pop, but something about the saltiness of the olives and the polenta makes it a Coca-Cola kind of day. The Balboa Cafe is always great for lunch. They’ve got two different kinds of burgers — the Balboa Burger that comes on a baguette, or the Bar Burger, which comes on a homemade bun. It’s a bit like a brasserie with a lot of good comfort food. You definitely get full.”
BOOKS
“City Lights Booksellers and Publishers is so cool — funky and fabulous. I love it. You defi-nitely get in touch with your inner fire to help change the world there. Sometimes all the books in the window are so negative. You have to be careful about how much of that stuff you expose yourself to at one moment. I love to go in and buy leftist magazines and get all fired up. I’m into reading The Nation every week. They have a huge magazine section.”
HERBS AND ELIXIRS
“Chinatown is great. I actually got really sick with bronchitis while we were filming, and my makeup artist went to Chinatown and talked to a man who put together packages of herbs and roots. She boiled it for me and I drank these very pungent potions to get better. I’m certain it helped. Herbal shops are all around Chinatown. I sort of say the older the person, the more credible the establishment. The older and more wizened the owner’s appearance, the more likely he is to have good advice and profound experience with herbs and roots. I don’t recommend that people take the herbs wantonly. They have very strong medicinal effects.”
DINNER
“PlumpJack Cafe, owned by the same folks who own the Balboa Cafe, is another San Francisco institution. It’s small, with really nice, attentive service. It’s a pretty calm, soothing atmosphere. I particularly love the salads. They mix them up with different kinds of nuts and dried fruit, and you could make a very good meal out of a salad and a light entree. PlumpJack has a terrific wine list. The owners also own a wine store, so if you’re in the mood for a certain kind of Burgundy, but you want to be adventuresome and maybe try something that you’ve not had before, you can have a conversation with them about it. And they’ll walk down to the corner to their wine shop and get it for you, charging the same price in the restaurant that they do at the shop. I made it kind of a policy while in San Francisco never to spend more than $30 on a bottle of wine in a restaurant, and we always had the most delicious stuff.”
SUNDAY
EXCURSION
“For Christmas, I gave my sister and her boyfriend two nights at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur [about 150 miles south of San Francisco]. It’s fantastic. It’s really expensive, though. Like the most expensive hotel in America that we’ve ever stayed at, so we don’t go there that much. You literally have individual free-standing rooms that are built into the cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. One night that we were there, there was a lightning storm out at sea. God put on a pretty fantastic show. We stayed there once in 1991 or 1992. My family, my mom and my sister and Pop and everybody, and I took a motorcycle trip from the Bay Area down Highway 1 to Malibu. I rode on the back of my sister’s Harley. When we got to Post Ranch Inn, I [crashed] her bike in the parking lot right in front of the whole welcoming staff. [My fiancé] Dario and I showed up there last year and the guy was like, ‘You been riding your bike any?’ I was so embarrassed that they remembered.”
ONE SPECIAL DAY
ONE GREAT DAY IN SAN FRANCISCO
“An amazing thing happened in The Presidio park, which is really beautiful. On Thanksgiving Day, I joined some childhood friends from Kentucky for a touch football game. It’s like a Saturday game that the same group of people get together to play. I met so many nice young people. A lot of young married people, people who were about to start families, which is a great environment for [my fiancé and me] to be in, since we’re in a parallel situation in our personal lives. I woke up and thought, You know, that’s a really American thing to do on Thanksgiving. Go to a beautiful public park and just get rowdy playing touch football with a bunch of strangers. Then, one day when we took the pups down to the Marina and walked out to the bridge, we ran into two different people that we had met at the touch football game on Thanksgiving Day. It’s just that kind of a city where it’s open and friendly. It’s accessible. Everyone is so oriented to the outdoors. It’s in the most beautiful, natural setting of any American city, and I’m just always happy there. San Francisco makes me happy.”
http://americanwaymag.com
