Latest Project is totally De-Lovely
LOS ANGELES — She’s a vision of de-loveliness in a printed J. Crew skirt and sky blue sweat jacket. Ashley Judd’s wet hair has been thrown into a ponytail, and her face isn’t covered in makeup, but chocolate frosting.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” Judd, 36, says, walking into a hotel suite eating chocolate cake and sweetly offering some words for her tardiness.
“I took a bath over lunch and I put the dogs in there with me. It was a Calgon moment.”
Shug and Buttermilk are now most likely the envy of many American males of the human variety.
“The dogs like to get in the bathtub with me. They just like to be held,” she says. “They also love the bubbles.”.
You can’t get more bubbly than Judd’s new musical “De-Lovely,” opening Friday. She plays Linda Porter, wife of Kevin Kline’s Cole Porter, in a sweeping period musical about the gay composer who marries his muse.
Judd says that this type of marriage isn’t so hard for her to compute. “I think that sex is overemphasized in our contemporary society,” she insists. “Cole and Linda had a nurturing and sustaining intimacy that by Cole’s own description was stunning.
“They stayed married for 35 years and that’s not by accident,” Judd says. “It was intentional. It was willful. It’s what they wanted.”
Judd researched Linda Porter’s life and found out that she had a terrible first marriage to a straight man. “He was very abusive to her. Then came Cole. To be with someone who loved her and didn’t want sex, I think to her, was a relief.”
The movie suggests that Linda gets very fed up with Cole’s various male love affairs over the years.
“There was a period when it was very difficult for her,” Judd says. “I would imagine she suffered a loneliness that you can find in all marriages.”
Even her own?
“Occasionally, I’m a Playstation widow,” jokes the wife of Dario Franchitti, a race-car driver with a penchant for video games.
“But back to Cole Porter,” she adds. “I think he knew Linda in a very authentic way. That’s the goal of this life. To find intimacy with another person. People also yearn to be known for who they really are. That’s what I think Linda loved about Cole. Linda saw him and Cole saw her. They had this profoundly reciprocal knowledge of each other that fueled their marriage.”
Judd wasn’t so fueled by a scene in the movie that required her to sit down at a piano and sing. Did she call her sister Wynonna for advice?
“I actually did call her before she was going on stage in a concert and Wy was really sweet. She was also funny because I didn’t think she heard me sing in church all those years. But she did. So Wy told me, ‘Sister, just do it like you did it in church. Go down when everybody else goes up.’”
Was that the first time Judd has sung in public?
“Sober!” she whoops.
Judd didn’t take a part in this film just to croon. She signed on because she wanted to play rich folk. “Linda and Cole Porter were super rich,” Judd says. “She was particularly super rich and had more money than he did. In fact, Cole went home to to Indiana to ask his grandfather and mother for more money so he could have a commensurate estate before he married Linda.”
Judd’s not exactly clipping coupons. “I’ve got the basics covered. I own my home. I have a car and health insurance. But the Porters, well, they were crazy rich. I thought it would be fun to play someone with crazy money.”
Judd marveled that Linda would wear a pair of white gloves only once and then toss them in the trash can. “She threw flowers away every single day. She needed new ones each morning.”
The actress shakes her head and insists, “That’s almost as bad as something I heard about Diana Ross, which was that she fired a housekeeper for taking home food that Diana was throwing out.” Suddenly, Judd stops speaking and adds, “I really shouldn’t be such a gossip. I’m not a gossip like that. I wish I could take that story back.”
Back to the cash. Judd insists she wasn’t paid that much to do “De-Lovely,” which was more of a labor of love.
“Money is never a motivation for me when it comes to taking a project. If you do a movie for money, you’re just screwed,” she insists. “In fact, Kevin told me when they offer him a lot of money, he passes before he even reads it. He already knows there’s something wrong with it if they’re offering him a lot of money.
“If you’re doing things for the right reasons, you’re going to be rich,” Judd says.
Perhaps it was her poor childhood in rural Kentucky that helped Judd see the light. But these days, she must look around her compound in Tennessee and feel pretty lucky.
“You know, I was cranky the other morning as I was trying to pack for this trip. My computer wouldn’t get me online. Dario had already left. My trip was being extended, and we were going to be apart longer. I was really sad.
“Then I went to the gym and turned on Animal Planet and they were doing a story about dogs who do hospital visits. This beautiful Golden Retriever was visiting a small child who was in traction. Well, my eyes just filled, and I thought, ‘I’m so fortunate that it’s preposterous.’”
Judd is still in the newlywed stage with Franchitti, and admits that their busy careers are the only hard part of married life.
“Dario handles the separations really well because he started racing when he was 10 years old, so he has always been gone every weekend,” she says. “The other day, he pointed out to me that he hasn’t even seen his mother for four months.”
As for having children, Judd says, “I’m sure you’ve heard me say it before, but the truth is consistent. It’s for God to decide. Frankly, if we were [trying], we wouldn’t tell anyone.”
Judd says that the tabloid attention on her marriage doesn’t upset either of them. “I don’t listen to gossip. I don’t look at the tabloids. I won’t allow that energy near me.
“I don’t even know what they’re saying about me anymore.”
Ask Judd if there’s something more she wants in her life, and she says, “Oh, I have a lot of stuff to work on. I think we’re all here to learn lessons. My life is an ongoing process.”
