“The Winona Nobody Knows,” by Jonathan Van Meter, was originally published in the October 1999 issue of Vogue.
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When I arrive at Winona Ryder’s house in Beverly Hills, she has been awake for only ten minutes. I’m guessing that all the makeup—raccoon eyes, pale foundation, pink lipstick—is from the night before. It’s noon on a Monday in August, a beautiful Los Angeles day. She’s wearing a red-and-white Who T-shirt (the kids are alright), and a turquoise A-line skirt cut off several inches below the knee. Her short, unwashed hair, flecked with blonde tips, is pushed up with a black hairband. On her right wrist are a rubber band and a beaded leather bracelet. Her elegant diamond-and-gold earrings look like they belong to a much dressier outfit. In a word—a word she probably hates—adorable. More Winona clichés: She is tiny, doll-like, luminescent; those brown and huge eyes, impossibly far apart.
Have I mentioned she’s adorable? Clutching a cup of tea, Winona heads outside to sit at a table under a big white umbrella on her red brick patio next to an inviting oval-shaped pool. “I live at this table,” she says, and it shows. There are piles of yellowing newspapers, an old candle with cigarette butts in it, a sketchbook, Time magazine, The Paris Review, a copy of Richard Ford’s Wildlife, and the book she’s currently reading, An Underachiever’s Diary, by Benjamin Anastas. Over the next two days, I, too, will live at this table while Winona variously sips from a can of Coke and a little bottle of water, smokes my cigarettes, and chatters away about everything but Matt Damon, who is off-limits.
Modest by Hollywood standards, Winona’s house is of the typical two-story Spanish variety; she bought it last year for $2.5 million (“a steal”) from Rene Russo’s sister, who is also the ex-wife of Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s lyricist. There’s a lot of rock-’n’-roll history in these walls—a selling point, and a fact that thrills her. “Neil Young’s Harvest was written here,” she says as only a person who lives and breathes music could. “That was one of my favorite albums.” Winona recently launched Roustabout Records, an independent label that her older brother, Jubal, and his best friend are running. She lives with her roommate of six years—Brett Brooks, a tall, handsome black man who’s a menswear buyer at Fred Segal—and her little brother, Uri, a 23-year-old actor/writer. “It’s my first real house,” she says. “I have a pool. I have gardeners. It’s an adult house. I definitely couldn’t live here alone.”
She stops suddenly; her eyes widen. “You want to go on a tour now?” she says as if suggesting that we open our Christmas presents a day early. And we’re off on an exhaustive walk through all ten rooms, complete with meticulous narration of each and every tchotchke—the provenance of every piece of art revealed, the story behind dozens of framed snapshots told. She uses the phrase “my prized possession” three times, referring to a W. Eugene Smith photograph of a little black boy climbing up a street sign, circa 1950; a snapshot of herself with her hero Tom Waits, taken at a concert a month ago; and a Sullivan’s Travels poster featuring Veronica Lake. Scattered about the house are memorabilia and artifacts from nearly every movie she’s been in—proof, perhaps, that the unreal, out-of-time life she leads with an ever-changing cast of characters has actually happened. There, behind the bar, is a foot-high bronze statue from Alien: Resurrection; just off the kitchen, on a shelf, a framed page of her narration from Heathers, signed by the director and editor. Next to it, a Polaroid of herself, Glenn Close, and Meryl Streep from The House of the Spirits. Upstairs in her messy bedroom (a mountain of beauty products, right next to the bed; many, many pairs of shoes) we find a snapshot that her mother took of Winona and Daniel Day-Lewis in full period costume on the set of The Age of Innocence. And, of course, there’s the requisite photo of Winona and Marty (Scorsese to you). “My show-off thing,” she says. Most endearingly, she has framed Arthur Miller’s bank deposit slip on which he wrote his home phone number during the filming of The Crucible. Under his number, he had written, “Call!” This gives her no end of joy.
There are other, more personal effects in her bedroom worth mentioning: A two-inch-by-two-inch framed picture of a three-day-old Winona. “My mom’s a Buddhist and I’m in this position that the Buddha is in, and she’s, like, ‘Noni, I know that you’re special because of this…’ I’m like, ‘Mom, you probably positioned me like that.’ But this is what’s really cool.” She takes the picture out of the frame and turns it over. “My dad was on the lam with Timothy Leary during this time and he showed this picture to him while they were in Switzerland skiing and that was when he asked him to be my godfather, and Tim wrote, ‘Love to the beautiful, newest Buddha girl from… ’—I think he meant to write ‘Godfather.’ They were probably really high.”
Also: A tiny hinged silver Tiffany frame that snaps open and shut like a locket. It was given to her by one of her dearest friends, the interior designer Kevin Haley, a one-time actor whom she’s known since she was a baby. On one side of the frame is a picture of a teenage Winona slumped on a couch, dressed in black, wearing movie-star sunglasses, giving the camera the finger. On the other side is the page from The Catcher in the Rye where Holden Caulfield sees fuck you written on the wall. “I was in Paris promoting Mermaids,” she says, “and I was a total insomniac and going nuts and having the worst time of my life, and Kevin took this picture and gave me this. I just treasure it. I take it with me wherever I go. It’s a very adolescent me, but it reminds me of that time so much, and that book was like my bible.”
