Positively Drew.(Drew Barrymore)(Interview)

Byline: Photographed by Steven Meisel

She doesn't employ her own private PR or a coterie of yes-men. Hollywood's other big names are actually happy to work on a Barrymore production. And, at long last, she's with a man who respects her. It's all, as Julia Reed reports, good.

It is a very chilly Friday night in Toronto, just before Christmas, and I am standing ankle deep in hay watching Drew Barrymore, who is wearing, among other things, black fishnets, an upside-down skirt, and a bathing suit pulled over a tiger-striped turtleneck, feed a very large raccoon his "luncheon" while announcing to no one in particular that she simply has to go to New York City and lead her own life. Except that it's not actually Drew Barrymore I'm looking at; she hasn't been Drew for almost three months. She is Little Edie Beale, the eccentric debutante cousin of Jackie Kennedy Onassis--in mind, body, and maybe even, at this point, soul.

"I haven't seen her since September 30," says Kent Cummins, a friend of many years and Barrymore's dresser on Grey Gardens, the HBO film Barrymore stars in with Jessica Lange. It is after midnight on the dilapidated set, and "Little Edie" is now descending the stairs in clunky white patent shoes. "Even when we go out, I'll be like, 'Are you in there?' " Cummins says. "Once she told me, 'Drew's inside and she loves you very much, but she just can't come out right now.' It truly is like living with Sybil."

Barrymore fought hard for the role of Little Edie, who lived with her mother, Big Edie, in gothic isolation in a crumbling--and cat-and-coon-infested--mansion in East Hampton, New York. The two were the subjects of a cult documentary, also called Grey Gardens, in 1975, and, more recently, of the Broadway musical starring Christine Ebersole. When the film, which does not yet have a release date, was announced, Drew approached its director, Michael Sucsy, and pressed the inches-thick "Little Edie binder" she'd compiled into his hands. "I thought somebody else must have printed out this big book," he tells me, "but then I looked and it was all her."

The role of angry, self-doubting daughter to an overbearing, reclusive mother required Barrymore to be a deeply sad lost soul one minute and a madcap entertainer, literally singing and dancing, the next. It was a difficult juxtaposition and a serious departure for the ever-sunny star of such romantic comedies as Never Been Kissed and Music and Lyrics, and the toughest of the three Charlie's Angels.

"Michael took a big chance on me, and I knew it," she says, "so I worked really hard."