(no subject)
Asia Argento is a lot of work. The 30-year-old actor-director fills the air with a thick cloud of cigarette smoke and a haze of contradictions. In fact, she's not unlike a character in the mythic universe of JT LeRoy, whose book of short stories The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things Argento has turned into a feature film, in which she also stars, to be released in March.
She claims she's a hermit, yet deejaying pays the rent. Acting saved her life, but being an actress nearly drove her insane. She repeatedly laments having no friends, but, at various points, mentions three 'best friends', including Panos, whose name is tattooed across the inside of her thin wrist. She calls her daughter's father, Italian musician Marco "Morgan" Castoldi, her 'husband', always pointing out that they're not really married. She's descended from nobility, though her maternal great-grandmother was a gypsy. She suffers near-crippling insecurity, but as a director she can turn into a megabitch who must be obeyed.
Argento answers the door to her apartment--- on a sleepy street in Parioli, the Beverly Hills of Rome--- looking like a whippet-thin teenager. Wearing an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt and jeans decorated with ballpoint doodles, she has jagged brown hair and knuckles armored in silver rings. The walls, frankly, could use a coat of paint. The parquet floor is ruptured and crumbling; the curtains appear to have been slashed with a knife. "I'm not the world's neatest person," she rasps, lacing sneakers on Anna Lou, her four-year-old daughter, and sending her out with the nanny. She heads to the kitchen to make coffee and spits into the sink along the way. "You can see I have no fantasy about furniture or whatever," she says, sinking onto the faux Oriental rug, peeling off her clunky boots and stretching her long bare feet.
She's got more serious obsessions. After reading LeRoy's book about a truck-stop hooker funding his mother's addictions, Argento, the daughter of B-movie actress Daria Nicolodi and cult horror-film director Dario Argento, struck up a friendship with the author, first via email, then in person. (Even though LeRoy's books were published as fiction, they were billed as heavily autobiographical; he also developed relationships with several celebrities.) In fact, Argento spent two years, from 2002 to 2004, in Los Angeles trying to get the movie made. Since the person she believed to be LeRoy visited her film set in Tennessee, however, his book and his identity have come under investigation.
During our first conversation, Argento is circumspect about the rumors. "Obviously there are things that don't match up," she says haltingly. "I never thought that the book was absolutely true, but I still want to believe that this is his story, or if it's not his, then it's a universal story."
But, just a few days after we meet, the New York Times reports that LeRoy is actually the fictional creation of a San Francisco couple named Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop, with Albert as the likely ghostwriter. For public appearances, LeRoy had been played by Knoop's half-sister Savannah. When Argento heard the news from her manager, Brian Young, who had also represented LeRoy until just recently, she says she was stunned and even a little amused. "The person I thought was JT would tell me, 'Call me Savavannah,'" remembers Argento, "because she was pretending that she had multiple personalities."
Looking back, she says she often wondered whether the book had been written by an editor at Bloomsbury, LeRoy's publishing house, or even by Albert, whom she knew as "Emily", a social worker who supposedly saved LeRoy from the streets. Still, she never questioned the validity of LeRoy's story or suspected a full-blown hoax. "The invention was completely genius," she says, laughing. "I'm not idiot, but I completely fell for it."
Argento now believes that Albert, Savannah, and someone with a more masculine voice all, at various times, played LeRoy over the phone. Any vocal variation was chalked up to LeRoy's multiple personality disorder and any lapse in memory blamed on childhood trauma.
Details get even stranger. To prep Argento for her role as Sarah, LeRoy's supposed junkie mother, the group played her tapes of a woman's voice they said was Sarah's and passed off childhood photos of a cross-dressed LeRoy, which she now believes were of Savannah dressed in frills.
On the set, LeRoy, aka Savannah, burst into tears whenever she saw Argento in costume and wept again at the film's premiere at Cannes. "Was it because she's such a good actress, or because she thought, Everybody loves this person who's not me?" Argento muses, praising Savannah's 'genius' theatrical skills. "I would hire her straightaway."
Eventually, Argento became convinced LeRoy was female. When she asked why LeRoy had breasts, she was told that he was a post-op transsexual taking female hormones. "The only thing I couldn't understand was that Savannah had lots of hair on her legs," she says, giggling. "I've never seen a girl with so much hair." To make matters more confusing, Argento and Savannah once argued over a guy--- Argento was dating him and Savannah was jealous. Later, Savannah told Argento she was dating a woman. (Argento and her 'husband' have been off and on for years.)
Touring together to promote the film ultimately soured her relationship with LeRoy. Usually Argento could excuse his fascination iwth celebrity and his divalike behavior, convincing herself that his hustler's past had made him needy. "I didn't want to disappoint him," she says. "I needed his support so much for the film because I thought this was his story."
But in May 2004, in Cannes, where the troupe was on a tight budget, Argento says she found LeRoy's over-the-top requests--- for special organic foods and a new Fendi bag--- more than she could bear. She told him "You're worse than J. Lo!" Argento recalls LeRoy blowing up, shouting "You don't understand--- I'm someone who grew up with nothing!"
Argento now attributes the trio's motivation to a desperate need for public attention. "It's more about being in the spotlight than the work," she says, pointing out that Albert and Co. haven't produced much literature lately.
Like many admirers, Argento wanted to believe in LeRoy and his survival. After all, his gruesome stories make the run-of-the-mill rough childhood stories look placid by comparison. If fans had known that Albert, a "40-year-old weirdo woman," invented LeRoy's horror stories, "we would have thought that she was a sicko," says Argento. "If we think it really happened, we're moved. We want to talk about what happened to us."
Declining to discuss details, Asia says her tumultuous relationship with her mother drew her to LeRoy's tale. "The movie is more real than the book at this point," she says. "Because my childhood was pretty horrible, this movie meant a lot to me." She says that making dark films like The Heart and 2000's Scarlet Diva, her directorial debut, about an Italian actress's descent into debauchery, keeps her out of psychotherapy.
In The Heart, Argento's sympathies lie with LeRoy's victimized protagonist, though the film forgoes any overt moralizing and shies away from only the book's goriest scenes of abuse. If Argento dodged these brutalities on-screen, however, she gave herself over to them on the set. "Completely arrogant, mean and deaf to everybody--- that was me when I was shooting," she says. Fueled by junk food, not sleeping much, not even washing, Argento transformed herself into Sarah. "And she wasn't the most pleasant person to be around," Argento says. The film, which has had a mixed reception at various film festivals, also stars three child actors as LeRoy, and features Michael Pitt, Peter Fonda, and Marilyn Manson. There is even a cameo by Winona Ryder, who, early on, had been caught up with the LeRoy cult.
Argento, who began acting at the age of nine in Rome, was exposed to the horror genre young, landing her first feature credit at 11 in Demons 2, a movie written by her father. "When I started acting, I really wanted it, and it saved my life because I was very awkward and didn't have friends," she says. She says that turning down a role in her father's film The Card Player nearly 20 years later to direct The Heart, however, severed their relationship.
But while her father gave her her start, the filmmaker Abel Ferrara, whom Asia calls her mentor and who directed her in New Rose Hotel in 1998, says her famous last name has nothing to do with her success. "She's been delivering the goods since she was a baby," he says. "Even her father wouldn't hire her if she couldn't do the job."
Argento certainly isn't hurting for work, even though she fired her Hollywood agent for not introducing her to her crush, fellow client Johnny Depp. "I've played the bimbo, the tortured artist, the junkie, the cop," she sighs, mentioning a few of her nearly 40 disparate roles in films like Queen Margot, Last Days, and Land of the Dead. This year she'll appear as Madame du Barry in Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette.
Argento admits that her adventurous nature has, on occasion, led her down the path less-traveled. Modeling topless at 22 for Helmut Newton and getting involved in the LeRoy scandal are just cases in point. "I've found myself in pretty extreme situations--- not as extreme as people would think, but just out of curiosity about human behavior," she says coyly, glancing around her dilapidated flat. "I live a very bourgeois life at the end of the day. This is as bourgeois for me as it gets." --Jessica Kerwin