Who Is This Daryl Hannah, Anyway?
Who is this blond, lissome 23-year-old whose witty portrayal of Madison the mermaid in Splash has abruptly placed her atop the more-than-a-pretty-face category of film actresses? Is she just a poor little rich girl from a cushy Chicago suburb who was showered with dance lessons and foreign trips, and glided through a world of ceaseless privilege; who dreamed of Hollywood glamour while surrounded with more riches than most film actors could ever put their hands on; who today asks that you not reveal the Colorado town where her family owns a huge estate, for fear the hoi polloi might move in; who disdains to admit what everyone already knows, that she’s the girlfriend of Jackson Browne?
Or is she someone else entirely — a painfully shy, towheaded child, left traumatized by her parents’ divorce; a young girl mistrustful, even suspicious, of the world of wealth that came with her mother’s second marriage; a skinny teenager, shunned by her schoolmates but equally awkward with the much older people in her acting and dance classes; and, finally, a would-be actress in the world’s most hedonistic city, with only some Midwestern values guiding the way — in short, a fish out of water?
The paradoxes start at the Plaza in New York, where Daryl and I are having lunch. Or trying to, anyway, Daryl Hannah may be the world’s only vegetarian who hates vegetables.
“This isn’t bad, this salad,” she says, digging in. “I mean, considering I don’t usually like green things. I still have that vegetable fear of childhood.” Hannah’s offbeat beauty is shining today, despite an amiably disheveled outfit that she’s afraid to unpeel. (“Do you think I’d be too casual if I took off my coat? I mean, this is like Annie Oakley goes to New York.”) Her reading glasses hang on a beaded string, like a librarian’s would. At last: an actress who doesn’t have a favorite designer. Thank God.
Hannah has called Madison the easiest role of her career “because she is close to the childlike side of me.” She recalls with relish her earliest attempts at mermaiddom: “My family went away a lot for Christmas vacations, and we used to go to this hotel in the Bahamas. And my friend and I used to play mermaid. Swear to God, we would tie our legs together and pretend we were mermaids in this beautiful pool. It had stairways that just drop off into the deep end, and you can pretend there are ships, you know? ‘Here’s the museum, here’s the ship, here’s the ocean. …'”
Hannah seems wholly at ease in the realm of fantasy and readily acknowledges that fairy tales rank high among her greatest inspirations. It’s the juxtaposition of the timelessness of legend and the yowsah-yowsah-yowsah hurly-burly of popular culture that produces Splash‘s funniest moments: Hannah, out of the ocean, walking wide-eyed through Bloomingdale’s, learning to speak English by watching television. How long, asks Madison’s understandably baffled boyfriend Allen (Tom Hanks), will she be able to stay with him? “Six fun-filled days,” she replies.
Hannah’s love of fantasy dates back to her days as a child in Chicago. Her parents divorced when Hannah was around seven, and she has little or no recollection of the next four or so years of her life. “I have a whole blank,” she says. (Her withdrawal was severe enough, she says, to warrant a diagnosis of “semi-autism.”) “I only remember when I was a kid in a house on a street with other houses; the next thing I knew we were living in a hotel and my mom was getting married.”
You could well argue that the most significant moment in Daryl Hannah’s life came in 1973, when Jupiter Industries chairman Jerry Wexler (brother of cinematographer Haskell Wexler) married Sue Hannah, and Daryl, together with sister Page and brother Don, left behind the middle-class life that she still cannot remember.
“Suddenly, I had my own huge room and my own bathroom, rather than all three of us sharing my brother’s bathroom,” she recalls. “I felt like someone had mistaken me for someone else — that they were going to give me back any day now.” Hannah laughs, but not blithely; the transition was not easy.
“It took me a long time to adjust — to realize that it was the way my life was going to be. For a long time, I had what you might call a paranoid or vivid imagination that it wasn’t real. I think that’s part of the reason I had such a desire to work: to make sure that, in case we were ever taken back, I would at least be able to support myself and my brother and sister.”
Adjust she did, though: There were trips to Europe, where she met ballerina Margot Fonteyn, to the Caribbean islands in the spring, to the family’s lavish estate (the kids’ house is apparently known as the “Rocket Ranch”) in the unsullied ski country of Colorado. Her life was as fantastic as any she might have imagined as a young child, yet she still clung to a fantasy life of her own.
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