The L Word =Love - Cynthia Summers

Volume 1 Number 2 • February 2009
34 gothe’s guide to the best bubble for the buck 39 party girl joy metcalfe 16 winds of change 12 CHOCOLATE kama sutra
13 FORD’S NEW FLEX 27 BURBERRY’S BOY WONDER 14 john maclachlan gray talks with john ince, who has sex on the brain
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WIN Vida Spa pampering for two at the Sutton Place Hotel! PAGE 17
The L Word
Love
=
Jennifer Beals,
TV gay role model,
and real-life Obama
advisor, glams it up
for myvancouver
as her world-changing
Vancouver-made series
enters its final season
From the
publishers of
myvancouver
Volume 1 Number 2 • February 2009
features
14
Q+EH?
JOHN INCE
Sex: what’s love got to do with it? What have politics, culture and social conditioning?
Not many in Vancouver have given as much thought to such questions – nor done as
much about them – as John Ince, the lawyer, author, educator, leader of the Sex Party and
entrepreneur who admits: “In my world, the sight of a woman’s ankle can still be a sexual
event.” Interview by John MacLachlan Gray. Photography by Zenaida Kwong
19
net worth
Market leader
Selling Vancouver property in this buyers’ market? Forget what you used to think it was
worth, then price ahead of the pack. By Peter Mitham. Illustration by Kathy Boake
14
21
MY VANCOUVER
LIZ BELL
Immigrant, mom, model agent. Photography by Robert Karpa
24
28
JENNIFER BEALS,
THE ORIGINAL
FLASHDANCER,
NOW L-WORD STAR,
UNEXPECTED ROLE
MODEL AND OBAMA
ADVISOR, TALKS TO
MYVANCOUVER
STYLE: luxury
THE NIGHT WATCH
A fine watch isn’t simply a handy way to tell the time – you can do that on your mobile
anyway. It’s an expression of good taste and style and in the case of the most sought-after
makes, it’s an appreciating asset. By Tony Whitney. Photography by Chris Haylett
19
28
COVER story
OUR MS. BEALS
Jennifer Beals’ second act, starring in Vancouver-shot The L Word and so unexpectedly
becoming a beacon for gay rights, suits the actress/activist who stumped for Barack Obama
and sees his election as something bigger than politics as usual.
mv
24
cover
departments
Photography by Kharen Hill.
Photo assistants: Jennifer
Houghton, Rob Seebacher, Geoff
Neufeldt. Photo equipmemt
supplied by beauphoto.com.
Stylist: Cynthia Summers.
Stylist’s assistant: Patti Bishop.
Hair: Paul Edwards for
sapphocosmetics.com.
Makeup: Joanne Fowler
for sapphocosmetics.com.
6 EDITOR Bob Mercer
8 IT HAPPENED ONE
Teal gown: Roberto Cavalli;
necklace: Liberty of London
blue scarab; shoes (not shown):
Guiseppe Zanotti; all from Holt
Renfrew, Vancouver.
8
11
12
13
14
16
17
myvancouvermag.ca February 2009
NIGHT
1981, Obolensky debut
RED REMEMBERS
Red Robinson’s Top 10
hits from yesteryears
intelligence
open house
What $11,500,000
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WHitney on
wheels
Tony Whitney
WHAT’S YOUR
SIGN?
Roxanna Bikadoroff
LIVING GREEN
Pamela Groberman
STREET LEVEL
Michelle Hopkins
22 the face
26
27
34
34
36
36
39
40
46
Photography by
Chris Haylett
the hit list
Jennifer Watton
CATWALK
Guy Babineau
best cellars
Jurgen Gothe
CAFE SOCIETY
Gary Barclay
CARE + FEEDING
Three squares
DINING GUIDE
Capsule reviews
Joy Joy Metcalfe
gallerista
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LYON’S GATE
Bernie Lyon
with Lee Bacchus
Fer tility
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( 604 422 7276
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Our
Jennifer Beals’ second act, starring in Vancouver-shot The L Word and so unexpectedly becoming a beacon for gay rights,
suits the actress/activist who stumped for Barack Obama and sees his election as something bigger than politics as usual
Ms.
Beals
Story by David Spaner
Photography by Kharen Hill
J
ennifer Beals found her second act in Vancouver.
Most actors wait forever for the iconic role that never comes.
For Beals, though, stardom came early, with Flashdance, the 1983
hit dedicated to the proposition that dancing will set you free.
Despite strong work in other films over the years, Beals continued to be identified with Flashdance. Then, in Vancouver, 20
years after her first iconic role, she created a second one – starring in The L Word, the television phenomenon dedicated to the
proposition that all lesbians, and everyone else, are created equal.
So popular is the shot-in-Vancouver Showtime series – which has just
begun its sixth and final season (airing Tuesdays at 7 p.m. on Showcase)
that its name has become a widely-used euphemism for lesbian.
“Yeah, it’s huge,” says Beals. “Really, globally, it’s been a really incredible
response.”
Beals first told me about The L Word over a lunch-time interview at the
Kitsilano Milestone’s in 2003. The show had just gone into production in
Vancouver. With its groundbreaking premise (a Sex and the City-style relationship series but with lesbian characters) and quality cast (for starters,
Beals, Pam Grier and Mia Kirshner), it seemed destined to become one of the
benchmark Vancouver TV series, alongside The X-Files and 21 Jump Street.
At the time, Beals was just beginning to grapple with the larger meaning of The L Word, and she would pause after some questions, as if unwilling
to say anything until she’d found words with a ring of truth. That search for
clarity is part of what makes Beals so unique in a profession that celebrates
celebrity and self-absorption. She is acutely aware that the world is larger
than her profession and herself, which brings her to campaign for Barack
Obama, study Buddhist philosophy and take roles in no-budget indie films.
But there are other sides to Beals, too, and the one that first responded to
28 myvancouvermag.ca February 2009
The L Word was all about her.
“To be totally honest, when I first read the pilot, I didn’t really think
about what will this mean socially, what will this mean culturally, what will
this mean for the gay community or for the community at large,” she now
says. “I just thought very selfishly as an actress.”
Beals was drawn to the complexity of her character, Bette Porter, a
strong-willed woman who worked as a curator at a Los Angeles art museum, but she had done some tepid television and was wary about jumping
into the small screen. So, she met with The L Word’s creator/producer Ilene
Chaiken, was impressed with her smarts and integrity, and signed on.
“When Jennifer and I both started this show, we had no idea it would
have the impact and the reach that it’s had,” says Chaiken. “Jennifer has
had a tremendous impact. She has become such an inspiration and role
model to so many women who never have seen themselves or their lives or
their aspirations represented on television.”
G
rowing up in Chicago, the daughter of an AfricanAmerican father who owned a grocery story and
Irish-American mother who taught school, Beals was
more voracious reader than star-struck movie fan (“I
remember having a big crush on Huckleberry Finn,”
she says). She also acted in student productions and
by 14 had an agent. Beals had barely started first-year classes at Yale University when she was cast in Flashdance, as a welder with dreams of dance
school. During her second term at Yale, the movie was released to tremendous fanfare. Beals was an instant cover girl, her bare-shouldered sweatshirt the style of the day.
Continued on page 32
February 2009 myvancouver 29
Our Ms. Beals
30 myvancouvermag.ca February 2009
Oscar de la Renta black gown with gold appliqué; Fendi black, strappy platform shoes;
David Yurman gold hoop earrings; all from Holt Renfrew. Jennifer Beals wears her own rings.
Dolce and Gabbana purple
satin bustier; Viola black seamed
stockings; Papillon Blanc black
satin garter belt; Agent Provocateur
black lace panties; Holt Renfrew
black fedora; Fendi thigh-high
grey suede boots; all from
Holt Renfrew.
Lanvin 2007 navy
cotton/wool-blend trenchcoat:
stylist’s own.
February 2009 myvancouver 31
Our Ms. Beals
from page 28
When a movie makes a splash like Flashdance, its young star can keep
doing what she’s doing or move to L.A. to pursue the opportunities.
“I had no intention of dropping out of school,” says Beals, “and woe to
the person who would suggest it to me. It’s just something I really loved.”
With her considerable acting chops and unique beauty, had Beals relocated to L.A. during the Flashdance mania, she might have wound up a
Julia Roberts-sized star.
“What’s the point of being a big movie star?” she says. “I mean, literally, at the end of the day, what’s the point of it?”
Beals, at 19, was more interested in exploring herself than chasing
fame. “If you’re interested in inquiry, a movie star isn’t perhaps the best
path. But if you go to university and you are exposed to a myriad of subjects and extraordinary teachers, then you’re more likely to go on that
path of inquiry. At least for me. I don’t think I could have made the pursuit
of movie stardom anything other than a misery.”
So, Beals finished her degree in literature. She met New York filmmaker Alex Rockwell, and the two were soon married, living in Manhattan
and working on In the Soup, a comic look at movie-making that would be
a Sundance hit in 1992. The sensibility that kept Beals at Yale put her in
sync with the independent film world, and she has kept one foot in indies,
appearing in such films as The Anniversary Party and Rodger Dodger.
Beals is also a working actress with a long resumé of TV and film work
between Flashdance and The L Word – some forgettable, some exceptional.
In the noirish Devil in a Blue Dress, for instance, Beals delivered a stunning,
Oscar-worthy performance as a sensitive-but-tough fatale enmeshed in
intrigue with private investigator Denzel Washington.
Beals’ home is the next place a good script takes her, so she is reticent
to says she lives any place. But not long after her breakup with Rockwell
in the mid-1990s, she got a place in L.A.
Her ties to Vancouver started shortly after when she met Maple
Ridge-reared Ken Dixon, who had worked on film crews. They married,
and had a daughter in 2005.
T
Beals saw in Obama an exhilarating way out of the Bush
years. ‘I’ve met him on several occasions. And he’s really the
person who looks you in the eye and talks to you and listens
to you, and remembers what you said the last time that you
met. And you just can’t even believe it because he’s met
thousands upon thousands of people. ... It’s more about a
movement than a political campaign.’
hese post-L Word days, Beals moves between homes
on the west side of Los Angeles and the west side of
Vancouver, undecided whether they’ll maintain a
place in Canada if she’s not shooting here.
“We haven’t really made a plan,” she says. “When I’m
not working, I do spend time here. Well, because my husband’s from here, we have family here. I love Vancouver. I would love to do
another series in Vancouver. I discovered triathlons in Vancouver – swimming in the ocean and running on trails and biking and . . .”
Maybe it’s a lesson derived from Beal’s onetime Yale classmate David
Duchovny, who found that joking about Vancouver, especially its weather,
can provoke the inner lynch mob in local rain-soaked media, but Beals
seems hard-pressed to find anything wrong with the city. (“I was in New
York a couple weeks ago and it started pouring down rain and everybody
started panicking, and I was like, ‘So what, it’s just rain.’”)
She can’t, however, resist mentioning just one thing: “I think somebody could help the architecture along,” she says. “Coming from Chicago,
it’s just really deplorable. It’s crazy because you have this amazing backdrop of the mountains and the ocean and you have so much to work with,
but nobody, I think, has given it the thought. It seems quite expedient. So
... but I do love being here.”
Having a black father and a white mother and being from Chicago,
voting for Obama must have almost been like voting for herself.
“I didn’t think of it that way,” Beals says with a laugh. “But it certainly resonated with me in a very personal way, especially since he was a
community organizer in Altgeld Gardens, which is where my father had
a store when I was a girl. But obviously you don’t campaign so hard for
someone – especially when you’re so much of a genetic hermit as I am
– just because they have a similar background.”
Beals activated for Obama last year and was invited to be on his
women’s policy committee. She saw in Obama an exhilarating way out
of the Bush years.
“It was this amazing possibility to have the dynamics of politics,
as they had been practised for the last eight years or more, completely
changed, because we were just in the politics of fear and there was no
Zac Pozen black gown;
YSL black-pattern
booties; Luc Kieffer
assorted bracelets;
King Baby men’s lion’s
head ring; all from
Holt Renfrew. Agent
Provocateur bra and
fishnet stockings.
sense of the community or a government for the people and by the people. And here was an opportunity to have someone who would lead but
who would also listen.
“I’ve met him on several occasions. And he’s really the person who
looks you in the eye and talks to you and listens to you, and remembers
what you said the last time that you met. And you just can’t even believe it because he’s met thousands upon thousands of people. ... It’s more
about a movement than a political campaign.”
Beals did not realize it at the time, but when she signed on to The
L Word, she was also signing on, in a sense, to the gay movement. Once
she knew what she had gotten herself into, she relished it, knowing that
somewhere, in the middle of nowhere, some girl who had identified herself as gay would find strength seeing herself represented on TV.
“It wasn’t until later that it dawned on me – I had had no idea this
was the first show of its kind and what does that mean. And for me what
it meant was that you have an enormous opportunity to be helpful to another group of people. That doesn’t mean that you in any way colour your
performance to be helpful. You be as honest as you possibly can be. And
the truth will be helpful.” mv
Photo assistants: Jennifer Houghton, Rob Seebacher, Geoff Neufeldt. Photo equipmemt supplied by beauphoto.com.
Stylist: Cynthia Summers. Stylist’s assistant: Patti Bishop. Hair: Paul Edwards for sapphocosmetics.com. Makeup: Joanne Fowler
for sapphocosmetics.com. Location thanks to Gwyn Roberts Management, Vogue Theatre, 918 Granville St., Vancouver.
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