Mickey Rourke is surrounded by cops. He looks over, winks and calls out: "I'll
be right there — just making a few new friends." He chats for a
few minutes, signs an autograph, lights up a Marlboro red and appears
genuinely at ease in the company of the blue-collar working man. Much more
at ease than he ever seemed in the company of movie stars. Here, on a
residential street in a dusty suburb outside Las Vegas, Rourke is hanging
out, waiting, in between takes of Tony Scott's latest film, Domino.
People remember Mickey Rourke as a riveting actor; he stood out as a maverick
refusing to be part of the Hollywood cloning system. He had the Brando aura:
sensitive and dangerous and unquestionably masculine. For a long time he
cultivated the power; it was familiar and comfortable — boxing, lifting
weights, picking fights, wooing women, riding Harleys, saying what he felt,
no matter what the consequences. He was a hell-raiser who didn't care what
anyone thought, and he paid a heavy price. He pissed off directors and
producers; it burnt bridges, cost him work.
Scott had to fight hard for Rourke to get the part. Studios were afraid to
work with him. "Yeah, there was some flavour-of-the-month c*** they
wanted for this part, but Tony went to bat for me. I found that out 10 days
ago. I was well behaved on the last few movies, and coming off working on
Robert Rodriguez's last movie, I didn't think he'd have to do that, but he
did."
Two months later, arriving at his house in Los Angeles, the first thing you
hear is seven small dogs yipping and yapping and woofing. They arrive in a
pack, gleefully tripping over each other, and Rourke appears at his front
door in torn blue jeans and tinted sunglasses, and shepherds them out into
the yard. He is tall and solid and moves with the swagger of a tough guy
who's tired of fighting.
The modest two-bedroom house in which he lives alone is rented, tucked away in
seclusion in the hills of Los Angeles. Rourke has learnt to control himself,
but his masculinity remains conspicuous and intact. So the little dogs seem
incongruous. The contradiction is glaring: the tiny chihuahua in muscular
arms. But the reason he's drawn to them is simple: small dogs, he says, live
longer than big dogs. And he gets very attached.
"Come on, honey," he purrs. For a second I think he is talking to
me, but he's addressing Ruby Baby, who I'll
later find out is the needy one.
His looks are far less imposing and surreal than they used to be. He still
works out every day at the gym, but more out of boredom and the need for
routine. He is healthy and fit. The surgery to his face (four operations in
total — rebuilt cartilage in his nose, repairing a fractured cheekbone) has
distorted his looks and helped keep his age a mystery — between 48 and 52?
There is a heap of vitamins in a plastic box on the coffee table next to the
pack of Camel Lights. He's trying to cut back on the Marlboros. There is a
book on the regime he's following — the new millennium-diet revolution — and
he talks about rebuilding the immune system. The sunglasses stay on because
he has conjunctivitis. He got it originally from the Vaseline and the
leather in the boxing days and now it reappears when he gets his make-up
done for movies. All I can think is: did he shake my hand? "It's not
contagious," he says, dabbing away dripping fluid with a tissue.
"But I told my agent it is," he laughs.
A few minutes pass before he introduces me to Little Mickey. (No, it's not
what you think.) Little Mickey was on death row at Chihuahua Rescue, and on
his cage was a sign that said: "Do not touch. Bites." When Rourke
picked him up, he bit off a piece of his lip. (He points out the scar. Next
to the scar from a boxing punch.) So blood's pouring out, like a pint of
blood. They get him some ice. They thought he would sue them. He said: "I'll
take him."
"He'd been abused. Somebody beat the shit out of him — for years."
Rourke tells me this story while stroking the now-docile dog that sits on
his lap. "You could look at this one's face and know he had a rough
life."
The same could be said for Mickey Rourke. The turbulent story of his life has
played out on his face. In the early days of Diner and Rumble Fish, it
conveyed depth in its youth; there was always a menacing smile. Then it
matured into movie-star seductive, interesting and deviantly sexual in 9½
Weeks, Angel Heart, and Barfly. But a vacancy crept in. The soullessness of
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man mirrored Rourke's own ambivalence. So
he fled back to boxing, something he'd done before acting. Why did he choose
to beat up his face? Maybe too much of his face had become a business.
For a number of years, people would look at his face, swollen from the harm
inside and out, and they would wonder: what happened? It wasn't just the
emotional scars from his past or the literal scars from the ring: it was
altered, alarming, and he knew it too. "I looked in the mirror one day
and went, 'Holy shit.' I just had too much armour. Physical armour. It was
the overtraining at the gym and what was going on in my head. It was scary.
No wonder when I walk through a restaurant, people whisper, 'Oh Jesus,
what's going to happen here?' It was my whole essence, really." People
didn't know what to think. The reports of violent behaviour, the transformed
face and bulked-up body, the attitude that went with it — all of it fed the
public's perception of him having gone off the rails.
This was several years ago. He was trying to get a job, living in Venice,
California, at the time. And there was a seismic shift; a moment when he saw
what others saw and why people were afraid to hire him. That day he knew he
belonged in therapy. So it began. The road to wellness.
He had nothing to lose; he'd lost everything already.
"You wake up one day and everything is gone. Your respectability, your
money, everyone you care about. You're alone. You call up and try to get a
table at a restaurant, and you can't. It went on for a long time. It's a
dark hole, where I would pray to God. I mean, literally, on my knees, where
I would say, 'Please can you just send me a little bit of daylight?' I
always thought it would go away. There would be a little bit of hope, but
then boom, it was black again."
He thought it would take six months of therapy and he'd be okay. Now it's
going on eight years. It's been eight years since he's done anything that
would put him in jeopardy. Eight years since he's been to Paris, where he
could run around, "sightsee," he says with a naughty smile. Eight
years since he's ridden a motorcycle (even though he has one in the garage)
or been to New York or had a significant romantic relationship. He lives
full time in LA now, a place he despises, sequestering himself to stay out
of trouble.
"But I always have to say, 'I'm not gonna go down those streets, I'm not
gonna go into that club, I'm not gonna go into that restaurant and I'm not
gonna make eye contact the way I used to.' So I'm not setting myself up for
an incident."
He has placed himself in emotional quarantine, living an abbreviated
existence, because he wants to come back. "What else am I going to do?"
He has the discipline and has made the commitment to change, even though he
didn't want to. He had to, he says, because he's Catholic. "If I wasn't
Catholic I probably would have blown my brains out." He was broke, had
sold his motorcycles, his cars, was two steps from getting a construction
job, a hairdresser friend in Beverly Hills was giving him a hundred dollars
a week to eat on; some days he didn't have gas money. This went on for three
years. He lived in a studio apartment in LA for $700 a month — enough to
make anyone contemplate suicide, let alone an actor who once earned $2.6m
for a film (1991's Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man).
The fall from grace was extreme. Bit by bit, dog by dog, a story unfolds.
Rourke lovingly pets Little Mickey — only that's not his name any more. "I
felt ridiculous going, 'Here, Little Mickey, Little Mickey.'" His new
name is Jaws. Just then, he touches him in the wrong place and the dog
starts snarling. "See? He's never gonna trust anybody."
His manner, so placid, suggests a mellower state of mind. He looks annoyed. "I
really hate that word. I'll never be mellow, okay? I'd rather be dead than
mellow. You might as well take me out back and shoot me in the back of the
head before I'm gonna be mellow."
What then? Calmer? "Contained. Let's put it this way: I was very happy
when my brother Joe said he was glad I changed. Coming from him it meant a
lot to me. He should have been more worried about what was going on with him."
His younger brother died last October from cancer. "The little things
don't bother me any more."
For example? "It has to do with little tiny shit that gets under your
skin. Business stuff. It's like... the word 'actress'. You know. Cate
Blanchett is an actress. Paris Hilton is not a f***ing... I mean, how can
they use that same f***ing word? You see what gets under my f***ing skin?
You know? It's shit like that. It would make me go off."
He admits he would short-circuit. "It was never drugs and booze.
Everybody likes to say that, but no. On my brother Joe." Steroids? "What
about them?" he asks.
"I never took steroids till I was finished fighting. After I was done
boxing. Afterwards I took testosterone shots, because after 34 your
testosterone level goes down, and if you're monitored by a doctor and get a
testosterone shot, it's fine. No, it wasn't drugs and alcohol. It was rage.
It's easier for people to label you. But rage is very intimidating. And it
was something I cultivated. An intimidation-factor thing. It was a macho
thing too."
Rourke was born in upstate New York and was six years old when his father, an
amateur body builder, left. His mother married a police officer with five
sons of his own and moved Mickey, his younger brother and their sister to
Florida. He grew up in Liberty City, a Miami ghetto of street violence,
drugs and poverty. It was the world he became comfortable in, where macho is
what you had to be to get by. He won't talk about his past, but the
determination to avoid it is futile. The violent home he grew up in, the
chaotic streets, the need to protect and intimidate — it's a history he
can't avoid.
He thinks for a long time when asked if he's introspective, before finally
arriving at the conclusion: "My mind don't work that way." But
then, as soon as he says this, he embraces the chance to explore it further.
"It depends on the person. The bravest person I ever met in my life was
my brother. And I miss him terribly. I wonder where he is right now. I think
about that a lot. I think about if I'm gonna see him again. I think about if
he's with me. I remember when he was sitting here really sick before I took
him to Mexico. He looked at me and he says, 'You changed, bro. You're not so
crazy.' And I knew it was relief to see me not off the wall."
On the mantel there are several photos of Joe: Joe with Mickey in New Orleans,
Joe on his Harley. There's a shrine with rosaries and a lit candle that will
continue to burn. "I think of him every night. He suffered. He didn't
want to go." The emotions are still raw. Rourke lifts his sunglasses
and wipes his eye. I can't tell if it's a tear or the infection.
Regrets loom large in Rourke's life. "I never liked my brother's wife,"
he says. "And I made peace with her so I could be with him the last two
weeks. I knew he needed me with him. And I did what I needed to do."
In spite of the fact that he and Joe were extremely close, there was a period
when they didn't speak for four or five years because of a particular
incident. Rourke hesitates.
"I don't know if I want it in the article."
Joe needed a big operation and Rourke was in LA. He didn't have the money to
buy a plane ticket home to Miami. Joe's wife got on the phone: "She
started calling me a loser and a has-been, and I couldn't tell her that I
didn't have the money for an airplane ticket. And uh... it really pissed me
off that she said those things." When I ask if this can be written
about, he shrugs. "I don't care."
His brother had cancer on and off since he was 17. When he was told he had six
months to live, Rourke says he knew he wouldn't make it this time. "Every
night I'd lie on this couch and think, 'My younger brother is dying.' I
mean, I took him to Mexico and tried the stem-cell thing, but there was a
part of me that sensed... I'd always gotten him out of trouble but I
couldn't save him this time."
Two days after Joe died, the director Tony Scott called. "We shared some
shit and he told me he had a brother that died too." He credits Scott
with saving him from slipping backwards, giving him work to go to.
The affection with which he speaks about Scott is childlike and endearing. It
happens when he speaks of other men he respects too — directors such as Alan
Parker or Adrian Lyne — and it's striking because so much of Rourke's past
was about fighting authority figures.
"He wasn't difficult, he was naughty," says Parker. "He admired
rock'n'roll stars. He didn't want to be a movie star. To him, movie stars
were Harrison Ford and people that he didn't like. He wanted to be David
Bowie."
Adrian Lyne once said: "If Mickey had died after Angel Heart, he would
have been bigger than James Dean. He was extraordinarily lovable. And when
he did behave in a naughty way, he was infinitely forgivable. I would love
to work with him again. He's the same actor."
It's been written that Rourke's stepfather bullied him and his brother, and he
never knew his biological father until he walked up to him when he was 26
and introduced himself. It was the early 1970s and he was about to do his
final audition for the prestigious Actors Studio, one of five students they
took out of thousands who applied. He had to do a scene between a father and
a son and he couldn't relate to a father figure, so his acting coach
suggested he find him. He called his mother, who made some phone calls. He
got a number and went to upstate New York.
"I called up this bar where he was spending time. They told me he had
left to go get something to eat. And he was in the restaurant that I was
calling from. Pretty wild.
He was there. I didn't know he was there. There were only about four or five
people in the restaurant and I looked at this man and I went, that's him,
right there. I went back to the phone and I called the bar back and asked
what he was wearing, and they told me what he was wearing.
"He walked out of the restaurant and stood at the corner, but when the
light changed, he didn't cross the street. Finally — I couldn't f***ing
move, my legs were shaking — and I went up and I said, 'Hey, I'm so and so,
are you so and so?' and he said, 'Yeah.' And then he f***ing took a drag and
said, 'I always knew you'd come by one day.' And we spent four or five hours
together and that was it."
He says he got out of it everything he needed and he never saw him after that.
But seeing Rourke with his dogs, I ask if he's made a conscious decision not
to have children. He pauses. He points to the glass front door and on the
other side is the tilted, anguished face of a jet-black pug. The dog is
whimpering.
Rourke smiles. "See that? That dog is the worst. That dog is a miserable
c***. He really is. Undisciplined. This f***ing dog. He doesn't listen. He
annoys all the other dogs. He still shits everywhere. He jumps up when other
dogs are resting. These other little dogs hate him. Everyone hates him.
Look. Look at him. He's got the whole yard to play in and all he wants to do
is sit there and look miserable."
"But here's the deal. I can't get rid of him. Because I took
responsibility for him. He's my little dog. I'm not gonna get rid of the
dog. I'm not gonna give him away. Because that's what happened to me. My
mother gave me away to somebody else — who abused my brother and me for
years. And if it goes on for years and years, you're better to take that
person outside and put a bullet in the back of their head. Because you don't
get over it. You don't get over the Halloween 3 that goes on for a
decade-plus. So it's like... It would be very easy... Most people would have
given this f***ing dog away already. He's useless. But he's mine. And I love
him and take care of him and I put up with his shit because I took
responsibility for him. Okay? So if I ever have a kid, that's the way it
would be."
Rourke revisits the subject of his brother. Towards the end of his life there
was a hospice nurse here at the house. One night she took Rourke aside and
asked to talk to him. "I went in the kitchen and had a cup of coffee
with her and she said, 'I gotta tell you something. Joe shouldn't still be
here. Do you know why he's not ready to go? Because he's worried about you.
You have to tell him it's okay for him to go.' Man, that hit me. I was
shaking. I went back in the bedroom and I put my arms around him and said,
'Hey, bro. I know how painful it is.' I told him how much I loved him and
everything. And I said, 'If you gotta go somewhere right now,' I said, 'you
go ahead and go there and I'll meet you there later on sometime.' I said,
'But if you gotta go now, that's okay, 'cause I'll be okay, you understand?'
And he took these weird kind of breaths and died in my arms.
"Once I was in the bedroom with him, it was okay. But the walk from the
kitchen to the bedroom was murder. It was absolute f***ing murder. I thought
I'd seen it all. Nothing will ever be like that."
He lights a cigarette and exhales a long line of smoke. "That's changed
me greatly in a lot of different ways. A lot of shit's just not that
important any more. Because Joe's gone."
There has always been an inferno of rage inside Mickey Rourke, and in 1993,
when a promoter talked him into boxing, he went back to it. He had boxed
before he became an actor, as a teenager, training at the Fifth Street Gym
in Miami, where Muhammad Ali worked out. He enjoyed the training and the
camaraderie of the guys in the gym. He was, he says, never afraid of getting
hit — his only fear was in the dressing room before the fight.
It was painful for him to give it up. He was 38 at the time. "The doctor
made it really f***ing clear to me. I was excited — three fights away from
moving up to cruiserweight division and fighting for a championship belt.
They wanted me to go up 15lb, where the competition wasn't that great, so I
had a chance. But the doctor said, 'Mickey, forget about it. It's over. You
failed the neurological. It's over.'"
He went back to acting and all the doors were closed. He missed having
something to do every day — somewhere to go, being around the guys. The
memory loss has improved and while he has nerve damage in his fingers when
he holds out his hands, which have a slight tremor, they don't look too
ruined. He still goes to the gym every day and hits the speed bag, but it's
not the same — and the adrenaline rush is gone.
Rourke's circle now is nonexistent. He hangs out with nobody. Relies on
nobody. He has one or two good friends — not actors ("not my cup
of tea") — and is still close to his ex-wife, the model Carré Otis.
They met during the erotic film Wild Orchid, had a volatile and passionate
romance, married in 1992, and have been on and off since. He confesses he
feels lonely. "To be honest with you, there's not a lot I do." But
women are around, right? There's a mischievous look. "I'm very
particular. I have people come over sometimes, but normally I don't want
them to stay overnight. I don't date."
Is it that he's not ready to let love in? "Don't know." Hung up on
somebody else? "Could be." He's talked before about how Otis is
the one love of his life. "I'm not gonna open up to just anyone. I got
a doctor I can open up to. There's nothing I feel I have to share with some
woman in a relationship right now.
"Uh," he says, shifting uncomfortably in his seat, "I think
because I got all the dogs, it fills the gap."
Rourke talks about guys who, when their relationships don't work, have a new
girlfriend two months later. He shakes his head. "I don't work that way."
Just then, a playful smirk appears as he reaches for a sip of water. "Means
I end up with Russian strippers."
When asked if people worry about him, he looks perplexed. "People? What
people? There aren't that many people around. Put it this way, I don't have
that many friends who really know what's going on with my life. It's nothing
that I talk about. This is the most I've talked with anybody about it. I'm
not looking for a girlfriend. I'm not looking for a relationship. I'm not
looking for a Band-Aid. I'm not looking for something to take the place of
something." He lets out a resigned sigh. "Besides, look what town
I'm in." The dogs race in and Rourke excuses himself to put some more
eye drops in. When he's finished, he returns to the subject of violence. He
tells me he knows now that there are repercussions to his actions.
"Look, if you grow up in a certain area — it's a neighbourhood thing, an
accepted mentality — there are no repercussions when you cross the line. You
just act upon it. But you don't realise that until you've made some pretty
shitty mistakes. When I found certain people were giving my old lady — my
ex-wife — drugs, I would walk right into a place and do what I had to do,
okay? But the next day you lose a major movie 'cause it's in all the
newspapers."
Repercussions, responsibility, consequences — these are words that were not in
his lexicon, but that he's using
a lot these days. "I don't have another f***ing 10 years to be out of
work. So it's important for me to be consistent
with controlling myself.
"I think Joe left me something. His spirit. As long as I can work with
people I'm excited about working with, it will be okay. I just can't work
for the pay cheque."
Several hours have passed and Rourke tells me he has an eye-doctor appointment
he has to go to. Then he will come home, eat some dinner, maybe watch a
movie before leaving for Texas in the morning to do some additional work on
another film he has coming out. This is his life. Dogs, doctors and staying
out of trouble. And now, after all the years of work and change he's gone
through, when he looks in the mirror, what does he see? He is silent,
submerged in his search for an honest response. "What I see," he
says, "is a stranger."
