Cameron Diaz

On a road trip to the desert, Cameron Diaz opens up to Robert Sullivan about being Hollywood's green queen, enduring heartbreaks, and taking on unexpected roles.

Photographed by Mario Testino.
The main thing you need to know about Cameron Diaz, should she pick you up at your hotel in Los Angeles and drive you to Palm Springs, is that Cameron Diaz is an excellent driver. Really. Top-notch. This is big news because, let's face it, you never know what to expect when you get in a car with a movie star; movie stars are, by definition, people who get driven around in cars, which means that there's a good chance their car-driving skills have atrophied, if they ever had them. This is not the case with Cameron Diaz. She has retained her driving skills. At the wheel of her Prius, she is not too fast, not too slow, but steady. If you want to turn on the light for a second to look around for a pen, that's OK. "You can leave it on," she says. "I'm fine."

In other words, you can relax when Cameron is at the wheel, as she drives through Hollywood, past Silver Lake, sneaking onto the freeway, the I-10. She has jumped in the car after a long day, but once her engine turns over, she is calm and collected. She learned to drive in Southern California, in her family's VW Camper van, a car that had been customized by her father. A friend confirms her driving prowess. "She's incredibly capable," her friend says. "You feel like nothing would happen even if she did drive you 300 miles an hour."

This feels true as Cameron merely crests the speed limit on the I-10, and don't forget: The way a person handles a car says a lot about a person. She's cool, car-wise, and if you tell her so—because how many headlines have you seen about celebrity driving that don't also involve a mug shot?—she thanks you.

"I appreciate that," Cameron says. She smiles and then adds, "I hope that you feel safe in my hands."

Wait, how does that sound? A little sinister? Especially coming from a person driving you-are-not-exactly-sure-where, since you, the reporter, didn't bother with directions; she was the one who said she'd get you there? Well, don't worry; after uttering these words, Cameron Diaz laughs. And, yes, she has a great laugh. If you mention to anyone you know that you just met Cameron Diaz, they are likely to ask if she's as nice as she seems, the centerpiece of her niceness being the laugh, which is an all-out laugh, a full-throttle, 70-mph-on-an-empty-highway-late-at-night laugh. Speaking of which, now that she is on the I-10, she notices a guy behind her, some jerk flaring halogen high beams and blinding the 36-year-old star of There's Something About Mary, The Mask, What Happens in Vegas, and the Shrek trilogy (which, as of next year, will be a quartet).

"He's getting closer!" she says.

Where many Americans on the road would be annoyed and act aggressively in response, Cameron Diaz just blinks, moves slowly right, and offers no insulting gestures as the guy cruises by. "How 'bout that, buddy?" she says, smiling. As the jerk moves on, she continues talking—a late-night conversation on the way to the desert. During which, at some point, we get a little lost, though it was my fault, really.

Cameron Diaz is having a short vacation, some time away. If you'd taken calls from her earlier that day, from a meeting that went late, stacked up on top of other meetings that had also gone late, you would feel exhausted just contemplating her schedule. You might have suspected that she wanted to call off the trip. But here she is, ready to go, grabbing an insulated mug of soup that she will sip while on the road. She's back at the box office, too, and probably destined for her usual big box-office numbers. Last year, What Happens in Vegas opened at number two, typical Diaz romantic-comedy gold, featuring Ashton Kutcher as a guy she accidentally marries and Dennis Miller as a judge who sentences the couple to a year of cohabitation.

When movie execs think of her, they naturally think green, and we're not talking about the ecologically sensitive kind of green. We're talking dough. When everyone else thinks of her, they are likely to think of the noncurrency kind. In her (hybrid electric) car, you recognize right away that she seems to think of herself as falling somewhere in between. Her recent MTV series, Trippin', was a travelogue that explored environmental concerns, a celebrity twist on the nature shows of the sixties, with Cameron taking the rapper DMX camping in Yellowstone, or Eva Mendes to explore Nepal. A New York Times critic praised Cameron for combining "school and recess" in the series: "She has learned to speak authoritatively about siltation and dynamite fishing and overpopulation, all in her surfer-girl vernacular." She wasn't using the show to make herself more of a star; she was using her celebrity to lure young people to the cause of conservation.

Which is something to note about Cameron Diaz early in the trip, before we get too far from L.A.: She's clearly not looking to be a poster girl for the environmental movement. She is there for the environment if it needs her, buying carbon offsets with no great fanfare, making ecologically sensitive shopping choices quietly and happily. She is trying hard not to preach or scold. Of her Prius she says, "It's just a car." She has had one for years, before they became (her dream come true) popular. "It's just a choice people can make."

She pauses to confirm one of her own choices—that is, she makes a call for directions. "Hey," she says. She's calling a friend she's meeting up with in Palm Springs. "Just checking," she says. "I'm taking the I-10 to 110, right?" Pause. "Cool," she says. "OK, perf! Great. Thanks."

What she is eager to talk about on the road is, quite naturally, her new film, out this month. It's called My Sister's Keeper, and if you were to describe it in a too-fast kind of way, you might say it is about the death of a child. But if you were to describe it in a more leisurely manner—in a far-right-lane kind of way—you could say it is about a family, and how that family deals with the death of a child, and with the painful machinations of the heart. "It's about falling in love," she says, eyes on the road. "It's about all different kinds of love. Parents falling in love with their children. Children falling in love with their parents. Falling in love for the first time. Falling in love with being a teenager. All of the things that you fall in love with, that our hearts give way to over a lifetime, and then the heartbreaks when those things get taken away."

It sounds like too much for one film, but the director, Nick Cassavetes, has taken what might be a melodramatic courtroom drama and fashioned a rich portrait of a family as it responds to a child with cancer. Abigail Breslin plays Anna, the dying girl's sister, who narrates the film. Anna is eleven and has endured years of medical procedures to prolong her sister's life. Anna was conceived as a genetically engineered child, a bone-marrow-donor match (something that is in fact medically possible today). As the film opens, she questions her role as her sister's life-support system. Cameron plays her mother, a fierce attorney who has given up her practice to concentrate exclusively on Kate, her older daughter, who is dying of leukemia.

"It was very cut-and-dried for me, as far as the mother's motivation," Cameron says. "This is a woman who does not waver." Cameron saw the mother as a relentless fighter. "I mean, that's not something you want to accept about anybody you love—particularly if you are a mother," she says. "That's what I held on to as I was telling her story. You are a parent. You fight to keep your child alive, no matter what it takes." She moves slowly to pass a truck. "I've seen what parents will do just for, you know, a frickin' autograph." A burst of full-throttle laughter.

One of the people she talked to as she researched the role was the director; Cassavetes has dealt with some of the issues in the film, which he also co-wrote, based on the novel by Jodi Picoult. "I have a sick kid of my own," he says, "and I really fell in love with the notion of telling the story of how a family deals with the illness and death of a child." Asked about casting Cameron, he describes a certain counterintuitiveness. "You know," Cassavetes says, "I don't believe she'd ever played a mother, but there's something so innately human about her, and—I mean this in the best way—there's something so vulnerable about her. And when your kid gets sick, you realize how powerless you are. And Cameron reminded me of that fragility, even though she's a dynamo. In this movie, she's the type of mother that I would want to have if I got sick."

For her part, Cameron says she was really conjuring up Cassavetes, a dad who would never give up. "I am really playing Nick in the movie," she says. "I am playing a six-foot-seven, tattooed, mean mad dog. He understood it intimately, because it's his experience."

"Put it this way," Cassavetes says. "When your kid is sick, the time for being polite has passed; it's time to get people well. But do you know what? Cameron gets pigeonholed that the thing she does well is make people laugh, and, as with all actors, people like to think that you are your character. And they picture Cameron as kind of dippy and airy and fun and beautiful. But she's a very successful woman who finds time to work not only at her profession but for global causes and for her family.

"I'll tell you something about Cameron," he goes on. "If you were going to build a female movie star as a bionic robo actress, you would build her. She's beautiful. She's athletic. The camera loves her. She's free and easy. She understands the process. The crew loves her, and she's a hard worker."

With My Sister's Keeper, she appears to have gone above and beyond the call: During filming Cameron's father, Emilio, died. He was young, just 58, when he died suddenly of pneumonia. The film shut down for a short time, and then she returned to work. "I think," Cameron says, "emotionally.…" She pauses as she dwells on the psychological impact the film had on her. "It definitely took its toll. Definitely."

"I mean, I remember when some of my own family died," says Cassavetes, still impressed that Cameron returned to work. "It's like, What are you going to do? When somebody dies, you're just left with you."

Cameron later told her friends that it was comforting to return to the cast and crew, after having grown to care for them.

"It's the human experience," she says of death as we finally leave the L.A. traffic behind. "You know, that's what the heart does. Things are given to us, and things are taken away. And I think the heart becomes stronger, more capable."

What do you talk about on an hours-long road trip late at night with a movie star? You talk about other trips, of course. In Cameron's case, she remembers her first trips as a kid, on a plane, with her sister, to Tampa, to visit her father's parents in the old Cuban neighborhood. "Spending a month in Tampa with your Cuban grandmother is like—well, we weren't allowed to go outside, because you would either get kidnapped or break an arm." More C.D. laughter. "So you spent a lot of time inside, playing cards, eating steak and rice and beans and drinking RC Cola and watching soap operas. It was a bit of a void for a few weeks, and then we would end up at an island in the Gulf that we'd go to, and we would be there for a week and a half, and that was just glorious."

She talks about taking a cross-country train after filming There's Something About Mary. "I just had this urge to see what was in between the takeoff and the landing," she says. "I was all by myself, and I had my camera and my books, and I read and wrote and took a bunch of photographs out the window and sat in the dining car and talked to people." Staring into fewer and fewer taillights, she reminisces about being a model in Japan when she was sixteen, when the look was Courteney Cox in Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" video, and biker boots, jeans, and T-shirts; about filming in Paris in the early nineties ("It was big hair, lots of lips, lots of eyeliner"); about wearing those corduroy O.P. shorts as a kid while camping with her pop in the VW van. "We used to drive up north to Sequoia when I was a kid," she says. "We used to camp a lot."

She recalls filming What Happens in Vegas in New York City, and thinking, That's it—I have to live here. Now she splits her time between New York and L.A., having recently bought a place in Manhattan—which prompts a fashion aside, regarding layers and the difference between dressing for L.A. and New York. "The underlayer would be what you would wear in L.A. without the overlayer," she says. "But the shoes are always so important in New York, aren't they? I mean, it's just important to be wearing comfortable shoes in New York because all you do is walk."

Speaking of environmentally friendly travel, I ask: Isn't that a great thing about New York?

"It's the best thing ever!" Cameron replies, but she does not stop. "New York is the best city in the world, no doubt about it. No other city possesses what New York possesses."

It could be considered to possess a logistical convenience to England, the country her boyfriend is from. The British press has lately reported that she and Paul Sculfor, a model, are shopping for a country house close to his parents in Upminster, Essex. There were even rumors that they might be scouting potential wedding spots. But on this trip, they remain rumors—the paparazzi-scarred actress (she has successfully sued the National Enquirer and The Sun and had a famous altercation with paparazzi while dating Justin Timberlake) deftly keeps the talk to larger love affairs. "I was just really thinking, I can't be away from New York. I'm having a major love affair with it right now."

Then she pulls off the interstate and onto state route 111. After a while, we hit the strip in Palm Springs, the old downtown. A woman is singing "Lady Marmalade" at an outdoor restaurant called Café 285. "Palm Springs is really a spa situation," Cameron says. "You come up here with your mom and your sister and some girlfriends for, like, a little girl getaway. It's nice and relaxing. Get some sun, hang out. I haven't done it in a long time, and you just reminded me that I needed to do that."

We pass places she has known since she was a teenager. "You used to be able to buy a T-shirt that said I LOVE PS on it," she says. Then: "I came down here in junior high for spring break—and in that parking lot over there.…" More trademark Cameron Diaz laughter. "I won't tell you."

This prompts a few annoying questions from me about high school, junior high school, and her vacationless life at the moment, and then more musings from her. "Right now, making a movie would be a vacation for me!" she says.

And there—I've done it. I've distracted her. We stop at a gas station on the outskirts of town, me inside asking a guy at the counter how far I've caused her to overshoot the spa, her checking the air pressure in her tires (one is a little low). You see? I wasn't kidding about feeling safe. I apologize for distracting her. "It's OK," she says. A few minutes later, she pulls up to the place, the Parker Palm Springs. "Wow!" she says. "This looks amazing."

You wake up in the desert under a startlingly beautiful clear sky, and you look up at the mountains, which are dusted with snow and surrounded by palm and cactus green, and eventually you look out to a peak and see Cameron Diaz posing for the camera—because, OK, it's not all play on a trip to Palm Springs with Cameron Diaz. There are a few photos to be taken, and though it is work to be photographed in Palm Springs, Cameron Diaz makes it look easy. Among her friends on hand is the makeup artist Gucci Westman, whom the fashion familiar know as the wife of David Neville, fashion director of Rag & Bone. Gucci is also the global artistic director of Revlon. She and Cameron became friends, ironically, around the time that Westman was intentionally making Cameron look drab in the Spike Jonze film Being John Malkovich. This involved thickened eyebrows, prosthetic teeth, dingy hair color, et cetera. They became friends on account of chemistry. "She's a Virgo; I'm a Libra," says Westman. "We have a funny relationship—when we are working together, she will try to tell me what to do, but I don't listen to her. She's the kind of a person who will do dishes in a hotel."

Westman says she is often amazed by her friend. "She's incredibly capable, and she's very good at multitasking. If there's something she doesn't know how to do, she will make it her project to learn it and learn it really well. Like, she learned how to snowboard in a weekend. Now she could basically compete. Same thing with anything she picks up. She just pushes herself and doesn't believe anything can stop her." And yet, Westman says, Cameron's conscientiousness does not take away from her overall fun-lovingness. "She's a total girl's girl. And she's the person who's fine, doesn't complain, and doesn't talk about herself. She's the person who's conscious of being present and listening to other people. And she's probably the person, of all my friends, whom I would call first if something went wrong. She is reliable to a fault. Just incredibly reliable, and loyal, and just a super, superaware friend."

At this moment, Cameron is also the person on the rocks in the desert sun in a Stella McCartney bikini, a caravan of photo people trailing down the mountain behind her. She is the one in the Phillip Lim silk dress (made in an environmentally sensitive manner), surrounded by bougainvillea. Base camp for the photo shoot is a beautiful mid-century house in the cliffs, and as the sun sets and she prepares to leave, Cameron meets the owners, who ask her to draw a picture for charity, a heart. Her hand makes a large arc—her heart is bigger than the small canvas. "My heart's too big," she says, apologetically, though this seems impossible.

That night in Palm Springs, Cameron goes out with some friends for Mexican food down on the strip. It's a regular place, with an excellent eighties-cover band. People are dancing. Cameron and Gucci are laughing and ordering chips. Among friends, anyway, she is relaxed about her movie career. "It's been fifteen years now, and I really feel like I'm just understanding it," she says. "You know, the toolbox is just taking shape. And I like that because, if you are lucky, life's a long journey, and I love the learning process. There are so many movies that I still want to make, so many different kinds."

At this point, she seems especially happy to have taken on a role that's unexpected, as in My Sister's Keeper. "People who put labels on themselves limit themselves," she says. "If you are a woman who's been labeled as a sex symbol, for instance—I mean, I am not saying that's the label people would apply to me. But if you see yourself that way, inevitably you get to a point when you are no longer a sex symbol. And if you can't move past that, you're putting a limit on yourself; you're arresting your development. And that's where I think a lot of women get in trouble.

"It's a journey," she adds in a mock-heavy stoner accent. "It's a total journey." After the laughter subsides, she goes on. "But it's also true. I mean, I'm not 25 years old anymore, nor do I want to be. I wouldn't even want to go back to being 30. You know what I mean? That journey—I've done it already. I don't want to do it again. It's a lot of work to get through it, and I am excited about moving forward. I think that people get caught up in getting back to some place that they already passed. Or to a place where you cannot stay."

If you pull Cameron's girlfriend aside later and ask her the ultimate question—"Is Cameron Diaz happy?"—Westman doesn't blink. "Yeah," she says. "She has this inner sort of joy. She can crack herself up. And she likes to have a good time. I think her father's passing away has brought a kind of awareness to life. And I think she realized that life is short and you'd better make the best of it."

And Cameron seems happy at the Mexican restaurant—she eats and laughs, and you have to fight her for the salsa—and when everyone heads back to the spa, we walk around the back, smelling jasmine in the garden. In the light of the torches, you can see the little plants blooming in the springtime of the desert. "See what I mean," she says. "They're beautiful!"

We also gaze at the stars in the dark desert sky, a lot of them. Turns out, if you spot a constellation, Cameron knows it—like Orion. "And there's where his sword is raised," she says. Can I just say how nice that is? Yes, it's a good thing when a movie star knows how to drive well, especially if she's driving you to the desert. But it's even better when a star knows the stars. It's hope for the universe—or for Hollywood, at least.