Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 1, 1993 TAG: 9311020025
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By EILEEN DASPIN NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"She's a little weird."
But if you think about it, someone who has written what Anne Rice has written should be more than a little weird. Really out there, in fact.
How else could she produce such bizarre, blood-spattered tales about witches and vampires, filled with endlessly brutal and horrific images?
Or her Beauty trilogy - published under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure - that delves into hard-core S&M, dominance and submission?
Even her historical work, "Cry to Heaven," about Italy's 18th-century castrati, was kinky.
But the disappointing truth is that Anne Rice is no Morticia Addams. She is just a good storyteller who knows her market.
Sex and violence sell.
Rice recently signed a three-book, $17 million contract with Knopf, eclipsing her previous two-book, $5 million deal.
She has a town house in the Florida panhandle, a condo in Miami, an apartment in New York and two sprawling Victorian mansions in New Orleans.
She gets squired around town in a hearselike limousine complete with tuxedoed driver, a tiny Sony Trinitron and VCR.
She's just bought her own haunted house - a 47,000-square-foot orphanage, built in 1865 - and is converting it into a family compound with four towers, its own private chapel and ballroom.
If the public wants to think she's a little weird, she'll play along.
Rice is in the parlor of her First Street mansion, in New Orleans' elegant Garden District, the setting for her Mayfair witches sagas, including "Lasher," published recently.
There is a wooden skull on a table in one corner, but the rest of the room is alarmingly conventional, with a piano, chandelier, a grouping of chairs and a beige-on-beige print sofa where, she points out, Mona Mayfair "does it" with her uncle, Michael Curry, in one of "Lasher's" steamy scenes.
She is wearing all black: a high-collared sweater, skirt, blazer and stockings; her trademark long black hair has been cut off at the chin.
She is eating brie and macadamia nuts, which she accompanies with Tab when she's dieting.
Rice's voice is clear and sharp, with none of the lazy twang of a New Orleans native. It's made even sharper by the topic at hand: contemporary American fiction.
"The well-made novel of small ideas and small emotions is scary to me," she says, hinting at, but not naming, such authors as John Updike and Anne Tyler. "When critics look back to the 20th century, they will look to the more eccentric novels.
"If you talk to people about what they love, it's not always the well-made novel of ideas. People are hungry for an eccentric voice. That's why they embraced Amy Tan and Donna Tartt."
"Lasher" interweaves the lives of a clan of contemporary witches and incubi in New Orleans with their ancestors going back 400 years to Donnelaith, Scotland.
As with her other books, the supernatural beings in "Lasher" are hip, sophisticated, emotionally deep and highly sexed.
Mona Mayfair, the dynasty's 13-year-old heiress apparent, is a computer whiz, makes references to Byron and seduces her middle-aged uncle while his wife is feared dead but has actually been kidnapped by her "son," a 92-chromosome devil who is raping and killing the Mayfair women in an attempt to reproduce.
Lestat, the autobiographical hero of Rice's Vampire Chronicles, is a 200-year-old vampire-cum-rock star (to be played by Tom Cruise in the movie) who spends his time worrying about the meaning of life, theology and art.
Her prose is gothic, steamy and full of references to Christian liturgy. Her heroes are larger than life.
"Pedestrian, realistic novelists can get bitter and angry that they get outsold by the entertainers," says Rice, whose "Interview With the Vampire" was dismissed by a critic for The New Republic as "pernicious" and "suckling eroticism."
"It's like they are sulking because they didn't get an A," Rice says. "They don't like it when Stephen King outsells them. Just because you wrote your good novel, you're not going to be famous. The world of arts doesn't know anything about justice. Just effect."
Not that what the critics say matters much. At the bookstore, and with her publisher and her fans, Anne Rice has legs.
"It's a combination of Dickens and a rock star when she does book signings," says Rice's editor at Knopf, Vicky Wilson. "They wait on line. Around the block, around the corner. For hours. They have five, six and seven different books of hers to sign, sometimes all of them."
"She makes us a lot of money," a Knopf executive says.
Each of Rice's books outsells the previous one. Sometimes they hit the bestseller lists even before they are officially released.
The Los Angeles branch of her fan club goes out to cafes together wearing fangs fitted by their dentists to look more authentic.
Rice spent her childhood in New Orleans, but moved to Texas, and then Berkeley, Calif., with her high school sweetheart, Stan Rice, whom she married in 1961.
Her career was launched overnight with "Interview," which she wrote to recover from the death of her 5-year-old daughter, Michelle, from leukemia.
It was the story of three 18th-century vampires - Louis, Lestat and Claudia, a little girl.
Much of her writing is autobiographical. Claudia was unwittingly based on Michelle; in "The Vampire Lestat," the hero finds his mother dying of consumption and saves her from mortal death by making her a vampire.
Rice's own mother died of alcoholism when she was 15.
"Everyone has moments when they are predators," she says. "When you are at the deathbed of a relative and feel, `I'm going to write about this later' . . . Pain, if it doesn't kill us, is going to improve us."
Among the things Rice is afraid of: the dark, haunted houses, spirits and ghosts, "Nightmare on Elm Street, Part III" and "Part IV."
She has terrible nightmares and says she spooks herself sometimes.
Her upstairs writing studio adjoins her bedroom and can be locked from the inside so that the whole area is secure.
"I've never seen a spirit or a ghost, and I'm not eager to. I've been invited to stay in houses that are haunted here in New Orleans, and I thought, `Like hell, no way, not for all the tea in China.' "
It has been almost two decades since Rice sold the rights to "Interview With the Vampire" to Paramount Pictures. The project has passed through the hands of Richard Sylbert, Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, John Travolta and Julia Phillips.
It was dumped on Paramount's TV division. There was talk of a Broadway musical or an opera.
Rice herself was asked to write three different screenplays. Now that the project is finally jelling with David Geffen producing - shooting begins Oct. 18 - Hollywood is slightly hysterical.
There have been months of speculation in the columns and trades about casting and script changes.
The cast includes Tom Cruise as Lestat and Brad Pitt as Louis. The director is Neil Jordan (The Crying Game).
Rice is anything but star struck.
"I don't want anything to do with Hollywood," she says. "I won't work with them anymore."
She's not even keen on David Geffen, who made it all happen.
"That worked out all right, let's put it that way," she says.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***