Between wild fires, earthquakes, race riots and a debilitating recession, the city of illusion has been looking a little sad of late. So there is a palpable cheer around Hollywood now that the highest-paid actress in the world is back in town, generating economic activity.
Two years after she made her last film and fell into a tabloid twilight zone over her personal life, Julia Roberts is starring in four new productions, the first being Alan J Pakula's adaptation of John Grisham's legal thriller The Pelican Brief, opening on Friday week.
At present, she is somewhere in the fortress of International Creative Management, where her agents are giving her last-minute tips on what not to say to a reporter. Which is a bit incongruous, because she has spent the last six weeks learning how to ask questions like a reporter, in the role she is now filming as a journalist in I Love Trouble
A wall in the office of the ICM agent Elaine Goldsmith slides open and there is Roberts, in cut-off jeans, moccasins and a kind of ponytail, and all of 26 years old. Her agents disappear, and for the next two-and-a-half hours she talks about life as a media caricature and as a new bride to the singer Lyle Lovett.
It was Pretty Woman, which took more than $400m worldwide, that made Julia Roberts a global star, one of only a handful who can make or break studio heads. She is now receiving more than $8m a film, the sort of price that comes with the status of being able to "open" a movie, which means that, no matter how bad it is, enough people will buy tickets in the first few days of its release to cover its costs. The downside is that she exists at a level where garage attendants are supposed to care about the tiniest details of her personal life. In that sense, she is both a victim of all the hyper-press that reached a frenzy when she cancelled her wedding to the actor Kiefer Sutherland two years ago and a beneficiary.
"They say I can open movies, and that's nice in that it puts it into people's minds that women can do it," she says. "It's not just Kevin Costner, not just Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not just guys."
She is less comfortable with the public-property aspect of her status. "People talk about this Julia Roberts almost like it's a cup of Pepsi. People think Julia Roberts is something they created. The fact is, 26 years ago, there was this scrunched-up little pink baby named Julia Roberts. I am a girl," she says, "like anybody else."
Her father, who died when she was 10, was a vacuum cleaner salesman; her mother a church secretary. At home, they staged and acted in plays, imbuing the three Roberts children with a love of entertaining. Julia was only a few years out of high school in Smyrna, Georgia, when the modest 1988 film Mystic Pizza made her a celebrity of the promising variety. It took some getting used to.
"I was in the bathroom somewhere, and this girl followed me and said: 'Excuse me, girl in stall No 1.' I said: 'Yeaaah?' She said: 'You were in Mystic Pizza.' 'I said: 'Yeah?' She said: 'Can I have your autograph?' I said: 'I'm a little tied up right now.'"
For her next film, Steel Magnolias (1989), Roberts received an Academy Award nomination. (The director of that movie, Herbert Ross, has since criticised her work as one-dimensional, suggesting she should take formal acting lessons.) Another Oscar nomination came with Pretty Woman, the fairytale story of a Hollywood hooker who spends the weekend with Richard Gere. It was followed by Sleeping With the Enemy (1991), where she is brutalised by an obsessive husband. Then came Dying Young, a disappointment, and Hook (both 1991), which was widely dismissed as a mess, though the director, Steven Spielberg, was blamed.
That year Roberts went through what her agent describes as a "Fellini summer", in which she was variously reported to have had a nervous breakdown, been on drugs and romanced several men, all the while feuding with Spielberg on the set of Hook. None of it, says Roberts, was true. She played Tinkerbell, but some of the gossip columnists referred to her as "Tinkerhell".
Now, with a cushion of rest between her and that period, she says she is not at all bitter or angry. "What people perceive that summer to be is for me a tale of fiction spun way out of control," she says. Yes, she was going to marry Kiefer Sutherland on the Fox Studio lot and three days before the wedding called it off. From then on, her every footstep was monitored, analysed, speculated upon.
The past two years "have been two of the most incredible years of my life". She travelled extensively, read more books than screenplays, nurtured old friendships and, six months ago, married Lovett, 36, a Texas crooner with an original haircut which has made him the butt of jokes comparing him to Woody Woodpecker.
"We're pretending to be a normal couple," says Roberts. "We get up in the morning and go to our jobs. He goes to the studio to cut a record; I go to the studio to make a movie." They consider New York home. "We can be walking down Sixth Avenue in the morning and people will come by and say, 'Hey, congratulations!' But then there are people who talk about my wedding dress looking like a tablecloth, too."
Her role model in the celebrity game is another New Yorker, Jacqueline Onassis. "How this woman has kept her composure, with what the tabloid shows have done to John F Kennedy, is unbelievable," she says. "This woman is nobility personified."
By contrast, Julia Roberts has to fight her own sense of defiance and outrage. "I've become very irate watching the news. It's gotten so bad here in LA. The other night, they kept running these blurbs: 'Tonight, at 11, Kiefer Sutherland responds to Pretty Woman's talk with Barbara Walters.' They were setting this up to such a point I started to get nervous. And, of course, it was just a clip from Kiefer's press junket for The Three Musketeers, him commenting on the publicity."
In Pakula's The Pelican Brief, she works with Denzel Washington. He plays a heroic investigative reporter who follows up her character's theory about the assassination of supreme court judges. She plays Darby Shaw, a law student and the girlfriend of an alcoholic professor. In the book, John Grisham introduced Darby's character thus: "For two brutal years, one of the few pleasures of law school had been to watch as she graced the halls and rooms with her long legs and baggy sweaters. There was a fabulous body in there somewhere, they could tell. But she was not one to flaunt it."
Nor does Pakula flaunt it. The Pelican Brief makes only minimal use of the physical attributes of its star. Instead, the movie follows a tangled plot, bound by a long, conspiratorial rope. Filming in New Orleans and Washington last summer was as close to a perfect experience as Julia Roberts has had in showbusiness. It "was a dream", she says. "You feel justified in holding out for something that pays off."
Pakula, who has directed such stars as Warren Beatty, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, says he found Roberts very easy to work with. "She gave everything. By the end, she had earned the respect of the entire crew. Julia responds to the other actors, which is what the best people do."
Roberts is midway through filming I Love Trouble. In it, she trades one-liners with an older journalist, played by Nick Nolte. Like other actresses who have starred opposite Nolte, she has had to get used to his sometimes crude behaviour. While he can be "completely charming and very nice, he's also completely disgusting. He's going to hate me for saying this, but he seems to go out of his way to repel people."
Still, the director, Charles Shyer, is impressed with Roberts. "We were looking at film the other day and our editor said: 'She's got it,'" he says. "I think Julia would have been a movie star in any era. There is a magic there with her.'"
A third new film, Mary Reilly, a period movie based on Valerie Martin's novel about a maidservant in the household of Dr Jekyll, is scheduled for production this spring. Such projects should silence Roberts's critics who argue that her range is restricted to playing victims in mainstream films.
Roberts has been somewhat typecast by Pretty Woman; a character who is most appealing when her hair is big and her laugh is deep. Such pigeonholing doesn't bother her. "I started out being Julia, Eric Roberts's sister, then I was Julia Mystic Pizza Roberts. So getting saddled with Pretty Woman was not the worst moment of my life."
Nor is she upset by those feminists who say she glorified prostitution in the film. "What are you going to do? You can't please everybody. That movie was a fairytale. We did everything but put a glass slipper on. And I'll tell you something else: for $3,000 a weekend, Richard Gere got a bargain."