One Jewel; many facets
By ROBERT W. BUTLER - Movie Editor
Date: 07/05/98 00:01
In less than five years, she has gone from waitress to
coffee-shop folk singer to multimillion-selling recording
artist. She sang the national anthem at this year's Super Bowl.
Just last month she hit the best-seller lists with Nights
Without Armor, a collection of her poems.
And next spring she will make her motion-picture debut in
director Ang Lee's Civil War drama, "Ride With the Devil,"
which last week completed principal photography in the
Kansas City area.
But the blond, blue-eyed pop icon known as Jewel doesn't
want to be remembered for any of that.
"Even the arts are secondary in my life," the 24-year-old said
recently as she stretched out on the carpeted floor of an office
adjacent to "Ride With the Devil's" indoor set in a Central
Industrial District warehouse.
"It's my profession, sure, but it's not rocket science. In the
end, I think of myself as a humanitarian. I hope when it's all
over, my fame is as a spokesman for causes."
She did in fact found a social-service agency early this year. Is
there no end to this woman's ambitions?
Of course it may not be ambition that drives Jewel as much as
a craving for adventure. Her life reads like a novel: born Jewel
Kilcher to hippie parents, raised on an Alaskan homestead
without electricity or running water, performing music with
her father in taverns.
Then, while still a teen-ager, she headed for Southern
California, living out of her van and performing her songs in
small San Diego clubs.
She was discovered and recorded an album ("Pieces of You")
that quickly found its way to the budget bin. Undeterred, she
went on a one-woman city-to-city tour to promote the CD,
organizing fans to call radio stations and request her songs.
It worked. Fueled by the single "Who Will Save Your Soul?"
and a couple of key TV appearances that allowed people to get
a glimpse of Jewel's onstage charisma, "Pieces of You" got a
second wind and went on to sell more than 6 million copies.
But now, Jewel said, "I've become very bored with music. I've
always done lots of things: sculpture, marble carving, dance.
I've devoted four years of my life to music, but I reached a
point where it was no longer a challenge. I was dying of
boredom.
"I really need challenges," she said, fiddling with the long,
blond hair extensions she wears as Sue Lee, a hard-luck
Missouri farm girl during the Civil War. "I don't feel alive
unless I'm taking chances."
Part of that chance-taking involves inciting passionate
responses from the public, both pro and con. To her fans, she's
a guitar-strumming folkie prophet. They design adoring Web
sites in her honor.
To her detractors she is "the world's luckiest waitress" who,
thanks to good fortune and her undeniable sexual charisma,
has parlayed the musical musings of an introspective
teen-ager into an entertainment empire. To them also, her
new book of poetry provides an irresistible target: a bunch of
youthful musings on aging, love, sex and jealousy.
Jewel said that she wrote the poems as a way of getting in
touch with her feelings and that until a publisher expressed
interest in them, she had no intention of seeing them in print.
"I knew I was setting myself up for criticism," she said. "But
who cares? Emily Bronte was criticized ... and her work was
brilliant. If I'm afraid of failure, then I'm not being
sufficiently challenged."
Her most recent challenge is movie acting. Although she had
little experience and no formal training, director Lee saw
something in Jewel that his Civil War film needed.
"She had a period upbringing and a period look," he said over
a lunch in the production's mess tent. "She's even got period
teeth."
(Told of this remark about her orthodontically challenged
smile, Jewel laughed and said, "Whoever thought my teeth
would get me work?")
Lee continued: "Also, this is very much a boy's story, and I
could see that Jewel had a sexual dominance that would let her
hold her own with all these young men. I think people are
going to be very happy with her work."
Not that it was easy. Jewel may give the impression of
supreme self-confidence, but her baptism in movie acting was
traumatic.
"I was the greenest," she said. "I showed up not knowing what
it meant to hit my mark or to play to the camera. I had to
relearn how to walk, to talk, to get rid of all my modern
mannerisms. I had to realize that my face would be 20 feet tall
on the screen and that a little would go a long way."
Panic dominated her first couple of days on the set.
"I knew I was in real trouble," she said. "I was in tears. But
Ang knew how to calm me. He's a really quiet person, and I
appreciated that. I don't work well with a tyrant. But Ang and
the guys have all been patient.
"What I finally realized is that to perform music, I pitch
myself up to a real high, then walk out on stage keeping that
rocket-booster level up for two hours. Afterward I'm
absolutely hollow; there's nothing left.
"But in the movies you have to deliver that intensity again and
again over an entire day of filming. I had to learn to pace
myself. But after the first couple of days, I started getting the
hang of it."
Then there was the collaborative nature of film. Jewel said
that when she tours, she usually travels alone, setting her own
schedule. But a movie set is like an army on the move. There's
a lot of hurry-up-and-wait while all the elements vital to a
scene are put in place.
"I'm not used to team sports," she said. "But on this film there
are so many young guys running around. It's like being in
school again."
In retrospect, Jewel said, it might have been easier to do
something lighter for her first movie -- perhaps a romantic
comedy.
"This film is really dramatic, and it puts Sue Lee through the
wringer. Lots of crying."
"Ride With the Devil" opens with Sue Lee's marriage,
attended by local boys Jake (Tobey Maguire) and Jack Bull
(Skeet Ulrich). The newly married Sue Lee flirts with Jack
Bull.
When next we encounter Jewel's character, the Civil War has
been raging for a year. Sue Lee is now a widow, living on a
farm near Jack Bull and Jake's winter hideout. She initiates an
affair with Jack Bull, by whom she has a baby. When that
romance ends badly, the unwed mother finds herself being
nudged into yet another relationship, this time with the naive
Jake, who knows a lot about killing but nothing about women.
"Sue Lee is incredibly brazen for her time and place," Jewel
said. "She's savvy to the politics of her circumstances. She
understands her place as a woman and how she'll have to use
her wiles to get what she needs. You know, during that time,
widows were considered incredibly intriguing because they
actually knew about sex."
But Sue Lee is essentially an unhappy figure -- in Jewel's
words, "half woman and half child" -- whose dreams collapse
as she is reduced to a refugee dependent on the charity of
others.
Jewel even wrote a song for Sue Lee, one she performs only
for herself. "It was an exercise to help me get in character. It's
a sad song that really isolated her emotions, her feelings of
loss."
Next month, her boredom with music apparently behind her,
Jewel is scheduled to go into the studio to record her second
CD. (Watch for a release in the fall.) And she's keeping her
eyes open for more acting gigs, praising director Lee for
making her first film experience pleasurable.
"Ang's very nurturing," she said. "He really cared about my
development as an actress -- I mean beyond this particular
movie."
And increasingly, she said, she's devoting more time to
Higher Ground for Humanity, the advocacy agency she
founded earlier this year.
"It's an umbrella organization that coordinates programs and
provides support for a wide variety of environmental and
humanitarian efforts," Jewel said. "You get more done with a
united front."
Asked how she can juggle so many different careers, Jewel
shrugs.
"I trust my own rhythm. I've always tended to do more than
one thing at a time. And I was taught never to believe my own
press."
All CopyrŠright 1998 The Kansas City Star