Carrey may stoop, but he always conquers. He can be seen currently doing one of his scorched-earth campaigns in “Batman Forever,” which just had a record-breaking $18 million opening night. Carrey plays Edward Nygma, a jittery mad scientist who metamorphoses into the audacious, cane-twirl-ing Riddler. The Riddler’s scheme to unmask Batman (Val Kilmer) and drain the brains of Gotham City is the engine that drives the movie, and Carrey’s been prancing away with every review (box, page 54). And that’s not the only thing he’s been running away with. Carrey was paid just $850,000 for 1994’s “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.” But last week his idlers made what may be the richest deal of all time: $20 million for a comedy called “Cable Man.” The project, slated to be Columbia Pictures’ flagship movie for the summer of 1996, concerns a lonely repairman trying to make friends. Studio chairman Mark Canton is quick to point out that, while Columbia is paying Carrey an eye-pop-ping sum, “Cable Man” doesn’t call for pricey stunts or special effects and that the budget can be kept down to about $38 million. Comedies tend to languish abroad, which makes the deal seem dodgy at first glance. But Carrey’s broad physical antics translate overseas. His movie “The Mask” has made an astonishing $200 million abroad–roughly as much as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “True Lies”–and his turn as the Riddler is expected to make him an even brighter international star. “We’ve done our homework,” Canton says of the “Cable Man” deal, which he hopes will launch a franchise. “Jim may be the biggest star in the world. We’re about to find out.”
In 1994, Jim Carrey delivered three No. 1 hits and, if you believed everything you mad, made an entire nation dumb. Some have dismissed him as a Jerry Lewis knockoff–a disgusting dean of the dimwits. But we haven’t seen a comic cavort with such abandon since the prime of Robin Williams, nor seen one sing and dance and swoop and glide with such swellegance since Steve Martin quit the premises. In the raucous “Ace Ventura,” Carrey was a swaggering pet detective who popularized the Talking Buttocks. In the cartoony Jekyll and Hyde story “The Mask,” he was a bumbling bank clerk, as well as a crazed avenger who bounced off the walls and danced a rumba when necessary. In the euphorically dim road movie “Dumb and Dumber,” Carrey was a lovestruck limo driver with a penchant for potty jokes. Now, he’s burning a hole through “Barman Forever.” Tommy Lee Jones, who plays Two-Face, the Riddler’s partner in crime, insists the idea of scene stealing is ungentlemanly: “I don’t like to think of the people I work with as potential thieves, and I pray that they don’t think of me that way.” Heads up, Tommy Lee, you’ve been robbed. “When the camera’s rolling,” says Carrey gleefully, “I’m a desperate motherf–ker.”
Inevitably, Carrey wants to be more than a court jester, and here is managers are hunting for a transition picture – Carrey can actually act. Their strategy is to begin releasing dramas between the comedies so that if they bomb, they’ll be bracketed by hits. “What are we aiming for ultimately says Eric Gold, who manages Carrey with partner Jimmy Miller. “Tom Hanks’s career. Seriously. Hanks is a guy that started out in ‘Bachelor Party’.” Carrey’s audience may not follow him into drama. So his future as a serious actor is a question mark: bright, glowing and Riddler-green. Carrey knows the risks, but fears that the perpetual mugging may wear thin. “I might look like an absolute idiot if I’m doing this stuff at 40 or 50,” he says. “Maybe it’s a young man’s sport.” What if he fails as a straight man? “I’ll go into the fetal position for a couple of days, and then I’ll learn how to deal with it.”
He’s only half kidding: Carrey is a man of many, moods. In person, the actor is tall, rangy and better-looking than the camera gives him credit for. “He looks like the guy every mother wants their daughter to marry,” says Joel Schumacher, who directed “Batman Forever.” “But he acts like the guy they usually do marry.” Carrey can be killingly funny or terribly quiet. Silly or sorrowful. One day, you look at Carrey and see a guy who’s in the midst of a protracted divorce that’s been splashed through the tabloids; a guy who’s tried Prozac and therapy; a guy who recently found himself crying, had no idea why, then realized it was because he missed his parents, who are not long dead. Another day, you look at Carrey and see a guy who once played a scene with icicles hanging out of his nose. Both these guys seem entirely human and decent.
One Friday in Charleston, Carrey is in a buoyant mood. This may be because he’s well rested or because the weather has cleared or because “Ace 2” is back on track after the original director resigned, citing creative differences with the star. At 1 o’clock, Carrey and his girlfriend, actress Lauren Holly from “Dumb and Dumber” and TV’s “Picket Fences,” charge playfully up the steps of Warner Bros.’ Gulfstream jet. The plane will take the couple to Los Angeles for tonight’s “Batman” premiere. It is not to be believed: gold-plated air nozzles, a leather toilet seat, a cabinet of crystal. “Isn’t this amazing?” says Holly. “The first time we flew in this, I made Jim take my picture in the cockpit.” (Anyone who believes the reports that Carrey has left Holly and returned to his soon-to-be ex has not seen Jim and Lauren hold hands during takeoff.) Later, Carrey paces the cabin looking for a place to talk and marveling at his good fortune. “This is the kind of plane the world’s problems are solved on,” he says, pausing at a pair of facing armchairs. “Let’s sit here. You be Kissinger, and I’ll be Nixon.” Carrey sits, his eyes all lit up. “My life is insane.”
Ah, yes, his life. There are two famous stories about Carrey, both from his pre-superstar days in L.A. One is that he used to stand up in the Hollywood Hills, telling himself he was famous until he actually believed it. The other is that years ago he wrote himself a $10 million check for “acting services rendered,” and postdated it Thanksgiving 1995. These stories are invariably trotted out as proof that Carrey believes in miracles, which is sweet. But they also suggest he’s read “every self-help book you could ever conceive of,” which is OK, too. Carrey grew up near Toronto, one of four kids in a Roman Catholic family. His father originally played sax with a big band, but had to sell his instrument to pay the hospital bills when Carrey’s older sister was born. Carrey describes his father as a kind, mild man who slogged away as an accountant to support his family. (He says there’s a lot of his father in the repressed Stanley Ipkiss from “The Mask.”)
At 51, Carrey’s father lost his job. “It really broke his heart,” says Carrey, who was 13. “It was hard to watch.” Carrey dropped out of the ninth grade, and he and his father, his mother and three siblings worked as janitors in a local wheel-rim factory. He was furious. “Me and my brother used to break into houses and steal booze and get drunk and vandalize,” says Carrey, apologetically. “We were maniacs.” The family also worked as security guards in the factory, though nothing much happened. Occasionally, Carrey’s brother would beat up a floor-cleaning machine with a hammer, or he himself would wheel through the factory in a giant crane. The Carrey family realized they were losing themselves to their anger. They quit, and lived in a Volkswagen camper and in a tent.
Carrey regards his father’s tumbling out of the middle class as the definitive story of his life, the moral being that it’s useless to play it safe. At 17, he supported his family by doing impressions in Toronto clubs. At 19, he moved to L.A., where he became a regular at the Comedy Store, went on tour with Rodney Dangerfield, who became a mentor, and starred in the briefly lived TV series “The Duck Factory.” Carrey felt his career taking off, and urged his parents to come to L.A. They moved into his apartment in the mid-’80s. The next thing he knew he was broke and in a hell of a black hole. “I thought I was having a nervous breakdown,” says Carrey, staring out the window of the plane. “And I probably was. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and think that the Devil was lying beside me. Or I’d be absolutely positive that there was something under the bed.”
Carrey had nightmares that he was strangling his mother. He worked on crazy paintings, including a portrait of his father with a gun and a stopwatch titled “Waiting to Die.” (“He flipped out when he saw it,” he says.) Surely Carrey has nm this stuff by a psychiatrist. “Oh, sure,” he says. “But I figured it out for myself. It was anger toward my parents. I resented them for the responsibility of taking care of them since I was 17. I resented them because there had always been a lot of pressure on me to be the star, to save-their lives, to buy them the big house with the pillars–like Elvis, you know? And it came to a head. I had no money. I had no jobs. And I couldn’t even come home to my own house because my parents were in the living room smoking. They were really lovely people, but they got caught up in thinking they were going to be taken care of.”
So Carrey shipped his parents back to Toronto, though he continued to support them. “It was the hardest thing I ever did,” says Carrey, who was in his mid-20s by then. “But I never had another nightmare, never had another fear.” He also scrapped his stand-up act. It was the same routine he’d done for years –a Sammy Davis Jr. tribute, a parody of Henry Fonda in “On Golden Pond”–and suddenly it seemed too safe. Too Vegas-y. And, more to the point, too parent-pleasing. (Carrey’s father was fond of saying, “Jimmy’s not a ham, he’s the whole pig!”) Eventually, there was a new act, improvisational and wild. “Jim was doing this ‘Snakeboy’ thing,” says manager Miller. “It was him on the stage just crawling around. I thought it was hysterical. Most of the audience didn’t get it.” In the late ’80s, Carrey married an actress named Melissa Womer. He had a daughter, now 7. And he bounced through small parts in “The Dead Pool,” “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “Earth Girls Are Easy.” Carrey was passed over for “Saturday Night Live,” but won a spot on Fox’s “In Living Color,” where he spent four years. He was the only white male east member. His characters, however, were beyond race. There was the disfigured Fire Marshal Bill, the steroid-addled female body-builder Vera de Mile. Here at last was a high-profile showcase for a comedian who would do anything–a true wild card who used comedy as regression therapy. “I think I’m just a high-strung person,” he says. “I have to spew all this stuff out. Otherwise, I’d be on the roof with a high-powered weapon.”
Carrey spewed most famously in “Ace Ventura.” There are learned theories about why the movie had a jaw-dropping $18 million opening weekend (a lot of “In Living Color” fans were 8 or younger) and why it stormed on to make $79 million (the nation’s full of people acting 8 or younger). But the unadorned truth is that “Are” was a scabrously funny movie once you gave in to it. So were “The Mask” and “Dumb and Dumber,” which made roughly $120 million each. Carrey’s comedy is not just therapy for him. It’s therapy for us. His work is freeingly silly. His screwball side owes an obvious debt to Jerry Lewis (page 5:3): “I watched his movies like a maniac when I was a kid.” And his surprisingly fluid, graceful side has clearly spent years trying to channel Fred Astaire and Gone Kelly: “I’m a great faker. I can fake anything.” Carrey still stares in the mirror, sings his brains out in the car to and from the set and is always looking for new moves to add to his arsenal. His work is joyous, rather than ironic; athletic, rather than intellectual. He says he sometimes looks at photographs of his face and sees weird muscles. This guy’s not just making funny faces, he’s getting a workout. “The thing about comedy is that there’s no sanctity in it,” says Carrey. “It goes straight to the nerve that’s not supposed to be tickled, straight to the thing that’s not supposed to be talked about.”
Carrey’s mother died of kidney failure in 1991, and never saw her son’s career explode or his salary ricochet into the realm of higher math. His father got a glimpse of the craziness to come, but died last year. Of what? “Loneliness,” says Carrey. “I’m serious. He’d al- ready kind of lost his heart, and when my mother died he deteriorated. He became manic-de-pressive, you know? He was calling Rome to speak to the pope. He was writing books about my life that made no sense. Stuff like that. When he was on medication he was fine, but he was lonely, you know? He was lonely.” Carrey slipped the $10 million cheek he’d written to himself into his dad’s casket. Later, he and Val Kilmer talked about fame and funerals. “I lost my father right before I started ‘Tombstone’,” says Kilmer. “And Jim lost his father right before we started ‘Batman.’ So some of our talks touched me. I mean, Jim loses his dad and he goes to the funeral and he’s got blood relations saying, ‘Can you sign this?’”
Spend time with Carrey and what begins to surprise you is not how much sadness and anger he’s worked up, but how much he’s worked out. It helps that he funnels his occasional low moments right into his art: when he’s depressed, he checks himself out in the mirror, so he can re-create the look later. And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that he’s built a spectacular life for himself. Carrey owns an 11,000-square-foot house in Brentwood, and has been dating Holly ever since they met during “Dumb and Dumber” last year. (Says Holly, “He said to me, ‘I would like you to be my girlfriend. Would you be my girlfriend?’ What gift on the planet could refuse when someone says that?”) Carrey’s personal life seems to amble along. He plays a middling game of tennis, listens to head-banging rock and occasionally walks down his staircase backward just for kicks. Carrey’s professional life, of course, breaks the sound barrier. “Batman Forever” is certain to top the box office. So should “Ace 2” this fall. “I think we’ll have five No. 1 hits in a row,” says manager Gold. “Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!”
Will the dramas work? Will Carrey’s fans sit still for them? Who knows? Steve Martin crossed over with “Roxanne,” but Bill Murray took a spill with “Razor’s Edge.” “Woody Allen once said, ‘The audience is never wrong’,” says Joel Schumacher. “That’s a painful truth, but it’s the truth.” To be fair, there’s evidence Carrey can pull off serious roles: he gave a raw performance as a young alcoholic in a 1991 TV movie called “Doing Time On Maple Drive,” and had touching moments in “The Mask.” Even if the dramas tank, Carrey will survive. His gift for comedy–not to mention his childlike love for the stuff–seems like a pretty deep ocean.
Before the jet lands in L.A., Holly gets bored and wanders to the back of the plane. “Want my totally biased opinion?” she says. “Jim is hilarious. And he’s so cute. Not only that, he’s an all-around entertainer. He sings. He dances . . .” Carrey laughs. “You sound like an agent,” he says. “‘He sings! He dances! You gotta see this kid!’” Carrey jumps up and does a goofy, shuffling tap dance in the aisle. Later, at a premiere party at the Armand Hammer museum, he will look a little intimidated by the crush of well-wishers. In fact, the $20 million man will be the only luminary requiring security men in a room packed with Geena Davis, David Geffen, Drew Barrymore and so on. But right now, Carrey seems happy just dancing in the aisle. He’s laughing. He’s lost in the moment. And he’s currently cruising at an altitude of 39,000 feet.
