of diving practice and where everyone should go to lunch.
Witherspoon has plans to meet her mother, and Jennie’s
taking Deacon and the girls to lunch downtown at Robert’s
Western World.
“Seriously?” I ask. “You can eat lunch there?” I had always
thought it was a giant bar but am told they have fried bologna
sandwiches.
“You know Reese and I were in the same class at Harpeth
Hall,” Jennie Witherspoon tells me. “We were both in Ms.
Renkl’s class.”
I wonder if Jennie felt the same way the rst time she walked
into this house. I wonder if she too thought that it was the kind
of place the other girls lived.
Jennie Witherspoon starts talking about The Morning Show.
She and John had watched the nal episode of the season the
night before. “We were so into it!” Jennie says. “We kept forget-
ting it was you.”
After the cake has been eaten and the lunch plans have been
made, Deacon slips o to play the piano for two minutes (and
I can say, based on those two minutes, he is very, very good)
while Jennie and the girls pull on their coats. Everyone says
goodbye. Witherspoon asks me if I want to use the powder
room before I go, and I tell her no, I’m ne.
“Use the powder room,” she says.
Under the front staircase is a tiny door to the tiniest bathroom
I have ever seen. It is the Alice in Wonderland of bathrooms,
with swallows painted in the miniature sink. I’m speechless.
“Right?” she says.W
ITHERSPOON OFFERS TO drive me back to
the bookstore, where I’ve left my car. I tell
her the trac will be awful, but she waves
me o. She may have a home in Nashville
but she and her family still live in Los
Angeles. She has a completely dierent notion of what con-
stitutes trac. And anyway, there’s a book she wants to pick up
for her mother.
When we go back into the bookstore we can barely cut a
path through the last-minute holiday shoppers. No one notices
us in their rush, but Witherspoon sees a painting of a small
dachshund reading a book that’s hanging on
the back wall.
“Is that Mary Todd Lincoln?” she asks
me, and then, derailed by a sudden, awful
thought, asks, “Is she...”
I assure her the dachshund is ne. We’re
in the process of having all the shop dogs’
portraits painted.
“You know I had my picture taken with
her the last time I was here.”
I tell her I do in fact remember, though
I’m amazed that she remembers. I tell her that’s how I want to
open this piece, with her shining her light on the dachshund.
“I’ve done enough for myself,” Witherspoon replies, deadpan.
“I need to do more for the Mary Todd Lincolns of the world.”
I have no doubt. She will come to the aid of small dachs-
hunds everywhere, once she gets the rest of the world straight-
ened out. QRenkl smiles. “She was often stamping her foot mad about
something. She was outraged by injustice in any form she
encountered it. But she was also funny and erce. She was like
any other teenage girl in an all-girls school—she never wore
makeup or combed her hair unless it was a dance or picture day.”
Witherspoon shakes her head at the memory of her British lit
survey and Margaret Renkl, who left Harpeth Hall at the end of
Witherspoon’s junior year. “I cried when she left.”
Witherspoon pulls up in front of a beautiful house that is no
more and no less than its beautiful neighbors. But when we step
inside I have to say it stops my heart for an instant, the ooding
light in the foyer, the sweeping staircase, the openness in every
direction, the wallpaper. There is dierent, complementary
wallpaper in room after room, includ-
ing a wallpapered ceiling that looks like
the tiled oor of a French bistro. I have
no idea what the neighbors’ houses look
like on the inside, but my guess would be
nothing like this. The house is welcom-
ing and warm in a way that feels almost
like a memory, but better than a memory
as it is both traditional and explosively
joyful. While I am exclaiming, she looks
around herself, maybe seeing it again.
“Growing up, all my friends at Har-
peth Hall lived in houses like this. I
always wanted to live in a house like
this, and now I do. It’s some sort of child-
hood fulllment.”
And that’s exactly it, because I grew
up in Nashville too and went to a dierent girls school. This
was the house of childhood dreams, or a better version of it.
This is the place a person spends her whole life looking for.
We go and sit in the big bright kitchen to talk some more.
I ask her if she thinks it’s a dangerous thing to be a child actor.
“The ambition?”
No.
“Oh, you mean the hope that it could happen?”
No, I mean, is it dangerous to be a child working in an adult
world?
“Ah,” she says, “yes. Bad things happened to me. I was
assaulted, harassed. It wasn’t isolated. I recently had a jour-
nalist ask me about it. She said, Well, why didn’t you speak up
sooner? And I thought, that’s so interesting to talk to someone
who experienced those things and then judge them for the way
they decide to speak about them. You tell your story in your
own time when you’re ready. But the shame that she tried to
put on me was unreal, and then she wrote about how selsh I
was for not bringing it up sooner. There wasn’t a public reckon-
ing 25 years ago when this stu happened to me. There wasn’t
a forum to speak about it either. Social media has created a new
way for people to express themselves that I didn’t have. That’s
the great strength in power and numbers. I think we have a lot
of judgment and that’s unfortunate because we’re all tender-
footed in these new times. We’re trying to nd our identity.
That’s what I really like about The Morning Show.”
There is a knock at the back door and Witherspoon’s sister-
in-law, Jennie, arrives with her two daughters. Then Wither-
spoon’s 16 - year-old son, Deacon, appears from wherever he’s
been in the house. Suddenly there’s a coffee cake and talkFor more Reese
Witherspoon
and behind-
the-scenes
footage from
our cover shoot,
visit VF.com.SUCH A FUN STAGE
Dress by Valentino
Haute Couture;
shoes by Manolo
Blahnik; necklace
by Tiffany & Co.
Throughout:
hair products by
Virtue; makeup
by Elizabeth Arden.VANITY FAIR APRIL 2020 67HA
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CED^ ON^ LOCATIONBYPORTFOLIO^ONE;^
FOR^ DETAILS,^ GO^ TO^ VF.COM/C
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