10 NEWS People
When Lowe decided to get sober
Rob Lowe took a long time to hit bottom, said
Cynthia Littleton in Variety. The addictions
that nearly destroyed his career began in his
early teens, when he started drinking. By 18
he was co-starring in The Outsiders, but at the
time drinking and cocaine were ubiquitous in
Hollywood. “There was always that wonderful
moment when, as an active drug abuser, you’d
go on the set and figure out which department was selling the
coke,” says Lowe, 56. “Where are the Red Vines, and where is
the great Peruvian blow?” While attending the 1988 Democratic
National Convention in Atlanta, Lowe and a friend met two young
women and filmed a sex tape in Lowe’s hotel room. The tape
leaked, and one of the women turned out to be 16. (Lowe claims
he didn’t know.) He didn’t get sober until two years later. “One
day my mother called and I could hear her voice on the answering
machine,” Lowe says. “I was really, really hungover. She was telling
me that my grandfather was in critical condition and she needed
my help. I didn’t pick up. My thought process was ‘I need to drink
a half a bottle of tequila right now.’” Lowe had the business card
of a drug and alcohol counselor. “I kept this card for a year in my
wallet,” he says. “I called it the next day.”
Why Novak fled Hollywood
Kim Novak’s impressive acting career started and ended within a
decade, said Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian (U.K.). At age 25,
she starred opposite James Stewart in the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock
thriller Vertigo. Written off at the time as hack work, Vertigo was
voted the greatest film ever by the British Film Institute last year.
Novak was close with Stewart and later with Frank Sinatra, with
whom she starred in Pal Joey and The Man With the Golden Arm.
The two became romantically involved. “He was very sexy,” says
Novak, 88. “The real Sinatra was a very sensitive person. But he
was affected by people putting him on a pedestal, so he let that
simple, beautiful side of him go. That’s why I left Hollywood. I
needed to save myself.” She’d also struggled with bipolar disorder
since her teens and the trauma left by a sexual molestation in her
childhood. So Novak rented a van and left California for Oregon,
where she’s become a veterinarian’s assistant and painter. In 2014,
she briefly returned to the spotlight to present an award at the
Oscars, and got fat injections in her face before the show. Donald
Trump tweeted, “Kim should sue her plastic surgeon!” The vicious
reaction reminded her why she’d left Hollywood in the first place.
“I’m much too vulnerable for this town,” she says.
Chloé Zhao took an unusual path to becoming an acclaimed
Hollywood director, said Alison Willmore in New York magazine. A
Chinese immigrant, she’s made films exploring the lives of people
in the Upper Midwest, most recently Nomadland, a front-runner
for this year’s Best Picture Oscar. Zhao, 38, was born Zhao Ting and
grew up in Beijing as the rebellious daughter of a steel executive.
At 14, after her parents divorced, Zhao left for boarding school in
the U.K., despite not speaking much English. She then attended
public high school in Los Angeles, living alone in a Koreatown
studio apartment behind a Sizzler. “I had such a romanticized ver-
sion of America,” she says. “This is not what I saw in the movies.”
Her experiences left her fascinated with her adopted country. Zhao
studied political science and then enrolled in NYU’s film school,
where one of her teachers was Spike Lee. For her thesis film, she
spent nearly a year gaining the trust of the Oglala Lakota reserva-
tion in Pine Ridge, S.D., one of the country’s poorest counties. Zhao
wanted Nomadland and 2017’s The Rider to tell universal stories
yet be true to their settings and respectful of the people who live
there. “In the end,” she says, “we leave, but their lives continue.”Getty
,^ A
P,^ NewscomZhao’s road to the Dakotas
QKim Kardashian West filed for divorce from
Kanye West last week, citing irreconcil-
able differences and seeking joint
custody of their children North, 7, Saint,
5, Chicago, 3, and Psalm, 1. Married
in 2014, the couple is jointly worth
an estimated $2.1 billion and re-
portedly plan to honor a prenuptial
agreement. They will divide their
property holdings, which include
a $60 million, lavishly renovated
mansion in Calabasas, Calif.,
where Kardashian, 40, has lived in
recent months, and two Wyoming
ranches, each worth about $15 mil-
lion, where West, 43, is living. The split
was reportedly precipitated by West’sstruggles with bipolar disorder and tension
with Kardashian’s mother, Kris Jenner, but
sources tell TMZ.com it’s “as amicable as a
divorce can be.”
QPresident Trump was treated like an em-
peror at his hotel restaurant near the White
House, according to a “Standard Operating
Procedure” for staff published by Washingto-
nian last week. Trump sat at a special booth
reserved for him and always ate the same
meal: two popovers, jumbo shrimp cocktail,
well-done steak and fries, plus apple pie or
chocolate cake. After Trump complained that
a companion got a bigger piece of meat,
the restaurant began serving him 40-ounce
tomahawk steaks. Trump, a notorious
germophobe, insisted that servers open his
ketchup bottles and Diet Cokes at the table
so he could see every one of the seven stepsservers were instructed to follow, including
holding bottles by the lower third only.
QWoody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn,
dismissed a new HBO docuseries about
Allen’s alleged sexual abuse of his then–7-
year-old daughter Dylan as a “hatchet job”
that’s “riddled with falsehoods.” Allen, 85,
and Previn, 50, declined to be interviewed
for the project, which includes a video shot
by former partner Mia Farrow in 1992 of
Dylan recounting being molested by Allen.
(For a review, see Film, p. 28.) Dylan said
Allen promised that if he could touch her
“privates,” he would take her to Paris and put
her in his movies. Allen and Previn accused
HBO of bias because it has a separate pro-
duction deal with Allen’s son Ronan Farrow,
an investigative journalist who’s been highly
critical of his father.