CHRISTINE BARANSKI arrived at Michael’s, the media hangout on West 55th Street, at 12:30 p.m. on the dot. A somewhat later arrival would have guaranteed an entrance, a gust of warm curiosity, but as she passed the empty tables at the front, the few patrons nosing their menus, I realized, or perhaps remembered, that such impromptu moments were best not left to chance. I should have reserved for 1 p.m.
Main Course | Christine Baranski
Christine Baranski: ‘I Was Never Beautiful’
By CATHY HORYN
Published: April 15, 2011
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Times Topic: Christine Baranski
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Sunday Routine | Christine Baranski: A Leisurely Day to Learn Her Lines (January 30, 2011)
Apparently, though, Ms. Baranski didn’t feel the need to contrive scenes, least of all small ones. Occasionally, over the next three hours, her voice hit a haughty key — Diane Lockhart in “The Good Wife” raising a triumphant glass of Scotch — but this was to be expected and savored, like Gilda’s hair. She had on a sparkling cream dress (Saint Laurent, she revealed), with a necklace of gold chains, and her own lustrous mane looked freshly washed. She asked for my portion of bacon on her Cobb salad, which eventually she consented to have wrapped (“I feel guilty”) and a cup of coffee, followed by a cappuccino (“for dessert”).
Between 12:30 and 3:15, when we left the table and Ms. Baranski automatically put on her dark glasses and we walked leisurely up Fifth Avenue to 68th Street, where we said goodbye, she gave the impression that she had nothing better to do. The dark glasses startlingly brought her celebrity to life and deflected a dozen stares outside Bergdorf’s, but during lunch I don’t think she noticed that the news mavens Barbara Walters and Arianna Huffington were seated two tables away, nor they the actress.
Of course, that is how it should be. Who cares, right? Yet she observed something about New York that threw a different light on all those confident people. Although her remark was made about another occasion — a recent cocktail party Ms. Baranski attended at the Time Warner building, where many literary stars and journalists were present — it seemed a valid comment about the cultural shifts taking place, when the world you know is suddenly not the world you possess.
We had been talking in a meandering way about careers and marriage. For 27 years Ms. Baranski, who is 58, has been married to the actor Matthew Cowles, the black sheep member of a family with ties to Cowles publishing and Drexel banking who has made a respectable living playing bad guys and white-trash types, beginning with a small part in “Midnight Cowboy.” “He’s the one you should be interviewing,” Ms. Baranski said.
I asked her how they met. “We did an Ibsen play in Garden City, Long Island,” she said. “And he asked me if I wanted to ride home on his motorcycle one night. He was this shaggy blond-haired guy who smoked unfiltered Mexican cigarettes. He was really exotic. I was in my early 30s. He loved riding around lower Manhattan — back when SoHo was a little dark. Anyhow, that’s how our romance began. We lived in a few funky lofts downtown. I was doing ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in Central Park. That’s the first role I played in New York that got some real recognition.” In fact, Mel Gussow, in his review in The New York Times, raved that her Helena was the show’s “single stylish performance.”
That was 1982. Eventually the couple moved to Litchfield, Conn., where Mr. Cowles’s family had an old homestead, so they could raise their two young daughters with fewer hassles. For several years in the mid-’90s, when she was playing the mouthy Maryann in the sitcom “Cybill,” Ms. Baranski commuted to Los Angeles, while Mr. Cowles stayed home. Today, their daughter Isabel Cowles, 26, is a law student, and her sister Lily, 23, is doing graduate work in anthropology at Oxford.
I said, knowing the answer, “They didn’t want to follow their parents into acting?”
Ms. Baranski looked at me and then toward the busy room of diners, her ski-bump nose coming into sharper view. “I almost consider that an achievement, I must tell you,” she purred in her Juilliard-trained voice.
All this talk about former haunts led Ms. Baranski to observe: “We’re kind of all over-stylized. Did you read the Patti Smith book?” She meant “Just Kids,” Ms. Smith’s memoir of the ’70s and ’80s. “God, I loved that.” She then mentioned the Fran Lebowitz documentary — had I seen it? “Well, she talks about how New York of the ’70s belonged to artists and intellectuals and people coming with big dreams. Now it’s for people with money and tourists.”
Still in this vein, I told her I’d picked up the recent New York magazine issue about apartments, with a touching piece by Gay Talese.
Ms. Baranski grinned. “I was standing behind Gay Talese last week. I was at a screening of the Jerry Weintraub movie. We were up in the Time Warner building, with that beautiful view. I was standing behind Gay Talese, who was waiting to get his martini. I thought, This is such a New York moment. Everybody dressed in black.”
She paused, brooding. “The city kind of doesn’t belong to them anymore.”
“Oh?” I said, interested.
“Don’t quote me on it,” she said, in a higher key.
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