GOING FOR A BURTON

By Rachel Cooke

From Sunday Times, 02.23.1997

The strange and passionate affair of Lisa Marie, former model and now actress, and Tim Burton, director of Batman and Beetlejuice, provides further proof of the old theory that people fall in love with mirror images of themselves. It's not just that the two of them have the same tiny rabbity front teeth, or a similar pop-eyed fascination with all things sci-fi. It's much weirder than that. They both believe that dogs can talk.

Later this month, Lisa Marie will be seen putting the extra into extraterrestrial. She has a starring role in Burton's new film, Mars Attacks!, a satirical, affectionate homage to the cheesy flying-saucer B-movies of the 1950s. But, asked to name her favourite performance in a film packed with star turns, she chooses neither her own nonspeaking part as Martian Girl, nor those played by, among others, Jack Nicholson, Annette Bening or Glenn Close. For Lisa Marie, the best performance of the film by far is the one given by Poppy, her pet Chihuahua.

"We've worked with other Chihuahuas before, but they weren't as good as Poppy," she says, fiddling with the ruffle on her new Galliano frock. "So Tim and I asked her if she'd do it. She said that she didn't really want to, but that she'd do it for us. She's very dramatic, she loves to be in front of the camera. Of course she got on well with Sarah Jessica Parker! She's so lovable. She's a great dog."

Lisa Marie--she doesn't use a surname, and is coy about her age although I imagine she is in her late twenties--has been Burton's girlfriend and fellow chihuahua-lover for four years, and is responsible, if friends of the couple are to be believed, for "saving his life". When they met in a New York club in 1992, both were at a low ebb. Burton's Batman sequel, Batman Returns, had done relatively poorly at the box office, and his marriage to the German painter Lena Gieseke was all but over. Lisa Marie, meanwhile, was in her "blue" period.

Tired of her work as a model--she posed nude for Robert Mapplethorpe, and did the odd Calvin Klein campaign--she was unsure how to fulfill her real ambition to be an actress. She and Burton got talking, and soon fell madly in love.

"Modeling was good experience, but I got sick of doing Obsession ads with all these male models," she says. "I didn't find it a turn-on at all. I found it a turn- off. I always knew what I really wanted to be doing." When Burton gave her a small role in his 1994 movie Ed Wood, her dreams finally came true.

In Mars Attacks! Lisa Marie is the only human who plays an alien; all the other Mekon-headed creatures are created by clever computer graphics. It was a gruelling role that required her to spend seven hours a day in make-up having a huge, double brain-concealing wig attached to her head, and being sewn into her dress. Unable to move with any speed once inside her costume, she was pulled across the set on a trolley. Hidden up her sleeve was a wire connected to technicians operating a swivelling "spy-ring" on one of her fingers. Concentrating on so many appendages--including enormous conical breasts--left her physically exhausted.

"It was very tough," she says. "Tim and I had decided together on how Martian Girl should look: the spray-on dress was my idea, and the blue eye shadow was Tim's. But the wig was very painful, and it took me an hour to go to the bathroom because I would literally have to be unstitched from my outfit. Thanks to the heavy make-up, I couldn't eat anything more than a fruit shake. The only way I could cope with it was to go into a Zen-like state."

You get the impression that the real reason she managed to survive the ordeal was down to who was sitting in the director's chair. Burton, who has the build of Jarvis Cocker, the hair of Michael Hutchence and the clothes of the Cure's Robert Smith, may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it would not be exaggerating to say that Lisa Marie worships him, describing her beloved as "handsome and brown-eyed", and mentioning his name in almost every other sentence.

"I'm so fortunate to work with the person I love. I adore being directed by Tim. He treats me exactly the same as all the other actors, although when we did Ed Wood he overcompensated by being too hard on me. He admits that now."

The pair share what Lisa Marie calls an "extraordinary connection". Like Burton, whose unhappiness as a teenager has been much pored over by critics, she did not enjoy a happy childhood. She was brought up by her father in New Jersey in a house shared with her grandparents. When she was five, her grandmother, who had been ill with dementia for some time, died. Her grandfather, who ran a local Fix-it store, was brokenhearted.

"He was my main support as a child, and would spend hours listening to me playing the piano. He loved me unconditionally. Even so, from a very early age I took on the responsibility for the home; I did the laundry, the cleaning. I always felt...old. When I was 15, I left home for New York. It was the only way I could survive. It's only since I met Tim that I've had the chance to have a few childhood experiences."

Even when they aren't working, she and Burton live out of a suitcase. "We're pretty much gypsies," she says. "We love taking road trips across the desert. Tim likes to draw and paint, so we take all our art equipment. We create little characters and imagine how they look, and sometimes I even dress up as them and we do a photoshoot together."

Although she went abroad soon after Mars Attacks! was released in America, Lisa Marie is disappointed by what she has heard about the film's poor reception there. "Americans do not have a sense of humour about themselves," she says. "I think some people may have been offended by it. But I try not to dwell on that. It's odd. You put so much of yourself into a movie, but at the end of the day you have no control over it, you just have to let go." Will she and Burton work together again soon? "I hope so." Will they marry? "I don't feel the need. I'd prefer to have a celebration of love."

As I left the Paris Ritz, where our meeting took place, I saw her and Burton coming down the hotel's incredibly grand staircase together. He was in trademark black (she may have got him eating "vegetarian", but the clothes could still use a little work), she was in her pale, diaphanous Galliano dress. Although surrounded by PRs and aides, they were completely oblivious to everyone but each other. In fact, they might just as well have been in the Nevada desert.