About Steve :: Person :: Romance
Anne Heche

A great deal has been written about Steve's affair with Anne Heche, most of it inaccurate.

They met on the set of A Simple Twist of Fate when Steve was going through is divorce with Victoria Tennant.  Heche had an uncredited bit part. Although she was half his age, they began an affair that lasted about 2 years, then ended badly.

It was not until years later that Heche took up with Ellen DeGeneris and became one of Hollywood's most famous lesbians.
 

    
    Esquire
MISTER LONELY HEARTS
Martha Sherrill
Apr 1996, Vol. 125, Issue 4

****

But it wasn't Tennant, he says, who devastated him. It was the subsequent relationship with Anne Heche, a twenty-five-year-old actress (the Heartbreak Kid, as Martin's friends now refer to her), that kicked him into a more reflective period. "It was a torturous love affair," Martin says, and when the relationship ended, he found himself forty-nine, alone again, and wondering what his life was all about.

"If it was a midlife crisis," says Moore, "it wasn't self-destructive or reckless or harmful to anyone else. It seemed instructive. And it wasn't just about sex, either; it was more complicated than that. The conventional male midlife crisis just seems to be about sex and death. And I don't think this is about death. It's about life."

STEP NUMBER NINE: TURN MISERY INTO ART "I spent about a year recovering," says Martin, "and searching out myself and asking why things happened the way they did. I wrote a play about it, Patter for the Floating Lady. Oh, I shouldn't have told you that. I should have said I made it up."

In Floating Lady, a magician appears onstage and levitates a young woman named Angie. At the end of the play, after it's clear these two have loved each other and never quite trusted each other and caused each other the requisite sorrows, she says, "'Now I wait for a man my own age who will stand before me at arm's length, and I will hand him unimaginable joy, and he will not move forward, and move back. Then I will hand him unimaginable pain. And he will stand neither moving forward nor moving back. Then and only then, I will slit myself from here to here [she indicates a vertical line from her neck to her abdomen], open my skin, and close him into me."

The character of Angie is a little brutal in her honesty and also self-contained. She is described as "twenty-five, off-beat-looking in her clothes, wears glasses, but that's because she's quietly hip. She's got something, but it's stand." She is also "very beautiful in her plainness."

"I'm not attracted to really beautiful women," Martin explains. "Certainly not to women who are all done up. But I'm not attracted to women who, even without makeup, are considered real drop-dead beauties. I find them sort of scary."

Since the Heartbreak Kid, he has turned up at friends' houses with several different women, most of them also beautiful in their plainness, as well as smart, serious, and aloof. At dinner parties, "Steve's dates never say anything," says Ephron. "I'd be grateful if he found a twenty-seven-year-old," Bartlett says, laughing. "That would be in the older range. In any case, some of us are bemused by his romantic desires, and we also wish him the best."

"I have learned," says Martin, in his defense, "that it's possible for a fifty-year-old to have the mentality of a twenty-five-year-old. And vice versa."

"I have a theory that I tease him about," says Moore. "It's a version of the principle that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that the development of the human being mirrors the development of the human race. It seems to me that Steve is conducting his own ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny experiment in regard to women. He's crowding the first forty years of a man's sexual experience into a few years. Maybe when he's eighty, he'll catch up to women my age. I just hope by then it's not too late."

Martin says that since his divorce he's had relationships with "a thirty-five-year-old, a fifty-year-old, and a twenty-six-year-old"--he is determined not to go down in history as the Guy Who Dates Young Things. He agrees with Ephron that he gravitates toward two types: sweet and kind; and not. What's attractive about women who aren't sweet and kind? "It's valuable when you finally win them," he says.

They hate everybody else and love you?

"Well; it just means you're constantly in the process of winning their love. Want to see the backyard?"

****
 		    
    Sunday Times (London)
October 24, 1999, Sunday
Lesbian gag gives comic Martin the last laugh
Christopher Goodwin

STEVE MARTIN has never talked openly about the public humiliation and private anguish he felt when his lover, the actress Anne Heche, dumped him for Ellen DeGeneres, Hollywood's best-known lesbian, in 1997.

But Tinseltown insiders claim that, as writer and star of his latest box office hit, Bowfinger, the comedian has wreaked revenge on the woman who broke his heart.

The film has grossed $ 65m so far in America and opened in Britain last week.

Friends say the taciturn Martin, 54, felt he had been used by Heche, who is half his age, and even suggested she had never loved him. Heche walked off with DeGeneres after meeting her at a post-Oscar party.

Nora Ephron, the writer and close friend of Martin, said he was "just a great giant open gaping wound" following Heche's departure. The comedian himself has admitted that the subsequent years have not been peaceful.

In the new film, Martin plays Bobby Bowfinger, a small-time Hollywood director. In one last, desperate attempt to make a success of his career, he decides to make a ludicrous sci-fi movie called Chubby Rain, about aliens who infiltrate Earth by hiding inside raindrops.

The female lead is a young actress called Daisy, played by the wide-eyed Heather Graham, who arrives in Hollywood just off the bus from Ohio. Can it be a coincidence that Anne Heche was born in Aurora, Ohio?

Daisy turns up for an audition in Bowfinger's office asking: "Is this where I go to be a star?"

Once she's seduced him into expanding her part in the film, she moves on, turning up at the film's premiere with a woman she introduces as "one of Hollywood's most influential lesbians".

"It's his way of letting everybody know what he thinks of Anne without slandering her," one of the American supermarket tabloids quoted a Warner Bros studio boss as saying. "He gets the last laugh, and who can blame him?"

Martin denies that he wrote the part to avenge himself. "I wasn't thinking of Anne," he says. "Anne and I are still good friends. Only that last scene could be identified with her."

Heche can comfort herself with the knowledge that hers is not the only ego pricked in Bowfinger.

Eddie Murphy plays Hollywood's leading action star, the intensely paranoid Kit Ramsey, who is always surrounded by a huge entourage of flunkeys.

Some have suggested that the performance is a remarkable self-portrait.
 		    
    http://www.canoe.ca/JamMoviesArtistsM/martin_steve.html
Toronto Sun
Monday, September 10, 2001
Heche 'dim memory'
BRUCE KIRKLAND

TORONTO -- Comedian Steve Martin said yesterday he has nothing new to add to the unravelling of the mystery that is Anne Heche, the emotionally disturbed actress whom Martin dated in the 1990s.

"The whole thing with me and her happened eight years ago," Martin told a Toronto filmfest press conference. "It's like a dim, dim memory."

As for the voices that Heche now says she heard in her head during that period, Martin said drily: "No, I didn't have any experience with that at all, sorry."

Martin says he did not watch Heche's let-it-all-hang-out interview with Barbara Walters on ABC-TV's 20/20 this past weekend, even though Heche discussed her relationship with Martin. Heche, who admitted she has battled mental illness for most of her life, just married cameraman Coleman Laffoon and is now pregnant with their first child.
 		    
           
   
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