Literally.

She has logged thousands of miles on planes, and that’s just in one recent week, with a whirlwind trip through New York, Miami and Vegas.

“I think I was meant to live on the road,” Diaz says, stretching out those magnificently toned legs that seem to go on forever. “I have been doing it since I was 16, and when I am somewhere for too long, I always get an itch to go someplace else.”

This pit stop in Los Angeles is just for the USA WEEKEND photo shoot and interview. A fizz of anticipation is in her familiar voice as she talks; she’ll be hopping on a red-eye flight right after the interview to Manhattan, where photographers will catch her the next day coming out of a gym with her boyfriend, Yankees star Alex Rodriguez.

At 38, when women in and outside Hollywood are feeling nostalgic about their younger, buoyant selves, Cameron Diaz has never lost hers.

“When you feel physically strong, it makes you feel different in the world and in your clothes,” Diaz says.

Ironically, the peripatetic actress has never been more grounded. She is in love and at the top of her game in her career, and with Bad Teacher, which lands in theaters this weekend, the superstar has never looked better or been a bigger box-office draw.

In her new comedy, Diaz plays a drunken, pot-smoking, foul-mouthed teacher from hell. Worse, she motivates her students to win a state competition so she can get breast implants to win over a wealthy substitute teacher played by her real-life ex-boyfriend, Justin Timberlake.

“We have always liked each other,” she says (they split in 2007). “I am not the same person I was when I was with Justin. Our lives have moved in different directions, and that’s OK.”

At 5-foot-9 and size 0, the ageless A-lister is whippet-thin, wearing jeans and a white shirt. Her face is bare of makeup, which is the way she likes it: “My skin is happier when I do less.” (At night she uses a light wash and moisturizer and leaves it at that.)

Still, even Diaz has had to make some concessions to aging. Gone are the days when she could eat fried food every day.

“I used to eat fried food from morning to night when I was in my 20s,” Diaz says as she sips a soy latte. “But I have really had to make some changes. I love fried chicken and french fries. I can’t do that anymore. As I get older, I realized I was working a little bit harder at digesting what I was eating, and I thought it is not fair to my body to keep doing this. If you are giving it a bunch of crap all the time, it will break down quicker and deteriorate quicker, so I stopped.”

Instead, in the summer she loves to grill fresh vegetables with herbs and chicken, fish, steak and shrimp, all with a swipe of oil. She adds salt after she takes them off the barbecue. Her breakfast of champions is a combination of egg whites, sautéed tomatoes and steel-cut oatmeal, all mixed together. She doesn’t eat white pasta or white bread.

One summer ritual she refuses to give up: hot dogs, beer and ballgames. All of it reminds her of her father, Emilio Diaz, an oil company foreman who died in 2008 at age 58 when a flu turned into pneumonia. Cameron, the youngest of three children and raised in San Diego, spent her childhood attending Los Angeles Dodgers games with him. Her mother, Billie, is an import-export agent.

“There is nothing like a Dodger dog and beer,” Diaz gushes. “It is such pure joy to have a great hot dog at a sporting event.” She likes hers with the works, including a healthy dollop of mayo.

And despite her jet-setting life, Diaz makes it all work.

“I can sleep anywhere, anytime,” declares the star, who left home at 16 to be a model. “I sleep on planes, no problem. I just take my purse and a pillow and build a little bridge.”

She makes it sound so simple.

© 2011 Mary Murphy, USA Weekend. No copyright infringement intended.

Cameron Diaz is many things: an ever-smiling, booty-shaking, blonde, leg-alicious movie goddess. But she’s also, surprisingly, something of a sage. “People always say, Oh, you haven’t changed at all, despite the fame,” she says, throwing ice cubes in a glass of pinot grigio at Gemma, a restaurant in downtown New York. “But I believe that fame makes you become who you are more clearly.” More than 15 years of global first-name-only celebrity teaches a girl a thing or two. “When all the doors are open for you, you have to set boundaries for yourself. If you don’t have a good upbringing, the danger is that you’ll take advantage of those limitless opportunities, and then,” she says, “you lose your shit.”

At 37, Cameron hasn’t lost anything. If anything, she’s gained a palpable sense of calm, of “consistency” (one of her favorite words). “I’m more accountable for my behavior because everyone sees me. Everyone talks about me,” she says. She pays attention to the simple things, like not cutting lines, paying for things that she’s offered for free, and not “shutting down a store and kicking everyone out so you can be alone.” She’s never wanted to score big on the “asshole-ometer.”

Cameron is a citizen of the world — lucky, really, because everyone in the world knows who she is. She’s even big in Bhutan, where she visited a few years ago. “Everyone there wears traditional dress, and when I got off the plane, this guy asked me to sign his sleeve. I thought, Where am I?”

Today, jeans are Cameron’s traditional dress. “Don’t even ask me how many pairs I have,” she says, rolling her giant blue eyes and explaining that she just bought two more — J Brand, Acne — at a store down the street. She’s carrying a Chanel bag inside another Chanel bag that is big enough to carry a small child. Her hair is the blondest and most voluminous it’s been in years, and she’s in tippity-top shape.

Cameron’s figure has always been a wonder of the world, but it’s reassuring that she works at it. “Five times a week,” she says. And before going on a press tour, which she’s been doing for her new film, Knight and Day with Tom Cruise, she works out even harder. See the kick she’s giving the Chrysler Building in this shoot. “That’s my Charlie’s Angels training. When you learn that, it becomes muscle memory. The body remembers things like that.” Well, some bodies do. Others have muscle Alzheimer’s. “Ha, ha, haaa!” goes Cameron.

That laugh. Cameron’s laugh is the laugh of a woman who unself-consciously enjoys her life. She lives it regardless of the paparazzi, the cell-phone snappers, the Bhutanese autograph seekers. She trundles herself through airports, breezing through a gauntlet of fans and newsstands filled with tabloids that have of late cast her in a telenovela with Kate Hudson over Yankee slugger Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez, who Cameron has been linked to. “I think you build sort of a resistance to it,” she says of situations like being photographed leaving Rodriguez’s apartment building in May. “I’m not going to spend my energy worrying about that. I’m just going to live my life, because I know who I am, what I’m doing, and who I’m doing it with.”

While she’s a voluble sort, Cameron has never been one to discuss who she’s dating. But cling to this: “I grew up with the Dodgers, but now I’m a Yankees fan.” Then a big diversional sip of wine.

Cameron can thank many things for her fame: her charisma, her joy for life, and, yes, her ass. Said tush, which first came to fame in 1994’s The Mask, was prominently displayed in short shorts on the set of her upcoming comedy Bad Teacher, opposite her ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake. How much credit does she give her ass for her success? “Ha! That’s funny, because most booties that propel girls are usually the bigger booties. I have a little tiny one, but” — she drops a register for gravitas — “it is, nonetheless, juicy.”

Speaking of juicy, how was it working with an ex? Her answer goes down as smoothly as her pinot grigio. “Justin and I have laughed together for years. He is the funniest guy; you’ve seen the stuff he does on SNL.” She appreciated the shorthand an ex-couple can have. “Oh, absolutely,” she says, nodding. Humor brought you together in the first place then? She responds with an emphatic yes.

Cameron has a unique relationship with men — a tomboyish camaraderie, but also a palpable frisson. “I’ve always loved men and boys,” she says with a grin. “I don’t get hung up on what boys do. I don’t have a nagging nature. I feel like I can be a woman but also relate to a man.”

An amateur psychologist might credit this to her father, Emilio, who she lost suddenly to pneumonia two years ago at age 58. His death devastated her and wised her up at the same time. “I emerged a different person,” she says. “It reorganizes you into a totally different human being. For my family, it was massive, because it was such a shock. I learned major lessons, the big one being that there’s some things you cannot change.”

What did change were Cameron’s priorities: the people she spent time with, the men she dated. “Who doesn’t like the bad boy, until you grow up and realize bad boys are not the way to go?” she asks. “I’m done with that.” She also plunged into work, shooting three films — Knight and Day, The Green Hornet, and Bad Teacher — in eight months. She’d go to set, “wear someone else’s clothes, speak someone else’s words,” and keep herself so busy, she didn’t even have time to buy jeans. She bought an iPad (she uses it mostly for approving things like contracts and movie-poster art) and got her news from NPR in her car.

She’s not online very much at all. “I don’t have time!” she protests. “I’m working! And I don’t like the Internet. I find it really, really dangerous.” She’s equally unimpressed by Twitter: “I’m not interested at all. I don’t want my life to be made content. It’s not interesting to me and too much energy. I can barely return my e-mails.”

After the endless promotion for Knight and Day, Cameron might be able to return an e-mail or two. Of her partner in screen crime, Cruise, she says, “We just hang out — catch up, tell stories. We’ve known each other such a long time. And his family was there, so it was great to have Katie, Suri, Connor.”

Of another fashion parade, the red carpet, she sighs. “It’s hard out there, man. We’re all choosing dresses from the same places. I really like Victoria Beckham, though,” she says, having worn a tight metallic Beckham number to an Oscars after-party. During her year of nonstop work, Cameron didn’t shop. “I’m so confused at this moment,” she says, laughing. “I don’t understand fashion at all right now.”

Cameron’s “straight up and down” body is obviously built for clothes. “Exercise for me is like eating, sleeping, and breathing,” she explains. “I’m consistent, and when I’m not consistent, it shows up on my body. I get really skinny, and I know it might sound like, ‘Well, good for you.’ But the body that people talk about is not me trying to stay slim, it’s the one where I work hard to keep weight on me.” She isn’t suffering the metabolism challenge yet either: “Your body definitely does change, but the more I work on my body at this age, the better it gets.”

She’s contemplating some Tracy Anderson torture sessions, as recommended by her friend Gwyneth Paltrow. “I love her so much!” she enthuses of her fellow leggy blonde. “We’ve known each other a long time, but it’s only in the last few years that we’ve become closer. She’s just a lovely, dear, sweet, genuine individual.”

Both have, of course, gone through their ingenue period and emerged full-grown women. “Oh, I feel so much more attractive now,” Cameron insists. “A thousand percent. I’m appreciating my skin and my wrinkles and all those things because you cannot stop aging, you can’t.” Well, you could. “Yes! The only way to stop it is if you die. But that’s not a great alternative.” She’d much rather be Helen Mirren. “That woman is drop-dead sexy. She’s not trying to turn back the hands of time, she is just taking care of herself.” And, more impressively, “She’s a nudist!”

In the end, like nudism, it’s about the simple things; “Food, wine, friends, love. I give good love. I love the people that I love well. They emerge happy.”

Cameron is happy too to be “emerging from my bubble. Right now, it’s about mapping out my life.” And lest she sound too much like Buddha, she adds, “But I’m still a good time.”

“Hi, it’s Cameron,” goes the chirpy, disembodied voice. Downstairs she’s casually texting on my front step, 10 feet from the hybrid SUV waiting to whisk us to the airport. Easy, surfer-girl smile and we’re off to the local Starbucks for fuel, where she’ll bound into the place like a local.

There is something terribly wrong with Cameron Diaz. It’s as though she missed the memo about being a global star—the highest-earning actress in Hollywood, thanks largely to some nimble voice work as the ogress Fiona in the Shrek franchise. At her level of influence and wealth, Diaz, the star of this month’s My Sister’s Keeper, really ought to be criminally precious, aloof, and entitled—not humping her own luggage (a buttery Prada satchel atop a rolly bag) through LaGuardia Airport, entourage-free, smiling and waving at the passengers crumpling slack-jawed at the sight of her. “I’m very good on my own,” she’ll tell me later. “I’m very adaptable and self-sufficient. I can pretty much take care of any situation.”

“Hi, ladies!” Diaz sings out at some gobsmacked security women. She beams, cheekbones high and wide, blue-gray eyes filling with light. It’s like watching the morning sun stroll past.

I can’t get my head around it. Immediately recognizable, with a number of headline-worthy relationships behind her, she has done hard time as tabloid catnip. How can she be so Zen about the constant, panicky crush of attention?

“I just have a lot of friends,” Diaz says with a pretty shrug. “That’s how I think of it. It’s nice to see people smile.” Although she will tell me later, while sitting on the floor in a crowded waiting area, that losing your anonymity is a bit like a death—it’s a loss that you mourn. “Every once in a while, you’ll have those moments when people give you the stink eye,” Diaz says. “And you’re like, ‘What the fuck is your problem? What, am I horrific-looking?’ But really what they’re thinking is, Am I seeing who I think I’m seeing? It’s just a shock.” She absentmindedly pulls and twists a long, golden lock of hair—a frequent tic. “I don’t have any problem with being famous,” Diaz says. “I’ve completely made peace with being recognizable and people wanting to peek into my life in some way.”

The focus of our trip: Diaz’s rather pressing concern about the failing health of our planet—the dying oceans, the nefarious processed-food industry, the toxins tickling our nostrils with every breath we take. (“I wish I could be blissfully ignorant,” Diaz sighs. “I wish I didn’t know anything.”) Eschewing hollow celebrity do-goodism—while refusing to attach her name or likeness to things like fragrances—she has taken it upon herself to make a low-budget, seat-of-the-pants documentary about our relationship to the planet, schlepping to some not-so-hot spots across the country to talk with local people about their environmental woes. Airport Marriott, here we come!

Inspired by the annual TED conference that she’s attended—a kind of smarty-pants consortium dedicated to the spread of innovative ideas put forth by speakers like Bono, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, and Samantha Power—Diaz felt the urge to start a far-reaching conversation about the environment. “I was like, I’m going to get a camera, and I’m going to mobile-home it across the country, and I’m just going to find out what people are thinking. What would it take for the common person to become engaged?”—in the catastrophe that is the state of our natural resources. Most of all, she wants to help raise consciousness. “There’s a lot of great minds out there who are thinking about this,” she says, “who are coming up with solutions. Not to crash anybody’s party, but to actually make the party better.” She laughs. “Really, that’s what it’s about—that’s my participation in it.”

Once in Houston, we hook up with the 11-person film crew that’s been assembled, which includes the genial, quirky director Jesse Dylan, son of Bob, who shot will.I.am’s “Yes We Can” video during election season. After enthusiastic greetings, we freshen up for no more than 30 minutes at the Marriott before descending, commando-style, on some environmentally stressed nook of the city so that a miked, un-beautified, unscripted Diaz and the boom-and-camera-wielding crew can find some strangers to grill about the environment.

Our first location: a poison-belching oil refinery. Hard by the smokestacks, Diaz gamely pops out of a cobalt-blue Kia to commune with some rawboned workers, at the end of their shifts, buying booze at a neighboring liquor store and puffing on cigarettes; she’s barely finished asking a woman about the local water supply when a security truck rolls past, then stops and idles. It’s a sinister, Silkwood-type scene. The jig is up—the equipment plus Diaz are quickly pulled into vehicles, and we speed off. “We’re being tailed,” someone says—the security truck bearing down, then turning back once we are beyond the refinery’s reach.

Our next stop is a parched playing field near a school that sits in the shadow of the refinery, where the climbing equipment includes old truck tires protruding from the ground. And it is here that I get deeper insight into what’s driving Diaz to pursue this cause.

“This smell wafting over?” she says, taking leggy denim strides across the field while picking up the acrid stink. “This is my childhood.”

Diaz grew up in Long Beach, CA, in a neighborhood similarly dominated by a behemoth polluter. “I could see the flame from the refinery burning from my bedroom window,” she says. “I remember my dad dusting all the time from all the dirt that came in.”

The freeway ran past their house. “The 18-wheelers would drive by, and we loved it because we’d . . .”—she makes a playful tugging motion with her arm—”and the truck drivers would blow their horns.” What Diaz didn’t realize until later was that the trucks were carrying toxic waste from the refinery and dumping it in pools at the end of her block. As a kid, she suffered from asthma, as well as that ongoing burning, itchy sensation in the eyes and throat that she’s starting to feel now.

Once she has eased people past the shock of encountering her (“Hi, I’m Cameron!”), she drops into a low, wide-leg stance so she’s eye-to-eye with her less willowy interviewees—high-school girls, the Latino father of a young boy, a science teacher—then launches into a series of questions while the cameras roll: Do you know where your food, your water come from? Do you worry about the environment? What would it take for you to become more involved? And while people do seem to care, they also indicate a feeling of powerlessness. What, after all, can one person do? Then there is the problem of illegal immigrants—and there are many in this area—being decidedly disinclined to draw attention to themselves by registering complaints about things like air quality.

But the showstopper is a woman we meet a bit later who lives in a little house in full view of the refinery, who tells Diaz about the morning a sulfur-holding tank at the plant exploded, the still-mysterious condition that led to her young son’s open-heart surgery, the spike in depression and suicides in the neighborhood, the six-figure payoff one family received when their son was diagnosed with leukemia . . . And yet, with unmistakable pride, the woman turns around and lifts her shirt to show us the name of the neighborhood tattooed in large black Gothic letters across the small of her back. Because this, despite everything, is home.

“I want to leave you with this thought,” Diaz says to the woman. “After all you’ve told me . . . what would it take for you to do something to change your environment?” The woman, speechless, looks like she’s going to cry.

“I’m sad,” Diaz says later, in the car on the way to a Mexican joint for dinner. “It’s just sad.” She drains a plastic water bottle and tosses it on the floor of the car. “And I’m unhappy about the waste I just produced.” Diaz and Dylan, sitting next to her in the backseat, conclude that we as a people are summarily, environmentally “fucked.” In fact, that quickly becomes the leitmotif of the trip, and it cracks them up every time. Diaz, out of the blue: “You know what we are?” Dylan: “Let me guess—fucked?”

But nothing keeps Diaz down for long; at 36, she has a goosey energy that seems almost teenagerish—hormonal. One morning when we’d set out at a cruel 7:30, I was fighting off drowsiness in the front seat while a slap-happy Diaz twisted and bounced in the back, loudly singing Madonna’s “Into the Groove”—without benefit of iPod or earbuds. She then claimed to need coffee, holding up an empty 20-ounce thermos. “I found this in Japan,” she said. “When I did, I was like . . .” And here Diaz started cuddling and stroking and kissing the thermos effusively.

Sipping a virgin margarita at the Mexican restaurant now, Diaz announces, “Shit just finds my face—it’s crazy.” She’s referring to the fact that she finally had her nose fixed, after breaking it four times—most recently with a surfboard, and before that with her own knee. More radical forms of surgery are likely out of the question for her; Diaz is philosophical about what God gave her. “I’d love a bigger butt, more meat on my bones,” she says. “I’d love to be more voluptuous. It’s just not my body type.”

Defiantly down-to-earth, Diaz holds on hard to the homegrown qualities that have made her such an accessible presence on-screen. She’s the kind of girl who whips out a Sephora makeup bag and touches up her face mid-conversation; the type to chat loudly in the next bathroom stall and emerge with her pants undone, zippering them up in front of the mirror while she gabs. (And yet, she argues for a degree of cinematic mystique. Of the wild children currently dominating the tabloids, she says in the manner of a wise elder, “I like sexy girls; I like slutty girls. But sometimes I go”—she mimes a yawn—”if that’s all there is.”)

“I went to school with 3500 kids from all walks of life,” Diaz tells me. “We had kids who were Samoan, with sarongs and tattoos and gray hair at 13. We had guys with turbans on their heads. Being Hispanic”—her father was Cuban-American—”I was part of the ethnic population, but I also had blonde hair and blue eyes. I was friends with everybody. That gave me the skills I needed to travel and be in the world.”

Unlike the Mileys and the Britneys who had handlers before they’d even had their first kiss, Diaz endured some lean, obscure years, mostly modeling, which she values. “I had the good fortune of becoming famous once I had already lived a life, traveled a lot, stood in line, had to ask people to help me, had to find a way to make something work, pay the rent, scrape by,” she says. “I used to do $4 a day with a girlfriend. We would get two tacos and split a Coke.”

Indeed, the only thing to really break her stride has been the unexpected death of her father at 58, from pneumonia, a year ago last April. By all accounts, it put Diaz to her knees. “It’s the most profound thing—singularly the most profound thing that has ever happened in my life,” she says. “It’s like you’re standing there with somebody next to you, and all of a sudden there’s this huge hole where they were. It’s just a massive hole—you can’t even see the bottom.” But, devastating as the loss was for her, Diaz emphatically refutes the reports that claimed she’d had a breakdown at the time and was hospitalized. A shrug. “People want you to be weak.”

If anything, Diaz says, the tragedy focused her. “When you lose a parent, it either derails you or it sobers you up. It either blows you off course or sets you on course. For me, I became very introspective. You go inside and you look at things very intensely.” Hence, this passion for hunkering down to what’s important, and tackling something much bigger than she is.

Before flying to Cleveland, we go to a park and meet a vibrant cross section of humanity: the businessman in upscale running gear who tells us that his contribution to the environment includes putting “environmentally friendly lightbulbs in my house” (environmentally friendly in finger quotes); the tie-dye-wearing Texas hipster-savant who says with a mordant laugh, “My father and I were never really close—but the one thing we had was, he taught me a love of nature.” Then Diaz approaches a gentle soul in a windbreaker and black pants, who spells out his great love for this park. “Sometimes if it rains, it’s hard to sleep; sometimes I go a little hungry. But I look forward to every day.” Cameron’s half-mast courtesan eyes fill with tears. At last—someone more in tune with the environment than we ever could have imagined—someone who basically lives in the park. None of us had realized the man was homeless. “He shifted something in me,” Diaz says afterward.

This is not an easy gig for a glittering star who will never want for much of anything. People instantly ascribe cynical motives. What’s an overprivileged limelight fixture like Cameron Diaz doing, telling us what’s important?

She gets that. Luckily, Diaz is clever enough to know the precise extent to which she is one of us, where her surreal otherness takes over, and the good that it can do.

“The planet needs a publicist,” she told me on the first day of our trip. “I had this cartoon in my head a couple of years ago when Paris Hilton was going to jail and Britney Spears was falling apart. There’s a woman at a desk talking to planet Earth, and she’s like, ‘I’m going to make you a star!’ And it says, ‘But I’m a planet.’ And she’s like, ‘No, I can tell, you’re going to be bigger than Paris and Britney. When I’m done with you, everyone’s going to know who you are!’” She laughs.

“It’s the planet, you know what I mean? She should be the one—she should be a star. How do we make this little planet of ours a big star? I want everybody to know who she is.”

© 2009 Lucy Kaylin, Marie Claire. No copyright infringement intended.

Diaz was in the midst of filming the heartbreaking My Sister’s Keeper, playing a mother fighting to save the life of her terminally ill daughter, when she faced a tragedy of her own. Her 58-year-old father, Emilio, died suddenly of complications from pneumonia. Production came to a halt as Diaz headed home to be with her family before returning to complete the film, which opens June 26.

Playing a parent facing the end of her child’s life would be a challenge for any actress, but I asked Diaz how the loss of her father influenced her performance.

“I was in shock,” she says. “Whether or not I got to take that experience and apply it to my work is something that I can’t answer.”

She is extremely close to her mother, Billie, and her sister, Chimine. She credits her family with her work ethic, her backbone, and her admittedly weird sense of humor. But her father was at the center of Diaz’s world.

A few years ago, we laughed together about how she had been brought up as a “daddy’s boy.”

“He was a huge football fan,” she says with a smile. “Dad didn’t have a son, so my sister and I sort of absorbed his love of sports. We’d watch a game, and he’d be screaming at the top of his lungs. Dad was so funny and such a boy. It was great to have that influence in my life.”

Diaz says the tight bond with her family helped her cope with the loss. “My mother said, ‘If there’s such a thing as grieving well, then we’ve grieved well, as a family,’” she reflects, choosing her words carefully. “I feel like we’ve done the best that we can through this. I think that’s something to be proud of.”

Arguably one of the most famous movie stars in the world, Diaz is among a long list of what Hollywood agents call MTAs—models turned actresses. She started striking poses for magazines when she was 16. “Modeling was like the waitressing that other young actresses were doing,” she says. Her audition to star opposite Jim Carrey in 1994’s The Mask turned out to be a career changer. The movie was a huge success at the box office.

Since then, Diaz has been the sexy comedic darling in breakaway hits like There’s Something About Mary, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Shrek, and Charlie’s Angels. But she’s also gained respect as an actress in more serious roles in films such as In Her Shoes and Gangs of New York.

Leaning over a bowl of vegetable soup that she is clearly enjoying at the Chateau Marmont, Diaz steals some of my french fries with a little giggle. The tall beauty sizzles in worn jeans and a silk tank top and sweater. Her smile and musical laugh seem to burn off the clouds on an overcast Los Angeles day.

For the 36-year-old star, the biggest downside of fame has been the paparazzi who have chronicled her romances over the years with famous men such as Justin Timberlake, Jared Leto, Matt Dillon, John Mayer, and, most recently, model Paul Sculfor. Diaz keeps her thoughts about those relationships private. But she’s happy to say that she’s still friends with her past loves.

She looks back on the relationships with no trace of bitterness. “I think that what I’ve found, in my experience, is that you always find the person who you’re meant to be with at that time in your life,” Diaz says. “And what I’ve also found is that you have to move on from those people at certain times, because that’s the way it happens. For me personally, there’s nothing wrong with that. A lot of people find themselves trapped in something that they’ve outgrown and are unhappy. And they don’t know how to get out of it because they think that they’re supposed to make it happen.

“I’m in a completely different place in my life now than I was five years ago,” she adds. “I’m very comfortable with where I am, I’m happy, and I’m looking forward to the future. I’m looking forward to this afternoon, tomorrow, the next day, and a month from now.”

Playing a mother in My Sister’s Keeper, Diaz expects to field questions about having a family of her own.

“I think that it’s normal for people to ask that,” she says, “especially of someone my age, because it seems like the obvious thing: ‘Why haven’t you done it?’ It doesn’t bother me. It’s not the cross I bear. I’m not somebody who is going to declare either way if I’m absolutely going to or I’m absolutely not going to have children. I have no idea. I’m still young. I have an unbelievable life. In some ways, I have the life that I have because I don’t have children.”

Diaz takes pride in being an aunt. “I have three nieces and a nephew,” she says. “I know what it’s like. I’ve changed the diapers. I’ve seen three births, so I totally get the whole picture. I don’t think it’s a compromise to have children. I don’t think it’s a compromise not to. I think it’s just a different choice.”

She scrunches way back on the couch and pauses before adding firmly: “People might say, ‘That’s bull. She actually really wants to have a baby.’ My answer is: ‘No! Everything I’m bringing into my life right now isn’t geared toward that. It might be one day.’”

In her career, Diaz remains driven and determined. “There are some things I just don’t hear,” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t hear, ‘You can’t do that.’ To be able to hear that, you have to believe that you’re not capable. The gift that I received from my family is that I was always made to feel that I was capable of doing whatever I wanted to do. There was no question about it. So I’ve always felt that all I can do is my best.”

Diaz brings that same positive spirit to her campaign to increase environmental awareness, beginning with the Prius she drives. “It’s not about taking care of the planet because we want to protect those fuzzy, cute little bears,” she says with passion. “It’s about us. We’re the ones who are at stake. Our future is at risk.” She orders tap water, not the bottled stuff, and can talk quite emphatically about portion size and wasted food in America.

Diaz stops to tie the laces on her cool gladiator sandals and considers what she’s learned in her climb to the top.

“There’s an assessment that comes with experiences in life,” she says. “For me, if I make an effort to get the most out of experiences, then I feel good. I don’t want to face difficult problems and let them sit on top of me and get the best of me. Certainly, I’ve done that in my lifetime. I hope not to do it too many more times.” Her mood changes, and she flashes her trademark smile. “I’m only human. It’s not all sunny days, but it’s not all gloomy either.

“The real beginning of being happy is having gratitude,” she adds. “That’s where I live. I’m just grateful for what I have. I’m not vying for other things. I don’t need to do this. I don’t need to have that. I think it’s the way I was raised.”

Diaz takes a sip of her decaf latte, crosses those long legs, and looks straight into my eyes.

“I’ll say it again,” she says. “It’s about coming from a very loving family. When you go out into the world and you see what people don’t have, you see how screwed up people can become when they have nothing that grounds them and gives them strength.”

She pushes her blond hair back and declares, “See why I feel lucky?”

© 2009 Jeanne Wolf, Parade. No copyright infringement intended.

Even at the pinnacle of the Hollywood hierarchy, there are many degrees of fame. Some A-listers can go about their lives relatively unhassled by autograph seekers and tabloid photographers, provided they steer clear of sex scandals and DUIs. Sarah Jessica Parker, for instance, can often be spotted dining at one of the sidewalk cafés near her home in New York’s West Village, nary a lensman in sight. And Uma Thurman is able to handle school pickups and drop-offs without anyone causing a fuss. But then there are stars like Cameron Diaz, who, try as they might, never seem to get a break from the madness—even in a tiny mountaintop village in Peru.

Last year, Diaz journeyed to South America as a guest host of the Canadian travel show 4Real. The idea was for her to visit a young shaman in the Peruvian hamlet of Chinchero, where he leads spirit ceremonies and dispenses medicinal herbs. One would imagine this remote region to be among the few places on earth where Diaz wouldn’t have to deal with the paparazzi (or “motherf—ers,” as she’s called them), but, alas, that was not to be. “We couldn’t go anywhere without people being like, ‘Cameron! Cameron!’” recalls 4Real’s producer and host, Sol Guy. “And there were paparazzi everywhere, pushing and shoving us.”

The frenzy reached its apex when the show visited Machu Picchu, the so-called “lost city of the Incas.” As Diaz and her crew were standing on a cliffside spot from which the view is most majestic, a gaggle of tired-looking women in grubby cargo pants arrived, having just hiked four days to take in the vistas. And were they appropriately awed, after their long uphill trek, at the picture postcard–worthy sight before them? Nope. They hardly seemed to notice—they were too busy gawking at Diaz and begging her to pose for photos.

On a dreary February day in New York, there are, thankfully, no such scenes when Diaz shows up for her interview at Gemma, the restaurant in the trendy Bowery Hotel. It’s just after 4 p.m. on a Thursday, and the dining room is deserted, just as she had planned it. As she enters, the actress, who is running a few minutes behind schedule, breaks into a mincing slo-mo jog, bouncing across the room and faux-frantically waving her long arms. “I’m so sorry,” she says when she arrives at the table, practically somersaulting onto the leather banquette. “Mercury is in retrograde, and that messes with technology, and I was trying to get on e-mail to approve something, and my computer kept crashing….” And with that she starts rubbing her mouth against her cowl-neck sweater, then furiously wiping her lips with her hands. “I feel like I have stuff all over my mouth. Do I have, like, gunk on my lips? Am I grossing you out?” she asks, dissolving into a fit of giggles. “It’s like, eewwww, gross!”

It’s this image of Diaz that fans know best—the hot babe who’s not afraid to look like a big ol’ dork, burping, tripping over her feet and blurting out ditzy things. At this year’s Oscars, Diaz’s presentation almost seemed self-parody; she bungled “cinematography,” pronouncing it “cinnamon-atography” before quickly recovering her poise and hamming it up for the crowd with an exaggerated “Oh, I can do it!” On a recent episode of Oprah she called in to commend her best friend Drew Barrymore’s million-dollar donation to the World Food Programme and ended up babbling on so long that Winfrey had to step in and cut her off practically midsentence.

This goofy-meets-gorgeous combination has proved to be a winning one: According to The Hollywood Reporter, she’s the third-highest paid actress in Hollywood (after Reese Witherspoon and Angelina Jolie), commanding $15 million a movie. For her work in last year’s Shrek the Third, she reportedly took home twice that, thanks to a profit-sharing deal.

In her latest film, What Happens in Vegas, opening in May, the slapstick Diaz again comes out to play. She stars as Joy McNally, an uptight Wall Street trader who, after a bad breakup, heads to Sin City for a weekend of fun. There, she meets a ne’er-do-well furniture maker (Ashton Kutcher) and, after a night of drunken groping, ends up marrying him in a quickie wedding chapel. The next morning, of course, the two realize that they kind of hate each other. But before they can annul their union they win a $3 million slot machine jackpot together, and a judge orders them to live as man and wife for six months or forfeit the cash. They shack up in his filthy bachelor pad, undergo court-ordered couples counseling with Queen Latifah and, well, you can guess what happens in the end.

The movie is hardly Shakespeare—or even romantic comedy on the level of The Holiday, thanks to a few too many gags about leaving the toilet seat up—but Diaz and Kutcher have palpable chemistry and look great together, sort of like the homecoming king and queen of Hollywood. The costars were already attached to the project when director Tom Vaughan (Starter for 10) was approached about the film, and that, he says, was “the major reason to make the movie. I thought, Why has no one done this before? It’s so obvious.”

Diaz signed on because, she says, “I just really wanted to spend the summer having a good time and laughing and enjoying myself.” And, from the sound of it, she did. The early scenes are shot in Las Vegas, a city she’s grown quite fond of after 15 years of wild weekends at the craps and roulette tables. “I looooove Vegas. It’s such an easy trip from L.A., and there’s always a hotel room because there’s about a billion of them,” she says, before adding with a laugh, “but honestly, you don’t even really need one if you’re just going for the weekend!”

It was New York, however, where the film was shot for three months, that really made an impression on Diaz. She spent Sundays hanging out in Central Park and getting lost in the endless nooks and crannies of the city just like any other newcomer. “You can walk down the street and end up in a gallery or some wonderful ethnic-food restaurant, or you can stop in a shop that sells, I don’t know, staplers from all over the world!” she enthuses, sounding, endearingly, more like a tourist than a movie star. “You don’t get that in L.A.—that kind of, I don’t know, specialty.”

The cast and crew took to spending Saturday nights at Sing Sing, an East Village karaoke bar where, says Diaz, “there’d be 30 of us in this really tiny room screaming at the top of our lungs. All of a sudden it would be four in the morning and we’d have no idea what time it was, no idea how long we’d been there, and nobody would be ready to go home. It was awesome.”

Kutcher, for one, doesn’t think Diaz is ready for a recording contract. “It’s tough to beat me rocking out to ‘Sister Christian,’” he says. “But Cameron gets an A for effort.”

Diaz went so gaga for New York that, in the end, she decided to make the city her second home. Though the Southern California native insists she’ll never sell her house on the West Coast (“My family’s there, so I’d never just leave”), she recently purchased a place in Manhattan, reportedly a West Village two-bedroom with an asking price of just under $3 million. “You know, bicoasssstal,” she says, drawing out the word in a mock pretentious way. For Diaz, what’s most appealing about the city, aside from the exotic stapler shops, is the fact that, she says, “I can actually have a life.” While there’s no escaping the paparazzi—even atop the Andes, as she’s learned—she finds it easier on the East Coast, where, unlike in Los Angeles, a mob of photographers isn’t permanently stationed outside her door. “I’m done with L.A.,” she proclaims, sounding, for the first time, less like kooky Cameron and more like a woman who’s not afraid to piss a few people off. “Those guys [the paparazzi], you can’t get away from them. You have no options because everybody’s in a car. Here, I can walk down the street like everybody else.” In New York, she adds, “not everybody is there to be rich and famous or attach themselves to rich and famous people. People want nothing from you. They just want to say, like, ‘Hey, how’s it going, Cameron?’ I like that interaction. I like to be in a place where I can be open to people and not worry about the consequences.”

Another highly illegal manoeuvre,” laughs Cameron Diaz, pulling a savage U-turn into an unsuspecting LA side street. “What’s up, baby? Are you scared?”

“Only because you’re driving like a lunatic, darling.”

“Sum yung gai?” she says, switching inexplicably to Chinese and implying, implausibly, that her passenger is in some way homosexual. “You wan’sum yung gai?”

You could be forgiven for believing this was a scene from her latest knockabout romcom wherein Cameron’s character bumps into an old flame from London and takes him out for a date in LA… with hilarious consequences.

But no, this is a verbatim exchange as we set out to lunch in Cameron’s celebrated Prius hybrid, on a honeyed Californian morning sometime in between Valentine’s Day and the Oscars.

Earlier, she had collected your reporter from the Sunset Marquis in Hollywood. “It’s me,” she had whispered, perhaps unnecessarily. “And guess what? No paparazzi assholes on my tail.”

She is dressed in narrow jeans, high-heeled, scuffed tan boots and a tight cream cardigan. Her jewellery is similarly discreet – a small golden teardrop on a fine chain, delicate hoop earrings and a single stone ring. Her hair is tied back with a few blonde fronds doing their own thing at the front. She smells sweet, like a meadow and, as ever, she’s fantastically funny.

With quality time to spend we decide upon the dream date: dim sum in China Town; an art gallery, maybe the MOCA [Museum Of Contemporary Art]; coffee in some funky neighbourhood then a drive around a few lesser-known pockets of LA, her hometown. “This is going to be fun,” she promises and with a surge of planet-friendly power, we are off. But not without a frankly smutty start.

“Ooh, that’s huge,” she gasps as I struggle to fit my old  analogue tape recorder into the car’s dash. “So big and shiny. You’re never going to get it into my tiny…”

“Enough with the double entendres, woman. We’ve only just met.”

“OK,” she coughs, daintily. “I’ll be serious. All day. But it’s not going to be easy. Anyway look, we’ve met before, you know what I’m like.”

This much is true. Cameron Diaz was young and innocent (“No I wasn’t! I was just young!”) when GQ, or anyone for that matter, first encountered this unconventionally pretty, yet virtually unknown surfer girl from Long Beach. She had recently completed her debut movie, The Mask. Unbeknown to her at 22, the tongue-lolling comedy would turn her world on its head.

It’s a pleasure to meet Cameron Diaz again, now on her 30th feature film – a goofy, tender comedy with Ashton Kutcher called What Happens In Vegas – due to fizz and pop into multiplexes across the globe early next month.

She repeatedly insists that she hasn’t changed but happily agrees that she now knows who she is and has accepted her God-given role as one of the most famous yet approachable stars. “As much as I don’t like people,” she says in one of many mind-twisting axioms, “I really want to meet every one of them.”

She has become a beautiful and captivating woman, having retained the slender, bendy body of a gymnast and the enquiring mind of a child. And she still has a smile that could stop the hands of time.

“Everything gets easier as you grow older,” says Cameron, turning her eyes – the colour of robins’ eggs – away from the road and then back again. “It’s just great. It’s about your spirit and the way you look at life. I’ve matured, definitely. But I kept an open mind about everything and that keeps you young. Age is just a number anyhow.”

That number is 35, and Cameron is a highly respected and stupendously paid actor.

She claims “not to have made that many movies in the past ten years”. (Shockingly, it’s been a full decade years since There’s Something About Mary – a film that made most right-thinking males fall in love with her.) Then remembers that she’s done “maybe a few Shreks. Oh, and some Charlie’s Angels and some other weird art house stuff, too.”

She coyly omits to mention that she has steadily come to master her craft and has held her own with all the big boys: Daniel Day-Lewis, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel, John Cusack and Tom Cruise.

“If you look to our left,” she smirks, refusing to rise to any co-star-bashing bait, “you’ll see Paramount Pictures where I shot Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise. Ah, me and Tom. Actually, he has this amazing energy.”

As we roll, in an environmentally considerate fashion, along Melrose Avenue, she breezes through her impressive résumé without ever appearing to drop a name or blow any bum-bound smoke.

Thinking about it now, she says, she’s enjoyed the more unlikely projects – “Like Marty [Martin Scorsese] doing Gangs Of New York or Oliver Stone doing a football movie [Any Given Sunday]” – as much as the spunky comedies, the karate-kick chick flicks and the ogre-oriented box-office busters.

Perhaps her finest acting achievement, you suggest, was Being John Malkovich. Such was the heavy disguise and unflattering nature of the part, you didn’t realise that Cameron Diaz was in the picture at all.

“I loved that film,” she croons, taking an audaciously sharp left. “The chimp was amazing. A-f***ing-mazing. And John Cusack is such an interesting man. He has a really big brain. I love that.”

We take the carpool lane on the freeway and head downtown (“Are you excited? I am, I can go faster!”) A truck pulls out in front of us. “Suck it, buddy!” she screams and eases around the beast. “Could you pass the bottle of water at your feet there?” she asks, before combusting with laughter. “Perhaps you should have some, you seem a little anxious.”

Her laugh is an extraordinary gurgle, the sounds of a baby savouring a decent brandy. “I frickin luuurve drah-vin,” she whoops in a non-specific Southern accent. “C’mon, enjoy yourself, we’re on a date!”

Do many guys ask you out on dates?

“I do get asked out,” she says. “It’s fun. And I like boys. A lot. I’m boy crazy. That hasn’t changed since I was very young. I love boys. I’m a lot of woman. In a lot of ways. And I understand that it can be intimidating.” You appear to be a very accommodating person, are you really that open?

“I like to bring people in and make connections,” she allows. “But if I don’t like somebody, it’s not like they don’t know. I don’t pretend. If I don’t want to let somebody in, they don’t get in. I’m not afraid of people not liking me. If someone’s rubbing me the wrong way, they will know about it. Oh yes.”

Do you have a lot of male in you?

“I’ve never been girlie but I love that aspect of being a woman,” she puzzles. “But then, I really like all the things guys like, too.”

What, baseball and masturbation?

“Hell, yeah!”

Being grumpy and hungry all the time?

“I am hungry all the time,” she says, finally turning off the freeway. “And I can be grumpy but that usually has to do with someone sticking a fucking camera in my face when I’m trying to buy my groceries. But that, I’m afraid, is how this town has become.”

Do you intend to leave LA?

“I’m going to get a place in New York,” she nods, affecting an exaggerated intellectual tone. “I’ll become bi-coastal. I feel I can have a life in New York, which is something that has become more of a task in Los Angeles. You get treated the same as everyone else in New York. Here, people have come to either become rich and famous or be near someone who’s rich and famous. It’s really sad. I never thought I’d get to the point where I thought I was done with LA – I’m from here – but…”

As if to prove her local’s credentials, Cameron locates the Empress Pavilion from memory explaining that this was where their kung fu master would take them while making the Charlie’s Angels movies. It’s a vast dining hall with a queue that can snake around the block.

Today the line is fairly short but remains impervious to A list, Golden Globe-grabbing, ninth most beautiful, best butt in the world clout. “There’s nothing I can do,” she pouts. “I’m hopeless at that Hollywood shit.”

So we pass some time, waiting in line, discussing her award-winning bottom. “I have a little butt,” she says, patting her compact rear quarters. “It’s not a big, chunky ass but it’s proportionate to my body. A while ago, I put on about six pounds and most of it went back there. Looked mighty fine, I can tell you.”

A few elderly Chinese diners turn in slow motion to watch this tall, pretty girl slapping her behind, then return to the more serious business of lunch.

A waitress pushing a trolley stops to tell her she’s pretty. “Does a girl ever get tired of being told she’s pretty?” she sighs.

“It’s when you’re told, ‘You’re much prettier than you look in photos.’ I mean, what the fuck? How are you expected to respond? ‘That’s because you saw some sleazebag photo of me loading up my car in my gym clothes?’ Is it a compliment? ‘You look half-human in real life’? It’s a weird one.”

We eventually secure a table for two. A grandmother dressed like Chairman Mao squints at us inscrutably. “Good look she’s rocking there,” says Cameron under her breath. “The whole military trouser-suit vibe. Liking it.”

Food arrives. Tons of it. Prawn dumplings, pot stickers, broadband noodles and enough Chinese broccoli for an entire dynasty; emerald green and threatening maximum flatulence. “We should be OK if we chew it well enough,” the lady, something of a gas expert, offers helpfully. “Do you want a pork bun now or shall we hold out?”

She eats heartily and burps only gently. Then the conversation turns to politics and she speaks, without any apparent oxygen requirements, for 15 minutes non-stop. Words tumble over themselves in a heartfelt rant about making America, “our country”, great again. It’s like Barack Obama in full flow, only less policy-phobic.

Are you ashamed of what Bush has done?

“I’m saddened by what has happened to America,” she says. “It’s been run terribly and American people have been completely led down the wrong road. I’ve travelled the world since I was 16 and in the past four years I have seen a sorry and definite decline in this country. That’s just a fact. A very sad fact but it’s real.”

But during the Bush administration, your life has improved immeasurably.

“Are you talking socially or economically?” she asks rhetorically. “I can’t give it to the politics of this country that my life has improved. The film industry is kind of immune to nationwide economics. We don’t suffer as much. If I worked in another industry then I may not have enjoyed such prosperity. I’m not denying that I have thrived, personally, under this administration but that doesn’t compensate for the world turning to shit all around us.”

Has it become harder to be an American?

“The openness towards Americans has dropped off massively. You can feel it. The love has gone. Luckily, as an actor, I’m not judged as being American. It’s been weird for me because although I’m white, I’ve always been labelled an Hispanic. I’m called Diaz. It doesn’t get more Spanish. Look, I’m half Cuban, part German, part English, part American Indian. Human beings do not come more mixed race than me. I’ve got blue eyes but I’ve always been a minority.”

What’s going to happen to America?

“I’m optimistic,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief. “Looking at the statistics, it doesn’t look good. America lives in a bubble but that could work for us if we have the right person to lead us through it. I feel that America and Americans need to be empowered in a way that they haven’t been in the past eight years. We’ve been living with the notion of fear and terror for too long. Be fearful. Fear, fear, fear. That’s all we know now. It makes people more defensive, makes them smaller. We’ve got to connect again. This is the greatest nation on the planet. We can accomplish anything. We can be so powerful. Not in a scary military sense but in a cultural sense. We can be strong again. We just have to get the desire and confidence back.”

By the time she’s finished, her breastbone is lightly flushed and the broccoli has gone cold.

Ever thought about a second career in the House of Representatives?

“I can get very passionate,” she says. “Will you excuse me for a moment? I’ll be right back.”

During her political speech, a camera flash had popped a couple of times, highlighting the zealot’s fire in her eyes. It has just gone off again. Someone is taking photographs and Cameron isn’t happy. She marches up to the woman responsible, three tables away, places her hand on the amateur snapper’s shoulder, speaks a few short sentences, smiles broadly, then turns on her heels with a face like thunder.

“I said, word for word, ‘Hello, would you mind please not taking any more pictures of me while I’m eating. Thank you so much, have a nice day.’ Totally killed her with kindness. If someone’s going to get mad at me for being sweet to her then she’s got some serious issues. She wasn’t being malicious. She’ll stop now. If she starts up again then she’s being disrespectful… and that’s a whole other conversation.

Shall we have the ‘but you’re a celebrity… deal with it’ discussion?

“Celebrity has become one brand,” she argues. “There’s no distinction any longer. You have no choice about turning up in those magazines and so you’re locked in with everyone else who appears in them. And there is a distinction.”

Cameron digs an indignant chopstick into a parcel of unidentified sea creature. “I love my life,” she shrugs. “I don’t have any shame in being happy. You spend so many years in darkness with stuff eating away at you – it’s OK to be happy. No matter who you are, the same things will happen to us all. Unless you die, you’re just going to get older. Youth is always going to be wasted on the young. You’ll never truly appreciate what you have until it’s lost. That’s growth, that’s wisdom, that’s learning, that’s life.”

Privately, are you a cynical person?

“I absolutely have my cynical moments. I’m human. I go through every aspect of existence. Every day!”

Have you ever felt as if you were going mad?

“I did,” admits Cameron. “When the paparazzi were particularly hard-core for a while back there, I didn’t know if I could handle it. When I was being constantly followed it made me feel very vulnerable but I have put that in its place now. It’s such a primal thing. You’re being chased and backed into a corner and your instinct is to claw your way out. And I was raised a fighter. My dad taught me to never back down.”

Do you want to have kids of your own?

“For me it’s not so much about having kids as having a partnership,” she says seriously. “Someone I want to have kids with. Because that’s for the rest of your life. And I’ve yet to find that person. I think that urge to procreate comes and goes. I already nurture a lot in my life. It’s in my nature.”

Could you play a man, like Cate Blanchett did inI’m Not There?

“I think I could,” she frowns. “I’ve had enough experience with them.”

How do actors justify the amount of money that they are paid?

“It’s a business,” she says, politely refusing a plate of Peking duck, then immediately regretting it. “If I don’t get paid someone is going to make that money off me. The people pushing the numbers know exactly how it works. And they’re making more than me. But I’ve got to say, I work my ass off, too.”

Do you ever look at the cheque you receive for a film and feel embarrassed?

“Oh God, yeah!” she splutters. “All the time. Are you insane? It’s ridiculous! But you have to think globally and I am in a global business. I just accept that. Although,” she passes over our own cheque for the meal, “you can accept that. It’s only 16 bucks. Hey, I told you I was a cheap date.”

The MOCA is disappointingly empty. But it’s only eight dollars each. And as my date, according toForbes magazine last year, is worth around $75m, we agree to go halves.

Thankfully, the visit is a hoot. The permanent collection – come on down: John Baldessari, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol – is a modernist chocolate-box treat and Cameron is excellent company.

She hardly stops laughing for the duration but it’s done with such good grace that the stewards are soon chuckling along with her.

Some giant glass sperm on the floor? “Are they like, actual size?” A sculpture made out of bin liners? “I love a concept.” Mental squiggle on white canvas. “I’m no genius with art but I know what I like.” A large painting of two erect penises touching? “Don’t you guys hate it when your cocks bang together like that?”

But it’s not all flippant frolics and reductive tomfoolery. She is moved by Rothko’s bleak mindscapes and lingers over bleakly comic monochromes by Raymond Pettibon. Then there’s a small black and white photograph, a group of carefree young girls on a bench, that brings an unexpected tear to her eye.

Culture done, we drive over to Fairfax, “my lovely old neighbourhood”, for coffee. Before entering the lounge, Cameron removes her widescreen Chanel sunglasses and replenishes her lip gloss with a slippery coconut concoction. “Want some?” she asks in the time-honoured tradition.

Ordering a large espresso with a cup of foamed milk on the side, she mixes the two until “it’s exactly the right colour”. Then she helps do mine. Twice.

Inevitably, the conversation becomes distinctly caffeinated, the subject matter lurching like a damp-trousered tramp from the inarguable to the insane: the collective unconscious, death, thermodynamics, finding inner contentment through outer space, dogs that can sniff out cancer, moist handshakes, foreign languages (“I can hardly speak English”), reincarnation (how long do you have to wait between interstellar shifts?), favourite fromage (“any French triple cream that melts like soup”), invincibility, breaking the law, effective use of the C-word, how to make the perfect pancake and why men like to shove a hand down their pants when they’re on the phone. “Right,” she scoffs. “And like girls don’t do that.”

Having talked herself out of a post-lunch sandwich (“But I’m hungry again!”), we get back in the car and side-wind up into the Hollywood Hills.

We drive in silence for a few miles and I’m wondering just how former boyfriend Justin Timberlake managed with this girl who, like John Cusack, has a really big brain and, like Tom Cruise, exudes this amazing energy. The poor bloke must have been exhausted. I make a note to ask her about this later.

She answers obliquely when I do. “When I’m in a relationship, I’m very loyal and very committed. I give a lot. But it’s been nice not having a boyfriend for the past year. In fact, it’s the first time I haven’t had a boyfriend in, like, ten years and I’m enjoying what I’m getting out of this moment. I don’t worry about it. I could be in a relationship if I wanted to be and felt ready to be, but I’m not. I haven’t finished doing what I’m doing. When I have, I’m sure you’ll hear about it. But, right now,” Cameron grins, closing the topic, and adopting the voice of a crack-happy hooker. “I’m not done cookin.”

We pull up outside the Sunset Marquis. My big tape recorder is full. My little brain is aching. This afternoon she has to go and pick a frock for the Oscars. She’s thinking maybe pink. What do I think?

I think she should pop down for a drink afterwards. Surprisingly, she does. But that’s a whole other conversation…

A hug, a coconut-flavoured kiss and before you can say “drive safely”, Cameron Diaz has reversed her Prius up a one-way slope at an unrecommended speed. “Another highly illegal manoeuvre!” she hollers and waves a defiant fist in the air.

A lot of woman. In a lot of ways.

© 2008 Adrian Deevoy, British GQ. No copyright infringement intended.

t takes a lot to ruin Cameron Diaz’s day, but on this sunny Wednesday in October, after the actress has spent two hours stuffing herself with crabcakes and Coke, giggling and wisecracking and breezily dishing out the California-girl charm that has helped make her one of the highest-paid actresses in the world, she sees something that really bums her out. Diaz has just wrapped up a lunch interview at the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica and has agreed to go to the beach and take a little walk. We get into her gray Prius, which is littered with half-empty bottles of Fiji water, and drive a few blocks to a beachside lot, where, within five seconds of leaving the car, she spots someone with a long-lens camera lurking behind a utility pole.

“Paparazzi,” she says, getting back to the car and motioning for me to do the same. When she sees the photographer slink into a silver SUV across the street, Diaz considers making a getaway but then decides she’s in the mood to face the enemy. What follows is a chilling lesson in the realities of celebrityhood, circa 2006.

Diaz pulls up next to the SUV, in which the paparazzo, a young woman in a white T-shirt, is crouching in the driver’s seat. The woman tries to stay hidden, so Diaz toots her horn and rolls down the window.

“Hi!” Diaz says. “How’s it goin’? Did you get a good shot?”

The paparazzo grudgingly sits up and offers a sycophantic smile. “I’m sorry,” she says. “If I can get one shot of you, I’ll leave you alone for the rest of the day. Otherwise there are going to be like 10 people coming.”

“Why?” Diaz asks.

“Because…that’s just the way the industry works. But if I just get one shot, I swear on my life that I’ll leave you alone.”

“So you’re saying that if you don’t get what you want, you’re going to just sic 10 other people on me?”

The photographer, who introduces herself as Danielle, tries to strike a sympathetic tone. “Honestly, I usually get sent on news stories,” Danielle says, adding that she’s here reluctantly, under pressure from her agency. Some tipster apparently spotted Diaz with me—a guy who’s not Diaz’s boyfriend of three and a half years, Justin Timberlake—and called it in. “Can we work out just a little deal?” Danielle pleads. “I mean, I’m just doing this to get ahead in my career.”

Diaz, who has stayed coolly polite thus far, can’t help but burst out laughing. “This is no way to get ahead!” she says. “This is, like, the bottom!”

“I know, but I just moved to L.A., and it’s like, I’m from Connecticut,” Danielle offers lamely. “I’m going to get in so much trouble, you have no idea.”

After listening to a few more entreaties, Diaz patiently explains why she won’t cooperate. “It’s a principle thing,” she says. “I can’t live with myself if I pose for you.”

“Please, please, please? Honestly, the agency will kill me.” “Oh, Danielle,” says Diaz finally. “I’m sorry. You should not be doing a job where you’re suffering this much. I hope another celebrity comes down here and cooperates, and I hope you get ahead in your journalistic career.” Diaz puts the car in gear and gets ready to speed off. “See you later, I’m sure!”

As she drives away, Diaz keeps glancing in the rearview mirror. “Awesome,” she says. “Now I get to spend the rest of the day with 10 motherf—ers on my back.”

Life wasn’t always quite this complicated for Diaz. In the top tier of Hollywood actresses, she was the blond babe who made everything look easy, the self-mocking klutz with a crooked grin who earned up to $20 million per film with little discernible effort. A native of Long Beach, California, Diaz began modeling in her teens and got into acting essentially by accident, after she auditioned for the 1994 film The Mask on a whim and—oops! —landed the lead role. As she racked up megahits including There’s Something About Mary and Charlie’s Angels, she gained a rep for being a lot savvier than she seemed: Who else but Diaz could manage to make only one movie a year, cash a fat check, grab her snowboard and fly away in search of fresh powder with Justin Timberlake in tow? She sat for the occasional magazine interview, as required, but had a knack for disarming even the most cynical writers so that her press coverage was devoid of the thinly veiled resentment that often clings to such icy icons as Nicole Kidman or Gwyneth Paltrow. When asked what motivated her career choices, Diaz inevitably replied, with apparent sincerity, that she mainly wanted “to have a good time.”

As Diaz tells it now, life was indeed pretty awesome until about two and a half years ago, when something “really, really got to me.” That something was a group of people like Danielle. “I wasn’t the best version of myself for a couple of years,” Diaz says. “Something happened in our industry, in our society, and there was an explosion of this really aggressive group of people. I don’t even know if they’re people—these paparazzi.” It was around this time that Diaz became known in tabloid circles as a kind of female Sean Penn, a proud tigress who’d bare her claws when provoked, most famously in 2004 on a dark street up the road from the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. After she and Timberlake were surprised by two photographers jumping out of the bushes, Diaz grabbed a camera from one of them and, he claimed, struck him in the neck and tripped him. The photographers sued Diaz and Timberlake for assault, and the case was settled in 2005.

TEEN: You took a bit of a break from working, why?
C.D.: I’m not in a race with anyone or in a competition with anyone. I mean that in the way that I don’t think my career or my life is a competition. I didn’t feel like I had to be somewhere for any other reason than if I wanted to be there. I hadn’t found anything that made me really want to go back to work. As we do in the beginning when we’re starting our careers and sort of flitting about and wanting to act and keep the ball in motion, I did film after film after film after film. It was an amazing experience that I’m so thankful for but I got to the point where I was like, “I don’t have a house. I don’t have any place to put my bags. I haven’t seen my family. I have no friends.” There was a part of my life that was really going strong but there were other aspects of my life that were so much like Amanda, my character in the movie, but not in the love aspect of it. Just in life you have to have a balance so I kind of took a little slow down for a little while which was nice. I should probably pick it back up but I really like it.

TEEN: Have you come to the same conclusion as Amanda does in the movie, to live for the moment?
C.D.L I have always lived that way. I’m terrible at making plans. I remember when I first started doing press interviews for The Mask, every single person asked me, and I think it was because I was new, 10 years from now, what kind of movies do you see yourself doing? And I’d kind of be like, “I don’t know.” I said, “Whatever I’m doing 10 years from now – I don’t know if I’ll be making movies, I don’t know if I’ll be doing something completely different, but whatever it is 10 years from now I want to be happy. Period.” I don’t know if it will be movies that makes me happy or milking a cow. I’m kind of on a milking a cow trip right now. I just have this imagery of five o’clock in the morning milking a cow, sort of like meditation.

TEEN: In the film, Amanda knows that her boyfriend is cheating on her. Do you think women have that intuition to know when a man is being unfaithful?
C.D.: I believe women know for sure. I think when you’re connected to somebody there’s no way that you can’t tell when something is off. As far as that goes in their relationship I think its not working on so many levels that’s not it at all. She doesn’t cry. She’s clearly without any communication whatsoever.

TEEN: Are you the type to get depressed or get over relationships quickly when you breakup?
C.D.: It’s like everybody. I’ve been slammed before and then other times I’m like, “Yes, this is awesome!” I think you just get through it. Having your heart broken is never fun but you’ve gotta get over it at some point, right?

TEEN: What advice would you give girls dealing with heartbreak?
C.D.: I think its just like everybody – like the characters Iris and Amanda, it goes back to knowing yourself, being happy with yourself, being connected to yourself – you always have to start there first. It’s really awesome growing up in a very narcissistic society because we’ve finally figured out that it’s all about us. I encourage you to figure it out within yourself.

TEEN: Will you and Justin ever work together?
C.D.: Probably not.

TEEN: What is your ideal holiday spot?
C.D.: I like to be by the water so I’m kind of an island girl or the mountains. I like the snow – I like both.

TEEN: Have you ever experienced a holiday like the one in the movie?
C.D.: I like to go on holidays with a group of friends or with family – those holidays are always the ones where I come out rejuvenated on another level that I don’t get when I go someplace alone. When I’m with the people that I love and I can share our lives together – those are the ones where I leave and think, “I can’t wait to do that again.”

TEEN: What’s the best present you’ve ever received?
C.D.: A can of whoopass.

© 2006 Audrey Fine, Seventeen. No copyright infringement intended.

I tell her about the French lady’s bizarre ant farm of behaviors, just to hear Cameron’s Big Laugh, which she seems to deny no one. “Awww, it’s Jordan’s sweet sixteen,” she chides, grinning at my implied threat that he won’t see 17. “Don’t crush him!”

The reason Cameron Diaz is here at all is that (she says) she will never again sit for a standard profile-interview. Near enough, this is it. And she has a few salient points to make about celebrity journalism. So the idea (her idea) is as follows: We’ll spend some time together, and I’ll write it up. Then she’ll elbow me off the page and respond—busting me if I’ve misquoted her, addressing the strangeness of having the media create an omnipresent “Cameron Diaz” persona, and in general conveying what it’s like to have your life turned into a weekly, wildly overpublicized semifictional soap opera. After that, bringing a knife to a gunfight, I’ll respond to her response. And so on, back and forth. It’ll be a media Thunderdome, except without that creepy little bald guy who rode on top of the really strong mute guy. (Or maybe with. The story is young.)

Paradox magnifies celebrity. At 33, Cameron Diaz is nothing if not a bundle of contradictions. She repeatedly points out during our three-hour dinner that this is work for her, “required publicity for the film”—In Her Shoes, in which she stars with Toni Collette—but the entire time, she is laughing the Big Laugh and more often than not is straying far from the topic of work. She tells an amazing story about a friend’s dog that could climb up the inside of a chimney and broke its legs twice in three days by falling off the roof. While every other actor in Hollywood speaks of his or her “art,” she speaks of her work in unusually businesslike terms, some kind of team process always involving her management, which she blithely calls “a business concern.” She praises those she admires—John Malkovich, for example, or Daniel Day-Lewis—by saying that they “deliver,” as if they’re extraordinarily well-known FedEx employees. And she doesn’t understand why anyone would really be curious to know anything about her, beyond that she loves making people laugh (which she does well in real life, playing the whole range from ordinary hilarity to very dark humor). By all appearances, she doesn’t take herself the least bit seriously, though only a fool would describe her as ditzy. And that combination of paradoxical elements, in movie stars, is easy on the mind.

The fact that Cameron Diaz has been lied about and mischaracterized in the press is both the price one pays to reside in the celebrity stratosphere and a reprehensible crime of journalism. Because when the Backstab Reporter comes to meet his subject, he doesn’t come showing the blade. He comes smiling. He’s all compliments—at last, the one guy in the media who appreciates your work. Only later, when he’s writing up the story, it’s 3 a.m. and he’s still seething about the time his father said that Terrible Thing when he was 9. So he takes it out on the celebrity. The celebrity, he realizes, deserves to be taken down a peg. Staring down the barrel of that deadline, it’s all so clear. The reporter realizes that Nice is dull; Nice is for suckers. So he chooses Mean. And when the mean stuff isn’t quite true, well, it’s 3 a.m. A lot of things are true at 3 a.m.—or else why would Dad have said that thing he said?

But Cameron Diaz is nice. In ways that even actors can’t fake for more than three hours, she is reflexively polite and, by all evidence, lacks the self-absorption that’s usually a prerequisite for her job. She sits surrounded by mirrors and never once checks her look. She automatically offers to share her food and asks you as many questions as you ask her—that sort of thing. Moreover, she rarely misses a chance to make fun of herself. “I know a lot of stuff I say about the press sounds like spoiled-celebrity stuff,” she says, “but I’m just one girl. I’m hunted by paparazzi, big dudes with heavy metal objects screaming ‘Get her!’ The people who don’t understand what that’s like, every single day, need to know they’re fortunate to have their…their anominity.”

“Anonymity?” I offer.

“What did I say?”

“Anominity,” I repeat.

She has another go: “Anomininity.”

“Not even in the ballpark.”

She emits the Big Laugh and tries yet again: “Amonynity!”

And it is at this very moment, after Cameron has explained why she cannot even sign autographs or pose for pictures anymore—because when she does it for one person, dozens of people queue up—that the hapless, French, 16-years-old-tonight Jordan, of all the people in this entire hotel, chooses to step up and meekly ask for a photograph.

Cameron’s face, still flushed with laughter, nearly melts at the irony. “Oh, Jordan,” she says, baffling him with the fact that she knows his backstory, “the crazy thing is that I don’t take pictures.”

Jordan promises, of course, he will show no one—absolutely no one, not ever.

“Except for everyone you know, right?” Cameron replies kindly. But she knows karma has brought this on her head. She poses as I snap a shot of the two, then purrs the requisite “Happy birthday!”

Appeased, Jordan rapidly quits the room with his digital swag. “It’s an interesting struggle,” Cameron says, “your needs versus people’s desires. People just don’t know what it’s like to lose their…what was it?”

“Anonymity?”

She catches her breath before explaining. “I’m from Long Beach, dude,” she says. “I can’t barely speak English!”

It is utterly inexcusable, but I cannot resist: “You can barely speak English?”

“See?” She actually topples over onto the blue banquette, hysterical, and after a long gale of laughter huffs out, “Oof. I just burned off my entire meal.”

Tabloid attention doesn’t merely double when two celebrities date. It exponentiates. Cameron’s romance with Justin Timberlake has made her life lovelier and far more arduous. “I don’t even think of the tabloid stuff as ‘press,’ ” she says, twirling her hair as ever. “Those are romance novels. They’re stories that have to go week to week, so they need movement for the fictional characters. I’m in at least five magazines a week, and there are at least five stories going on. I’m getting married or breaking up; Justin and I are moving in together; or I want to get married. None of it’s true. Not any of it! People are so obsessed with it all. The idea that people are together just to get married and have children—not every relationship ends up that way.”

It’s all oil for the machine. The five or ten psychotic paparazzi who camp in Cameron’s front yard (and because of whom she may never, ever go into her front yard) take pictures to accompany this story of “Cameron and Justin”—because text is no good without art. And art is worthless without text.

Printed once, a myth is reprinted everywhere, on the authority of the original printing. You can read that Cameron will only wash her face with Evian water. “Ridiculous!” she says, as loudly as etiquette allows. There is also the story that she is freakishly superstitious, a tale that tabloids love to print about nearly any Big Name, since it makes the celebrity seem nutty (or better, hooked into the infinite). But besides knocking on wood, Cameron lacks any such obsession. “I once flew on Friday the thirteenth with a black cat on my lap during a thunderstorm,” she says. “And the flight attendant was retiring! It was her last flight!”

Something seems odd here. “They were givin’ out black cats for the flight?” I ask.

“No, it was my cat.”

“What’s its name?”

She pauses, then cagily decides to deny something to the press. “Nuh-uh. That I won’t tell you.”

I decide to claim the same rights open to other reporters who “cover” Cameron Diaz, and tell her that the name of the cat is Fluffers. Fluffers is the name of the cat.

“No,” she says vaguely. “It’s Jack Handey.”

“You’re suckering me in,” I tell her. “You’re making that up.”

“I might be,” she says, laughing at half speed. “But you should use that!”

The names of her cats are one thing (actually, two things). But savoring the joy of withholding, Cameron even refuses to tell me her middle name. She’s making me pay for the tabloid “news,” the fiction that drives her up a tree—for example, the tale of the lady in Monte Carlo who says she punched Cameron in the face. Cameron has never been to Monte Carlo. Worse, Cameron is suing the National Enquirer, which asserted that she had an affair with a married man. “You just can’t sue everybody,” she says wearily, before getting back to a happier word. “Anonymity!”

You should know these disparate facts about Cameron Diaz: Her paternal grandparents were Cuban and, though she doesn’t speak Spanish, she occasionally dreams in that language. She suffered alcohol poisoning in Australia at the age of 18—and when asked what the liquor was, cheerfully replies, “Everything the Aussies pour down your throat, dude!” She loves poker and recently was the runner-up in a Texas Hold ‘Em tournament in Tunica, Mississippi. Further, she does a spot-on impression of John Malkovich as the Russian gambler in Rounders: “Chyeck. Chyeck! This son of bitch, all night he is chyecking me! He beat me straight up!”

Know this if nothing else: The girl knows how to tell a story. Here’s one from two nights before our dinner. See, that night, working on the computer upstairs in her house, Cameron heard some sort of fuss outside the window. Running out, she found to her horror that Fluffers, the cat that has an entirely different name than Fluffers, had caught something. “I realized, shit, it’s a bird!” she says, freshly aghast. “I ran after it and got it and took it in. I did it all: got a little box, made a nest, and figured it would sleep the night. Then I went on the Internet to find out how to care for a baby bird. It turned out it’s illegal to handle any bird—illegal! The mothers, despite what you hear, will take care of the bird if they find it again. And the next morning, I was going to meet Jane Goodall. So I got up early to find the nest it had fallen from, thinking how fitting all this was. Here I am, going to see Jane Goodall, and I’m out looking for a nest and being very observant, thinking, ‘Where can my cat have found this?’ and looking for tracks and trails. Nothing.

“Eventually, I said, ‘Fuck it, I’ll just make something.’ I got one of those cone-shaped birthday hats and put stuff inside, then carefully found a secure spot in a pine tree. First I tried to feed the bird some worms from my compost barrel; I gently stuck one in the beak. The bird would have none of it. Bitch wouldn’t eat it! Fifteen minutes later, the worm is still squirming in the most terrifying place it can imagine—in a bird’s beak. I said, ‘Okay, little birdie, I hope you make it through the day and that your mama comes and finds you.’ I put the bird into the new nest, all nice and neat, and you know what the little fucker did? Got up and fuckin’ flew away!”

So. What about this story, here, in the evil press? “This is roulette for me,” Cameron says, retracting her smile. “I don’t know if it’s gonna shoot me in the head or shoot me in the foot, if I’ll only be limping or if it will be the end of me.”

Dear Marshall,
Well, shit. Let’s see, this was my big idea. I was going to expose the dirty workings of celebrity journalism and show everyone that when they read about a celebrity, the article is more about the journalist than it is about the celebrity. This turns out to be a difficult task, though, when you’re dealing with a writer who is so aware of his accountability. My guess is that your fear of enduring the public wrath of an unhappy celebrity had something to do with your delivering an article that portrays me as a fun, not-as-stupid-as-you-think, hot bitch. (I added that last part; you missed it.) I have manners, I’m aware of my karmic responsibilities, and I understand how annoying it is to hear celebrities bitch about being celebrities. I’m self-aware enough not to look in the mirror every five seconds, the way that most hobo-chic, pretentious, self-absorbed celebrities who talk about their “art” do. I should be happy about this “accountability factor,” but you’ve thrown a wrench into my plans.

Any complaints now will make me sound vain and thin-skinned at best. But the truth is that I don’t think any person could read an article written about him- or herself, be it flattering or critical, and not feel that there was some misrepresentation. And I guarantee you that if you saw pictures and read articles that portrayed you as a stranger to yourself, you’d understand where I’m coming from.

You see, it’s the strangest thing that as an actor you’re required to sit down with a total stranger and reveal something of yourself in order to hock your product. I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem performing this part of the job if it weren’t for the fact that the conversations that take place at these meetings are rarely about the film I’m supposed to be publicizing. They are almost completely about my private life. You’re right, I consider the publicity stuff to be my job; it’s what I get paid for (though I’m gonna have to start taking smaller paychecks). But I can’t help feeling anxious about where the conversation is going to go.

I’ve really come to believe that it’s unfair that these conversations are interpreted from only one side. It doesn’t feel good when your opinions and memories are misrepresented and then broadcast to the world. And while I’m sure the writer doesn’t always set out to do that, it’s what usually happens. That’s why I’ve chosen to keep certain things to myself. It’s the reason that I won’t tell the names of my cats. That’s something that is mine, and I don’t want the whole world to know. My cats’ names are too personal for a stranger to be familiar with them.

I realize there are some people who have no problem giving it all up; they want people to know everything about them, as if that somehow empowers them. I’m not judging them for that—whatever floats your boat, right? But those people do set the rest of us “celebrities” up. For me, there is a difference between exhibitionism and performing. I chose a profession where I can do what comes naturally to me, which is to perform and entertain. As far as my exhibitionist urges, I need only reveal them to the fortunate few.

Before I began writing my part of this article, I sat down and read your first section, and when I got to the story about my inability to say “anonymity,” I thought, Wow, it’s amazing I couldn’t say that word, even though the lack of it is such a huge part of my own dilemma. The irony! Anyway, I was glad you used it to endear me to readers instead of humiliate me. Because the truth is that I can laugh at myself, just as I did when it took place. And I don’t mind if other people laugh at me. But I was there at the moment, and although I do lack the ability to overcome certain linguistic challenges, I had a grasp on the meaning as well as the use of the word. So will readers get that, or will they just think that I am a flighty actress?

But then I read it out loud to my mom, and all of a sudden I thought, Wow, he totally captured the moment. I’m too damn sensitive. (I also thought that this accountability thing was working out for me. Is it possible that you could make a journalist rise to the occasion?) You never can really see yourself as others see you, it seems, and so that is the real point of this little exercise. Every time I read a description of myself in these articles, I think, Who are they talking about? The writer’s perception of you is based on many things. One is what they’ve already read about you. Take, for example, the rumor that I only wash my face with Evian. That bit of information is false, and I think it’s one that jumps from celebrity to celebrity, since I heard the same thing about Demi Moore ten years ago.

As a celebrity, you are exempt from having to do anything for yourself. You shouldn’t stand in line, you shouldn’t pay for anything—these things are considered the perks. But you also can’t be a part of the world that thrives outside your door; you have to fight with people to do anything for yourself; you can’t connect with people, because all they see is your celebrity; you have no right to privacy; people can say whatever they want to say about you, even if it’s a lie—and everyone believes it. Most of the people you meet only want to talk about one thing—what it’s like to be a celebrity. Which is a boring conversation and one that I may put the kibosh on as soon as I finish this article. All in all, your world becomes very small, and you have to make a conscious as well as a very tactful and creative effort to expand it.

Of course, this experience hasn’t been so bad. At least not yet. If readers are at all impressed by me and my charming, self-effacing nature, all admiration should be directed toward you, Marshall. After all, this article is more about you than it is about me.

Dear Cameron,

Well, I wasn’t afraid to be called out by you—and come to think of it, I’m not sure I rose to the occasion. The one small defense I’d throw out is that my profile of you wasn’t accurate or slander-free merely because I was being scrutinized. It would have read the same, word for word, if it were a stand-alone article. But that leads to a key distinction—one that both you and I have evoked in different ways—when it comes to celebrity journalism.

There are two ways, more or less, to do a profile. One is when the subject gives you three hours; the other is when he or she gives you time over three months. In profiles, as I think I mentioned over dinner, access is gold. The longer a writer is allowed to spend with the subject (obvious as this sounds), the more genuinely insightful the piece will become. I’ve done a ludicrous number of Hollywood profiles and, without exception, the articles I’ve written after I’ve spent deep time with the subjects are the ones that leave everyone happy—because, as far wiser writers than I have pointed out, we are admittedly spending a limited amount of time with you, then building a Fictional Cameron, one we dearly hope is as close to the Real Cameron as possible. Are you, the reader wonders, anything like the cutpurse with a heart of gold in Gangs of New York? Or the enlightened ne’er-do-well sister in your new flick, In Her Shoes? Or are you most like the four-second glimpse we get of you sitting on the subway in Minority Report? (If even three readers catch that reference, I’ll be a very happy guy.)

See, the syphilitic tabloid journos don’t need time to build their fictional Camerons. They can whip up their own version without even leaving the shop. They’ll listen intently to something phoned in by an under-tipped waiter—or really, anyone—then just type away. I will not defend them. They’re the reason that, when I visit my hometown at Christmas, family members tell the neighbors that I’m an optometrist. But be warned: After what you said about the happy effect of reading my thing aloud to your mom, I’ll be calling her regularly from now on. She’ll be sitting through a lot of profiles in the next few years.

Still, maybe I’m wrong. Let’s juice it up here. Tell me somethin’ splashy. Give me some romance-novel stuff. Are you and Justin on the rocks? Let fly! Or tell me to fuck off! (I’m sorry to go all Pacino in Scent of a Woman on your ass.) What is the work of which you are most proud? Is it There’s Something About Mary? Or Being John Malkovich? I’m betting it’s one of the two. Though, in marketing terms, you should say it’s In Her Shoes.

There’s an apocryphal Bob Woodward joke about profiles—that he doesn’t even switch on the tape recorder for his first four hours with a subject. “Bob,” as I call him after years of a make-believe close friendship, didn’t mean this in regard to celebrity journalism. But it applies. Every actor I know can spend a few hours spinning a persona that he or she wants the reporter to write about—hell, even I could pretend to be an Austrian cabinet minister for that long. But even the most gifted celebrity, faking it, runs out of steam after a few hours, especially if the reporter talks not as a magazine automaton but as an actual person. The celebrity then shows a fleeting glimmer of who he or she actually is. It’s human nature.

What you say about the crude insanity of someone pretending to know you after three or four hours, I agree, is entirely true. You know this in your bones after eleven years of it; I know it from the other side, from many years of fretting about it. I’ll admit to you that there was a moment over dinner when I was tempted to unfairly psychologize you. Given the way you talk of your focus on directors in your films and the importance of their vision in guiding your performance—to say nothing of how game you are—I got a vibe that when you were a kid, you were a bit of a daddy’s girl. I offer this up knowing full well that some of your directors have been female. And I don’t have a shred of evidence to know this is true. But that’s the point. I’m not supposed to run vibes. I do not run vibes. So I present it as a presumed falsehood. (That said, are you gonna kick my ass for saying this? Because I’m a bleeder. Seriously.)

More to the point, in the three-hour frame, the reporter can only hope that you’re behaving remotely like the Cameron Diaz one meets in the wild. That is, like the natural, actual Cameron Diaz. In person, I could only go with my instinct, that I was seeing something beyond the Presentation Cameron’s maneuvers. If you were working that game (which I’m not cynical enough to believe), the mispronunciation of anonymity would have been pure genius. Because it did show that you can laugh at yourself—a quality rare among celebrities—and that the fact that your characters tend to be incredibly game seems to be an actual part of your personality.

So how to defend celebrity journalism at all? My odd defense is this. In a true and fair interview, one during which the reporter is listening, watching how your hands move, and looking you straight in the eye, there is every chance that you, the celebrity, will say something incisive. Just as you did, for example, about the fun-house-mirror effect of being “interpreted” by Some Guy who has barely shaken your hand. In a true and fair interview, if you can give a reader a glimpse of yourself—and the reporter manages to reveal a somewhat reliable Fictional Cameron—it can deepen the characters you play. I don’t mean merely that it should make people lean back in the cinema and say, “Gosh, that Cameron Diaz can really act, seeing as how different her hair looks in this Malkovich picture!” I mean that something can resonate when what they know of you (or believe they know) is right there in front of them, on the screen. A look in the eye; the air of truth. It can bolster your performance just a tiny bit, I think.

To see you have fun in an interview—to hear you, once removed, laugh your ass off after a word comes out wrong—readers hear the Big Laugh as being that much more real on-screen. And they see that you’re having fun, which, especially in something like Mary, they want to see. The 7 percent of celebrity profiles that actually succeed are an echo chamber of real personalities, without being intrusive into, say, the sexual positions you and Justin enjoy (which I have in my notes) or your serious heroin problem, which I would never, ever mention.

That said, with celebrities (and more so, publicists), this is all a game of balancing time against value. You and your team figured three or four hours would do the trick here—though, this being a unique back-and-forth piece, none of the rules apply. This was never going to be just three hours, and you were getting a voice. Ordinarily, when I get three hours from a Big Name, I only go so far as to offer to the reader what it’s like to spend exactly three hours with that person. It’s a snapshot. I don’t pretend I’ve leapt down the chute into John Malkovich’s soul.

On the other hand, when I get three months, in different cities and spending large slices of time with someone, everything runs deeper. The fictional subject suddenly isn’t so fictional. Many times, in those cases, the reporter stays friends with those subjects after the piece comes out. Because at that point, there’s no way around it: You know each other somewhat well. There are times when reporting turns into a fellowship and the subject tells you things, off the record, that his own family doesn’t know. Things that you never repeat to anyone, ever. Trust does exist between actual humans, even when one of the humans works in the media. It’s rare, but it happens.

So the press isn’t always out to lie about you, or write that bullshit romance novel, or score those topless photos (okay, two out of three). Granted, since Watergate, the press has been more important—and also far more arrogant. Part of that arrogance is an assumption in the minds of journalists who have watched All the President’s Men a few too many times that any profile without something just awful in it is a puff piece, which isn’t exactly true. Before Watergate, there were celebrity profiles that were not so much knee-jerk negative as nuanced. You could read a piece about Frank Sinatra that left people who hated him saying, “Finally, they nailed that bastard Sinatra!” and left those who loved him saying, “Finally, they captured Sinatra’s greatness!”

It can be that way again. It should be—and sometimes, it is. (By the way, did I really forget to describe you as a “hot bitch” in part one of this piece? Jesus, I’m losing my craft.)

Dear Marshall,

You are hilarious. Really, I think you’re a funny mother$#&*@!. I get it: It’s impossible to give an honest portrayal of someone when the time allotted by said celebrity’s “team” is only enough for you to assault a poor 16-year-old boy and his mother. (By the way, let’s just address this topic while we are here. Jordan’s mother was a little overzealous, but that’s what proud mothers do. They are fierce forces of nature and will stop at nothing when it comes to their kid. Try to see it from her point of view.) So are we cool on Jordan and his mother now?

Where was I going? Oh yeah, if ever I lost my head and did anything asinsane as let a journalist follow me around for three months, I would definitely give you a go at trying to keep up with me. I get what you’re saying. If only you could witness me in all aspects of my life, not just my three-hour dog and pony show at the Chateau, you could create a more rounded portrayal of me. And I truly appreciate your willingness to dedicate the time to achieve that. Look, I like you. I think you’re funny and smart, and there’s always the possibility that we could be friends. But if you and I spent chunks of time together, I would always be aware that you were there to observe me, and you would always be making some kind of note that you would later incorporate into your story about me. Giving that kind of time is not something that any of my other friends do. It’s not that I have anything to hide. I don’t pull my cats’ (who shall remain nameless) tails or beat my assistant or let her beat me (kinky). I’ve just become very protective of what is mine. I hold sacred things that many people wouldn’t think twice about giving over.

Are you wondering what I am comfortable giving over? Because I’ve been asking myself that question. I think of all the possible things we could have talked about when we met. We could have discussed world politics, which I have a lot of opinions about, but no one wants to hear an actor’s point of view when it comes to politics. Actors who do try to talk politics get mocked. So I choose to be political in a way that I feel is most effective given the position I am in. Or you could have written about all the things that you turned the recorder off for. That would have made for an awesome story. We could have talked about…well, we could have talked about anything. But we didn’t. Why?

Because people are obsessed with celebrity, that’s why. And I have to tell you, from where I stand, it doesn’t seem like such a healthy thing. It’s really strange to see it from the inside. So strange that I sort of wish everyone could see what it looks like from in here.

But obviously, I’m too guarded to ever allow anyone in from the outside to observe it. That said, you never know, maybe next week I’ll feel different about it. Maybe I’ll start carrying around a video recorder to document my and Justin’s tongue wrestling. Or I’ll invite the entire staff of Us Weekly to my annual pap smear. We could spin it off into a new reality series: E!’s Celebrity Gyno-Challenge. (I’m probably the only one who is laughing at that, right?)

Obviously, I have some shit to work out, but this has been a very cathartic experience. So, thanks. I kind of wish you could see everything I deleted. I appreciate the opportunity to do this insane dance that we call “the celebrity profile” in a new and different way. It’s been fun. Why do we do it in the first place? Well, I guess we both need our jobs.

P.S. I wasn’t a daddy’s girl. I asked my mom.

Part 5.

Dear Cameron,

So our little experiment comes to an end. I’ve tried hard to be fair, and not only because whenever the subject of lawsuits came up (and this isn’t on the tapes), you silently pointed at me and nodded furiously. Nor is it because of Justin’s late-night phone threats. Not entirely.

Actually, it’s been a real pleasure. You had me at “Well, shit.”

Do I have regrets? Of course I do. For one, you never told us what your favorite film work was. (Why do you refuse? Is it the Zapruder film? Oh, my God. It’s the Zapruder film, isn’t it?) And, alas, America shall never know the names of your cats. I sort of wish I hadn’t guessed Fluffers, because it later occurred to me that fluffers are the people who work on the sets of porn movies and…well, you know. (There are jokes in life we can never take back.) But is it too much to ask simply to know the name of a cat? Come to think of it, is it too much to ask that cats be able to talk, and in doing so, convey messages from the dead? I tell you it is not!

I can neither explain nor defend America’s sad obsession with celebrity. A lot of people lead empty lives. As Bob Redford once said to me, “Reading about glamour is the cure when reality is not enough.” Actually, he didn’t technically say it to me. I think I saw it in an article somewhere. Also, it might have been Dustin Hoffman. It was definitely a big star. In any case, for my money, he or she hit the nail on the head in that paraphrased quote.

© 2005 Marshall Sella, GQ. No copyright infringement intended.