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When the script deftly maneuvers Angela, Mike, Tony and Connie into the most expensively hideous suite in a Miami Beach hotel, Demme finds a satisfying comic payoff for the first time in his career. And in Pfeiffer -- a California blond in black wig and cramped Queens patois -- he has secured the emotional anchor to his vertiginous sight gags.
You have perhaps heard that Pfeiffer is beyond gorgeous: serene blue eyes, jawline by Garbo, perfect teeth unstained by the occasional Marlboro. The bearer is more modest in appraisal. "Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, they're beautiful," Pfeiffer says. "I think I look like a duck. The way my mouth curls up and my nose tilts, I should have played Howard the Duck." Sure, but Howard couldn't work his mouth so that when fashioned into a smile, it has the innocence of a shy Cinderella's, and when upended, it curdles into the sulk of a party animal no man should even bother trying to impress.
It was as the sulky siren that Pfeiffer made her first mark, as a punkette in Grease 2, as Al Pacino's coked-out wife in Scarface, as a Hitchcockian heroine with a Los Angeles '80s twist in Into the Night. Then, switching on the Cinderella smile, she became a princess in the medieval adventure Ladyhawke and the sweetest witch in Eastwick. She has played movie stars in Sweet Liberty and PBS's Natica Jackson, two fables about creatures of illusion manipulating the reality of voyeurs who dare mistake the actress for the role.
Which one is she? All of them and none. "I have five points of view about everything," Pfeiffer says. "I mean, the rooms of my house are decorated in all different styles." She also has a minority opinion of her acting: "I keep doing these comedies, and I don't think I'm funny." She is a cover girl with the inverted-searchligh t soul of a Woody Allen heroine.
Pfeiffer, from Orange County, Calif., is one of four children born to an air-conditioner retailer and his wife. "I was a tomboy," she says, "always beating somebody up. The comments on my report card said that I needed to work on my mouth -- I talked way too much. Then, in fourth grade, boys started to find me attractive, so I put away my boxing gloves." At school Michelle acted up; at home she acted out. "I'd sing into the garden hose and pretend I was Elvis," she recalls. "Whenever I'd try to con my mother, she'd say, 'What a drama queen!' "
From 14, this princess worked, mainly for the Von's supermarket chain: "I still think I'm the best box girl Von's ever had." But one day in 1977 revelation smote the check-out girl when she came out short on her register. "I said to myself, 'What do you want to do?' The answer was acting." By 1981 she was Greased.
The same year she wed Actor Peter Horton (thirtysomething); they were separated last year, and now the all-American girl is beauless. "Dating is a disaster for me. I don't know how to, and I don't get the point. You're not really friends, you're not really lovers. Besides, I never go anywhere. For a while I dated ((Actor)) Michael Keaton, whom I met at Fireside, my local grocery store. So I guess I'll just wait to meet somebody at Fireside again."