HOLLYWOOD -- This is how Halle Berry gets my attention: She walks into a Beverly Hills hotel room wearing a, form-fitting mauve-colored cashmere dress with a plunging neckline.
She proceeds to sit down slowly and gracefully in a chair. Then she giggles uncontrollably when she's presented with her first question.
"Am I pregnant?" says the slender Berry, roaring with laughter, grabbing the front of her expensive dress and stretching it outward. "Does it look like I'm pregnant?"
This is how Halle Berry gets my attention.
And no, she doesn't look pregnant. But she does seem a little tense, despite her laughter.
Yet a sense of humor is her only weapon during these days of being featured on trash TV and supermarket tabloids.
The rumor -- being pregnant out of wedlock -- is just the latest in a series of poison-pen stories she has endured since her messy break up with pro ball player David Justice a few years ago.
The gossip doesn't seem to fit the image of the former Miss Teen Ohio who became Miss Ohio, then runner-up to Miss U.S.A. in 1986.
A great deal has changed between then and now, but Berry has always had a reputation for being honorable and decent and kind and, most of all, optimistic.
As a cynical Berry laughs off the latest outrage in her personal and professional life, the weariness seems to be showing.
"You want to know what's so funny?" continues Berry, pretending to confide. "Two weeks ago, they said I'm back with David. This past week, I'm back with Shamar Moore. None of it is true.
"They've got to come up with a story. You just have to laugh.
"One week, I'm with him, and the next week, I'm with this one. I thought, 'God, I must be the biggest whore in town.' Or they're just making this stuff up."
Victim or not, Berry happens to be incredibly busy.
As well as playing the lead in the Dorothy Dandridge story for HBO, she's producing the project on the black singer-actress, which begins shooting next month. Previously, she helped Warren Beatty with the producing chores on Bulworth, in which she co-starred.
In her role in Why Do Fools Fall In Love?, she focuses on acting as one of the three wives of Frankie Lymon, who had a pop hit in 1955 with Why Do Fools Fall In Love? but died of a heroin overdose 13 years later at age 26. Vivica A. Fox and Lela Rochon are the other wives, and Larenz Tate plays Lymon. The movie profiles the three wives who sued for Lymon's estate in the 1980s.
For Berry, the role was an opportunity for her to do a vamp routine as Lola, the only female singer of The Platters, who eventually falls for Lymon.
"I don't usually get to play the glamorous, saucy character," she says.
Her fans might disagree, although critics and fans alike agreed that her crackhead in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever was an incredibly effective debut for a beauty queen.
So was her sexy businesswoman in Eddie Murphy's Boomerang, her tough flight attendant in Executive Decision, her aging slave grandmother in the miniseries Queen and her style-setting secretary in the live-action movie of The Flintstones.
Yes, even the former model is surprised to find out that her cropped hair look in The Flintstones -- "I've worn my hair for 10 years just like that" -- caused a fad among African-American girls that still lingers.
Certainly, her Flintstones part and her Why Do Fools Fall In Love? portrayal signal a maturing for Berry.
"I think I'm just getting older. As I get older, I'm able to laugh at things more, laugh at myself more and find humor in more situations," she maintains.
"And because of that, I think I'm better able now to translate that into my work.
"When I first started, I was really serious, because I came from modeling and beauty pageants, and I thought Hollywood would not take me seriously. So I had to become a serious actor and did serious stuff. And now that I've gotten older, and I've done a few things, I'm settling into who I really am.
"I'm realizing that it's okay to be that, and this, and that. I don't have to be one or the other. I can incorporate all of them into who I am."
Still, Berry turns pouty when her accomplishments are read back to her. It's a long and impressive list, but it seems to bring her no joy.
"I think 30 bothered me a little bit," whispers Berry who, two days before the interview, turned the big Three-0. "Just because I used to think that at 30 this is not where I'd be.
"If I really adhered to what my goals were, I've come up short."
But Halle Berry is a movie star and a respected actor with a great portfolio and a wonderful future, she's told. So how do you figure that means coming up short at the ripe young age of 30?
"I have no husband, no kids. I have no real life," says Berry playfully but seriously. "I want babies. I want to be wearing a maternity dress."
So you want the pregnancy story to be true? So maybe you can do it like Jodie Foster and have one on your own?
Berry chuckles: "I'd get the bad seed, trust me. I'd get the bad sperm and end up with the demon. I'd have Chucky."
So Berry wants to stand by her man. All she needs is a man at this point.
"Well, I'm looking for him right now, as we speak," she says, cackling with laughter again. "Maybe that's the way I need to go. Get a guy who's been there, done it. Do you know anybody who's 45?
"I don't think I'll date 60-year-olds. I don't think I'll date Warren Beatty. That's a little bit much for me. He's already married with kids.
"But wait a minute. That's the other mistake I'm not going to make. I'm not looking. Because my mother said, 'If you look, you're gonna find the wrong thing.'
"So I'm not looking. I'm just open to it, if he walks up to me."
Any walk-ups lately?
"I've gotten no walk-ups lately," Berry says.
This time she's not laughing at all.
Not even on your birthday?
"I didn't do anything, really. I was working on that day. I have a birthday cake that none of my friends have come over to even cut yet.
"At this point, I'm going to freeze it for next year."
That would be the 31st. But who's counting?
THE HALLE BERRY FILE
BORN: In Cleveland, where she was raised by her divorced mother, a psychiatric ward nurse at a veteran's hospital.
HER PET PROJECT: The Dorothy Dandridge story, chronicling the rise and fall of the 1950s black singer/actress.
"Everybody wanted to do that project. Diana Ross wanted it, Whitney Houston wanted it," says Berry.
"I got it because I think I'm probably the most passionate about it, and I think that's why. I think the other ones wanted to do it. And maybe they will.
"But I feel that Dorothy Dandridge passed me the ball, because our lives were so alike."
More Artists
