The young woman in the bluejeans and the Range Rover is searching for something.
Like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, her eyes are
wide behind sunglasses. But Courteney Cox who has followed up nine
seasons as Monica on the forever-beloved sitcom Friends by producing
a residential reality-television show called Mix it Up is
not window-shopping for diamonds. She's looking for multimillion-dollar
residential real estate.
Realtor at her side, she cruises the pricier boulevards of Los Angeles,
her eyes focused, senses heightened, every ounce of her being longing to
step inside some new house and have that rush, that knowing that's
she's found It, that she's found home.
I just like to look at houses, she tells me. It's
my hobby.
Her hobby has turned into an obsession. I'm a nut when it comes
to moving, she says. This obsession has facilitated seven moves since
she arrived in Los Angeles, a college architecture student turned actress,
in 1986.
I ask for a quick tour of Courteney's houses. My first one was
an apartment, she says. It went to a store called Rapport. It
was in the '80s, and it was all pink and black Italian lacquer, very
Miami Vice. Then, I moved to a house in Beverly Glen, and did it
much more American Country; I just wanted everything to be authentic. I
went from Miami Vice to needing to have real old things. I went from
that house to a Gothic house. I went to flea markets and bought only, like,
old church benches. It was a house that Gypsy Rose Lee used to live in.
I think it was haunted, to tell you the truth, at least that's what
people say.
'since I did that one very Gothic, then I wanted to go light and airy.
So I moved to Santa Monica. Then, I went to Brentwood, then I went to a
French Country house in Santa Monica, then moved back to Brentwood and did
like a modern Moroccan colonial [sold last year to Ricki Lake for a reported
$6.5 million].
You move as many times as I do, I don't know how I keep up with
myself, she says. I've had so many different styles. Every
time I move I say to my friends, "Please remind me to never move again."
Then, one week later, the boxes are unpacked and I forget.
Some pop psychologist, or quack magazine writer, might interpret all this
house-hunting and moving as a search for home. But Courteney says no, home
is where the heart is, not where the body might be planted. I mention a
quote I had heard years ago, that it takes seven years to get a house out
of your system, whereas it takes only five to get over a fire, and Courteney
stops me short. Oh, it takes me about a day to get a house out of
my spirits, she says.
A day?
I move on, and I forget, she continues. Houses, when I
am in them, I love them and I think about them all the time. And decorating
them and making them the most comfortable place, because I'm a real
homebody. But as soon as I find another one, I'm on to the next project
and forget about the other one. When I feel like I have done everything
I can do to the house, I'm ready to start all over.
Now, she and her husband, actor David Arquette, live in a four-bedroom contemporary
that they bought last February for a reported $4.5 million. It's a
modest abode when compared to Friends girlfriend Jennifer Aniston
and Brad Pitt's $13.5 million six-bedroom Beverly Hills French Provincial.
But Courteney has renovated her new house to near-perfection.
I don't really have a process, she says. I just move
in and start thinking about how I want to decorate it. I know I don't
like to repeat myself, so whatever I did before, I'm not going to do
again. I think I only brought two things from my old house to this new house.
I sold most of the furniture with the house, and I just like to start new.
I just like new things. I don't mean like brand-new. I just like change.
So moving day will soon come again, as surely as the changing of the seasons.
I actually have a few rooms that have not been done yet, she
says. But I'm working on it, and I will enjoy that for a while,
and then I will say, avid, what do you think?? And he will say,
?Not yet. Then, I'll find a great house and something will
have to happen.
Having been born in Courteney's hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, I
know her type: the Southern belle who can handle every imaginable household
and professional task while simultaneously keeping a boot heel at her menfolk's
backside. She was raised in the better side of the city; her father, now
deceased, owned a pool construction company, and her mother was a homemaker.
She and her sister, Virginia, now an interior designer, shared a room, which
they did just so perfectly, and then kept redoing over and over again.
After graduating from high school, Courteney and Virginia moved to Washington,
D.C., where Courteney studied architecture at Mount Vernon College. The
sisters shared a studio apartment. Although they had next to no money, they
put whatever they had in their apartment. 'this place was so bad, we
had to make it better, Courteney remembers.
Thus she began the process of her first real renovation, employing the techniques
of economy and resourcefulness that carried her through her pre-Friends
days.
She so loved home design that she planned to become a residential architect.
But she switched to modeling and moved to New York after signing with the
venerable Ford Agency, appearing in commercials for Noxzema and Maybelline
and snagging a bit part on the soap As the World Turns. When she
landed her first television series, the short-lived Misfits of Science,
she moved to Los Angeles, where she hasn't stopped moving since.
I moved out because I had a television series, she says. After
we did 13 episodes, as opposed to buying a car, I bought a nice house.
From a sizable casting call, director Brian De Palma chose her as the girl
seemingly plucked from a live audience for Bruce Springsteen's Dancing
in the Dark video. Her star began rising when she played Michael J.
Fox's girlfriend in the sitcom Family Ties; it kept rising when
she starred as Jim Carrey's girlfriend in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.
Then, in 1993, she read for a part in a new NBC sitcom called Friends.
'they were interested in me for the Rachel part, she says of
reading for the role in Friends that Jennifer Aniston would make
famous. I thought that I would be a better Monica, so I went in for
Monica instead. In retrospect, I don't know if that was a good decision
or a bad decision. But I just felt more comfortable with the part of Monica
at the time, with the way she was written in the pilot. I think Jennifer
is the perfect Rachel.
She had no inkling that Friends would last nine seasons, that by
the last season she and the other cast members would earn $1 million per
episode, allowing her to move as much as she wants.
She can visualize exactly how a house could look. But she says she couldn't
see her future when she auditioned for the show that would make her a television
superstar.
It would be different now if somebody said, ?You are going to
get the part in this pilot of a show that's going to go on for 10 years.
Then you would get more excited. I remember meeting Jennifer Aniston at
the audition and I thought, Well, this is going to be fun, because
she is great. I remember reading with Matt LeBlanc, because they were
hiring Joey after they cast my part. I remember thinking, ?He's
really cute. I hope he gets the job.?
To a massive prime-time television audience, she became Monica Geller Bing,
the phobic aspiring professional chef and the anchor of the ensemble of
Friends. In real life, she became the joy of Realtors, contractors,
and moving companies across Los Angeles.
Her obsession with homes gave rise to her new show.
While the other Friends were casting about for their next career
moves, Courteney says, I really lucked out.
She was at dinner with some friends, she says, and the conversation turned
to design conflicts between husbands and wives, sons and fathers, and how
explosive opinions on interior design can become. With David and me,
it's the same thing, she says. We are so different and
we had to combine the two styles.
She's a self-confessed control freak and he's a die-hard pack
rat. Their design styles represented a titanic clash of opposites: her tasteful,
forever-changing but singular stylishness versus her husband's endless
trove of ?kooky young design? knickknacks, memorabilia, and weirdness,
most of which, Courteney says, 'should have been thrown away. No person
alive needs that much stuff.
When they moved in together, she says, the seven-years-younger David tried
to bring his velvet Elvis towels and plaster her bathroom doors with ?60s
flower stickers. I was in love with him, so I said, ?Let's
don't pack up the junk. I just tried to fit in his favorite things
to make him feel that it was his house, too, because it was.
 But
melding the contents of his packed-to-the-rafters L.A. bachelor apartment
with her Brentwood home's sleek interior design was a challenge for
the pair, who married in 1999. David likes to collect, everything
from those bobblehead dolls to puppets, large items that can be like a cow.
He'll come home with a robot, or marionette dolls the size of people.
It could be anything; you name it. I couldn't even describe his taste.
He just loves everything. If he sees something, it's almost like he
has to have it. His great-grandparents were in vaudeville, so they loved
'show stuff.?
At the dinner where she and her friends discussed design conflicts between
couples moving in together, the idea for a new reality-TV show struck. Real
couples who are at war stylistically Great couples with great
conflicts, she calls them would be chosen from auditions, given
$2,500 to decorate one room in their home, and assisted by a team of movers,
painters, designers, thrift-store owners, friends, and family, all with
the cameras rolling and the conflicts raging.
Courteney would serve as executive producer and design consultant; her husband
would serve as co-executive producer.
I pitched it to the Women's Entertainment network about a week
later, and five or six months later I've filmed 13 episodes, started
my own production company, and I am madly in love with both the whole idea
of being a producer and this show, she says. It's about
two people mother/daughter, lovers, husband/wife, anything
who live together and have a conflict. We get to know them so you are emotionally
involved with them [and] you hope it works out. We take the design seriously,
but we have a lot of fun. I made sure that we hired the best designers,
which I think is really important, but at the same time we have a lot of
goofy things happen on the show that make you laugh.
So the Birmingham Belle is back in business, at last in the arena that she
loves most. Courteney now gets to move with every new episode. She'll
certainly be touring a lot of new houses with the show and on her own, and
that can lead to only one thing: another move.
At the end of our conversation, I feel the surge of an improbable emotion
when talking to someone who makes more in a day than many people earn in
a lifetime: sympathy for the peripatetic actress.
Won't you ever stop moving? I ask. Won't you
ever be settled? Won't you ever be done with this obsession?
Maybe someday, she says, and then she's off in a million directions,
moving on, always moving on.
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