Wearing it Well
He may look suave in a suit, but Richard Gere's definition of style stretches far beyond his closet to the core of his being.
Story by Mark Seal
"Really? Why?" I asked, surprised.
"Because I don't have any," he says.
"C'mon!" I insist. Gere, 55, has been the epitome of a clotheshorse for three decades now, introducing the world to Giorgio Armani in American Gigolo, giving the business suit a second coming in Pretty Woman, bringing back 1920s double-breasted pinstripes in Chicago - not to mention looking immaculate in a tux with first wife Cindy Crawford and present wife Carey Lowell.
"Well, that's because they always have me, like, at an opening, when I put a tuxedo on, and I look good in a tuxedo," he says. "But I have no style. I have jeans and a T-shirt. It's been that way forever: a black T-shirt and jeans."
I try a different tack: "When you were growing up on a farm, it was T-shirts and jeans, too?"
"Well, I didn't grow up on a farm," he says. "It's one of those apocryphal stories. No. My father grew up on a farm. I grew up in a small town, very normal, normal, normal America."
I have a stack of magazine stories all swearing that Richard Gere grew up on a farm. "Every time I tell them [the truth], they don't print it because they like the story, so they just keep printing it over and over again," he says.
"Okay, no style, no farm," I say. "But this is the style issue, and we've got to"
He senses me struggling.
"Well, I could tell the story of one movie in particular, Breathless," he says. "I liked this character. I was sneaking up on how to play him and I didn't have the costume. It was a few days before we started shooting, and the costume designer and I couldn't find a thing. Then we found these green-checkered golf pants, cut tight, and a kind of '50s jack shirt, and it just was this guy. It was just clearly him. And the character clicked because of that [costume]."
Clothing informs character. That 's a good place to start, and something that Richard Gere cannot deny. We run through a quick list of his movies, where clothes made the man. Ironically enough, the man in T-shirts and jeans has done some of his finest work while wearing a suit, from Pretty Woman -where he says, "There were suits all over the place; I said, 'You don't need an actor for this; you just need a suit'"- to Chicago - "That was a 1920s suit; I had to lose seven pounds to fit into it, but when I put it on, it made me feel that I was in the '20s"- to, of course, wearing Armani in the seminal 1980s film American Gigolo. He made the character so convincing that men still confront him, ready to fight for their wives, including a trucker who literally ran him off the road to threaten him. "I'd never heard of Giorgio, and I never knew anything about specific designers," he says. "I didn't care."
Those Armani tuxes he wears to premières and special events are annual gifts from the designer, now a friend, says Gere. "But, again, I'm not a style horse," he insists. "I hate to go shopping."
I ask what his wife, Carey Lowell, who starred in the James Bond film Licence to Kill before becoming a regular on Law and Order, thinks about all of this.
"She hates what I wear," he says. "I'll go out wearing sweat pants all the time. She just thinks I don't care, which basically I don't."
In his new film, Shall We Dance, he plays a businessman who discovers another side of himself when he begins dance lessons with an instructor played by Jennifer Lopez. He is once again "a suit, a business guy" - a role that will surely perpetuate his stylish persona.
But Gere's own take on style? "If people just do something that makes them feel good, that's their style. That's what you respond to in anyone you tend to like: Are they comfortable in their own skin?"
There are different ways to showcase style, of course - the style of a great home, a sleek automobile, a well-lived life. But Gere is stylish in a different way, a deeper way, and he found his style through struggle.
One of five kids born to Homer, now 80, a retired insurance salesman (who did grow up on a Pennsylvania dairy farm), and Doris, a homemaker, Richard Gere was, as he says, "Normal, normal, normal." He won a gymnastics scholarship to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. But he left after two years to pursue acting and embark upon a new life.
"[I] hitchhiked to Boston and did some auditions, one of them for the Provincetown Playhouse," he recalls. "And I was very joyously accepted there."
A bell rang deep inside of him. He says he knew that he had found his place in the world. He still remembers the phone call from the producer of the playhouse. "I could feel the blood rush to my head, that, yeah, this is the next part of my life."
But he wasn't stylish, he insists, not when he performed in New York rock bands or landed a role in a post-Hair rock musical, moonlighting as a waiter so shy he could barely take orders. Gere says he wasn't stylish in leather as an understudy for the role of Danny Zuko in a Broadway production of Grease, or when he began appearing in a steady succession of films.
No, Gere found his style, his place in the world, in one of the darkest periods of his life, as a struggling actor early in his career, when a mild case of depression led him from his tiny New York apartment into the streets, searching for something. "I was searching like anyone hopefully searches," he says. "When you leave home and the world is not exactly what you've been led to believe it is. There's a certain dissonance, I call it, between what we're told the world is, what reality is, and what our heart tells us it is. And the surface is highly suspect."
His search led him to a 24-hour bookstore where "there were a lot of night owls," he says. Most of them, Gere included, gravitated to the Eastern religion section. "At that point, it was fairly limited as to how many translations there were of Sufi books, Buddhist books, Hindu books, but this store had most of the ones that were available," he says. After he'd read the books, he began the practice. "I saw teachers, I went to centers, did retreats, and it started to resonate throughout almost everything in my life."
From there, he dove into the depths, instead of staying on the surface. In the early 1980s, he made his first pilgrimage to Tibet. He did this by "instinct," he says. But the trip took on a deeper meaning when he was introduced to the Dalai Lama, who asked Gere what he did for a living.
"I'm an actor," Gere told him.
"So he asked me this question about emotions," Gere says. "If they were real when I cried, when I laughed, when I was angry. I gave him a very actory answer: that it's more believable from really doing it. And he looked very deeply into my eyes and started laughing.
"It was a key teaching," Gere continues. "Even though I was a magician conjuring these emotions to make them work for the scene, I, on some level, had a belief in them as if they were real. If you transport that to real life, it's the same thing. When we get angry, or what we take as anger in real life, the root of it is really an illusion. It's just a conjuring trick."
The thought was liberating for Gere, and it launched him into an even deeper level.
I mention a line I have read, attributed to the Dalai Lama: Anything that's motivated by personal enrichment leads to suffering for me, while anything that enriches the happiness of others makes me happy.
"Well, that comes from, I believe, a ninth-century Indian teacher, but certainly it's a keystone of Buddhism. We're all interconnected, and if I myopically see myself as the center of the universe, it's always going to lead to suffering because it leads to separation, and it leads to the enrichment of this illusion of the ego, of the self," he says.
He relates this teaching to his work as an actor. "Any creative act that is not an offering probably isn't worth very much," he says. "I think any creative artist instinctively knows that, whether they're religious or not."
Gere not only became a student of the Dalai Lama, he also began taking up the cause of the Tibetan people for independence, traveling so extensively throughout India, Nepal, Zanskar, Tibet, Mongolia, and China that he produced a book, Pilgrim (Bulfinch Press, 1997), a collection of his photographs from his 25-year journey into Buddhism.
I ask him about meditation, and he relates another story about the Dalai Lama, who explained meditation in a radio interview. "He said, 'My practice is, I get up in the morning and I set my motivation for the day and then I live my day.' That's a pretty simple outline. But it's also pretty profound. Setting one's motivation for the day is not an easy thing, and it can be extremely complex and intense and all-inclusive. But if you set your motivation properly, which is to be of service, to make your life an offering, to make it meaningful, then every opportunity to be of service that arises, you're ready to do it."
Gere's service, of course, is not only spiritual and political; it's also theatrical. But he says that, when it comes to movie roles, he does not plan, manipulate, or search. His longtime agent, Ed Limato, once said that Gere has never given the public exactly what it wants, and he has turned down many roles, including the original script of Pretty Woman.
"Life brings so much, and it's better when you're not looking for it," Gere says. "The universe is a very rich place if you just leave yourself open. So much comes."
I suggest that most people couldn't abide by that, and instead try to force things to happen.
"Look, if you want to play the piano, you've got to practice," he explains. "If I want to be an actor, I've got to learn to be an actor. But in terms of what movie I'm doing next, or what role I want to play, I never think of it that way - ever. I mean, the times I've gone out and said, 'Well, I want to make a political movie about Tibet, or about a musician,' I'll never find that script. But something else will come along that is equally stimulating, and that's what I'm supposed to be doing at that time.
"It's like falling in love," he continues. "Someone is there, and your heart moves, and that's the way it is with a script, a project, whatever. If it touches your heart, you act on it."
In 1995, Richard Gere met actress Carey Lowell, a "very attractive, fun, funny, intelligent woman," and they married in 2002. Gere was 50 when his now-4-year-old son, Homer, named for Gere's father, was born. He says that he spent the first 50 years of his life "doing me." Now he prefers "doing him," serving his son.
"I can't think of a way that [my son's birth] didn't change me," he says. "There's nothing that remains the same."
He's still "doing Richard Gere, of course, and he rattles off the traits, the acquired talents learned from making movies: perfecting his golf swing to play a Dallas physician in Dr. T and the Women; reuniting with his childhood instrument, the trumpet, in The Cotton Club, thanks to legendary musicians who prepared him for the role; months of dance lessons to prepare him for his role in Chicago and, later, in Shall We Dance.
But nobody taught Gere about style. That comes from a well deep within him, and even Gere, a "conjurer" of characters, of "temporary constructs," which he wears and then discards like so many suits in his closet, cannot deny that it bubbles to the surface and makes us believe.
"You're really stretching here, man," he tells me when I bring up the "s" word again.
So, okay, Richard Gere is not stylish. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have style.