April 25, 1996

AT HOME WITH: Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick;Too Cute for Words?

By Bruce Weber, New York Times

IN the public mind, celebrity couples tend to take on qualities as a unit, often as a result of the projects they made famous together. Think of the weathered passion of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, so brutally caricatured (or maybe not) in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Or the crusty affection of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy.

True, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker have a ways to go before they become a legendary pair. Relatively speaking, they're still children -- she turned 31 on Oscar Monday; he turned 34 a couple of weeks earlier; their careers, though well established, are still in their fledgling stages, and they're not married. But in their first attempt at working together, they may have already found the quintessential expression of themselves.

Indeed, watching them onstage in the "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" revival is not unlike sharing a cup of coffee with them at home. Like J. Pierrepont Finch, the craftily rising executive, and Rosemary Pilkington, the love-struck, marriage-minded secretary, they are young, acutely enamored of each other and working for the same company. More to the point, onstage or at home, the adorable quotient is off the charts.

"Look at them!" audience members at the Richard Rodgers Theater are wont to stage-whisper. "They are absolutely adorable. Look!" Or a variation.

And it's true; they're a pleasing, gratifying visual. Like, say, kittens, they make you look.

Ms. Parker is almost dewy-eyed in her affection for her boyfriend of the past four years, habitually tugging on his shirt or taking his hand as they sit in the dining area of her apartment in TriBeCa. They don't live here; they live in his place, a little uptown. She uses this place to work -- to read scripts, answer correspondence, etc. -- and that has given it a lived-in look.

It's bright and a little untidy, but she said that it makes her nervous to be here, especially alone -- there's a nervous Nellie aspect to her personality -- and that she has never spent the night in it. She told a story about a recent break-in that might have come from one of her movie comedies. The robber just walked in the front door, she said, and was surprised to find her assistant there. He backed out, but apparently not wanting to have made the trip for nothing, snatched a brand new Dustbuster.

Mr. Broderick has just come in, unshaven and a little puffy eyed, from a trip for milk, and he is not quite warmed up yet for a chat. Ms. Parker brightened as he entered. To paraphrase Rosemary, she seems quite happy to have kept his coffee warm. There is a sense she gives off, at home and onstage, that's adoring and adorable both. It may be unfashionable, but what seems important to her is love first, work second.

"There's a lot that I relate to about Rosemary," Ms. Parker said, answering a question about whether any fights have erupted between them over their stage work. "I can't imagine fighting with any actor about anything, and certainly not Matthew. I'd rather have him as a boyfriend than fight about whether I upstage him or not. I'll be happy to be upstaged."

Part of this has to do with the fact that Mr. Broderick is an old hand in this production, and its star. He originated the role in this revival (Robert Morse was, of course, the 1961 original), spent a year in the part, then took a few months off to make a movie before returning in mid-March, with Ms. Parker as his foil.

"It's a strange little straddle," Ms. Parker said. "You wonder, you know? Maybe we won't have any chemistry."

Mr. Broderick, the less voluble of the pair, shook his head. A handsome, quietly easygoing man, he has a remarkably guileless face. Perfect for the sweet, conniving Finch. (In the film "Glory," it worked against him; as a Civil War officer, he looked like a prep school student with a false beard.)

"The part that takes some adjusting and is a little uncomfortable for me is I have a slight feeling of dangling our couplehood around Times Square," he said. Nonetheless, he said, working with her has been easier than he thought.

"I think she's great in the part," he said, and then he grinned, Finch-like. "I guess if I didn't, that would be awkward. I mean, if I was losing laughs . . ."

M S. PARKER, a tiny, sinewy woman with long dark-blond ringlets, a megawatt smile and startlingly bright eyes, met Mr. Broderick in November 1991. He had become friends with her older brothers, Pippin and Toby, after he had directed a play at the Naked Angels Theater Company in which Toby performed. By then, he had already starred in the films that established his credentials as an adorable guy, a kind of all-American, boy-next-door leading man. And he had already won a Tony Award for Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs."

But he wasn't exactly brimming with confidence, apparently. And after the movie date, the romance didn't exactly take off. "My memory is that literally months passed when I didn't ask her for a date," Mr. Broderick said.

"Your memory is correct," Ms. Parker said, giggling, and reflexively naming the date the call finally came: Feb. 1, 1992. "Then he left a very charming, very self-effacing message on the machine. You know, 'Hi, it's Matthew Broderick.' You had to use your last name."

"I had to give her my credits," he said.

Ms. Parker, whose role in "How to Succeed" is her first singing part since she played the title role in "Annie" on Broadway in 1978, was a child actress. She has appeared in other successful New York productions, but it was her enthusiastically elastic turn as a men's-store sales clerk who memorably measured Steve Martin for a pair of trousers in "L.A. Story" (1991) that boosted her to fame -- that and her handful of dates with John F. Kennedy Jr.

She has been in several films since, including the recently released "If Lucy Fell," in which she plays, incongruously, the homely girl (and even more incongruously, a psychiatrist). Ms. Parker emerges as too, well, you know, to be ignored.

Insofar as their ambitions appear to be sensible, a little lofty and not merely glamorous, in the contemporary show business whirl Ms. Parker and Mr. Broderick are an unusual pair. Broadway producers are forever, of course, lamenting the loss of acting talent to Hollywood, where the money is and where performers don't have to face an audience for eight grueling performances a week. But Ms. Parker and Mr. Broderick have each made the commitment to a dual career, rare enough, but even rarer for performers so young. It's illustrative of the couple's brand of stardom that not only were they not in California to attend the Academy Awards ceremony, they didn't even watch it on television.

"If I watch the Oscars, basically it's three hours of being enraged with jealousy," Mr. Broderick said, the kind of love-hate emotion that actors rarely express publicly. "In Hollywood, the theater is looked at as a trip to the gym to get ready for your next movie. They say: 'That's good. It's your life and you like that and we totally support you.' " He smirked.

Ms. Parker added: "A woman's movie career is much shorter than a man's, and it's awfully nice to have a career in theater, where a woman can work longer. So I do this out of love, but not without a certain degree of calculation. I want a career in theater because in a couple of years my opportunities in film will change drastically."

Asked what it's like being onstage together, the couple spoke thoughtfully but inconclusively. It sounded a lot as if they were trying out their ideas on each other for the first time. Indeed, Rosemary and Finch struggle with the same issue.

"I think the only way to find out if you can survive it is to try it," said Mr. Broderick, who recalled that his professional debut at age 17 was opposite his father, James Broderick. "That was the same kind of odd thing. 'Why is that man talking that way and wearing a funny hat?' With this play, half the time I'm like, 'Who are you kidding with that polka-dot dress?' "

Ms. Parker said: "It feels too intimate for us to be onstage. I feel like people are looking at us sometimes not as Finch and Rosemary. That's my own problem, that I should leave the moment of being onstage and wonder about that. It's just that this is a person I don't know that way. I'm not a colleague of, you know what I mean? I'm his girlfriend."

Mr. Broderick: "Onstage you want to be using your imagination the whole time and the difficulty is to feel like your imagination is free. There's this whole history and you can't really erase that, so I imagine that what we do has to be some kind of interpretation of our relationship."

Ms. Parker: "The last 48 hours or so, Matthew has had this running joke about us, we work together, we eat together, we sleep together, we wake up together, we work together, we eat together, we sleep together. . . . It occurred to me that that was a dangerous part of this, that our world would become very small. There was always something nice about sharing your experiences. Now, all of a sudden our experiences are the same, and I don't feel like I'm bringing a lot to the table."

If they sound happy and settled, they aren't saying anything about their future together. To the "M word" question, they say they don't know. And Ms. Parker, asked if she has designs on motherhood, responded blithely, "Doesn't everyone?"

"We don't talk too much about the performances," Ms. Parker said. "Although I wouldn't mind his tips, his notes, his help. I don't think we've figured out that part of it yet, either. He's given me a couple of things, and then apologized afterwards."

Mr. Broderick smiled wryly and said, imitating himself, "Could you take just a bit off the pause ----"

"Darling?" Ms. Parker said, finishing his thought, batting her eyelashes, adorably.