April 21, 1988

Blues For Matthew

After his tragic accident, Matthew Broderick is back on track

By Amy Engeler, Rolling Stone (p. 29)

Matthew Broderick, the man-child with the impish mug, arrives at the Manhattan restaurant after a fifty-block journey uptown through midday traffic on a beat-up ten-speed bike. The February wind-chill is nearly zero, but his cheeks are still chalky pale. Broderick wears his usual lived-in clothes, his chinos tucked into white socks. And his lips are so chapped they are turning orange.

Led to a table way in the back of the Houlihan's across from Lincoln Center, Broderick sits down and sheds one sweater to reveal another, both of which look as if they had been picked up off the floor and thrown on in haste. His scruffy hair, he admits with some amusement, hasn't been touched since he got a crew cut ten months ago.

Broderick still visits a physiotherapist daily and has only recently been able to get back on his bike. For much of the fall his leg was in a cast as a result of an automobile accident last summer in which two Irishwomen were killed.

By all accounts, it was a typical Irish afternoon, complete with sudden downpour. Six weeks earlier Broderick had finished filming Biloxi Blues -- which was released last month -- and was touring Northern Ireland with his girlfriend of nearly three years, the actress Jennifer Grey, whom he had met while filming Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The two had rented a red BMW 316 and were on a country road headed toward the hamlet of Maguiresbridge.

Visiting Ireland was nothing unusual for Broderick. For the past fifteen years his family has owned a four-bedroom house on two acres of land overlooking the ocean in county Donegal. His father, the late actor James Broderick (the television series Family, Dog Day Afternoon), and his mother, the painter Patricia Broderick, bought the house after renting another in Donegal for two years.

That afternoon, when Broderick and Grey passed near Enniskillen, about eighty miles west of Belfast, they stopped at a gas station for directions. An off-duty policeman obliged, and though they didn't go the way he suggested, the man followed them for a few miles and was later able to report that Broderick was driving at a reasonable speed, under 40 mph.

After a brief rainstorm the BMW stopped at another gas station on the outskirts of Enniskillen. When Broderick and Grey pulled back onto the road about 3:00 p.m., the rain had ended, but the roads were still slick. Not a mile from the station, on an unobscured straightaway, they collided head-on with a brown Volvo carrying Anna Gallagher and her mother, Margaret Doherty. The two women were pronounced dead on arrival at the Erne Hospital. Broderick, who had facial cuts and a fractured thigh, had to be cut out of the BMW. Grey was bruised but escaped without serious injury.

"I vaguely remember making my bed that morning, and that is it; then I remember waking up at the hospital," says Broderick, who sent sympathy notes to the family of the dead women. "That's sort of common, as strange as it sounds. I hit my head and was knocked out. You often lose a day when that happens."

Grey remained conscious but says she was bent over putting a cassette into the tape machine at the moment of the accident. "She always did the tapes, because I'm a pretty careful driver, believe it or not," says Broderick. "I don't usually do the tapes when I'm driving."

Broderick's fracture kept him flat on his back in a private ward of Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital for three weeks. He was kept on for another week to gain strength. On September 7th, 1987, he was arraigned in a makeshift court in the hospital on charges of causing death by reckless driving. Released on $4075 bail, he came home to New York later in September on crutches.

Without skid marks or witnesses, the cause of the accident remained a mystery. Broderick hired engineers to reconstruct the accident, but their findings were apparently inconclusive, and he acknowledges that he may have been on the wrong side of the road: "It's possible that that's what happened."

On February 15th, 1988, Broderick pleaded guilty in absentia to a reduced charge of careless driving. His lawyer, David Smyth, told the magistrate, "It is a tragic situation, and no one will ever know exactly what happened. I am instructed to indicate that Broderick will always feel extremely upset." The court imposed a fine of $175. The New York Post published the news under the headline FERRIS BUELLER'S LET OFF!

Though Broderick gets teary recalling the ordeal, he would like to put the experience behind him. "My leg was broken," he says. "I was badly messed up. I have no desire to be more badly hurt. I don't feel that I need to have more misfortune or that anything bad has to happen to me to pay for this. I can say it's over, and I'm really glad it's over. I want to go on."

What is strange about the accident, and what probably added to its tabloid appeal, was that it seemed so out of character. Broderick, 26, is not known as a reckless driver in any sense. He lived with his mother until he was well into his twenties, and he has never been part of his generation's high-gloss brat-packer crew. Nonetheless, people like to think they've found a dark side to someone who has always appeared so incredibly good-humored and all-American.

His closest association as an actor has been with the most wholesome of modern playwrights, Neil Simon. In the new movie Biloxi Blues, adapted from Simon's Broadway hit, Broderick appears as an introspective World War II army private. Directed by Mike Nichols and filmed last spring at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, the movie found much of the cast, including Christopher Walken as the platoon's crazy sergeant, slogging through Southern swamps to recreate the film's boot-camp story.

Biloxi Blues is the second installment in Simon's trilogy about Eugene Morris Jerome, the playwright's alter ego. Broderick received a Tony award for his performance as the fifteen-year-old Eugene in 1983's Brighton Beach Memoirs and two years later returned as the same character in Biloxi Blues.

"Other people can act like automatons and do whatever the director says, but not Matthew," says Simon. "He's not a renegade, but he questions things."

Even in his forgettable films, Broderick has shown a natural sense of comic timing. He is both the cherubic boy and the little devil with his finger stuck in the pie. In Biloxi Blues, his sole piece of work in the past year, Broderick turns in another sweetly amusing performance and is particularly touching in the scene in which he loses his virginity to a prostitute ("Was that it?").

Broderick is not prone to philosophizing about himself. He is shy, slightly sheepish, and he answers some questions with a nod. By far, his most valuable conversational asset is the gigantic smile he offers as a sort of punch line to his jokes.

As the son of an actor, Broderick was exposed to the business young. The playwright Horton Foote came for Thanksgiving one year, and Broderick remembers meeting Mike Nichols as a child at a party with his parents. Broderick attended the Walden School, a private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side with a strong drama program. With no plans to attend college, he graduated from Walden and hit the casting calls.

Foote gave Broderick his first role, a part in his play Valentine's Day at HB Studio. "I realized then there was a big intuitive talent there," says Foote. "He shows deep sensitivity, nothing phony." A year later, against the advice of his agent, who warned that he might be typecast as a gay actor, Broderick accepted a role in Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy. When the show became a Broadway hit, Broderick was asked to audition for Brighton Beach Memoirs and won that role.

His first film was Max Dugan Returns, which was followed by his big hit WarGames, then Ladyhawke, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, 1918 and last year's Project X, in which he costarred with chimps. Though he has mainly played teenagers up to now, he may soon be taking on more adult roles. "There will be a time when he'll want to stop the clock," says Foote. "But now I think he wants to get out of playing boys. And well he should."

Outside the restaurant, Broderick is told that the cast of Saturday Night Live -- he was to appear on the show March 26th -- will be coming to a screening of Biloxi Blues. Broderick looks perplexed, then sweetly asks, "So they can see how to make fun of me?"

"I'm really scared about being on Saturday Night Live," he admits later. "I mean, they're so used to that fast comedy thing. I'm really slow. I'm usually uptight for about a month."

Meanwhile, Broderick leads an admittedly quiet life in his Greenwich Village duplex, not far from where he grew up, not far from Jennifer Grey's house. "He's very different from other actors," says Grey. "You don't ever feel when you're with him that you're with an actor. I mean this in the best way. Actors tend to be pretty unbearable."

"He reads comic books instead of scripts," she adds.

Broderick would like to begin working on films again. One strong possibility is a project called Life After Life, in which he would play his first real adult role, as the romantic lead opposite Cybill Shepherd. "I've only just recently been able to work," says Broderick. "I was limping for a long time. I've been having trouble deciding what to do. I really, really want to work, but I don't want just anything."

Will it be hard for him to shake the repercussions of the accident? "I don't know -- I think everything that happens affects you as an actor," he says. "This certainly was a big thing. It will change me."