Tuesday, April 14, 1998 | 9:39 a.m.
HOLLYWOOD - Joe Klein, author of the novel "Primary Colors," said he had Kathy Bates in mind when he wrote the character Libby Holden, the trigger-happy loyalist and "dust buster" for the presidential candidate patterned on Bill Clinton. Mike Nichols, director of the film adaptation, said Ms. Bates was the actress he wanted from the start.
"Bates is transcendent," Nichols said. "She's just the real thing."
The critics and audiences agree. Although Ms. Bates is a supporting player in the film, which stars John Travolta and Emma Thompson in the story of a Southern governor's political ascendancy, with the inevitable trail of compromises and disillusion, her heartbreaking performance steals the show.
"It's one of my few opportunities to work on a class A project, oh yeah, and I would sit in the makeup trailer and tell everyone, 'Can you believe this is so much fun?"' said Ms. Bates, who is 49. "I loved Libby. I loved her guts, her fearlessness, her idealism, her humor and, yes, her craziness."
Ms. Bates has made a successful career of playing brash, outsize and eccentric women; she won an Academy Award for playing a seriously nutty fan who imprisons her favorite writer, played by James Caan, in "Misery" (1990). But she is actually quite shy, and at the same time utterly matter-of-fact about herself.
"From the very beginning I got the same thing from people all the time: 'Oh, I don't know if you're pretty enough to be an actress,' and 'You're not pretty enough for daytime TV, that's for sure,' and 'You need to lose weight,' and 'You're not going to make it and you should think about doing something else,"' she said during an interview in her hotel room in Beverly Hills.
"When I did my first press junket, for 'Misery,' the very first question I got was 'You know, you don't look like Michelle Pfeiffer,"' she said with a shrug. "And I thought: 'Oh great, here we are. Well at least I know what the score is.' It's been a big deal for me and I've had to make my peace with it."
In person, Ms. Bates is not only more attractive than she appears on screen, with deep-set blue-green eyes and a full, round mouth ("Her mouth is unbelievably sexy," Rob Reiner, the director of "Misery," once said), but also quite charismatic. Her presence dominates the room.
Beyond comments about her looks, Ms. Bates said she had been even more troubled for years about whether acting was a worthy profession. "From the beginning I kept asking myself: 'Is this really helping anybody? Am I really making a valid contribution to society?"' she said. "It seemed to be such a self-aggrandizing profession and I wasn't sure this was a good thing to be doing with my life. It really bugged me."
But Ms. Bates said she never doubted her skill. Her mother called her "Sarah" after Sarah Bernhardt. "I was really dramatic as a child," she said, rolling her eyes. "This sounds egotistical but I thought I could be good, I thought I could be one of the best. I knew I had been given a talent that needed to be developed."
Her role in "Primary Colors" is the moral center of the film, that of a loyalist who ultimately feels betrayed by the candidate she adores, because the idealism and principles of the governor and his wife, played by Ms. Thompson, have been twisted in their quest for the presidency.
The character is loosely based on Clinton's chief of staff when he was governor of Arkansas, Betsey Wright, who famously remarked that she was in charge of "bimbo eruptions."
Ms. Bates says a pivotal scene for her is one near the finale when she confronts Travolta's character, the governor, who plans to use a sleazy tactic to defeat an opponent. "There's that moment when she looks at him and says, 'We can't do this, because it's not who we are,' and he says, 'Well, we've all got to grow up and move on."'
"It's like that moment between two lovers when they say: 'Hey, I'm sorry. I can't go the same way you're going,"' said Ms. Bates. "I knew somebody like that in my life that I was crazy about and who was magnetic and charismatic and imbued with so much power. And that's how Libby felt. She says, 'God, they were gold and they were glorious.' And to see finally that he had to check his ideals at the door is so profoundly disappointing."
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