When Arquette's boyfriend was Steve Porcaro of Toto, she would demonstrate her fealty by showing up at the studio at 4:00 A.M. laden with all the munchies money could buy. Arquette was willing to go to any length to stand by her man—even if that meant standing in the wings, watching him perform while her own career went on hold. This was self-destructive, but Toto immortalized her for it. Arquette speaks of this notoriety with gentle irony.

"'Oh! You're that Rosanna!' people would say to me, meaning 'Rosanna the girlfriend.' And the truth is, I was that Rosanna. I'd just finished Baby, It's You, my career was hot, and I wasn't ready. Agents would be calling me and I'd be saying, 'Um, just a minute. I'm not ready, I'm busy, I'm...'"

As the oldest of five children, Rosanna had been raised to put the focus on others. Her parents were activists and artists. Her four little brothers and sisters were often Rosanna's to tend to. Then, too, there were the Peace and Love anthems that pulsed through her childhood. At the sit-ins and rallies where she wore body paint asking adults to Stop the War, young Rosanna learned that the only kind of upward mobility that counted was spiritual.

Quite literally a child of the sixties (she was born August 10, 1959), Rosanna attended free schools, lived in her parents' artists' community, and vacationed in spiritual summer camps. While surrounded by working artists, she was surrounded by the sixties as well. The people that she knew thought a lot more about higher consciousness than they did about getting hired. It is one of the ironies of Arquette's young life that just as her career is taking off, she finds herself finally landing. Not that she has become a crass materialist, you understand. More simply, the garden of earthly delights has finally managed to attract her attention and summon her down from the ozone.

"I am trying to buy myself this house," Arquette says, arranging herself and her yards of silk on the Persian carpet. "I want a home and I want it now. I have been living in hotels, working all the time. I've found a house that I like, but my accountants say it's too much, find another. I don't want to!" Arquette laughs at herself. "I want a home!" she wails, plaintively, as though explaining the female version of Manifest Destiny—or perhaps doing Hannah, the pioneer woman she's playing for Larry Kasdan in Silverado.

It is not only her recent life that has been nomadic. There was always an aspect of gypsy caravan-road show-traveling circus about the Arquette family. Truly members of the Woodstock Nation, they went wherever and whenever the spirit moved them, from Washington Square to Washington, D.C., from Chicago to Hollywood to San Francisco to Virginia. The Arquettes were members of the Movement and the Movement did exactly that: move.

In the communal living rooms, young Rosanna absorbed conversations on communism, socialism, feminism, activism—any "ism" or "wasm" that was around. Free school was nothing compared with the education she got hearing about free love, free drugs, free clinics. If freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, one of the first things young Rosanna lost was her political virginity. Before she hit puberty, she understood the war on poverty. All ears and eyes, young Rosanna acquired a political consciousness that most Yuppies would never be able to fathom.

The sixties brought not only higher consciousness, but lower companions; there was the good drama of theater games and the bad drama of mind games. In her early teens, Rosanna sampled pot, mescaline, acid, and alcohol. In the midst of all this anarchy, Rosanna told her parents she needed more freedom and had to leave home to find it. Freedom-loving themselves, the elder Arquettes let her walk through an open door.

At fifteen, she packed a knapsack and hitchhiked across America. Like a homing pigeon, she followed the pathway laid out by her dream. At seventeen, she was living on her own in Hollywood. In television movies, girls who do this sort of thing end up on the streets. Instead, Arquette ended up on the boards of a local theater. She was discovered there by theater director Paul Sills, who introduced her to a local casting director.

In rapid succession, Rosanna Arquette made eight television movies—capping them off with her role as Nicole in the 1982 Executioner's Song, released soon after as a feature in Europe. Arquette's Nicole was a tour de force. Suddenly critics were seeing what the directors had all along—a star on par with "[Sissy] Spacek, Debra Winger, and Nastassia Kinski" to quote Gene Siskel, a critic not known for hyperbole. Despite the shrinkage inevitable to the small screen, Arquette was clearly a large-screen talent. What happened next?

"I was the other girl besides Julie Andrews who showed her tits for Blake Edwards," Arquette says ruefully, recalling her experience on S.O.B.

"OK, we're going to have you take your shirt off," Blake Edwards told Arquette as William Holden, Robert Preston, and an entire crew and cast of extras were standing by. It was the first Arquette had heard of this. "I was supposed to wear a bathing-suit top. That's what I'd been told." Growing up in a show business household, Arquette had also been told, "The show must go on." What was she to do? "Call my agents? Call my mother? I tried, but every minute was costing money." Rather than let the producers lose their shirts recasting, Arquette took off her own.

Like Jessica Lange before her, Arquette was learning some of Hollywood's funny little ways. In order to get a chance to act, an actress must first prove she has breasts and is willing to bare them. Then the very same actress must prove that she not only has breasts, but she can act despite them. Lange's career was caught in the grip of King Kong for years afterward. If she had been less nubile, her acting career might have been more immediately upwardly mobile.

Rosanna Arquette—"the one with the beautiful eyes and the great mamumbas," wrote a Rolling Stone reporter. To say the least, Arquette's mamumbas made quite an impact. "I used to tease Rosanna that we should have her wear a restraining bra," recalls Lawrence Schiller. "I thought her being so well endowed might be too much in some of the lovemaking scenes. Then I thought... There are those who may think I went too far, shooting her astride, shooting her straight on with her breasts right in his face. I could have cast a flat-chested actress, but I had cast Rosanna. And so..." Just like other actresses before her, Arquette discovered, "I would get cast for my tits and not my acting."

Raised as she was to think of nakedness as natural—"After all, everybody's got a body, right?"—it was hard for Arquette to assimilate the way nakedness becomes, gasp, nudity on the screen. "It's scary to realize that somewhere in the dark, guys are getting off on you."

Martin Scorsese recalls that the first time he saw Arquette was in The Executioner's Song. "It was a very depressing time in my own life, and when I watched that movie, I became attached to her character and Tommy Lee Jones in a way that I hadn't been in a long, long time. Yes, I thought she was very sexy, but I also thought, Who is this woman? She's a remarkable actress. I remember early one Sunday morning watching her on this religious show—"Guiding Light," I think. That time, she played this young mother who had lost her child to crib death. She tore apart the child's room. She was remarkable."

"I've gotten in a lot of trouble for being honest and outspoken," Arquette says laughing—and her breasts are a topic that makes her quite outspoken. There was a time in Chicago when a reporter asked her what she wanted to do next, as an actress, "but he asked this question to my tits."

When her tits didn't answer immediately, the reporter persisted, "After all those hot scenes in Executioner's Song, what did you really, ah, feel like doing?"

"I feel like punching you right in the face," Arquette snapped.

The reporter had his story and Arquette had her emotional relief. She also had a problem: The immediate relief of mouthing off could do her permanent damage in print. What Arquette needed was to learn to "zip the lip." Good reviews are one thing; bad press is another. No actress likes to be typecast as a "bad actor," but talkative ones often are. Elizabeth Ashley, Barbara Hershey, Jane Fonda—all these actresses had to fight to overcome their media profile.

The problem recurred on the set of Desperately Seeking Susan. Arquette was playing a drab little suburban housewife obsessed with a glamorous creature named Susan. Susan was being played by a glamorous creature named Madonna. In the preproduction time between signing on the dotted line and "Roll camera, roll sound," Madonna had gone from being a New York club scene "personality" to the nation's hottest pop star. The movie had gone from being a Rosanna Arquette film to being a "Madonna vehicle"—at least in the media and in Arquette-as-a-drab-little-nobody's worst fears.

It seemed to Arquette that her part kept getting smaller and Madonna's kept getting larger. In the days after filming and before she saw the film, Arquette complained to reporters, "I thought I was going to be making this small, charming film—not some rock video." To a reporter from Moviegoer magazine, she complained of director Susan Seidelman's "insensitivity."

Sitting in her manager's office, holding out a copy of the offending article, wrinkling her nose at the dead rat she's discovered, Arquette moans, "Can you believe I said that? I can. Me and my goddamn mouth. I feel awful!"

Arquette feels awful because she is now Rosanna Arquette again. Roberta, the nobody, has receded into memory. Arquette feels awful because she has seen the film and she did make the "small, charming" film she had hoped to make. She feels awful because when the Moviegoer piece came out, "I got these phone calls from friends of mine—older and wiser—studio people. 'What are you doing to yourself?' they asked." And, finally, she feels bad because she hurt Susan Seidelman's feelings. "I didn't think," Arquette says with a sigh.

"I think," says Seidelman, on the weekend of her rave opening, "that the very same qualities that make Rosanna such a wonderful actress are what make her say the things she does. She has a real honesty and doesn't censor herself—and she lives moment to moment, the way you do in a character. Each moment has its own emotional truth. Whatever she thinks just then, she just blurts it out. She is very childlike that way. I think many great actresses are. Maybe that is what makes them great actresses. they are in touch with their inner life in a very immediate way."

"I am getting better," Arquette insists. "I'm just not doing it fast enough." Fast enough to escape the rumor mill?

"Rosanna and Susan have kissed and made up," says Sarah Pillsbury. As the film's coproducer, she finds the press hoopla about a feud to be so much sensationalism. "People outside the business do not understand the collaborative nature of moviemaking. With so many volatile artistic temperaments involved, there's bound to be some conflict. Personally, I think conflict can help a movie."

"I call it the I-hate-you-Baby-I-love-you-Baby syndrome," says screenwriter Michael Shepard. To outsiders, it appears baffling and duplicitous: "They're all phonies out there." To the movie community, it is no more than a family spat.

Amy Robinson concurs: "The moviemaking process is essentially a private one. What happens in the work process is really mysterious and irrelevant to an outsider. What counts is what's on the screen. If what's on the screen is good, then the experience was a good one—for movie people."

When she saw herself as she appeared in print—hotheaded, flaky, a little too wild—Arquette did not like what she saw. Surrounded for years by people who were burning out, she knew enough to diagnose her own symptoms. Although few people saw her as having any kind of problem, she herself felt out of control. She went into a drug rehabilitation program with a friend a year and a half ago. For the first time, Rosanna, who had always taken such good care of everybody else, began to take care of Rosanna. She got clean and sober and very, very clearheaded.

Arquette's hands smooth down the front of her silks. She is pensive and very serious when she talks about drugs and the effects they have had on her and many of her gifted friends. "The coke scene," she says with deep anger, "what a joke. Everybody's a genius on coke—and nobody is. I can tell a using performance when I see one. People make these bullshit choices." Like many Hollywood insiders, Arquette believes that the City of Angels is being divided by drugs into two camps: those who do and those who don't.

"It's two different worlds," says Scorsese. "You really have to cast your lot with one camp or the other." He, too, has seen the fast lanes first-hand and he's seen his own share of casualties. "I sometimes wonder if it is really that much worse out here now than it was during the twenties and thirties," he says. "And then I think, Yes. It is. The cocaine changed everything. It's a cartel, more than that, a conglomerate, a monster—"

Like a heroine who is giddy with relief at escaping the monster, Rosanna Arquette finds herself awfully buoyant some days. "I'm going through high emotional things right now, recovering from a bad twenty years." Three days a week for four hours at a crack, Arquette studies her craft with coach Sandra Seacat. Seacat is a follower of Swami Chidvilasananda, a devotee of Sita yoga, and her spiritual beliefs infiltrate her acting classes, indeed shape them. Arquette explains, "Sandra believes that scripts to not come to us by accident, that we get the scripts we need to work on our own development." Arquette insists that her roles have in fact reflected her own recovery.

Scorsese describes After Hours as a comedy, but a "black comedy." Asked to elaborate, he says, "It's Kafkaesque. You remember Franz. A funny guy, great at parties. Not that many people know that about Kafka. A wonderful dancer, tells story after story—and this, I think, is one of them." Asked to describe Arquette's role in all of this, Scorsese demurs. "You've got to see the movie. I don't want to give it away, but I will say that one-half of the time her character, Marcy, will seem absolutely perfectly normal and the other half—you have to see the film—let's just say she's seriously disturbed—quite, quite self-destructive."

In Silverado, she plays Hannah, the pioneer woman who, instead of turning her will and life over to one man, quite independently chooses to become involved with two. "Hannah is this strong, homely person," Arquette notes, and while she worked on the film in New Mexico last winter, she also worded on strengthening her own character.

These days, Arquette is very much center stage as an artist and in her own life. Not coincidentally, her boyfriend is a record producer, a man long used to nurturing artists. Arquette wears an antique diamond ring that he gave her, but no wedding band. In this phase of her life, she is still working on being separate and equal. "Once I've got that down..." She straightens the ring.

Rosanna Arquette, movie star, is wearing black lace stockings, a blue mini-skirt, an After Hours T-shirt, and a homely tweed jacket. It is as if she has decided to dress as all of her current crop of characters—Marcy, Roberta, and Hannah—all at the same time. She is striding along the strip of Melrose Avenue that reminds her of New York's Columbus Avenue. There are punk clothing stores, antique furniture emporiums, thrift shops, health-food restaurants, and swank eateries featuring nouvelle cuisine. Parts of Rosanna would look right at home in each of them.

"What I'd really like to find is a good jukebox," says Rosanna in the manner of Roberta Glass, shopper par excellence.

A jukebox?

"Oh! For my house. I've bought a house! The house I wanted! The-one-that-was-too-expensive-but-I-couldn't-find-another-cheaper-just-like-it-because...it's like a tree house!" This is Rosanna as Marcy, "half normal and half seriously disturbed."

Unperturbed, Rosanna as Hannah the pioneer woman continues: "It is so wonderful to have a home, a nest. It's so warm and rustic."

And so, if Rosanna as herself has her way, it will be warm and rustic with a jukebox located dead center. Try as she does to approximate normal living, Arquette's tastes run unmistakably to the theatrical.

"Oh no!" She moans with sudden drama, staring out the window and across the street. "Do you see that?"

"That" is her favorite store, Commes Les Garcons. It is swank and showy and features a palm tree growing up through its skylight. As soon as Arquette enters, she is greeted by coos and purrs. The purrs rumble from Geoffrey, a polo anyone? homme fatale who writes screenplays when he isn't selling clothes. The coos burst from Patrick, a vision, or perhaps a nightmare in drop-dead chic; black hair, eye make-up, dress, pants, and pointy little black shoes. Patrick's band will be playing that evening at Club Lingerie, tres chic, and he does so hope that his favorite movie star (Rosanna) will be able to attend.

Rosanna isn't sure that she can. Patrick abruptly spots the Madonna video undulating on the monitor at the back of the store. "She's so sexy! So sexy!" he shrills. As an afterthought, he adds, "Of course, so are you, Rosanna...darling."

As it happens, Rosanna Darling is hoping that she is sexy, too. In the morning, she and Madonna will be doing a photo session together for their joint Rolling Stone cover. On the video, Madonna, "the new Marilyn Monroe," is slithering through her paces in leather and lurex. Eyeing the screen, Rosanna Arquette fingers a demure number, lilacs and violets on a diaphanous lavender field.

On screen, Arquette's former boyfriend Steve Porcaro replaces Madonna. the irony of this is not lost on Patrick. With the instincts of a born National Enquirer scout, he pivots to scrutinize Porcaro's impact, if any. Rosanna Arquette, actress and movie star, surveys her image in the mirror. Dressed now in her lilacs and violets, she looks like a wood nymph. Yes, there are echoes of the young Natalie Wood—until Arquette seizes a pair of purple lace leggings and smiles with wicked delight.