His friends weren't at all surprised. "He's an unusually empathetic guy and has a keen eye for almost anything," says New York Times Magazine editor Adam Moss, who plays in a regular poker game with Cunningham. "He has this uncanny ability to know how other people experience the world." That's a handy skill for a card-sharp—and a blessing for a writer.
The women in Cunningham's book—portrayed in the Golden Globe-winning drama by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep—are loosely linked by Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. Kidman is Woolf; Moore a troubled California housewife reading Woolf's book ca. 1949; Streep a modern-day editor who, like Mrs. Dalloway, is planning a party. Like Mrs. Dalloway, "it's essentially an optimistic book that deals with the terrible things that happen to people," Cunningham says. "One reason I love Woolf is that she suffered from profound depression and wrote this book about the miracle of being alive—for just an hour."
Cunningham first encountered Woolf back in 1967, when he was a 15-year-old spouting off about folk singers to a girl from his suburban Los Angeles neighborhood, whom he wanted to impress. Finally, the girl asked, "Have you ever thought of being less stupid?"
"I had been thinking about being less stupid," says Cunningham, 50, who now lives in Provincetown, Mass., and Manhattan with his partner of 15 years, psychoanalyst Ken Corbett, 49. "She said, 'Why don't you read a book?' "
Her recommendation led him to Mrs. Dalloway, and reading it quite literally changed his life. It inspired Cunningham, the son of Don, 78, a retired ad man, and Dorothy, a real estate agent who died in 2001, to be a writer himself. Three weeks ago it led to his dancing on a chair at 3 a.m. at an L.A. strip club, where he went with Kidman and actor Jude Law following the Golden Globes ("Nicole," says Cunningham, "was cheering me on").
Between those two moments, he graduated from Stanford, tended bar in Colorado and failed at farming with a friend in Nebraska ("I was not the stuff of which farmers are made") before entering the MFA writing program at the University of Iowa. His first novel, Golden States, was published to little notice in 1984. A Home at the End of the World followed to fine reviews. (Its film version will begin shooting this spring, with Colin Farrell.) He hoped his third, Flesh and Blood, would make his name. Instead, it moved New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani to declare, as Cunningham recalls it, "this guy can't write at all."
But Cunningham felt ready to tackle an idea he had mulled over since the 10th grade. "I wanted to write about the power of reading a great book," he says. He borrowed Woolf's original title for Mrs. Dalloway and predicted his novel would "sell a few thousand copies, then march with whatever dignity it could muster to the remainders table."
He didn't expect The Hours to win the Pulitzer or, even less likely, to catch Hollywood's attention. But producer Scott Rudin saw something in the book even Cunningham hadn't and hired playwright David Hare to handle the adaptation. "Everything about The Hours was surprising," says Cunningham. His major disappointment about the film version is that his mother didn't live to see it. During filming she began to lose her battle with colon and liver cancer. When it looked as though the end was near, Rudin sent over 20 raw minutes of tape. "I was holding my mother's hand, watching Julianne Moore play somebody who wouldn't exist if my mother hadn't," he says. "She loved it."
Now Cunningham is at a crossroads, with anonymity behind him and huge expectations ahead. "Part of what fueled the effort for me has always been the sense that I'm underappreciated, underpaid," he says. "What do you do when you find yourself over appreciated and overpaid?" He owes a lot to that girl back in high school—and to Woolf. "She's done so much for me, I'm glad to do a little something for her, even posthumously," he says. "This morning Mrs. Dalloway is No. 4 on Amazon."
Allison Adato
Liza Hamm in New York City
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- Liza Hamm.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
