The Spokesman-Review from Spokane, Washington • 124

"I was everybody's bad boy," says the actor. But he had another side. How Richard Gere Learned To Reach Out I to THINK leave yourself," YOU home to HAVE said be Richard Gere. "You have to destroy a lot of things in the process. You've got to destroy daddies' and all that Gere talked with me in his austere apartment in Manhattan's Greenwich Village.

Its bookshelves heavy with studies of Tibet, Buddhism and philosophy, the room is more appropriate to an assistant professor than a film star. Gere, 39, was dressed in a blue workshirt, tight dark-gray chinos and half-boots. He is tall, muscular and handsome, with an easy, engaging smile. His mind is quick, complex, unsentimental and appreciative of irony. As I was to learn, central to his life has been a rebellion against received values and a search for new ones.

Before he left home, Gere had a typical small-town, middle-class boyhood in upstate New York. His parents had moved there from Philadelphia, where Gere was born. The second of five children, Gere was athletic and musical. Among the instruments he mastered were the guitar, trumpet, banjo and sitar. "My father is a very soulful trumpet player," he told me.

"My mother plays the piano. We were Methodists, so there was a lot of singing in church. My parents were very involved with the church. Very moral people. Straight-shooters.

My father even played with the idea of becoming a preacher." Gere's father sold insurance. "'He didn't see himself as a businessman," the actor told me. "He was protecting people's families. He never made a lot of money, and that was never a factor around our house. What mattered were the good works of the church or the school and community.

As for myself?" Gere sat forward. his hand through his hair, a characteris- est of Hollywood. In 1977, after a few tic gesture. "I didn't go to classes. I just read a lot.

I was very much a dreamer." At the end of his sophomore year, Gere worked in summer stock in Provincetown, where the director of the Seattle Repertory Theatre spotted him and persuaded him to join that company. After one season in Seattle, playing minor roles, he headed for Vermont, where he organized some friends into a band. When the films, he was offered the role of a migrant worker in Days of Heaven. "As soon as I did that film, everything else took off," Gere recalled. "I was hot.

I was the newest thing in town. That How had it felt, at 28, to be the hottest young actor in town? He grinned. "It was great having the attention," he said. "I thought: 'This is it! I've done it! I'm going to retire father. my "It was just the opposite.

I wanted noth- band fell apart six weeks later, Gere I'm putting money away for college for ing to do with anybody! I hated every- moved on to Greenwich Village. It was my the whole thing. It's incredbody and assumed everybody hated me. the height of the hippie age, and Gere, ibly euphorious. All of a sudden the I was rebellious.

A bad boy. Everybody's his hair below his shoulders, lived in rehearsal period of your life is over, and bad makeshift quarters and looked for work. your future has arrived. It's liberating." Gere's excellence at gymnastics won His first important break was replacing Gere's career really took off with him an athletic scholarship to the Uni- Barry Bostwick as Danny Zuko in the Looking for Mr. Goodbar, released in versity of Massachusetts in 1967 and hit Broadway musical Grease.

1977. American Gigolo in 1980 brought allowed him to leave home. "I was a By the mid-'70s, Gere's growing rep- him stardom, and An Officer and a Genterrible student!" he admitted, running utation in the theater had piqued the inter- tleman, two years later, made him an DO A ER "Knowing yourself, growththat's the real work of life," says actor Richard Gere. international superstar. Curiously, none of the films that followed would duplicate their success.

His most recent movie was Miles From Home. I asked how fame has affected him. "Well," he said, "the change is almost always in the people around you. When I became famous, very close friends were insecure of their place in my life and were becoming aggressive and difficult. Prove we're still friends.

Prove you haven't changed. It's heavy going, especially when you want to enjoy that moment you've worked so hard for." An intensely private man, Gere has never married, although for several years he maintained a rather public relationship with Sylvia Martins, a Brazilian painter. I asked what mattered most to him. "My faith," he said. "Emptying the negative out of my heart.

The career? I'm not really that interested. Discovering things. Knowing yourself. Growth. That's the real work of life." Gere has studied Buddhism for 15 years.

"I always wanted to know, 'Who am 'What is the origin of he said quietly. "We're all afraid. We're all bound one way or another. And sufWestenberger fering fering. "In the is all last There's few around no years," us.

And separation." he it's added, our "I've suffelt the need to do more for othersTheo whether its aid to Central America or for AIDS or support for the Tibetan people, who are suffering terribly under the Gere's concern for Tibet has brought him into friendship with the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhists. "He's a wonderful combination of things," "Gere said. "Brilliant. Very generous, very compassionate, very easy. He's avuncular, warm.

He meets me with this big hug. I described it once as being, maybe for the only time in your life, in the presence of someone who wants nothing other than your "Is the Dalai Lama like the father you should have had?" I inquired. "He's like the father we all should have had," 'Gere answered. "It's like completing the circle, and the circle is really finding the father here." He tapped his chest above his heart. PAGE 10 NOVEMBER 27, 1988 PARADE MAGAZINE.