Vp Issue 11: "In Bed with Guinevere Turner"

[Originally published in issue 11 2006 by Grace Moon]

“Would you like some champagne?” asks Guinevere Turner, as she reclines on the bed of her Palm Springs hotel suite during the Dinah Shore weekend. Guinevere seems perfectly suited for the entertainment lifestyle. She’s completely at ease with reporters and fans. She attended this years’ Dinah Shore for the requisite L Word book signing, the Power-Up event, and did press interviews for the film The Notorious Bettie Page, which she co-wrote. Her suite was filled with hot urban hipsters just in from LA and elsewhere to enjoy the notorious Lesbians Gone Wild weekend. Velvetpark conducted the last interview of the evening over a bottle (or was it two?) of champagne and cigarettes.

So how many people have you already spoken to? I just don’t want to go down the same road and make it boring because you said all the same things to 500 other people.

Not five hundred, but probably twenty-five.

And all the gay press is going to print the same stuff.

Especially the gay boys, I always feel like they are covering me because the have to.

[grinning] “The girl who wrote Go Fish”

I always laugh, its like Guinevere “Go Fish” Turner. No, actually my middle name is Jane. I can be Guinevere “Bettie Page” Turner anything, but please… seriously, it’s been twelve years.

Speaking of Bettie Page, there is something about what you’ve written [over the years] and how you’ve written things, and there seems to be a relationship between sex and…I don’t know if violence is the right word but something dark. And this Bettie Page story seems to incorporate those elements. Am I going down the right road here?

You are, but as Alex Trebek would say, “Can you put it in the form of a question?”

Okay, well, lets just start with who came up with the idea to do the Bettie Page story? You were working with Mary Herron on it—was it a collaborative idea?

Mary Herron and I share a producer—the indomitable Christine Vachon. Christine was working with Mary on I Shot Andy Warhol and I was promoting Go Fish. We were at a club in London, and [at the time] I was so fucking mad at Rose Troche.

Why? For personal reasons?

When we first started our tour of Go Fish we had just broken up and it was ugly.

You broke up