It is Friday night when the phone rings in my apartment in New York.

"Hi, it's Debra. I'm in town.''

"How are you?"

"I'm having an identity crisis."

"Could you save it until tomorrow so we can get it on tape?"

From across town, The Laugh begins, that profoundly sexual, guttural giggle that threw John Travolta into the saddle, blatantly seduced Richard Gere, and jerked tears from us when Shirley MacLaine heard strains of it for the last time in the cancer ward in Terms of Endearment. Very few people can be identified by their laugh alone. Debra Winger is one of them.

The next afternoon we are sitting twenty-four floors above Manhattan in a Denning & Fourcade decorated apartment I have borrowed because mine is being painted and Winger's three-year-old son, Noah, is occupying her hotel suite. As the actress suspiciously eyes the decor, as compatible with her worldview as Dom Perignon is with Dr Pepper, she elaborates on her current state of mind. This is no mere identity crisis, she assures me, no thirty-five-year-old actress wondering, "What's it all about, Alfie?"

This is an "an existential journey. If I were looking for a title for this period in my life, it's a search," she muses, "and the thing about a search, especially if it's a little existential, is if you know what you're searching for, you're not really searching." 

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She stops, glances out at the Manhattan skyline, smiling. Winger realizes that talking about this Existential Thing places her in the realm of some starlet in the thrall of Camus and Sartre—even though she comes quite honorably by this current obsession. Last year she spent six months in Morocco communing with the hip granddaddy of existentialism, novelist Paul Bowles, whose masterpiece, The Sheltering Sky, is finally making it to the screen, starring Winger and John Malkovich and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.

To say that the Sahara Desert, where the movie was filmed, and Paul Bowles had an impact on Winger is an understatement. "I am in love with Paul Bowles," says the actress matter-of-factly. "It's as much of a love affair as I've ever had." Her identification with North Africa, meanwhile, is "the strongest thing that's ever happened to me with a place. It seemed like the beginning of all things for me, the purest thought patterns, the sense of consciousness, all the things that sound way too trendy. But it reflected the essence of my being."

That essence has a lot to do with spunk and daring, qualities that made her twenties—"the twa's," as she likes to call them—such a memorable decade in her career. ("I always liked the sound of 'twa' better than 'thi,' " she says as her mouth screws up in distaste over the notion of being thirty-something. "I mean, think of all the wonderful words that start with 'twa'.. .twenty, twinkle, twirl.. .twat.") The last five years, on the other hand, have been arduous: Winger ended her relationship with then governor of Nebraska Robert Kerrey, married actor Timothy Hutton, had a baby, divorced Hutton, got back together with Kerrey, and watched the red-hot career of her "twa's" grind into neutral with box-office disappointments like . Betrayed and Everybody Wins, ^ which barely made it into theaters. Yet it wasn't until she disguised herself as a boy and traveled, the only woman among men, deep into the Sahara with the Tuareg, a nomadic Hamitic tribe, that it became clear to Debra Winger exactly what had happened. "I have to admit that the last few years weren't so good for me, that I got overwhelmed by life—marriage, a baby, a house—overwhelmed. But somewhere in the middle of the desert in Niger, I met up with my nerve and I took it back. I realized I'd met the origin of my species with the Tuareg. Everything was familiar."

Metaphysically reassured, Winger the fatalist returned to America, sat back, and waited for "life to reveal itself." It did. She got evicted. Her landlord, delighted with the improvements she'd made on her Pacific Palisades house, decided to move back in. Winger took this displacement as a sign from above. By the end of last June, she had unburdened herself of many worldly possessions, put the rest in storage, and gone on the lam.

A week later, back in Tangier for a visit, it hit her. "I gave away 50 percent of my life and the rest is in a warehouse," she wailed incredulously over the phone from London, where she'd landed after spending three days with Paul Bowles in Morocco. "I gave up everything I'd known for the last ten years and got on a plane. I was so determined and had so much energy that it didn't hit me until I got alone in a hotel room in North Africa. How do I feel?" The Laugh resonated across the Atlantic. ''Brilliant. When Flory [her assistant] and Noah get here I might boot Flory back to the States and just take off with my kid on my back."

'I am in love with Paul Bowles. It's as much of a love affair as I've ever had."

Even now, Debra Winger has no idea where she may end up: Europe, the East Coast... almost anywhere except Washington, D.C., despite the obvious draw of Bob Kerrey. Though she says she's ''in love" with the forty-seven-year-old divorced senator, she's got a problem with his life-style.

''If I wanted an aquarium, I would've bought one and lived in it," says Winger, clearly underwhelmed by the prospect of being a political wife. ''That's why I don't have any problems seeing other men," she adds. ''I cannot be clear about the whole political thing— I've never been clear about it. When he was governor, I'd get some distance from him and I'd say, 'I'm never going back. I hate that life. Why don't they leave me alone?' Then I'd see him and turn into mush. It's not a thing you can deal with logically when you love someone."

But is America, even baby-boom America, ready for a First Lady whose cinema portfolio includes her buck naked astride Richard Gere? ''I'm not asking the country to accept her," Kerrey says over the phone from his Washington office. Is Debra a political detriment? ''No, mostly because I think it's never wrong to be in love and respond to it."

Winger and Kerrey have been responding to each other since 1983, when she met Nebraska's governor while filming Terms of Endearment in Lincoln. To some, the relationship between the actress and the attractive, outspoken war hero who lost part of a leg in Vietnam and won a Purple Heart has been, in its own right, existential. Defying traditional political wisdom that says a divorced actress with a taste for sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll might not be the most desirable mate for a possible presidential contender, Kerrey has stayed the course with Winger. On their first go-around, he made advisers sweat when she moved into the governor's mansion. Kerrey addressed the ensuing furor in typical maverick style: he ignored it, stunned his supporters by not seeking re-election in 1986 (some say because of Winger), then came back in 1988 to win a United States Senate seat.

'We wanted to have a child. I think Noah knocked at our door."

In late '85 the Winger-Kerrey relationship ended. "It was a rough breakup, we didn't part friends,'' says Winger, who won't elaborate. Though she married Hutton the following March, she swears there was "no overlap" of the two men in her life. In fact, when she invited her former beau to the party celebrating the marriage, he showed up. "She was getting married and I was very happy for her. I really hoped that marriage would last," says Kerrey. "We've had a relationship since we met seven years ago; it never really ended. It became different, certainly. She became a married woman with whom I had a friendship." (Hutton, incidentally, had no problem with Kerrey being at the celebration. "If I had, it would've been hypocritical because I had someone there as well. It was the first time I'd met him, so I was curious. I thought he was a good guy.")

Winger and Kerrey corresponded throughout her marriage. And when it ended two years after it started, they began seeing each other again while Kerrey was teaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since then, their relationship has gone, she says, "at its own pace, slow and open to lots of things." Kerrey travels between an apartment in Washington and Nebraska, where he has two children, thirteen and fifteen, from a former marriage. He sees Winger "whenever I can, which is not as often as I want. It seems like once every ten years." Though she says she dates other people, Kerrey refuses to divulge such details. "I'm not willing to examine this relationship publicly, for reasons having to do with her and me, not for reasons having to do with the voters. Do I think the relationship has a future? Yes. What kind? I don't know."

As screenwriter Nancy Larson, a friend of Winger's from the Urban Cowboy days, points out, "No man knows Debra better than Bob. She feels safe with him. He loves her, knowing all the hidden comers." Of which there are plenty. Debra Winger's friends paint her as a hip Jewish mother, racing to sickbeds with chicken soup and staying until the patient walks. Her foes say she is neurotic and unprofessional. Nobody, however, says she isn't smart. In a world of make-believe, where truth is often at a premium, she goes to the heart of things. "I'm always accused of being very honest," she says. "Maybe that's confusing." It is certainly arresting. She is, at once, totally judgmental and totally democratic. Though she has the kind of intellectual intensity that can make you feel light-headed, it can also bum you out.

And she knows it. "I'm scared of myself sometimes," says Winger of her profoundly unpredictable behavior, partially attributed by others, over the years, to drug use. "I'm scared of my mood swings. But, on the other hand, the feeling I know I'd have to trade, those highs, I like too much. Every doctor I've ever gone to has wanted to give me some version of lithium, but who wants it? My down is not that down and it doesn't last that long. Noah has been the best drug that way. He makes me happy when I'm sad, and sometimes he makes me sad when I'm happy. I see that it's more movable. It doesn't scare me, because it's not as rock solid or as untouchable by another human as I thought."

Yes, she says, she did do drugs, exacerbating what was already a high-strung personality. "I did everything. I'm not going to deny it. It depended upon where I was.... If I was by the river, I did mushrooms; if I was here or there, maybe coke. But I never went so far off the end that I couldn't do my work. I never went that deep. It was never a daily thing. In the past I got accused of erratic behavior more when I was not doing drugs than when I was. If I locked myself in and wouldn't come out, they'd say, 'It's not her fault—she's doing drugs.' Once you've been accused of it when you're innocent, it's hard to cop to it when you're guilty."

And though she says she's stopped, it wasn't a result of motherhood, as some friends have suggested. "You just gotta get that shit out of your life. I'm not a do-gooder; I don't go around saying 'Don't use drugs,' because I had a lot of fun. But I just don't have room for it anymore. The payment is too great. It ain't worth the pain.

"I wish my mood swings were due to drugs," she adds, "because then all I'd have had to do is stop taking them. But it's not true."

Winger's intensity is legendary in movie circles. Over the years, the actress's "turbulent brilliance," as Shirley MacLaine described it in her Oscar speech, has produced inspired performances and left fuming masses in its wake: lovers, friends, directors. Especially directors. "She has a terrible reputation," allows Bertolucci over the phone from his editing room in London. "So many people said to me, 'You don't know what you're facing with her. ' In general a director can find an actor a great influence. Sometimes it's like playing with a Stradivarius or Steinway. Debra is like a Stradivarius which can play itself. I have never seen any actor capable of such suffering. Never seen somebody so much in pain about her work, so involved, so obsessed. During this movie she stepped into another dimension of her creativity. It is difficult to step back. You get used to a certain temperature, you look for it all the time."

The woman who arrives for our summer-afternoon session comes unescorted, unrecognized, and on foot from an Upper East Side hotel. The angular, taut sexuality of her Urban Cowboy body has given way to the more mature curviness of someone who has carried a child. Still, even without makeup, Winger could pass for a decade younger. Known for being happier undressed than dressed, she is wearing black jeans, high-top Reeboks, and an orange short-sleeved cotton shirt.

Ostensibly, we are together to talk about The Sheltering Sky. But to Winger an interview is no mere conversation; it's a commitment, a baring of the soul, a process in which she thinks up and expounds new theories that, invariably, come back to haunt her. To prepare for this mano a mano, an exercise she abhors and seldom endures, she's had to rest up, train, spend a week in Hawaii. Now forced to face the inevitable without a tan (it rained every day), she greets her ordeal with a glass of wine and a Marlboro Light taken from a pack, she hastens to point out, bought en route to the interview—one of the few occasions when the formerly unapologetic consumer of unfiltered Camels still feels compelled to smoke.

Winger and Malkovich weren't Bertolucci's first choices for Kit and Port Moresby, the American couple who travel through North Africa to save their marriage, only for one to lose life, and the other sanity. Originally, the director wanted Melanie Griffith and William Hurt, but since "both were pregnant" he looked elsewhere. "The most important thing was to have two faces that express a kind of immediate intelligence," Bertolucci explained. "Two very intelligent people. In Debra, I saw a kind of Jewish intelligence, a strong, mysterious fire in her eyes, always those incredible eyes."

But Bertolucci hadn't immediately sought out those eyes when forced to look beyond Griffith, even though he had gotten to know Winger when she and Jack Nicholson did "a seven-country tour of brothels" for Terms of Endearment. Annoyed at being omitted from Bernardo's dance card, Winger confronted Jeremy Thomas, producer of Everybody Wins and The Sheltering Sky. Thomas told Winger that Bertolucci thought she was too strong to play a character "so damaged by life she's scared of her shadow. My usual response is 'Well, I am an actress,' but these days I'm so willing to take rejection, it's scary," laughs Winger. "I don't just accept it, I agree. In fact, I give them new reasons to reject me.

"But I've always done that," she adds. "I tried to talk [director James] Brooks out of using me in Terms after I fought for that role. I'm such a good saleswoman, I want them to know I could fall on my face—'I'm not telling you it's a done deal. I'm telling you I want to try.' I gave Brooks a list of actresses I thought would be better. With Bernardo, I not only gave him names he'd never heard of, I gave him their telephone numbers."

Fortunately, he made no additional calls. ''To meet Bernardo is to love him," gushes Winger. ''Then to work with him is to really love him deeply. Bernardo is alive. He is a living, breathing human being and he lets you in." The fact that he is also a star, often more the main attraction of his own movies than his actors, "takes the pressure off so you can really do double-time work. Plus, I didn't find it to be totally true, because when the cameras are on, he's your biggest supporter. You can just feel him saying, 'Just go and do it, baby. I'm right there helping you.' I felt very supported—and pushed—by him. Always pushed. What a great director does is put you in touch. I wish I could say what a great actress does for a great director, because then I might start to feel like one," she says as we wind up.

Later that night I return home to find two tortured messages from Winger on my answering machine. She has seen the New York Times Sunday magazine's on-the-set article about the making of The Sheltering Sky. Though I'd told her about it, indicated that Bertolucci took credit for almost everything, including her romance with Paul Bowles, at the time Winger had merely rolled her eyes and laughed: "He's such an egotist. He has to be the daddy to all things, to grace your affairs. Everybody who's fucking on the set, every grip, every gaffer who's having a fling with a script supervisor, he's responsible for it. He's the choreographer of that world."

But by midnight Bernardo Bertolucci is no longer Bob Fosse. "I'm completely livid," she snorts. "I'm crazed."

The second message clocks in at one A.M. When I return her calls, she says she has already tracked down Jeremy Thomas and is on the hunt for Bernardo.

It is a calmer, if still-incensed, Winger I meet the next evening at the Lowell Hotel. Clearly, Thomas and Bertolucci have spent the last twenty-four hours placating their star.

Has she changed her mind about Bernardo? "I'd just add that his ego goes further than I can imagine," she says, looking exhausted. "Everyone jokingly and lovingly says he's a megalomaniac, but, my God"—she laughs—"it stretches over oceans... dunes..."

I change the subject to John Malkovich. She smiles. They didn't hang out but got along fine. "You can have dinner with John if you want to talk about John.

Which is another thing he said," she says, abruptly returning to the New York Times piece. Bertolucci had commented that the emotional stakes in Tangier were raised because both Winger and Malkovich were recovering from love affairs—she with Hutton, he with Michelle Pfeiffer. "Bernardo steamed up this whole thing. I was riding high, feeling great, and John fell in love with a second A.D.—she was pregnant with his child."

Winger wanted no journalists on the set. "I thought I handled it great, because John and Bernardo were such whores for the press. Excuse me, but they were. They had these fashion wars. John, you know, really wants to be a runway model. And then there was Bernardo with his hat..."

They dressed? In the desert?

"Every day. The fashion wars."

She guffaws. "I adore Bernardo, but he's a bad boy. He needs to be slapped. So I slap him and then go to work with him."

Paul Bowles's masterpiece of an existential novel has been trying to make it to the screen since it was published forty-one years ago. But it wasn't until Bertolucci set his powerful and selective sights on it that The Sheltering Sky became a $20 million celluloid reality with a six-month shooting schedule, beginning in Tangier, where Bowles has lived since 1947, and ending in the Sahara Desert. Bertolucci visualized the brooding, interior saga as "a simple love story about two very complicated people," a couple he believes are based on Bowles and his wife, Jane, who died in 1973. "Paul completely denies that Kit is based on his wife, but I couldn't help thinking it was Jane all along," says Bertolucci. "When I met Debra, I had the feeling of her being very close to the possibility of Jane Bowles."

As, apparently, did Bowles when Winger arrived in Tangier steeped in research and sporting the cropped hair that made her a dead ringer for the dramatic, bisexual Jane. "I was fascinated how Debra kept filling herself up with everything she could find about Jane Bowles, until the moment she became Jane," marvels Bertolucci, "until Paul Bowles, finally, started to fancy her."

"It was a conscious effort on my part to look like Jane, and two people who knew her told me there was a resemblance, which was luck," Winger says. "Still, it must have been weird for Paul, because he said his life, basically, stopped when she died. He hasn't written a book since, because there's nobody to read it."

Their mutual impact was evident from the first night they met, when Bertolucci brought Bowles to a dinner at Winger's Tangier digs. "I thought I'd be able to stand back and have an impression, but instead I fell in love—on sight," she says. "We spent every nonworking moment together. He always came up for lunch, dinner.. .on the set we were always sitting with each other. We had scenes together—he was in the film. Meeting him was sparks."

One wonders just how hot those sparks got, given Winger's reputation with men and Bowles's age and renowned homosexuality. Was this a consummated love affair? She laughs. "Well, he is seventynine, but if he were younger and I were ...older, we'd be acting on this." She pauses, smiling. "I think I draw the line at sixty-eight."

If so, it's one of the few lines Debra Winger has drawn in her life. As her pal Jack Nicholson puts it, "She walks it like she talks it." At twenty-five, she electrified audiences opposite John Travolta in Urban Cowboy and, from that impressive debut, seemed to move effortlessly from success to success, grabbing Oscar nominations for An Officer and a Gentleman and Terms of Endearment.

Privately, the passage wasn't as smooth. Following Urban Cowboy she holed up in the Chateau Marmont, with her dog, Pete, and bottles of Jack Daniel's, experiencing the first throes of the love/hate game she plays with celebrity. Though she actively seeks to work in a business where fame is the desired end product, she says it could be the thing that ultimately drives her away.

In short order, Winger became known for her fast-living, chain-smoking, hard-drinking life-style. She played the game by men's rules and made no bones about it. Women, she felt, were too consumed by the charade of getting and keeping a man, hardly a concern for the woman who simply took the men she wanted.

"Debra used her body like you use your mouth," says one female observer. Though men gravitated toward her urgent, raw-nerved sexuality, women backed off, sensing she had neither boundaries nor rules. She, in turn, found most women "untrustworthy." Though she claims to have more female friends today, she allows that "I don't love women the way I love men. I love men pretty much. They're interesting. I'm more tolerant of them. I can say, 'Oh, he's an asshole, but I love him.' But if she's an asshole, she's an asshole."

Winger claims her appeal is unorchestrated, and indeed, depending on the light, the moment, the mood, she can look remarkably pretty or surprisingly plain. If she's sexy, she claims, it's by accident. "I have never used that word to define myself. There was a period of time when, I have to admit, I heard that a lot. But when I hear it now, it takes me aback and I go, Oh, they're talking about the old me. They're talking about me when I was young. But now it's been three years of motherhood..."

Constant, twenty-four-hour-a-day, no-day-care—albeit part-time-nanny—single motherhood. With the same intensity Winger brings to roles, she has now turned to Emmanuel Noah Hutton, her son by Tim Hutton, from whom she was divorced last June. The Winger-Hutton union lasted two years, about eighteen months longer than most people thought it would. That the aggressive thirty-year-old Jewish Winger suddenly married the passive twenty-five-year-old Gentile Hutton stunned everyone—including the bride, who'd always been with men at least ten years her senior. Yet he remembers that from the moment they met at a small L. A. party there was an attraction. ''We ended up talking to each other and it was as if no one else were there." A year later they ran into each other again and then once more at a Farm Aid concert. ''Something was there," Hutton claims, "but we both had the ability to turn the magnets away from each other." Finally, four years ago on New Year's Eve, Hutton saw Winger, newly split from Bob Kerrey, grieving over the death of a beloved grandfather and "at sea." This time the magnets connected. The next day Hutton called Winger.

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"I'd never met anyone like her," he recalls over the phone from his Greenwich Village loft, "and don't imagine I ever will again. She's an original. I loved spending time together in a way I hadn't experienced before."

Not quite eleven weeks later they were married. Desperate to have children, Winger got pregnant on her wedding night. Though she miscarried, she immediately got pregnant again. "For two people who were a couple of drifters, having a baby was a specific idea we had right away," says Hutton.

Five months into the marriage, when I first met Winger, she was the proverbial starry-eyed bride, confiding during our interview that, "candidly, the sexiest thing in the world is to be totally naked with your wedding band on." Today she says, somewhat defensively, she is proud of those emotions. "I go into everything like that. Give it your best shot. Believe in it fully. I saw everything the way I thought that it could be. I still think it could've been that way. The effort wasn't made. I have to accept responsibility. But, you know, it's only so long you can dance with someone, step on each other's toes, and not say, 'Look, this is not working.' We wanted to have a child. That was a big pull for us getting married. We felt pushed by some unidentifiable force. I think Noah knocked at our door."

When Noah knocked, much of the grand passion, that exquisite sensuality of nakedness and wedding rings, walked out: "The passion comes and goes, and with a child, it goes. You can feel the same romantic things, but you don't have time. Maybe we weren't mature enough to ride it out."

"It was not well balanced," confides one close friend. "She was too strong and he wasn't strong enough and neither of them liked that. She wanted someone stronger; he wanted someone not quite so strong."

"There's something about Tim that is very deep and very sensitive, and Debra responded to his essence," surmises Nancy Larson. "But the periphery of his being was not as formed or ready for what marriage called for. The externals weren't quite right."

"Marriage is like this thirty-five-foot wave behind you," says Winger as she reaches for a cigarette. "You're swimming like hell and you're either having the greatest time of your life or you're going to be smacked to the rocks. Maybe you'll live, maybe you won't. The wave, I think, is luck. But then, when you have a child, there is another wave and that one is ongoing. Your marriage doesn't end with divorce—you're in it for the rest of your life, tied to that person. Tim and I are very conscious of that, and that's great for our kid. Maybe," she adds after a moment's reflection, "maybe the reason we came together was simply to produce Noah."

When Winger was pregnant, she indulged, packing on sixty-three pounds, living, as is possible only in Hollywood, by the Goldie Rule: "I always heard that Goldie Hawn gained sixty-five pounds, so as long as I kept it under sixty-five I was O.K."

Winger's first notion was natural childbirth, home delivery, birthing rooms. At ten months pregnant and counting, she knew they'd have to induce. That didn't work either. Ultimately, nearly a day after she'd entered the hospital, Winger had a cesarean. "I usually want people who are going to be inside my body to be invited, but I didn't have time to get invitations out," she says dryly. " And I was awake during the whole thing—I felt their hands, moving the organs, because they didn't give me enough anesthetic. I kept telling the anesthesiologist, 'I'm a horse—treat me like a grown man,' but he said no. I felt everything."

She also heard The Voice. In twenty-four hours, she went from witch to ethereal being. She became, she says, "Everywoman," no small claim for someone who had found her own sex untrustworthy a mere four years earlier. "Sybil had nothing on me during birthing. In retrospect, I had an emotional and mental experience that was synonymous with the birthing of a child. I've never said this before," she adds, accelerating as the theory formulates in her mind, "but that voice, possibly, was the mother that was born with Noah." She stops, torching up another cigarette.

And Hutton? "Oh, Tim was standing right next to me. He was amazingly strong. And this is a guy who can't even have a blood test. I shouldn't say that," she laughs. "He's been tested, all those women who are in love with him out there, he's been tested...but he came through. He was there, waiting for the kid to come out. And Noah breast-fed immediately. While they were sewing me up he was sucking. That's a Mom Machine, right?" (Though she had planned to breast-feed for two years, eleven months later "Noah just sort of pushed my breast away and looked around the room. I thought, Hey, honey, I've walked for a lot less rejection than that—you're out of here. But I felt terrible.") "Now, of course, one day Noah is going to say, 'Fuck you, I'm out of here, I have a better life.' I'm not too worried about it. I am totally in love with my child. We take lots of drugs to get to the place where he is."

The next evening, at her suite in the Lowell Hotel, Winger again brings up the subject of marriage. We are alone. Noah has gone to stay with his father, who has the night off from Prelude to a Kiss, the Broadway play in which he replaced Alec Baldwin. In the living room, a huge arrangement of flowers from Hutton sits on the desk. Winger mentions that when she dropped Noah off at his father's loft his latest girlfriend, Mary-Louise Parker, who co-stars in Prelude, was there.

Winger says she doesn't know anything about marriage except she's not deeply attracted that often. "I remember reading something about the difference between commercial and holy art. When you commercialize something, you want to own it, have it in your house, look at it. Maybe put it in a museum. Holy art, at the same time it compels you, it repels you because it's so strong. If it's truly holy art, you couldn't have it in your house. Marriage still holds that strong a thing for me. It pulls, but it also repels, and maybe I wasn't aware of the second part—how holy it is."

She pauses, rakes her fingers through her hair, a look of doubt clouding her blue eyes. "I'm still in the process of figuring everything out and maybe never will," she finally says, adding almost defiantly, "but I have no regrets, none, I swear to you. You'd be able to see it. The times I've come close to thinking, This may be the first regret of my life, it always goes away. I still regret nothing."

Later, as she prepares to meet a friend for a late drink, Winger changes from her black pedal pushers and white oversize man's shirt into a long black leotard and chiffon overskirt, popping a saucy, black-banded boater on her head. As we walk toward the door, she points to a Patricia Underwood blue straw cloche lying on a table. "How about a husband who buys his ex-wife a blue hat?" she laughs. When I mention that the hat is similar to one Parker was wearing in a recent newspaper photo, Winger grimaces. "I guess I won't be wearing that hat."

Two nights later, when I return to the Lowell, the door to Winger's suite is opened by a miniature version of Tim Hutton. Though just three, Noah Hutton is as tall as most six-year-olds (his paternal great-grandmother was six feet four), with a thick mop of blond-brown curls and his mother's penetrating blue eyes. Brimming with self-confidence, he leads me into the living room, now strewn with toys and books, where Winger's assistant, Flory Lovings, sits with Debra. Noah calls his mother "Mombo." "I don't know where he got it," she says, shrugging. "It just came out one day. He's like Jack [Nicholson] that way—he nicknames everybody." Noah proceeds to reel off the alphabet without a hitch, recite a healthy sampling of his nursery-rhyme repertoire, and transport himself to Oz within an intricately designed lion's suit complete with an elaborate head and mane, handmade by Hutton's mother, a designer of miniature books.

When I mention that the importance of her own biological urges seems to have been superseded by her son's, Winger takes me literally. "I am so hooked into the basics of life. Anything you have about bodily functions goes right out the window when you have a kid. 'Yeah, O.K., he's shitting. We're happy he's pissing.' The body becomes electric. You've got so much love for the functioning of it and that opens a whole bunch of doors. You're not afraid of feeling—even something that hurts."

"Noah became a position to view the world in terms other than herself," says screenwriter Larson. "She's brilliant with him. With a child, resistance always comes up, but instead of telling him no, she invents routes and directs him to something more interesting." To wit: one day, Noah blows his nose into a Kleenex and starts to replace the tissue in the box. Patiently, his mother reminds him why this is not a good idea: "Honey, when you blow your nose in a Kleenex, you don't put it back in the box. I know it seems unecological, but remember how we talked about fulfilling a Kleenex's destiny by blowing your nose in it? Afterwards you have to send it on to a new life and you have to put it in the trash." Noah happily trots off with the soiled Kleenex in hand.

At age two, when Noah was playing in the world's largest sandbox, the Sahara Desert, Bertolucci noticed the unusual relationship between his star and her son. "She lets him be a visionary, which is all you can be at two," he comments. "Often he accompanied her to the screening of the dailies. He never cried, he always just sat there watching. Then, at the end of the rushes, he would stand up, look around at us with a complimentary expression, and applaud." The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles, and the desert have had their own effect on Noah. One morning last summer when Winger was fixing breakfast, she called out from the kitchen:

"Noah, how do you want your eggs?"

"Eggs. . .istential," came the reply.

Hutton, Kerrey, and even Jack Nicholson claim they are not surprised at Winger's natural proclivity for mothering. When I suggest that Nicholson and Winger would have an interesting child, she agrees. "Don't think it wasn't discussed. Still a possibility. This is the pisser about men, right? Yves Montand, first kid at sixty-seven. Give me a break."

"Did I think she'd make such a good mother?" asks her agent rhetorically. "The casual answer is no, although, in retrospect, it shouldn't be surprising, because she approaches everything with intensity. But, at the time, who would've thought it?"

Certainly not Shirley MacLaine. "As you know, Shirley and Debra had their set-tos during Terms of Endearment," relates Larry Mark, a longtime Winger friend and Disney producer. "Well, one day Shirley calls me. She'd run into Debra and Noah on a plane and said, 'I totally fell in love with Debra when I saw her with that child.' "

If anything, motherhood seems to have focused Winger, defused her self-absorption, reined in the wildness.

"A Lot of it now is caged wildness," she says with both wistfulness and resignation. "I'm not so into damaging myself anymore, because the fear of who would raise my child is too great. Once, I was driving a little fast and my friend in the car said, 'You can drive fast, but your mother will raise Noah.' Aaaaah. Foot to the brake. All love intended to my mother, but I want to raise my child."

Like all daughters of Depression or post-Depression mothers, Winger suffers the guilt of the blessed and liberated. The same women who raised their daughters to seek what they didn't have often keep them from enjoying it once they get it. Ruth Winger, her mother, worked fulltime for an insurance company from the time Debra was five. Now sixty-six, she has had four heart attacks and open-heart surgery; Debra's father has suffered three heart attacks. "Sometimes I think my mother is tortured watching me go freely, because she couldn't," Winger says. "She had her first heart attack in her forties. It was my fault. That's whatI was told."

Ruth Winger had been first violin in her high-school orchestra. When she had that first heart attack, Winger returned east, to her grandmother's house. She felt she was on a mission—to restore to her mother something she had lost, given up for her children. "I wanted to give something back to her. So I went up in the attic, because I remembered seeing the violin case up there. I found it, opened it, and it was...dust. It had completely disintegrated. I was going to deliver this violin to her. I felt my heart breaking, because I thought, What can I do? What can I give back to my mother?"

It seems Winger is still trying to answer that question, still worrying that she doesn't do as much as her sister, who lives five minutes from their parents, or her brother, an assistant superintendent of schools in Los Angeles County, who married Winger's best friend from junior high school. She says, "My mother gave me a very unconditional, 'the door is always open' approach to life, which is a real basic Jewish thing. No matter what you do, the door is open."

One senses that Winger works hard to make sure her son's door is open to his father even though Hutton doesn't walk through it as often as she would like. He says he sees his son every three weeks to a month and, when Noah's in New York, every day; they've worked out a system where "we'll always feel like a family." He tells of hopping on a Sunday plane, flying to L.A., spending Monday with his child, and getting back for Tuesday's performance. "Noah asked if I'd come out."

Hutton's view of the brief marriage is, typically, less intense than Winger's: he opines that a "so-called successful marriage is not one where you celebrate your fortieth anniversary, but one where both people know when it's run its course and how to deal with that."

Winger says that even if The Sheltering Sky falters at the box office the experience, in itself, is complete. Not quite, according to some of Hollywood's current commercial cognoscenti—those wonderful folks who gave us boy-bonding movies and revived the bimbo/prostitute as heroine for the nineties. Debra Winger needs a hit.

Even though Winger hasn't had a bona fide box-office success since Terms of Endearment, she maintains she's missed little. "Tell me the great movies you've seen that had a woman in them? Did I miss a part?" She read Music Box (which went to Jessica Lange) and turned it down. She met with director Steve Kloves for The Fabulous Baker Boys (which Michelle Pfeiffer made memorable) and later found the movie charming even though he could have done without the "gimmicky casting of the Bridges brothers. That role really put Michelle out there; it never would have done anything for me."

Winger says she likes Pfeiffer and that it's important to say that. "I think she's troubled being so beautiful, but we should all have such problems. She's growing, that's what I like about Michelle. She always seems to be working on herself. I saw her on a flight from New York to L.A. and she had one of those dictionary machines. I'm touched by her. I can tell she wants to be better and better. How can you take away from that?"

Mention another prominent movie blonde and she averts her glance. "I don't know her work," she says, at first hedging on the subject of Kathleen Turner. "I'm not drawn to it. I know she works her butt off, but it's a different approach. It's very hard when people don't give you a chance to like them because they like themselves so much. There's no room. The quota for the people who like Kathleen Turner is filled. By her account. She doesn't need me. I want people to need me a little bit."

Although Winger's smoldering creative temperature has made several directors question whether they need her, she seems to have calmed down in the last few movies and years. She says it makes her feel mature to be able to say that Taylor Hackford (1982's An Officer and a Gentleman) and Ivan Reitman (1986's Legal Eagles), whom she once categorized as "animals," still remain the two worst directors with whom she's worked.

Reitman, who has rarely talked publicly about his Legal Eagles days with Winger, recalls that the two got along "great" at first. "She wrote me a love note about how well things were going. She's highly sensitive. She misses nothing. She's very emotional. She'd broken up with Kerrey. Then she met Tim Hutton and just wanted to get married. I had a movie to finish. I wanted her on the set and working, but she kept saying things like 'I can't work past this day—I've got to get married.' "

Then there was Robert Redford, who had been persuaded by Reitman to cast Winger. Redford didn't like her. During filming, he took "twice as much time coming out of his trailer because he didn't want to come on the set," Reitman recalls. "Debra always made cracks about his masculinity—calling him 'pretty boy'—because she felt less attractive. My job was to try and make it look like they really liked each other."

In public, Reitman says, "she was careful not to slam Redford—she knew he's too much of an icon—even though her biggest problems were with him.

"She's tarnished goods," he says when asked to evaluate her in the current pecking order of female stars. "People feel she's talented. I do, too, and the critics especially like her. But her choices of films haven't been the best, and her personal eccentricities hurt her."

For her part, Winger points out that she adored Costa-Gavras, who directed Betrayed, "even though he went for high dramatics when he didn't need to. But I loved working with him. He's got that childlike enthusiasm and a tart, dark side." She also liked director Karel Reisz, although he was one of "the wrong reasons, along with Arthur Miller and playing a multiple-personality disorder," that drew her to this year's ill-fated Every- body Wins (to which nobody went). "But if I saw Karel now, I wouldn't put a contract out on him. It was like Guyana— there was a big batch of Kool-Aid and we all drank from it.

"I want to be directed," declares Winger. "I'm the one you can call at 3:30 in the morning. Not only will you not wake me, but I'm up working on the same thing you're going to ask me about. When you work, you're burning. You're ignited. Sometimes it's torture and, sometimes, ecstasy. It's one or the other and not a lot in between. I still think I'm a director's dream. Or nightmare. But at least I hold the possibility to be the dream.

"By the way, I push for what I think can be the best, and if I feel they're not going for the best, it kills me," she adds. "I read this line by Boris Pasternak which says, 'Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.' That moment is so powerful, I'm not going to miss it to make friends. I get enough Christmas cards." (Kerrey has his own version of Pasternak. "Politics," he wryly wrote to Winger, "is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through the politician.")

Movies are "life and death—every single one of them," and she treats them accordingly, immersing herself in research, keeping a journal, and writing letters to the director as the character (missives she insists be burned). If, instinctively, something doesn't feel right, she refuses to do the scene. During An Officer and a Gentleman her angst caused her to go AWOL from the cast and crew and move into the local Y. On the set of Terms of Endearment her feud with Shirley MacLaine became the stuff of legend, some of which she has furthered herself. One afternoon she shows me a picture taken on the set. Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine are sitting up in bed together, gaping at the camera. Nicholson is laughing and MacLaine looks stunned; the picture was taken seconds after she discovered a woman in her bed. Unbeknownst to director Jim Brooks and MacLaine, who was shooting her big love scene with Nicholson, Winger had hidden under the covers at the foot of the bed. When they yelled "Action," Debra began running her hand up MacLaine's leg and kissing her. "To her credit," laughs Winger, "Shirley never broke scene. She wasn't mad. When they cut, she just said, 'Stop that, or I might start liking it.' And went right back to work."

"Everyone thinks that the last two times out Debra just hit a rough patch," says Larry Mark. ' 'They all expect her to be in a hit any minute now. I mean, if Richard Gere can pull it out of the bag..."

Richard Gere is the last person to whom Debra Winger wants to be compared. She hasn't bothered to see Pretty Woman. Gere and Winger did not hit it off during the filming of An Officer and a Gentleman. She says he was ''a brick wall." Her antipathy toward Gere, according to rumor, was more personal than professional. He reportedly spurned Winger, who, during her halcyon pre-motherhood years, garnered a reputation for trying to bed down almost every man with whom she worked.

"I guess I've heard that about myself and I sort of like it," she concedes with a rueful grin. "Is that sick of me, that I like that reputation. . .so long as I don't have to live up to it?"

She pauses and starts to giggle. "Being thought of as wild is something I cultivate. But, obviously, if I had done everything I read I did, I wouldn't be alive."

In fact, Winger's strength in Hollywood is rooted in her willingness to say no. Her choices are seldom mainstream or career-strategic. In 1986, when the powerful Creative Artists Agency put its clients Winger, Robert Redford, and Ivan Reitman in Legal Eagles, Winger loudly and publicly accused CAA of packaging. ("How do you package Debra Winger?" asks Reitman. "You can hardly tell her to come out of the trailer.")

She has since returned to the Mike Ovitz fold. "It sounds like anthropomorphizing—how can you actually attribute human qualities to an agent?—but I missed Rick," she says with some embarrassment of Rick Nicita, her CAA agent. "I offered to put up 51 percent to start him in his own agency, even offered clients along with myself, but he refused. I don't even care if they ever get me a job, it's somebody I can pay to talk about my career with me."

Ten percent of $3 million, Winger's asking rate per picture, is pricey guidance counseling, to say the least. Her boutique deal means she doesn't have to talk with other agents or even, for that matter, with the agency. "I've never been to the I. M. Pei building, nor will I ever grace it. My scripts come in a plain brown wrapper so I don't have to see the CAA logo. What brought me down was that corporate mentality. But they continue to thrive, so they must be doing something right. They haven't killed anyone, although I think they've been implicated distantly in a couple of deaths. I know I'm stupid. I'm like a person who buys the best people but doesn't use them. Somewhere I believe that Rick's commission goes directly to him, but I lie to myself."

Still, Winger claims to have no complaints that male stars make at least twice as much as their female equivalents. "I'm shocked that I get this price. I heard Sigourney Weaver complaining that women don't make as much as men, that she wants to organize a press conference so actresses can come out—I'm sure Kathleen Turner will show up—to stand up to make more money. What will people think? We already make millions of dollars. 'I only make three million and Arnold Schwarzenegger makes nine. Gimme, gimme, gimme.' Meryl is angry about this, too, but she doesn't carry a film. She does not 'open.' If you want to have the pressure of someone like Schwarzenegger and you have to open a film at $20 million, you should make it. I don't want that pressure. I'd much rather have the choice than the pressure.

"Besides, I'm still saying, 'I'd pay to do this role.' In reality I wouldn't, but I stood in the middle of the Sahara Desert saying, 'Wow, look at me.' When I came back I ran into Theresa Russell at a party. She came running up, grabbed me, and said, 'Oh, I'm so fucking jealous of you. We're all so fucking jealous of you.' She and Nick [Roeg] always wanted to do this film. And I said, 'You know what? When you said that, I realized I was jealous of myself.' "

Fortunate, indeed, since her last two films bombed. "Last two? Last four," she corrects. "But this is always what I ask my agent. I say, 'Give me some perspective, because I'll never know.' It's like your kid is ugly but no one is ever going to tell you and you'll never see it. If your career is flopping, nobody is going to tell you."

"I'm realistic. I know I can't say, 'I'm leaving—I'm going to the Sahara Desert with my child!' The reality is to bring the desert with you." We were sitting in Winger's Pacific Palisades home, looking at pictures taken on the set of The Sheltering Sky. The house is a low-slung, single-level, glass-and-wood affair with floating sitting areas, and, on this June afternoon, gigantic cardboard packing boxes filled with Debra's and Noah's earthly belongings—or, rather, what was left of them. She had given away most of her clothes and "all of her tchotchkes." Once everything was in storage, Noah and she, two suitcases in hand, were hitting the road.

As Winger wandered around, already a displaced person in the house "Noah and I moved to when we left Tim," I thought of Pete. Pete, she likes to say, was the most successful relationship Debra Winger ever had. He died in this house last February just after she returned from the Sheltering Sky shoot. It was Pete who taught Winger about being a mother.

Pete was Winger's German shepherd. They lived together for fifteen years. He taught her more about life, she says, than any human being has. She immortalized him in an Annie Leibovitz photograph in Life magazine, a two-page spread where she and Pete were French-kissing. She loves that shot. Others see it as another example of Debra pushing the shock envelope.

"When Petey would greet me at the door, in my most aware moments, it was as if I was walking out of my house and he was walking toward me from my future. He brought me to the moment. If you leave for five minutes or two months, they greet you the same because that's reality. Petey was always meeting me at the precipice of reality. He was my mate."

When Winger was in Africa, Pete had a stroke. The veterinarian said she'd never see him again, but he made a miraculous recovery. His owner called home, waiting nine hours to get a phone line out so she could talk to her dog: "Wait for me, I'm coming." She felt he'd come around.

"He met me at the door wagging his tail, and, two days later, he had another stroke. I knew he'd waited for me. And then I couldn't let go of him—I was the one. He became paralyzed. He wasn't in pain, but he couldn't lift his back legs, then his front, then his neck. I had to catheterize him four times a day. Finally, I said, 'What am I doing?'

"So I called somebody and held his head in my lap. I've never seen the light go out of a being before. Of course, he died with his eyes open; he tortured me to the end. I had dear friends who put him in the back of a station wagon and drove him to a personal crematorium where you know the ashes you get are your own dog.

"When I got the ashes in the box, they were still hot. I thought none of this was going to mean anything, but I still carried this sense of responsibility and deep respect for what this was. So I got on the plane with Noah and flew to New Mexico, where Pete was bom, to my cabin, and we went right into the forest. I looked for the perfect point, but I got sick of that and said, 'What am I searching for?' So we went to the river where he used to play, and opened the box.

"I didn't know how much of this I should expose Noah to, but we opened the box and he said, 'What's that?' And I said, 'That's Petey's magic dust.' That's the thing about kids—things come out of your mouth, you hear them for the first time, and you say, 'That's O.K. I like that one.' So we took these handfuls of magic dust and we stood up on this big boulder until all the ashes were dissipated. They moved like ghosts through the trees. When I did it, I had no way of knowing how rewarding it would be and how full my cycle was. So even in death Pete taught me more.

"When we got to New York this trip, it was sunset. I said to Noah, 'Let's go for a walk.' When we got to the park, Noah dropped to all fours and said, 'Petey's here.' And I said, 'Oh, you're Petey? Where's Noah?' I don't know what a psychologist would say about this, but my immediate reaction was 'O.K., be Petey, as long as Noah is here, too.' So he walked down Madison Avenue on all fours in his new pants. When we got to a restaurant, he walked in on all fours and I'd put a ribbon around his neck because I thought, What if he darts out after a tennis ball?

"Anyway, in this restaurant they were all looking at me with polite smiles and I'm saying, 'This is my dog, Petey.' And he's going, 'Woof.' And I walked around with my kid on a leash.

"When you have a kid, they bring you with them. They take you. If you're willing, they take you.

"He was a dog for two hours. He was Petey. I said, 'Petey, where did you come from?' and he said, 'I was by the waterfall and I was in the mountains. I came to see you because I heard you were in the park.' What more can I ask for? If I was looking for a sign from beyond, I'd take that instead of a trance channeler any day."