Playing House

Drew Barrymore (far right) represents the fourth generation of the storied acting
dynasty which included (left to right) Maurice Barrymore (the stage name for
Herbert Blythe), John Barrymore ("The Great Profile"), and John Drew Barrymore.

When she first decided to make a movie with Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore told Howard Stern in an interview, “I want to be a modern, weird Hepburn-Tracy Hollywood couple.”

Adam Sandler, the son of a Brooklyn nursery school teacher and a Jewish
electrical engineer, first stepped into the primetime spotlight as Smitty,
Theo Huxtable's buddy, on "The Cosby Show" in the late 1980s.

In the grand tradition of the motion picture industry, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn were among the most popular romantic duos on the screen, appearing together in nine films, from 1942 to 1967’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (which was released six months after Tracy’s death at age 67). Tracy and Hepburn’s romantic relationship off-screen was one of Hollywood’s longest-kept “open” secrets.

Tracy, who was married to Louise Treadwell, a repertory theater actress, was convinced that his affairs with a number of other actresses (before he met Hepburn) was directly responsible for the fact that his first child, a son named John, was born deaf and dumb. A deep-seeded Catholic guilt gnawed at the actor for the rest of his life and prevented him from divorcing his wife, although it didn’t dissuade him from a separation to play house with Katharine Hepburn.

Drew Barrymore admitted she was muddling through a slump in her career when she first phoned Adam Sandler and asked to meet him. Recalling their initial meeting, she said, “We looked like the worst blind date you’ve ever seen. I showed up with purple hair and a leopard coat and he was in his classic cargo pants.” Barrymore told Sandler, “I really believe that you and I could get together and do something meaningful.”

That “something eventful” evolved into 1998’s “The Wedding Singer,” an alternately crass and surprisingly sweet (particularly so in the wake of Sandler’s previous frat-boy romps “Billy Madison” and “Happy Gilmore”) rehash of the old boy-meets-girl plot. Adam Sandler portrays an ‘80s lounge singer who once hoped to be a rock star, Drew Barrymore is a waitress he meets at a wedding reception, both stuck in unsavory relationships with opposites unworthy of their affections. “The Wedding Singer” was directed by Frank Coraci and scripted by Tim Herlihy ( a longtime friend and associate of Sandler’s who inspired Sandler’s recurring “Saturday Night Live” sketch “”The Herlihy Boy”), with Sandler, Judd Apatow, and Carrie Fisher (who has enjoyed a long side-career as an accomplished script doctor) contributing to the screenplay.

Mr. O'Malley(  (Chris Farley) pleads a case for 
the Herlihy Boy (Adam Sandler) on "SNL."

Roger Ebert loathed “The Wedding Singer” as “one of the sad by-products of the dumbing-down of America,” calling it a film that forces us “to witness the goofy plots of the 1930s played sincerely, as if they were really deep.” He sniped, “The plot is so familiar the end credits should have issued a blanket thank-you to a century of Hollywood love-coms.”

On the other hand, A.V. Club reviewer Joshua Klein observed, “Sandler is endearing as a sensitive nice guy, and Barrymore is a cute love interest.” Janet Maslin, of The New York Times, noted, “Oozing niceness, Adam Sandler plays it semi-serious in ‘The Wedding Singer,’ a comedy with a dual personality. Half the film is an ingenuous love story, but the better half consists of pop culture time-warp jokes set in 1985."

A.V Club noted, "'The Wedding Singer' fails to deliver the anticipated laughs.
Only great cameos...stop it from sinking into mushy sentiment." These cameos
include Steve Buscemi (pictured above), Billy Idol, Kevin Nealon, Jon Lovitz,
Brian Posehn, Robert Smigel, and Chauntal Lewis.

Drew Barrymore openly credits Adam Sandler for her subsequent success. She had formed her own production company, Flower Films, in 1995, and executive-produced her first film, “Never Been Kissed,” a year following “The Wedding Singer.” She was a producer on a number of movies, including “Charlie’s Angels,” “Fever Pitch,” and “Whip It.”

The two reunited onscreen in 2004’s “50 First Dates” (pictured above), a romantic comedy set in Oahu casting Adam Sandler as a womanizing veterinarian at a marine animal park and Drew Barrymore as the victim of a serious car wreck who wakes up every morning remembering only everything up to the moment of the accident.  Despite similarities to short-term memory loss and anterograde amnesia, Barrymore’s memory impairment is fictitiously referred to as Goldfield’s Syndrome. Directed by Peter Segal, who had made “Tommy Boy” and worked with Sandler on “Anger Management” and “The Longest Yard,” the movie was originally called “50 First Kisses” but was changed to avoid confusion with Barrymore’s film “Never Been Kissed,” which was released the previous year.

“The movie is sort of an experiment for Sandler,” Roger Ebert remarked. “He reveals the warm side of his personality, and leaves behind the hostility, anger and gross-out humor…This is a kinder, gentler Adam Sandler.” Ebert noted that “as entertainment, it’s ingratiating and lovable. And it suggests that Sandler, whose movies are so often based on hostility, has another speed, another tone, that plays very nicely.”

Ebert called “50 First Dates” “a lighthearted romantic comedy” that provides Adam Sandler and Barrymore with a sweet story.” Sandler and Barrymore, who had earlier won an MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss in “The Wedding Singer,” won the MTV Movie Award for Best On-Screen Duo in 2004 (pictured below). “They work well together,” Ebert noted, “they have the same tone of smiling, coy sincerity.”

A decade after “50 First Dates,” Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore were teamed for the third time in “Blended.” The threadbare premise of the film finds Sandler as a widowed father of three girls who finagles a resort vacation rendezvous with divorcee Barrymore and her two sons. You see, Sandler took Barrymore on a disastrous blind date to Hooters, and – aw, skip it. You know the formula: Boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-etc.-etc.

Jim Friedman (Adam Sandler) arrives in South Africa for a "blended familymoon"
with daughters Espn (Emma Fuhrmann), Lou (Alyvia Alyn Lind) and "Larry"
(Bella Thorne). In one of the films slyest gags, Sandler, whose character works
in a sporting goods store, admits his middle daughter was named after the ESPN
network. Dan Patrick, a former ESPN sportscaster and longtime friend of Sandler's
who appears briefly as Sndler's boss in "Blended," has had cameo roles in a dozen
Sandler pictures. David Letterman once derided Patrick as a "stooge" for Sandler.

The movie was filmed on-location at the animal park, hotel, pool terrace, and restaurant at Lost City, a resort in South Africa that caters to “familymoons.” In fact, the romantic comedy was originally called “Familymoobn,” but the filmmakers, for whatever reason, changed it to “Blended,” which has to be one of the blandest movie titles ever pureed by Hollywood mixmasters.

Lauren Reynolds (Drew Barrymore) regards the first night of her "familymoon"
with apprehension, despite the obvious enthusiasm shared by sons Brendan
(Braxton Beckham) and Tyler (Kyle Red Silverstein).

Although he found “Blended” “grotesquely offensive,” The New Yorker’s Richard Brody admitted, “The romance is sweet and even effervescent, the comedy is homespun and sentimental, but it’s packed with such a repellent batch of stereotypes and prejudices that it’s unpalatable even to contemplate.”

The irrepressibly buoyant Terry Crews and his harmony backup singers,
dubbed Thathoo, can always be counted on for flash-mobbing a plot turn in
"Blended" as a tireless, hilarious Greek chorus. 

Likewise, The New York Times critic A.O. Scott griped about the script’s “retrograde gender politics; its delight in the humiliation of children; its sentimental hypocrisy about male behavior; its quasi-zoological depiction of Africans as servile, dancing, drum-playing simpletons.” Scott warned, “Parents strongly cautioned. It will make your children stupid.”

Graham Young, of the Birmingham Mail, countered, “It’s warm, funny, tender, serious…and decidedly old-fashioned. There’s no swearing, no pandering to repeated toilet gags, and the ‘gross-out’ market is all but ignored. Instead, there’s lots of genuinely funny slapstick, singing asides and some great kids’ performances.”

The New Yorker's Richard Brody called Adam Sandler "a Jewish Everyman
with the tone and lone of a live-action Fred Flintstone."

At the Golden Raspberry Awards, Adam Sandler was nominated for a Razzie for Worst Actor for his performance in “Blended.” Likewise, Drew Barrymore was nominated as Worst Actress, while Shaquille O’Neal was nominated for Worst Supporting Actor as Sandler’s belly-dancing coworker at a sporting goods store. Undeterred, Adam Sandler again hooked up with director Frank Coraci (who also directed Sandler in “The Wedding Singer,” “The Waterboy,” and “Click”) for “The Ridiculous Six.”

At this point, the obvious chemistry and comfortable interplay between Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore caused a lot of people to wonder if they were genuinely a couple off-camera. Speculation about successful screen couples has regularly occurred in movie theaters for decades.

Created in the 1934 novel The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon, Nick and Nora Charles were a fictional couple who solved murder mysteries while exchanging snappy repartee and drinking a lot of cocktails. From 1934 to 1947, William Powell and Myrna Loy portrayed Nick and Nora in the six movies of the successful “Thin Man” franchise. Powell and Loy (pictured above) were so strongly identified with the characters that audiences mistakenly assumed they were a couple in real life.

Olivia de Havilland portrays Libby Custer, devoted wife of George Armstrong
Custer (Errol Flynn), in "They Died with Their Boots On" (1941).

Errol  Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, who made eight films together, notably “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” became the most successful motion picture romantic duo in Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Flynn, who was married to French-born actress Lili Damita, acknowledged his attraction to de Havilland. In a 2009 interview, Olivia de Havilland (who will turn 100 July 1), denied any romance. She admitted, “Yes, we did fall in love and I believe this is evident in the chemistry between us. But his circumstances at the time prevented the relationship going further. I have not talked about it a great deal but the relationship was not consummated. Chemistry was there though. It was there."

Maureen O'Hara and John play tempestuous newlyweds
in "The Quiet Man," directed in 1952 by John Ford.

Maureen O’Hara portrayed John Wayne’s fiery wife – newly-wed, estranged, divorced, or otherwise – in five films, namely “Rio Grande” (1950), “The Quiet Man” (1952), “The Wings of Eagles” (1957), “McLintock!” (1963), and “Big Jake” (1971). Off-screen, Wayne had a predilection for Latin spouses (all three of them).

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, actors Mariette Harley and James Garner
(left) appeared in so many commercials for Polaroid cameras that people believed
they were married in real life. Years later, viewers assumed Radio Shack spokes-
people Howie Long and Teri Hatcher (right) were a real-life couple.

In May 2014, when Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore appeared together on the late-night talk show “Chelsea Lately,” the host, Chelsea Handler - who was originally cast as Barrymore’s best friend in "Blended" before the role went to Wendi McLendon-Covey (best known as the buxom Deputy Clementine Johnson on Comedy Central’ “Reno 911!” before her breakthrough role in “Bridesmaids”) - bluntly asked, “Have you guys ever dated? Have you ever hooked up or had penetration?” Barrymore blurted, “Not even a little! Not even ‘church tongue.’ Nothing really.”

Sandler interjected, “One night I screamed, ‘Please look at it!’ No, we always just hung out and had a good time. We always socialized, but we never – it’s good.” “That’s probably why we’ve been able to stick together all these years,” Barrymore said, “because there never was that awkward moment.”

In June 2003, Adam Sandler married actress Jacqueline Samantha Titone.
They have two daughters, Sunny and Sadie.

In her recently published memoir, Wildflower, Drew Barrymore dedicated a chapter to Sandler, called “Adam.” “He believed in me,” Barrymore said. “It’s a little bit of a love letter to him because I have grown with this man.”

In June 2012, Drew Barrymore married Will Kopelman.
They have two daughters, Olive Barrymore Kopelman
and Frankie Barrymore Kopelman.