December 1989 was the coldest ever recorded in Boston, where Winona Ryder was shooting her subsequent movie role in Mermaids. It was also the destination for Johnny’s regular cross-country treks throughout 21 Jump Street’s fourth season, his last, as he travelled back and forth to see her, catching the last flight out of Vancouver every Friday and the last one back every Sunday. ‘It was worth it, but man, I was a world-weary traveller.’

That alone was enough to suggest this was a different kind of relationship for Johnny. In fact, it was the closest he would come to actually getting married. Although he openly admitted to relishing the idea, he remained uncertain as to whether or not he believed in the concept. Sure, he liked the image, but still questioned whether one person could be with another until ‘death them do part’. He simply couldn’t tell if that was humanly possible. All the same, he was prepared to give it a try, and who better to try with, than Winona? ‘We’ll do it when we have a chunk of time and we can do it quietly with a three-month honeymoon. I’ve hard about places in Australia, islands where you can be dropped off, and there’s nothing there at all. I guess you just run around eating coconuts, foliage and bugs.’

Winona would probably have agreed. ‘I’ve got the feeling that this is right. But I don’t want to do it just so I can say I did it. I want to have, like, a honeymoon and the whole shebang.We’re going to get married as soon as we have time and we’re not working.’ In another period, she repeated much the same sentiment. ‘Johnny and I have both been working really hard on Edward Scissorhands, so we haven’t had much time to talk about when the marriage will be. But it will be!’

Even Winona’s father was enthusiastic. He himself entertained no doubts whatsoever. If anything, his instincts screamed approval. ‘He thinks "Marry him!"’ said Winona, taking her evidence from the weekends she and Johnny spent at Winona’s family home. Once there, she remembers, they were completely pampered. ‘They really love him a lot and even bring me and Johnny breakfast in bed. They’re so cool.’ Yet it could have turned out so differently. ‘It would have been easy not to like me,’ Johnny added, ‘older people might have just seen tattoos.’

Far less cautious, in fact, was Cher, Winona’s co-star from Mermaids. She did her best to warn Winona. ‘Neither one of them knows what they are doing, but they might as well go through it together. At least she’s going through it with a person who cares a lot about her.’ Not that Winona disguised her determination. As far as she was concerned nobody was going to preach to her about Johnny. ‘She really likes Johnny, so I think she’s pretty happy for me,’ Winona said of her co-star. ‘And although she gives me advice, she doesn’t expect me to take it. I’m going to do what I’m going to do anyway.’

The tabloid press, of course, was a different matter entirely. ‘We don’t feel like royalty,’ complained Winona, recalling the time that People magazine named them the King and Queen of Young Hollywood. ‘We read in the papers when they make that comparison and it makes us giggle. It makes us self-conscious in a way that neither of us enjoys. It’s uncomfortable to be watched all the time or to have people eavesdropping on your conversations in a restaurant. They make things up about you which is even worse.’

But according to Daniel Waters, the scriptwriter from Winona’s movie Heathers, she enjoys it more than she’s prepared to admit. ‘There’s a part of her that likes it even though she denies it. Right now, she’s got a Natalie Wood obsession.’ Not surprising when you consider that Winona would become the first American actress since Wood successfully to transcend a career from adolescence to adulthood in the full glare of the Hollywood spotlight.

Certainly, she and Johnny would have considerable presence at the ShoWest movie event in Las Vegas where the National Association of Theater Owners saluted them both as the Young Stars of Tomorrow. It was where, with matching rings, they publicly announced their engagement, and according to US magazine, acted ‘like a couple of teenagers, groping each other and falling to the floor’. But did they really? Even if they did, it was no more than what any other young couple in love and just engaged would do.

Still, the press couldn’t stop talking about it. Neither could the Hollywood grapevine. ‘When I was young, I was the sweetheart of the press,’ acknowledged Winona. ‘They loved me, but they were kind of waiting for me to mess up. I had no skeletons in my closet, no major past to talk about. I wasn’t with anyone. Then I became engaged to Johnny.’

She had just turned 18 and was still getting acquainted with the tabloids. ‘Suddenly people are curious about things you wouldn’t even tell your friends.’ It was Cher, Winona

credits, with helping her through much of that. ‘She’s been through that her whole life – she taught me what I should take seriously and what I should let go.’

Indeed, it was during this time that Johnny developed his hatred for the press, and Winona carefully began to keep her media exposure in check. Most actors have a love-hate relationship with journalists. Although most are willing to be accommodating with film publicity, when their private lives are under the microscope, most celebrities object to the intrusion. Even when things are stable, being asked the same question 10,000 times is understandably irritating.

It was this aspect that annoyed Johnny more than any other. He particularly remembers one occasion when he was ‘in the john of some bar and some stranger came up to me, and said, "So, are you and Winona still together?" At the urinal, for Christ’s sake!’ Another, Shout magazine, went even further, when they pleaded with Johnny to spill the beans on whether he was still, as they put it, ‘snogging Winona’!

Neither could he forget just how pernicious the influence of the tabloid press could be. One incident, in particular, had drawn unwanted attention to them both. Winona was due to star in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III as Mary, the daughter of the Corleone family reprised by Al Pacino and Diane Keaton in the roles they made famous, or had been made famous by, almost two decades before.

It was, recalls Patrick Palmer, Winona’s producer from Mermaids, an opportunity for her to star in a true American classic that would establish Winona as a genuine adult star, if for nothing other than the love scenes with Andy Garcia. It was something she hadn’t really touched upon in her earlier roles, not that she would be participating in any nude, or even semi-nude, scenes for the voyeuristic benefit of the cameras.

Less than a day after Winona finished Mermaids, she and Johnny boarded a plane for Rome. Although she was still exhausted from the upper-respiratory problem that had hit

her during filming, she was not concerned. Not even as she sniffed and coughed her way across the Atlantic. But almost as soon as they stepped off the plane, they both knew she was in bad shape. She was literally burning up with a 104-degree fever. Not only that, but her lungs were killing her, and the pressurised cabin had made her ears extremely painful. Days later, her condition was exactly the same, but right on schedule, she presented herself for work. Then she collapsed in her hotel room.

Johnny immediately summoned the production team doctor, who promptly announced Winona too sick to work, and too sick even to fly home for a few days. ‘I literally couldn’t move. It wasn’t my choice. It was out of my hands.’ Even when she and Johnny did eventually fly back to Petaluma, all she could do was lie in bed. ‘I had nothing left in my system. I was a wreck in every sense of the word and I just needed to rest and do nothing.’ But as a result, ‘I was getting threats that my career would be over and that I was going to get sued,’ she recalls. Even her agent warned that if she walked out of the movie she might as well give up acting there and then. Winona left the agency some time later. But what good did that really do? Everywhere she turned, it seemed, the advice was the same.

The press, of course, was another matter entirely. Winona recalls, ‘I was sick physically, and exhausted. That’s what happened.’ But immediately on her return home, and for months to come, Winona became equally sick of having to defend herself. The standard catalogue of absurd and untruthful rumours circulated around Hollywood about why she had left the movie; she was pregnant, she had overdosed, she was having a nervous breakdown, it was drugs, it was an eating disorder, it was Johnny having an affair, it was an assortment of other disasters.

Some even suggested it had been engineered so that she and Johnny could make Edward Scissorhands together. What seemed to escape their attention, though, was the fact that Winona had already agreed to appear in the film long before Johnny was cast alongside her. Later, she would concede that the two movies’ schedules did conflict, but that was a bridge she intended to cross when she came to it. Finally losing patience, Winona snapped, ‘It’s amazing how people want things to be as nasty and complicated as possible.’

The truth, she continued, was simple. ‘I was told by my doctor that I couldn’t work. I don’t know why nobody believed it. Maybe people thought Johnny was influencing me, but he wasn’t. He was just taking care of me, ordering room service, sticking his fingers down my throat, helping me to throw up.’ Today, Winona credits Johnny alone with helping her through the ensuing storm. But how many times would she have to defend her decision to walk out on The Godfather? How many times would she have to explain?

‘Sure, it’s disappointing, devastating in fact. I wish it didn’t happen, but it did. Obviously I would have loved to have worked with those wonderful actors and a great director. But it wasn’t a choice. It wasn’t like, "Well, I’m not feeling well today. Maybe I won’t do this movie." The doctor was there and he said, "You have an upper respiratory infection. You can’t do it." My leaving the movie was a disappointment to everyone. Especially me.’

For the time being though, all Winona could do was lie in bed, and recuperate throughout the period she should have been filming in Rome. She also focused on making sure her relationship with Johnny worked out. But it wouldn’t be the only time. ‘He is an amazing person whom I have an enormous amount of respect for and very deep feelings for. It’s not a possessive, weird little Hollywood promenade.’ When she did finally return to work, it would be alongside Johnny on Tim Burton’s warm Florida set of Edward Scissorhands.

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