April 25, 2004

The Rock is talking about tea parties. The ones where dolls perch in their little chairs with little cups of ‘tea,’ their conversation a child’s imaginary prattle. Only in the Rock’s house, the dollies dine with the “daddies,” which happen to be action-hero figures of daddy. Daddy, in his black wrestling trunks, all massive arms and thick thighs and pumped-out chest. Daddy, flexed and ready to tear someone’s head off.

There is no head-tearing at the tea table. No ‘People’s Elbow’ inflicted upon some unsuspecting dolly. Simone — the Rock’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter — writes this script. Daddy just plays along.

“It’s great!” says the Rock, aka Dwayne Johnson. “She has baby dolls and daddy dolls and they sit and drink tea and do stuff together. It’s funny.” The Rock attempts to simulate the dolls having some sort of social interaction, and he’s so into it you can’t help but look at him — all 6 feet 5 inches and 245 pounds of him — and think: This is the man who cracked open wrestler Mankind’s head with a chair?

The Rock is a softy. There have been hints of this in his movies — the latest, a remake of Walking Tall — as he has morphed from pro wrestling megastar into modern-day action hero, Hollywood’s hope for the next Arnold, or Rambo. His characters, including Chris Vaughn, the war veteran turned vigilante police officer he plays in Walking Tall, have these please-don’t-make-me-hurt-you moments. His screen voice is gentle. His heart, we are to believe, is good. Then he smacks the bad guy in the head with a 2-by-4. Multiple times.

“What I didn’t want to do was just be the Rock for people who saw him on TV,” Johnson says. “And I took a small step towards that, I think, with The Scorpion King. And with The Rundown, that’s a performance you wouldn’t quite expect. Prior to The Rundown, the wrestling sector knew I was funny, but the rest of the country certainly didn’t.” Johnson, 31, can hardly blame the average person for thinking he is a little scary or a little mean. Until they meet him.

“I get that all the time — that you’re a lot different than I thought,” says Johnson. In person, the Rock is charming, self-deprecating and down-to-earth. The overinflated body he had as a wrestler (“I was a fatty,” he says. “I looked like the Michelin Man.”) has been downsized, 35 pounds shaved off his impressive frame. His face is thinner, and he’s quick to smile. Still, the arms are almost forbidding, the left one covered with an elaborate tattoo that reflects his Samoan heritage.

He’s been big since childhood. In high school, he was so large (6 feet 4, 225 pounds by age 15) that he was dogged by rumours he was either on steroids — Johnson swears he tried them only briefly, before his freshman year of college — or he was an undercover cop.

His size, he says, comes from his genes: his father, Rocky Johnson, was one of the first African-Americans in pro wrestling, and his mother, Ata, is the daughter of Samoan High Chief Peter Maivia, who also wrestled. And being immersed in the wrestling world since childhood primed him for creating the outsize personality that is the Rock.

“I always thought the character of the Rock was just me with the volume turned way up, and speakers, and amps,” he says. “But the same guy, with the same walk, same talk, same voice, same intonation. I was just louder and in your face and over the top with some of the things I say.”

The Rock says his wife, Dany, is a lot like Johnson at 18 or 19, when the two met. Then, Johnson was a freshman football player at the University of Miami, and she was 22 and a senior.

“When he was 18, he was all ego,” Dany says by phone from their home in Davie, Fla. “He was good-looking, but all ego.”

And, she says, he had to learn to control his temper. In his book, Johnson writes of how he almost strangled a woman at a family wedding, how he attacked a team-mate and tried to rip his tongue out and how he was caught on national television in a rampage against an opposing team’s mascot.

This did not sit well with Dany. And one day, when Dwayne was almost 20, they had a fight over the phone and there was a screaming hang-up and then...nothing. He had broken the phone. Finally, he did call back — from a pay phone. But Dany was fed up. “We need to get a hold on the temper,” she told him. Chastened, he told her “never again.”

“The man who developed into the Rock, there was a lot of that strength and that violence and that real tenacity in Dwayne,” she says. “But the savvy, the charisma, the witty lines are the reflection of the older Dwayne, when he was 25, 26.”

There was a long road in between. Close to broke, the couple moved in together during Johnson’s sophomore year at Miami, and struggled as she started an entry-level job at Merrill Lynch. He got injured, recuperated and hoped to make it to the National Football League as a defensive lineman after graduation, but wasn’t drafted. So he wound up in Calgary, trying to make it in the Canadian Football League while sleeping on a used mattress and living off food he sneaked from meetings for the team’s travel squad.

“Every week, religiously, I’d walk in, take my sandwich, linger, take another sandwich,” he says. “I’d sit down and the coaches would say, ‘Uh, Dwayne, you’re not needed again this week.’ And I’d be, like, ‘Oh!,’ and I’d just get up and walk out. With my sandwiches.”

Eventually, he was cut, bummed a ride to the airport and flew home to Dany. He tried to get a job painting houses, without luck. He decided it was time he tried to follow in his father’s footsteps and take up wrestling but felt awful leaving Dany behind. She sent him on his way.

“It blows my mind today,” says Johnson, who married Dany in 1997. “She’s like, ‘I love you, go pursue your dreams.’ When you look back...” And then he gets choked up, just thinking about it.

But, he’s a softy. Only softies don’t do so well in the world of professional wrestling, which is why his first foray into the business — a good guy under the professional name Rocky Maivia — didn’t get him very far. But once he developed the persona of the Rock, in August 1997, he was on his way to stardom.

“We went through quite a bit,” Dany says. At one point, when she was starting her career and he was a sophomore, they sold all their CDs so they’d have enough money to get through the month. She even sold her favourite, an Eric Clapton compilation set.

“It’s such a different field now,” she says. “Such a different scope. But he stays as grounded as he needs to be.”

Which is why home base for the Johnsons remains in Florida, next door to Dany’s sister, five minutes from each of Dwayne’s parents, close to his grandmother. A “little get-together” for the Johnsons immediately produces 27 people, Dany jokes. And the home they bought in the Los Angeles area — Johnson stays there when he’s filming a movie — is out in Hidden Hills, far from Beverly Hills. Johnson’s agent has to drag him to big premieres or parties.

Johnson swears he never expected to end up in this world of movie stars and red carpets. Certainly, he wasn’t being serious when he wrote, in his book, that he was going to be the “next Schwarzenegger — only better looking.” Mention that little comment and Johnson immediately smacks himself on the forehead.

“Oh, my God!” says Johnson, who has since become friends with Arnold Schwarzenegger and does a wicked impression of him. “How embarrassing is that? I was running my mouth, as always.”

Johnson loves to make fun of himself — he had a blast hosting Saturday Night Live, which invited him back for a second stint. In a sequel to Get Shorty that he’s currently filming, he’s playing a character who’s based almost entirely on his personal characteristics (30, Samoan, does this eyebrow-lift thing) and loving the farcical nature of it.

Dany, who is now a partner in her own investment company, is the one at home most with Simone, while Johnson travels for his work. The separation is hard, he says, but it’s much better than when he was with the WWE road show. And the situation does have its advantages.

“I reap the benefits of being away and then getting to come home and everything’s just fantastic,” Johnson says. “Dany tells me all the time: ‘Your daughter threw the worst fit today!’ and I never see that. It’s wonderful.”

Still, when he’s home, it’s all about daddy. In the morning, it’s daddy that Simone calls for from her bed, or daddy she tries to drag into the kitchen to make pancakes. And it’s daddy who is wrapped around Simone’s little finger. Total pushover. Set another cup and saucer at the tea table. Yes, the Rock is a softy. Just don’t let him near any 2-by-4s. —Dawn/ The LAT/WP News Service.

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