By Jamie Diamond

This onetime teen idol, who jumped the street from TV to the motion-picture screen, remains adolescent to the core, unwilling to don the metaphoric vestments of adulthood...but therein lies his seductive charm.

Johnny Depp arrives an hour late--hair in a ponytail, wrinkled short-sleeved shirt over wrinkled T, ugly plastic sunglasses. He has strolled over to this pub on Sunset Boulevard after a meeting with Tim Burton, the director for whom he bound himself in black leather and fastened blades to his hands in the modern fable Edward Scissorhands. Those hands today function not as cutting tool but more simply as notepad: Depp has scribbled on his palm the titles of a couple of films he wants to see, The Loved One and The Tomb of Lugiu. "Tim was talking about them, and I wrote them down so I wouldn't forget," he explains, giving no indication he's aware paper exists and turns up even in the offices of film directors as unconventional as Burton.

Part Cherokee, part Irish, and part German. Depp conveys the sort of masculine delicacy that made him a teen idol. one of the few to leap successfully from TV to the big screen. At one time-- when he starred in the undercover-cop show 21 Jump Street--he received as many as ten thousand letters a month, and his high cheekbones and luminous eyes graced the covers of Tiger Beat and Sixteen. Yet today. in garish sunglasses and an outfit that looks to have been assembled from the bedroom floor of a teenage boy. Johnny Depp does not seem like a figure whose public appearance could transform young women into screaming maniacs. "I saw him at the height of all that attention, and it was like being on the street with Elvis," I'd later be told by John Waters. who directed Depp in Cry-Baby, a nineties parody of a teen star. "It was different from being with a movie celebrity. It was like being with an idol."

When a waitress comes to the table and asks what Depp would like, he says with a little smile, Can you give me everything? Can you satisfy my every desire?" She looks at him tolerantly and says, "What would you like?" He replies, "Everything." and then orders a pack of Marlboros, a shot of Irish whiskey, and a Coke. Striking a match in a matchbook with one finger--a skill he mastered when he broke two fingers in a car accident--he lights up. "I love to smoke," he says. "I want to have another mouth grafted on so I can smoke more. Instead of three packs a day, I want to smoke six packs a day." At the end of two hours, the cigarette package would be empty, and a few whiskey glasses too.

Depp has been having meetings with Tim Burton to discuss their next movie project, Ed Wood,now in preproduction. Following his bent for out-of-tile-mainstream roles--not only that android in Edward Scissorhands but also a nimble misfit who mistakes himself for Buster Keaton (Benny & Joon) a timorous chap who lives with his six-hundred-pound mother (the upcoming What's Eating Gilbert Grape). and an Eskimo-obsessed loner who resides in his truck (Arizona Dream, winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival)--Depp is taking on another offbeat character: the real-life Ed Wood. Jr., a heterosexual cross-dresser who directed such camp films as the cult classic Glen or Glenda?, in which Wood also appears, wearing a lady's angora sweater. What is Depp's attraction to this figure? Has he ever, um, worn women's clothing? "Actually. yes." he says. Like many boys from small towns coming of age in the seventies, Depp dreamed of being a rock star and taught himself to play guitar when he was about twelve. He'd look in the mirror, practice encores, take bows. And, of course, he needed a costume. "Sometimes I'd wear my mom's shirts with Frenchcut sleeves and her seersucker bell-bottoms," he says, giving a smile. "I'm familiar with women's clothing."

To prepare for the part of Wood, Depp has experimented further with women's wear, trying on a bra and slip. "I'd never worn a bra before, so I couldn't understand that you're constantly bound and constrained and reminded by this"--he waves his hands underneath his armpits--"this thing. After wearing a slip and a bra, I have much more respect for women."

Stop the presses: Has Depp's experience with lingerie altered his attitude toward women? Is the key to equality Maidenform? "Not exactly. The way I've changed is I find myself constantly sneaking looks at women's shoes and stockings. At the texture of their clothes. I've developed this subconscious habit. It might be dangerous. I'm a little worried," he says.

Depp is drawn to idiosyncratic characters because they confirm his identity as an maverick. "I don't feel part of anything," he says. "I don't feel I can fit in with the whole shebang." He's undone his ponytail turned his pink fuzzy rubber band into a ring, and now sweeps his long hair away from his face. "I'm a freak," says this odd combination of rough and polish, a self-educated high-school dropout who collects first editions of Hemingway and Kerouac, a romantic who feels compelled to become engaged to the women he dates (Sherilyn Fenn, Jennifer Grey, and Winona Ryder from whom he recently split).

Offering another explanation for Depp's maverick posture, Mary Stuart Masterson, his Benny & Joon costar, had said to me earlier, "The kind of attention Johnny's gotten, I'd feel like a freak too. When you get a disproportionate amount of praise, there's nothing you can feel inside yourself that matches up. You want to say, 'Please, blow out that candle on your altar for me and just take care of yourself.' That's why he's rebellious."

Born John Christopher Depp II in 1963, he says his earliest memories are almost a blur of motion. "I don't even have a mental picture of the houses we lived in, because there were so many. We were like gypsies." When John was six, his family moved from Kentucky to Florida, where they took up residence in a motel for nearly a year, until his father found work. By the time John was fifteen, his parents had divorced, his father for the first time, his mother for the second. As the youngest of four children, including two from his mother's first marriage, John was the last kid at home. He quit high school. did his share of drugs, and for a time lived in a friend's '67 Impala. "I think I had a childhood," says Depp, who remains close to his mother. "I remember playing with Tinker Toys and Big Wheels and being happy. At the same time, I can remember my parents fighting and us kids wondering who was going to go with whom if they got divorced. Puberty was very vague. I literally locked myself in a room and played guitar."

By the age of sixteen, Depp was good enough to play in a band that had some local success and opened for the Talking Heads and the B-52s. Within the next four years, he moved to Los Angeles, married fellow musician Lori Allison, and was barely making a living playing guitar. He says it's hard for him now to understand why he married in the first place (his eternal vows lasted two years): "Maybe I was trying to right the wrongs of my parents' breakup. maybe I was forcing myself into a situation where "Well, it could have been love. Maybe."

After a year in Los Angeles, Depp managed to get himself murdered by a fellow named Freddy Krueger in a little film called A Nightmare on Elm Street. His acting career had begun as a fluke. "I was walking down Melrose with Nick Cage [a friend of his wife's], trying to find a job, because the band I was in was making twenty-five bucks a week, and I was doing this day job of selling pens on the telephone. and Nick says, 'Come meet my agent."' That meeting led to Nightmare. Acting classes followed, as well as some television parts and a small role in 1986 in Platoon. And then drum roll--the Cinderella story: Depp became an overnight sensation in Fox's first hit TV show, 21 Jump Street. He downs a shot of Irish whiskey and pushes his hair back. "I played the young Republican," Depp says, as though revealing he dined with Jeffrey Dahmer. The resulting four-year stint was so unpleasant that he refuses to utter the series' name, instead referring to it as "that show"--as in "When I first started acting, I didn't give a f--- because I was a musician. And suddenly that show hit and they started to sell me as this popcicle." It was an effective sales job, resulting in fan clubs and an unauthorized biography. Depp, however, did not like playing a high-school narc: "I felt like a hypocrite, sensationalizing these guys who bust high-school kids for joints. To me. it was fascist." What's more. he had all that attention to handle: "My first reaction was to close up and put up a wall. Then I got mad. They were selling me as a product, but the product had no relation to who I was, and I had no control over the situation. I wanted them to fire me. They wouldn't. But at the same time, they did good things for me. They gave me a job, they gave me a paycheck, and they put me on the map."

In the decade Depp has lived in Los Angeles, he's refused to set down roots, especially the kind stars with money can sink. A perpetual outsider, he likes hotels and rented bungalows and often finds himself tooling around in rented autos because one of his own cars has died. "We used to call him the homeless millionaire," John Waters would later remark to me. remembering the months in 1990 when Depp was making Cry-Baby. "I'd say, 'Where do you want me to send your mail? A Bench. Anywhere. U.S.A.?' I think he's bought a house by now. Anyway, he has an address. But I'm not sure he looks in the mailbox--I'm not sure he participates mail. He has a style that looks like he's not trying."

And yet for all the, seeming indifference, Depp employs, in addition to an agent, a business manager, a lawyer, a publicist, and his sister Christie to help schedule his appointments. What's more, he's become an entrepreneur, having recently opened a swank nightclub in Los Angeles called the Viper Room that he hopes will echo the glamour of Hollywood past.

"I get good advice," he says. But he does concede to a strange romance with permanence: "I have this love of tradition and foundation and stability, and at the same time I have this gypsy spirit I couldn't let go of if I wanted to."

Well, if anyone is keeping a tally, tattoos count as permanent, and Depp has three. On his left shoulder is the first: an Indian chief in full headdress, a tribute to his Cherokee great-great-grandmother, Minnie. Mom holds forth on the other shoulder, in a tattoo bearing her name, Betty Sue. And for balance, above the Indian sits Depp's most recent: Winona Forever, which, if truth were told, would read Winona for the Last Few Years.

Besides emblazoning himself with tattoos, Depp scores his flesh with a knife whenever something happens that he finds deeply important. He indicates a line of little scars, like tears, pouring down his arm. "I have a funny relationship to my body," he admits. Then he rests his fist on the brick wall next to the table: "If I punched that wall, I'd want to feel it and break my hand and see the blood. It's really kind of stupid and romantic, but if you feel something very strong, you attempt to make it forever. So I have these scars on my arm. The last is this big one here I inflicted about a year and a half ago." He leans back. "Ah, it sounds so stupid, but for me there shouldn't be any halfway."

There was very little halfway with Ryder. She and Depp locked eyes in 1989 at the premiere of her film Great Balls of Fire. The requisite engagement ring appeared five months after they started dating. The two were inseparable; they acted together in Edward Scissorhands, and there were marriage plans. Now, says Depp, "it's At over. Recently. But our breakup doesn't wi take away from the honesty of this." He pounds the shoulder on which Winona presides. "Because I meant it. If I were keeping a journal, I wouldn't go back , and say, ` We broke up, so I'm erasing everything.' The relationship's been up and down. Both of us came to the conclusion that it got too weird. But she's a great kid, and I want her to be happy."

Ever a gentleman, Depp will not reveal the details that led to the end, but he turns to the brick wall again to illustrate. With his eyes half-closed, he moves his hand softly against the bricks, as if he were a blind man caressing the face of a lover. "If you're in a room, you explore that place completely," he whispers. "You feel the texture of the walls, and you can smell the room without smelling it, and you learn everything about it. And then there comes a time when you say, 'All right, I've learned it. So I have to go somewhere else. Somehow."'

The somehow lingers in the air. But is Depp saying he'll always get tired and want to explore other rooms? "I sure hope I could find one person who could be the one," he says. "It would be amazing if it was possible."

Five days later we meet for breakfast at a greasy spoon. Depp pulls into the parking lot in a '58 Apache pickup bearing a paint job that appears to have been sprayed from a can. His hair is the color of an Irish setter's, and he's wearing a secondhand leather jacket in the same cinnamon tone.

"Wow, I just got a handful of gum," he says, sliding into a booth. He explains he dyed his hair red for one day to re-shoot a scene for Gilbert Grape, which also stars Juliette Lewis and Mary Steenburgen. Directed by Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog), the film concerns a young man trapped in a small town who feels so responsible to his family he almost forfeits having a life. "Somewhere along the line, Gilbert emotionally killed himself," says Depp. "He's surrounded by a six-hundred-pound mom who's given up, a brother who's mentally retarded, and sisters who dwell in their own strange world."

What's Eating Gilbert Grape marks Depp's first film in which the other actors portray the weirdos. "He's the straight guy," Hallstrom had told me earlier. "It's not true, but I know he felt he was boring in the part. To me, this is his best performance. You see a little more of him. He doesn't hide behind his eccentricities."

Depp himself fails to mention his fear of boring people, but he does say that playing Gilbert was emotionally painful: "He shut down, and I can relate to that. I felt bad for the four months we shot. It was a very lonely time. Also, the movie had to do with family and growing up and, in a way, not growing up, and feeling responsible for your family. It struck some old memory chords." To make things easier, Depp and the director turned to humor. According to Hallstrom, vented some weird communication system during the shoot where had strange codes for emotions. When you're dealing with emotions for such a long period of time, it can be draining to stay serious. So we used a code language to protect ourselves--it was part of that fear we both have of getting near true emotions. For weeks, we had a weird thing going on with the Swedish word for radish. The sort of things that adolescent boys get a kick out of, Depp seems to get a kick out of. Like his eight-foot rooster, or his collection of creepy clown paintings, or his extensive bug collection, all of which he describes as "pretty Cub Scout."

"He's a young soul," I'd heard from Hallstrom. And from Mary Stuart Masterson: "I think he's about fourteen, but then he can be really old and wise."

"I know I've hit thirty and I'm not seventeen," says Depp himself, "but I still feel seventeen. I don't want to be an adult."

Do women like that? "They probably want adults. But I'm both. I've always got two extreme sides." Maybe he's hindered by having such a young-sounding name. "I've been Johnny since I was a kid," he says protectively. "I couldn't change my name now. It'd be like Billy Baldwin going to what William Baldwin?"

With no warning, Depp fixes his attention on his coffee cup. There's a fat brown cockroach prancing along its rim. "Hi," Depp says to the roach, widening his eyes. "Wow, look how he's kicking his abdomen. I think he's going to give birth in my coffee." Calling over a waiter, Depp says, "Excuse me." The waiter spots the roach and with great embarrassment starts to remove the cup. But Depp stops him: "It's okay; he's my friend." And then Depp asks what he really wants to ask: "Do you guys sell cigarettes here?" The answer is no, so we get up to go. "'Bye, kid," Depp says, waving to the cockroach.

It may be Depp's unwillingness to wear the vestments of adulthood that makes him so appealing. Masterson thinks he charms women because "he doesn't try hard to do it. There's no agenda to his sexuality. He's not trying to manipulate or overpower or dominate or flex his ego." Like a naive child, he follows his heart. Yet he's sailed smoothly through adult waters where many teen idols before him have capsized and drowned.