Actress Zooey Decshanel haunts Hollywood's past.

Zooey Deschanel is scared of ghosts. "It's something that I laugh about during the day," she says, grinning nervously, "but at night it's no joke." We're in a pastry cafe somewhere in Hollywood. We've both had a lot of coffee, and the conversation is growing more confessional with each refill. Someone's leg is bouncing up and down under the table.
"I still hold by breath when I pass by graveyards," Deschanel continues. "When I was little, my sister told me that I could prolong my life by an hour is I held my breath each time I passed one."
These are unexpected phobias for someone who has surrounded herself with ghosts her whole life. Since adolescence, Deschanel has been absorbed by the specters of show business. Her taste for Golden Age garb and flapper bobs are evidence of a childhood spent studying every nuance of grainy old promo photos. Her bedroom in high school was plastered with magazine clippings of Audrey Hepburn, Vivienne Leigh, and Liz Taylor. And her cabaret act, a duo with actress Samantha Shelton, summons up the pop voices of the 1940s and '50s. "I used to work really hard on my singing impressions - that was my party trick," she says. "I'd sit in my room and listen to Judy Garland and Ella Fitzgerald and Julie Andrews, and work on it."
Deschanel was born not far from here, in Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood whose streets could turn up on star maps from a bygone era. Her father is noted cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who shot, among other films, The Right Stuff and Being There. Her mother worked as an actress until turning her attention to raising her two daughters. Zooey Deschanel's own career began in a Little Theater production of Into the Woods. She soon made a name for herself as a potent and understated supporting actress - in Almost Famous, she played a precocious journalist's flight-attendant sister; in The Good Girl, she worked disaffected retail opposite Jennifer Aniston. But it was this summer's All the Real Girls that finally allowed Deschanel a chance to test her mettle as a movie centerpiece. A lyrical portrayal of love and trust set in a blue-collar North Carolina town, the film gave the actress' intoxicating but slow-working acting style plenty of time to take effect.
Deschanel is a difficult person to describe, but her skin is a good place to start. The actress is pale. In places, blue-gray veins show through her rice-paper jaw line. A mop of arrestingly dark hair and a pair of mooning eyes offset the ethereal effect. Today, it is 86 degrees and cloudless in Hollywood, and though the midday sun is directly above us, the light it gives off seems to emanate from every surface. It's the kind of light that's so vivid it makes the world go quiet. In its glare, Los Angeles seems like a deserted soundstage bathed in klieg lights.
We've decided to take a stroll - to walk off some of the caffine - and I'm trailing Deschanel past the Hollywood split-levels with a tape recorder. "I didn't bring any sun block," she says, tugging on a red coat over her stripped T-shirt.
Deschanel's pallor is well earned. She has spent the better part of her life sitting in darkened rooms. The Academy, the New Beverly, the Egyptian (where you can see a Vincente Minnelli double feature for six bucks): Deschanel loves revival cinemas. "I don't go out very much. I don't drink or do drugs. I'm not interested in the party lifestyle," she says. It was her father who introduced her to the solace of old celluloid.
"I always wanted to do theater," she explains. "I wanted to do musicals; that was my goal. But that changed when I was 11. My dad started showing me all of Hitchcock's movies. And then Stanley Kubrick when I was 12 or 13. And then I got into the French New Wave a little later. And it slowly dawned on me how much I loved film. I wanted to be like the girls in the Godard movies. I saw Contempt at the Academy, and I was so amazed by the treatment of time in the movie, how it was unclear how much time had passed."
Deschanel's response to cinema is genuine - and that includes the campiest of golden-era farces. She's shockingly uncynical for a woman who grew up in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. Movies get to her, and that includes in-flight entertainment. "I watched Shallow Hal on a plane once," she says, "and I cried, because I was like, 'He likes her even though she's overweight.'"
By her own admission, Deschanel's always been a little thin-skinned. "As a child, somebody would do one little thing and I would go nuts. I would freak out when people would tease me," she admits. "I would feel emotions very deeply. Some of that's still in me, and I get a lot of that out by working." The actress grew up a Hollywood insider who felt like an outsider. "There was nobody who disliked me in high school, but it wasn't like I fit in so well," she says without much bitterness. "I felt like a ghost passing through. I was really frustrated - I never felt like I was in the place I was supposed to be. It upset me all the time, because I didn't understand why I didn't fit."
That's why her role in the Christmas caper Elf is an unexpectedly nice fit. Deschanel is the movie's starry-eyed misfit - a department store elf who's having trouble coming out of her shell. It takes one of Santa's actual little helpers, in the form of Will Ferrell, to help her overcome her fears. "Then, of course, we save Christmas," she says. "You always have to save Christmas in a Christmas movie." After a string of lauded indie films, a yuletide campfest might seem like a strange career choice for Deschanel. Then again, this woman lives for screwball comedies (she may be the only person ever who cried at a Jack Black flick). And, well, you can imagine how she feels about Christmas carols. "The Phil Spector Christmas album is one of my favorites of all time," she says, beaming. "The picture of him [on the record sleeve] in a Santa Claus suit with a Back To Mono pin on - he's so freaky." A Wall-of-Sound Christmas fits in neatly with Deschanel's fantastic inner world - with her Anna Karina magazine clippings, her silent double features, her cabaret act.
But right now, the holiday season is a long way off, and Phil Spector is no Santa Claus. Ms. Deschanel will spend the rest of the afternoon at a photo shoot somewhere in Hollywood, trying to dodge the harsh summer sun, and summoning up her beloved Tinsel Town ghosts. When we part ways, the actress buttons her red coat, smiles goodbye, and slips into her Volvo station wagon. I'm not sure I haven't just met one.