MARKY MARK'S NEW RAP

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

The artist formerly known as Marky Mark is sitting on a couch in a room on the top floor of the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto, posing for a photographer. He is fully dressed, and he's giving the camera a forlorn look. The rapper turned film actor and star of the controversial new porn-world comedy-drama Boogie Nights now prefers to be called Mark Wahlberg, the name his mother and father gave him when he was born, 26 years ago, in Boston, Mass. But the photographer wants a bit more attitude, a bit more of the old Calvin Klein pinup Marky Mark. How 'bout stripping and covering his crotch with his hands? "No!" yells Wahlberg's manager, the intrusive, Jerry McGuire-ish Steve Levinson. "I knew I needed to be here!" Later, Wahlberg is asked if he would have stripped. "Sure," he says. "Ask me to jump out the window, and I'd do that too." And he fakes a dive through the nearest window.

For now, at least, his career is headed in the opposite direction. When a performer changes his name, he is, in a John Cougar Mellencamp kind of way, either ready for the remainder bin or ready to get serious. The old Marky was never much of a rapper--do a Nexis search and you will not find the adjective Tupac Shakurish used to describe his bland hip-hop work--but in Hollywood these days, he is giving off heat. Wahlberg's performance in The Basketball Diaries (1995) as a drug-addled Catholic school dropout, opposite the De Niro of his generation, Leonardo DiCaprio, was surprisingly well received. Just last week he had dinner with the actual Robert De Niro to talk about a boxing film the two plan to star in called Out on My Feet. And Wahlberg is already drawing serious critical attention for his unexpectedly impressive work in Boogie Nights as Dirk Diggler, a softheaded hard-core porn actor. "This new movie of his is going to make him a star," predicts DreamWorks mogul David Geffen, an early Wahlberg mentor. "He's built a legitimate career for himself, which he did not have as a recording artist. There's something about Mark, a sexy bad-boy vibe, that's very appealing. People thought he was here today gone tomorrow, but he's going to be here today and here tomorrow."

How? Why? Perhaps it is the corruption of youth that fascinates. Marky Mark's raps were as limp as the tongues of old sneakers, addressing subjects like peace and resisting drugs and blah blah blah with all the force of an NBC "The More You Know" public service announcement. His Calvin Klein ads were racy, but in a courteous, folded-napkin sort of way, all rounded pecs and flat abs, clean living and bright smiles. In Boogie Nights, Wahlberg gets real and raunchy: his character masturbates for money, has on-camera sex, snorts coke, robs houses and delivers a monologue with a 13-in. prosthetic penis hanging between his legs. After a recent screening, a group of men followed him into the bathroom, wondering, waiting, hoping. Says Wahlberg: "They were a little bummed out that I'd used the stall."

Beyond the fans, fame and buff muscle tone, Wahlberg has a softer side. In an interview in Toronto (where he has just wrapped another film, the action-comedy The Big Hit), he smokes but asks permission before lighting up. He speaks in quiet tones, looking you directly in the eye. He's smarter than you might think too, carefully picking roles that showcase his charisma while strengthening his acting chops. "He's a natural," says Penny Marshall, who directed him in his first film, the 1994 comedy Renaissance Man. "He's got a killer smile, is a good actor and takes direction very well. There's a certain quality of presence that he's used to and that he can give off."

Indeed, onscreen he has a puggish grace that combines a warm confidence in his body with a disarming modesty when it comes to displaying emotions. In Boogie Nights, even as the private parts flash and the cameras roll, he manages to convey a sullied sweetness. Says James Foley, who directed Wahlberg in the thriller Fear (1996): "He seemed to have access to a great deal of emotion with little effort. He doesn't wear his intensity on his sleeve. But he is very intense, very serious... He's driven to be celebrated for the quality of his work."

Some of that drive is channeled straight from his boyhood days in Boston. Wahlberg says Dorchester, the section of the city where he was brought up, "is probably considered one of the most racist places in the world." His family is working class, his mother a retired nurse, his father a retired truck driver; he was the youngest of nine children. "It was definitely hard being the last. By the time I was growing up, [my parents] had to have been exhausted, because I was running around in the streets all hours of the night, drugs in the house, money, coming up with new cars--all kinds of stuff. And nobody knew what was going on until I would have to make the phone call and say, 'I'm in jail.'"

But being the brother of a star has its advantages. Wahlberg's brother Donnie, of the then popular teen group New Kids on the Block, helped him form the hip-hop group Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. The group scored a platinum record in 1991, and after Geffen spotted him and recommended him to Calvin Klein, Wahlberg landed a modeling gig and began appearing in underwear ads worldwide, including on a huge billboard in Times Square. It upset him, however, that he was just a "statue" in the campaign and that his music wasn't featured somehow. "People were really looking for the exploitation of Marky Mark," he says. The next album didn't do well, and his image was further damaged when stories surfaced about racist and homophobic remarks and incidents from his youth. One involved a 45-day stay in jail in 1988 for assaulting an Asian-American man over a bottle of beer.

Wahlberg, who attended primarily black schools and performed regularly in gay clubs, denies any bias. He explains that he and his friends had been smoking angel dust. "We attacked a bunch of people that night. The guy who had beer, we were trying to rob him and he ended up getting a lot more hurt than I thought...I thought it was all in a dream until I realized when I woke up, I was in prison." While in jail, he decided he wanted "more out of life."

And he got it. F. Scott Fitzgerald's oft-quoted remark that there are no second acts in American lives is a canard. Especially in American lives, there are second acts, encores, curtain calls, sequels and comebacks. In this case the first act was Marky Mark, rapper. The second is Mark Wahlberg, actor, perhaps even artiste. "I'm not shooting for the stars," Wahlberg says. "I'm just kind of doing things that I feel I can do good. I think I outgrew the Marky Mark thing, y' know?" Could be. Based on the way his second act is going, it will be fun to see if he's back for a third.

--Reported by Georgia Harbison/Toronto

With reporting by GEORGIA HARBISON/TORONTO