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DATELINE: Better Sex in the City?

Kim Cattrall, the siren from "Sex in the City," has a blueprint for sex.

NBC News

http://www.msnbc.com/news/693390.asp

Jan. 27 - She walks into a room and raises the temperature 10 degrees. Sultry. Sexy. Seductive. Slipping into the skin of Samantha Jones on "Sex in the City" has been the role of a lifetime for actress Kim Cattrall. And now, after turning up the heat on Sunday night TV, correspondent Josh Mankiewicz tells us she just may do the same for your love life.

HER NAME IS Samantha Jones. Samantha likes men. Samantha likes women. Because what Samantha really likes is sex and plenty of it.

Samantha, of course, is just a figment of someone's imagination. She's a TV character, played by actress Kim Cattrall, who in real life is softer and considerably more demure than the man-eater she plays on HBO's "Sex and the City." The truth is, they're pretty different.

"Oh, yes," say Cattrall. Samantha is uncomfortable about her age, but Kim is not.

"I celebrate 45," says Cattrall. "I've never been here before, and I love what it's brought me."

The real Kim is more inhibited? "Well, I think that I'm certainly not that character," she says.

Good thing, because living Samantha's life could wear a girl out. In a business criticized for showing too much, too often, Samantha has made a virtue out of excess.

The show is the saga of four girlfriends who, when it premiered four years ago, were unmarried warriors on the battlefield that is singles life in Gotham. It's told through the eyes and typewriter of a sex columnist, played by Sarah Jessica Parker.

And while her friends are on a never-ending search for Mr. Right, Samantha usually makes do with "Mr. Right Now." Her character works in public-relations, and in nearly every episode, she's having relations with some member of the general public. And remember, this is cable where the standards are as loose as well, as Samantha.

Is Samantha a slut? "I don't consider her a slut, no," says Cattrall. "Slut to me has a negative connotation, and I don't think of anything that Samantha does as uninformed, not a joyous celebratory way of living." So she's more of an explorer? "I think that she's an adventuress, yes," she says. "She's sort of like Auntie Mame in the fact that everybody else is picking at the hors d'oeuvres, and she's gone through the hors d'oeuvres, and she's going for the main course. She has an appetite."

NO SATISFACTION

So does Kim Cattrall, for acting. Born in Liverpool, at age 12, she began training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She had no trouble getting work on this side of the Atlantic, acting in films like "Bonfire of the Vanities" and "Mannequin." But she was longing for another kind of attention. Through two marriages and several relationships, she kept having what she now describes as unsatisfactory sex.

"It's kind of ironic that I play this incredibly sexual character," she says. "My journey was much more frustrating than what I had hoped it would be, and I was beginning, in my early 40s, to shut down. And that was, I think, the scariest place for me to be, not having found fulfillment in a relationship or even with a boyfriend or being married."

But in 1998, both her professional life and her sex life took flight. Darren Star, the creator of "Sex and the City," offered Cattrall the part of Samantha and she said no.

"I went back to Kim and had lunch with her a couple of times and said, please, please, please reconsider, because you can be fabulous in this role," says Star. "And she is."

He's been quoted as saying that Kim Cattrall is one of the few actresses who can have sex funny.

"Yes, absolutely," says Star. "She's Lucy in the sack. She's always going for the big comic moment."

It turned out to be more than just a great career move. In leaving L.A. for New York, she found better sex in a different city. Before she had shot even the first episode, she met the man of her dreams in a New York City jazz club. Audio executive Mark Levinson and Cattrall married nine months later.

"There just didn't seem to be any reason to wait," she says.

Levinson says, "As my dad used to say, if it's not good why do it? And if it is good, why stop?"

Which sounds actually like something Samantha would say.

"Definitely," says Cattrall.

LIFE FOLLOWING ART

And now, at the height of her popularity, real life Kim and her real-life husband Mark have written a book called "Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm." It's very frank, very graphic, the kind of book Samantha would have on her "Sex in the City" coffee table, or more likely, next to her bed. And that made us wonder, is life starting to imitate art?

Is it a coincidence that she's playing this incredibly sexual character and she's written a book about sex? "I feel that as an actor, things come into your life for a reason," she says. "And I think that one of the reasons for me to play Samantha was maybe to be a spokesperson for empowerment of sexuality. On a daily basis women were reaching out and saying, 'Hey that episode, fill in the blank. That happened to me.' And what I was being confronted with was not just my own history of being unfulfilled and frustrated and dissatisfied, was a lot of other women's as well."

But she wanted to do it her way. Instead of a celebrity tell all, Cattrall enlisted her husband to co-author what they describe as a user-friendly workbook, written by sex partners, not sex therapists.

When she said to Levinson, "Honey I want to write about our sex life and I want you to write about it too," he said "Great idea"?

"It wasn't quite like that," he says. "It was more like, 'There's interest in a book from me,' and what do you think?"

Cattrall says, "I think the thing that's important to remember about the book is that this is not a book about Mark and Kim's sex life. This is a book about your sex life in the sense of there's specific things that you can do to have satisfaction to have fulfillment in your life."

In fact, there are 143 pages of things you can do, with graphic illustrations included.

"We wanted it to look a certain way and be a certain way," she says. "That you could take a page out of it and make your own notes."

It's all about what a girl needs - literally. The title makes that perfectly clear. And apparently it's what a lot of girls want as well. "Satisfaction" sold out at a book-signing event in Santa Monica this week. Cattrall says she wrote it for all those kindred female spirits who know what they want but don't know how to tell their men, who don't know how to ask.

DIRECTIONS FOR GUYS

"I think in sexual intimacy the man feels a lot of time that he has to know everything," she says. "And if he doesn't, you know, then he's letting his partner down and he also doesn't want to talk about it."

Men won't stop and ask for directions.

"That's right," she says. "They think that they should know the road. And my experience with talking with a lot of my friends, girlfriends especially, is that a lot of men learn one or two things that worked when they were in college or high school and they sort of stretch it out for the next 20 years."

But what if you can't even lead the horse to water? Right about now, there are wives and girlfriends across the country exasperated at their husbands and boyfriends who have not gotten up from in front of the television set for what seems like, you know, the Ice Age. And the feeling a lot of them have is, he's not listening to me about anything. Certainly he's not listening to me about what I want sexually.

"And?" asks Cattrall.

Which would seem to suggest that a how-to guide for sex is….

"Timely?" she says.

Well, or probably not going to be picked up by those guys who instead reach for the sports section.

"I think if the book starts out as a curiosity item about that gal on 'Sex in the City,' who wrote a book," she says. "And maybe there's one or two things that you can come away from, I think that I'll be satisfied. And hopefully they'll be satisfied."

And what about Kim's muse, Samantha? This new year, she seems to have found a different kind of satisfaction, doing something that's for her, really outrageous - falling in love.

"I think it remains to be seen how long the relationship will last, but I think it's really fascinating to see her go through, jump through those emotional loops and blockades and see if she will actually make it or not," she says.

Does that mean Samantha's actually settling down? "I don't think she's settling down quite yet," says Cattrall. "But she's dipping her toe in to see how warm the water is, or cold."

So what will happen as this acclaimed show, winner of three Golden Globes and an Emmy for best comedy, heads into its fifth season? Well, that's the thing about both life and art. They're often unpredictable. Just ask Kim Cattrall, who never imagined that an acting role would change her life and maybe yours as well.

She's been great for Samantha, but maybe Samantha's even better for her? "I think we've been good for each other," says Cattrall. "And I think when it comes to an end, it will be sad, but that will be the birth of something else. But she has definitely contributed so much to my life. She's made me more empowered."

Soon Kim Cattrall will get to reveal her maternal side. She'll be playing mother to pop superstar Britney Spears in the new film "Crossroads," opening next month.

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