I Loved Her in the Movies

by Robert Wagner

  But most people only remember her for The Brady Bunch. Granted, this is better than not being remembered at all, and I’m sure Florence is grateful for all the opportunities she’s had because of the show, but it’s still locked her into a public image as the bright, ever cheerful, always competent mom negotiating the adolescent squabbles of Jan and Marcia.

  Years after The Brady Bunch, Florence did an episode of Hart to Hart with me, and after that we would occasionally encounter each other around town. The more I saw her, the more I grew to respect her. Florence always had talent, but she never had it made. She was one of ten children, grew up poor, and sang at outdoor markets for spare change.

  About twenty-five years ago I found myself on the same plane as Florence at a time when I could feel myself slipping into depression. Depression can involve personal issues, things like professional frustrations—that is to say external, more or less rational causes—or it can be part of your chemistry or your biorhythms and have nothing to do with any objective reality.

  I had just enough experience with depression to know how crippling it can be. You can feel the fog gathering, then darkening. First it gradually obliterates your vision of the world, so that all you can see or feel is the fog, and then it moves on to your navigational skills. You can’t get away.

  I went over to say hi to Florence, and in the course of the conversation I told her how I was feeling, after which I complimented her on her own level of positive energy. She waved the compliment aside and said, “I’ve had a lot of help.” And then she began telling me about a woman who had helped her through various crises through hypnosis.

  I had used hypnosis once or twice before, mainly to cope with a bad case of stage fright. Florence suggested that it might very well help me forestall a full-scale bout of depression, and she gave me a referral. The trick with any medical professional is to find someone you can relate to and trust, and I immediately felt comfortable with Florence’s friend Cheryl O’Neill.

  Before Cheryl puts you into the hypnotic state, you talk to her about the issues that are overloading you—what you’re anxious about. You’re lying down, with your eyes closed and with a blanket over you. Cheryl will instruct, “Take three deep breaths. You’ll feel your feet relaxing, your legs, your knees.” You visualize coming down a series of stairs. When you reach the floor, you turn to the right. At that point, sometimes you drift off into something that feels like sleep, while other times you’re fully conscious and aware of what’s being said in the room.

  After Cheryl puts you under, she addresses your issues. Sometimes after you come out of it, you can feel an immediate sense of relief, while other times it takes a little longer. After I’d been going to Cheryl for a while I found that I could hypnotize myself in order to deal with basic problems like insomnia, or even to moderate negative impulses like impatience and anger. Hypnosis has proven good for my concentration, and great for my imagination.

  What I didn’t realize at the time is that most analysts use hypnotism at one time or another, on one patient or another. A lot of athletes use it, especially those who need to maintain focus over a lengthy competition in which they’re basically isolated, such as golfers and baseball players. I also know a number of singers who use it, not to mention actors, as completing a few minutes of usable film over an eight- or ten-hour workday requires more concentration than a lot of people can supply all by themselves.

  As I’ve gotten to know Florence better, I’ve come to realize that she is a genuinely interesting woman, and very far from the character of Carol Brady. She’s been knocked on her behind many times and she always gets up—the most critical character attribute if you’re going to have any kind of a rewarding life.

  She’s a hell of a lady who made a huge difference in my own life, and an indefatigable, magnetic personality.

  • • •

  It seems like I’ve known Don Johnson forever. He used to refer to me as his good luck charm because I ran into him a day or so before Miami Vice got picked up by NBC and I told him the project sounded very strong. Years after, he and Melanie Griffith bought a house in Aspen, and Don and I passed the time by playing countless rounds of golf, not to mention a lot of fly fishing.

  When Melanie gave birth to their daughter, Dakota, I visited them at the hospital and was the second man to hold that beautiful child. A few years later, Jill and I were invited to Don’s annual Fourth of July party. Dakota was about four by that time, and when she saw us coming up the driveway, she took off running toward us. After a sprint of about fifty yards, Dakota came to a screeching halt and breathlessly asked Jill, “Where did you get that lip gloss?”

  I told Don he had a serious problem.

  All this is by way of explaining that our families became intertwined in a way I could never have foreseen when I worked with Melanie’s mother, Tippi Hedren, in an episode of It Takes a Thief. It was the period after the failure of Marnie, when Tippi was working out her contract with Universal.

  At the time, nobody at Universal really knew if there had been a relationship between Hitchcock and Tippi, but we all wondered. He had clearly been besotted with her. The Birds had been a great success—I think it’s Hitchcock’s last good picture—and despite the critical and financial failure of Marnie, Tippi was by far the best thing in the picture. It’s such a strange movie; Sean Connery’s character is actually more psychologically damaged than Tippi’s, but none of the other characters seem aware of it. For that matter, neither does Hitchcock.

  I knew a lot of actors who worked for Hitchcock, and, with the exception of Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant, none of them enjoyed the experience. If you were going to act for Hitchcock, you were going to be left more or less alone. Paul Newman told me Hitchcock’s attitude toward actors was “Wheel in the meat and shoot it.” (Small-world department: Tom Wright, who’s one of the best directors at NCIS, used to be a storyboard artist for Hitchcock.)

  Hitchcock was beloved by Lew Wasserman. Lew gave Hitchcock his own unit at Universal, housed in his own building, and made him very wealthy. The strange thing is that both Lew and Hitchcock tended to be cold—dust could come out of their mouths.

  I worked with Melanie in Crazy in Alabama, which was directed by Antonio Banderas, whom she married after she and Don divorced. It was the first—and only—picture directed by Antonio, and I thought he did a very creditable job. Most of my scenes were shot at the Chateau Marmont, and throughout the shoot Antonio was totally prepared. He knew what he wanted out of every line of the script and every shot. On top of that, I found him to be a kind, empathetic director, probably because he was an actor long before he began directing and knew actors’ problems from the inside.

  Melanie was accomplished and professional in a part that was quite a stretch for her—she played a woman who kills her husband, abandons her children (one of whom was played by Dakota), and takes off for Hollywood in search of fame and fortune, accompanied by the head of her late husband. As you can see, the title was an accurate reflection of the movie. Working with her, I realized that Melanie had a lot more on the ball than she’d been able to show professionally—she’s obviously a very sexy girl and got typed early.

  Melanie isn’t particularly like her mother, other than the fact that they’re both dreamers. Tippi presents as aristocratic, while Melanie is earthier, but they share a devotion to Tippi’s great passion, the Shambala Animal Preserve.

  Eventually Melanie and Antonio broke up. Melanie still lives in Aspen, and we see each other frequently, while Don has moved to Santa Barbara, which means that I lost one of my prime golfing buddies. On the other hand, I now have the possibility of working with a third generation of the family. Melanie’s daughter, Dakota, has obviously got a lot of talent and consistently makes daring choices.

  Dakota, if you need someone to play your grandfather, I’m available.

  • • •

  In 2015, I traveled to Romania to m
ake a movie entitled What Happened to Monday? for Raffaella de Laurentiis. My costars were Glenn Close and Willem Dafoe. I had known Glenn only glancingly—we were seated next to each other at a dinner party some years earlier. But even then we discovered mutual interests: Among other things, we had the same drama coach, an amazing man named Harold Guskin. Harold wrote a book entitled How to Stop Acting, the gist of which was that acting was about being rather than acting per se. Harold taught in his apartment in New York and inspired great loyalty from his students, among whom were James Gandolfini, Kevin Kline, and Bridget Fonda.

  Harold taught you not only to get out of your own way, but also to find out about the other person, which could be defined as the other character, the other actor, or the person you sat next to on the train. For Harold, it wasn’t about you, it was about the character—how would the character react, in an honest way, to this situation in which he found himself? Harold and I both believed that the worst thing a director could tell you was how to “act,” because you don’t want to act, you want to be.

  Harold had some similarities to Stella Adler, who taught her students how to live as much as she taught them how to act. Stella wanted them to be functioning members of society, to be alive to writing, art, everything that makes up culture. In other words, acting was not something that took place in a vacuum. To be a better actor, you had to be a better person, a better citizen. And beyond that, Harold and Stella both believed that acting was not a matter of producing a reaction in the actor, it was about producing a reaction in the audience. If the actor feels it, but the audience is left cold, what exactly has been accomplished?

  Glenn Close

  It follows, then, that Glenn is not concerned with stardom or power or any of the ancillary things that accompany fame. She’s all about honoring the work. She has some of the same focus and fierceness of Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck, and to my mind there is no higher praise for an actress. We thoroughly rehearsed our scenes at our hotel long before we got on the set, and we had several dinners together. She’s warm and ingratiating, an interesting woman with a huge amount of professional courage—Albert Nobbs, the movie in which she played a Victorian woman who lives her life as a man, was a tour de force that Glenn cowrote. It was just a little ahead of the curve in terms of the public interest in gender fluidity; if it was released today it would attract a lot more of the attention it deserved.

  In so many ways, acting is a strange business. You work hard with another actor, and you become entirely open to each other. You give more than the lines; you give them yourself at that moment in time. That kind of emotional openness has to be accompanied by a great deal of trust and mutual respect, so neither of you will be tempted to take advantage of that privileged connection, either professionally or personally. Glenn Close reminds you of what acting, at its best, is all about.

  EPILOGUE

  Writing this book has forced me to think long and hard about several key questions. One of them is: Do actresses have it harder than actors?

  As you may have gathered, I believe the answer is a resounding yes. Now, you may think that insecurity is insecurity, and that it’s implicit in the profession, so what’s the difference?

  Well, let me lay it out for you. It can’t be said too often—actresses have shorter careers than actors. This is a generalization, but for every Meryl Streep there are ten Demi Moores and Meg Ryans, women who earned major salaries and major parts for precisely as long as they were the Hot Young Girl and whose professional opportunities began to dry up just about the time they hit forty, or just about the time a fresh crop of hot young girls begin to assert themselves.

  This reality is something that every thirty-five-year-old actress knows. When the bell rings signaling another year, and rigorous self-appraisal leads you to the conclusion that you’re not Meryl Streep, that bell is not necessarily a cause for celebration, but rather a little ratcheting up of panic.

  Is this fair? Hell, no. It’s Darwinian. Only the strong—or the hugely talented—survive. That was the case when I came into the business after World War II, and it’s the case today.

  Men, on the other hand, can and often do go on acting into their fifties and beyond. Occasionally it gets a little uncomfortable. I’ve mentioned how incongruous it was for Gary Cooper to romance Audrey Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon. Honesty compels me to admit that it would have been far less jarring if Cary Grant had taken the part instead, which was indeed offered to him. (Can you believe it? Gary Cooper was second choice!)

  The difference was cosmetic; Coop was only three years older than Cary, but he looked fifteen years older. A few years later, Cary and Audrey worked together in Charade. Cary was always wary of such an age disparity on-screen, as he was concerned about looking like a dirty old man. He finessed these roles by nudging the writers to make the girl chase him rather than the other way around. Since he was Cary Grant, and was producing most of his later pictures himself, he had a way of getting what he wanted.

  But life has no screenwriter, and Cary preferred younger women offscreen. He married Dyan Cannon, had his daughter, Jennifer, with her, and Barbara, his last wife, was decades younger than he was.

  A few years ago, I made a movie with Louise Fletcher, who won an Academy Award for her performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I loved her in that movie, but had never met her before we worked together. Louise made the shoot a lovely experience—a fine actress with a great sense of humor, which is crucial for me.

  It struck me at the time that Louise’s career had suffered because she was simply too good in a completely unsympathetic part. She had played smaller parts before Cuckoo’s Nest, but that picture was her introduction to a mass audience, and they so completely bought her as Nurse Ratched that the opportunities that followed in the wake of that picture’s success were more limited than you would have imagined.

  It was the Anthony Perkins problem; Perkins had made many pictures before Psycho, but he hadn’t seemed to fit into any of them as well as he did as Norman Bates in the Hitchcock picture. The role typed him as a fidgety invert, and it was a type he could never escape.

  Tony ultimately did what I had done and went to Europe, where he tried making all sorts of pictures. But he finally capitulated and decided that playing Norman Bates was better than playing nothing at all. He did a batch of sequels to Psycho and even directed one of them.

  But there was no possibility of sequels to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, so Louise has only rarely had the chance to display her versatility for characters other than control-freak dragon ladies. Believe me, it’s the audience’s loss.

  There’s another way that the movies are harder on women: The minute an actress asserts her prerogatives, you can rest assured that there are hundreds of men all too willing to label her a bitch or worse, an attitude that is rarely the response when a male actor makes equivalent demands.

  It’s not as bad today as it was sixty years ago, but when I got into the movies it was a business run for and by a group of men who expected and appreciated it when women were submissive. When Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland demanded the same privileges that were granted as a matter of course to male stars—better scripts, more freedom—and would raise holy hell until they got what they wanted, they were granted only a grudging respect.

  Modern actresses are generally much more courageous than most of the women I grew up with, but then they can afford to be—they make a lot more money.

  In an earlier era, so much energy was spent—or misspent—worrying about the creation of an image and, once that was achieved, its maintenance.

  That process resulted in a different kind of actress, one who was beset by constant concerns. Insecurity, mainly. When I was starting out, a lot of actresses—and actors as well—spent a lot of time wondering if they were any good.

  But from what I see of young actors today, they don’t worry much over what other peo
ple might think of their performances. They just go and do them. There’s something about this generation that makes them particularly brave; their attitude is, if I fail, I fail. What of it? Onward.

  I think the best of the older generation who continue to work are Gena Rowlands and Diane Keaton. Of a younger group, I like Julia Roberts and Helen Hunt. Helen Hunt is a spectacular talent who I suspect is often overlooked because she’s not particularly competitive and usually gravitates toward smaller pictures that aren’t going to get much attention in a crowded marketplace. But make no mistake—she is the real deal. She and Julia Roberts manage to have it both ways in that they capture both sides of the feminine principle: They can embody a fantasy figure and they can also capture a woman’s reality.

  And a word needs to be said for Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence, both of whom will have long careers.

  Someone once asked George Balanchine what would happen to his ballets after he was gone. I like his answer: “People dance while I’m here, they dance a certain way. When I’m gone, they will continue dancing, but somebody will rehearse them different and it will all be a little different, with different approach, different intensity. So a few years go by and I won’t be here. Will be my ballets, but will look different.”

  I like his fatalism in the face of the facts. Things change, and that’s the way it has to be. But you’ll pardon me if I continue to watch Stanwyck and Davis and Lupino for just a little longer.

  All the women in this book had different kinds of careers, different needs as actresses, different needs as women. But almost all of them shared one primary characteristic: They said yes.

  They didn’t linger on the inequities of show business; they figured that the business had worked to their advantage when they were young, so when the balance of power turned against them when they grew old, that was just the way of the world.