Recently, the failure of such critically acclaimed films as Quiz Show and The Shawshank Redemption to draw big numbers has intimidated the studios, blocking them from giving the green light to other adult films with superb scripts that might meet the same fate, for example, Evening Star, the sequel to Terms of Endearment. In the final analysis, the studios go for grosses and put art on hold.
So the dance of feeling, humanity, money, and control goes on. And as the years pass and we come closer to the turn of not only a century, but a millennium, one can feel the attempt to balance the ledger between talent and responsibility. Everyone is doing his best really. No one (with a few exceptions) is purposefully malevolent or freakish in the need to control. The lies, the manipulation, the seductions, the tears, the subjugation of one’s very soul are usually done in the name of being true and authentic to one’s purpose and art. It is a colossal paradox: to be true to one’s authentic vision sometimes requires the basest of fakery, disinformation, duplicity, hypocrisy, distortion, spuriousness, and unctuous deception!
That is why Hollywood is referred to as the Big Knife. That is why civilians are fascinated by how we conduct our “reality.” We do things in Hollywood in the name of entertainment that most governments do in the name of espionage.
Money, power, sex, and talent are the checkers on our board. The honored ingredients necessary to achieving the shiniest American Dream of all.
In the nineties, we sense that we are coming to a point where we must resolve the greed and longing for those checkers. Are we giving back as much as we receive? How low will we stoop to titillate the basic instincts of our audiences just to make money?
We are coming to a point where spiritually and sociologically we need to accept the responsibility of the First Amendment. We have not yet evolved into loving and maturely aware people in this land of unbridled freedom and democracy. Too often we are like cruel, self-involved children whose very survival depends upon material protection and territorial imperatives. If our excuse in Hollywood is that we are simply reflecting the culture when we tell our stories, then it is time to demonstrate our creative leadership and tell stories that contribute to the culture we would like to reflect.
These illusions we spin, these dreams we weave, are important. They can even be life altering.
And as we seem to be spinning out of control while plunging into a new age, I and many others are finding that we need to establish a dominion over ourselves rather than imposing domination on others. We can do something about who we are. We can really do nothing about anyone else.
Our films, our art, our books help us to see who we are as well as who we might aspire to be.
I hope for a time when the exercise of and approaches to self-knowledge will no longer be ridiculed. When the sharing of human experience can be freely expressed without the accusation of sentimentality or of washing one’s linen in public. I hope for an environment where the investigation of self will not be looked upon as self-indulgent and self-centered, but rather as self-centering. If we are not centered in self, how can we be centered in our work and our expression of human life?
To make a film that works, each of us involved has had to look long and deeply into ourselves—where we came from, where we’ve been, and where we wish to go—before we can even begin to know and understand the characters we wish to paint upon the Big Screen. When we look honestly within ourselves, it is clear that our view of the world changes. We are not victims of the world we see, we are victims of the way we see the world.
We in Hollywood make and sculpt and fashion unusual pictures of the world we live in, in accordance with how we see ourselves. It is easy to commit millions of dollars to violent pictures if we feel violent within ourselves. Altering our perspective of the world will only come from alterations within ourselves. To me, that is our challenge in Hollywood as we head into the year 2000. Even nature seems to be saying “a balance comes from within. Begin now before it is too late.”
16
AAAAARGHH!
Acting With Aging, Anxiety, Anger,
and Accomplishment
It’s no fun becoming old, but it can be fun for an actress because it’s a nice feeling to command the respect that comes with age, wisdom, and experience. Older actors become a kind of royalty. When we were young, it was obvious what we didn’t know. With age we are a mystery. When we were young, people wanted to know us from the outside in. With age they want to know us from the inside out. In youth people wanted to know us in bed. In age they simply want to know us. Our interior gold attracts many “minors.”
When I was twenty years old and did my first picture, the seriousness of becoming a long-distance runner never occurred to me. I was flippant about my talent and early success, presuming that the magic would always be there. I didn’t know enough about the perils of success to worry about its impermanence. It didn’t occur to me to police myself or take care that I wasn’t robbed of my due or worry that someone else might possibly be gaining on me. I had an interesting life, was making lots of money, had a husband who seemed to emotionally support and believe in me. I simply felt driven to express myself. When I look back at how supremely naive I was, I don’t know how I lasted. On the other hand, perhaps my attitude was what sustained me. I expected that success was and always would be my choice.
The lessons of failure and aging would come later as my life and my work unfolded, and they were directly related to what I learned from the characters I played. My young parts, when I was in my twenties, were wide-eyed, curious, and openhearted. Something like me. I trusted in people as I found them, walked into the face of danger because it was an adventure, fell in love at the drop of a good love scene, and never stopped to consider the consequences of much of anything. I didn’t analyze my characters much, never had pages of notes and suggestions for the director, and rarely studied my lines the night before. Frankly, I winged it…. Something like the characters I was playing.
Yes, my characters were usually what I would call “pixilated.” They were so pixilated, people called me “kooky” for many years. Perhaps I drew characters to me that helped me analyze myself in an entertaining way. The girls I played in The Trouble with Harry and Artists and Models were zany, droll, chirpy characters who got away with being outrageous. I remember giving an interview during those years in which I claimed to be designing an image for myself that would enable me to get away with anything.
My character as Princess Aouda in Around the World in Eighty Days was my plea to be authentic in playing any nationality. Eighty Days was also the commencement of my love for travel.
Japan was my first location, and from then on my life became a travelogue, which remains true to this day. I found that I was either playing parts that exemplified what I longed to do, or I continued in my life what I had begun on the screen.
I couldn’t happily make Westerns or pictures on location outside in the sun because I had hypersensitive blue eyes. I devoured Vitamin A just to keep my eyes open. I didn’t care much for dusty cowboy towns or horses anyway, and I felt silly playing Glenn Ford’s girlfriend in The Sheepman, trying to make peace between cattle ranchers and farmers, neither of whom I knew anything about or even cared about.
And when I worked with Shirley Booth in The Matchmaker and Hot Spell (she was my idol at the time), it never occurred to me that I would one day be her age (forty-five!!). But I was learning through these scripts the emotional tone difference between playing comedy and drama.
Then came Some Came Running, which changed my acting life. It enabled me to combine comedy and drama. Smiling through tears became my specialty.
The process of fashioning the acting magic is an exercise no one else in the world can comprehend unless they’ve tried it.
I personally need to know the physical characteristics and body movement of the person I’m playing. From there I work inward.
When I arrived on the set of the location for Some Came Running, I had no idea how I would play
the part until I stepped off the bus in the first scene with Frank Sinatra. I looked down and my toes were turned inward. I realized then that Ginny Moorehead wanted to walk pigeon-toed. She wanted to stumble and be slightly uncoordinated, just as she was in her life. She wanted to lurch through life lovingly, putting other people’s welfare before her own.
When I was sure of her body movement, I knew what she chose to put on her body. The dresses were her misguided idea of sexy; so tight that her bra strap always showed. I knew she wasn’t fastidious and never even noticed that her black roots showed beneath her dyed red hair. Because she was so unconcerned with herself, she elicited a feeling of warmth and pity from the audience. When Dean and Frank chimed, “Hell, even she knows she’s a pig,” it made a cruel sense.
Ginny was one of my favorite characters because I didn’t have to search for her. She revealed herself to me immediately. She was a definable character.
Probably I have been a character actress from the beginning. I like eccentricity and contradiction in a character. I adore unpredictability that surprises even me. I love going to the edge of characters and never going over. From the beginning I loved the risk. Then again, sometimes the character didn’t demand such audacity.
Fran Kubelik in The Apartment was one of those. I could not articulate anything definite about her. In fact, I was never really sure who she was. That was precisely how she was … unformed, a victim of circumstance who didn’t have an evident self-profile to fall back upon. She reacted to everyone else around her. I, therefore, had to react, not act, in that picture. It was finer and more subtle writing than I was used to.
Billy Wilder and Izzy Diamond were so brilliant in their observations about life that often Jack Lemmon and I would interact, in the commissary over lunch without ever knowing that we were enacting a scene that was missing. A day or two later, what we had said would appear as script pages.
Dean and Frank were teaching me to play gin rummy at the time we were shooting The Apartment. I would play gin in between setups. That’s how the gin game ended up in the movie. I used to hold up four fingers when my mouth said three, just for fun. That’s in the movie too.
During the scene where my brother comes to rescue me and there is a physical scuffle, I had a hard time reacting with panic and concern, so Billy got a huge piece of wood and cracked it in two in front of my face below the camera. I was properly shocked.
During the scene where Fran is left alone on Christmas Eve, something went wrong with the sound. When the picture was over, I went in to “loop” (dub in my voice) with crying. The soundtrack during that crying scene came from a bottle of menthol I inhaled. It made me blubber into the microphone…. It’s hard for me to think it’s necessary to really work up the tears when the same effect can be achieved with a little well-used Hollywood technology.
I don’t mean to belittle real feelings translated to the screen, and I won’t. But it is true that an audience always reacts more to what you hold back as an actor than what you express. Think of Bette Davis dying in Dark Victory. Audiences can identify with that withholding feeling.
The same goes for playing drunk. As Jack Nicholson told me, you play trying not to be drunk. Again, that’s what the audience identifies with, because they always try not to be drunk when they are.
A director can’t really help an actor with those internal mechanisms. He can be helpful by being kind and patient or he can think he’s being helpful by challenging you to do it or else.
When Billy Wilder approached Jack Lemmon and me to do Irma La Douce, I was thrilled that I would be doing a musical, which was its original incarnation in Europe and on Broadway. But Billy decided against the music. Perhaps that was because he had never done one. Many good directors feel that musicals with a good script are just that—a good story with music. But a musical picture is a different language altogether. The structure of the plot, by necessity, has to be different, because it is continually interrupted by musical numbers. A scene can’t provide all the information in a musical. The lyrics of a song have to extend the flow of information in a scene, otherwise the song is redundant and the audience feels bored by the repetition.
I didn’t particularly like the plot of Irma. I thought it was caricaturish and hard to believe. The music took it into the realm of fantasy, and that’s what made it work for me. Without the French music, I had a problem.
But Billy was right, for himself, not to make it a musical. He said he didn’t know how. So he made a kind of Feydeau farce instead. But I felt the movie was slightly crude, clumsy. I didn’t understand why I got nominated for an Oscar, and would have been really nonplussed had I won. I knew I wouldn’t, but had that happened, I was ready to make a speech for the legalization of the oldest profession in the world.
The biggest disappointment to me in my early career was William Wyler’s remake of his own film These Three, retitled The Children’s Hour. It was adapted quite faithfully by John Michael Hayes from Lillian Hellman’s play, only in the earlier film version two women were in love with the same man. This time Willy intended to do it right: a man (Jim Garner) and a woman (me) were in love with the same woman (Audrey Hepburn).
I, therefore, conceived Martha’s character (as per the script) to lovingly build her adoration and emotional involvement with the character of Karen so that the audience would realize early on what was going on. In fact, Martha was unaware of her feelings being in any way inappropriate until the little girl exaggerated Martha’s behavior into a lie. Within that lie was the ounce of truth.
Audrey and I became very close working together. She was, and remained until her death, one of my favorite people. Audrey trusted Willy and on many occasions would turn to me, sigh, and remark with confidence how wonderful it was to work with someone to whom you could entrust your artistic integrity.
But after the shoot was completed, Willy got cold feet about the lesbian subject. He cut out all the scenes that portrayed Martha falling in love with Karen. Scenes where I (Martha) lovingly pressed Karen’s clothes, or brushed her hair, or baked her cookies ended up on the cutting-room floor. The audience was supposed to be aware of the growing love Martha developed for Karen, which is what gave the film tension, because Karen was not aware either. In eliminating those scenes, Willy gutted the intention of the film.
Thus, in the end, he was not faithful to Lillian Hellman’s play and the result was a disaster with the critics. One called it a “cultural antique.” Another led his review with “The lesbian said the better.”
I was crushed. So was Willy. But he hadn’t been willing to take the chance and go all the way.
• • •
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE, AS THE YEARS PASSED, I realized that I had carved a career out of playing victims. I hadn’t been aware of this until I analyzed my parts.
Ask Any Girl with David Niven was a comedy in which a small-town girl was victimized by the big city. Career was the drama of a party girl victimized by her own behavior. Fran Kubelik in The Apartment was the victim of a married man’s insensitive guilt and the male power structure in the business where she worked. Finally, as her life became too much for her, she tried to kill herself.
In The Children’s Hour, my character, Martha, was the victim of a child’s lie.
In Can-Can, although my character was strong and funny, she was a victim of the whims of Frank Sinatra.
In Two for the Seesaw, Gittel Mosca was the prize victim of Greenwich Village … street-wise, dancer-wise, Mitchum-wise, marriage-wise, life-wise.
In Irma La Douce, the title character worked hard so her pimp could continue to live the lifestyle to which he was accustomed.
In Yellow Rolls-Royce, I was a gangster’s moll trying to make the best of things. In Woman Times Seven, all seven women were victims of their circumstances told in endearingly Vittorio De Sica terms.
In What a Way to Go, each of my character’s husbands died, leaving me with millions of dollars—and no life.
The ultimate m
usical victim without parallel was Sweet Charity Hope Valentine. She was just like her name—sweet, full of hope, believed she was a valentine, and gave everybody her charity. Of course, Charity should have been a hard-bitten little whore who was basically only serious about the money she kept in her coffee can.
It was time to do something else. I had learned all I needed to learn about the various forms of victimization. I graduated to roles involving women’s relationships to work and family, but not before going through the first phase of discovering what it meant to be unwanted and out of work.
THE YEAR WAS 1976 AND I WAS FORTY-TWO YEARS OLD.
I had given up a year and a half to work for George McGovern in 1972, done two films that were unsuccessful, Desperate Characters and The Possession of Joel Delaney, and made my foray into television with a series, Shirley’s World, that was so bad I made certain I was unavailable to watch it every Wednesday night at 9:30.
Suddenly I realized the meaning of the word “has-been.” It seemed to be happening to me. I had been away from Hollywood because of my political work, and when I did return to pictures, my choices were dreadful. There were no parts for me. I never felt I was blacklisted because of my opposition to Nixon (although most of Hollywood supported him). The reason I couldn’t get work was because I was unbankable. The days of being the new quirky girl in town were long past. I was middle-aged and gaining—not only in my life, but my body.
I became depressed and felt underutilized. I was a racehorse with some Thoroughbred blood in my veins and I couldn’t find a racetrack.
I was living in New York, enjoying life to a certain extent, but aware that with every day that passed I was becoming more and more estranged from my real home—Hollywood. For the first time, my future was murky, undependable. I began to worry about myself. Gone were the work-crammed younger days of adoration and flippancy. I was feeling the ravages of time and the stark wisdom of reality.
My Lucky Stars Page 32