Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker

by Stephen Galloway

  —

  The couple were strapped. After paying to pack their things and ship them to Los Angeles, their savings were almost gone. They had just a few hundred dollars left, barely enough to cover the obligatory first and last months’ rent.

  Michael was due to begin work at the Cedars of Lebanon hospital, which meant he would be gone for twelve hours or more each day. Money would start trickling in—$300 per month, nowhere near enough to pay for rent and food and gas, let alone the occasional night out.

  Lansing used her last moments of unalloyed freedom to visit Universal Studios (where she tried to sneak away from the tour group, until a security guard dragged her back into the fold) and MGM (where she spotted her first real-life star, Dr. Kildare’s Richard Chamberlain, but failed to make contact). Then she searched for a place to live.

  She found what she needed on North Kenmore Avenue, a quiet street in the eastern part of Hollywood, nestled between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, where she and Michael moved into a boxy two-story building wrapped around a courtyard and pool. The place was close enough to Michael’s work that he could get there on foot. After signing a month-to-month rental agreement, Lansing devoted her time to reading Fitzgerald and Hemingway while waiting for her belongings to arrive.

  A week later, she set out for her first job interview, driving downtown for a meeting with a harried official from the teachers’ union who told her to call at 7:00 a.m. sharp the following day to find out if a substitute teacher was needed. The next morning she rose early and discovered she had a job.

  That day, she set out for the forbidden zone of South Central L.A., not realizing as she drove south on Crenshaw Boulevard, passing Adams and Jefferson Boulevards, that she was crossing an invisible threshold beyond which most sheltered Caucasian girls feared to tread. It was well before the era when the Crips and the Bloods would run rampant and a crack epidemic would decimate the inner city, but South Central was still reeling from one of the most destructive upheavals of modern times, the Watts Riots of 1965, which had climaxed in a conflagration that lasted almost a week.

  “The city burning is Los Angeles’ deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion wrote in her 1968 essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.”

  Entering a high school in the Crenshaw district, Lansing was unfazed by the staring eyes and occasional titters from the boys and girls she hoped to transform. She went straight to the principal’s office and introduced herself.

  “He looked at me and wondered why they had sent me,” she said. “Then I was led into a classroom that seemed a lot like the classrooms I knew in Chicago, with a blackboard and a box of chalk and high windows.”

  She was here to teach English and math, the subjects she knew best, which represented her unusual combination of left-and right-brain strengths. But she had other aspirations, too: as a student, she had loved the work of anthropologist Margaret Mead and in her private fantasies had often thought of venturing to faraway places to help those less privileged than herself. South Central was not quite the Third World, but it was poles apart from the environment she knew. To her delight, she discovered she had a natural aptitude for teaching, even though she was not much older than her students.

  “They were great,” she said. “I loved teaching, and I was never afraid. Maybe it was my naïveté, but I didn’t feel any sense of danger.”

  Still, the challenges she faced were hard to ignore. Ten months had passed since the fires were extinguished, but the embers left from the riots were still smoldering, and Lansing could sense that as she moved from one school to another.

  “I took the toughest assignments,” she said. “I went into reform schools where they only had plastic knives and forks, because nobody ever trusted the kids with real ones.”

  —

  While Lansing taught—searching for work as a model and actress at the same time—Michael buried himself in medicine. Much as he cared for his wife, he did not fully connect with her aspirations, and failed to understand how deeply they possessed her. Like her, he still had one foot set in the belief system of the 1950s, an age when men were men and women were women, their roles separate and distinctly unequal. He was glad she was earning money, but in his heart he expected her to give up her plans for him.

  “I was going to be an intern at Cedars,” he said. “I never thought we were going to Los Angeles for what she wanted.” Her acting was a hobby, he believed, and “then she got serious.”

  In these early days, when their adult personalities were still coalescing and well before their differences would cleave them apart, Michael spent all his free time with his wife.

  “We used to go out to eat, though we had no money for anywhere grand,” said Lansing. “We went to Denny’s and other simple places, but they were fun. We were used to Chicago, where you could buy a steak for $1.19. Michael was always working, six days a week, so a lot of the time we just stayed in and watched TV. And at night, whenever he was at the hospital, I’d go to see him and eat with him there, because it was only two blocks away. Without him, I read a lot and went to the movies, sometimes with a friend and often alone.”

  She felt sure her relationship would remain the same here as it was before. But strains were beginning to show. Michael, like every intern, was exhausted to the breaking point. At the same time, his interests were changing. He was increasingly drawn to plastic surgery, which puzzled his wife, though she never told him; she had imagined he was her own Dr. Kildare, a future heart surgeon or neurologist. But plastic surgery? Wasn’t that all about fixing noses and enlarging breasts?

  Her husband, in turn, was surprised to find the seventeen-year-old girl he had fallen for transforming into an ambitious woman. She had cast off the last vestiges of her awkward adolescence with the help of a surgeon friend of his who removed a small bump on her nose. Even if she did not realize it, Michael did: men were all over her. He could hardly turn his back without some stranger pouncing. In a city built on the belief that looks were everything—where Raquel Welch, wearing a fur bikini in the soon-to-be-released One Million Years B.C., was the epitome of sexuality—she was a valuable commodity, and Michael hated it.

  “I was jealous,” he admitted.

  While her husband paced the hallways of the old Cedars, Lansing soaked up everything Los Angeles had to offer. Clubs from the Troubador to the Whisky a Go Go were beginning to make their names, breathing life into new bands such as Buffalo Springfield and The Doors and redefining Sunset, the street where the Brownsteins had first stayed, as the center of all that was hip. Women were abandoning their twinsets and pearls in favor of low-cut dresses and the miniskirts that designer Mary Quant had popularized in London. Big boots were trampling all over demure heels (Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” hit number one on the charts just before the Brownsteins moved to L.A.). It was a brave new world, irresistible to any starry-eyed immigrant, especially one harboring dreams of glory. She began to make new friends, several of them young women newly arrived like herself, few known to Michael. One day he snapped.

  “I remember—this isn’t nice—when she was out and was coming back late, I was just livid,” he said. “She was coming up the street and I ran in front of the car. She stopped, and I opened the door and pulled her out. I was in a rage.”

  —

  As time progressed, Lansing’s job proved more demanding than she had expected.

  It was tolerable when she found a stack of pornography on her desk. That she could handle with aplomb. “I suggested we make it into a bulletin board,” she said, and followed that up with a lesson on human reproduction. But she got a bitter dose of reality when a student threw a shoe at her without repercussions. And fear kicked in when “a gang came in and started to beat up one of the students.” The gang members were on a quest for vengeance—why, she never learned—and began to pound one of her pupils as
he screamed for help and his classmates stared at him, frozen. “I tried to get them off,” said Lansing, “then they tried to hit me. I went to find the principal, but he wasn’t there because they’d thrown a Molotov cocktail in his office. He was sitting in the courtyard.”

  When the gang members rampaged through the school and even tied up some teachers before the police arrived, Lansing had enough. “I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ ” she remembered. “I called my parents and begged them for help. I asked for money to leave my job. But they refused. My father had never liked the idea of my leaving Chicago, and perhaps he wanted me to come back. All he said was, ‘Be careful.’ And my mother handled it the same way.”

  It was tough love.

  “I was really angry,” Lansing admitted.

  —

  Throughout, she was living on hope.

  Leaving work in East Los Angeles for an audition one afternoon, she pulled into a gas station to slip out of her drab clothes and into something more enticing. She did not get the job, but she saw the effect, and from then on that became her routine.

  “It was always the same,” she said. “I’d leave school and stop off somewhere to change my clothes. I owned one dress, a sexy pink number with a scooped neckline that showed a little cleavage, and I wore it over and over because I didn’t have the money to buy anything else.”

  At her first audition, she discovered she was not alone. It was a cattle call, as she saw when she stepped into a hall packed with young women like herself. Each had migrated here from another city or state; each had come with the same goal of becoming a star. Few were serious actresses or appeared all that interested in their craft; riches and celebrity were the treasures they sought, the pots of gold they hoped to find at the end of the Los Angeles rainbow. This was the epicenter of fame and fortune, and a magnet for those who craved one or both.

  After waiting for hours, Lansing had the briefest of meetings, then handed over an eight-by-ten photo of herself, just like all the other girls—they were always “girls,” not women—and left without getting to show what she could do. This became a pattern.

  “We were thrown into rejection early on,” said Linda Gray, one of the young actresses who bonded with Lansing and who would later star in Dallas. “You would mop the floor or hold up a box of soap powder. It wasn’t very creative, but it was what we did. And [some jobs] were lucrative. There was a standard fee. When I did still photography, it was $25 an hour, which was fantastic.”

  Such jobs were rare, and if one actress got them, that meant others did not. This was eat-or-be-eaten, Hollywood at its most naked and raw, and perhaps because of that, when Lansing tried to befriend her rivals, they often rebuffed her and she retreated into her shell. It never occurred to her that they might be as vulnerable as she, or that they might be even lonelier and more afraid. All she saw was their perfection and her lack of it.

  “I’d wait in line for hours with a hundred girls,” she said. “They were all five foot ten, with blue eyes and long, flowing hair. When my turn came, I’d show my pictures, toss my hair, and wait anxiously to see if I’d made the final round. Everyone was in competition and nobody talked to anyone else. It was horrible.”

  Even worse was the reality of the “casting couch,” the sexual license exercised by the powers-that-be. “Many people made a move on me,” said Lansing. “The worst was this agent, who was very well known, who I thought was going to represent me. He said he wanted to meet, and I was really excited. This sounds so stupid: he wanted to meet and talk in an apartment of his in the middle of the day. I went there, and he came out in his boxer shorts. It was so bad it was funny. I just said, ‘This is ridiculous,’ and walked out.”

  Knowing she needed to lift her game artistically, she began taking acting lessons twice a week and stuck to the work no matter what other obligations got in the way.

  “She was very intellectual and very quick at analyzing,” said her acting coach, Richard Brander, “but it took her longer to get to the emotion. There was a scene adapted from an Irwin Shaw short story, ‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.’ She had to argue with the man who played her husband, and she couldn’t let go. So I took [the husband] aside and said, ‘Give her a little shove’—and when he did, there was fire in her eyes. She got so angry, she started really falling into the scene. Afterward she went, ‘Whoa!’ I said, ‘Now you’re involved.’ Then her real sensitivity started to come through.”

  Lansing had a brief taste of success when she landed a national shampoo commercial opposite the then-unknown Farrah Fawcett. Other modeling work followed, including commercials for Max Factor and Ivory Soap. But this was modeling, not acting. She was far from an overnight sensation, and as her first year bled into a second, her sense of conviction began to sag, only bouncing back when she was introduced to Gabriel Katzka, a producer who would later make 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

  “He was like an uncle to me,” she recalled. “He said, ‘What are you doing here? You’re a nice Jewish girl. Go back to Chicago.’ I said, ‘I want to be an actress.’ He said, ‘But don’t you know how terrible this place is?’ I kept telling him how nice everyone was, and this elegant man walked in, in a beautiful suit. When he left, I said: ‘Now that’s a perfect gentleman. Why do you say everybody’s so bad?’ He said, ‘You think that’s a perfect gentleman?’ and smiled.”

  The gentleman was producer Walter Wanger, known for making Cleopatra, but even better known inside the gossip mill of Hollywood for shooting at a man’s balls after he reportedly had an affair with Wanger’s wife.

  “Listen,” said Katzka, “I’m going to protect you. I’m going to make some calls so nobody takes advantage.” Whatever he did worked, and from that point on Lansing was inoculated, at least to some degree, against overzealous admirers.

  Through Katzka, she was led to a manager, Joe Wander. With some trepidation, she set out for Wander’s house, afraid of what it meant that he was inviting her to his home, and even more worried when she laid eyes on his giant dog.

  “Joe was a real ‘dese, dems and dose’ kind of guy who talked in malapropisms, but he didn’t do anything harmful, and he never made a pass at me,” she said.

  With his rough-hewn manner and great smile—another actress client called him “a sleazy looking version of Marcello Mastroianni…likable and engaging”—he turned out to be genuinely interested in her career. Shoving aside the debris that littered his sofa, he invited her to sit, then listened to her stories while he gave her every assurance of success, promising that she would soon be catapulted to stardom. His willingness to take her on, his straightforward manner and lack of pretense made him instantly appealing. He laid out a strategy for his new client: he would send her to multiple auditions while spreading the word about this brilliant unknown.

  “He was an operator who was always looking for an angle,” said Lansing. “He would fudge my résumé and tell me, ‘Don’t worry, no one will check.’ ”

  Some of his clients believed he had other sidelines, though they could never figure out what. “It was very mysterious,” said Annabelle Weston, an actress. “We didn’t know much about his background. But he was as nice as could be.”

  Wander was a cut above most managers Lansing met, many of them Los Angeles versions of Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose. He would spend hours boosting her self-esteem, reminding her she was both beautiful and talented. He may not have been Pygmalion to her Galatea, but for a rough-and-tumble man, he was kind, walking her through each audition before it took place and always returning her calls.

  While his client was going to meetings, Wander served as a de facto press agent, mailing out news items that were fodder for the gossip columns. Lansing was a stunning ingenue, he proclaimed, whom he had first seen in a performance of The Crucible at Northwestern. It did not matter that he had never seen the production, let alone that no such production had taken place; the hype was what counted.

  “Sherry was so outstan
ding that I just had to go backstage and make my pitch, corny as it sounds,” he told the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner’s James Bacon, a veteran newsman who was likely wise to these falsehoods. When Lansing objected, Wander told her to be quiet, that this was the way things were done in Hollywood. The news might have been printed in black and white, he said, but show business was full of grays.

  “For years, I thought that’s just how things were done,” said Lansing. “This was the old Hollywood, where myth became reality.”

  —

  The new Hollywood had its own version of reality that was fast moving away from the old one, though few realized it in the mid-1960s.

  Blow-Up, the story of a London photographer who witnesses a murder, and Alfie, which made a star of its Cockney hero Michael Caine (both released in 1966), were harbingers of a new era, with their frank discussions of sex, their heightened realism and critique of contemporary mores, even if neither had the ground-shaking impact of Mike Nichols’s The Graduate and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (both from 1967).

  It would be three years before the watershed of 1969, when a low-budget release named Easy Rider turned the old model on its head by proving that a picture made for less than $500,000, starring a bunch of longhairs and unknowns, could outearn most studio releases. That in turn heralded an outpouring of more sexual, psychological and socially probing pictures from the “kids with beards,” in Billy Wilder’s phrase—a host of young directors itching to remake film, among them Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather), Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show), Hal Ashby (The Last Detail), Woody Allen (Annie Hall), Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces), Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey), Robert Altman (Nashville), William Friedkin (The French Connection) and Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver).

  Their works were not the distant gunfire of European auteurs whose pictures had more impact on filmmakers than on mainstream America. Rather, they were grenades lobbed into the very territory to which the studios had laid claim: the thirteen thousand theaters sprinkled across the heartland, one-third of them drive-ins.