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

by Stephen Galloway

  Douglas found an ally in her, not least when she badgered Melnick to raise the budget from $4.8 million to $5.9 million. (Fonda received $500,000 of that, Jack Lemmon $250,000, and Douglas $262,000, which included his producing and acting services, according to documents in the Columbia archive.)

  “In those days, Sherry was smoking these black Sherman cigarettes, and she sat down with us on the script,” said Douglas. “I was, I would say, pretty defensive, but smart enough to realize she knew what she was talking about. She was a real structuralist.”

  Lansing sided with him when Melnick demanded he shave off the beard he had grown for the part. “I remember her coming in with a gift she brought in a little wrapped box from Melnick,” said Douglas. “In it were a comb and some scissors, and a note from Dan saying, ‘I trust you know what to do with this.’ I was stubborn on that one and I ignored it. She had very mixed feelings about being the messenger. She handled it diplomatically but ultimately supported me.”

  Lansing knew from her experience with Hawks that no matter how rational and well-argued an executive’s point, ultimately it would mean nothing once the shoot began, when the director and stars alone would determine what was done. “An executive has to build trust,” she said. “Otherwise the talent isn’t going to do a thing.”

  This was reinforced the hard way when Fonda called her one day, livid after learning that the studio wanted to change the picture’s title. Its marketing executives thought nobody would understand what The China Syndrome meant, and did not want to spend a fortune to explain it. Among the alternative titles were Misuse of Power, Event at Ventana, An Element of Risk, What Price Power, The Power Syndrome, Power Hungry, Chain Reaction and Scramm. Many early production documents referred to the movie as Eyewitness, but neither that nor any other title had been locked in when Lansing’s assistant said Fonda was on the line. The executive was secretly intimidated by her.

  “Sherry,” said Fonda, “I hear some idiot wants to change the title. That’s totally unacceptable.”

  “The marketing people are afraid the audience won’t understand it,” said Lansing.

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Fonda. “We’ll explain the title, and then of course they’ll understand it, just like Dog Day Afternoon. Wasn’t that a good title?”

  “Y-yes,” stammered Lansing.

  “Great,” said Fonda, hanging up the phone.

  —

  Nowhere did Fonda impress Lansing more than during the shoot, which got under way in January 1978. At various times on location, the actress was vilified by locals, still incensed by her activism to end the Vietnam War. There were screams of “Commie bitch,” and on one site a man dropped a wrench that “would have cracked her skull,” according to her co-star, Jack Lemmon. But Fonda refused to cave in to the pressure and kept working as if nothing had happened.

  Despite getting off to a shaky start (both Fonda and Douglas had the flu), the shoot stuck to its schedule until Fonda was involved in an accident while filming a sequence in which she had to board a helicopter.

  “I was wearing very elevated espadrilles, kind of three-inch platforms,” she said. “I was stupid. It was a scene up in the mountains where there had been a car accident, and I was running and hit a pebble and it twisted my ankle and I went down [and broke] my right foot. I’d broken it three times already. No big deal.”

  She was rushed to the hospital with Bridges racing alongside the car, calling to her through the open window as she ripped off her blouse and threw it out, yelling for him to put it on her standin and keep filming.

  Lansing was not there. By then she had been involved in a far graver accident of her own.

  —

  Rain was bucketing down on the evening of March 4, 1978, as Lansing hurried through Beverly Hills with her date, James Aubrey.

  The former CBS and MGM executive was another of the older, powerful men to whom the young woman gravitated, mystifying even those who felt they knew her the best. “He was an enormous protector of hers and he cared deeply about her, as crazy as he was—and he was crazy,” said Columbia executive Robert Cort.

  Known as “the Smiling Cobra,” Aubrey was among the most vilified executives in Hollywood history, but Lansing seemed blind to his less pleasant traits—his willingness to fire others and indifference to what they felt—and saw in him a reflection of Howard Roark, the iconoclastic hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, one of the books that had marked her the most as a teenager.

  “That was a landmark novel for me, and I fell in love with his character,” she said. “He was an iconic figure, wonderfully self-possessed, and didn’t need the approval of others, and neither did Jim. He was utterly self-contained, and that was alluring.”

  Men like this appealed to her because they had qualities she felt she lacked: strength, security and self-assurance. “They did not need approval, they did not need to be liked,” she said. “And those were traits I admired and wished I had. But I also felt, like with my father, that underneath the tough front was a softness I could reach.”

  She and Aubrey were crossing Wilshire Boulevard, heading toward the Fine Arts Theatre, where they planned to see a new Alain Delon film, Monsieur Klein, when the driver of a passing car failed to spot them. Even though they were in the crosswalk and another car had stopped to let them walk on, the first car kept going at around 40 m.p.h. and struck Lansing head-on.

  “The car plowed into my right leg and flipped me so high in the air that my head smashed down on its roof, cracking my skull,” she said. “I was carried thirty feet and dropped at the curb. Jim was clipped by the car and spun around, and seriously hurt, too, but I took the brunt of the hit.”

  The driver, a young lawyer who had passed his bar exam that very day, pulled over, but there was nothing he could do. He was not drunk; he simply had not noticed them, and now stood by helplessly as the horror unfolded. Passers-by stopped to gape, the traffic came to a dead halt, and an ambulance arrived within minutes to whisk Aubrey and Lansing away to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

  “My leg was shattered,” said Lansing. “I needed immediate surgery or I was at risk of losing it.”

  Weeks earlier, she had sent a chocolate leg to the China Syndrome crew, jokingly telling them to “break a leg.” Now it was her leg that was broken, and the situation was deadly serious. Lying in the emergency room, she floated in and out of consciousness, only vaguely aware of the peril she was in, when she overheard doctors murmuring among themselves, saying they might have to amputate the limb.

  “As I was being rolled into the operating room, I mumbled that I was allergic to anesthesia, even though I wasn’t,” she said. “I knew Norton’s first wife had died from it, but I was delirious.”

  The hospital staff scrambled to find somebody who could tell them the truth, and reached Melnick, who had just canceled a skiing trip with Spielberg because of the bad weather. He tried to contact Margot, but did not know how to reach her. Lansing’s secretary was the only person he could think of who might have her phone number—and nobody knew the secretary’s last name. “That’s how sexist things were then,” said Lansing.

  Eventually Melnick got hold of the number, but not before calling Dr. Harvard Ellman, a leading orthopedic surgeon who had recently operated on his shoulder, and who fortuitously was at Cedars that evening. He came to see Lansing at once. She had to have the operation, he told her, and she would have it with anesthesia.

  After an MRI revealed that her skull was fractured, a four-hour surgery ensued, with surgeons operating on her head and leg. It was touch and go whether Ellman would be able to save the leg. “Later he told me it was broken in so many places, he’d have had to amputate if I’d lost circulation anywhere,” said Lansing. “Luckily, I didn’t.”

  When she regained consciousness, she found Melnick and one of her best friends, writer David Z. Goodman, in her room in the intensive care unit.

  “Was it my fault?” she asked over and over.

  “Of course
not,” Goodman assured her, and then smiled. “You’re carrying a lot of guilt.”

  After the accident, Margot and Norton rushed to Los Angeles. So many of Lansing’s friends swarmed the hospital that the staff tried to have them banned; Melnick had to steal a stethoscope and pretend he was a doctor just to sneak in.

  “We were really scared because it sounded at first as if she had some brain damage,” said Lansing’s friend Luttrell. “It was a really horrible accident.”

  “I was lucky to be alive,” said Lansing. “I had a nineteen-and-a-half-pound plaster cast with two huge pins sticking out and bandages wrapped around my head.”

  The accident shook her out of her obsessive work mode and made her pause to consider everyday life. “A flamboyant nurse named Zane washed the blood from my hair,” she said. “It felt like the kindest thing anyone could do.”

  Dr. Ellman told her the surgery had been a success. “He said, ‘You’ll get to dance again,’ ” she recalled.

  For the following month, she was confined to the hospital. Once she knew she was better, she began to worry about having permanent scars, and “spending my life looking like I did after the sheriff slashed my face in Rio Lobo.” But the scars healed, as did her body.

  And so did her relationship with her mother. Whatever tension still lingered between them from the years following David’s death slowly began to dissipate as Lansing witnessed the full extent of her mother’s love. “Everyone told me how worried she was,” said Lansing. “She cried every day.”

  Alone with her, once Norton had gone home, Lansing finally had her mother to herself, and in her vulnerability discovered the mother she had always wanted. “My mother was so loving and so present and so caring,” she said. “She was there every single morning, noon and night until I had to go to sleep.”

  When the plaster cast on Lansing’s leg was cut off at last, Margot wept—tears of relief and joy and sorrow, because she knew her daughter did not need her anymore and would soon return to the life she had known before, just as Margot would return to her own. It was a bittersweet parting—the inevitable separation of one generation from another—and Lansing was heartsick to see her go. “But she knew I was truly healing,” she said.

  She left the hospital and settled into a friend’s guest house, unable to climb the stairs of her own home. Alone in the lushness of a magnificent garden, she discovered an inner peace that had eluded her through her twenties.

  “I sat outside every day, reading books and talking to my friends,” she said. “The conversations weren’t the rushed ones I was used to, and I began to learn things about them that I’d never known, and about myself, too. I started to think about my life, and wondered what I really wanted, and whether I was on the right path.”

  Sitting in that garden, surrounded by trees and flowers and birds, she savored each minute of her freedom, for once living fully in the moment. Part of her wished to live like this, free of all burdens; another part of her was tugged back to the working life, and all the stresses that went with it. For the first time, there was the hint of a collision between the Lansing who so fully inhabited the world and the Lansing who rebelled against it.

  But here, earthly concerns no longer seemed to matter. “I hadn’t died,” she said. “I felt reborn.”

  —

  A year after Lansing’s accident, The China Syndrome opened on March 16, 1979, to critical praise and strong box office, despite being savaged by conservative pundits such as Newsweek’s George F. Will.

  “The film falsely suggests that nuclear-power companies carelessly risk destroying their billion-dollar investments,” he wrote, “that exposing to air the top of a reactor’s core would produce a meltdown; that there are no backup systems to prevent the magnification of small human or mechanical mishaps into meltdowns.”

  Two weeks later, he was proved wrong. On the morning of March 28, a valve malfunctioned inside a reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In itself, the incident would have been minor, but it set off a series of responses that the plant’s staff misunderstood, and therefore they failed to take appropriate action. As the reactor’s core began to overheat, warning lights flashed and klaxons blared, while temperatures inside the core rose to 4,300 degrees, just a few hundred degrees short of a meltdown. Soon the international media heard about what was happening and swarmed to Pennsylvania as the entire world waited in fear that the meltdown would take place, possibly killing hundreds of thousands or even more.

  Lansing was driving to work when she heard about the incident on her radio and pulled over to listen. She had wanted to make films that were relevant, but to have them wrapped up in a real-life tragedy was surreal. “It was all over the news, all day and night,” she said, “and they kept taking a clip from the movie to explain what had happened, the very thing I’d wanted us to insert.”

  Fonda was shooting The Electric Horseman in St. George, Utah, when she learned what was going on, “which was interesting,” she noted, “because that was where the big nuclear tests were made, out near Nevada, and the wind blew across that part of Utah, and big concentrations of cancer began to emerge around the area. I had been an activist against nuclear energy and nuclear power. I had been traveling the country, speaking out. I was terrified, but I also felt, ‘I told you so.’ ”

  For the rest of the week, America was held in the grip of fear.

  “The world has never known a day quite like today,” CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite declared on Friday, March 30, one and a half days after the inciting incident. “And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse. The potential is there for the ultimate risk of a meltdown.”

  Lansing was appalled at the catastrophe, but had to make rational decisions about its impact on her film. “You can’t believe that on every newscast you’re seeing excerpts from your movie,” she said. “You’re shaken by the reality and you feel guilty because you also wonder how it will affect the film.”

  She and her fellow executives conferred with the filmmakers to create a unified strategy while wondering if this would even matter, given what might occur. Bridges refused to capitalize on the news and declined to speak to Cronkite, despite the newsman’s towering authority.

  “No interviews—this whole thing is too serious,” he wrote in an unpublished diary. “Referring all calls to Columbia.”

  There was talk of evacuating Pennsylvania, and speculation that even this would not save its residents. Frantic efforts got under way to find anyone, anywhere, who could repair the plant, and the danger was defused only when its original designers ordered technicians to flood the reactor with water, lowering temperatures and finally bringing the crisis under control.

  “By Sunday, it was over,” said Lansing. “President Carter visited the site four days after the accident, and the plant was safe.”

  The China Syndrome would forever be connected with that disaster, the most serious nuclear accident in American history. The film did well and earned $51.7 million in North America alone; while many observers believed the movie’s box office was boosted by its proximity to reality, Lansing and marketing executive Robert Cort felt otherwise.

  “Everybody thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re just going to have this runaway hit,’ ” said Cort, “and the next weekend, after Three Mile Island, the movie fell off the charts. It just dropped.”

  “People want to be scared at the movies, and they enjoy being scared when it isn’t real,” Lansing reflected. “Then suddenly it is real and you’re hearing about that every day, and the last thing you want to do is see a movie about it.”

  —

  The picture was Lansing’s first close-up experience of the extraordinary interplay between movies and society.

  “I believed films had the ability to change the world,” she said. “They could alter public opinion and impact legislation and affect how you felt. Film and social change were wrapped up in my mind, not as interchangeable things but as interwoven f
orces. A wonderful piece of entertainment is great, but it’s not where my heart lay.”

  Her heart lay in movies like Kramer vs. Kramer, the second major picture Melnick assigned her at Columbia. He had used the project as bait to draw her to the studio, knowing she loved it.

  Based on a 1977 novel by Avery Corman, Kramer told the story of a New York advertising executive so preoccupied with his work that he fails to notice his marriage is on the rocks. When his wife leaves him, he has to bring up their young son alone, only for her to return fifteen months later and demand custody.

  “It wasn’t the man who interested me—it was the woman,” said Lansing. “I was attracted to a woman who broke social conventions, and I identified with her. I was fascinated by the idea that a woman abandons her child. What behavior could be less acceptable than that?”

  She had attempted to buy the rights while still at MGM, but Corman’s agent had sold them to Stanley Jaffe, the former Columbia executive who was now a producer. Jaffe had asked Robert Benton to write the script, which he had agreed to do on the condition that François Truffaut direct. It was a reprise of Benton’s dream for Bonnie and Clyde—the film he had co-written with David Newman that had put both of them on the map—which Truffaut had toyed with making before Arthur Penn directed it.

  “Truffaut and I were friends,” said Benton. “I’d always wanted to work with him as a writer, and at one point we had talked about doing Mildred Pierce, and then about [telling the story of] Howard Hughes as he got older, but we weren’t able to work either one out. Truffaut was interested in this, but he couldn’t do it right away.”

  When Truffaut pushed Kramer off to some unspecified date in the future, Benton realized his hopes were futile and agreed to direct as well as write. With Dustin Hoffman cast as Ted Kramer, the male lead, the problem of finding his wife, Joanna, became pressing.

  “I remember talking to Benton endlessly about that,” said Lansing. “The challenge was not to make her overly unsympathetic. Leaving a child is almost unforgivable for a woman, but I viewed it as her attempt to find her identity. She was always someone’s wife or mother, and had never established who she really was. She didn’t leave her son because she didn’t love him; she left him because she had no sense of herself.”