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

by Stephen Galloway

  Lansing longed to have her mother by her side and solder whatever rift remained between them. She wanted to talk about everything they had felt and experienced, but that was not in her mother’s nature.

  “She concentrated on becoming well, rather than looking back,” said Lansing. “She never said, ‘Come home. Let’s have a long lunch.’ None of that happened. There were no intimate conversations.”

  If her mother revealed any of her concerns, they were more about her family than herself. “She didn’t say, ‘Why me?’ ” said Lansing. “She worried about us. ‘Can you really take all this time off work?’ ‘Are you OK?’ I saw the comfort her girlfriends gave her—more than I could give her, because when you’re a mother you still want to take care of your children. I would see her close girlfriends come to visit and I often thought they were able to give her more joy than I was.”

  A pall fell over the family as each of its members grappled with the situation and what it might mean, none able or willing to discuss it with the others. Margot and Norton preferred it that way: when they made their trips to Chicago, they did not even tell Lansing’s siblings they were there, though both Andrea and Dick lived within driving distance of the hospital.

  “Like every serious topic in my childhood,” said Lansing, “it wasn’t discussed at all.”

  Judy flew in from New York, where she was now married with two children and working as a psychotherapist, and spent the nights in Margot’s hospital room during the chemotherapy; Lansing came almost every weekend, and was constantly on the phone.

  Norton hardly ever left his wife’s side. “He showed her absolute love,” said Lansing. “He just kept reassuring her how beautiful she was. Each time he had to step away, he’d give her a thumbs-up and say, ‘I love you, honey. You’ll be OK.’ ”

  At first it appeared he might be right. After the initial rounds of chemotherapy, Margot’s hair grew back in all its luster, and soon she felt well enough to visit her daughter in Los Angeles, where one of Lansing’s friends recalled being charmed by this woman with her faint foreign accent.

  But months into her remission, she found a lump on her stomach. It was malignant. Rapidly and inexorably, she began to decline until she was so sick that, during one of Lansing’s visits, she failed to notice a huge bandage wrapped around her daughter’s face, from a brush with melanoma.

  “She didn’t even ask what happened,” said Lansing. “That’s how sick she was. I just said I’d had a skin irregularity removed, and she was ashamed she hadn’t noticed.”

  Soon after, Margot forgot her daughter’s fortieth birthday.

  —

  “I dreamed I could put her cancer in my body and fight it off,” said Lansing. “I was younger and stronger, and thought I could handle it better. I kept praying, ‘Please, give me the disease so that I don’t have to watch her suffer.’ ”

  When she learned of an experimental vaccine being developed at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas in Houston, she cold-called the hospital, only to be told the next available appointment was three months away. “I don’t have three months!” she insisted. “The cancer’s eaten a hole in my mother’s stomach!” She approached anyone and everyone for help, and eventually found a friend who led her to one of the hospital’s benefactors, who in turn secured her an appointment.

  Margot was too sick to travel, so Lansing flew to Houston and was introduced to an oncologist. In a testament to his graciousness and her perseverance, he flew to Chicago the next day and administered the vaccine. It was an extraordinary gesture that he repeated every other week for two months.

  “After the first round of shots, my mother felt better,” said Lansing. “One afternoon we took her out in the sun. She was tired and fragile, but she looked beautiful again. ‘It’s working,’ she kept saying. But it wasn’t working at all. I wanted her to live so badly, I couldn’t see she was about to die.”

  As Margot grew more and more ill, Lansing became frantic. Time seemed to be cornering her, crushing her, and the more she fought, the less she seemed able to do.

  Even now, Margot was unable to tell her daughter all the things she so needed to hear. “I desperately wanted her to tell me how much she loved me,” said Lansing. “I longed to have that loving, hugging relationship with her. I told her, ‘I love you so much.’ But she never said it back.”

  In her anguish, she kept thinking how much her mother had wanted her to marry, but now, in her final days, Margot let that go. “I’d say, ‘I’ll get married. I’ll find some nice Jewish guy,’ ” said Lansing. “And she said, ‘No. I don’t know that marriage is for you.’ She liberated me. On her deathbed, she set me free.”

  The end came in September 1984, a year after Lansing first learned of her mother’s illness. She was in New York City, taking a brief break over the Labor Day weekend to visit friends, when she received an urgent message to fly to Chicago. By the time she arrived, her mother was dead. She was sixty-three years old.

  “I remember walking into her hospital room and seeing her lying there, motionless,” said Lansing. “She was so beautiful, and she looked so much at peace, I didn’t believe she was really dead. All the tubes were gone. Nothing was beeping. Her death didn’t even register until my father entered the room and started sobbing hysterically. I’d never seen him cry. That’s when I couldn’t deny it. I just kept thinking, ‘I didn’t save her. I failed.’ And my body went numb.”

  —

  The numbness lingered for months. Lansing longed to escape through work, but there was no work pressing enough to give her release. She was distraught and would cry at the mention of her mother’s name.

  “She was emotional, emotional, emotional,” said her friend Luttrell. “She felt lost when her mother died. It took her a long time to get over it, and maybe she never did.”

  Going through Margot’s possessions, Lansing discovered a secret: her mother had kept a scrapbook of her daughter’s achievements over all these years. Photos and newspaper articles had been clipped and pasted with loving care, and yet Margot had never said a word. It was more than Lansing could bear.

  “I was almost nonfunctional,” she said. “For days and weeks and months, there were so many emotions swirling around my head, and I couldn’t find a way to block them off or separate them from the other things I was meant to think about.”

  Margot’s death was a watershed for her daughter. If the loss of her father David had fostered her insecurity and driven her to become an actress, so the loss of her mother would push her to help others.

  Two deaths shaped her life—one the first half, the other the second.

  Ashamed to realize how little she knew about cancer, she now began to familiarize herself with the latest medical advances. Over the next few years, that passion almost supplanted film as she filled her calendar with activities in the nonprofit world.

  “I felt the only way I could honor my mother and make sense of her death was to fund research for a cure, so that no one would suffer like she did,” said Lansing.

  In the late 1980s, she approached industrialist Armand Hammer, a leading financier of cancer research, with a singular proposition. With his permission, she said, she would serve as his eyes and ears, going around the country and finding the most worthwhile young researchers for him to support. He agreed, and for several weeks each year, she would set out on her scouting expeditions.

  “I’d get a list of scientists and learn about their work and directly call their labs,” she said. “I’d say, ‘Could I visit you and see what you’re doing, with the goal of finding you funding?’ And everybody said yes. And what I found was, scientists are very much like actors and directors. They’re passionate, they never give up, they’re quirky and idiosyncratic. If you said, ‘We have no money, but you can have this tiny little space there, and you can work on your molecules or your mice,’ they would do it. They’re very much like people from the film business, with one difference: in the movie world, if someth
ing goes bad, we say, ‘Well, we’re not curing cancer,’ but that’s exactly what these scientists are doing.”

  When she introduced Hammer to one scientist, UCLA Medical Center’s Judith Gasson—the key player behind GM-CSF, a drug used to ward off infections and increase patients’ tolerance for chemotherapy—their meeting bore parallels to some of Lansing’s earlier encounters.

  “Honey, do you work with other doctors?” asked Hammer.

  “Yes,” said Gasson.

  “So you helped them discover GM-CSF?” Hammer continued.

  “No,” said Gasson. “I purified it, and they helped me.”

  Hammer gave her a $50,000 grant and Lansing joined him to create Stop Cancer, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising funds for young scientists, which she chaired after his death in 1990.

  —

  By the mid-1980s, Jaffe and Lansing still only had two pictures to show for their efforts. Perhaps they had erred in their approach. Rather than work on a diverse group of projects, all at various stages of development and liable to pop at any time—standard operating procedure for most producers, who would oversee thirty to forty screenplays at once—their development slate was limited to a few choice vehicles.

  “We didn’t have a lot, probably fewer than eight,” said Lansing. “We didn’t believe in developing anything we didn’t love.”

  Only two of their scripts were ready to go a step further. One, Diversion, was adapted from a British short about a husband who commits adultery and pays the price; the other, Reckless Endangerment, was a rape drama based on a real-life case that had made headlines across the country. Nobody wanted to make either one. “The titles alone suggested our predicament,” said Lansing.

  With their professional life stalled, CAA’s Ovitz stepped in. In his late thirties, he was at the peak of his power, and as the producers’ agent, he was also responsible for directing good material their way and helping to close their deals.

  Over the past decade, he had built CAA into the dominant force in Hollywood, signing almost all the big stars. Their attachment to him and his agency had given him enormous political capital, which he was willing to leverage. He was admired and feared, respected and reviled, but Jaffe and Lansing felt they should heed his advice.

  “My goal as an agent was to create work for the clients before they ever got an offer, and to protect them,” said Ovitz. “The whole look of the CAA building [a white fortress designed by architect I. M. Pei] was a protective façade for creative people. But now it was about saving [the Jaffe-Lansing company].”

  In 1985, the three met for dinner at Spago, the industry’s most prominent watering hole. “We sat in a prime booth in the corner, with a picture window that featured a full view of the Sunset Strip and its movie billboards,” said Lansing. “Ovitz was showing the town that we were worthy of dinner.”

  He was also showing the two producers how ineffective they were. As he gestured toward the Strip, with its cascading billboards and parade of displays for upcoming movies, it was obvious none of these pictures was theirs. Nor was that likely to change with their current batch of apparently uncommercial screenplays, particularly the two they most cared to make.

  “Put those things aside,” Ovitz counseled. “Stop beating your heads against the wall. Let me get you guys back in the mainstream. Eddie Murphy’s really hot, and comedies with him are in demand. I can put one of those together for you.”

  Ovitz knew artists, respected them, sometimes even liked them, but he also realized that they had to be steered away from their worst instincts. Art was all well and good, but it did not pay the bills. Some of his most gifted clients, of course, might have rebelled against that concept, but Ovitz was sure he was right. That’s what had put him on top, and it was what would keep him there years longer.

  “You have to realize,” he said, “I handled Marty Scorsese, and Marty’s penchant was not always to do commercial movies, and when he came to me I switched that around. I used Marty as an example. I said, ‘I can help you.’ ”

  “He was doing what an agent should,” said Lansing, “because we were as cold as ice. He was saying, ‘I can put you on one of these movies.’ But that wasn’t what we expected.”

  Had she opted to be a producer simply to make the vapid comedies Ovitz was recommending? Had she given up an executive’s salary to oversee movies she would never pay to watch? True, a film like the one Ovitz was proposing would put her and Jaffe back in the game, but was that their real goal? Was it not possible to have success and still make the movies they cared for?

  She listened and said nothing, and the more Ovitz spoke the more her heart sank. At last, the threesome said goodbye, as Jaffe and Lansing stepped out of the restaurant into the chill of the night. The city stretched before them, its lights gleaming with the promise they had held so many years earlier, when Lansing first came to Los Angeles, and the city held up a mirror to a future that would have no pain and no regrets. But at this moment, the world looked dark.

  “I think I’m going to cut my throat,” said Jaffe.

  Lansing felt the same way.

  “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “Only movies we believe in,” he replied.

  At forty, Lansing knew what it was to be obsessed.

  Just a few years earlier, she had been jilted by a steady boyfriend who had told her, “I don’t think I love you anymore” while both were in bed, and then got up and said goodbye, leaving her so deflated she could not drag herself out of her home for two full days. No matter what she had accomplished, it seemed like nothing compared to his love. And for the next few weeks, this woman who had been a pioneer in her field, who had risen to the summit of the most competitive industry in the world, kept circling his house deep into the night, searching for evidence of the thing she dreaded: another woman’s presence. Each time she spotted a stranger’s car, she would agonize that he had found someone else. She would call him at all hours, only to hang up as soon as he answered the phone. Her emotions were in turmoil; her life seemed unhinged. Wasn’t wisdom supposed to kick in by now? “I felt he took part of me with him,” she said.

  This was the backdrop to the movie that would revitalize her career.

  Fatal Attraction was based on a short film that Jaffe had discovered on a scouting trip to London. It was written and directed by James Dearden, the son of director Basil Dearden (Khartoum), one of the British film industry’s elder statesmen. A graduate of Oxford University, James had three shorts to his name and was just beginning to get some feature projects off the ground when Jaffe met him and saw what he had done. He called Lansing at once, he recalled: “I said, ‘What do you think? This guy’s really talented.’ ”

  Diversion, the short that Jaffe liked best, was the story of a writer who is left alone for a weekend when his family goes away, and then calls a woman whose number he has kept. That night, they sleep at her place, only for the woman to slash her wrists before he leaves. Shaken, the man nurses her through the night and returns home, believing the nightmare is over. But when he is sitting with his wife and kids, she calls. The film ends with him staring at the ringing phone as his wife asks, “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

  “I’m not going to say [the story] was autobiographical,” said Dearden, “but everyone has been in situations where they’ve been harassed. I had an experience where somebody kept calling me, and I got very uncomfortable. And I had a girlfriend who cut her wrists, very theatrically and not to kill herself. Then a good friend of mine was pursued by this beautiful but crazy woman and it was destroying his marriage.”

  Not much had happened since his short was completed in 1980, and when Dearden met Jaffe he did not expect anything to change. “I thought I’d never hear from him again,” he said. “That’s usually the case.”

  Jaffe was intrigued, Lansing fascinated when she saw the film, not just because its sexual morality enthralled her, but also because it echoed her belief that each of us must bear responsib
ility for his or her actions.

  The short came only a few years after she had been riveted by the trial of Jean Harris, the elegant principal of a girls’ boarding school who made headlines when she shot and killed her lover and was found guilty of second-degree murder. Lansing could not get Harris out of her head, and the real-life woman’s passions dovetailed with those of the movie’s antiheroine. “How could a professional woman feel so scorned that she murdered her lover?” she asked. “What did he do to her psyche to make her snap?”

  It was the rejected woman in Diversion who drew her far more than its male protagonist. She understood the pain of abandonment and knew men like him—successful and seemingly content, with loyal wives on whom they cheated without a shred of guilt. Once she had gone on a blind date with a former basketball star, only to learn after he picked her up that he was married. She told him to turn the car around. “I was furious,” she said. “And I was even angrier with the friend who set me up for assuming I’d ever go out with him.”

  Lansing invited Dearden to meet her in Los Angeles. Initially they planned to discuss several story ideas, but they kept returning to the short film, debating ways to make it strong enough to sustain a feature. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind,” said Lansing.

  No matter how hard they tried to find a twist that would propel the thin plot forward, they came up blank. Jaffe was skeptical. “What’s the movie?” he kept asking. “The wife picks up the phone, the woman says, ‘I had an affair with your husband,’ and then the wife throws him out. Where’s the drama?”

  Lansing could not answer that just yet, but the story haunted her nonetheless. She fretted over it, engaging in marathon talks with Dearden, both in person and by phone once he had returned to London. “I couldn’t get that relationship out of my mind,” she said. “I couldn’t forget this woman whose self-esteem is stripped away when her lover leaves. I thought of my own experience, and couldn’t let it go.”

  She resumed work with Dearden in Los Angeles during a second lengthy session and then a third, hashing and rehashing his story, always in the hope of a breakthrough. “We’d meet all morning and all afternoon, and maybe all morning and all afternoon again,” said the writer. “It was quite intense.”