—
This was Lansing’s state of mind in March 1991 when she was invited to an Academy Awards party at the home of real estate developer Richard Cohen.
It was a small affair by Hollywood standards, with a few dozen people gathered for the most glamorous night of the movie year, all casually enjoying each other’s company without having to dress up or ferry themselves to the ceremony.
As Lansing stepped into the den with her friend Martha Luttrell, she noticed a man wearing aviator-style glasses, but did not recognize him. This was unusual because he was one of Hollywood’s most famous directors. His name was William Friedkin, and at fifty-five he had already made two classics, 1971’s The French Connection and 1973’s The Exorcist. He had won an Oscar for the former while still in his mid-thirties, and was part of the dizzying array of talent that had emerged in the 1970s to alter the landscape of film, along with Francis Coppola, Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese. One of the guests introduced him.
“You can’t be William Friedkin,” said Lansing. “You’re much too young and much too cute.”
“And you can’t be Sherry Lansing,” he replied with a smile. “You’re much too cute and much too young.”
Their connection was immediate. As they sat down to speak, an easy conversation that roamed across a number of subjects—none of them related to work—Lansing was charmed by Friedkin’s wit and his flashes of brilliance.
Her first husband, Michael, had been a good girl’s idea of a bad boy, but Friedkin was a bad boy par excellence. He had once raced a car through the streets of New York, shooting a chase scene for French Connection at such a speed that he put his life and others’ in danger, all for his art. On another occasion, after winning the Directors Guild of America award, he stepped off the stage and saw his onetime employer, Alfred Hitchcock. Remembering how Hitchcock had chastised him for not wearing a tie on the set of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, he snapped his elastic bowtie at him. “How do you like the tie, Hitch?” he quipped.
He had worked with many of the same people as Lansing, and even been in the same places at some of the same times. He had once slipped late into a screening of The King of Comedy and asked a friend if he’d missed anything. “Just Sherry Lansing giving her welcome speech,” he was told. Another time, he had met with Jaffe in the office right next to hers, but Lansing was too busy to say hello.
Both were Jewish and from Chicago, but their overt similarities ended there. Luck was on Friedkin’s side that night, however: he not only won the Oscar pool (Dances with Wolves was named Best Picture) but also got Lansing’s number.
The following week, while out of town, he called her every day, and their conversations lasted for hours. On their first date, he whisked her to San Francisco, where a car was waiting at the airport to take them to Muir Woods, the Marin County nature preserve he loved.
“We drove to the Rockridge market in Berkeley, ordered some stuff, went up to Muir Woods, and had a picnic,” he recalled. “Sherry had a seemingly insatiable curiosity about the things we both liked—many of which, I found out later, she didn’t like at all: basketball and classical music. But she was in the moment. Not a lot of people are in the moment.”
“I felt I’d known him my whole life,” said Lansing. “I could tell him anything and he wouldn’t judge me. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can present myself fully the way I am.’ ”
In Muir Woods, they strolled for hours, roaming among the redwoods, staring at the endless blue of the Pacific Ocean, wandering along its pathways until the last squibs of light faded on the horizon, and still they were there. “We just kept talking and talking,” said Lansing. “It was magical.”
That night, she called Luttrell.
“I think I’m in love,” she said.
—
Some of her friends were dubious. This was a man with three failed marriages, who even now was in the midst of a divorce.
Herbert Ross, the director whose wife had once scorned Lansing’s vicuña coat, “launched into a litany of complaints about him at a dinner,” she said. Ross was aware they had gone on a date, but did not know more. “He told me how Billy had left all these women brokenhearted and how no woman could ever tame such a beast.” Only then did it sink in: Lansing was in love. “Oh my gosh!” said Ross. “I just made him more appealing.”
If, in normal circumstances, Lansing worried too much about other people’s opinions, she never let them influence her here. “I’d gotten to the point where I didn’t give a damn,” she said. “I thought, ‘This is the man I love, and if you don’t like it, I don’t care.’ ”
Many were skeptical, said John Goldwyn, then Paramount’s production chief. “[Agent] Sue Mengers was the only person who said, ‘Sherry, you’ll never be bored.’ She was in love with him. She was absolutely crazy in love with this guy. She had these relationships with men that never went anywhere [including architect Richard Meier and Italian count Giovanni di Volpi], but Billy was tough. She found an excitement with him and she absolutely believed he was a genius.”
Three months after they met, the couple decided to marry in Barbados. They went alone, without family or friends, and arrived unprepared.
“I wanted a Jewish ceremony,” said Lansing, “so when we got there we looked through the phone book and found the number of the only synagogue on the island. But the synagogue was a historic landmark with no congregation, and we were told the rabbi wouldn’t be there for six months.”
With some trepidation, she agreed to let a local priest officiate, on the condition that the ceremony be nondenominational. When the wedding got under way on the beach, however, the priest could not help himself.
“We are gathered here,” he began, “in the name of our lord and savior Jesus Christ—”
“Stop!” yelled Lansing.
“What’s wrong?” asked Friedkin.
“Didn’t you hear?” she replied. “He said, ‘our lord Jesus Christ.’ We’re Jewish!”
The priest started over, and made the same mistake.
When he did so a third time, Lansing grabbed his Bible, whipped out a pencil and crossed out the word “Jesus.”
“I was beside myself,” she said. “I wanted our marriage to be real.”
—
Marriage inevitably altered Lansing’s life. “Part of me was scared it would ruin our relationship,” she said. “But I was happy in a way I’d never been happy before. There weren’t enough hours in the day to be together. For the first time since childhood, I’d found unconditional love.”
Until now, she had buried herself so deeply in work, it was impossible to think of anything else. Moving forward, she had to create a new life as part of a couple, helped by the fact that Friedkin never seemed to mind if she came home late from a meeting or had to fly out of town for a film. He was a filmmaker, too, and nobody better understood the topsy-turvy nature of the movie business.
Their life could seem glamorous but also startlingly normal. “I went to Lakers games with Billy,” said Lansing. “I also went to the symphony, though after the first couple of times I was so bored I started bringing scripts to read on my lap.”
She had no illusions that marriage to Friedkin would resemble anything she had known before, or that she could transform him into the sort of Boy Scout her friends might have liked. She made no attempt to change him, nor did he attempt to change her.
“He made me feel adored,” she said. “I could gain fifty pounds and he’d still think I was the prettiest woman in the world. I didn’t have a face-lift, I didn’t do anything—and if I did, he’d have said, ‘Oh my God, why would you change the Mona Lisa?’ He’s a complicated man; I’m not going to say he isn’t. But he’s very romantic, and he’s one of the kindest people I’ve known. He’s a genius, and geniuses think differently, and that’s the fundamental difference between him and almost everybody else I was with.”
Once, when Friedkin was being particularly demanding, a friend shrugged it off. “You mar
ried real talent, not a fake,” he told Lansing. “You have to deal with all the craziness and the screaming and the yelling, but he’s the real thing.”
Marrying Friedkin, she inherited a family. He had two sons by different women, and she was determined to make them part of her life. She remembered only too well how abandoned she had felt by the men who came courting her mother, who disappeared from her own life once they vanished from Margot’s, and she also recalled her exclusion from the enchanted circle that Margot and Norton had formed. She would never allow that to happen here.
She became a mother to Jack, eight, and Cedric, fourteen, and the younger son began to divide his time between the couple’s house and his other home, though Lansing was at pains not to damage the boys’ ties to their biological mothers. “The greatest bonus Billy gave me was these two children,” she said. “They were guileless, they were kind, they were fun. They were just a joy.”
Jack started coming to her office after school, sitting in an alcove where she would help him with his homework before they drove home together. “We’d have dinner as a family, and I’d think, ‘This is what my friends have been talking about all these years,’ ” she said. “I always thought people were bullshitting about what it was like to be truly loved. I thought, ‘It can’t be that good.’ But it is.”
There was a downside, of course. During her filmmaking years, Lansing had loved nothing more than going on location, escaping the confines of her office and visiting an exotic locale where she would become part of the film crew family. But now “that lost its allure,” she said. When she left Los Angeles to shoot School Ties, “most evenings, I’d just go back to my hotel and crawl under the covers and call Billy.”
His absence left a gaping hole, deeper than she had imagined. She could not face another prolonged absence. Something had to change. But what?
—
Jaffe had been at Paramount Communications for a year and a half and was just coming to terms with the fact that one of his boldest decisions had backfired: hiring Brandon Tartikoff as chairman of Paramount Pictures.
On paper, the appointment seemed inspired. Tartikoff, the former president of NBC Entertainment, had been among the most brilliant television executives of his era, responsible for launching The Cosby Show and lifting NBC to number one in the ratings. But he was a creature of the small screen, not the large, and at Paramount he discovered the chasm that separated the two.
Film, in this pre-franchise age, was all about creating a single piece of entertainment so compelling that audiences would leave their homes to watch it on a Friday or Saturday night. Television was about filling a programming slot. The men and women who worked in each medium existed in separate but parallel universes.
Tartikoff’s skills lay in TV, not film, and his pictures reflected that. “He would have these crazy ideas for movies,” said Michelle Manning, a senior Paramount production executive. “One was called Squeeze Boxes, which was like Glee with accordions. He also pitched Copter Cop, about a motorcycle cop with a propeller.”
His indecisiveness infuriated Jaffe, who had run the studio when he was in his late twenties and knew better than anyone how it should function. Their relationship was not helped when Tartikoff took a leave of absence to promote his autobiography, The Last Great Ride, and posed in his swimsuit for a magazine photo shoot.
More than anything, his work was hindered by a tragedy. In January 1991, a few months before he joined the studio, he was involved in a car accident that left his eight-year-old daughter brain-damaged. His attempts to cope with her medical and educational needs, especially when she was moved to New Orleans for better care, placed an almost unbearable strain on him.
“I remember coming to his office one day and he was ashen,” said Jaffe. “I thought he was sick. I said, ‘Are you OK?’ He said: ‘My daughter came home for the first time, and her friends came to visit. When she was by herself in the hospital, we thought she was making great strides. Then we saw her against the normal children. It broke my heart.’ ”
The Jaffe-Tartikoff relationship reached a tipping point at a company retreat in Rancho Mirage, California, where each division of Paramount Communications had to make a presentation. Tartikoff was unprepared.
“Brandon said, ‘Oh, we just need some clips from the movies,’ ” recalled Manning. “We were the splashy part, and the first day was Simon & Schuster’s presentation, and all of a sudden there’s music and there’s factoids on the screen. Then after that was the Paramount Parks guy. He just was so funny, talking about rides and people throwing up, and I’m like, ‘We are fucked. We are so fucked.’ ”
Jaffe and his boss, Martin Davis, conferred. “I said, ‘This can’t go on. This is crazy,’ ” noted Jaffe. “I said to Brandon, ‘I think we should meet up.’ He came in the next morning. I said, ‘Look, we’re going to have to make some changes. I’m going to get more involved until we get this ship righted.’ Brandon said, ‘I just think I should leave.’ ”
Within days, he was out and Jaffe turned to Lansing. Would she become chairman of Paramount Pictures?
“I’d had two other offers, to run a studio and a mini-major [a company with the money to make movies and distribute them],” she said, “but I’d never made it past the appetizer before saying no. Now things were different. The key issue was quality of life. I wanted to enjoy my marriage. I wanted to be back home for dinner. With this job, I’d be based in L.A., I’d be more in control and I wouldn’t have to travel as much.”
For days she wavered, reluctant to go back to corporate life even as she felt this was the best solution. Friedkin encouraged her to do whatever she thought best.
“I remember the two of us meeting with [Jaffe],” he said. “He told her, ‘Make sure Billy is OK with this.’ I said, ‘Don’t even take me into account.’ I said to Sherry, ‘If you want to do this, you should. If you don’t want to do it, you shouldn’t.’ ”
In weighing her decision, Lansing remembered a friend’s advice: at Harvard Business School he had learned that a person should reconstitute herself professionally every ten years.
“In the end, I applied the same question I did when I thought of getting married: would I regret it if I didn’t?” said Lansing. “So I accepted, on certain conditions: marketing and distribution would have to report to me, and I would have to have green-light authority, though I’d always consult with Stanley.”
Jaffe said yes to both demands, and on November 5, 1992, less than a week after Tartikoff’s resignation, the trade press and major newspapers broke the news that Lansing had been named chairman and CEO of the Paramount Pictures motion picture group.
Once again, she was the highest-ranking woman in film.
Twelve years had passed since Lansing was named president of Fox, and the landscape for women had altered—if not quite irrevocably, at least for the better. She was still a pioneer in the eyes of other women, but not quite the leader of a revolution.
Women were still nowhere near equal to men in the uppermost sectors of Hollywood, nor were they doing any better in America’s largest companies: only 19 of the 4,012 highest-paid executives were women, according to a 1990 survey in Fortune magazine. But they were rapidly ascending the ranks.
“A decade ago even women’s staunchest male advocates said time had to pass; women lacked the seasoning and seniority to run the show,” noted Fortune. “Today that explanation rings increasingly hollow. Women have gained access to virtually every line of work and are bulging in the pipeline. The U.S. Department of Labor says they make up 40% of a loosely defined category of managers and administrators that covers everyone from President [George H. W.] Bush to the person running the local Dairy Queen.”
In the entertainment industry, several women held senior positions and were ready to progress further. A 1991 study commissioned by the nonprofit group Women in Film showed that women held 30 percent of middle-management posts in the top twenty film and TV companies, holding 378 jobs in all. Wit
hin a few years, they would become familiar presences in the corner offices of networks and studios alike.
Indications that a tectonic shift was under way were all around. After more than a decade in which Lansing and Steel had stood in splendid isolation at the epicenter of power, others were starting to join them. Lucy Fisher, a few years Lansing’s junior, was an executive vice president of production at Warner Bros. and would soon become vice chairman of Columbia-TriStar Pictures, a division of Sony. Amy Pascal was executive vice president of production at Columbia, already on her path to being chairman of the studio. And Stacey Snider was president of production at TriStar and later would be named chairman of Universal Pictures and also 20th Century Fox. Only an increasingly frail and contrarian rear guard still considered these women upstarts or dared to treat them with the kind of condescension that was routine in Lansing’s formative years. As far as the majority of industry members were concerned, women were here to stay.
“It didn’t feel that things were utterly impossible, but at the same time there were very, very few role models,” said Snider. “I didn’t know how hard it had been for other women, because I came of age when women had pushed out the boundaries.”
That, at least, was in the executive field. It was another story in different sectors of the entertainment world, and Lansing was endlessly baffled that the strides made by women executives were not matched by the writers, directors, cameramen, editors and other technicians who toiled on the shop floor. Why had women grasped the gold ring in one arena but not all? Was it that motherhood interrupted their careers? Or was it that Hollywood, to all appearances the most liberal of enclaves, was in fact deeply averse to change?
The promise that rippled through Hollywood in the early 1990s proved fleeting. A decade later, the surge had plateaued, and a 2016 report by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism noted that only 15.2 percent of directors were women, along with 28.9 percent of writers and 22.6 percent of the creators of television series. In film (as opposed to television) only 3.4 percent of movies were directed by women. Over the course of a quarter century, things had hardly improved at all.
Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker Page 21