She’s a hell of a lady who made a huge difference in my own life, and an indefatigable, magnetic personality.
• • •
It seems like I’ve known Don Johnson forever. He used to refer to me as his good luck charm because I ran into him a day or so before Miami Vice got picked up by NBC and I told him the project sounded very strong. Years after, he and Melanie Griffith bought a house in Aspen, and Don and I passed the time by playing countless rounds of golf, not to mention a lot of fly fishing.
When Melanie gave birth to their daughter, Dakota, I visited them at the hospital and was the second man to hold that beautiful child. A few years later, Jill and I were invited to Don’s annual Fourth of July party. Dakota was about four by that time, and when she saw us coming up the driveway, she took off running toward us. After a sprint of about fifty yards, Dakota came to a screeching halt and breathlessly asked Jill, “Where did you get that lip gloss?”
I told Don he had a serious problem.
All this is by way of explaining that our families became intertwined in a way I could never have foreseen when I worked with Melanie’s mother, Tippi Hedren, in an episode of It Takes a Thief. It was the period after the failure of Marnie, when Tippi was working out her contract with Universal.
At the time, nobody at Universal really knew if there had been a relationship between Hitchcock and Tippi, but we all wondered. He had clearly been besotted with her. The Birds had been a great success—I think it’s Hitchcock’s last good picture—and despite the critical and financial failure of Marnie, Tippi was by far the best thing in the picture. It’s such a strange movie; Sean Connery’s character is actually more psychologically damaged than Tippi’s, but none of the other characters seem aware of it. For that matter, neither does Hitchcock.
I knew a lot of actors who worked for Hitchcock, and, with the exception of Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant, none of them enjoyed the experience. If you were going to act for Hitchcock, you were going to be left more or less alone. Paul Newman told me Hitchcock’s attitude toward actors was “Wheel in the meat and shoot it.” (Small-world department: Tom Wright, who’s one of the best directors at NCIS, used to be a storyboard artist for Hitchcock.)
Hitchcock was beloved by Lew Wasserman. Lew gave Hitchcock his own unit at Universal, housed in his own building, and made him very wealthy. The strange thing is that both Lew and Hitchcock tended to be cold—dust could come out of their mouths.
I worked with Melanie in Crazy in Alabama, which was directed by Antonio Banderas, whom she married after she and Don divorced. It was the first—and only—picture directed by Antonio, and I thought he did a very creditable job. Most of my scenes were shot at the Chateau Marmont, and throughout the shoot Antonio was totally prepared. He knew what he wanted out of every line of the script and every shot. On top of that, I found him to be a kind, empathetic director, probably because he was an actor long before he began directing and knew actors’ problems from the inside.
Melanie was accomplished and professional in a part that was quite a stretch for her—she played a woman who kills her husband, abandons her children (one of whom was played by Dakota), and takes off for Hollywood in search of fame and fortune, accompanied by the head of her late husband. As you can see, the title was an accurate reflection of the movie. Working with her, I realized that Melanie had a lot more on the ball than she’d been able to show professionally—she’s obviously a very sexy girl and got typed early.
Melanie isn’t particularly like her mother, other than the fact that they’re both dreamers. Tippi presents as aristocratic, while Melanie is earthier, but they share a devotion to Tippi’s great passion, the Shambala Animal Preserve.
Eventually Melanie and Antonio broke up. Melanie still lives in Aspen, and we see each other frequently, while Don has moved to Santa Barbara, which means that I lost one of my prime golfing buddies. On the other hand, I now have the possibility of working with a third generation of the family. Melanie’s daughter, Dakota, has obviously got a lot of talent and consistently makes daring choices.
Dakota, if you need someone to play your grandfather, I’m available.
• • •
In 2015, I traveled to Romania to make a movie entitled What Happened to Monday? for Raffaella de Laurentiis. My costars were Glenn Close and Willem Dafoe. I had known Glenn only glancingly—we were seated next to each other at a dinner party some years earlier. But even then we discovered mutual interests: Among other things, we had the same drama coach, an amazing man named Harold Guskin. Harold wrote a book entitled How to Stop Acting, the gist of which was that acting was about being rather than acting per se. Harold taught in his apartment in New York and inspired great loyalty from his students, among whom were James Gandolfini, Kevin Kline, and Bridget Fonda.
Harold taught you not only to get out of your own way, but also to find out about the other person, which could be defined as the other character, the other actor, or the person you sat next to on the train. For Harold, it wasn’t about you, it was about the character—how would the character react, in an honest way, to this situation in which he found himself? Harold and I both believed that the worst thing a director could tell you was how to “act,” because you don’t want to act, you want to be.
Harold had some similarities to Stella Adler, who taught her students how to live as much as she taught them how to act. Stella wanted them to be functioning members of society, to be alive to writing, art, everything that makes up culture. In other words, acting was not something that took place in a vacuum. To be a better actor, you had to be a better person, a better citizen. And beyond that, Harold and Stella both believed that acting was not a matter of producing a reaction in the actor, it was about producing a reaction in the audience. If the actor feels it, but the audience is left cold, what exactly has been accomplished?
Glenn Close
It follows, then, that Glenn is not concerned with stardom or power or any of the ancillary things that accompany fame. She’s all about honoring the work. She has some of the same focus and fierceness of Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck, and to my mind there is no higher praise for an actress. We thoroughly rehearsed our scenes at our hotel long before we got on the set, and we had several dinners together. She’s warm and ingratiating, an interesting woman with a huge amount of professional courage—Albert Nobbs, the movie in which she played a Victorian woman who lives her life as a man, was a tour de force that Glenn cowrote. It was just a little ahead of the curve in terms of the public interest in gender fluidity; if it was released today it would attract a lot more of the attention it deserved.
In so many ways, acting is a strange business. You work hard with another actor, and you become entirely open to each other. You give more than the lines; you give them yourself at that moment in time. That kind of emotional openness has to be accompanied by a great deal of trust and mutual respect, so neither of you will be tempted to take advantage of that privileged connection, either professionally or personally. Glenn Close reminds you of what acting, at its best, is all about.
EPILOGUE
Writing this book has forced me to think long and hard about several key questions. One of them is: Do actresses have it harder than actors?
As you may have gathered, I believe the answer is a resounding yes. Now, you may think that insecurity is insecurity, and that it’s implicit in the profession, so what’s the difference?
Well, let me lay it out for you. It can’t be said too often—actresses have shorter careers than actors. This is a generalization, but for every Meryl Streep there are ten Demi Moores and Meg Ryans, women who earned major salaries and major parts for precisely as long as they were the Hot Young Girl and whose professional opportunities began to dry up just about the time they hit forty, or just about the time a fresh crop of hot young girls begin to assert themselves.
This reality is something that every thirty-five-year-old actress knows. When the bell rings signaling another year, and rigorous self-app
raisal leads you to the conclusion that you’re not Meryl Streep, that bell is not necessarily a cause for celebration, but rather a little ratcheting up of panic.
Is this fair? Hell, no. It’s Darwinian. Only the strong—or the hugely talented—survive. That was the case when I came into the business after World War II, and it’s the case today.
Men, on the other hand, can and often do go on acting into their fifties and beyond. Occasionally it gets a little uncomfortable. I’ve mentioned how incongruous it was for Gary Cooper to romance Audrey Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon. Honesty compels me to admit that it would have been far less jarring if Cary Grant had taken the part instead, which was indeed offered to him. (Can you believe it? Gary Cooper was second choice!)
The difference was cosmetic; Coop was only three years older than Cary, but he looked fifteen years older. A few years later, Cary and Audrey worked together in Charade. Cary was always wary of such an age disparity on-screen, as he was concerned about looking like a dirty old man. He finessed these roles by nudging the writers to make the girl chase him rather than the other way around. Since he was Cary Grant, and was producing most of his later pictures himself, he had a way of getting what he wanted.
But life has no screenwriter, and Cary preferred younger women offscreen. He married Dyan Cannon, had his daughter, Jennifer, with her, and Barbara, his last wife, was decades younger than he was.
A few years ago, I made a movie with Louise Fletcher, who won an Academy Award for her performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I loved her in that movie, but had never met her before we worked together. Louise made the shoot a lovely experience—a fine actress with a great sense of humor, which is crucial for me.
It struck me at the time that Louise’s career had suffered because she was simply too good in a completely unsympathetic part. She had played smaller parts before Cuckoo’s Nest, but that picture was her introduction to a mass audience, and they so completely bought her as Nurse Ratched that the opportunities that followed in the wake of that picture’s success were more limited than you would have imagined.
It was the Anthony Perkins problem; Perkins had made many pictures before Psycho, but he hadn’t seemed to fit into any of them as well as he did as Norman Bates in the Hitchcock picture. The role typed him as a fidgety invert, and it was a type he could never escape.
Tony ultimately did what I had done and went to Europe, where he tried making all sorts of pictures. But he finally capitulated and decided that playing Norman Bates was better than playing nothing at all. He did a batch of sequels to Psycho and even directed one of them.
But there was no possibility of sequels to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, so Louise has only rarely had the chance to display her versatility for characters other than control-freak dragon ladies. Believe me, it’s the audience’s loss.
There’s another way that the movies are harder on women: The minute an actress asserts her prerogatives, you can rest assured that there are hundreds of men all too willing to label her a bitch or worse, an attitude that is rarely the response when a male actor makes equivalent demands.
It’s not as bad today as it was sixty years ago, but when I got into the movies it was a business run for and by a group of men who expected and appreciated it when women were submissive. When Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland demanded the same privileges that were granted as a matter of course to male stars—better scripts, more freedom—and would raise holy hell until they got what they wanted, they were granted only a grudging respect.
Modern actresses are generally much more courageous than most of the women I grew up with, but then they can afford to be—they make a lot more money.
In an earlier era, so much energy was spent—or misspent—worrying about the creation of an image and, once that was achieved, its maintenance.
That process resulted in a different kind of actress, one who was beset by constant concerns. Insecurity, mainly. When I was starting out, a lot of actresses—and actors as well—spent a lot of time wondering if they were any good.
But from what I see of young actors today, they don’t worry much over what other people might think of their performances. They just go and do them. There’s something about this generation that makes them particularly brave; their attitude is, if I fail, I fail. What of it? Onward.
I think the best of the older generation who continue to work are Gena Rowlands and Diane Keaton. Of a younger group, I like Julia Roberts and Helen Hunt. Helen Hunt is a spectacular talent who I suspect is often overlooked because she’s not particularly competitive and usually gravitates toward smaller pictures that aren’t going to get much attention in a crowded marketplace. But make no mistake—she is the real deal. She and Julia Roberts manage to have it both ways in that they capture both sides of the feminine principle: They can embody a fantasy figure and they can also capture a woman’s reality.
And a word needs to be said for Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence, both of whom will have long careers.
Someone once asked George Balanchine what would happen to his ballets after he was gone. I like his answer: “People dance while I’m here, they dance a certain way. When I’m gone, they will continue dancing, but somebody will rehearse them different and it will all be a little different, with different approach, different intensity. So a few years go by and I won’t be here. Will be my ballets, but will look different.”
I like his fatalism in the face of the facts. Things change, and that’s the way it has to be. But you’ll pardon me if I continue to watch Stanwyck and Davis and Lupino for just a little longer.
All the women in this book had different kinds of careers, different needs as actresses, different needs as women. But almost all of them shared one primary characteristic: They said yes.
They didn’t linger on the inequities of show business; they figured that the business had worked to their advantage when they were young, so when the balance of power turned against them when they grew old, that was just the way of the world.
They may have had regrets—we all have those—but very few of them allowed themselves the luxury of bitterness. I don’t believe that someone like Irene Dunne missed acting at all, because she had found something to replace it that stimulated her mind and filled her heart. That’s the key—not to pine for what was, but to discover what is and what can be.
A great part in a great movie can be transformative for an actor or actress, but there’s more to life than that—a yes from a special person. I’ve been lucky enough to get those. Where would I have been if Minna Wallis hadn’t said yes to a green kid a lifetime ago? For that matter, where would I have been if Barbara Stanwyck hadn’t said yes? Or Natalie? Or Jill? My career would have been the same, but my life would have been impoverished.
And when I read a book about Louis B. Mayer and MGM, I said yes to the idea of writing my memoirs with the author of that book, and that has resulted in a third career, one I never expected but have relished. We share the same sense of humor, and Scott knows more about the movie business than most people in the movie business.
So here I am at eighty-six, still adding to the contents of my treasure chest, still working and adding memories—something I hope never changes.
It’s the way I am. It’s also the way the women I loved in the movies were . . . and are.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I Loved Her in the Movies began with Viking executive editor Rick Kot, who thought the idea would make a great book and proceeded to back up his enthusiasm with a contract and his own encyclopedic knowledge of the movies. It’s a cliché to say that real book editors are an extinct species, and it’s also inaccurate. Everyone who’s lucky enough to work with Rick knows it’s not true. Thanks, pal.
Diego Núñez ramrodded the manuscript, the photographs, and the authors with a gentle touch that never failed. And Jason Ramirez came through with a cover design that encapsulates everything sensual and romantic about the movies.
Arranging everything was the
amazing Mort Janklow, the literary agent for both authors.
The audio book was recorded at Great Divide Studios in Aspen, Colorado, by Jaimie Rosenberg, director Kevin Thomsen, and producer Sarah Jaffe. Their professionalism sustained even when my voice didn’t.
A very special thanks to Jill St. John and Lynn Kalber, our wives, who put up with weeks of cackling laughter cascading from the next room, as we amused ourselves with dueling Cary Grant imitations.
Finally, honesty compels us to thank Max, Mabel, and Clementine, our dogs, who regularly had to postpone their walks because their dads were busy working. They send their very best to Ivy.
INDEX
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.
Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
Abbott, George, 127, 134
Adler, Stella, 228
All About Eve (1950), 49, 101, 104, 131
Allyson, June, 61, 127–28, 129–130
Andrews, Julie, 222–23
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 181
Arden, Eve, 131
Arliss, George, 101
Arnaz, Desi, 190–91
Arrougé, Martin, 13
Arthur, Jean, 23–25, 24
Arzner, Dorothy, 15, 97
Astaire, Fred, 74, 89–90, 127, 206
Auntie Mame (1958), 108, 113
Autry, Gene, 136
The Awful Truth (1937), 38–39, 41
Baby Face (1933), 15
Bacall, Lauren, 96–97, 166, 193
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), 169
Balanchine, George, 1, 234
Ball, Lucille, 91, 96, 149, 190–92
Banderas, Antonio, 227
Bankhead, Tallulah, 175
Banton, Travis, 34
I Loved Her in the Movies: Memories of Hollywood's Legendary Actresses Page 21
