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

by Stephen Galloway

  —

  In January 1956, the couple wed in their rabbi’s study. Margot was thirty-five, Norton ten years older. The children were not invited.

  Richard, nine, and Andrea, sixteen—both from Norton’s first marriage—moved into Margot’s house as the families merged into one and Margot sold off her properties, never to work again because a working woman was one who had failed. She came from the Old World, not the New; the professional life was for a husband, not his wife. The woman who had stamped the importance of work on her children now turned her back on it altogether.

  Little by little, all traces of David disappeared. The ledgers, vinyl records, clothes and photographs were given away until there was no sign he had ever lived in the house. Sherry Lee had to go to her grandmother Yetta’s to look at a photo of him on her piano. She was not even allowed to mention his name in front of Norton, nor was she permitted to attend Yom Kippur services in his honor because that would have hurt Norton’s feelings—though she went, no matter what she was told.

  “My father was very narcissistic, very charismatic,” said Andrea. “He was very self-centered, very handsome, very good in business. Was he tough? Yes. He was not a warm person.”

  But Sherry Lee grew accustomed to Norton and he to her, and she was glad, “because now I was normal and had a father.”

  When she was twelve, Margot asked her to take her new father’s last name, and she agreed. Sherry Lee Duhl had ceased to exist. She would be Sherry Lansing from now on.

  —

  The adults’ love affair was all-consuming. Each day, when Norton returned from work, the children would be banished while he and Margot sat over cocktails, absorbed in one another’s company. “They’d snuggle up, and Norton would wrap his arm around my mother, when none of the other parents ever seemed to touch each other,” said Lansing. “All the neighborhood kids were shocked.”

  They lived in their own private bubble, and as much as they cared for their children, none was allowed to penetrate their holy of holies. The couple would even take vacations alone, to exotic-sounding places such as the Bahamas, the children pining to go with them. Their bond was unassailable. Margot had had happiness and lost it; she would do whatever she could to maintain that happiness now.

  True, there were times when Norton’s armor cracked open, revealing an unexpected tenderness inside. Once, when he took his daughter shopping and she was unable to choose a dress, he let her buy every one she liked—eight in all—until her mother, horrified, made her take all but one back.

  Sherry watched how her mother charmed her father, but did not know how to do so herself. Secretly, she was afraid of him and never dared to confront him. Instead, she stuffed her anger deep down inside, burying it so profoundly that it was hidden even from herself.

  Unable to enter her parents’ enchanted circle, the girl attempted to create one of her own. She performed plays with Judy (always taking the leading role) and on Saturdays would lose herself in the neoclassical Hamilton and Jeffery movie palaces, where she would stare up at the faces of her idols, longing to be as charming as Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina or as glamorous as Lana Turner in Imitation of Life, and aching to experience the passion of Susan Hayward in I Want to Live!

  Each year she sat with her mother on the family couch, having begged to stay up late for the Academy Awards. When Hayward was named Best Actress for playing a real-life woman sent to death row, Sherry wept with longing and frustration, burning with the desire to be on that stage, too.

  The seeds of her ambition were sown here, the first impulse to reinvent herself as something other than an ordinary girl living thousands of miles from the epicenters of glamour and power. But try as she might, she could never find a link between her humdrum existence and that over-the-rainbow place called Hollywood, and when she confided her dreams to a friend, he just laughed.

  “I want to be in the movies,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” he scoffed. “You’re from the South Side of Chicago.”

  —

  Her parents insisted she attend a private high school for girls, and the teenager insisted she would not.

  She had set her sights on the prestigious University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, a hub for gifted children. Grudgingly, Margot and Norton allowed her to sit for the exam, and despite having chicken pox when she took it, she passed.

  Founded in 1896, the Lab School (as it was known) was famous for its academic rigor and liberalism, and the teenage girl flourished there, rubbing shoulders with some of the brightest minds she had encountered. If her home life lacked intellectual stimulus, her school was awash in it. Each day she was bombarded with analysis, debate and instruction on everything from the history of communism, fascism and democracy to advanced math, at which she excelled.

  She fell in love with the school, which “was totally nonjudgmental,” she said. “There was no prejudice, and there was interracial dating long before other schools considered it. But the pressures were different. Intellect was all that mattered. Some of the students were so brilliant, one who was three grades below me started crying because students from the university forced him to do their homework.”

  The school was the perfect incubator for the career woman she would become, and here she honed her work ethic and social grace, her intellect and drive. In this pre-feminist, “pre-revolution” world (in the words of her school friend Laurie Marshall), “I had confidence in my intellect,” said Lansing, “even if I had no self-confidence in anything else.”

  She was plagued by insecurity. Tall and gawky, she felt that her looks paled beside those of her mother, who was still so stunning teenagers would wolf-whistle when she passed, reinforcing the teenager’s sense of inadequacy.

  Nor did Margot value her daughter’s intelligence. How would that help her land a husband? Looks were what mattered, not brains. So she focused on Sherry’s appearance, anxious that she was all skin and bone.

  “Oh my God, she’s grown another inch!” she yelled at the doctor. “Can’t you give her some kind of medicine?”

  “I felt like a freak,” said Lansing.

  She failed to notice she was changing, and so did her mother. Almost imperceptibly, the once-gangly girl’s figure was filling out and she was emerging as a beauty. The stick-thin twelve-year-old began to disappear, replaced by an attractive teen. At sixteen, she was stunning.

  Reading that the Carson Pirie Scott department store was searching for models in its bridal division, Margot decided Sherry should apply. For days on end, she taught her how to walk like a model, balance books on her head and twirl around. This was her way of boosting her daughter’s confidence, and she was determined the girl would succeed.

  “I was so scared when we arrived for my walk-through, but I kept going because my mother convinced me,” said Lansing. “I was just happy she had faith in my looks. And then I was hired.”

  The ugly duckling had become a swan, and men took note. Even her brother was impressed when she brought home a University of Chicago basketball star—though when the two went out, the young woman could never think of anything to say, and after a few dates her would-be boyfriend lost all patience.

  “I could take out a piece of paper and write down exactly what’s going to happen to you,” he groused. “You’ll be a fat housewife, living in the suburbs with nothing to do.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said fiercely. “I’m going to Hollywood and I’m going to be a star!”

  —

  Five years later, a university graduate and new wife, she did just that.

  She had spent the past years excelling at the Lab School and then working on her degree. Norton had wanted her to go to Tulane University in New Orleans, but when Northwestern accepted her as a speech major (with a minor in drama) she chose to remain in Chicago alongside her boyfriend and soon-to-be husband.

  Lansing was seventeen and still in high school when she met Michael Brownstein at a University of Chicago fraternity house party.
She had reached her full height of five feet ten inches, not as tall as her mother had feared, but enough to give her an aura of being older and considerably wiser than she was. She was warm, intelligent and beautiful—especially in the eyes of the young man she met this evening, sitting in one of the frat house rooms, strumming his guitar.

  Michael was nineteen years old, a medical student and the son of a doctor, and Jewish like her. In his jeans and cowboy hat, he seemed to be the spitting image of James Garner, and academically gifted to boot. (He would become a leading sex-reassignment surgeon.) He excelled without trying, though he was also a maverick who showed little interest in doing what he was told. Rather than study, he would tear through the city on his old motorbike or spend his hard-earned cash taking flying lessons, once scaring Lansing stiff when he flew her to dinner in Detroit.

  “He was very, very intelligent and good-looking and a little crazy in a positive sense,” said his best friend, John Stiefel. “We drank a lot and laughed a lot and we would fight for fun. I don’t think that was well received at the fraternity dorm.”

  Michael was as smitten with the young woman as she was with him. She was sparkling and fun, always the first on the dance floor and ready to run off at a moment’s notice just to get a hamburger in Milwaukee, ninety miles away.

  “Even then, she was kind of a prize,” he said. “She was gorgeous. She was smart—I caught that right away—and funny. She came in with a fraternity brother of mine, and we hit it off and he wasn’t too happy about it.”

  Michael was dangerous enough to be exciting, but wholesome enough to be safe. He was a good girl’s idea of a bad boy, perfect for a woman seeking a rebel, not a revolutionary. He had a part-time job, an unusual one given his background: he drove a city bus, and Lansing would accompany him for long stretches, happy to sit behind him for his entire eight-hour shift.

  For the first time since she was a child, she truly felt loved. With no money to buy flowers, Michael would cut up crepe paper and staple the petals on stems. He would discuss her longings and dreams without once laughing at their absurdity. “He listened,” she said. “And I badly needed to be heard.”

  On July 5, 1964, the couple wed at the Continental Hotel and Town Club, in a ceremony attended by some 180 guests. After a honeymoon in New York, they took in their first Broadway musical, Hello, Dolly!, and Lansing tried out for the TV game show Password before they returned to a small apartment on the North Side of Chicago, where they remained until Lansing’s graduation in June 1966.

  Only one blot stained these years: her disappointment with Northwestern.

  “I wasn’t happy there,” she acknowledged. “The Lab School was such a glorious place—it was all about intellect and not how you looked, and wasn’t judgmental, and Northwestern just couldn’t live up to that.” She was disturbed by the anti-Semitism there. “It was huge at the time. There was a girl who didn’t look Jewish, and she wanted to join one of the non-Jewish sororities, and I said, ‘We can’t pledge there, we’re Jews.’ She did it anyway. I said, ‘They’ll turn against you.’ And in the second year, they did.”

  Lansing started to act, but while she loved rehearsals, fear kicked in as soon as she was cast, and her teacher terrified the students. “There was a girl he broke down in a horrible way, and she never came back,” she recalled. “He was very hard on us.”

  Now this was drawing to an end.

  On the last day of her school year, in the sweltering heat of an un-air-conditioned hall, Lansing waited until her name was called out and then went onstage, proud to be graduating cum laude. She scanned the crowd for her parents, but to her disappointment they were nowhere to be seen. Afterward, she found them outside.

  When she asked what had happened, Norton shrugged.

  “It was too goddamn hot,” he said.

  On a hot and dusty afternoon in the summer of 1966, Sherry and Michael Brownstein’s green-and-white Mustang clattered over the Cahuenga Pass, caked with mud and dirt after four days on the road. Lansing looked up from the tiny TV set she had stowed in the car, which would crackle into life and then die as they passed from one state to another, and glimpsed Los Angeles for the first time.

  Her initial view was not of the ocean or the palm trees that swayed along the manicured boulevards of Beverly Hills, nor of the Hollywood sign that had fallen into disrepair, but rather of a city enveloped in smog. She could barely make out the skyscrapers that towered above downtown L.A., which resembled New York and Chicago more than the paradise of her dreams. A thick morass of smoke and fumes from the oil refineries and industrial plants enveloped buildings that climbed ever upward in their struggle for air, dwarfing the men and women who moved like figurines through the heavily trafficked streets.

  If Lansing had had even an iota of cynicism, she might have regarded this as an omen: not everything was going to be quite the way she had imagined in the City of Angels. But she was wide-eyed and innocent, and knew nothing of herself or the world, let alone the mecca of entertainment she was about to confront.

  Here she was soon to be discovered, she was sure, heedless of the thousands of others fleeing their adolescence, just like her, all streaming into Los Angeles, swelling its population from almost two million in 1950 to twice that three decades later, each thinking he was bigger and better than the rest, each perfect prey for the hucksters and charlatans who masqueraded as producers, managers and agents.

  She was dangerously naive, like Michael. Both were so oblivious to the reality of Hollywood that they had seriously contemplated moving to San Francisco instead of Los Angeles, by mistake; after all, that was California, too, wasn’t it, so how far from Hollywood could it be?

  The freeway whisked them through an avenue of skyscrapers and along a collection of urban arteries before spitting them into the streets of the city, where Lansing still believed unknowns such as Lana Turner had been spotted at a soda fountain, and where Schwab’s Pharmacy was a real place, not just a metaphor for every hopeful waiting to be made a star.

  Down Sunset Boulevard the Mustang rolled, along the very street she had seen in the movie that bore its name, with its haunting opening of a man floating facedown in a pool—dead, even as he narrated his story—though the real-life Sunset appeared to have nothing in common with the film, not this eastern section anyway. Where were the mansions and their celebrities, the lofty palaces where the rich and famous moved among liveried servants, hosting parties for the privileged few? One-and two-story stucco buildings lined the wide, straight street, with its car washes and drugstores and massive billboards, parading the wonders of everything from king-size Coke to the Marlboro Man.

  Worn out from their marathon drive, the couple checked in to one of the hundreds of motels that had sprouted like refugee camps, providing shelter for the thousands of immigrants who flooded into the city, and plopped down on a king-size bed. But Lansing was in no mood to rest. She was hungry for each nugget of information she could wolf down about her new hometown, knowing that every day she dawdled she was one step further from stardom. The two went out almost immediately, back in their car, cruising alongside the immense, boat-like convertibles that floated along the highway, their smiling owners never honking or changing lanes, either dazed by the sun or on a perpetual, laid-back high, until they reached the center of Hollywood and found a run-down, squalid township that seemed light-years removed from the Shangri-la Lansing had envisioned.

  Strip clubs and seedy bars popped up at intervals, sprinkled with the occasional hotspot whose name she vaguely recognized—from the Musso and Frank Grill to Frederick’s of Hollywood, the lingerie store whose revealing outfits a proper girl like herself would never be caught buying. Hollywood was a dump, the magic behind its mythical name either hidden behind these walls or in some other secret place that had yet to be located.

  None of this, however, was enough to dampen her excitement, which burned brightest when she reached the site she most craved to see, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Built in the 1
920s by the industry’s best-known exhibitor, with the kind of baroque excess that made a mockery of understatement, it maintained an oriental splendor, with pagoda-like towers hovering over a concrete apron flecked with the hand-and footprints of stars. Lansing darted from Shirley Temple to Bette Davis to Marilyn Monroe and prayed that one day her name might be stamped beside theirs.

  The streets were exploding with life. Hippies in bell-bottoms and Afghan coats weaved between the tourists; shady characters tried to sell her marijuana; peaceniks held up signs proclaiming MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR, the slogan that was just beginning to filter through the culture. These men and women belonged to a raw, anti-establishment breed hailing from a universe galaxies removed from Lansing’s own. But their antiwar banners were warnings of the dark cloud that hovered alongside her dreams, reminders that Michael might soon be summoned to serve. The United States had launched a sustained aerial bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese, with the first heavy fighting involving American troops in the Ia Drang Valley. Lyndon B. Johnson had escalated the military’s presence in Asia, with regular combat units deployed to Vietnam. Almost 400,000 troops were stationed there by the end of 1966, with talk that the president would ratchet up the war even more.

  Lansing knew this. But here, as she gazed in awe at the splendor of the Chinese Theatre and its link to the Hollywood of old, that was far from her thoughts. Michael had signed up for the Berry Plan, which allowed medical students to defer their military service until they had finished their training, and his had not even begun. He still had his freedom, and—God willing—the war would be over before his hospital stint ended. And so Lansing pushed her fears aside and allowed the revolution of the 1960s to carry on around her but not inside her.

  “That all happened outside my life,” she said. “I might as well have been on another planet.”