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

by Stephen Galloway

  For now, the signal of a coming revolution was lost amid the noise of industrial moviemaking. The two top box office hits of 1966 were the distinctly old-school The Bible: In the Beginning…, a fictionalized version of the first part of Genesis (with Richard Harris as Cain, John Huston as Noah and Peter O’Toole as the Three Angels); and Hawaii, a nineteenth-century period piece based on the James Michener novel in which a devout missionary and his bride set out for the islands, where naked girls splashed in the ocean, waiting to be converted. This was the bread and butter of the majors.

  Other films “were still anomalies in a world that had just made The Sound of Music the highest-grossing film in history,” writes Mark Harris in Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. “What paid studio bills in the mid-1960s were James Bond extravaganzas, John Wayne westerns, Elvis Presley quickies, Dean Martin action comedies, and a long-standing willingness on the part of moviegoers to suspend disbelief.”

  —

  Lansing was more than willing to suspend her own.

  “Each day, I’d sit waiting for the phone to ring,” she said. “I had no control over when I auditioned or where. Whenever Joe called, I’d race across town for some casting assistant who probably didn’t want to see me, then go home and wait by the phone again.”

  Lansing would head out to offices large and small, meet filmmakers legitimate and illegitimate, hope for the best and frequently experience the worst. She saw that actors, if not quite cattle—as Hitchcock had described them—were treated as such, and grew to resent this injustice. It bothered her to be kept waiting for hours, as if she had no feelings. It humiliated her when casting directors regarded her as interchangeable with a hundred others. Actors, with the exception of a few major stars, were second-class citizens, she discovered—and actresses were third-class.

  Small roles began to come her way, eventually allowing her to leave teaching after three years of substitute work. She was a background player on Rowan & Martin’s LaughIn, the benchmark 1960s comedy series, in which she pranced on the set with a handful of other young women, yelling the show’s catchphrase, “Sock it to me!”

  “Each week we’d throw a cocktail party, and every Monday morning we’d audition girls for it,” said executive producer George Schlatter. “[A casting associate] comes in, looks around, sees this girl, and says, ‘You’re perfect! You’re tall, you’re brunette, you have full lips, you have dark eyes—they’ll love you.’ It was Sherry.”

  She also appeared in ten episodes of Hugh Hefner’s short-lived jazz show Playboy After Dark, where she could be seen hanging out with the Playmates and guests in the Playboy Mansion, in an attempt to convey what a party there was like. Michael tolerated this, perhaps uneasily; his wife was fully clothed and Hefner treated her with respect. Like all those who worked for him, he made sure she was well fed, if nothing else. “Rather than the usual slop, there was always a huge spread of food,” said Lansing. “It was a great lesson to see a boss making sure that everyone was treated like a human being.”

  She got her first taste of a real role as a “safari club girl” in 1969’s The April Fools, a romantic comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve, in which she played a partygoer hovering in the background through the long scene when the two leads meet.

  “It took us almost three weeks to shoot that,” said Dee Gardner, another of the safari club girls, who remembered the stifling heat on the set. “It was closed in, like a box, and it was hot, and when they’d shoot they’d turn off the air-conditioning. But money seemed to be unlimited.”

  So did the lavish treatment the safari club girls were given after the film wrapped, when Lansing, Gardner and a third actress, Poupée Bocar, were sent on a multicity promotional tour. “Most of the girls were real ‘actress’ types,” said Gardner, “but Poupée and Sherry were very smart women, so it was a completely different kind of tour than you’d normally find. We went to Dallas, and New Orleans was unique. We were on a float throwing doubloons out to the crowd, in these skimpy costumes, and these young men were doing provocative dances up against it. And we went to see the mayor [Victor Schiro], who was about five feet tall. We’re all these tall, striking women—and he greets us, gives us the key to the city, then pulls out a shelf and stands on it to take pictures.”

  Lansing got her biggest break yet when Wander told her to take the next plane to New York, where she would audition for a small role in Loving, a movie that had already started filming under director Irvin Kershner, about a few days in the life of an illustrator struggling with alcoholism and a foundering marriage. She raced to the airport and agonized for hours as her plane remained grounded due to hydraulic problems.

  Upon her arrival, she went straight to the casting office, where, typically, twenty other actresses were waiting. Convinced that one of them must have won the role, she checked in to her hotel and then got a call telling her the job was hers. She screamed for joy.

  “I was so happy I even told the maid,” she said. “I started dancing with her, yelling: ‘I got the part! I got the part!’ ”

  Lansing had two scenes as an attractive young woman whose life bisects that of the illustrator (George Segal) and who becomes almost comically inebriated. It was a secondary role but nonetheless challenging, and as the shoot progressed so did her fears. She was sure Kershner disliked her high-pitched voice with its distinct Chicago twang, no matter how much one of the producers, Ray Wagner, denied it.

  “She was very good,” he said. “She hadn’t had that much experience, so it was a bit of a gamble, but Kershner was not a director to just say, ‘That’s OK.’ He was very stringent. We were all pleased.”

  Lansing was thrilled when the Hollywood Reporter described her as “impressive and shapely,” while Variety praised her for being a “chic sexpot.” At the time, that was flattering rather than demeaning.

  —

  The specter of war had been looming ever larger since the Brownsteins arrived in Los Angeles. In June 1968, shortly before Lansing got April Fools, her fears came true when Michael learned he had to serve. To their relief, he was going not to Vietnam but rather to the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Korea, where he would be stationed for the next thirteen months.

  A welter of conflicting emotions consumed the young couple. Michael was worried about whatever dangers lay ahead, even though active hostilities had ended in 1953, while Lansing was torn, grateful that her husband had been spared Vietnam but also relieved by their imposed separation. Weeks after receiving his notice, Michael said goodbye, left their Kenmore Avenue home, and set out for the airport on his own.

  “It was a very tearful parting,” he said. “I took a taxi to LAX, flew to Seattle, and I was stuck there for three days.”

  Later that week, he got to Seoul and was shaken by what he saw. Flies swarmed from the meat that hung on hooks out in the open. Outdoor ditches served as toilets. His surroundings were primitive, telephone communication next to impossible. It took hours to get a phone line, and when he did, he had trouble making out his wife’s voice, so faint that it seemed to have been wafted to him by a breeze. “This wasn’t satellite, it was microwave,” he said. “You’d go into this facility and you might be there two or three hours until you got a connection, and the wave goes in and out, and it just disappears, and you’re yelling back and forth.”

  Eventually he gave up calling; Lansing could not get through at all. And so for months they hardly spoke, communicating instead through letters. Michael was alone and bored. Here, in the middle of nowhere, with little to do and nobody from home, he grew increasingly distant from the wife he had left behind.

  The DMZ marked him deeply. “I saw horrible injuries, most of them from friendly fire,” he said. “People were stepping on mines from the original conflict. Guys [would get] drunk and on drugs, wander in the mess hall and pass a grenade around—which went off one time. When we were called in, there were five guys dead, with their intestines co
ming down the stairs.” Fear was a constant, uncertainty a given. “We’d go into those villages and I was like, ‘God, what’s happening? Where am I?’ We’d [drink] and sit up on a stone and think, ‘Which way is America?’ and shout, ‘Help!’ But no one was there.”

  Back home, Lansing’s experience as a wife with a husband at war was far from unique. “Everybody was being drafted,” she said. “It was part of life. I’d go out with girlfriends or couples, but I was working seven days a week, trying to get acting jobs and teaching modeling at the Caroline Leonetti agency.”

  Halfway through Michael’s tour of duty, she flew to meet him in Japan, where he kept silent about the hardships he was facing. An invisible curtain was falling between them. In Tokyo, “we talked about getting a divorce,” he said. “There was no precipitating event. We just drifted apart.”

  Lansing was crushed by the prospect of breaking up, and even more by the thought of telling her family. When she called her mother, “she blamed me for not making the marriage work. She said it was the wife’s job to hold a marriage together, and I should be able to fix what was wrong. She said, ‘If you were a better wife, you’d make it work.’ ”

  Divorce was still frowned on, though the divorce rate would explode in the 1970s. Riddled with guilt, Lansing decided to hold off, letting her marriage grind along its bumpy path, helped by Michael’s absence. But when he returned in October 1969, she knew it was over. He spent the briefest time with her before leaving for Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, his next posting. When he halfheartedly asked if she wanted to join him, she demurred. “We’re getting a divorce by attrition,” he quipped. She did not disagree.

  “Our breakup had no fireworks and no fights,” she said. “Things were so amicable that we even used the same lawyer. I didn’t want any money, but the lawyer said it would be a problem if I didn’t ask for alimony, because if Michael became a successful doctor, I could sue and claim coercion.”

  Michael agreed to pay her $100 a year; the judge signed and stamped their papers, and the divorce was official.

  “My mother was so ashamed, she didn’t tell anyone,” said Lansing. “When my grandmother was in the hospital and asked why Michael never visited, she’d point to a random doctor and say, ‘You just missed him.’ ”

  Living in her Kenmore Avenue apartment, the young woman felt abandoned. She had come to Los Angeles desiring so much, and after four years had so little. Her closest friends were far away, her family emotionally farther. She had imagined by now that Michael would be a doctor and she would be a film star, living the kind of idealized life she had seen on television and in the movies; instead, she was scraping by, taking jobs low on the artistic totem pole.

  She looked at the acting she had done and found it wanting. With one or two exceptions, “these were glorified modeling jobs,” she said. “Landing them was all about looks and luck. No talent was required.”

  Alone in her apartment, she cried at the thought of Michael’s loss and what her life had become. Then Norton called. He said he was coming to Los Angeles on business, but she knew he was really flying out just to see her. For four days he remained at her side, sleeping on her couch and tending to her with a gentleness he had never allowed himself to reveal. For the first time, they talked fully and openly.

  “My father was able to accept what was unpleasant, whereas my mother couldn’t,” reflected Lansing. “He didn’t shirk from it. It was then that I knew I truly loved him, and he truly loved me.”

  Shortly after her divorce, Lansing learned that one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors, Howard Hawks, was about to make a new western.

  The director had been hired by an independent company, Cinema Center Films, in the belief he could still deliver a hit, though a decade had elapsed since his last one, 1959’s Rio Bravo. Looking to reteam with John Wayne, he turned to a story by Burton Wohl about a Union Army captain who joins forces with a Confederate officer on the trail of a gang of train robbers. He later added another writer to the mix, his trusted colleague Leigh Brackett, as they worked on the screenplay, then called San Timoteo and later retitled Rio Lobo.

  At seventy-three years old, Hawks was a cold and patrician figure, a philanderer and compulsive gambler whom few liked and fewer loved, a man’s man more comfortable with Wayne and his ilk than with the women he invariably sought to reshape. One of Hollywood’s most admired artists, he was also one of its most inscrutable.

  “Many people are conveniently called enigmas,” writes his biographer, Todd McCarthy, in Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, “but even Hawks’s friends referred to him that way. He was Sphinxlike, remote, cold, private, intimidating, self-absorbed, a man with eyes like blue ice cubes.”

  Hawks had directed such seminal works as 1932’s Scarface and 1938’s Bringing Up Baby, but Lansing above all knew that he had launched the career of Lauren Bacall in 1944’s To Have and Have Not. Summoned to meet him, she was petrified.

  “I showed up in my nicest clothes, with my hair straightened and light makeup on my face,” she said. “He shook his head and told me to come back looking less put-together.”

  When she returned days later in jeans, with her hair mussed up and no visible makeup, Hawks was content. He had never liked his women to be too conventionally feminine; androgyny was his thing, even his obsession—indeed, on one occasion, when he went to meet his estranged daughter, he took as a gift two men’s shirts wrapped in a paper bag. He intimidated Lansing, but nonetheless treated her better than many other women in his orbit. “He had a gruff manner, but he didn’t yell,” she said. “He was quiet, but forceful and strong. I don’t remember gabbing a lot or laughing with him—he wasn’t that kind of person. It was more business: ‘I told you to walk there, didn’t I? Now walk here, do this, do that.’ He knew what he wanted.”

  There was a darker side to him, however, with a need for absolute and unquestioned control. As he and Lansing spent more time together, with only vague hints that she would have a part in his movie, but no contract and no promises, she saw he was trying to mold her into someone else. Over and over, as they rehearsed, she felt her innermost self being siphoned away. Hawks wished to alter her very being—not just the way she acted but the way she moved, talked, walked. Reminding her that he had discovered Bacall, he urged her to speak like the throaty-voiced star. “He thought I sounded too girly,” said Lansing. “He told me that to turn my voice from shrill to husky, I needed to practice screaming at the top of my lungs until I developed calluses on my vocal cords.”

  Each day at dawn, she would drive to the top of Los Angeles’ Griffith Park and yell. “My hair was tied back, and I was wrapped in an old coat that I had brought from Chicago,” she said. “My throat was sore, my vocal cords ached. I’d take a deep breath and let out a primal scream.”

  One morning, a homeless man leaped from the bushes at the sound of her shrieking, more scared of Lansing than she was of him. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “I’m screaming!” she replied. That seemed to satisfy him, and he returned to his bushes.

  Hawks began to squire Lansing around town, taking her to dinners with the rich and famous, turning her into the latest of the many human baubles to decorate his arm. She did not object, however uncomfortable she felt. It helped that Hawks never made a pass, although in some ways that seemed stranger than if he had. This once-virile man, with his baritone voice and authoritative manner, simply needed to prove he could summon a beautiful girl at will, regardless of whether he had any intention to take it further. “It was all for show,” said Lansing. “You arrived for dinner, you went wherever he wanted, you were polite, he kissed you on the cheek and said good night, and you went home. He never tried anything.”

  Only once, when she was invited to Hawks’s home in Palm Springs, did she sense something different, something sexual in the air. “That’s the only time I was a little nervous,” she said. “And I remember thinking, ‘I’ll just go home. I’ll get up and go. I’m a big girl. I have
a car.’ ” Her worries proved unfounded. “The illusion was all that was important.”

  She never thought of her effect on him or on others. Polly Platt, a production designer then married to director Peter Bogdanovich, recalled the humiliation she felt when the four went out to dinner. Halfway through the meal, “[Lansing] gets up, stands up, and she was gorgeous,” said Platt. “And I was not.” As the young actress left them to find a restroom, according to author Rachel Abramowitz, Hawks leaned over to Bogdanovich and whispered loud enough for Platt to hear, as if she were not even there, “Peter, now that is the kind of girl that you should be with.”

  —

  Weeks after their first meeting, Hawks screen-tested Lansing opposite Chris Mitchum, whom he was considering for one of the leading roles. She had to shoot one scene topless, though her arms were draped across her breasts and pasties covered her nipples.

  “She was absolutely terrified,” said Mitchum. “She didn’t know how the scene was going to be done. We talked about it and I said, ‘Take that nervousness and use it in the scene. Play with it.’ She had a Valium. She said, ‘I was thinking of taking it to calm my nerves.’ Well, she dropped the Valium. Had it been me, I would have been out cold by the time they shot the scene. But she was very calm.”

  Lansing landed the role, but she was convinced she was going to become an addict and end up on Skid Row, a fear that would haunt her for years, no matter how successful she became.

  “I panicked,” she said. “I was a Jewish girl from Chicago who was not only divorced, but losing track of who I was.” She thought of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, the 1966 bestseller about the temptations facing three young women in show business. “I was convinced I was headed for a life of depravity.”

  Hawks wanted to shoot in Durango, Mexico, but British director Michael Winner had snuck in ahead of him and booked a preexisting set he would have liked to use, so Hawks relocated to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where a two-week shoot was followed by a month and a half in Old Tucson, Arizona, before the shoot ended with studio work in Los Angeles.