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

by Stephen Galloway

  It was in Old Tucson that Lansing met Wayne for the first time and found him “warm and accessible,” not merely the right-wing nemesis of Hollywood liberals. “He talked to everybody and played cards with the guys,” she said. “He’d sit around and tell stories. He wasn’t intimidating. He wasn’t snobbish. People adored him. And at the end of the shoot, he gave each of us a cup that said, ‘The Duke. Rio Lobo.’ ”

  In their few scenes together, Wayne was professional and encouraging, if distant. He did not discuss his craft with her, nor did he say anything about his private life. She did not know that the sixty-three-year-old actor was battling the cancer that eventually would kill him, as well as dealing with the death of his mother and the implosion of his marriage to Pilar Pallete.

  “I was cast as Amelita, a girl who vows revenge on the sheriff for beating me up and scarring my face,” said Lansing. “I loved the idea of playing a vigilante who kills the bad guy. My big line, delivered in my huskiest voice, was: ‘Turn around, sheriff, I want you to see who’s going to kill you.’ I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God! I’m in a movie with John Wayne. This is what I worked for my whole life. This is what I dreamed of, sitting in those movie theaters in Chicago.’ ”

  Early in the shoot, Wayne left to attend the 42nd Academy Awards, where he had been nominated for his role as Rooster Cogburn in 1969’s True Grit. When he returned, having finally won an Oscar as Best Actor, he was greeted by the entire cast and crew, all wearing black eye patches in honor of his True Grit character. Even his horse had one.

  On set, it was Hawks who impressed Lansing even more than Wayne. Hundreds of miles from the studio, he ruled with absolute authority, and nothing anyone said could shift him to do anything he didn’t like. When the studio dragged its feet over Mitchum’s casting, she recalled how the director dawdled, slowing production to a crawl. “He complained that his ankle hurt, meaning he would have to stop work for the day,” she said. “Then he told them he was coming down with the flu. Everything started to drag and got strung out for days. The bottom line was, he wasn’t going to shoot until he got the actor he wanted. There was nothing the studio could do; if they fired him, they’d have to replace him immediately or risk losing all their money. So Chris was given the part.”

  Lansing feared she was not delivering what her director wanted. She looked with envy at the film’s leading lady, Jennifer O’Neill, wishing she could be as beautiful and sophisticated as the twenty-two-year-old former model who was going through her own conflicts with Hawks.

  O’Neill recalled meeting him before the shoot began. It bore unfortunate parallels to Lansing’s experience. “He was sitting behind a giant mahogany desk and we spoke for a few minutes about the film,” she remembered. “He said, ‘I created Lauren Bacall, and you need to speak from the diaphragm [like her].’ He said, ‘Come here!’ and I hesitantly got up, and he said, ‘No, no, come here around the desk.’ I thought, ‘Oh no, what’s going to happen?’ I was very, very nervous, and as I rounded the desk slowly, inches at a time, he suddenly punched me in the diaphragm and said, ‘That’s where you have to speak from!’ ”

  When O’Neill refused to sign a multipicture contract with the director, which would have allowed him to loan her out to other filmmakers for a fraction of what she felt she deserved, he was incensed. “We went down to the set, and in front of the whole crew he said he was going to blackball me from the business and that I would never work again,” she noted. “It was very intimidating.”

  Lansing observed the growing rift between them as Hawks started taking scenes away from O’Neill and giving them to her, including the final sequence when Amelita shoots the bad guy, the last scene Hawks would ever film. But she never felt free to discuss it. Divide and conquer was the order of the day, and Lansing and O’Neill never became friends, to each woman’s regret, said O’Neill, because “she was as lovely then as she is now.”

  Lansing followed Hawks’s rules, which meant not fraternizing with anyone of whom he did not approve, least of all the lowly crew members, with whom she felt most at home. He was old-school and class-bound, locked in the hierarchy of the past at a time when all things past and hierarchical were coming under assault.

  “One of the stuntmen, whom I liked, though not in a romantic way, said, ‘Oh, I’d better not talk to you. I’ll get in trouble,’ ” recalled Lansing. “Hawks didn’t want anyone talking to his leading ladies, because that was the fantasy: they were there for him alone.”

  The fantasy continued off-camera as well as on. “He insisted that I talk in my throaty voice during the entire shoot,” she said. “I’d go out to lunch or dinner with him and Wayne and speak as if I were Lauren Bacall. I was supposed to be a sex symbol, which was totally unnatural to me. I sounded fake and I felt fake. I was miserable.”

  On her last day of work, Hawks turned on her with some of the harshness he had previously reserved for O’Neill. “I had to cry and shoot the bad guy, and he kept making me do it again and again and again,” she said. “Wayne—Duke, as he was called—went over and said, ‘Hey, you’re being too hard on her.’ But Hawks just dismissed it out of hand. He told me later, ‘I knew you could take it.’ ”

  He was wrong. She could handle his criticism, but not her growing awareness that she hated acting. She loathed the falseness, the pretense, the need to transform herself into someone she did not recognize, the push to become a manufactured being removed from any part of her own reality. If this was acting, she realized, it was not for her. Just as her dream was starting to come true, it was turning into a nightmare.

  She began to suffer from psychosomatic pain. “I got this incredible tension in my arms and legs whenever I acted, just from being anyone other than myself,” she said. “I almost couldn’t function. Hawks was creating who I was, and I had to become that person. It was all fake, and the fakeness drove me crazy.”

  When Rio Lobo opened in December 1970, her reviews fell flat. She and another actress, Susana Dosamantes, were “somewhat sultrier than they are talented,” noted the Los Angeles Times. Nor did the movie fare any better at the box office than it did with the critics: it earned less than its $5 million budget.

  “However charitable one might care to be,” writes McCarthy of Hawks, “the evidence of decline is too obvious to ignore. The film’s lack of creative spark, of inspiration, of energy, of any driving force is palpable in every scene save for the train prologue….Few great directors ever went out with a bang; like most of them, Hawks, at the estimable age of seventy-four, sort of faded away.”

  And so did Lansing’s acting career. If she had thought this would lead to bigger parts, she was wrong. After Rio Lobo, she guest-starred as Joel Grey’s wife in the NBC courtroom drama Ironside, and then appeared opposite Burt Reynolds in an episode of ABC’s crime series Dan August.

  “Dan August was a disaster,” she said. “I remember the day it all went wrong. We were shooting a critical scene. The director wanted me to cry, but all I could do was blink. I thought, if I squeezed my eyes tight, I could make tears come, but it was no use. I kept blinking as hard as I could. After at least ten awful takes, the director called for a break. I knew he was stopping because I couldn’t give him what he wanted.”

  Reynolds wandered over. “Hey, high pockets,” he said, referring to her pantsuit. “You’re really good. You just need to relax.”

  But she could not, no matter how hard she tried. The more she forced herself, the worse she became, until she felt as if she were sinking deeper into an artistic and psychological quagmire. “I was becoming more and more miserable,” she said. “Instead of relaxing, I became more uptight. I kept telling myself, ‘If I just get this next role, everything will be different.’ But it never was.”

  After Dan August, she never acted again.

  “Her heart wasn’t in it,” said Reynolds. But he remembered their conversations four decades later and recalled something unique about this young woman, a vitality and hunger, an energy still incho
ate but searching for an outlet.

  “I was struck by that drive, that enormous drive,” he said. “It was very powerful. I felt whatever she tackled, if she gave it 100 percent she’d succeed.”

  As her acting career collapsed, Lansing fell into a depression. She had failed at the two things that mattered to her most, her marriage and her career.

  The young woman who a few years earlier had attacked Los Angeles with an almost reckless abandon felt rudderless and adrift. Again and again, she asked herself: Why had her luck changed? What should she have done differently? Was it other people’s fault, or had she constructed her own dollhouse full of holes?

  In her mid-twenties she began to see a psychoanalyst, but her first experience was a disaster. “He said if I didn’t see him five times a week, I’d become even more depressed,” she recalled. “He told me only he could help me. He made me think I was mentally ill and that I’d commit suicide if I didn’t keep going to him. When I told him I could only afford to come twice a week, he said, ‘Make sacrifices.’ He wanted to take total control of my life. He told me, ‘When I’m done with you, you won’t even want a career. You’ll be happy staying home and baking pies.’ ”

  With no guide to steer her away from the analyst, Lansing remained with him for two years. “It didn’t occur to me that he should probably lose his license,” she said. “I was young and impressionable. It took every ounce of strength I had to break free. The thought lingered in me that I was seriously unstable. It was a secret I carried for years.”

  When a friend set her up on a blind date, she was certain the man would soon spot the fissures beneath her polished façade. “I kept thinking, ‘He’d better not get to know me well or he’ll discover I’m certifiable,’ ” she said.

  Her date was another psychoanalyst, and when she finally opened up about her experience, “he said, ‘I beg you to see another doctor so this isn’t what you think therapy is like,’ ” she recalled. “Then he picked up the phone and called a friend, who introduced me to Dr. Joshua Hoffs.”

  Lansing went to meet Hoffs at his West Los Angeles office, where she found him surrounded by paintings, as warm as her last therapist had been cold.

  “I was instantly comfortable,” she said. “He had this approach where nothing seemed too serious. I came from parents who were highly critical, where everything was life and death, and he’d just smile and say, ‘I won’t judge you unless you’re doing something that’s seriously going to hurt you.’ ”

  Lansing began to see him regularly, and over the next five years would visit him as often as three times a week. She discussed the seemingly contradictory messages her mother had sent—she was a woman of unquestionable strength, who nonetheless had submerged her strength when she married her second husband; a woman skilled enough to run a business, who had turned her back on all forms of business as soon as she could resume domestic life. “Work, in effect, was only a placeholder until she could find a husband,” said Lansing.

  All this she discussed with Hoffs, along with the loss of her father, in an intense and emotional exploration that continued for years. “Analysis is about re-parenting yourself and relearning the habits of a lifetime,” she said. “I’m convinced I wouldn’t have the life I have today if it weren’t for that.”

  —

  Lansing’s acting career was over, but what would take its place?

  The answer came through Ray Wagner, her Loving producer. Some fifteen years her senior, he was old enough to have experience but not so old as to be removed from her concerns. A former advertising executive, he had started in commercials before producing an early TV movie, 1964’s The Hanged Man, and one of Lansing’s favorite films, 1968’s Petulia with Julie Christie. He was a man of unusual warmth and sensitivity, and had become close to her during their Connecticut shoot, where he found she possessed a rare combination of analytic and intuitive intelligence.

  “I said, ‘Why don’t you come and be a reader?’ ” he remembered. “Her judgment was excellent, better than mine.”

  In 1971, she began her new career. The gangling girl who had remade herself as an actress would remake herself again, this time as a script reader and future executive. If being a director’s puppet had not worked, she would instead become the puppet master.

  With Wagner, she discovered the intricacies of how a screenplay was developed. She learned that the best writing used dialogue almost in counterpoint to the visuals, so that what was heard was different from what was seen; she found that a well-made scene could unfold over many pages, with a beginning, middle and end just like a self-contained story; and she observed that each of the best screenplays was driven by an underlying idea that the writer wanted to convey about life itself. It was this that touched her the most, because it meant films could have meaning and be just as effective in catalyzing change as her work in schools.

  Over the following weeks and months, she plowed through dozens and dozens of scripts, noting her thoughts on each one.

  “She kept a little wire-bound book,” said Wagner, “and she’d write down exactly how much time she spent on that script, how many hours and minutes, and I would pay her accordingly. She could see what worked and what didn’t, and knew how to fix things.”

  Through Wagner, Lansing discovered she could be emotionally open without feeling any less secure. He was proud of his emotions and did nothing to hide them. “If Ray saw a film that moved him, he’d cry,” she said. “If he was hurt or upset, he’d share his feelings. He was the first person I met who hugged, and I was so needy for hugs.”

  At twenty-six years old, she was starting from scratch, joining the legions of struggling readers, writers and would-be producers who lived off the scripts that floated through the city like industrial plankton. Thousands circulated at any time: comedies and dramas, science fiction and thrillers, action-adventures and romances, all hammered out by eager writers hunched over their Olympias and Olivettis.

  It was the bottom rung on a tall ladder, but a rung often used as a starting point by others who had gone on to become producers and executives. Script reading, along with working in an agency mailroom, was the best means to earn a modest living while soaking oneself in Hollywood’s rituals and rules.

  “It was one of the most interesting ways to begin a career,” said Jeff Berg, who also started as a reader and later became chairman of the agency ICM. “You read everything that comes in: plays, novels, manuscripts, screenplays, pilots, treatments, outlines. You’re reading every kind of material that’s going to be marketed. What better training to hone your critical skills?”

  Earning $5 per hour as a part-timer, Lansing had to work around the clock to make a fraction of her pay as an actress, but she had none of the anxiety that accompanied it. For the first time, she was content, burrowing through material stacked in neat piles in the cubbyhole of a room that Wagner had set aside for her in his Beverly Hills offices.

  “I felt instantly comfortable as a reader,” she said. “I felt qualified, I felt valued and I felt peaceful. I felt, if I never did anything else for the rest of my life, I’d be happy.”

  For days and weeks, she toiled in her tiny office, indifferent to the world around her, as she read hundreds of submissions, studying the intricacies of character and dialogue and learning the mechanics of effective plots. She approached each script the same way: she would take an hour and a half to read it, then thirty minutes to write a synopsis and comments. First came the “log line,” a sentence or two that explained the script’s premise, the hook that would tell a buyer whether this was worth pursuing; next came a one-page story summary; and finally a critical evaluation, in which she explained each script’s strengths and weaknesses and potential for success. Good screenplays, then as now, were the rarest of gems.

  She wrote all her reports by hand because she had never learned to type. “I didn’t want to,” she said. “That was my form of rebellion, because I knew I’d end up becoming a secretary if ever I did, and I
was scared I wouldn’t go further.”

  Throughout, Wagner was her mentor. “He would let me come to story meetings, and we’d analyze the characters and their connection to the plot,” she said. “And he showed me how you could handle things with grace. If he had to tell a writer his script wasn’t great, the writer would always leave feeling good. He was honest, he was emotional, and he didn’t lie. He was an impeccable producer and an idealist, who had a profound effect on my life.”

  Wagner watched with delight as Lansing “took on a maturity and a wisdom that can only come from being in the arena, and learned all the highways and byways of traveling in the business.”

  After six months, he hired her full-time. A year and a half later, with Wagner’s support, Lansing was named story editor at Leonard Stern’s Talent Associates, where she joined a major television producer whose credits included Get Smart and McMillan and Wife.

  This was a period of transformation, a voyage of intellectual and artistic discovery that altered Lansing’s thinking about herself and her career. Unformed before, she began to take shape now.

  “I spent hours in story meetings, immersed in conversation about characters’ motivations and actions,” she said. “For the first time in my life, I felt authentic.”

  —

  If Wagner was her better angel, she had a darker one, too.

  At a dinner party hosted by Stern, Lansing was seated next to Dan Melnick, a famed executive who was the head of production at MGM. He was as cynical as Wagner was idealistic, as suspicious as Wagner was trusting.

  “He sat next to me, perfectly dressed,” said Lansing. “He had a three-piece suit—he always wore a vest and a suit. He was so sophisticated, and I was so unsophisticated. He talked about art and movies, and I guess he tried to impress me, though I didn’t realize that’s what he was trying to do.”