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

by Stephen Galloway

  At forty-two years old, with his world-weary manner and sardonic voice, Melnick bore something of a resemblance to Humphrey Bogart, if a more urbane version. He had grown up poor in Rego Park, New York, and spent a lifetime trying to escape it. His house was a treasure trove of paintings and sculpture, and he fought for the money to maintain them. Even his office was filled with artwork, most notably the sculpture of a vagina—“a kind of impressionistic art, which he described as being there to remind him of his ex-wife,” said an executive who knew him well.

  He was complicated and contradictory, a Machiavellian mover and shaker who nonetheless loved film with a genuine passion. He battled for the pictures he believed in, fighting to piece together the money and the stars that would allow them to be made. Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical dance movie All That Jazz (1979) would never have been made without him; nor would such original pictures as Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980) and Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978), which created an international uproar with its depiction of brutality in a Turkish prison, but which also gave Oliver Stone his first big break as a writer.

  “A lot of studio executives ride the fence between the creative element and the corporate investor,” observed Steven Spielberg. “Few have bent over as far in the direction of the filmmaker as Dan Melnick.”

  Melnick and Wagner became the two polar forces that tugged at Lansing’s soul, the light and the dark, the sweet and the sour. Repeatedly she would be drawn to tough, uncompromising and sometimes scary men like Melnick, even as she gravitated toward more gentle souls like Wagner—perhaps the same split she had found in her two fathers, Norton and David.

  It was one of the central mysteries of Lansing’s personality that she could tolerate men whom others often found intolerable. Some felt her affinity for them was off-putting, while others deemed it incomprehensible. And yet, paradoxically, in an era when women were often shoved aside and ignored, it was these macho men—Melnick and the others who would later take his place—who were willing to take a chance and give Lansing her most significant breaks.

  She never forgot what Melnick taught her, though she developed more ambivalent feelings about him in the coming years, partly because she had dated him for a while, to her regret. “After that, I never wanted to go out with any other executive I’d have to work with, because I felt it tainted me unfairly,” she said. “And then it dogged me, even though I owe Danny so much.”

  In 1975, a few months after their initial meeting, Melnick made Lansing an offer she could not refuse: to join him as executive story editor at MGM.

  —

  The studio system was in turmoil. Half a century after most of the majors had come into being, all ruled as personal fiefdoms by despots such as Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck, they had become faint shadows of their former selves. The men who had founded them were either dead or defanged, and the audiences that had flocked to their product were in a steady decline that had begun at the end of World War II and was only now bottoming out. Average weekly attendance had tumbled to 44 million in 1965, half of what it was just after the war, as returning veterans settled down to build their families, and as television captured their attention at the expense of local theaters—and nobody had a clue what to do.

  Mayer was long gone, having died in 1957, years after being ousted from the company that bore his name; Cohn, the profanity-spewing chief of Columbia Pictures, had died a year later. While Zanuck had had a brief and glorious restoration, summoned back to Fox in the early 1960s after a protracted exile in Paris, he was forced out in 1971, the victim of a power struggle with Fox’s board. He did not go down without a fight, firing his own son before he in turn was fired.

  Jack Warner, the last of the four brothers who had built the Burbank studio, clung to power a while longer, having cheated one sibling out of his shares in order to do so. But he, too, had left at last, and Warner Bros., like almost all the other studios, now belonged to outsiders, corporate behemoths that knew nothing of film. This was part of a tectonic shift that would jolt the movie industry out of one era and send it spinning into another.

  The studios were in their death throes as autonomous nation-states. Gulf + Western Industries, which had its roots in the sale of auto parts, had purchased Paramount in 1966; a year later Transamerica, which made its money through insurance, had bought United Artists—and these were only the first assaults on Hollywood by the conglomerates. Warner Bros. was bought by Kinney National, a company built on parking lots and funeral parlors, and while Fox and Disney retained their independence, MGM had fallen into the hands of Kirk Kerkorian, the most predatory of Las Vegas raiders, who proceeded to sell it off piecemeal, unloading much of its land and auctioning or trashing priceless memorabilia, until all that was left was the shell of a studio.

  The corporate owners brought in “a new age of greed,” said film historian Leonard Maltin. “Hollywood has always been about greed, but before that they at least knew how to go about their daily business. And in the late 1960s and ’70s a lot of the components of that business underwent radical change.”

  Curiously, as the business went through this change—and as knowledgeable insiders were replaced by faraway accountants less able to make informed decisions—Hollywood entered a golden age, perhaps because the barriers that had kept young directors at bay were now removed. In the years following 1969’s Easy Rider, their work flooded the market. In part this was a response to the convulsions of the Vietnam War and the social upheaval of the 1960s, and audience demands for something different from the tame work they had seen until now; in part it was a reaction to the groundbreaking filmmaking coming out of France and England; and in part it was because a new establishment was rising up and replacing the old. Lansing was in the vanguard.

  On her first day at MGM, however, as she entered the Thalberg Building, where she had her office, it was the studio’s history and tradition that affected her far more than any thoughts of change.

  “This was the place I’d dreamed of,” she said. “It was so exciting, going through that gate and having my own office, and a big office, too. Danny had decorated it with lithographs from his own collection. He said, ‘Change anything you want.’ But there was nothing to change.”

  MGM had been struggling since the late 1950s, and things were only beginning to look up thanks to an unexpected hit, 1974’s That’s Entertainment!, a compilation of classic moments from the greatest movie musicals, which had debuted in Cannes the previous year. The movie’s success breathed life into the moribund empire; and for several staffers who still remembered how bad things had been, Lansing’s vitality matched their rising optimism.

  “She walked in wearing a green miniskirt and matching green sweater and white boots,” said Susan Merzbach, then an MGM script reader. “That was our first glimpse of this gorgeous person, the most exotic beast I had ever seen.”

  Regardless of the damage Kerkorian had inflicted, “the studio had a library the likes of which I had never known—every script, every piece of material,” said Merzbach. “The files were meticulously kept. There was a basement of file cabinets that went on for yards, with memos from Louis B. Mayer, Marx Brothers screenplays, and all of MGM’s history.”

  The pictures were just lying there, waiting to be seen whenever Lansing could find a projectionist to screen them. She taught herself film history through these movies.

  “She had to learn,” said Merzbach. “So lunchtimes we spent in an MGM screening room, watching film after film—Singin’ in the Rain, Dark Victory, everything we could get a print of. Sometimes she would turn and say, ‘Who would mind if we speed through this?’ because she had gotten what she needed.”

  Melnick gave her a list of one hundred pictures, from classics such as Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Rebecca and Fred Astaire’s Top Hat to more modern endeavors such as Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. He expected her to watch them all. She must learn to love t
he past as well as the present, he said, and judge filmmakers by their greatest work, not merely their latest. He also instructed her to delve into every detail of a script and read draft after draft, just as he did. This was unusual for an executive of his stature, who would normally expect his staff to do the grunt work.

  “Danny was obsessed with doing it right,” said Lansing. “There were no half measures with him. He’d meet with all the writers and read all their drafts and brainstorm ways to make each screenplay better. He had a great love of film and a great respect for the audience. He believed audiences were smart and would understand the material you gave them, so there was no need to dumb it down.”

  Soon she was developing her own material, including a sequel to Gone with the Wind that had been in the works with producers David Brown and Richard Zanuck (Darryl’s son). Scarlett O’Hara died in the first draft Lansing read, but she believed the story should conclude with Rhett Butler’s death. She won that argument, though the movie was never made.

  “Sherry would share the scripts with all the readers and ask for our comments,” said Merzbach. “That had never been done before. She wanted to know what we thought. She was as democratic a presence as I have ever seen. You’d walk into a meeting with Melnick or [production executive] Dick Shepherd, and their faces were sort of closed; they’re waiting to hear what you’re going to say and whether they’ll like it. You’d walk into a meeting with Sherry and it was, ‘Whaddya got?’ I was in heaven.”

  On one occasion, Kerkorian, MGM’s owner, stopped by Lansing’s office. She had admired him from a distance and noted the way he stood in line at the studio commissary, never cutting in, even though he owned the place.

  “It was the end of the day and I had cleaned off my desk, as was my routine,” she recalled. “Kerkorian peeked in and said, ‘You’ve got nothing on your desk.’ ‘That’s right,’ I told him. That was my routine. I was worried he’d think I had nothing to do. But he said: ‘Neither do I, and neither does Lew Wasserman [the head of MCA-Universal and the most powerful man in Hollywood]. That’s why you’re a good executive.’ ”

  She approached her work as methodically as a math problem. Years before executives used spreadsheets, and decades before the Internet revolutionized information, “she figured out a system for tracking every single book that came from the publishers,” said Merzbach, “and she was very good at it.”

  When one top literary agent refused to deal with the studio, now something of a backwater compared to the others, “Sherry called him every day until he finally met her,” continued Merzbach. “Then she charmed him and got this huge advance information. It didn’t matter what their reputation was; Sherry could turn them all.”

  Others could sometimes turn her, particularly the founders of Creative Artists Agency, which had opened its doors in the same year she joined MGM, under the leadership of five upstarts from the William Morris Agency. Their roots were in television, not film, at a time when the two businesses were discrete and unconnected.

  One of the CAA leaders, Bill Haber, had been trying to win Lansing over, without success. “The first time he called me, he said, ‘I’d like to come and see you and go over the projects on your list,’ ” she remembered. “I said, ‘That would be great, but Susan does that.’ He said, ‘But I don’t want Susan.’ I said, ‘That’s the way we do it with everybody else.’ He said, ‘But I don’t want to be treated like everybody else.’ ”

  Haber told her he had a plan. “He said, ‘You know what? I’m going to shower you with gifts so you won’t treat me like everyone else,’ ” she noted. “Then he literally started showering us with gifts. The first time, he sent us fifty boxes of Morton salt, whose logo was a girl with an umbrella under a shower. I started to laugh and called him back. He wouldn’t take my call. The next day, sixty bottles of soap came for each of us. I called him again, and he still wouldn’t return my call. This goes on for days. Soap, shower caps, mops start arriving—my office is now like a store. I keep calling him, saying, ‘OK, stop!’ ”

  Lansing decided she had to one-up him. “So we hired an actor and told him, ‘We want you to go to CAA dressed in a towel, as if you’ve just had a shower,’ ” she said. “ ‘Then go to Bill Haber’s office and say, ‘The girls throw in the towel.’ ”

  The actor (one of Merzbach’s friends) did as instructed, but when he talked his way into the agent’s office, shampooing his hair, he got carried away. “He says, ‘The girls throw in the towel’—and he whips off the towel, and he’s stark naked underneath,” said Lansing. “They were sitting there with one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, Peter Sellers, trying to sign him. Sellers goes: ‘Wow. This is the coolest place I’ve ever seen!’ and signs with CAA.”

  Finally Haber called and they agreed to meet. “I’m taking you someplace very special, so you won’t forget,” he said. “Just be outside your office.”

  Lansing and Merzbach were waiting in the lobby when “suddenly a limo arrives and this red carpet is thrown out,” recalled Lansing. “I don’t think I’d ever been in a limo, and it was enormous. This guy comes out with a violin, and starts playing it as we get into the car. There’s a bottle of champagne, and Susan starts to laugh, and I start to laugh. I’ve never seen Bill Haber in my life. I say to the driver, ‘Are you Bill Haber?’ ‘Nope. I’m just taking you to him, miss.’ I said, ‘Well, where are we going?’ He says, ‘I’m not allowed to tell you.’ He starts driving in the pouring rain. We cannot believe the sheer brilliance of this. Finally, he pulls up to the airport. We get out and a guy in a suit says, ‘Hi, I’m Bill Haber.’ I say, ‘Wow. How clever. We’re eating at the airport?’ He says, ‘No.’ Then a guy with a blue badge that says PILOT MIKE comes out. I say, ‘Oh. Do you work for the airline?’ He says, ‘No. I work for CAA.’ ”

  The pilot was Mike Rosenfeld, another senior agent, whose hobby was flying. He and Haber flew the two women all of ten minutes to dinner. There they sat trading tales.

  “[One of the men] said, ‘Let’s all tell stories of some strange tryst we’ve had,’ ” Merzbach remembered. “I won’t tell you what Sherry said, but it had to do with a nooner at a motel not far from MGM, where she used her real name and her real credit card. We were all on a high. It was magic.”

  —

  Even as Lansing was becoming more entrenched in Hollywood, part of her was pulling away. The young woman who, like Huck Finn, had lit out for the territory was showing a dawning awareness that there were other territories beyond even this one.

  She began to carve out time, taking three weeks each summer when she would travel the world, sometimes with her sister Judy, sometimes alone. The first such trip took her to Israel.

  “I met my sister there,” she said. “We had backpacks and no money, and did the whole trip on $125. We stayed in youth hostels and visited a kibbutz. Then I went to Italy, my first trip on my own. And later I went all through India, again with my sister. At the time, the trains were on strike and we were stuck in Calcutta. We’d go to the station every day, where there were many homeless who’d maimed themselves. One woman had two dead babies in her hands. I sat there thinking, ‘This can’t be happening.’ Later, we went to Delhi and Kashmir and Mumbai, and finally stayed in a hotel, and when I took a bath, dirt was covering me all over because I’d been traveling so long.”

  Having read Mirella Ricciardi’s Vanishing Africa, Lansing was keen to see Kenya. She flew to Nairobi, where she spent days living in a tent, first with the Maasai and then the Samburu tribe.

  “A guide left me there,” she said. “Nobody could speak to me, except by gestures, but I loved it. The kids would all gather outside, and when I woke up they’d be touching my hair, touching my skin. Everything comes into balance because you know the world is a big place and you’re very small, and the things that bother you at home no longer seem like life or death. I wanted to live a simpler life. Travel was my salvation.”

  After voyaging down the Amazon, her last major ex
pedition was to Australia. “I got permission to live with the Aborigines,” she said. “It was sad because the culture, which had been so beautiful, had been bastardized. They had boom boxes. Everything had changed.”

  These were Lansing’s happiest years, Merzbach believed, before the pressure of high office and her increasing visibility began to weigh her down. “She was fun and funny and real,” said Merzbach. “The celebrity hadn’t begun.”

  —

  Despite her newfound success, Lansing could still feel like a country mouse. She recalled being humiliated when a hatcheck girl brought out her coat after a formal dinner with director Herbert Ross, and Ross’s wife asked, “Whose is this fake vicuña thing?”

  Snobbism was rampant, sexism raging. “I was promoted to vice president at the same time as one of my male colleagues,” she said. “He was given more money, and I wasn’t. So I went in and asked for a raise. The head of business affairs said, ‘Well, I understand why you feel you deserve it, but you’re single and he’s married and has kids, so he deserves a raise and you don’t.’ The terrible thing is, I accepted it. I was so conditioned to think I was worth less money that I actually went, ‘Oh. OK.’ ”

  Still, she was gaining both confidence and skill, and Melnick soon asked her to meet with one of the industry’s greatest writers, Paddy Chayefsky, in New York. Chayefsky had won Oscars for 1955’s Marty and 1971’s The Hospital, but he was notoriously hostile to executives and had even poured a bowl of soup over one who’d had the temerity to question him.

  “He was at his best when he was angry,” writes Dave Itzkoff in Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies. “It wasn’t simply that so many things bothered him, or that when they did, they irritated him to the fullest possible degree. But where others avoided conflict, he cultivated it and embraced it. His fury nourished him.”