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

by Stephen Galloway

  “This was the first time in my career that I was involved in a political battle,” she said. “And the truth is, I was too scared to quit.”

  —

  Eleven miles away, on the other side of the hills that served as a modern-day Maginot Line between Los Angeles and the sprawling San Fernando Valley, 20th Century Fox was going through its own problems. After enjoying an extraordinary run, fueled by such pictures as 1977’s The Turning Point and Julia, and revved into overdrive by Star Wars, the man most responsible for Fox’s success was ready to call it quits.

  Alan Ladd Jr., known to almost everyone as “Laddie,” was an exceptional executive. The son of a movie star, he was a former agent and producer who indulged in none of the backslapping behavior that was routine for most executives, the easy camaraderie that served as an hors d’oeuvre to the main course of a business deal. He was as taciturn as a Trappist monk and so uncharismatic he might have passed for an accountant were it not for his astounding ability to pick pictures.

  But Ladd’s boss had never liked him. Dennis Stanfill, Fox’s chairman and CEO, had establishment written all over him—in his clothes, his bearing, his Naval Academy education and his Rhodes Scholarship. He was a corporate player to the core.

  “Dennis and I just didn’t agree on anything,” said Ladd. “He was a suit-and-tie man, and I was always very casual. We really couldn’t get along. The film people, my side, were making all the profits with Star Wars, and yet he was paying the accountants and people like that the same salary and bonuses. I gave away most of my bonus to my team. He thought I was crazy. I said, ‘I’m leaving.’ He said, ‘You can’t.’ ” News reports at the time claimed the two got into a shoving match on the lot, but Ladd denied that. “He made me a very substantial offer to stay another year, but I said, ‘No, thank you.’ ”

  Ladd’s exit was one of the ritual bloodlettings in which the studios indulged every few years, when one top executive would be bounced out only to be replaced by another, thrown out of his own studio, each one gathering up his loyalists and taking them to his next destination. But it left Stanfill with a gaping hole, especially as most of Fox’s brightest talent had flowed out in a great exodus after Ladd. With no senior executive ready to take over, he had to look elsewhere, and thought of Hirschfield.

  The former Columbia executive, after becoming collateral damage in the Begelman affair, had gone to Warners, where he had an office and a phone but essentially was in a holding pattern until he found something else to do.

  “I had a couple of very good friends from my investment-banking days who were on the Fox board,” he said. “When Ladd and his group walked out, my friends talked to Stanfill. They said, ‘Hirschfield’s at Warners. You should talk to him.’ ”

  When Stanfill came calling, Hirschfield jumped at the chance to go to Fox as its vice chairman and chief operating officer, even though the former Wall Street player would have been better in Stanfill’s job. Now it was up to him to find someone who could make the movies.

  Melnick was an option, but Melnick preferred producing; besides, did Hirschfield really want to deal with a prima donna like that? He could not help thinking of Melnick’s demands—like the time both went to a test screening on the other side of the country: when Melnick was nowhere to be found, Hirschfield called his assistant, who told him Melnick was at the local airport, refusing to budge until a limousine picked him up—and not just any limousine, but a white one specifically. “I said, ‘Tell Mr. Melnick, as far as I’m concerned, he can stay at the airport all night,’ ” Hirschfield recalled, “ ‘because there’s not going to be any car—white, black or anything else.’ ”

  What about Michael Ovitz, the gap-toothed Valley boy who was fast making a name for himself at CAA? “I thought he’d be perfect,” said Hirschfield. “He had great credibility, knew everybody, and had access—and access is important. But Michael clearly had bigger things in mind. He said, ‘I don’t want to run a studio.’ ”

  Unsure where to turn, Hirschfield consulted Melnick and Jaffe, both of whom had agreed to leave Columbia and join Fox as producers. Each sold him on the same name: Lansing.

  “I knew she was experienced and I knew she was smart,” said Hirschfield. “I needed someone who would reestablish our credibility as quickly as possible, because Ladd and his team were godlike in the industry. We needed something to stop the bleeding. We didn’t even have a guy who worked in the mailroom. Everybody had left.”

  He mentioned the idea to Stanfill, unsure how his old-school boss would react, “because there were [almost] no female executives in that company. But he just loved the idea. ‘It’s an absolute stroke of genius,’ he said.”

  “It was the first time a woman [would be] in a top role in a movie company, and that was one of the distinctions I was happy to make,” said Stanfill. “I knew what she had done and thought she would be able to do more.”

  Hirschfield offered Lansing the job, only for her to hesitate.

  After seeing what Douglas had done with China Syndrome and Jaffe with Kramer, she had developed a taste for producing and was planning to become a producer once her deal ran out at Columbia. Burned by the studio shenanigans she had just witnessed, she was no longer sure she had the appetite for the work.

  “My first thought was I didn’t want the job,” she said. She had begun to date actor Wayne Rogers, one of the stars of the TV series M*A*S*H, “and I was concerned about how it would affect whatever personal life I had left. I knew the routine of a studio executive was all-consuming, and to be president of production would only increase the demands. It also seemed like a no-win proposition. As [executive] Peter Guber said, ‘The best you can hope for is a tie.’ ”

  “She was really worried about losing control of her life,” said her friend Luttrell, with whom she huddled to hash things out. “The conversation was about, ‘Oh my God! What should I do? Do I want to take on this huge responsibility?’ ”

  Lansing consulted Norman Garey, her attorney, a benevolent and paternal figure whose clients included such superstars as Marlon Brando; she spoke to Melnick and Jaffe and other executives who had made the move from Columbia to Fox, all of whom urged her to accept. And still she hesitated.

  She firmly believed that no woman could have everything she wanted, at least not at once—not a husband, kids and a career. Maybe two of the three, but no more. “I never thought I could have it all,” she said. “I thought, you have to make choices in life and it’s important for the choices to be the ones that make you happy, not someone else. I felt I couldn’t be a wife and a mother and run a studio—maybe sequentially, but not all together. That wasn’t necessarily true for others, but it was true for me, and I knew I’d always feel guilty if I tried to do all three. I was afraid that being a mother would take over my identity, and at that point I wanted a career and a relationship more than I wanted children.”

  She vacillated. Each time she was about to say yes, she thought of everything she would have to give up; each time she was about to say no, she worried she would never have an opportunity like this again.

  “When Sherry makes a decision, she tortures over it,” said Luttrell. “That’s just who she is. She spends a lot of time discussing it in detail and talking about the bad and the good. I questioned her: ‘Do you want to have a family? Let’s talk about it.’ It’s hard to do this job and have a full personal life, and none of us had much of one in those days. We all worked harder than anybody. But I don’t think that was driving her so much as the fear of losing control.”

  After days of introspection, Lansing realized she would regret it if she did not take the job. She called Hirschfield to say yes.

  Negotiations got under way between the studio and Garey, her lawyer, the latter insisting she get a substantial raise from the $75,000 she had earned at Columbia—more like $100,000, he suggested.

  “That won’t work,” said Hirschfield.

  “But this is a much bigger job,” Garey hit back.<
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  “Will you let me finish?” continued Hirschfield. “No one will take her seriously unless she gets the same salary as a man. The job pays $325,000.”

  The lawyer was silent.

  “OK,” he said. “That will be fine.”

  With the contract signed, all that remained was for Lansing to inform Price, who was unaware of the machinations going on behind his back. He had started to wonder why Lansing was taking so long to sign her new deal when she walked into his office, unannounced. The rage she had bottled up came pouring out.

  “With righteous indignation I said, ‘I’m leaving,’ ” she recalled. “This was a woman scorned, getting her revenge. It wasn’t a good side of me. I said, ‘You told me I’d never report to anyone but you, and you lied. And I’m gone.’ I felt empowered. I felt morally justified, though I regret it today. I felt he hadn’t told me the truth, and this was justice.”

  Price was furious.

  “He threw me out,” said Lansing. “He wouldn’t even let me go to the Kramer premiere.”

  —

  On January 2, 1980, the front page of the New York Times broke the story: “Sherry Lansing, Former Model, Named Head of Fox Productions.”

  The news swept across the world. Other publications—in England, France, Italy, Germany, Israel, India, Kenya and even Zambia—followed with their own reports. The media frenzy caught Lansing unawares. “The coverage continued for months,” she said. “There were magazine profiles and news analyses about what my promotion meant for women in the corporate world. Time ran a story, and that spring I made the cover of the New York Times Magazine. I was even in a Doonesbury comic strip.”

  Us used her name as an answer in a pop quiz, beneath a photo with the question: “This woman is smiling because (a) she no longer teaches high school math (b) she has just become head of 20th Century-Fox (c) she earns $300,000 a year.” The answer: all of the above.

  “The headlines were hilarious,” said Lansing. “In the New York Post I was a ‘Foxy Lady.’ In Variety, a ‘First Lady.’ Fortune said, ‘The Math Teacher Goes Hollywood.’ ”

  The Los Angeles Times headlined its story “A Movie Mogul Eats Her Words,” reminding readers that she had only recently predicted that no woman in her lifetime would become a studio president. When a reporter asked her to defend that remark, she explained: “I just thought there was too much prejudice [for it to happen now]. When people talked about possible heads of production, a woman’s name was never considered—even if she was in line for the job. I was dealing with reality.”

  While she had not felt pressured to represent her gender—because she never imagined anyone would perceive her as its representative—that changed when Frances Lear, the wife of producer Norman Lear and future editor in chief of Lear’s magazine, threw a dinner party in her honor. “It started nicely,” said Lansing. “Someone got up to make a toast, saying, ‘We’re so excited—the first woman to head a studio, it’s a big breakthrough.’ Then a feisty little woman stood up, jabbing her finger at me, and said: ‘You represent all of us. And if you fail, you fail for all of us. You have to succeed more than anybody’s ever succeeded.’ I was taken aback. [Actress] Marlo Thomas said, ‘Jesus! Give her a break. If a guy lasts a year in that job, it’s considered a miracle.’ ”

  Reporters tracked down Lansing’s ex-husband, Michael, now living in San Francisco, and he graciously said that if the couple had moved there instead of Los Angeles, “she would have become the president of Bank of America.” Even Princess Grace of Monaco, a Fox board member, asked Lansing how she was coping and wondered if she could give her daughter some advice about handling pressure.

  Only Margot seemed more concerned than happy. “Well,” she said, “no one’s going to marry you now.”

  But none of this mattered, because Lansing was glowing with the joy of success. The would-be star was part of Hollywood’s most exclusive club. The failed actress had found the role of a lifetime.

  On the morning of January 2, 1980, Lansing rose early, did her usual hour of exercise, left the one-bedroom townhouse on the outskirts of Westwood where she had been living for several years after leaving her Kenmore apartment, and set out for 20th Century Fox.

  Her nerves were tingling, her brain was on fire. She was agitated and exhilarated at the same time. She had just gone through the bone-crushing experience of discovering that a man she had deemed an ally, even a friend, had maneuvered behind her back to fill the job she felt should have been hers; she in turn had outmaneuvered him and gone to Fox. Was this what making movies was all about? Was this how you changed the world?

  At age thirty-five, she had an income beyond anything she had ever imagined and a level of celebrity that had caught her unawares. Even Norton, who had thought little of her attempts to become an actress, was in awe of his daughter’s salary, and at last had begun to acknowledge how capable she was. Part of her was thrilled, part wary. She was entering rocky terrain, without a dash of Melnick’s manipulativeness or a hint of his cunning. She reflected on what he so often said: “Running a studio is like leading a cavalry charge. The position is prominent, but the mortality rate is uncomfortably high.”

  Melnick was a grandmaster compared to this novice, a strategist where she was still a tactician, but it was she who would be running things now and it would be her skills, not his, that would determine the outcome. Ten thousand industry eyes were watching as she took over a post hitherto reserved for men. She had no peers, no female predecessors to whom she could turn; only a sprinkling of women could address her as a professional equal, and most were scattered across the country in different industries and different time zones.

  “Those were hard days for a woman to come in,” said Hirschfield. “Women were always in tertiary roles. But she really didn’t let that get in the way. She had a great way of getting on with people, and she was always very pragmatic about what the objective was.”

  If Lansing succeeded, she would open the door for other women to follow; if not, the door might close on them for years to come.

  All this played through her mind as her car pulled off Pico Boulevard and into Fox’s historic lot on the west side of Los Angeles, where she came to a dead halt, face-to-face with an implacable security guard. He scanned his list of employees and could not find her name. Word of her appointment had leapfrogged across the globe but had not reached him.

  “Sorry, miss,” he told her. “I can’t let you in.”

  “But I’m the head of the studio,” she insisted.

  “You can’t be,” he said with a shrug.

  No matter what she told him or how vehemently she did so, he refused to believe her. Finally, she gunned her engine, charged around the barrier with the guard on her heels, and made it all the way to her new office, as Hirschfield’s secretary came running to the rescue.

  —

  By 9:00 a.m. she had settled into her palatial office in the very building where Darryl Zanuck had ruled supreme. Ignoring the hundreds of flowers from admirers and rivals alike, she began to conduct an inventory of the material at hand.

  Fox had deep pockets thanks to 1977’s Star Wars, but perhaps less deep than people imagined. The Lucas film had provided 85 percent of Fox’s earnings in 1978 and 62 percent in 1979, according to Newsweek; moving forward, however, projected earnings looked weak. Indeed, the magazine noted, “the company had to rely on its diverse subsidiary operations—everything from soft-drink bottling to the Aspen (Colo.) Skiing Corp.—to keep overall profits from falling sharply.”

  The studio would soon have The Empire Strikes Back, the second release in the Star Wars franchise, which was due out in May, but only a small part of the money it made would come back to Fox. In closing his deal for the original Star Wars, Lucas had cleverly retained the rights to any sequels. It was a mistake that one of Lansing’s colleagues called “the costliest decision in the history of motion pictures”—and one that became even costlier when Fox gave back the merchandising rights to Lucas in
order for him to make Empire, rights that would bring in more than $20 billion over the coming years.

  Star Wars and Jaws were ushering in a new era, and the corporations that were muscling in on the studios were looking for the sort of returns only movies like these could make. But their full impact was still a decade or two away.

  “When big corporations saw the kind of money that could be made with blockbusters, they wanted to own them, and then nobody knew how to make anything except things that had already been made,” said Amy Pascal, later chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment. “When you know it’s possible to get that kind of audience, that’s what you want.”

  At Fox, where Star Wars was still regarded as a freak exception, other films were already in the pipeline, including the Jane Fonda–Lily Tomlin–Dolly Parton comedy Nine to Five, which would be released in December 1980 and give Fox a bona fide hit. But Lansing knew any credit would go to Laddie, not her. She needed new pictures and she needed them fast.

  “We were starting from zero,” said Hirschfield. “We went over some of the material. We had no films at all. The backlog Laddie had left was very problematic.”

  Two senior production executives remained in place, and Lansing kept both. Claire Townsend was a Princeton graduate in her late twenties who had worked for consumer advocate Ralph Nader before joining the studio, and whose nickname was “Blonde Ambition”—which said just as much about the antipathy women faced as it did about Townsend herself, whom Lansing found easy to work with. David Field, a former United Artists president of production, was different: distant at best, moody and aloof at worst.

  “Everybody was loyal to Laddie—they didn’t have anything against me, but that was where their loyalty was,” said Lansing. “Still, I believed then, as I’ve always believed, that you give people a chance to prove themselves.”