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

by Stephen Galloway

  She became one of the leaders in the effort to open the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, the only major hospital to serve South Central Los Angeles. That hospital replaced the notorious King/Drew Hospital, which had closed years earlier when federal funding was withdrawn. Rallying the forces needed to open the institution was a gargantuan endeavor that involved mobilizing the UC regents, having the University of California agree to supply a permanent staff of doctors, and bringing in outsiders who would fund the hundreds of millions in operational and building costs. The new hospital opened in July 2015, eight years after the old one had closed. It was among Lansing’s proudest achievements.

  As her life changed, so did Friedkin’s. In 1999, he had directed his first opera, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, to much acclaim. Now he began to travel for different productions, and Lansing frequently accompanied him.

  “Billy did operas in Turin, Vienna, Tel Aviv, Munich and Florence,” she said. “We’d rent a one-or two-bedroom apartment, and we’d wake up whenever we wanted, like newlyweds. Billy would fix breakfast, and then I’d have these simple, existential days. I’d go out and speak to anyone who could understand me. I’d make local friends, and have lunch or coffee or visit a museum, and then have dinner with Billy in the evening. These were some of the happiest times in my life, when it was just the two of us.”

  There was only one blot on those halcyon days: when she learned that the two men she had groomed to be her successors at Paramount, Robert Friedman and Donald De Line, were being pushed aside by Redstone. But that was counterbalanced by the blockbuster returns of her last major pictures, War of the Worlds and Mission: Impossible III.

  “Robbie and Donald both went on to do well,” said Lansing. “They were living their own lives and I was living mine.”

  —

  No aspect of Lansing’s new life proved more daunting than the fight over tuition costs at the University of California, which affected hundreds of thousands of students each year.

  Costs had skyrocketed at the UC campuses, with undergraduate fees rising 90 percent in the six years prior to 2007, according to the Los Angeles Times. When the Great Recession struck in 2008 and the State of California slashed the university system’s budget, the regents felt they had no choice but to charge students even more.

  “We were almost $1 billion behind [what was needed to fund the UC system], because of the cuts,” said UC president Mark Yudof. “On top of that, we had to put in around $1 billion a year to make sure our retirement system would be viable. Tuition had to be increased, because there are only so many places you can go.”

  The timing was terrible. Everyone in the state was suffering, and many people were without jobs. Opponents argued that the regents should slash the salaries of the highest-paid faculty, and the regents themselves were divided. But Lansing insisted that cutting salaries would make the UC less competitive in the long run, damaging its resources and reputation, even though she viscerally disliked the idea of tuition hikes.

  “Sherry did not want to see tuition go up, or at least go up more than it had to,” said Jerry Brown, who became governor of California in January 2007. “She was very helpful in keeping tuition down. [I wanted] to keep the tuition down in the short term but would argue for lowering the cost structure of UC so the tuition could stay down for a very long time. Of course, that’s very challenging for the board, for the president of the university and for the entire structure of UC. You’re talking about a level of transformation that’s not easy.”

  More than most regents, Lansing knew from personal experience what a burden this would be. Some of the young men and women she had befriended through Big Brothers Big Sisters had to plead with their families to go to school; it was inconceivable that these families would assume thousands of dollars in debt when they could barely pay the rent.

  And it was not just the poor who felt squeezed. Lansing also had middle-class friends, including skilled technicians who had worked on her films, who came to her for advice, desperate because they had to choose between paying their mortgages and supporting their kids through college.

  When the regents raised tuition by a massive 32 percent in November 2009, student anger boiled over.

  “During two days of protests at UCLA, where the UC regents met to vote on the fee increase, about 2,000 students from the 10-campus system confronted riot police, shouted slogans and blocked building exits,” Time reported. “Like a scene out of the angry 1960s, students surged against barricades and briefly seized a building near the main campus quad; police used taser guns on several protesters, and arrested nearly 20. All the while, police helicopters hovered overhead, TV vans with high antennas stood ready and students played drums and strummed guitars.”

  California Highway Patrol officers in riot gear swept through the university but were powerless to stop the students, who headed for the regents’ meeting place.

  “They surrounded the building,” said Yudof. “We were trapped. There were officers that had guns with rubber bullets. Some people went out in disguise, but I couldn’t because everyone knew my face.”

  “They held us hostage,” said Lansing. “The cops said, ‘You have to stay here until the mob dies down.’ I said, ‘That’s ridiculous. They’re not going to hurt us. They’re college kids.’ ”

  She gathered her things and started to leave. “I said, naively, ‘I’ll pretend I’m a student. They won’t recognize me,’ ” she recalled. “I told one of the staff members, ‘We’ll carry our notebooks in front of us, just like the kids, and we’ll walk out.’ ”

  Ignoring objections, Lansing left the conference room once her meeting was over, stepped out of the building, and plunged into the crowd. Looking down at her notebook in an attempt to hide her face, she wove through the mass of people with their clenched fists and banners held high, comically imagining no one would notice her.

  She almost got away with it, when a young woman spotted her. “Regent!” she screamed. The crowd turned as one.

  “That’s when I first knew physical fear,” said Lansing. “I was caught. I thought they’d attack me because ‘crowd fever’ was in the air and there were thousands of them packed in.”

  A police officer pried her loose and she started to run.

  “I was in my little high heels, with my book bag, waving around the notebook in one hand,” she said. “Some of the students followed me, and a reporter chased after me with his camera, and it was all over the evening news. But I managed to get away.”

  The protests continued deep into 2011, inflamed by the Occupy movement that was spreading across the country. At one point a police officer pulled a gun on a student, while another pepper-sprayed peaceful demonstrators. At UC Riverside, a student hurled himself at the regents and had to be torn off them, said Lansing, who by this time had been elected chairman of the regents, and who may well have been spared worse because she had reached out to hear the students’ point of view.

  “She met personally with students, which is something none of the other regents did,” noted Larry Gordon, then a higher-education reporter for the Los Angeles Times. “[That] was a nice touch.”

  There seemed to be no way out until Brown advocated the passage of a new ballot measure, Proposition 30, which would raise personal income taxes and the state sales tax in order to defray education cuts. Lansing agreed to back it on one condition: that the governor commit $100 million for UC tuition. She knew he would need all the student support he could get if he were to have a hope of passing the measure, and this seemed a fair trade-off.

  “If not,” she argued, “why would the kids lend it their support?”

  Brown gave his tacit approval, and Lansing began to tour the university’s campuses in an attempt to win the students over. Sitting in cluttered offices and tiny dorm rooms, she begged them to back the proposition.

  “I said, ‘I know you think we’re all evil and we’re monsters, but we’re not,’ ” she recalled. “I told them we had no choice b
ut to raise tuition because the state kept cutting our budget. But I assured them, ‘The governor will support us if you back Prop 30. This has to be our strategy.’ ”

  The students reached out to friends and families and alumni, while Lansing worked behind the scenes to persuade her fellow regents to endorse the ballot measure. They could vote against it as individuals, she said, but it was essential the board give Brown its organizational backing. “I knew we could horse-trade,” she said, “because I’d been doing that for years at Paramount.”

  “She [was] a good advocate for UC,” said Brown. “It helped push public opinion in a positive direction and gave us the ultimate victory we had.”

  In November 2012, Prop 30 was approved by a resounding 55 percent of the voters; Brown gave the UC more money; the regents froze tuition. The fight was over, at least for now.

  —

  Early in the tuition battle, Lansing was shaken to learn that her husband would have to undergo a triple bypass, surprising given how physically fit he was.

  While the operation went well, things took a serious turn for the worse when Friedkin discovered he had an infection caused by the bacteria Serratia, a hospital-borne infection highly resistant to antibiotics that he had picked up during his bypass. It had spread from his bloodstream into his sternum, the bone protecting the heart. Lansing was consumed with fear, especially when she found out that another operation was needed and there was a real chance the sternum would have to be replaced, an extremely serious procedure with no guarantee of success.

  “He had this terrible infection,” she said. “The operation had a 50 percent mortality rate. It was horrible, just horrible.”

  Friedkin was still in the hospital when he was told this. By now, he had lost all confidence in the doctor who had operated on him and insisted on moving to another institution.

  “The first hospital claimed I was cured and there was no problem,” he said. “You see liquid coming out of your chest, and the guy says there’s nothing wrong. I said, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’ Sherry did the impossible and got me moved.”

  The day of the operation, Lansing watched with growing anxiety as doctors at UCLA Medical Center—the hospital where she had taken Friedkin—wheeled him into the operating room. With hours of uncertainty ahead of her, she found refuge in the university chapel.

  “I was terrified,” she said. “I was afraid he was going to die. I remember crying. I prayed to God, ‘I’ll do anything you want, just save him.’ ”

  For eight hours, she waited while Friedkin remained in the operating room, not knowing whether he was going to live or die. At last, one of the surgeons came out. The operation had gone well, he told her, and the sternum did not have to be removed, but there was still the possibility that something could go wrong.

  “They reconstructed it,” said Lansing. “It was the most painful thing in the world. It took two months for him to get better, but we knew he was going to make it.”

  He emerged stronger than before and went on to direct his most acclaimed film in years, 2011’s Killer Joe, as well as resume his peripatetic opera career. The change of doctors and his wife’s forcefulness were crucial, he believed.

  “I wouldn’t have survived otherwise,” he said. “She saved my life.”

  —

  Friedkin’s illness and the protracted tuition battle took place even as Lansing was preoccupied with the most important mission of her life: the creation of Stand Up to Cancer.

  Over lunch with one of her friends, Ellen Ziffren, shortly after leaving Paramount, she had discussed the idea of doing something bigger and bolder in the fight against cancer. But what? A documentary? A fundraiser? The women were not sure.

  To formulate a plan, they approached Lisa Paulsen and Kathleen Lobb, executives with the Entertainment Industry Foundation, a nonprofit group used to raising millions of dollars for a multitude of causes. These women in turn recruited Katie Couric, the Today show host who was soon to be named anchor of the CBS Evening News and who had lost her husband to colon cancer.

  “I had my very personal experience with my husband, and my sister Emily died of pancreatic cancer,” said Couric. “Everybody has been touched by this disease.”

  In conversations that began in late 2005 and stretched into 2007, the women settled on a plan: they would create a telethon, an hour-long televised fundraiser sprinkled with some of Hollywood’s biggest names. Lansing was convinced that stars, producers and executives alike would rally to the cause. Cancer affected everyone, she argued; there was not a man or woman in America who did not have a friend, a relative or even a child who had the disease.

  “We had all dealt with cancer in our lives, in our families,” she said. “We were raw, even angry, because advances had not developed as fast as we might have hoped, given the billions of dollars that had been invested in research.”

  The project became more pressing when Lansing heard that an old acquaintance, Laura Ziskin, was working on a similar idea.

  Then in her mid-fifties, Ziskin was at the peak of an impressive career that had seen her produce such movies as 1987’s No Way Out and 2002’s Spider-Man, run a division of 20th Century Fox, and executive-produce two Academy Awards telecasts. But she had recently been treated for stage three breast cancer. After going through radiation, chemotherapy, a mastectomy and a stem-cell transplant, she felt she had a new lease on life, only for the cancer to strike again. She knew it might be fatal, but would not succumb until she had fought it with everything she had—including her skills as a producer. Joining three other women to create a television special specifically focused on breast cancer (the others were marketing executives Rusty Robertson and Sue Schwartz, and producer Noreen Fraser, also a breast cancer survivor), she was moving ahead with her plans when Lansing called.

  “Let’s work together,” she said.

  Of the nine women, many did not know each other at all; many had never worked on a project this large; and many were new to the nonprofit world. But all had been impacted by cancer. Two were survivors; the others had mothers, sisters, brothers, cousins, spouses, colleagues and friends who had fought the disease.

  “Whenever you do something new, it’s difficult,” noted Lansing. “There are hundreds of hurdles you have to get over, and as soon as you get past those there are even bigger ones. We were trying to create something dynamic and full of sizzle, but also scientifically solid. We said, ‘We’re all mightier together than separately.’ ”

  Things got off to a shaky start at a breakfast meeting when two of the women questioned whether some of the others had the ability to handle an operation like this. “They said, ‘We don’t think you guys can do this on your own,’ ” remembered Schwartz. “ ‘You have no infrastructure. You have no capacity. Why should we put our faith in you?’ ” Later, the tension was resolved, but other conflicts simmered.

  One meeting, said Schwartz, “was very contentious. Sherry said, ‘Just apologize.’ I said, ‘But I didn’t do anything wrong.’ She said, ‘Look, I’ve apologized so much in my life, I don’t even know what I’m apologizing for anymore. Don’t ever let ego stand in the way of the result.’ ” Schwartz took her advice. “I wrote this mea culpa, hated every minute of doing it, but the issue was put to bed.”

  In another meeting, “I was feeling really bad energy,” said Robertson. “And Sherry stood up. She walked over to me and hugged me in front of everybody, and she goes, ‘You are going to do great, and I’m here to help you in any way.’ She’s the tie that bound us together, the tie that binds.”

  That binding almost snapped when questions were raised about whether Ziskin or Fraser should be the lead producer. As the women settled into Lansing’s office to discuss it, the conversation became heated and tears spilled over.

  “When people are passionate, emotions run high,” said Schwartz. “Because this was a shotgun marriage, there were some bumps in the road.”

  Couric had persuaded NBC to air the show. But eve
n as the women went back and forth resolving their issues, their ambition was growing. What if every network agreed to run it, the women wondered? That would create a media “roadblock” and a sensation.

  Lansing began to reach out to the other network chiefs, helped by Ziffren’s husband, Ken, a leading entertainment lawyer.

  “We didn’t just double-team them,” said Couric. “We triple-and quadruple-teamed them to embrace this unprecedented effort.”

  Only Fox declined, because News Corp. president Peter Chernin favored devoting resources to his own preferred cause, malaria. In the end, ABC, NBC and CBS all pledged to air a one-hour, commercial-free, prime-time benefit. A date was set for Friday, September 5, 2008.

  Problems remained. One was raising money (a secret of the telethon world was that most of it had to be raised ahead of time, through sponsorships and the like). The other was getting a scientific seal of approval.

  “This was nine Hollywood women with absolutely no credentials, with one who was battling cancer, but who was our conscience and in front of us every day,” said Lansing. “We had to get credibility. Someone said, ‘Get Phil Sharp and everyone will flow your way.’ ”

  Phillip Sharp was a Nobel Prize–winning geneticist whose services were as coveted as any movie star’s. Lansing knew how unlikely he would be to commit. This would take more than a few letters and phone calls; it would require a whirlwind campaign to convince him. When they learned that he would soon be attending a cancer-related conference, the women set out in force.

  “In the midst of this meeting, Sherry Lansing approaches me,” Sharp recalled. “At her side were Laura Ziskin and the others. And she walked up and introduced herself and basically said, ‘I want you to help us start Stand Up to Cancer,’ then in a much more articulate and elaborate way talked about what they were trying to do to transform cancer research to make it more collaborative, to translate it far more to patients’ benefit, to really change the culture. I knew these ladies were going to have an enormous impact. I thought, ‘If I have any spare time left in my life, I should be helping them,’ and I decided to do it almost instantaneously.”