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

by Stephen Galloway

  “The minute he said yes,” said Lansing, “he got every scientist he wanted on the advisory committee—and suddenly we had credibility.”

  The women—all amateurs, all enthusiasts—convened a series of meetings with Sharp and the other scientists, forging the guidelines of their fundraiser: who would handle what, where the money would go, how applicants for funding should apply, and how the eventual recipients would be determined.

  Some of the women favored spending the money on advocacy, others on whatever form of cancer had attacked them or their families.

  “As everything fell into place with the final network commitments,” recalled Lobb, “we said to the scientists: ‘We feel confident that we can raise a lot of money. Tell us what should be done differently in terms of cancer research.’ ”

  The scientists suggested creating “dream teams,” bringing together groups of researchers and medical specialists across different institutions and even different countries—as few as 54 and as many as 111 scientists on any one team—who had not collaborated before. It was a bold idea that would require convincing the scientists to overcome their ingrained competitiveness and reluctance to share data.

  “That hadn’t been done before, certainly not in the nonprofit world in [that] way,” said Sharp. “We’ve changed philosophies: a surgeon removing a pancreas in Philadelphia is sending the tissue immediately to basic scientists in San Diego and Princeton—and it’s that integration that’s been so productive. You have to develop a culture in which people collaborate and share, and we’ve been able to do that in very successful ways.”

  “If you’ve ever been struck by cancer, you know how frustrating it is,” said Lansing. “Often, one hospital doesn’t communicate with another. We wanted to bring down the barriers between the scientists, so that they would all work together.”

  She was convinced the idea could succeed because she had seen it work with the stem cell endeavors. “The thing that board did so well was to break down the silos and make it a group effort,” said Lansing. “It became all about sharing information. No scientist was allowed to keep his research to himself, and the information had to be made public.”

  Lansing met with Ziskin to finalize their plans. “I remember sitting with Laura, who was the soul of this and gave it her whole life, and asking her, ‘How do we make this work?’ ” she recalled. “Laura said, ‘You need to give them a whole lot of money. Not $10,000. Not $100,000. Not even $1 million—but $10 million. If you have that much money to give out, they’ll find a way to get along.’ ”

  Raising such an enormous sum—not just $10 million, but multiples of that, if several projects were to be funded—was all but unimaginable.

  “We established a goal of raising $100 million,” said Paulsen. “It was sheer will. We didn’t really have a rhyme or reason. I said, ‘We don’t have any idea how much will be raised in a proactive telethon. They’ve mainly been reactive—like after 9/11, after the 2004 tsunami, after Hurricane Katrina.’ ”

  Lansing embarked on the fundraising and discovered just how difficult it could be. “You can go all the way to Texas or New York, and have a wonderful meeting,” she said, “and the person will say, ‘Great. Here’s $5,000’ ”—a fraction of what she was after. “Time and again, you get used to hearing the word no.”

  Donations began to trickle in, but they were paltry, and Lansing knew it was vital to secure at least one gargantuan commitment in order to leverage others’ support. When their best hope, Chicago Bulls and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, turned them down, she was crushed. Then, almost in passing, Reinsdorf mentioned someone who might help: Bud Selig.

  “You guys have to talk to him,” he said. “He’s coming to town.”

  The commissioner of Major League Baseball and his wife were due in Los Angeles that weekend. Calls were hastily placed, schedules scrambled and rearranged, as the women dropped everything to meet him at his hotel.

  “We sat down, and Sherry and Laura did the pitch,” said Ziffren. “Laura talked about her battles [with cancer]. She talked about the television special. She talked about the science. She talked about the importance of this and why we had to do it now. I held my breath for a full two minutes, and then Sherry put her hand on Bud and said, ‘We want MLB [Major League Baseball] to be our first $10 million donor.’ None of us could believe she really said that: $10 million.”

  “I’d never asked anyone for $10 million in my life,” Lansing acknowledged. “If I ask for $1,000 and they say yes, I’m thrilled. If someone gives me $25,000, I think I’m going to pass out. But I did it just like I was asking him to pass me the salt. Underneath, I was going, ‘$10 million! What the hell am I saying?’ ”

  “We were coming from our home in Phoenix to a baseball scouts’ dinner that we go to every year,” explained Selig. “And we went up to our room, and there were these women. I must tell you, I’ve had a lot of presentations made to me over the years, but this was as impressive and emotional and sensitive a presentation as I have ever heard. You could tell how strongly Sherry felt about it and how well conceived the whole plan was.”

  “Well—” he began.

  His wife cut in. “She said, ‘Come on, Buddy, what are you waiting for?’ ” recalled Lansing. “And she gave him this nudge on the arm. I call it the nudge that was heard around the world. And he burst out laughing.”

  “My wife gave me a poke in the ribs,” confirmed Selig. “And we said yes.”

  The meeting had lasted all of fifteen minutes. As the women got up to leave, several started to cry, but Lansing would have none of it. Crying implied doubt; doubt implied the possibility of failure; failure was not an option.

  “I said: ‘Never cry,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘Never cry again.’ ”

  —

  At 8:00 p.m. (EST) on September 5, 2008, the first ever Stand Up to Cancer special kicked off with a message from Sidney Poitier.

  “We used to have such wild dreams, the kind that brought us together, made us a movement,” he said, before a virtual galaxy of stars appeared onstage in Los Angeles’ Kodak Theatre, where the telethon was taking place. “To those who say, ‘Impossible, can’t happen, won’t happen,’ [we say] ‘We didn’t hear a word.’ ”

  That broadcast led to pledges of $101 million—$23 million of it coming from the telethon alone, the rest raised beforehand—and led the women to make it a regular event, broadcast on each network and many cable channels.

  By the end of 2016, they had obtained almost $500 million for multiple dream teams spread across the world. That money paid for everything from 160 separate clinical trials involving 1,100 scientists in 131 institutions to research that changed the life of David Gobin, a retired Baltimore K9 cop with lung cancer.

  “If those nine ladies hadn’t started Stand Up to Cancer,” he said, “I honestly don’t know if I’d be here today.”

  More than anything, the women had proved they could work as one.

  “It’s like any recipe,” said Schwartz. “You take a lot of spices and think, ‘Oh, this is going to be really difficult to stomach,’ but the spices end up making a broth that’s really palatable. All of us, with our different disciplines, helped create a structure that was completely unique. Laura was a phenomenal producer; Katie was a great journalist; Lisa understood the nonprofit world; Ellen had important contacts; Rusty and I had marketing and branding capabilities; Kathleen was excellent at crisis management; and Sherry was Sherry.”

  —

  Only one of Lansing’s Stand Up to Cancer friends was not at her side as the organization kept growing: Ziskin, who died in June 2011.

  She was sixty-one, six years younger than Lansing. Like the latter, she had started as a reader before becoming a producer and executive; like her friend, she had laid siege to the barricades of a male world and largely succeeded; and also like her, she had experienced her greatest glory in her middle years, when all the struggles she had experienced paled beside the success of the S
pider-Man franchise. If she had never quite burned with Lansing’s incandescence, she, too, had lit a path for women, and without her the path seemed darker.

  Once these women had been rivals, fighting for their careers. Then they had become allies, fighting for their cause. Now Ziskin was gone.

  On June 28, 2011, Lansing, along with hundreds of others, pulled into the Sony Pictures parking lot to attend Ziskin’s memorial service. It was a virtual who’s who of Hollywood over the past thirty years, an empire of men and women who had shaped the culture.

  As Lansing headed toward the stage where the service was taking place, she took in the studio around her. This was the former headquarters of MGM, the grandest of all the motion picture fiefdoms, home to as many stars as there were in heaven until the lot was sold to Sony in 1989.

  It was here that Lansing had first worked with Daniel Melnick, in an office filled with his artwork, piled high with scripts and readers’ notes, one of the happiest times of her life. More than three decades had passed since then, and many of the men and women with whom she had toiled shoulder to shoulder were dead, often barely remembered, least of all by the generation that now ruled the kingdom that once was theirs.

  Melnick had died two years earlier, after years of drug abuse had exerted their toll and forced him to sell his exquisite home and the paintings he loved so much. At the end, he bore little resemblance to the dynamic executive Lansing had admired.

  She thought of him and the other towering figures who had accompanied her on her journey. Hawks, her Rio Lobo director, had died in 1977, weeks after her arrival at Columbia, embittered by his inability to make another film, consigned to the shelf of former greats. She had spoken to him one final time, weeks before his death, when she called to say how happy she was in her new post at Columbia. “You’d have been a better actress,” he grunted.

  James Aubrey, one of her mentors, the man called “the Smiling Cobra” by many but never by Lansing herself, had passed away in 1994 at the age of seventy-five, lamented by few, forgotten by most. And Dawn Steel, pushed out of the safety of the studios and into the murky waters of independent producing, had been dead for fourteen years. She had hardly gotten her second act under way, let alone commenced her third.

  These were giants all, their ghosts permeating the offices and stages where Lansing walked now. It saddened her how fast their names had faded, how quickly their achievements had been bleached out by time.

  Her father Norton was dead, too, having succumbed to dementia in his later years, even as he and Lansing had become ever closer, his gruffness replaced by a sweetness none would have expected of the man in his prime. He named her his executor, and his death hit her hard.

  She thought of him, but above all, she thought of her mother. What would Margot think of her daughter now? Would she be proud of everything Sherry Lee had accomplished? Would she admire the woman she’d become? Would she at last feel free to reveal those secret scrapbooks she had kept through the years, and perhaps enjoy them at her daughter’s side? Lansing thought of the terrible irony that her failure to save her mother had led her to help save so many others. She thought of Margot’s struggle at the end, and then she thought back to one of her favorite memories: when she sat beside her mother as they watched the Academy Awards, having begged to stay up late for the broadcast.

  She remembered the pain and the passion she had felt, the longing and the hurt: how she had ached to be onstage like Susan Hayward, so elegant in her black dress and white gloves, when James Cagney and Kim Novak presented her with an Oscar for I Want to Live!, whose title could almost be Lansing’s motto.

  Did her mother ever imagine her daughter would have such success? Did she ever think a day would come when Lansing would take her place on that Oscar stage, too?

  —

  Eight months before the Stand Up special, Lansing received a call from Sid Ganis, her former Paramount colleague and now the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, informing her that the board of governors had named her that year’s recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award—an honorary Oscar.

  Lansing was overwhelmed, not just by the extraordinary recognition, but by the fact that it came for the work that mattered to her even more than film, in the nonprofit field.

  On the evening of February 25, 2007, the police were out in force, as was their wont on the biggest night of the show business year. Hundreds of officers, detectives, and security guards swarmed through the streets of Hollywood, milling among the fire engines, the ambulances and the armada of television news vans that jostled for space at the 79th Academy Awards. As thousands of fans swarmed to get a good view of the stragglers who walked down the red carpet and disappeared inside the Kodak Theatre, those who were seated waited for the show to begin.

  A few rows from the front, Lansing sat squeezed beside her husband and sons, trying to calm her nerves. She was not new to this: she had been nominated for Fatal Attraction and had attended countless award shows during her time as a studio head. But she felt naked now.

  “I was nervous,” she said. “I’d been to too many parties, and sat through too many award shows, listening to people snipe about the winners and criticize their speeches. I didn’t want to embarrass myself.”

  Before the ceremony, she had asked for her friend Poitier’s advice. “He told me he couldn’t sleep for weeks in the lead-up to the Oscars,” she recalled. “He said, ‘We set such high standards for ourselves. We expect nothing less than perfection.’ ”

  She glanced at the men and women who filled the seats around her, the very locus of everyone who was anyone in Hollywood. There was Leonardo DiCaprio, the actor whose casting she had secretly questioned until she met him, soaking wet and gorgeous, on the set of Titanic. There was Tom Hanks, who had made two of her favorite movies, Forrest Gump and Saving Private Ryan, and who had been stoic in both, even though he had given up half his salary on the former and endured discomfort on the latter. And there was Steven Spielberg, the filmmaker she had come to admire so much as she watched him move effortlessly from Ryan to War of the Worlds, the picture that had rescued her just when she thought her summer was doomed.

  Thanks to a previous rehearsal, she knew exactly when she would go onstage, how much her Oscar weighed (eight and a half pounds), and how long she would speak—two minutes in all out of a five-minute segment. Afterward, she would be led through a warren of backstage rooms, where she would be interrogated by the reporters cloistered there—print journalists in one room, radio in the next, TV in the third—all eager to ask about her storied life. Few knew the mixture of strength and suppleness it had taken to get to the top, the resilience, the adamantine will.

  Other women had risen to power in her wake, but none had done so with quite her élan or left anything like her imprint. Even a decade after her departure from Paramount, she remained the gold standard for what an executive should be, an icon in a world with too few.

  “She paved the way for the tsunami of women who now fill the executive ranks of our industry,” said Meryl Streep. “[She was] the pioneer who made ‘female head of studio’ no longer an oxymoron, by virtue of her smarts, her determination, her capacity for tough decisions, and not insignificantly, her charm, her calm and her kindness.”

  “She was tough, but she had a lot of grace in her toughness,” said Jane Fonda. “It was a combination you didn’t find that often, and for a woman it was a really important thing.”

  Lansing was the first woman to reign in this man’s world and still the one who had done it the best. She had not so much knocked obstacles aside as ignored them altogether, allowing other women to follow in her footsteps while never bothering to look at the footprints she had left behind.

  She was a paradox: a feminist icon who was not especially active as a feminist; a revolutionary more at ease with the establishment than with other rebels; a groundbreaker who seemed oblivious to the ground she had broken.

  She had remade herself at ea
ch stage of her career and even now was in the midst of remaking herself once more, as if only by cracking her old shell could she be free to grow a new one.

  She valued the future over the past, action over reflection, optimism over pessimism. She had created a remarkable career, only to abandon it for a quite different one. This evening, for the first time, these two careers were coming together.

  After the obligatory opening monologue, the Oscar host, Ellen DeGeneres, guided the audience through a panoply of awards before reaching the middle of the show. Lansing took a deep breath as a smiling Tom Cruise materialized onstage.

  He spoke about her distinguished work, and the many lives she had lived, inside and outside the studio. “She is an uncommon individual, a singular woman,” he said. “She is the very personification of what this significant award represents.”

  Then Lansing stepped out, and the audience rose to its feet.

  Alone at the podium, she did not address her roots as an actress, nor her résumé as a producer, nor even her twelve years as a studio chairman. As always, she was less focused on the past than the present, more intent on what she was doing now than what she had done before.

  “Through my work, I have met research scientists who struggle every day to find cures for diseases,” she said. “They do so quietly, without glamour or attention, but always with passion and conviction. I have met schoolteachers who are battling against insurmountable odds, and yet they never stop trying to reach our children. To me, they are the real heroes, and tonight I share this honor with all of them. A special thank-you to the members of the Academy for this extraordinary honor. I promise to spend the rest of my life trying to live up to it.”