I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (29 page)

I
n Malibu one day my friend Mary Beth showed me a piece in a Minnesota newspaper about eight women on strike against a bank in Willmar, Minnesota, Mary Beth’s hometown. Mary Beth was married to Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, and he got funds from a group interested in important but overlooked documentary subjects.

It was winter when Mary Beth and I left for Willmar. We left the beach at a sunny eighty-five degrees and landed in Minnesota at twenty degrees below zero.

We drove to Mary Beth’s childhood home, a half hour from the airport. Her dad was Dr. Mac McCarthy, brother of Senator Eugene, and her mother was Muriel. Mary Beth’s six sisters had scattered, so I had one of their rooms to myself.

I had been dropped into a Midwestern town, totally foreign to a big-city girl. We walked on hard, frozen ground to the bank, where I saw eight people, snow-jacketed, mufflered, and booted, walking up and down past an unimpressive one-story building that had the word
BANK
printed in gold letters. They carried wooden sticks with placards.

The women had been picketing for a year, winter and summer. Their case would be heard in court at the end of the month.

They ranged in age from their twenties to their fifties. All had been tellers at this bank, some for many years. One of the women, Irene, had realized that the women had trained, one after another, young men hired by the bank president, then watched them go on to become their superiors. Their bosses. With better pay and kinder hours. When Irene confronted the bank president and asked why the women, especially those with seniority, were never promoted, he dismissed her out of hand. “You are only women, after all,” he said.

The women went on strike. All of them were married, most with families.

It was a privilege to become friends with them on my first excursion into documentary filmmaking—to film their lives, this crisis, and the people in the town of Willmar.

One day as I walked the snow-covered streets with a microphone and camera crew, I tried asking a question of a passerby, “Whose side are you on, the bank’s or the women’s?” and my lips froze. I couldn’t form the “Who?” to ask the sentence. That’s the cold they walked in every day.

By the time we finished, Judy Irola, who was on camera, a real teacher, and I had become an intimate part of the women’s lives and understood how important it was to document them. They lost the court case. But they won. They made history.

Nationwide, bankers saw the documentary and changed their policies. Other women were given positions the Willmar women had fought for. The youngest of the eight, Glennis, became a labor organizer in Minneapolis. And I was hooked. I wanted to make documentaries.

This was a politics that went to my heart. Not fair. A woman taken
advantage of, put down, bullied. A way I could take sides and still be safe. Not labeled Red, Pink, Mauve.

•   •   •

N
ow it was not acting but directing that was the new challenge, the new place I was being stopped, where all women were being stopped. The studios and producers who remained so gracious to me as an actress reacted as if I were overripe cheese when I mentioned directing. There were only three active women directing at the time, and they were all from New York, independent filmmakers with no connection to the studio system: Joan Micklin Silver, Martha Coolidge, and Claudia Weil. I had to do it because Hollywood said I couldn’t. My cue was always “No, you can’t.”

T
illie Olsen was a San Francisco icon, a writer who put her career on hold for thirty years and then produced a succession of exquisite stories, starting with a collection called
Tell Me a Riddle
. In 1980, three young women who had heard Olsen lecture while they were still in college saw my production of
The Stronger
and decided they wanted me to direct a movie for their company, The Godmothers, based on Olsen’s title story.

Their names were Rachel Lyon, Mindy Affrime, and Susan O’Connell. Everything in my life at that time was so magical, so filled with endless possibilities, that I took being chosen to direct
Riddle
for granted. It’s only now that I appreciate the sheer miracle of it, that these girls got
Riddle
made and persuaded Saul Zaentz to be the executive producer.

Saul was a great, veteran producer and an interesting, charming guy. At the time, he was building a huge sound studio and editing facility in San Francisco. It was there we edited the film. The only other people working there at the time were Tippi Hedren and her then-husband, Noel Marshall. They had just finished a documentary about their house full of lions. Tippi’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Melanie
Griffith, was part of the lion household and was mauled by a lion under the misdirection of her stepfather.

Joyce Eliason, the gifted and sensitive writer who wrote the screenplay, and I bonded while we worked on the script for a year at the Green House, waiting for the Godmother girls to raise the money.

They had shown the script to Melvyn Douglas, the urbane, light leading man who had played opposite Garbo in
Ninotchka
, and who we hoped would play the male lead. Douglas said he wanted to do it, pending a meeting with me, a first-time director. We met for lunch in a small bistro with dark green walls. He was sitting at the table, nervously looking at a menu, as I walked toward him. The charming lover of all those great ladies of film in the forties and fifties was in his seventies now.

I’d known that his wife, Helen Gahagan Douglas, was an actress who was elected to Congress in 1944 and that she’d later lost her seat to Richard Nixon after being brutally smeared as a Red. Now here he was—a gift from the Godmothers.

“Would I have to use an accent in this?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ve never done an accent,” he said. “I’ve never worked on an accent. I don’t know whether I can do it.”

I looked at him and loved him so much. Such an actor. All those films behind him, and with this one, it was like he’d never worked before—a child actor, insecure, open, perfect.

I had called Germany to try to get Elisabeth Bergner to play opposite Melvyn. I had adored her when I was growing up. She, too, carried a buried child inside. She, too, had to be in her seventies by now. The main story in
Riddle
is the long marriage of two émigrés from Russia. Eva, the wife, is nearly deaf, lost in memories of her youth in Russia, where she had been a revolutionary. She listens to old, stirring music and pores over her photograph albums, which preserve
the heroes of her youth. She is happily immured in her house and her yard, her kitchen and her things, turning her hearing aid off when she wants to retreat into her own world. Her husband is too old to care for the house anymore. It’s become a burden. He’d been a union housepainter, but now he physically cannot climb the ladder to fix the roof. He wants to move to a senior center, where his friends are, and play cards and enjoy himself. Eva has a fainting spell and is taken to the hospital. She has incurable cancer. Melvyn doesn’t tell her. He secretly sells the house and takes Eva on a trip to visit their children, ending up in San Francisco with a grandchild (Brooke Adams), who is a kindred spirit for Eva. In the end, the old spark ignites between Melvyn and Eva; the loss of their house brings them together, and their need and caring, their love for each other is found before he loses her.

When I told this story to Elisabeth Bergner over the phone in Berlin, she sighed. “It’s too close, darling,” she said. “It’s too close. I can’t do it.”

For me the only other woman who could play the part was Lila Kedrova. Childlike, vulnerable, passionate, a consummate artist. She played opposite Tony Quinn in
Zorba the Greek
and was a revelation.

Melvyn and Lila bonded, as enemies and as lovers. The day we began shooting in San Francisco, Melvyn was trying to climb a ladder to fix his roof in the scene. His arthritis was so bad and so painful in his legs and feet that he couldn’t get past the first rung. In frustration he banged into the house. “They’re going to hate me,” Melvyn worried. “The audience will hate me for treating her like that.”

“The audience will see you trying to climb this ladder, Melvyn. You can’t climb it; they’ll see that. They’ll be on your side forever after that.”

He nodded, lunged into the character, and never looked back.

Riddle
had huge echoes for me, factually and emotionally. It was so my story in a way that I swam in the making of it. Drowned
underwater, part of the time. I felt that Eva and I had made the same journey, she to overthrow the czar, I to overthrow the blacklisters. Eva’s discovery was that the Stalinists, the replacement czars, were killing and imprisoning the poets and writers and artists she worshipped, the heroes in her album. They weren’t in Tillie Olsen’s story. I, as director, put them there, because they were in mine, too—Arnie, Joe Bromberg, Phil Loeb, John Garfield, Canada Lee, and all the others who lost their lives and freedom to the McCarthy period.

The journey was a huge and thrilling release for me. I was surrounded by genius, starting with Tillie Olsen, Melvyn and Lila, Fred Murphy on camera, Patrizia von Brandenstein, production designer, costume designer, invisible cook running Eva’s kitchen. And my own vision was so clear. I knew what I needed to see. I used my new viewfinder. I was totally, easily in charge. My head and heart in sync, technically and emotionally.

Lila was a French actress, sensitive about her age and her looks. In real life, she was married to a much younger man, who doted on her.
Tell Me a Riddle
was based on the lives of a couple who had emigrated to America in the twenties. Lila had asked if I couldn’t make them emigrate around World War II, so she could be younger. She would sneak thick black mascara onto her eyelashes. I’d look through the camera and there they were, her big scandalous eyes. “Rosie,” I’d yell at her makeup lady, by prior agreement. “Rosie, how many times do I have to tell you? No mascara on Lila.” Lila would look sideways at Rosie, a little smile on her face.

The only problem was that migraines moved in to stay during the filming, though remarkably, never while I was actually shooting. I don’t know what body changes were taking place inside me, but every Friday night after work, as soon as I opened the door to my little apartment, one side of my head would start beating, one eye would close, one pulse in my temple throb. I was stunned by the pain and nausea.
I let ice-cold water beat on my head in the shower, tried ice packs and sleeping pills, and sobbed in frustration.

Doctors in that period were jaw-droppingly ignorant and stupid about migraines. “Warm milk.” “Stay calmer.” “See a psychiatrist.” This was fifteen years at least before Fiorinal, Butalbital. Imitrex was developed by Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. I know—I was the first recipient of Imitrex, which, at the time I was given it, around 1990, was a self-administered shot. But that’s another story.

Monday mornings, as soon as I started work, something in my body would kick in and keep me going until the next weekend. I don’t know how much the combination of migraines, pain medication, and a lifelong regimen of sleeping pills contributed to my forgetting my lines. I do know pain and sleeplessness were at that time in charge of my life, enough to require constant medication in order to do a day’s work. I was on a constant balance beam to keep my concentration on track.

Riddle
made it all worthwhile. Lila, Melvyn, Brooke Adams.

There is a scene toward the end of the film, on a long staircase leading down to an outside door, where Melvyn finally tells a fleeing Lila that there’s no more house for her to go back to; he’d sold it. The two of them were so moving, so remarkable. Sitting on the stairs, she stunned, he crying, regretting. I sat under the camera on the stairs, facing them, bawling, stifling my sobs and trying not to ruin their shot. That scene alone made up for all the migraines, and there were many such scenes.

Watching
Riddle
again last year at a screening Rachel Lyon gave at the college where she was teaching, I groaned at my self-indulgence in the editing room. I hung on to moments at the end of the film, when Eva dies, to the point where it’s excruciating. Self-delusion is my forte, and I never recognize it when it’s under way.

Melvyn made one more film, the great
Being There
with Peter Sellers, directed by my friend Hal Ashby, which someone recently told me was a box office flop. Lila was struck with early onset Alzheimer’s.

•   •   •

O
ne bizarre footnote to the audience for
Tell Me a Riddle
.

The film opened and closed in New York at an obscure uptown art theater after a run of two weeks. I was in mourning. All that work and brilliance and devotion, finished, gone.

A young gay friend of Milton Justice approached me. He convinced me there were people with lots of money to distribute art films in Tyler, Texas, the Rose Capital of the World. Milton assured me he was connected, so one weekend Milton, Joey, and I flew to Tyler. We drove from the small airport straight to their main big old-fashioned movie theater. Stepping out of the car to enter the theater, the heat was like a hand pushing down on your head.

We entered the coldest air-conditioned, rococo, vast movie theater. Scattered among the old red velvet seats were two dozen people, couples mostly, politely standing to meet me, the director of the movie.

As I approached the smoky silhouettes, they turned into people. Rosy-faced, hearty men in cream-colored suits, no strangers to bourbon. Frail ladies in print dresses. On their permed heads, small hats with little veils.

I knew, unmistakably, I was their first Jew, and they were here at two-thirty on a sizzling Texas afternoon to watch a movie about Jewish immigrants, formerly Communist Jewish immigrants, with an esoteric deaf Jewish heroine, a long, slow film about The Other.

My heart sank.

I wanted to save them.

They scattered in seats in the empty, cold theater and politely sat for almost two interminable hours.

At the film’s end they swiveled in their seats and patted their hands together. Some of the ladies patted with white gloves.

Afterward, we drove to someone’s modest home for the reception. Outside the car window was sandy desolation. Not one rose in the Rose Capital of the World.

On the way back from the bathroom, I passed a bedroom, the door slightly ajar. There on the carpet sat a luscious woman with short dark hair avidly reading
Women’s Wear Daily
.
Omigod
, I thought,
a paisan.

I moved on to the parlor and deliberately picked a small green velvet couch to sit on, saving the only other seat for my mysterious ally from the bedroom.

A line formed in front of me. The audience had arrived, and each person who saw the movie was going to personally meet me and have a private conversation.

As the juicy lady from the bedroom entered the parlor, I patted the seat next to me. “Keep me company,” I whispered. She smiled adorably and sat.

As limp, gloved hand after hearty, warm man hand shook mine, I heard, “Lovely! Really lovely!” from pale crumpled faces, from red flushed faces. “Fine! Just fine!”

I finally sat on the velvet sofa and turned to my new friend. I searched for the opening words. “I see you read
Women’s Wear Daily
, da da da.” Then, searching for common ground, she says, “I hate blacks, don’t you?” in a real Southern accent.

Of course she did.

I was in Dixieland, USA.