I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (32 page)

Years before, he had lost the fight with Arnie, had been rendered helpless. Now he circled Joey like a lion, repeatedly challenging him, but never winning. Now, from a distance, he could lean on me where it hurt, impose his will, and challenge Joey at the same time. It was animal instinct. I remember when Joey, flush with victory, sat down at our dining room table with Abe, laying his gift at Abe’s feet. “I sold the house,” he told him, at a huge price that would protect me for life. Abe said to Joey, “Motel management, that’s what you should do. Start a little motel.” He couldn’t stop himself, and my mother wasn’t there to reason with him. Indeed, by erasing the debt, she’d betrayed him. He wanted so badly to hold me hostage. To make me beholden to him again. To possess power again. I understood his raw need. But I knew he was comfortable financially. I knew it wasn’t about money.

I was fighting him for my mother’s right to do what she wanted to do, with her secret savings and her posthumous wiping out of the debt.
She had always sneaked around him to do what she wanted. She enjoyed hiding things from him, small things. When my father said, “Absolutely no cats,” she and Fremo sneaked stray cats into the attic in the East Rockaway house. They were excited, giddy with nervous laughter. But he was used to being boss of the house, she accepted that, and it worked.

Our deal on the Green House was complicated. The wealthy young couple who wanted to buy it had a year to make a final decision, which put us in a kind of hold-your-breath position. We couldn’t rent or sublet in New York indefinitely. At some point we felt we had to buy something, but only if and when the Green House sold.

A more gracious and mature daughter would have given in, would have just paid off the debt. But I felt my arm was being twisted. I was being tested: Good Daughter, Bad Daughter.

Mark, my father’s cousin, called, very sober. “He has a smart lawyer,” he said. “Abe can hold up the sale of your house.”

My heart sank. We were living in New York, totally dependent on the sale of the Green House for our long-term security. I couldn’t sleep. My heart was flip-flopping inside me. Dad was calling, chatting, with never a mention of the house or the loan. We both ignored the dead body in the middle of the room. He had the power now. I felt threatened and airless.

Finally I called Mark. He and my father were close, and he had influence. “Mark, please make him stop. It’s making me sick. He scares me.” I was becoming more and more frightened of him and his need for power over me, to be the dominant man in my life. We were frozen in a bad play, taking on the roles of father and daughter, totally displacing the real father and daughter we had been to each other all my life.
Maybe,
I thought,
maybe this anger is giving him purpose, a fresh reason to live, strength. Maybe he just needs it—like he needed to be on
60 Minutes
.

Mark called about a week later. “Okay,” he said, “he won’t go after the house.” My father had given me the gift of my own house.

Dad. Daddy. Stalwart, sweet tobacco–smelling Daddy. Daddy of singing in the car, “For I adore, I adore you, Giannina mia.” That dad was gone, lost to me. My father took his place.

I think my tunnel vision, my total unawareness of what a woman can or can’t take on, was my ticket to doing everything. I’m a very ignorant person in many practical ways—in all practical ways. The only thing I understand about money is in order to get it I have to work; the money goes to wise people who make sure the rent, groceries, and children’s school fees are paid. If not for Joey, who has produced every project with our company, I, who was deliberately raised to be the princess who couldn’t sleep on the pea, who was so sensitive and protected, would be in a very painful place. I am totally dependent on the kindness of friends. If I were ever really aware of the total responsibility, if I were dollar-wise, reputation-wise, day-, week-, month-, editing-, and especially camera-wise, I would never have pushed so hard to do the work.

I
had an idea. Why couldn’t
The Willmar 8
, the documentary, be turned into a movie for television? I took the doc and the concept to Joan Barnett and Karen Danaher-Dorr at NBC. They got behind it and they got behind me as the director. It would be my first solo directing job for a wide audience. I loved the idea of casting actors I knew in the parts of the real women I’d met in Minnesota. I loved the idea of bringing the issue to a huge public. Not lecturing about women’s issues, but showing the reality of women’s place in the banking industry. In those days, 1984, before cable, the three networks supplied everything to the country, so twenty million viewers for an evening’s entertainment was average. (Three years later, when we made
Nobody’s Child
with Marlo Thomas, we had forty million viewers.)

We were still living in the Green House when I pitched
The Willmar 8
as a TV movie. Joan and Karen gave us the money to go ahead with a script. By the time Joyce Eliason, who’d written the script for
Tell Me a Riddle
, began working on the script, we had moved to New York. The NBC women set up a meeting with their superior, a mild blond guy, very pleasant, who turned the idea down. Sorry, it was not
a topic that would interest NBC viewers. I met with him. Again, pleasant; again, no.

I spoke to our NBC supporters. “The only way to get it on is to convince the head of NBC,” Joan said.

“Who’s that?”

“Grant Tinker.”

“How do I reach him?” They gave me his telephone number.

I sat on the bed in New York reaching for the phone, hanging up, walking around the bedroom, breathing deeply. I sat down and dialed. It was Tinker’s private number. He picked up. I don’t know what I said, or implored, but the essence was, “I know I’m not going through channels and I’m imposing, but I believe this is a good script, and an important one. I’ll accept whatever you’ll say, but I just ask you to read it. I think it deserves that.”

He said, “I’ll look into it.” He read the script and gave it a go. Thank you, Grant Tinker.

I didn’t realize it, I’d moved so quickly, but I was moving on setting the pattern for my next career. The one that not only kept me afloat, but unafraid, fascinated, eager, dazzled, and happy.

I asked Fred Murphy, who shot
Tell Me a Riddle
, to be on camera, and I asked Everett Chambers, an old close friend and an experienced producer, to produce. Everett was a straight-arrow, by-the-book guy. His brother, Dick, had been Joey’s first partner in the commercial business.

The cast was led by Jean Stapleton. My daughter Dinah Manoff played the twenty-year-old teller. Jean was a huge star at the time, playing the ditsy wife in Norman Lear’s
All in the Family
. In real life, she was deeply aware of women’s issues and wanted to be a part of this story.

We found a perfect town for Willmar in rural Canada—perfect
street, perfect real café across from the bank. Perfect cold weather. Except for the snow. It never snowed. We had to import the snow in trucks from the nearest mountain and pack our set with it.

Our first day I shot exteriors: the women walking in front of the bank with their placards, the town kids throwing snowballs trying to provoke them. I’d worked out a dolly shot with Fred Murphy when Everett came running up.

“That’s not the way to shoot it!” he barked. I stood there, openmouthed, while he explained how the shot should be done. “You don’t know how to direct it!”

My crew and I were quiet as he walked away. I wondered if I still had a crew. This was the first day, the first shot, and we didn’t even know one another. My old friend and mentor Everett, whom I expected to protect me, was going to be an adversary for the whole shoot.

Everett didn’t like how I said “Action.” As an actress, I never noticed how my directors said it. It depended on the intimacy of the scene or the space they had to yell “A-a-a-action”—or whisper it. It was second nature.

Everett coached me: “AK-shun!” Sharp, decisive, crisp, military,
achtung!
-like. I would say it after him five or six times until he said excitedly, “That’s it!” Then I’d go on set and of course do it my way. Same with cut. “Cut!” he’d demonstrate sharply. “Cut, cut!” I regarded him in bafflement. Such strange behavior from a real person. Bewildering.

Toward the end, Everett called NBC and had executives come down and watch me shoot for two days, with a warning from him that I was incompetent. The executive said to me, “You’re doing a good job. We were really worried getting Everett’s reports about you, that you were a loose cannon.” After that, I was a loose cannon for one night. I wanted an extra scene of celebration at the bank. Everett
forbade it. All of us, cast and crew, stayed late and filmed it, without his knowledge. It felt great.

Fred Murphy and the crew were brothers to me. They formed a shield, and from that first day on we bonded. After shooting
Willmar 8
, Everett and I became strangers.

NBC changed the title
Willmar 8
to
A Matter of Sex
, a title that might draw or confuse an audience. The finished film was a disappointment to me. It resembled the doc but had little of its charisma and power. I take responsibility for that. And I don’t know if it had any great effect. The documentary three years earlier had changed the face of the banking industry. This was
Willmar 8
lite.

From then on we sold scripts based on our documentaries to the networks and made an impact with some remarkable content, to huge audiences. It would be the pattern and the key to my directing movies for television for the next two projects.

I
’d returned to Joe Papp, to the Public Theater, at the height of Joe’s power and influence. I put my head inside the door, and Joe came to me with open arms like the force of nature he was. “I forgive you, I forgive you,” he laughed with his gorgeous face. I was home.

I’d brought him a brilliant anti-Soviet play with a huge cast. Instead, he suggested putting together the short plays of Václav Havel. I’d never heard of him. This was 1983. Havel was a Czech writer. The Communist Czech government cracked down on free speech. Havel, a brilliant satirist, kept writing short plays that infuriated the government. He’d been jailed for about three years when Joe suggested we choose several of his short plays and put them together under one title. I don’t know who suggested
A Private View
, but that’s what we called it.

Havel’s friends and wife had managed to spirit his plays from his cell to living rooms all over the country, where actors performed them for anti-Soviet rebellious Czechs.

It was a great time for me, a great choice from Joe. The plays and
the cast were brilliant and caustic; Richard Jordan received an Obie for a star turn in the last play.

I met Havel years later, after the Soviets were thrown out, before he was elected first president of the Czech Republic. Joe Papp set up a meeting in the sacristy of St. John the Divine. I genuflected. He shook my hand. So many heroes in our lives.

And finally, thirty years later, thanks to Joe, I worked on a play expressing my own private views about a regime that imprisoned and killed artists.

G
ood things began to happen. An agent had shown both
The Stronger
and
The Willmar 8
to Sheila Nevins at HBO. She headed their documentary department and still does, a quixotic woman, high-strung, dark-haired, attractive. We talked, Joey joked, seduced, opened Sheila’s desk drawer. When he found two tampons and stuck them in his ears with the strings hanging down, she was amused, and we got the job. The
Willmar 8
documentary was a great calling card. She gave us a brilliant assignment almost immediately: to go to a prison to find out about women who commit murder. We had our first documentary as a production company in New York.

Ronnie Eldridge was a New York City councilwoman who knew the prison system inside out. (She was also married to Jimmy Breslin, one of my idols—for his brilliant writing, his passion, and for being a bad boy.) Ronnie brought in Prue Glass, a high-ranking social worker who had ties to the prison system. We decided to film at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Westchester County, about an hour’s drive from the city.

In 1975, my film
The Stronger
and Barbara Kopple’s
Harlan County, USA
had been screened alongside each other at the Los
Angeles Film Festival, with the two of us seated side by side in the audience.
Harlan County
was a revelation to me. I’d never seen anything like it before. I hadn’t known a thing about documentary filmmaking, and it changed my life. It had inspired me to do
The Willmar 8
.

Now her husband, Hart Perry, was set to do camera on our women’s prison doc. He told me that Barbara wanted to do the sound. Shocked, I said no, of course not. How could a great filmmaker like Barbara work sound for me, a beginner? I wasn’t at her level. Barbara called. “Lee, I do sound. I’m a sound person. This is what I do between making my own films. I’m not going to judge you—really.”

So Barbara came on board. Half of the time she carried her six-month-old son, Nicholas, in a carrier and placed him safely out of the way in whatever cell we were shooting in. I never heard a sound out of him. A true soundwoman’s baby.

•   •   •

W
e became the prisoners’ adopted family. The women inmates gathered on the tiers yelling greetings as we made our way across their baseball field from the examining and X-ray house where we were inspected by the police guard each morning. I kept some cocaine in my sneaker, just in case I crashed late in the day. Joey, of course, had it stashed every place he could. We all met in the assistant warden’s office. Joey was so nervous about getting caught and sent to prison himself that when the warden entered the office, a huge imposing man, Joey jumped up, held his hand out to shake the warden’s, and said, “Hi, I’m Hart Perry.” At which point Hart got up and didn’t know what to say. Joey said, “I mean
he’s
Hart Perry.” And Hart said, “And he’s Joe Feury!” We all jumped up then, with a jumble of introductions, till the warden, a really nice, smart guy, held up his hands and backed off.

The women on the tier would yell, “Hi, Joey!” They loved him.
One lesbian prisoner would yell, “Hi, Prue! Hey, Prue, c’mon up here!” Prue would duck her head. We were a warm and welcome diversion for these women prisoners.

Violet was Native American. She had two daughters and a little granddaughter. She’d lived upstate, a hardscrabble life, a lot of hard drinking. She was also simpatico, warm, open, tears streaming over her round cheeks as she described, “He came in with a rifle, pushed me out of bed with it. I was begging, running around the room, grabbed the end of the rifle, turned it around, and it went off.” Here she broke down completely, sobbing. She loved the fucker.

Did I believe her? Completely. Did she belong in prison? Heartbroken, overweight, and sick?

Her two daughters and four-year-old granddaughter came to visit.

Bedford provided a nice trailer, a little playground for overnight family visits (I guess not conjugal, because most of the husbands were dead). One of Violet’s daughters was working to be a lawyer; the other was in a violent relationship with her husband. Violet’s pretty granddaughter was on the swing when I asked her what she would do if a man hit her. “Kill ’im,” she answered matter-of-factly, in her light, sweet voice.

I’d had an intuition that it was the weak, trapped women who killed to get away from their men. Not the strong women, who could just walk out and slam the door behind them.

My sense of my own “entitlement” was sharply defined by being shut up with the women I filmed, whose stories, one after the other, were so despairing and brutal, filled with so many regrets and losses.

Prue Glass left her job as a social worker and joined our company, Feury/Grant Entertainment (note the billing), for the next twenty years, as did Mary Beth, as did Virginia Cotts, whose cool head has saved my hot one on many an airplane, as did Roberta Morris, who is still working with me transcribing these ink-stained pages onto the
computer. All producers with Feury/Grant Entertainment. This new group of friends was a magnet, and I was a magnet for them. Intrepid warriors, swords high, for the many revelations and explorations from one end of the human spectrum to the other. It all started at Bedford Hills.

I was up on my documentary roller skates, downhill racing as I had on 148th Street. This was thrilling, deep inside another world that had opened up for me, to me.

•   •   •

T
hen “the girl” came to New York. Mary Beth generously offered the couch in her temporary apartment, which was also on the West Side, a few blocks away.

Joey began visiting them first thing in the morning for her fresh-brewed cappuccino, and her neediness, and for the way she laughed at everything he said. She became pink when she laughed, and sometimes even teary. As an actor, she was a great reactor. Who could resist cappuccino and pink cheeks every morning?

Not Joey.