I Blame Dennis Hopper (14 page)

When I moved to New York, I actually tried to get an apartment in
The Goodbye Girl
building. It's a movie about hopes and dreams and emotional triumphs. I had come to New York City to follow my dream to become an actress. I had known all the time I was sitting in that backseat that I would get there.

Years after I had moved away from New York to Los Angeles, I had the privilege of working with Richard Dreyfuss. The film was
Lansky
, and I was playing his wife. We were filming a scene in the bedroom. Richard was giving me some direction about how I should cry while he opened some drawers to pack for a trip. He said, “Now, when I open the first drawer, I want you to give me a little cry, and I'll be taking the clothes from the drawer and putting them in the suitcase. Then when I open the second drawer, you'll give me a big cry and I'll slam the first drawer, then you'll give me a big cry and say, ‘Meyer, please!' and I'll slam the second drawer and turn around…” I was lost. All I could think of was Richard Dreyfuss packing and being funny in
The Goodbye Girl
. My tears dried up and turned to laughter. I just covered my face with my hands and pretended I was crying. The director came in and pulled me aside, and said, “Is there a problem? It looks like you're laughing.”

“Yes, there's a problem,” I said. “The man packs funny! He won an Oscar for packing funny!”

Richard Dreyfuss said, “I wanted to be Spencer Tracy because I knew I would never be Errol Flynn.”

I wanted to be Richard Dreyfuss because I knew I would never be Farrah Fawcett or Christie Brinkley. So my question is, Now do you see why it's so important to know who Spencer Tracy is?

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

Screaming for Marty

“Look at how good I look in a turban. I need to be in
The Last Temptation of Christ
.” Funny, I never got the call.

When I was at my first acting school, the faculty would ask first-year students to play minor parts in some of the senior stage productions so the teachers could chart our progress. I was tapped for a small role in a William Inge play called
Natural Affection
.
Natural Affection
told the story of a juvenile delinquent violently acting out against his mother. I played the neighbor who lives across the hall. I was thrilled. Then I actually read the play. I had two scenes. In the first, I'm coming home from a date. I had a couple lines. My second scene was the last one of the play. I enter their apartment looking for the mother's boyfriend, calling out “Bernie! Bernie!” The boy—angry because he has to go back to reform school—picks up a kitchen knife and stabs me to death. Then, as I lie dead on the living room floor, he drinks a glass of milk. Curtain. The End.

Now, William Inge wrote some great plays and films:
Picnic
,
Come Back Little Sheba
,
Dark at the Top of the Stairs
,
Splendor in the Grass
 …
Natural Affection
was just not one of them. The last scene was just about the worst, most mixed-up ending of a play I had ever read. I also had proof. There were only thirty-six performances of it on Broadway. Something needed to be done to fix this turkey.

Have I mentioned I was a know-it-all? I'm a know-it-all. But only about one subject: the movies. I know the movies. I love the movies. So I knew what needed to be stolen
from
the movies. I said to the director, “What if the neighbor is like a darker version of Holly Golightly from
Breakfast at Tiffany's
? She's Holly a few years after the movie. Things haven't worked out for her; she's kind of beat-up, a boozer, living next door in a sea of bottles.”

The director was pretty busy, you know, actually directing the play, and this was a walk-on role, so he didn't much care what I did. “What, Illeana? I guess so … we'll be getting to you soon.” I immediately took this as a yes and went backstage to get into character. Mainly by fastening a gigantic rhinestone clip in my hair à la Audrey in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. I waited, and I waited.

There was one problem. We could never get past the intolerably long first act to get to my entrance. It portrayed the mother's adjustment to her delinquent son, his Oedipal complex, her abusive boyfriend Bernie, and, somehow, her obsession with polishing inlay furniture. As I said, thirty-six performances on Broadway. Since I had to sit there, waiting for my entrance, I had a lot of free time to come up with
other
ideas I thought would save this play. I sidled up next to the director and whispered, “Have you thought about how we are going to do the ending?”

He stared at me, as if trying to remember who I was. “What, Illeana?”

I said, “The ending? The ending where I'm killed by the son?”

He scratched his head as if he hadn't even thought about it, so I said, “What if it's like a Hitchcock movie?” assuming he would just know what I meant.

I discovered Hitchcock through a wonderful book and series I saw growing up called
The Men Who Made the Movies,
by Richard Schickel, and I am proud to say I still have my first-edition copy. It was through this documentary—a series of interviews with directors from Hawks to Hitchcock—that I began to understand the process of moviemaking that I had first experienced on the set of
Being There
.

In
The Men Who Made the Movies,
Hitchcock shows examples from his films to illustrate how to create drama and suspense. He describes the film
Frenzy,
which features a murder scene and is a great example of how to create almost unbearable tension. He doesn't show the girl's death, but rather shows the killer enter the building where she works. The audience knows he's the killer. She doesn't. He cuts to the outside street, and the camera pulls out. Imagining the girl's demise is much worse than actually seeing it. This lesson stayed with me and was invaluable when it came to pitching a new ending to
Natural Affection
.

I said to the director, “What if I come over looking for Bernie, Mom's boyfriend, but he's not there. I start flirting with the boy. I start taking my dress off. But the dress gets caught over my head. While I'm laughing and stumbling around, the kid picks up a knife and starts to come at me. I don't see the knife coming at me, but the audience does.”

I saw the wheels turning and the director starting to get excited. “Yes,” he said. “We do have the issue of him stabbing you, and this would solve that because we wouldn't have to see it. I like it. We'll get to you soon.”

Every day I would engage the director about the ending. He seemed to enjoy my enthusiasm for planning my own murder. Then, during one rehearsal, I was talking about the ending, which, by this point I had all worked out, and he snapped at me, “Illeana, you can stay and watch, but you have to stop talking to me; it's very distracting. We will get to you.” I was so hurt; I decided I wouldn't come to rehearsal for three days. When I was called to return to finally do my scenes I would simply act my part as written. I'd just sit there, read my Ruth Gordon autobiography, and just get on with it. No fanfare, nothing. Fine. I was leaving rehearsal, and the director stopped me. He wanted to talk to me because
he
was hurt that I had stopped coming to rehearsal!

“Where have you been?” he said.

I was flabbergasted. “I thought I was getting on your nerves?”

“You were,” he said, laughing. “It's funny; you are so irritating when you're here, but when you aren't here I really miss you. Please come back!”

I have since identified this as one of my most lovable traits: You can't stand me when I'm around, but when I am not around, you really miss me! Anyway, I came back, and the ending, lucky for me, was still el stinko. With just days before our opening performance, we rewrote and restaged it—with some help from the master, Alfred Hitchcock. I am not being facetious when I say this was probably one of my first great collaborations with a director.

We couldn't have real blood onstage, since it would of course stain everything, so we came up with this idea that the boy would stab me with the dress over my head, and I would immediately fall behind the couch. Behind the couch, where no one could see, were a bucket of stage blood and some thick pillows. We timed it so that I would scream and stab the pillow while he dipped his knife into the bucket of blood. Every time he raised the knife, there would be more and more blood on it. The effect was chilling, and you never saw anything except the bloody knife and my legs thrashing around from behind the couch. What you
imagined
was happening was so much worse than seeing it. Thank you, Alfred Hitchcock!

The first night we did the show was crazy. The minute the dress was twisted over my head and the boy started walking toward me with the knife, the audience went nuts. They started screaming, “No! He has a knife! Get out!” It was so intense it actually scared me.

I refused to do the curtain call, because I didn't want to ruin it for the audience. How could I get up and take bows after I'd just been killed? The director, who had by this time become my biggest ally, shook his head at me. “Fine, Illeana; you're the director.”

When the play was over—and it was a big success, by the way—he said, “You know, you have one of the most bloodcurdling screams I have ever heard. You could make money with that scream.”

I joked, “Yeah, Special Skills: bloodcurdling screams!” Little did he know that I would take his advice and that scream would take me far.

A few years later, I had graduated from the Neighborhood Playhouse and had become involved with a company called Goodwater. We were doing an Off Broadway showcase comprising mostly actors and writers who happened to be assistants to many of the great filmmakers in the Brill Building in Manhattan. The Brill Building—at 1619 Broadway—had once been Tin Pan Alley. Then it became a notable film and production house. Directors such as Jonathan Demme, Spike Lee, Paul Schrader—you name it—all had offices there. A friend in our show was working as an assistant for the film director Frank Perry. He had an office next to Peggy Siegal's and was also a client of hers. Peggy was a very famous publicist—still is—handling all the biggest movies of the era. He had overheard that she needed a new assistant because hers was moving on to work for Martin Scorsese, who was also in the building. My friend recommended me. I passed my interview, and pretty soon I had my dream job. Every day I learned something invaluable about show business. Like, be prepared.

On my first day of work, I rode the elevator with Warren Beatty and Elaine May. They were actually discussing
Ishtar
, which they were editing, in the elevator. I thought, Man, an elevator ride with the right director might land you in a movie.

A lot of my duties involved inviting and escorting famous people to premieres. My roommate would tease me, “That's what you do? Invite famous people to parties?”

“Yes!” I would say excitedly. I mean, the fact that I had Neil Simon's home number and Walter Cronkite's and could call them and invite them to a party—as if we were friends—well, who didn't want to make calls like that? Also, the fact that I knew who Joe Mankiewicz and Garson Kanin were, or that Adolph Green was
married
to Phyllis Newman but that his
partner
was Betty Comden, was finally identified as an important skill. Dream job!

One day I was on the phone with David Denby, who was then a very important movie reviewer for
New York
magazine. (He is now a very important reviewer for
The New Yorker
.) Well, part of representing the film was screening it for reviewers. Peggy always wanted to let a filmmaker know in advance if a review of their film would be positive, so one of my jobs would be to call a reviewer and gauge their reactions after a screening. Mr. Denby—to put it mildly—did not receive these calls well, but I made them nonetheless. On a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.

“Hello, Mr. Denby—I'm calling from Peggy Siegal.”

“No, I do not have a reaction to
Beverly Hills Cop II
.” Click.

Peggy Siegal came walking in as I was looking at the phone. “Did you call David Denby?”

“Yes, Peggy. He just hung up on me.”

“Call him back.”

“What? No, Peggy, he just hung up on me.”

“Call him back.”

“But
____
”

Just then, Frank Perry came running in and looking around. He stopped and did a double take at me, pointing his finger. “You're an actress, right?”

I smiled wryly. “Yes, Frank. I'm an actress who answers the phone for a living.”

“No!” he said. “Put the phone down.”

I looked at Peggy. “What about Denby?”

She said incredulously, “You're an actress?”