The Sheila Variations

Hepburn Miscellania

These quotes are scattered through the special edition of the New York Daily News. Hepburn seemed to have spoken in often-publishable words.

I would love to rattle off one-liners in such a way.

"I'm like some weather-beaten old monument. People are beginning to realize they'll miss me when I'm gone."

"I had years of perfect companionship with a man among men. I've never regretted it." (So much for Elena Pearson, a writer from Queens, quoted in one of the pieces about Hepburn: "She didn't need men. She was strong. She was powerful." Uh: Elena? Life sometimes is a bit more complex than that. Mmkay? Not everybody is going to fit into your neat little ideology.) Hepburn would turn down roles so that she could tend to Tracy, she coddled him, she helped him sober up, she thought it was more important that she be available to Tracy, than to advance her career. Yes, she was strong, Yes, she was powerful ... but she didn't need men?? The two (or three) are not mutually exclusive.

At least I hope they're not, for my own sake. Jeez.

To add to the complexity, here is Hepburn's take on her relationship with men:

"In my relationships I know that I have some qualities that are offensive to people -- especially men. I'm loud and talkative and I get onto subjects that irritate. If I feel these things causing a break, I know something has to give. I never think the man is going to give -- or anyone else for that matter -- so I do. I just deliberately change. I just shut up -- when every atom in me wants to speak up."

(Response, Ms. Pearson??)

And along those lines, here is what she said about her relationship with Spencer Tracy. I remember reading it in her autobiography and feeling ... baffled ... confused ... why didn't she stand up to him? Why didn't she say "Take me as I am, you fool!" Well, she did not, and we must take her at her word that she has no regrets. Anyway, here is the quote in question:

"Well, the things he found irritating I removed."

I feel like I could spend the rest of my life thinking about that statement.

More Hepburn quotables:

"The thing about life is that you must survive. Life is going to be difficult, and dreadful things will happen. What you do is to move along, get on with it, and be tough. Not in the sense of being mean to others, but tough with yourself and making a deadly effort not to be defeated."

"I just don't like to be half-good. It drives me insane. And I'm willing to do anything to try to be really good. I'm very aware when I'm very good -- and I like to be very, very good. Oh, I think perfection is the only standard for people who are stars."

"Marriage is not a natural institution -- otherwise why sign a contract for it?"

"I can't stand Mary of Scotland. I think she was an absolute ass. I thought Elizabeth was absolutely right to have her condemned to death."

This one breaks my heart a bit:

"Being an actor is a humiliating experience. Because you are selling yourself to the public, your face, your personality, and that is humiliating. As you get older, it becomes more humiliating, because you've got less to sell."

"Everyone thought I was bold and fearless and even arrogant, but inside I was always quaking ... I don't care how afraid I may be inside -- I do what I htink I should."

Indeed.

More Kate Hepburn

Here's another quote from Miss Hepburn, which has made me tear up all over again:

"With all the opportunities I had, I could have done more. And if I'd done more, I could have been quite remarkable."

A class act, that dame.

(via Volokh)

I'm a terrible person

I considered going on a date with someone I am not really interested in, merely because he has an air-conditioner in his apartment, and I do not. It's been a heat-wave. I hate the heat. I don't just hate the heat. I despise the heat, and I despise how I feel when it is hot. I am irritable, grumpy, desperate to cool off.

I said to my roommate casually, rubbing ice cubes up and down my arms, "I think I might call [insert name here] and see what he's up to tonight."

"But I thought you weren't interested in him."

"I'm not really. But he has air-conditioning."

Long horrified pause. In that pause, I came to my senses, and said to her tentatively:

"So ... I shouldn't call him ... You think it would be kind of mean?"

"Uh .... YES."

"Okay. I see what you're saying."

I lost my moral compass there, in the muggy 95 degree weather.

The Divine Kate

They just don't make movie stars and actresses like Katherine Hepburn anymore.

She was a true original.

More on Miss Hepburn:

Roger Ebert has written a beautiful eulogy to this most treasured American icon.

A couple of my favorite anecdotes, anecdotes which have entered into the realm of myth in my own mind, having studied Katherine Hepburn's life and acting for years:

Dorothy Parker saw Hepburn in a Broadway play, early on in Hepburn's career. Parker, true to form, wrote that Hepburn displays the "gamut of emotions, from A to B." My take on this is: Not every actor is capable of going from A to Z. A to Z is extremely over-rated. The greats, the ones who are burned into the psyche of movie-goers everywhere, pretty much do ONE thing, and do it better than anybody else on the planet. Spencer Tracy. Cary freakin' Grant. Humphrey Bogart. These are not people who transform themselves endlessly, from part to part to part. They are not chameleons. You always recognize Humphrey Bogart. But that does not diminish the accomplishment. More than anyone else in the world, they could bring that one thing, that one essence, to life -- It's like a kind of magic.

Katherine Hepburn said, about herself: "I strike people as peculiar in some way, although I don't quite understand why. Of course, I have an angular face, an angular body and, I suppose, an angular personality, which jabs into people."

KNOW THYSELF. It is perhaps the most important thing to have, to own, if you want to be an actor. Know thyself. Easier said than done.

The following snippet, offered up by Ebert, brought tears to my eyes. Katherine Hepburn obviously developed a pronounced tremor in her face and voice, as she got older. An interviewer (a rude a**hole, if you ask me) asked her about her decision to continue acting, even though her face and voice shook. She replied (and I can just imagine HOW she said it), "What choice do I have?"

Take THAT.

A good friend of hers was being interviewed last night on CNN or something, and of course, questions came up about her relationship with Spencer Tracy, and whether or not Katherine Hepburn had any regrets. The friend answered, "Oh, no no no. Kate never wasted time with regrets."

I should have my own personal Hepburn/Tracy film festival. Is there anything more enjoyable than watching the two of them spar, trying to best each other intellectually? Is there anything sexier? More erotic? Their wars of words...God, to have a relationship like that! They battle, they spit out insults at one another, and yet the overriding feeling is that all they want to do is throw each other down.

Do actors still know how to do that?

Of course, the material now is not half as good as the material was back then. Also, actors back then all came out of the theatre tradition. Almost nobody in Hollywood now comes out of the theatre tradition. There IS no theatre tradition! And it shows in the work of the actors and actresses up on the screen. I can't really explain it, but I look at someone like Katherine Hepburn and I KNOW she has had theatre training.

The same is true for someone like Meryl Streep. Olympia Dukakis. Robert DeNiro. These people are obviously trained for the stage.

A funny story about Katherine Hepburn:

It was the 1930s. A new theatre group was being formed, a group who wanted to bring relevant plays to Broadway, plays which spoke to the angst of the time. In the 1930s, the majority of material on Broadway was fluffy high-brow comedies, the foibles of the upper-class. So, a "group" got together, headed by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford, and they wanted to change all that.

The theatre which evolved out of that, the Group Theatre, only lasted a decade. But the Group is one of the most influential things to have ever happened in American theatre. Its influence cannot be over-stated. First of all, the Group Theatre gave us Clifford Odets' plays. The Group Theatre was where Elia Kazan, who went on to direct the most influential and loved films of the 20th century, first got his training. Out of the Group Theatre eventually came the most influential acting teachers of the last century: Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Bobby Lewis, Morris Carnovsky ...

The Group died because of in-fighting, and financial problems. Out of the ashes of the Group Theatre the Actors Studio was created by Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan, and obviously: the Actors Studio is directly responsible (in my view) for the elevation of film acting to an actual art form. The technique taught there created the kind of film acting which we all now take for granted. Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Ellen Burstyn, James Dean, Montgomery Clift ... all of these people came out of the Actors Studio.

But back to the Group Theatre: they were a bunch of successful people, in the middle of the Depression, who started holding meetings about how to revive the theatre, how to work as an ensemble, how to model themselves after the Moscow Art Theatre, how to be a group in a capitalist society which did not support such endeavors. Harold Clurman invited the big-wigs of the New York theatre scene to come join them, to come sit in on the meetings, to see if they would want to be a part of such an exciting and new project.

Katherine Hepburn, a 20-something Broadway actress at the time, not yet world-famous, "Philadelphia Story" still in her future, was invited to come to some of these meetings. She came. She sat. She listened. In the middle of the meeting, this young unknown actress got up and started to walk out. Harold Clurman stopped her. "Where are you going? What's going on?"

Hepburn replied, "This is all very well for you people. But I'm going to be a star, you see."

The purist Group people were horrified at this. But who has the last laugh now?

Big news

Big big news.

My nephew Cashel, who will be 6 in October, lost his first tooth. He left me a message about it on my cell phone. Saying softly and seriously, informing me of the facts, "I lost a tooth." Then there was a brief pause, and he could no longer contain himself, so he shrieked gleefully, "I LOST A TOOTH."

I cannot believe it. I'm not ready for him to have big-boy teeth! He's only 5! What is this world coming to!!

Congratulations, Cashel! Welcome to the world of big-kid teeth.

Diary Friday

This is something I began in my old blog: Diary Fridays. Because I am insane, I have about three boxes of old journals lying around, dating back to tortured adolescence. Every Friday, I post something randomly from one of these journals. There is no rhyme or reason to it, I don't care about chronology. One of the reasons why I started sifting through my journals again (something I rarely do) is because now that I am writing more, the journals act as potential lightning rods. I will read something, some event, long-forgotten, and it will set off a spark in my brain: That's a starting point, that's an interesting story ... write about that!

The following entry is a list of impressions I had after wrapping my first film.

June 30, 1997 2 a.m.

We just wrapped. Mercury's in retrograde.

Images from the shoot:

I fell in love with all of the tech guys. Their hard work. Their no-nonsense practical humorous personalities.

It was so hot that our makeup staying on became a group crisis. Mike Z., one of the production assistants, was given the assignment to FAN me and Jen. He was like our very own Roman slave.

Jen and I sat out on the fire escape, catching the breeze.

The lighting and sound people just kill me. Their toolbelts, clothespins clipped to their shirts, drenched in sweat, trouble-shooting, solving problems left and right.

Very intense.

Me to Jen: "We are wearing a lot of makeup right now."

Acting in a film was so new. At first it didn't feel like acting to me. The lack of continuity, shooting out of sequence, shooting the same two seconds over and over. But ... I think I have taken to it. The DP called me a "pro" which meant the world to me because he really is a pro.

Ian, holding the light meter up to my face. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, in preparation for the next shot. He was in darkness, I was standing in the shaft of light (which it had taken them three hours to set up). I whispered to him, "Am I in the right place?" He said, in a low voice, that light meter by my cheek, he in total darkness, "You're in the right place." Now: he just meant that I hit my mark and I just meant Have I hit my mark? But - suddenly - there was a deeper meaning attached to the exchange, having to do with my life. Am I in the right place? Have I got here in time? Am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing? And suddenly, after he said, "You're in the right place", I was in tears for real. I mean, I already had been in tears for real, but they were tears I had worked and prepared for. Professional actress tears. The second tears were of a very different kind. They were real, and NO WORK AT ALL had to be done to keep them going.

But that low voice of his, and the words he said, it was really all I needed from then on, in take after take after take after take. Makeup touchups, light adjustments, etc. I'd have to get involved with something technical - move left, move right, hold the jacket this way - Then I'd get back to myself, I'd hear his soft voice, "You're in the right place", and all of the feeling would come up again.

In retrospect, I'm not even positive that it really happened. It seems like a dream ... Ian's voice, what he said.

So many funny impressions from the shoot. Jen and I playing our intense little scene on the bed with TEN PEOPLE clustered around us, the boom dangling, everyone just RIGHT THERE WITH US in our scene.

Ian rigged the lights for a specific shot in such a hilarious and creative way. It was like Apollo 13. Everybody rushing around trying to solve problems, and the solutions people came up with! Ian finished his contraption, stood back from it, and yelled out to the entire room: "NOBODY TOUCH THIS."

There was a shot of my hands holding the diary, and tears had to drip down onto the page, blurring the ink. So Neil and Kristen huddled together, feverishly trying to come up with a solution that, when drippd onto the page, would look like a mascara-filled teardrop. They were like mad scientists, and everything was deadly serious.

There were too many blank pages in the prop diary so Cheryl feverishly filled in blank pages, writing down heartfelt entries SO FAST -- they needed the journal for the next shot -- I read them later and it was so damn FUNNY. "Today down at the gazebo, I think I learned what love really is." Cheryl!

And then Neil, hovering over my head from behind, dripping his teardrop solution down onto the page. The camera right behind me, everyone standing around watching. The way the first drop fell, it was as though I had cried a teardrop the size of a dinner platter. Everyone ROARED with laughter. John, our British DP, murmured, "Oh, blimey, look at that."

Then for the shot where I show the tattoo on my stomach. I was lying on the bed, holding up my shirt, lights blaring downon me -- Neil was to apply the tattoo. He and Mike Z. had tested how the tattoos looked on themselves, so the two of them were basically covered in random fake tattoos. I was so charmed by that. These two big jocky guys wearing goof-ball tattoos on their biceps. So everyone was waiting, and watching. Neil put the tattoo on my stomach. "Blow your stomach out." Which I did. Ian then dashed over and held the light meter next to my stomach. Click. Mark dashed over with his tape measure, held one end on my rib cage and pulled it back to the camera. All while Neil was holding the sponge down on me, applying the tattoo. I was starting to get the giggles.

Then he peeled it off and BLEW ON IT - frantically -- like a madman -- to dry it in time for the shot. I barely know this man. He's Rebecca's boyfriendand here he is blowing on my stomach.

Shelagh, the director, to Barbara, the PA: "Barbara, you can go get the babylegs and highhat, yes?"
Barbara: "Well, I -- ah -- um, I have no idea what those are, but yes, I can get them."

Shelagh, to me and Jen, after seeing dailies: "You guys are not you!"

Neil, right before a shot, literally right before John called out "Action", said: "Wait, stop!" -- raced out onto the set to grab his cup which he had raccidentally left behind on the bureau. The cup was clearly labeled: NEIL

Neil, standing on top of a ladder, keeping himself awake by blinking hard.

Shelagh at one point went into hysterical laughter and threw herself down onto one of the beds, in hysterics. Marco, fiddling with the camera, said, without turning around, "Everybody has to calm down."

Jen and I, in our over-the-top rave-chick makeup, staggered home to Hoboken every night at 3, 4 in the morning. We called ourselves "Hoboken Whores".

Marco, racing around with five tools in his hand, doing 10 things at once, suddenly stopped and confessed to me, "I have had way too much sugar."

John, Marco, and Neil bustled about with equipment like Oompa Loompas.

Mike Z. started as a lowly production assistant and by the end of the shoot was a full-blown gaffer.
"Mike, grab me that black wrap--"
"Mike, do we have another C stand?"
"Mike, tear off some opal for us--"

I still can't get over Cheryl, Neil, and Kristen FRANTICALLY working to get the smudges in the diary, Cheryl FRANTICALLY whipping out lovelorn passages to be then immediately smudged by Neil.

Cheryl also played the old crone who we knock down in the street. We were shooting over on 27th Street, and Cheryl had her dress hiked up to her neck, getting a pillow duct-taped to her underwear, in full-view on the street.

We shot on Orchard Street and crowds gathered to watch. One drunken man came up to me as I was standing around waiting, he was drunk and it was 10 in the morning, and he blithered at me, "You look like that girl in FiahStahtah."

Uh ... Do you mean Firestarter? And that was Drew Barrymore in Firestarter ... Drew Barrymore was 7 years old in FiahStahtah. I look 7?

Everyone has their specific job to do on a set. Every job is valued. Barbara setting up the craft services table. Making coffee. So essential.

Matt, the sound guy, a Libra, total sweetheart. Had been to two wrap parties in two days. He had big black circles around his eyes as though he had been receiving electroshock therapy.

Jen and I helped each other through it all. Checking in, keeping focused. The fire escape, the breeze, the billowing flag, the hazy view of World Trade, the beautiful light in the air.

Calling upon the muses. The acting muses. It is amazing how reliable this work can be, how it allows you to drop into different realities truthfully.

At one point, one TINY piece of hair was sticking up out of my head. Ian said it would look huge, so suddenly, all at once, Ian, Marco, and John, all reached out, 3 hands coming at me, and they all touched my hair, smoothing down the stray strand.

We lost our makeup person on the second half of the third day, and MARCO, the first AD did our touchups. This little tough-guy, holding a powder puff.

It was so hot that first day. We shot in a stairwell the entire day. Ian and Paul were so sweaty that I feared for their health. Ian told Marco: "I drank two gallons of water and I peed ONCE." Glanced at me shyly. "Sorry." (Deference to the Hoboken Whore's delicate sensibilities.)

The pizzaria guy let us use his bathroom on Orchard. The shoe store guy let us in to use the mirror. The fat Hasidic man told us not to block his store, he was very rude. People took pictures of us. Everyone loves the movies.

During Jen's last shot, where she dissolves, I was watching -- and instead of watching her I watched everyone else watching her. Let me try to explain what I saw, because to me, it is the thrill of movie-making. Everything was so vivid, so over-exposed, over-magnified. The quiet, the seriousness, the intentness. Marco watching her. But he wasn't a spectator, like an audience-member. He wasn't watching her acting. He was watching a million things at once - the lights, the shadows, if she hit her marks, how it all looks -- then John says "Cut", and Marco goes right back to being a bustling Oompa Loompa, fiddling with the camera again.

The same goes for everyone else. Everyone has their domain. Me and Jen have the acting domain. We are all a team, we all need each other. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.

I loved Matt, the beleaguered sound guy. I said, "So tell me about being a sound guy." There was a long pause and he then confessed, with wry humor, "It's a shit life." I can see what he's talking about. The sound guy has to wait and wait and wait, holding that huge boom ... he conceivably could ruin everything if a truck goes by while the scene happens and he doesn't catch it ... Nobody appreciates the sound guy. So on our last night of filming, poor Matt: He had been waiting around for two, three hours, to record the wild lines. Just as we sat down to begin, an enormous fireworks display started going off literally at the end of the block. The black circles deepened under Matt's eyes.

Right before we shot one of the scenes on the bed, I said to Neil, sort of shyly, not wanting to be a pain in the ass actress, "Is there a wallet for the money?" He looked at me with a blank and yet totally alert expression. "A wallet?" Shelagh, nearby, nodded. "We need a wallet." Neil nodded briefly, a can-do man, and dashed off, in a complete panic. Literally 30 seconds later he came back with the perfect wallet. I have no idea where he got it. He conjured it out of thin air.

The filming of the fight scene was awesome. "Just go bonkers," John said, because he was doing the whole thing hand-held. So we did. We went bonkers. Finally, there was room for some chaos, for happy accidents, like when I fell on the floor and grabbed onto her leg, and she spun me around, laughing maniacally. After three days of hitting marks, and doing only snippets of scenes, it was so freeing to go nuts. And know that John was catching it all.

The last shot of the shoot was a close-up of the black velvet bag, propped up on my green fur blanket, lit gorgeously. It was 1:30 in the morning, everyone was breaking stuff down, only Shelagh and John stayed by the camera filming the bag for about four minutes, so the credits can roll over it when the film is complete. It was beautifully arranged, but the whole thing suddenly felt so random. Like: What in the world are we all doing?? And then John and Shelagh walked away, when they were done, but no one turned off the special lights, and the room was empty. And in the center of the empty room, with nobody around, was this glowing beautiful random bag with a movie camera pointed at it.

Why is that image just so damn beautiful to me? So symbolic? It seems to me that that image alone says everything you need to know about the life of an artist.

Am I in the right place?
You're in the right place.

More from Robert Evans

Excerpt from The Kid Stays in the Picture:

Here's how his relationship began with Ali MacGraw, whom he ended up marrying (not to mention making her a star).

But needless to say, from the following excerpt, things did not begin well. He had to wine and dine her to get her to agree to do Love Story, and she wasn't a star yet, it was Love Story which catapulted her into mega-mega stardom. At the time of the casting of the film, she was a hippie model, living in New York City. Yet her ego was enormous, and she told Robert Evans she wanted to approve her co-stars, and was also furious about the director Evans had chosen.

Here's the story of their lunch:

I set up a lunch date with Love Story's mentor and star, MacGraw, at La Grenouille. By the time dessert was served, I would have made the phone book with her. Would you say she got to me? I sure in hell knew I didn't get to her. With all my props, my position, my "boy wonder" rep, she was as turned off to me as I was turned on to her. My competition was a model/actor she had been living with for three years, sharing the bills in a 3 1/2 room apartment on West 77th Street. Almost purposefully, she kept on interjecting how in love she was. Leaving the restaurant, I hailed a cab. As it pulled up she gave me her last zinger.

"Hope we shoot in the summer. Robin and I are getting married in the fall. We plan to spend October in Venice. Ever been there?"

"Nope."

"Then wait. Only go there when you're madly in love."

That's it. I grabbed her arm, whispering, "Never plan, kid. Planning's for the poor."

She tried to snap back. "No way--"

"Let me finish, Miss Charm. An hour ago, Love Story was even money to end up in the shredder. You win, I lose. Got it? Stop being Miss Inverse Snob, will ya? It doesn't wear well. Don't turn your nose down to success. If anything goes wrong with you and Blondie between now and post time, I'm seven digits away."

Uh ...

What?

I love it: "Never plan, kid. Planning's for the poor."

He is an insane personality, and catapulted American films into the stratosphere.

Robert Evans

The Kid Stays in the Picture, written by maverick film-producer Robert Evans, the man responsible for Harold and Maude, Love Story, The Godfather, Rosemary's Baby, is absolute sheer liquid pleasure. I am tearing through it.

The writing style of the book is hysterical.

Here's an excerpt:

Let's get down to facts -- like agents, managers, lawyers, money. Writing about where it's at is easy pocket money; about how it feels, that's different. Not only does it take talent, which most of these penholders don't have, but writing about feelings takes a helluva lot more time. We're in the business of deals, not excellence. The ten percenters know their clients can write three concept scripts a year. To write texture takes time; time is money and money is what pays their light bills.

See what I mean? I love it. He's such a tough guy. He also knows everybody, has had lunch with everybody, has slept with everybody, and has lived to tell the tale. It's the kind of book where he was supposed to be hanging out with Sharon Tate at the Polanski house the night everyone was butchered by a bunch of wild lunatics. Sharon had called Evans and invited him over, and he said something along the lines of, "Listen, baby, I gotta work."

It's all: "Lemme tell ya somethin', baby..."

I love it.

And the stories are priceless. Let me dig some up and share them here. There's a lot to learn from his tale.

I CAN'T HELP BUT WONDER...

What kind of person chases their endless pints of beer with shots of Red Bull? Is this a person confused about life? About who they want to be as they navigate the social sphere? Someone who, on the one hand, thinks: "I must wake up! I must be alert! I must keep going!", and who on the other hand thinks: "Jesus, I have to lie down for a minute."

I fear the combination.

I fear what it all might mean.

And that's all I'm sayin'.