My Life So Far (60 page)

B
ecause of the profound changes I’d experienced over the previous five years, I had a new sense of the possibility of personal transformation, and I wanted to use films as a catalyst for this process. Movies like my brother and Dennis Hopper’s
Easy Rider,
as well as
Five Easy Pieces
and
Midnight Cowboy,
show the revolutionary changes that were rocking American filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s. I, however, subscribe to what British playwright David Hare says: “The best place to be radical is at the center.” I wanted to make films that were stylistically mainstream, films Middle America could relate to: about ordinary people going through personal transformation. Though it was inchoate at the time, I was also beginning to view transformation from a perspective of gender: What is man? What is woman? What makes them do what they do the way they do it?

I saw the fledgling film that Bruce Gilbert, Nancy Dowd, and I had been developing as a way to help redefine masculinity.

Our story had a marine, my husband, with full use of his body (including his penis), who wanted above all to prove his manhood by being a “hero.” But because he was neither sensitive nor spontaneous, he was not a good lover. The paraplegic I met in the VA hospital, on the other hand, did
not
have a functioning penis, and all he wanted was to be human. His willingness to reexamine long held beliefs, along with his physical incapacity, made him sensitive to another’s needs. His pleasure came through giving pleasure—at least that was my intention, and thus the film could potentially illuminate a sexuality beyond genitalia.

We needed to take the project to the next stage, where we could pitch it to a studio, and veteran screenwriter Waldo Salt, writer of
Midnight Cowboy,
was the one we wanted. My agent told us he would be impossible to get: “Forget it, there is no way. There’s no studio attached and it isn’t a commercial project.” Not to be discouraged, Bruce got Waldo’s phone number in Connecticut and called him cold. To our surprise Waldo said, “Sounds interesting. Send me what you have.”

Waldo agreed to come onto the project but wanted to start from scratch and bring in the team with whom he had done
Midnight Cowboy
and
The Day of the Locust:
British director John Schlesinger and producer Jerry Hellman. I had great respect for Schlesinger, who had come from the world of documentaries and whose films had an unusual, gritty realism that would be perfect for us. Jerry Hellman’s experience, taste, and enthusiasm for the fragile project made me optimistic that we might actually get it made. Though it was not an easy pill for Bruce to swallow after the work he had put into it, he agreed to be associate producer. We both knew we needed all the experience and heft we could get (as well as a new script) if the film was to get made. Studios weren’t exactly clamoring for stories about Vietnam vets in wheelchairs, and the few Vietnam-based stories that had been released hadn’t done well.

In a grand gesture of commitment and generosity, Waldo and Jerry did something very rare: They agreed to work on spec until we had something that would convince a studio to give us development money. Jerry got us an office at MGM (where United Artists was then headquartered). Bruce quit his job, and thus began the second phase of our project’s development.

Waldo Salt was an old lefty, one of the Hollywood writers who had been blacklisted in the fifties. He had a heart of gold and a great talent for capturing the subtext of a scene. With Bruce and Jerry’s help he threw himself into his research with the gusto one would expect from a man with his history, visiting VA hospitals, talking with vets. (It was Waldo who encouraged Ron Kovic to write
his
memoir,
Born on the Fourth of July.
) Jerry financed the research from his own pocket and came up with the film’s title,
Coming Home.

Waldo’s script maintained the original triangular story, turning my husband into a marine officer and me into a traditional officer’s wife, waiting for her husband to come home from Vietnam in the late sixties. He had me getting my own apartment and volunteering (against my husband’s wishes) in the VA hospital, where I meet a man who has already come home from Vietnam and needs to heal—body
and
soul—from the physical and psychic wounds of the war.

On the strength of Waldo’s lengthy treatment, the heads of United Artists agreed to finance the development of a full screenplay. We were off and running, but we would soon learn how much time goes into producing original material. I would have two other films under my belt
—Julia
and
Fun with Dick and Jane—
before
Coming Home
would be ready to shoot. Before that happened, only seven weeks before our intended start date, Waldo suffered a massive heart attack and was unable to continue working. Then John Schlesinger bowed out with these memorable words: “Jane, you don’t need a British fag on this one.” I loved him for his forthrightness but was beginning to wonder if, in the face of such setbacks, victory could be pulled from the jaws of defeat.

M
eanwhile Tom’s interest in running for office grew, stemming from the fact that in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate, new political forces had been unleashed, which he labeled “progressive populism.” Jimmy Carter was running for president, Jerry Brown was the new governor of California, and a whole new class of congressmen and women like Bella Abzug, Tim Wirth, Andy Young, and Pat Schroeder were in office, making their strength felt.

Tom had spent six months traveling the state, meeting with people, testing the waters, debating whether or not to run for the U.S. Senate. The meeting I remember most vividly during that time was with César Chávez, the internationally respected founder and leader of the United Farm Workers union. It was the first time I had met César, who like Martin Luther King Jr. was a devout follower of Gandhi’s principles of nonviolent resistance, not just as a tactic but as a governing philosophy. I was mesmerized by his soft eyes and quiet wisdom. The meeting was especially moving because my father’s film
The Grapes of Wrath
had so personalized for me the plight of migrant farmworkers, whether they were “Okie” refugees from the Dust Bowl or Mexicans.

Speaking at a rally with César Chávez, founder and leader of the United Farm Workers union.

(AP/Wide World Photos)

When Tom asked César what he thought about the idea of his running for the U.S. Senate, César answered, “We’ve seen many candidates come and go. It would be a waste of time and money unless you build something lasting, like a machine. Not like Mayor Daley has, but a machine for people.
That
would interest us.”

M
eanwhile a woman came into my life who would become a pivotal friend. A year or two before the war ended I had received a call from film producer Hannah Weinstein in New York, asking if I would help her daughter, Paula, get a job in Hollywood. Back in 1971 Hannah had been the first person to give me a generous contribution for the GI office; I remembered well how warm and encouraging she had been to me at the time, and though I didn’t know Paula, I wanted to return Hannah’s favor.

Paula was a tall brunette with sexy brown eyes and a dry sense of humor. A recent graduate from Columbia University, where she had been involved in student antiwar protests, she now wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a film producer. I was impressed with her guts and obvious intelligence. As soon as our lunch was over I walked across the street and asked my agent, Mike Medavoy, to hire Paula. He did—as a script reader. It didn’t take long for the agency to recognize talent, and soon thereafter, when Mike left to become an executive at United Artists Pictures, Paula became my agent—and to this day she remains one of my most cherished friends. Our lives are intertwined personally and professionally. I am godmother to her daughter Hannah, she was one of the producers of the most recent movie I made,
Monster-in-Law
(fifteen years after my retirement), and we always have each other’s backs.

As my agent, Paula did something for me that no one had ever done: She fought a passionate and personal battle to win me the role of Lillian Hellman in
Julia.
Lillian, the author of such plays as
The Little Foxes
and
Toys in the Attic,
happened to also be Paula’s godmother.

As Lillian Hellman in
Julia.

(Eva Sereny/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.)

With Vanessa Redgrave in a scene from
Julia.

(Photofest)

Julia
takes place in the 1930s during the rise of Nazism in Europe and is the story of the relationship between Lillian and her childhood friend Julia. Julia goes off to Vienna and becomes involved in the anti-Fascist movement, trying to get help to Jews inside Nazi-occupied Austria and Poland. Though they have not seen each other for years, Julia seeks help from her friend Lillian, asking her to smuggle money (sewn into the lining of a fashionable fur hat) through customs into Poland, where she arranges to meet her. Their last, memorable, terribly moving scene together, which is both a reunion and farewell, takes place in a restaurant in Warsaw where Lillian surreptitiously passes the hat with the hidden money to Julia under the table. Years later Lillian learns that her friend has been murdered by Nazis.

The film provided me with a multidimensional, dramatic role in what has become a film classic and brought me my third Oscar nomination for Best Actress. It also gave me the chance to work with the great director Fred Zinnemann—who had made
From Here to Eternity, High Noon,
and
A Man for All Seasons—
and my professional idol Vanessa Redgrave. There is a quality about Vanessa that makes me feel as if she resides in a netherworld of mystery that eludes the rest of us mortals. Her voice seems to come from some deep place that knows all suffering and all secrets. Watching her work is like seeing through layers of glass, each layer painted in mythic watercolor images, layer after layer, until it becomes dark—but even then you know you haven’t come to the bottom of it.

Vanessa was perfect as Julia, who Lillian knows is braver, stronger, and more committed than she is herself, and I benefited from the memory that I held in my bones of my own brave childhood friend Sue Sally, whose lead I had always been ready to follow, just as Lillian tried to follow Julia’s. When we worked together I recall never being sure where Vanessa was drawing her inspiration from, what choices she was working off of, and this invariably threw me slightly off balance—which worked in the film. The only other time I had experienced this with an actor was with Marlon Brando in
The Chase
(written, by the way, by Lillian Hellman). Like Vanessa, he always seemed to be in another reality, working off some secret, magnetic, inner rhythm that made me have to adjust to
him
rather than maintaining my own integrity in the scene. I suppose I didn’t
have
to; but maybe that’s just who I was back then.