Writing this book has forced me to think long and hard about several key questions. One of them is: Do actresses have it harder than actors?
As you may have gathered, I believe the answer is a resounding yes. Now, you may think that insecurity is insecurity, and that it’s implicit in the profession, so what’s the difference?
Well, let me lay it out for you. It can’t be said too often—actresses have shorter careers than actors. This is a generalization, but for every Meryl Streep there are ten Demi Moores and Meg Ryans, women who earned major salaries and major parts for precisely as long as they were the Hot Young Girl and whose professional opportunities began to dry up just about the time they hit forty, or just about the time a fresh crop of hot young girls begin to assert themselves.
This reality is something that every thirty-five-year-old actress knows. When the bell rings signaling another year, and rigorous self-appraisal leads you to the conclusion that you’re not Meryl Streep, that bell is not necessarily a cause for celebration, but rather a little ratcheting up of panic.
Is this fair? Hell, no. It’s Darwinian. Only the strong—or the hugely talented—survive. That was the case when I came into the business after World War II, and it’s the case today.
Men, on the other hand, can and often do go on acting into their fifties and beyond. Occasionally it gets a little uncomfortable. I’ve mentioned how incongruous it was for Gary Cooper to romance Audrey Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon. Honesty compels me to admit that it would have been far less jarring if Cary Grant had taken the part instead, which was indeed offered to him. (Can you believe it? Gary Cooper was second choice!)
The difference was cosmetic; Coop was only three years older than Cary, but he looked fifteen years older. A few years later, Cary and Audrey worked together in Charade. Cary was always wary of such an age disparity on-screen, as he was concerned about looking like a dirty old man. He finessed these roles by nudging the writers to make the girl chase him rather than the other way around. Since he was Cary Grant, and was producing most of his later pictures himself, he had a way of getting what he wanted.
But life has no screenwriter, and Cary preferred younger women offscreen. He married Dyan Cannon, had his daughter, Jennifer, with her, and Barbara, his last wife, was decades younger than he was.
A few years ago, I made a movie with Louise Fletcher, who won an Academy Award for her performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I loved her in that movie, but had never met her before we worked together. Louise made the shoot a lovely experience—a fine actress with a great sense of humor, which is crucial for me.
It struck me at the time that Louise’s career had suffered because she was simply too good in a completely unsympathetic part. She had played smaller parts before Cuckoo’s Nest, but that picture was her introduction to a mass audience, and they so completely bought her as Nurse Ratched that the opportunities that followed in the wake of that picture’s success were more limited than you would have imagined.
It was the Anthony Perkins problem; Perkins had made many pictures before Psycho, but he hadn’t seemed to fit into any of them as well as he did as Norman Bates in the Hitchcock picture. The role typed him as a fidgety invert, and it was a type he could never escape.
Tony ultimately did what I had done and went to Europe, where he tried making all sorts of pictures. But he finally capitulated and decided that playing Norman Bates was better than playing nothing at all. He did a batch of sequels to Psycho and even directed one of them.
But there was no possibility of sequels to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, so Louise has only rarely had the chance to display her versatility for characters other than control-freak dragon ladies. Believe me, it’s the audience’s loss.
There’s another way that the movies are harder on women: The minute an actress asserts her prerogatives, you can rest assured that there are hundreds of men all too willing to label her a bitch or worse, an attitude that is rarely the response when a male actor makes equivalent demands.
It’s not as bad today as it was sixty years ago, but when I got into the movies it was a business run for and by a group of men who expected and appreciated it when women were submissive. When Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland demanded the same privileges that were granted as a matter of course to male stars—better scripts, more freedom—and would raise holy hell until they got what they wanted, they were granted only a grudging respect.
Modern actresses are generally much more courageous than most of the women I grew up with, but then they can afford to be—they make a lot more money.
In an earlier era, so much energy was spent—or misspent—worrying about the creation of an image and, once that was achieved, its maintenance.
That process resulted in a different kind of actress, one who was beset by constant concerns. Insecurity, mainly. When I was starting out, a lot of actresses—and actors as well—spent a lot of time wondering if they were any good.
But from what I see of young actors today, they don’t worry much over what other people might think of their performances. They just go and do them. There’s something about this generation that makes them particularly brave; their attitude is, if I fail, I fail. What of it? Onward.
I think the best of the older generation who continue to work are Gena Rowlands and Diane Keaton. Of a younger group, I like Julia Roberts and Helen Hunt. Helen Hunt is a spectacular talent who I suspect is often overlooked because she’s not particularly competitive and usually gravitates toward smaller pictures that aren’t going to get much attention in a crowded marketplace. But make no mistake—she is the real deal. She and Julia Roberts manage to have it both ways in that they capture both sides of the feminine principle: They can embody a fantasy figure and they can also capture a woman’s reality.
And a word needs to be said for Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence, both of whom will have long careers.
Someone once asked George Balanchine what would happen to his ballets after he was gone. I like his answer: “People dance while I’m here, they dance a certain way. When I’m gone, they will continue dancing, but somebody will rehearse them different and it will all be a little different, with different approach, different intensity. So a few years go by and I won’t be here. Will be my ballets, but will look different.”
I like his fatalism in the face of the facts. Things change, and that’s the way it has to be. But you’ll pardon me if I continue to watch Stanwyck and Davis and Lupino for just a little longer.
All the women in this book had different kinds of careers, different needs as actresses, different needs as women. But almost all of them shared one primary characteristic: They said yes.
They didn’t linger on the inequities of show business; they figured that the business had worked to their advantage when they were young, so when the balance of power turned against them when they grew old, that was just the way of the world.
They may have had regrets—we all have those—but very few of them allowed themselves the luxury of bitterness. I don’t believe that someone like Irene Dunne missed acting at all, because she had found something to replace it that stimulated her mind and filled her heart. That’s the key—not to pine for what was, but to discover what is and what can be.
A great part in a great movie can be transformative for an actor or actress, but there’s more to life than that—a yes from a special person. I’ve been lucky enough to get those. Where would I have been if Minna Wallis hadn’t said yes to a green kid a lifetime ago? For that matter, where would I have been if Barbara Stanwyck hadn’t said yes? Or Natalie? Or Jill? My career would have been the same, but my life would have been impoverished.
And when I read a book about Louis B. Mayer and MGM, I said yes to the idea of writing my memoirs with the author of that book, and that has resulted in a third career, one I never expected but have relished. We share the same sense of humor, and Scott knows more about the movie business than most people in the movie business.
So here I am at eighty-six, still adding to the contents of my treasure chest, still working and adding memories—something I hope never changes.
It’s the way I am. It’s also the way the women I loved in the movies were . . . and are.