Good 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.
• • •
We 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.
• • •
Then “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.