Will the Steel Magnolias star who one wanted to be "just like Shirley Temple" now follow her role model off the screen into a committed life public good works?
Three-year-old Daryl Hannah was thought by doctors to suffer from "flexibility problems." Her mother, Susan, prescribed ballet classes-nothing less than dance lessons conducted by her friend and fellow prominent Chicagoan, Maria Tallchief, the New York City Ballet prima ballerina and former Mrs. George Balanchine. Under Tallchief's riveting gaze, little Daryl pirouetted and jeted away her musculoskeletal cricks.
Born to affluence in Chicago's North Side, Daryl Hannah was a closed-off, faraway kid who sought release in dance, fairy tales, athletics, and "The Late, Late Show." At age seven, she went into a tailspin when her mother divorced Donald Hannah, a tugboat and barge tycoon. The breakup, according to a lifelong friend of the family's, embraced "some really rough times." Susan then married Jerrold Wexler, father of five, and captain of Jupiter Industries, a $3 billion Chicago-based empire that encompasses two public companies and interests in trucking, construction, manufacturing and finance. Young Daryl entered the rarefied realm of Serious Money: private planes, lavish estates in Telluride, Colorado, and at Long Grove, outside of Chicago. Hannah, brother Donald and sister Page spent a year living with their mother at the Knickerbocker Hotel, one of dozens owned by Wexler, while construction crews completed the Lakeshore Drive apartment building to which the family would later move. Daryl hid in laundry carts, sneaked into pantries, and spied on ballroom parties, half imagining herself the model for the heroine of the Eloise storybooks, the little rich girl who called the Plaza Hotel home.
But teachers at the progressive, $4,000-a-year Francis W. Parker School detected a child who signaled her inner distress through growing detachment and ritualistic rocking. Daryl's behavior, described in Rolling Stone as "semi-autistic," prompted suggestions to her parents from teachers that she be removed from classes for therapy. Again, her mother prescribed an unorthodox cure: a year of Caribbean island-hopping. "It was my mom's philosophy," Hannah says, "that may be I just needed to run free in my fantasies in order to exorcise the little demons at play in me. When I came back, I found it a lot easier to cope and keep my private, secret world to myself. I learned how to play the game of associating with people."
Daryl returned to the Parker School, which she claims to have "hated." By puberty, she had evolved into a fullblown space oddity classmates dubbed "Tooth-picks" and "Beanpole." Her hair spilled in stringy shocks over a mask of moonstruck dreaminess; she was lanky, rawboned, and athletic in a school top-heavy with self-assured thoroughbreds. "She was somewhat eccentric," former principal Dren Geer says of the kid who sealed her fate by becoming the only girl who played on the soccer team. Classmates and teachers recall her unexpectedly surfacing from cloud cuckooland with such self-mocking gestures as an impromptu after-class boogaloo. "She had a very wry, almost New Englander's sense of humor," Geer recalls. "You'd say hello to her walking down the hall and she'd pull a funny face and do a little antic thing." Still, the principal once asked Hannah's mother: "Is she drunk?" Laughed a parent long attuned to her child's quirks: "Well, you know, that's just Daryl."
It may be difficult for us to reconcile the mermaid naif Lorelei of Splash or the burnished love object, Roxanne, with the geek manque lurking in Daryl Hannah's offscreen past. Or is it? An aide to her manager arranges for Hannah and me to meet at a neighborhood deli less than four blocks from her home. When I first glimpse Hannah -- in a bulky cardigan, fashionably nerdy sunglasses, jeans, hair yanked back from her face -- all 5'9" of her is doubled-over, chaining her 10-speed Vega to a signpost. As we make our introductions, I can barely understand a word she is saying until Hannah slips off the retainer her orthodontist has just tightened. She crosses the restaurant with a striking combination of grace and lumbering shuffle -- the dancer and the jock.
Up close, Daryl Hannah appears winsome, far less strapping and squared-off than the way the camera often reads her. As we converse, she fidgets with her hair, giggles--her face hidden behind her hands--noshes a bagel (cream cheese seems irresistibly attracted to her cheeks) and apologizes for talking with her mouth full. Very much in evidence is the fragile, oddly endearing and fiercely private child that she and others describe.
Since Hannah shuns interviews, I immediately ask how she had reacted to the prospect of this one. "Noooooo," she wails, striking a horrified pose and rolling her eyes. "And you know why: Who wants to be put under a microscope and examined? Part of the attraction of acting is being somebody else, of expressing yourself and your feelings through another character." But, these days, the girl who has won feel-bad notices for clinkers -- Summer Lovers, Clan of the Cave Bear, Legal Eagles --can feel good about her comic turn in Steel Magnolias, the movie version of Robert Harling's play about the trials and tribulations of six Southern women. Hannah, playing a none-too-bright, Jesusthumping beautician, scrunches her eyes behind Lisa Loopner glasses, bumps into scenery, and defies us to detect the dollface under the churchmouse hair, the curves cloaked by the schmatte straight out of dog-patch. It's a timeworn movie star ploy: the dish who goes dishrag to prove she can act.
Since Splash--in which Tom Hanks explained away Hannah's character's drowsy innocence by saying, "She's from out of town"--the actress has tended to be typed as an exotic. Her new movie may not accomplish for her what, say, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean did for Cher or what Stay Hungry did for Sally Field. But for Hannah, whose screen persona can seem so walled-in and, well, absent, Steel Magnolias is a small victory. She succeeds for the first time in suggesting someone other than a creature from a galaxy far, far away.
And thus, she has agreed to an interview. Apparently, Daryl's desire to be an actress can be traced back to her time at the tony private school in Chicago. One day, during the fifth grade, one of Hannah's classmates ("Tanya Neimark, one of the popular girls") passed around for Show-and-Tell 8X10 glossies of herself acting in children's theater and TV commercials. "A light went off in my head," Hannah recalls. "I always had insomnia as a child. And still do, a lot of times. But rather than lie awake sleepless, I used to sneak down the hall to watch 'The Late, Late Show,' all those great old movies. I saw Singin' in the Rain, which made me sort of realize how movies were made, and I thought, 'That's what I really want to do. I want to be just like Shirley Temple' Then, of course, I went into a panic because I thought I was already over the hill." One of Temple's best-loved roles was, of course, Poor Little Rich Girl.
Hannah hauled herself on the sly to the North Side modeling agencies. She was supported and encouraged by Marie Stone, the Parker school's curriculum coordinator, who later became her advisor and recently traveled with the actress fact-finding through Nicaragua. "More than anybody, she guided the way I've chosen to live my life," Hannah says of the mentor who urged her to become an actress instead of a professional skier. "She gave me a sense of boundless limits." When several agents wanted head shots of the 11 year-old, Hannah told her mother who, she recalls, promptly "flipped out." The maternal concern heightened further when Page, Hannah's "me-too" eight-year-old sister, wanted head shots of her own. "Susan Wexler is not conventional in her judgment, says an associate of Daryl and Page's mother, "but she has good judgment. If she decides that any of her children need or want something that is important for them, she'll do whatever it takes." In the end, Susan Wexler relented.
"Mostly I never got the jobs," Daryl Hannah says of her modeling days, giggling into her hands. "My hair was too thin, I was just too weird-looking. Page got tons of work because she was red-haired, freckled, all-American, the cutest little thing you've ever seen, while I was this..." Hannah plumbs for a suitable description, then, coming up empty, pulls her best troll face.
Like classmate Jennifer Beals, Hannah did get occasional work--and how long now can it be before someone unearths he public service entreaty telling fellow kiddies about not being ashamed to visit their immigrant grandparents?
Like her brother and sister, Hannah "took classes until nine at night: dance, tap, jazz, tennis." But, even with a mom who, says Hannah, believed in "develop-your-child classes while you've still got them," she had to fight for evening acting classes that she took at the esteemed Goodman Theater and St. Nicholas Theater: now Steppenwolf. Today, Hannah's mother, who only gradually came to approve of her acting, serves on the boards of directors for both theaters.
In 1978, Hannah landed a one-word role in Brian De Palma's The Fury and the experience--Hannah calls a teacher "Creepo!"-settled any career indecision. "I was too scared to do theater, so I went into films," she says. Under the pretext of pursuing a degree at the University of Southern California, Hannah moved to Los Angeles that same year. Fears about old weird Daryl surfaced anew in her parents, who worried that she was destined to become a Moonie. Or worse. Hannah staged for Jerry and Susan Wexler an elaborate sight gag to celebrate her parents' first trip to see her on the West Coast. Upon deplaning, the Wexlers beheld their daughter wearing a dangling cross, a sheath, a beatific smile, handing out religious pamphlets. Hannah had finally learned to spoof terror--others' and her own.
While a freshman at USC, she landed small movie roles, playing Kim Basinger's younger sister in Hard Country, and dodging a teenage slasher with Rachel Ward in The Final Terror. Between movie stints and an occasional history or lit course, Hannah studied acting. Again, it was nothing but the best: Stella Adler, whom she found "frightening and fascinating," and the esteemed Jeff Corey. Experiences with less scrupulous acting coaches ("Bloodsuckers," she calls them) began the wising-up of Daryl Hannah, a process that some observers believe took longer for her than for many other moviestruck pretty young things. For instance, there was that weekend she jetted to Vegas, apparently believing an acquaintance who said that she could earn $500 just for posing for record album covers. Instead, Hannah found herself among a harem of heavily made-up, older girls and several middle-aged businessmen eager to play Humbert Humbert-Lolita games. Then there was the L.A. bachelorette house Hannah shared with Rachel Ward cheek by jowl with the freeway. "Both of us were from families that were well off," Hannah has said. "We had these guilt complexes that you should suffer." Hannah declines to discuss that era. But some remember that both beautiful women knew how to party hardy.
The Hollywood ascent of Daryl Hannah is inextricably linked with Chuck Binder, her personal manager. Far more than Farrah Fawcett was to manager/producer Jay Bernstein, Hannah was Binder's E-ticket ride to the big time. "He was just starting to manage," Hannah says of her first association with Binder, who declined to discuss his client for this interview. According to the Schwab's Drugstore version of the story, Binder began that pursuit after seeing Hannah dancing at a Beverly Hills party. Hannah may be one of the few Hollywood women able to utter such things as, "Lots of times, when young girls come out here, a lot of producers and directors call you in, supposedly for a meeting, but really just for a date," without sounding the least bit disingenuous.
"Daryl was this sweet, incredible-looking creature," observes a friend of the actress's from that time. "She was like Dorothy Stratten in some ways. She was luckier, though, because [Binder] found and promoted her and not some psychopath like Paul Snider." In fact, the lead role in Star 80, Bob Fosse's account of the murder by husband Snider of Playboy centerfold and budding actress Stratten, is one of the few that Hannah admits regret about losing. (Mariel Hemingway got the role.)
Binder was pretty straight with me," Hannah says. "He'd gotten me a lot of work. Even if it was a really well-known, incredible director, if he knew the guy was interested in me in that way, he would not send me out. Chuck revolves in that world and knows which guys are like that, probably has been like that himself. Luckily, he wasn't like that with me."
Binder shepherded Hannah through the early days of go-see's and auditions that led to Ridley Scott's casting her in the 1982 Blade Runner. Hannah's sullen, androgynous charisma won her notice, and her first agent. Producer Leonard Goldberg appropriated Hannah as his "discovery" when she appeared as a fashion model--a thinly disguised Brooke Shields--in a TV movie, Paper Dolls. But the incipient sex bomb seemed profoundly uneasy with her pin-up quotient. She demanded a body double for Summer Lovers, the menage-a-go-go debacle directed by Randal Kleiser. Peter Gallagher, Hannah's co-star and fellow survivor, found her "terribly bright" but "very young in some kind of interplanetary way." Today, Hannah is loath to discuss the film. Shooting love scenes in Reckless, her next film, with Aidan Quinn, Hannah broke out in hives. "As soon as I get hired, they start talking about, 'Oh, and the nude scene....' What nude scene? It's just a drag. There are some definite sleazebags around. Every once in a while, you step in a little doggie-doo. I've often been talked into things, because I always doubt my initial instincts. I'm getting a little bit stronger in believing in my own instincts now."
But, playing Madison, the innocently randy mermaid in Splash, thrust Hannah into the collective fantasies of a good percentage of America's male population. The 1984 movie made money in tons, and Hannah became the blonde of the moment, among the first to get a crack at "A" scripts, with covers of Life, and People to attest to her visual appeal. But for once, or so said her Hollywood coworkers, smarts went along with the killer bod. "If anyone has ideas about her being some blonde bimbo, they're wrong," Splash director Ron Howard observed. Still, journalists quoted Hannah as confessing that she sometimes couldn't remember to feed herself or had to "really work at ordinary things--like putting gas in the car."
"After Splash," she says, "everybody saw me as The Blonde. They forgot about the personality aspect, how much character there was in the part, and wanted to cast me as a decorative thing. Nothing good comes from that." In Hannah's case, little good has. In The Pope of Greenwich Village, she barely registered in all that sub-Scorsese murk. Far more embarrassing was Clan of the Cave Bear -- One Million Years B.C. minus the Neanderthal va-va-va-voom of Raquel Welch. In Legal Eagles, Hannah was but a percentage point in the quintessential '80s movie deal. In Oliver Stone's testosterone-fueled Wall Street, Hannah's performance prompted one critic to liken her screen presence to "a throw pillow." Perhaps the erstwhile blonde of the moment's moment had passed.
Some in Hollywood believe that Hannah's instincts and career advisors have served her badly. In fact, Hannah and manager Chuck Binder temporarily parted company during her run of bum movies. "I like to work," she says, with a touch of defensiveness. "In a lot of cases, you have to pick the best of what's around, or what's offered to you, in order to keep working."
What others say is that Daryl Hannah is a very rich, very headstrong young woman who ought to take her career far more seriously. Apparently, director Fred Schepisi had to talk her into Roxanne, the improbable 1987 hit which helped nudge Hannah toward bankability again. She had been intent on convincing Schepisi to go instead with second choice Christine Lahti.
Others argue that Hannah is paradoxical. While giving off a careless vibe, she is actually a case study in blonde ambition. On the good will generated by Roxanne, Hannah took her production auspices, Girlie Pictures, to Lorimar for a two-year stint. None of her own projects came off, so the would-be mogul chose director Neil Jordan's misbegotten High Spirits. Hannah played a lovestruck ghost, a sort of supernatural sister to Madison the mermaid, but opposite her was Steve Guttenberg, who is no Tom Hanks. The movie evaporated.
Some have tried to sell Hannah in the mold of such old time studio goddesses as Marilyn Monroe or Grace Kelly. Yet if Hannah compares to any Hollywood archetype, it is Kim Novak--another big blonde sleepwalker type--whom Columbia Pictures mogul Harry Cohn manufactured as a replacement for Rita Hayworth. Whether Hannah has the staying power of a Novak is debatable; she lacks Novak's hunger to please. And, after all, Hannah has no mighty Cohn nor the weight of an old-time studio behind her. Landing Steel Magnolias -- which she says she "had to fight for" -- seems less an indicator of Hannah's career ascent than of '80s studiothink. How many ticket-buyers under 40 would spend seven bucks to see a picture starring Sally Field, Dolly Parton, and Shirley MacLaine? How many studio executives would risk relatively unknown Julia Roberts in the centerpiece role of a $30 million movie? Do the math. Enter Hannah.
During the shooting of the movie in Natchitoches, Louisiana, a film crew followed such fellow cast members as Field, Parton, and MacLaine for a video presskit that will be shown on TV. Hannah so shunned them that, last August, a special crew had to be dispatched to her home so that she could be included in the program. "I typically hide from any cameras that are around," she says.
In fact, Daryl Hannah builds walls when she believes her private life is threatened. Off-limits to interviewers are such topics as her real father, her long romantic liaison with singer/song-writer Jackson Browne, her alleged romance with John Kennedy Jr. (nephew-by-marriage of her Steel Magnolias director Herbert Ross), and films, directors, and co-workers she does not like. In fact, when Hannah later learns that I have contacted dozens of people close to her for this interview, she phones to say that she is "uncomfortable" with what is, after all, standard journalistic practice. Explains the actress who has made a metier of playing mermaids, Neanderthals, and ghosts, "Why should people know that I am someone who went to this particular school or had that job, instead of the background of the role I'm playing?"
With me, Hannah would comment on her allegiance to causes (Central America, ecology, Amnesty International) that, to some, smack of the guilty deb who limos to Skid Row to feed the bums every Thanksgiving. Has she heard such criticism? "I haven't actually," she says, laughing, "and I don't think it would bother me. The only time I've publicly voiced any opinion was when I did an ad for Amnesty International."
Hannah comes by her activism honestly. She spent her 15th summer with uncle Haskell Wexler, during which the politically-committed cinematographer hipped Hannah to things she says she had "never even heard of, like nuclear power." To that "awakening" Hannah attributes her conviction that "Your conscience either does or doesn't respond to the things you learn. Either you feel capable of trying to do something or not." Former principal Geer says of the Wexlers, "They do an enormous number of things in a very low-key, understated way. In my position at the the school, they did remarkable things for children and I was the only person who knew what was going on. If they became aware of anything that needed to be done, particularly for a black or Hispanic child, it would be."
Forbes Magazine estimates the net worth of Jerry and Susan Wexler as "at least $250 million," and Wexler is currently rehabilitating the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago from a combat zone to affordable living units. He has also been known to buy a piano for an impoverished Russian emigre musician or to endow educational programs for the disadvantaged or to contribute humanitarian aid to El Salvador. Says a Chicago arts patron, "If any of the Wexler children become interested in a complex, possibly not-very-popular cause, their parents support it, no matter how much negative reaction is generated by it."
"We're a big family and we spend a lot of time gathering in different places," Daryl Hannah says. Those places include a lavish estate in Telluride, Colorado, a Santa Barbara ranch where Hannah keeps horses, and the two-floor apartment decorated by wonderfully eclectic art pieces in an unassuming building on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago's Lincoln Park area. Two of Hannah's stepsisters and Page, her "absolute best friend in life now," and a star of last summer's Shag, live in the same neighborhood as she.
Signs point to Daryl Hannah's willingness to step up to smarter career choices. Aside from Steel Magnolias, she, to overcome her "enormous amount of stage fright," performed in an invitation-only play in Manhattan and will next be seen in a black comedy, Crazy People, out later this year. When she signed to do that movie, her costar was John Malkovich. Days into filming, Dudley Moore replaced Malkovich. Could that twist of fate take Hannah back to square one as the Bo Derek of the '80s? She says, laughing, "There was all this turmoil on the surface, but everyone liked each other. I think it'll turn out to be good." In November, Hannah will be glimpsed in Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which she utters a single line for director Woody Allen.
What she hopes to avoid is another movie in which she is a mere "ornament." She says, "To this day, directors say 'I'm really going to show people that you can act. On most of the films I've done, the most I ever hoped for was that the director would just leave me alone. And most of the time, they did. Only a few times have I been fortunate enough to have directors who actually knew how to help. I'm tired of getting discovered every time I do a film, I'm ready to take a little responsibility for myself, you know?"
Pondering her future, Hannah says she's enthusiastic about her reactivation of Girlie Productions with Dawn Steel at Columbia. "There will definitely come a day," she says, "when I will just stop making movies and start focusing on the things that I feel are truly important." Such as? Again, her gaze seals over. Yesterday's favorite blonde, ready for responsibility, ready to tackle the important stuff? For an instant, I think maybe so.
On the street outside the deli, Hannah snaps her orthodontic retainer back in, jams on her sunglasses, and dashes off on her bike as I climb into my car. As she pedals toward her home, she shoots backward glances. Is Hannah merely cautious in Southern California traffic or is she worried that a journalist will further invade her privacy by following her? As I drive away, I think, Daryl Hannah probably isn't ready to forsake movies for more important things just yet.
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Stephen Rebello's work has appeared in Playboy, Premiere, Vogue, Los Angeles and L.A. Style. He is currently at work on his third book.