The Curious Career of Jill Clayburgh

Clayburgh did get work, off Broadway and on. She starred in two Broadway musicals, The Rothschilds and, for Bob Fosse, Pippin. "He just didn't like me," she says of working with Fosse. "Well, okay, he hated me. He had this very arrogant 'Bob Fosse's a genius and you're just a cog in the wheel' approach. He didn't like it that I wasn't a dancer, that I was an actor with a role, and I had questions about the role."

Clayburgh's relationship with Pacino didn't survive his meteoric rise to stardom in 1972. While he was garnering raves for The Godfather, she was doing a bit part in the bomb Portnoy's Complaint. A decade later, she told an interviewer, "When I lived with Pacino, I felt what some wives must feel, what a kid must feel. He was famous, and I wasn't." Asked about Pacino today--yet another decade later--she gives me a shrug and a "so what?" expression, then finally says, "We see each other sometimes."

In 1973, Clayburgh went after the leading role in David Rabe's play In the Boom Boom Room. And she watched it go to Madeline Kahn: "I auditioned for a play of my husband's. I mean, I didn't know him at the time. They wanted someone with a 'name.' Madeline Kahn got the role, and only because she'd made a few films, so I said to myself, 'This is ridiculous! I'm gonna go get a name.' I went to Hollywood and I had a very hard time. I couldn't get any work."

At least none she wants to talk about. Playing a series of what she calls "boring little wives and girlfriends" in forgettable films like The Thief Who Came to Dinner, The Terminal Man and the TV movie The Snoop Sisters, she hated working in Hollywood.

"I found it intimidating and very scary," she says. "I was like, you know, give me the script and I'll act the part, but I didn't understand about meetings and casting agents and how it all works. I really hated the driving. I would end up in a heap by the side of the road, in tears, three times a week. When I go there these days, I tell them, 'I'm really a bad driver, you've got to pick me up and take me home.' I act like a New Yorker."

Understandably, Clayburgh jumped at the opportunity to play a leading role in the 1974 Broadway production of Tom Stoppard's play Jumpers, but when it brought reviews that suggested Clayburgh was no Diana Rigg--the actress who had created the part in the original London staging--Clayburgh was ready to pack it in.

"But then, in 1975, I got a really good part," she says, "in the TV film Hustling, and after that I started getting more good parts." Hustling, based on Gail Sheehy's book, cast Clayburgh as a Times Square hooker, and the film, Clayburgh, and co-star Lee Remick all won acclaim. On the strength of her Emmy nomination, Clayburgh landed what had been--before the film was made--perhaps the most sought-after role of 1976: Carole Lombard in Gable and Lombard. It is a measure of the industry-wide belief in Clayburgh after Hustling that Gable and Lombard--a bona fide disaster--did not make a dent in her rise to stardom. It would have sunk the movie career of a lesser performer.

"I haven't thought about that film in a long time," she says with a groan when I mention it. "I don't think the script was ... uhmmm ... great? James Brolin had the more difficult task, because while most people didn't really know who Carole Lombard was, they had a definite image of Clark Gable. It was a fun part to play--I mean, if it had only been 'Jane Doe, kooky gal,' you know? I'll never forget when I went to the first screening. What a disaster!"

A TV movie in which Clayburgh and Peter Falk played two cancer victims, Griffin and Phoenix: A Love Story, restored her luster: the film was such a hit, it was released later theatrically. Then, at the end of '76, Clayburgh's career really kicked into high gear with the first of four box-office hits, Silver Streak, which was the surprise sleeper of its year. The film's popularity made Clayburgh a movie "name," and an adoring press found her rather like '30s and '40s comedienne Jean Arthur--her own favorite actress, whom she'd seen, as a child, play Peter Pan on Broadway. Nevertheless, Clayburgh doesn't pretend she liked making Silver Streak.

"I don't really love doing adventure-type films," she says. "I'm not good at looking scared when the gun goes off, when in reality there's no gun there. It's like a TV movie I made recently, Firestorm: 72 Hours in Oakland. I had to imagine seeing the fire, and look where they needed me to look for special effects that were going to be added later It's not really acting".

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