Now that the golden girl of the '70s is beginning to reappear on the big screen, it's a good time to look back and trace her long, strange trip of hard work, talent, good luck and questionable decisions.
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Now that the golden girl of the '70s is beginning to reappear on the big screen, it's a good time to look back and trace her long, strange trip of hard work, talent, good luck and questionable decisions
Back in the late '70s, Jill Clayburgh seemed to ascend "overnight" and became--out of nowhere--America's premier feminist sweetheart, an icon of The Liberated Woman's Life. In two of her biggest success, An Unmarried Woman and Starting Over, she played dramatic and comedic variations, respectively, on the character she became identified with: an intelligent, sophisticated, anxiety-ridden woman unsure about commitment. With her pleasing and accessible, rather than drop-dead, good looks, Clayburgh was an almost-revered ideal and her career was red-hot. But while typecasting certainly made her a star, it carried the usual price. It turned out that movies about librated women were just another passing Hollywood fad, and when audiences had enough, Clayburgh's star began to fade.
Unlike Jane Fonda and Diane Keaton, who also rode the "new American women" trend to the top, Clayburgh had no real previous screen presence and no evident powers of instantaneous self-reinvention. As Clayburgh later acknowledged in an interview, "It's a tricky thing for an actor to be too closely associated with the material she plays."
When Clayburgh agreed to be interviewed at the Westchester County, New York, country home she shares with her kids and her husband, playwright David Rabe, I wanted to talk with her about her career moves, good, bad and accidental. For Clayburgh didn't just disappear from view--she's consistently made films for TV, and in the last couple of years she's begun to take on small roles again in feature films, one in last year's regrettable Whispers in the Dark and another in the current Rich in Love. But then, Hollywood careers never continue in a straight upward trajectory toward heaven. I wanted her comments as, together, we plotted the course of an actress who's been pretty much all over the map.
Clayburgh's house is a big, rambling affair with plenty of children (her two, plus neighborhood friends) and dogs running loose. It is so picture-perfect it reminds me of a '50s sitcom--that is, until I see photographs of Madonna and Sean Penn decorating the kitchen. The Clayburgh/Rabe home may be rustic and homey, but two mainstream show-biz careers are run out of this place. When I compliment Clayburgh on how non-Hollywood her house seems, she laughs, "I always wanted a perfect life, and now I have one."
When we sit down in the study to chat with the tape recorder running, Clayburgh clears up at once any notion that when she hit the big time in the '70s it was an "overnight" success. "I wanted to act," she says, "and I worked on it." And she started early.
Growing up privileged on New York's Upper East Side, she had the requisite childhood problems that draw so many to acting. She once told Saturday Review that she was "a bossy brat," sufficiently unhappy that her parents sent her to a psychiatrist in the second grade, and that she's been in therapy ever since. "And I always will be," she said later. "I don't have to worry about terminating [treatment], because I'm incapable of it." When I ask Clayburgh about all this, she says, "Not the second grade--it was the fourth grade! I was an angry child. I don't go [to therapy] intensely--you know, this is not a Woody Allen comedy. But she has helped me a lot." So Clayburgh is no longer angry? "Talk to my family," she says with a laugh.
Clayburgh attended all the "right" schools, and while in college at Sarah Lawrence she made her film debut opposite another struggling young actor, Robert De Niro, in Brian De Palma's early movie, The Wedding Party. Not long after, she met another actor on the rise, Al Pacino, and lived with him in New York for several years while both tried to get their careers off the ground. Clayburgh did a year on a soap and even a Camay soap commercial, experiences she recalls with no fondness.
"Commercials are hell. I used to sit with Blythe Danner and Sandy Duncan and Diane Keaton for sometimes six hours before they'd even see us. They didn't give a shit about our time. I had thought I'd make money doing commercials, but by the time I bought the clothes to wear to the auditions, paid for the taxi ride there, and wasted my day waiting around--it was a no-win proposition. It was just endless to get these roles, and then you end up sitting in this fucking tub of Camay soap destroying your skin! Oh, I hated it."
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".
Clayburgh followed Silver Streak with another hit comedy, Semi-Tough, which cast her as a daft screwball gal desired by not one but two of the hottest movie stars of the time, Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson. And again Clayburgh got a chance to show off her skill for fleshing out underwritten roles, playing off the two men as if there was something in the script to play.
What Clayburgh needed next was a hit picture she could call her own, and she got it when Paul Mazursky--looking for a leading lady with "vulnerability, intelligence, and a sexuality that wasn't brazen"--cast her in the lead of An Unmarried Woman, a runaway Zeitgeist smash that touched a nerve with women everywhere. Playing Erica, who loses her identity as wife-and-mother when her husband leaves her, only to find a new life with supportive women pals, a supportive woman therapist, and a really cute new boyfriend, Clayburgh became the actress of the times. Actually an unmarried career gal with no kids, Clayburgh rode the crest of the film's enormous success all the way to an Oscar nomination and a Best Actress Prize at the Cannes Film Festival (which she shared with Isabelle Huppert for Violette).
"Roles are funny," Clayburgh said later. "For more than a year now, people have been saying, 'You're just like that person in An Unmarried Woman,'" adding that acclaim brought strain: "It's very frightening when you've suddenly got a big success. This sudden thing of, 'What if I fail?' So I was careful."
So careful, in fact, that she began making serious strategic errors. She passed up plum roles like Norma Rae, which she could have played very well--and which later won Sally Field an Oscar. Clayburgh waited a year before finally deciding on her next movie. Taking the high road, she played an incestuous opera diva in Bernardo Bertolucci's Luna, about which she prophetically remarked, "If I fail, I'll fail in Bertolucci's arms." Clayburgh certainly had reason to want to work with Bertolucci. Having made Last Tango in Paris and The Conformist in the previous few years, he had ascended to the level of acknowledged film genius. Then again, Clayburgh was set to play a mother who masturbates her heroin-addicted teenage son.
Luna was a commercial and critical disaster. "It was written to be incestuous," she told The New York Times. "But Bernardo was biting his fingernails and going nuts. He knew it wasn't right. He said, 'There just can't be incest because then there's nowhere to go. You can't go from such an act of destruction to a happy ending--nobody will buy it.'" Nobody did buy it, though today the film has a small cult following, which pleases Clayburgh.
"People like it or they hate it," she says happily. "I like that, because there's nothing wishy-washy about it. I don't know if it was one of the best films ever made, but it was certainly one of the best experiences I ever had. That's a role I would love to play over again, now that I have children. I think that there are things I understand about motherhood that I could have brought to the role."
Fortunately for Clayburgh, Luna opened the same week as the film she'd made after it, the hit comedy Starting Over, which teamed her with both Burl Reynolds and Candice Bergen. And yet, though this smash took the sting out of the failure of Luna--Clayburgh got a second Oscar nomination for Starting Over--there were those in the movie industry who were wondering whether Clayburgh's name, solo, could open a film that was not An Unmarried Woman.
Asked, around this time, whether it was true that she had turned down a $1 million salary to play the role that went to Lesley-Anne Down in a turgid thriller called Sphinx, Clayburgh told American Premiere, "If I did movies like Sphinx, what would people think of me? What kind of job would I get next?" But left to her own devices she managed to do at least as much damage as Sphinx could ever have done. When I ask her about what went wrong at this point, Clayburgh replies succinctly, "I just made a lot of movies that were unsuccessful, so there were no more offers."
The first of Clayburgh's bad films was another of the period's feminist-woman-undecided-about-love flicks, It's My Turn, badly directed by Girlfriends helmer Claudia Weill. Then, in a feminist-success-story "comedy" called_ First Monday in October_, she did a turn as a U.S. Supreme Court judge. Next, working from a script by her husband, playwright Rabe, she played another hyper-contemporary woman, a documentary filmmaker faced with the peril of Valium addiction in I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can. Last and least, she played an American lawyer in Costa-Gavras's pro-Palestinian rant, Hannah K.
Clayburgh groans aloud at the mention of the Costa-Gavras fiasco. "An extremely difficult movie--perhaps the most difficult I've ever done. I really should have taken a couple of years off when I had my first baby, but instead I schlepped this little baby all over Israel, in really difficult conditions. I got very sick. Also, Costa-Gavras was incredibly stressed by the subject matter, and the script was so stilted it might have been translated from another language." She laughs and says, "I really don't think I understood the character he wanted me to portray."
Several promising projects that might have helped Clayburgh out of these career doldrums did not get made: Sweet Libby, a biography of '30s torch singer Libby Holman; a film version of the off-Broadway hit A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking, pairing her with Susan Sarandon; a remake of Carole Lombard's great screwball comedy Nothing Sacred; and any number of others at Clayburgh's own production company. The proverbial tide had turned, and suddenly Clayburgh found herself the recipient of such snideness as this comment from Us magazine: "The cement ridges of an increasingly rigid screen persona threaten to bake the actress into premature self-parody."
In her 1982 interview with Saturday Review, Clayburgh waxed clairvoyant: "I don't know what the future holds. It's frightening. Women could go out again. They could just be a new fad in movies." Precisely. When Hollywood turned, increasingly, to the buddy "boy" films of the '80s--and, in any case, shunned Clayburgh for exceeding the limit of flop films (two in a row, at most)--she took time off to concentrate on her growing family. She also took the opportunity in every interview she did to distance herself from the role everyone associated her with, Erica in An Unmarried Woman. She called the film "old-fashioned" while explaining, "I was an actress picked by a director. It wasn't my story ... I'm not Gloria Steinem," and announced, "I'm so sick of those books for women, by women, that say you can have it all, because you cannot. It's a lot of crap .. . women who aren't doing it all now feel inferior, when actually nobody is doing it all."
Though there had been talk, at one time, of Clayburgh reteaming with her college-days pal Brian De Palma to make a feature called Where Are the Children?, based on Mary Higgins Clark's novel, by the time it finally got made--in 1986--De Palma had departed, and after a brief run in a handful of theaters, the film went straight to video. She followed this with a TV movie, Miles to Go, playing--as she had in Griffin and Phoenix--a cancer victim. In 1987, Andrei Konchalovsky came to Clayburgh's rescue, returning her--and co-star Barbara Hershey--to the big screen in his little-seen Shy People. After that, it was again back to TV for several "issue" films: Who Gets the Friends? (divorce), Unspeakable Acts (child abuse), Reason for Living: The Jill Ireland Story (cancer, again, plus a son on heroin, again). If these were "classy" TV projects, others were not: Clayburgh replaced ailing Kate Jackson in the killer-hunting-down-a-career-woman Fear Stalk, and the aforementioned Firestorm, earlier this year, was just another recreation of a recent tragedy. Throughout the late '80s, Clayburgh offered no-nonsense answers to questions other performers might have reasonably dodged. When the Long Beach Press-Telegram asked why she had never fulfilled her promise, Clayburgh said, "Stupid career moves. You can't go flying off with Bertolucci with a script that isn't finished--that's not a bright thing to do. I had been offered Norma Rae at the time. I should've done Norma Rae."
When I ask if she wishes things were different, Clayburgh concedes, "I do wish my career were in better shape, but fame is not what attracted me to acting. Fame is not where my heart and soul lie. I mean, I've never been a star like Stallone or Madonna--people never went, 'Ooooh, it's Jill Clayburgh!' I used to have to act, now I enjoy acting."
She returned to the big screen again last year, playing the wife of psychiatrist Alan Alda in Whispers in the Dark. This year, she's in the vastly better Rich in Love, in which she plays a woman who walks out on her husband and family, leaving them all to fend for themselves. Sitting with her in her home, nothing could seem farther from Clay-burgh's own life.
"It's not what I would do," she says, "but it is like acting out a fantasy. I don't really identify with that character on some levels, but you know, everyone feels like doing it some days."
As I prepare to leave, I ask Clayburgh what she wants to be doing in 10 years. "I don't really think like that," she answers. "I just sort of try to get through the day." I press for a reply, and she tells me, "Oh, I might work for the Peace Corps. Maybe I'd become a mountain woman, hiking and camping. Or perhaps I'll move to Italy--I don't get much pleasure from New York right now. Well," she says with a laugh, "I sure as hell loved that Matisse show."
One last question: is there a role she's never gotten to play? "I never got to play Peter Pan," she says. "That's something I could really go for. But I don't know if the world is ready for a 50-year-old Peter Pan!" I tell her that both Veronica Lake and Tallulah Bankhead played the ageless lad when they were well over 21, and Clayburgh laughs. "You mean they flew around on wires and everything? Then I certainly can! This is food for thought."
Eve Golden is the author of Platinum Girl: The Life and Legends of Jean Harlow. This is her first feature article for Movieline.