Director Herbert Ross can be (and is) accused of many things. A boring career is not one of them. Here, the inimitable Hollywood veteran talks about wrangling divas, delivering hits, and turning Kathleen Turner and Dennis Quaid into a stylish comic duo for Undercover Blues.
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He has directed 23 movies, among them 1977's smash hit The Turning Point, 1984's teen blockbuster Footloose and 1989's popular tear-jerker Steel Magnolias. His movies have reaped a combined total of 37 Oscar nominations. At age 66 he commands--in notoriously ageist Hollywood--anywhere from $2 to $3 million a picture. It strikes me as no profound mystery why I should want to interview this man.
"Why are you doing a story on Herbert Ross?" the producer asks guardedly when I make my first call to get a feel for the town's attitude towards one of its veteran directors. Beneath the suspicion in his tone lurks a hint of, "Is he still alive?" I next call Ray Stark, producer of a number of Ross's films, including Funny Lady, The Owl and the Pussycat and Steel Magnolias. Stark declines to take or return my call, and instead sends this fax: "Herb was a good friend. . . [who] directed seven movies for me after starting out as director of musical sequences for Funny Girl. All were successful at the box office, and, at least six of them critically well-received. Five earned various Academy Awards recognition." Apart from the interesting use of the past tense in "Herb was a friend," it reads like a press release. I call Stark's office, and get no further than the assistant who indicates that his boss has communicated about all he plans to. I next try a high-profile production boss who worked several times with Ross. This man characterizes his colleague as ''mean, arrogant, nasty, small-minded, pretentious."
Why am I doing a story on Herbert Ross? Who could possibly resist?
I find the man who inspired the above responses--as well as others we'll get to--ensconced in his suite of offices in Culver City, where he's putting the final sheen on his new film Undercover Blues, a spy action-comedy starring Kathleen Turner and Dennis Quaid. Tanned and trim, Ross signals "Just a sec" as he wraps up a phone chat with the film's titles designer, Wayne Fitzgerald, on the topic of possibly creating James Bond-spoofing opening credits for Blues. I look around me and notice that the walls and surfaces of Ross's working space are absolutely devoid of the standard moviemaking mementos. This man choreographed golden age TV shows starring Martha Raye and Milton Berle, directed Barbra Streisand's Broadway debut, brought Julia Roberts before the masses--and there is not a hint of any of that anywhere here. Instead, there's a framed architecture rendering of a Romanesque arch, there are piles of art volumes as well as books on literary and artistic strolls through Paris, and there's a CD of Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No. 3.
Ross hangs up the phone, stands up and genuflects to the assistant who has just procured for him a cigarette. "Please don't tell my wife," he implores with husky theatricality, before hungrily inhaling. "I really am trying to quit. I go to the gym every day for my sins." Ross's cool, sweeping style is exactly as Kathleen Turner has described it:
"Herbert has this marvelously grand manner that harks back to an era of titanic show business personalities. He carries it off so well, he almost makes one nostalgic for that world."
I begin our talk by reading to Ross a quote he gave during his late-'70s heyday, when two movies he directed, The Goodbye Girl and The Turning Point, both got Best Picture Oscar nominations in the same year. Draping his rangy frame across a couch like the former dancer and current weekly analysand he is, Ross listens, head cocked, to his own words: "If I'm lucky, I'll get to wear my halo for a year or two, until one of my movies bombs." Tossing back his head, Ross snorts, shooting a jet of smoke into the air, and observes dryly, ''I'd say the state of the halo is slightly tarnished, wouldn't you?"
Well, yes, actually. Shortly after a series of moneymakers in the '70s had excitable critics comparing him to Frank Capra and money men offering him the works--big-movie versions of The Thorn Birds, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Evita--Ross made the admirably odd, truly daring, very costly and financially disastrous Pennies From Heaven, in which Steve Martin danced and lip-synced as an anguished Depression-era sheet music salesman. Though Ross calls Pennies his "most complete [work], in terms of realizing the dream," the film split critics and eluded audiences. After that, Ross seemed to be marking time with fare like I Ought to Be in Pictures and Max Dugan Returns, both by Neil Simon.
But Ross had known huge success choreographing and directing ballet works, Broadway musicals and TV specials before he ever began directing movies at age 42, and he went on to more success after his film slump. He directed the monster teen hit Footloose in 1984, Michael J. Fox's hit The Secret of My Success in 1987, and Steel Magnolias in 1989. Still, overall, Ross's output is erratic.
"Erratic is one way of saying it,'' Ross observes just a touch frostily. "Diverse is another. I consider myself an artist. You want to flex your muscles, not repeat. Sometimes, circumstance forces you to do that very thing, sometimes you allow yourself to be vanquished and just go with the flow. I'm very proud of The Secret of My Success. Sometimes the things that are most popular require the most skill. But, nobody is making movies that I would love to make. By nature, I would prefer to do a Howards End, but James Ivory does those very well and I don't have a wealthy partner to fund my movies. Anyway, I've never known how you do those out-of-the-mainstream movies. I've always worked within a highly professional structure, like a major ballet company, a Broadway production, a major studio. I discovered long ago that even in a rarefied art form like the ballet, you have to have hits."
Putting out a "diverse" array of big-hit-or-big-big-miss commercial movies is but one of the things for which Herb Ross is known. Another subject of his personal legend concerns his infamous wranglings with the stars of his films, particularly the women. For his part, Ross has dealt with some tough customers. Take the cast of Steel Magnolias, a pawpaw patch of divas, limit-testers, war-horses, nervous Nellies, newcomers. Ross claims, when I inquire about his dealings with these ladies, that his strategy with Shirley MacLaine, Sally Field, Daryl Hannah, Dolly Parton, Olympia Dukakis and then rookie Julia Roberts was "never to speak to any of them privately. Whatever we did, we always did together. I requested that Ray Stark, who was smart enough to agree, give equal billing to Julia and equal perks, right down to size of the trailer. So nobody was ever threatened by anyone else."
Nobody? Roberts has, I remind Ross, spoken icily to the press about him. "There had been a lot of resistance to casting her and Ray asked me to look at Baja Oklahoma,'' Ross recalls. Baja Oklahoma is an HBO movie, in which, Ross tells me, Roberts ''looked bad and gave a very bad performance. Then, after the success of Steel Magnolias, Julia, to my astonishment, was not very nice to me. I called to ask why and she said, 'You weren't very nice to me and gave me a very hard time.'
I said, 'Julia, I was trying to get a performance out of you.' She had a great deal of trouble because she could only play the top of the scenes-- bright and cheerful, in a general way, never understanding the subtext of her character's being desperately afraid. We shot and shot and I somehow was able to get that subtext out of her falsely, by saying, 'That's not right, try this,' getting her very nervous. I had desperately wanted Meg Ryan, who turned us down to do When Harry Met Sally..., and I was crazy about Winona Ryder, who was just too young."
Observing that "one could never anticipate Roberts's gigantic success," Ross hastens to add, "I remember saying to her, 'Are you going to go back to New York to study?' because I thought she was going to have problems. And she said, 'What for?'"
Other people paint a different picture of the Ross-Roberts dynamic, and of Ross's style of relating to actresses in general. One producer calls Ross "one of several directors who, based on their own fear, insecurity and inadequacy, pick out females and torture them to death to the point of making them weep. He did it to Julia, he did it to Dolly on the same picture, he did it to Joan Cusack on My Blue Heaven. If Julia was so inadequate, why did he try to get her for that unreleasable True Colors? She flatly refused."
Neil Simon, who worked with Ross on two Broadway plays and five films, two of which Marsha Mason starred in (who was Simon's wife at the time) defends Ross, sort of: "Herb is very strong in his opinions and, much like other choreographers like Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett, very dominating and exacting. I saw him be really cruel to Maggie Smith on California Suite, bringing her to the point of tears. But she was sensational in that movie and won an Oscar. When I talked to him about that behavior with Maggie and with others, he said, 'I am really tough and I don't realize it. Would you point it out to me sometimes?' Sometimes you could. Sometimes you couldn't."
"I like actors and have a very healthy respect for the process they go through to achieve something that looks very simple," Ross says, pooh-poohing his rep. "For instance, Barbra Streisand. I was with her when she was very young, so I knew her, understood her in a way that was very simple. The most interesting part of directing Barbra, of directing period, is to be able to steer-- though that's not the best word--the person to the place I believe she should be, then see that person get there on their own, so it's totally internal. I learned a lesson with Dennis Quaid getting him to accomplish what he did in Undercover Blues. He was aware that I was pushing and pushing in scene after scene and I thought, uh-oh, when suddenly he said, 'Listen, don't be satisfied with one take. Push me until you get exactly what you want.'"
Since Ross, the son of a postal worker, didn't come to his imperious self-assurance by birth, it certainly must have helped to be able to tutor under such titanic egos as Otto Preminger, for whom he choreographed the 1954 Carmen Jones, and William Wyler, for whom he handled dance sequences in Funny Girl. But if the manner in which Ross expresses his worldview owes something to the tradition of tyrannical directors, the underlying foundation of self-confidence seems to have more to do with Ross's extraordinary relationship with the late Nora Kaye, the former American Ballet Theater prima ballerina to whom he was married for almost 30 years. According to producer Howard Rosenman, Kaye was not only Ross's "muse and his genius," who co-produced his best movie work and herself finished cutting dance sequences in The Turning Point while Ross began shooting The Goodbye Girl, but also "this fabulous human being, a regular gal from Brooklyn who kept him grounded. And on his toes." Director Joel Schumacher, who credits Ross for giving him one of his first big movie assignments as a costume designer on the 1973 The Last of Sheila, recalls, "If it hadn't been for Nora's warm, no-nonsense support, I'd have been terror-stricken at having to deal with the superstars who were involved in that movie."
Ross met Kaye in New York when, in his twenties, having received raves for his choreographic debut piece Caprichos, he was about to stage the same work for The American Ballet Theater, where Kaye was the star. Kaye chose not to appear in Ross's piece, but the two met up again years later under happier circumstances. By that time, Ross had already grown bored with Broadway, which he thought "completely frivolous," and was weary of indulging in what he once called "a hedonistic, drifting life; drugs, drinking too much, smoking too much." He and Kaye married in Rome and toured the Continent with a small company that performed modern dance by Ross, then turned up in the early '60s in Hollywood, where their personal and professional destinies became inseparable. Incidents from Kaye's life inspired Ross's very successful film The Turning Point. "Aside from her enormous reputation, her presence, artistry, intelligence, generosity and wit, she respected me," Ross recalls. "When someone does that, you live up to it. When she was assisting me, I was able to deliver show-stopper after show-stopper."
And, when things turned dark for Kaye, Ross suffered. Which brings us back to our discussion of "erratic" versus "diverse."
"I went through a lot of trauma,'' Ross says with a catch in his voice. "It was just after Footloose that Nora began to be not well. And after that, everything went... sort of funny." Blowing a smoke stream, he pauses significantly. "I did Dancers because it was an experience Nora wanted to have," he says of the dismal Baryshnikov May/December romance set in the ballet world, a movie many believed might be another Turning Point. "It was a project that she had initiated. It helped keep her going. Its success or failure didn't matter to me as much as the fact that I was able to get the picture on and to shoot it. She got to see it on tape at home. Naturally, I was very distressed by the circumstances of my life. But when she wanted me to do The Secret of My Success, just as something to get me back to work, I did. That movie had a happy ending, but Nora was very, very ill when I did it. Later, we went to Italy and by the time we got back, she was really unwell and died soon afterwards. I went into shock and was very lucky that I was in therapy."
Ross's renowned acid wit didn't fail him even in those dire emotional straits. Associates recall how, at Kaye's funeral, Shirley MacLaine walked up to Ross and whispered, "Herb, if you want to get in touch with Nora, give me a call after the funeral," to which Ross whispered back, "Shirley, if I want to get in touch with Nora, I'll call her myself."
Although the Ross-Kaye relationship could hardly be called traditional, the couple (whom Gail Sheehy featured in a Passages chapter, "Living Out the Fantasy") inspired one longtime friend to call it "a very modern, deep love story. They shared so many interests, so many friends." So interconnected were their lives in the minds of cronies that one to this day bristles at the memory of the day Ross liquidated at auction "every single objet d'art and piece of memorabilia that he and Nora had collected together over the years. He just married the princess and didn't look back.''
The "princess" was Lee Radziwill, whom Ross married five years ago.
Another intimate friend of Ross's believes that the marriage to Radziwill was perfectly in keeping with Ross's nature--that clean emotional breaks are part of his survival mechanism. "Years ago, in Manhattan, Herbert had a lover of many years," says the friend. "When he met, then married Nora Kaye, he never said goodbye to his lover, nor even went back to their apartment. Just moved out and severed all ties."
Another anecdote of this type dates back further. As early as his junior year of high school, Ross announced to his father that he was leaving home to enter the biz. Ignoring his father's pleas for him to finish school, Ross departed that night; hours later, a massive heart attack left him an orphan. Reflecting on the tragedy, Ross once told a reporter, "I would do the same thing again, because there was no other alternative for me."
If Nora Kaye "saved" Ross's life, as Ross once claimed, he credits Lee Radziwill with having brought him "back to life." Guests at their wedding, reported on by le tout Manhattan's gossipers, included Radziwill's sister, Jacqueline Onassis, Ray Stark, Rudolf Nureyev, Daryl Hannah, John Kennedy Jr., Stephen Sondheim, Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters and "Dynasty" co-executive producer Doug Cramer, who had introduced the bride and groom. Although any "Mrs. Herbert Ross" would find difficulty in competing with the memory of Kaye, Radziwill definitely seems to have failed to enchant all Ross intimates.
One person describes her as "pushy and aggressive" and recalls how, at the Buckingham Palace premiere of Steel Magnolias, she sat herself right next to Prince Charles in the seat allocated for Olympia Dukakis, and would not move, provoking a hubbub in which the Prince and Princess of Wales then went about trying to change their seats. The whole thing resulted in a letter of protest from the Palace to Columbia/TriStar's London office.
Naysayers or no, it's clear that Radziwill, who directs special events for Giorgio Armani, sparked Ross to get back to work. "The princess and her husband have very cultivated, expensive tastes," snipes one observer. Which perhaps goes some way to explain why Ross did, in quick succession, the woeful Steve Martin Mafia comedy, My Blue Heaven, which he calls "a horrible experience, something I never should have done," and True Colors, a wafer-thin Reagan-years indictment starring James Spader and John Cusack.
"I had just gotten married and wanted to start a new life." Ross admits. "So, I did these two pictures back to back, because I needed the cash. Is that a good reason? Then, I took a year off and when this little picture came up," he says, referring to Undercover Blues, a movie originally announced for Demi Moore, "I was restless and unhappy not working. After all, I've been at this profession, in one aspect or another, since I was 15."
These days, even for an old pro, a "little picture" can be tough to pull off. After all, the project--which Ross describes as "kind of an homage to The Thin Man, except with a child instead of a dog"--was greenlighted by MGM, a studio whose continued existence seemed iffy at the time. Ross ruffled executive feathers by going over budget. And then, the pairing of Kathleen Turner and Dennis Quaid doesn't necessarily strike one as this year's hot box office coup. Asserts MGM CEO Alan Ladd Jr., who gave Quaid his first big break in Breaking Away and Turner hers in Body Heat, "I'm not saying that getting Kathleen, Dennis and Herb was like getting Julia Roberts, Mel Gibson and whoever you think is the hottest director of the moment. But these three elements have been involved before in major hits. Herbert went over budget, which is not normal for him, but we had a very difficult action-comedy to make and I'm very happy with how it turned out."
"You could say the same thing about me," Ross observes, when I mention the spotty recent track records of Turner and Quaid, correctly implying that, of course, I have. "People make errors in judgment. Or the material or chemistry isn't functioning. There's always been a 'you're as good as your last picture' syndrome in Hollywood, but I don't know that that's true anymore. Bram Stoker's Dracula isn't Coppola's best, but there's a respect for his body of work and there are moments in it that are great."
So, are there great moments in Undercover Blues? "As it turns out, I had a rip-roaring time making this movie. Yes, we had budget problems, but then, everybody does; [the studio] underestimated the cost of doing this kind of thing, but stepped up to it. The script also needed a great deal of fine-tuning. At the end of the day, the movie is good, very light, very upbeat. I love Kathleen. I love Dennis. And it's been testing very well. There's one scene for which I hate myself because I did it poorly. And, no, I won't tell you which scene. You'll know. Oddly, the movie was very full of pitfalls. For instance, we were nervous that the audience might reject our characters because, like the dog in The Thin Man movies, their child seems to be in danger. But I'm interested in all genres, all disciplines, and this gave me a chance to do bloodless action sequences different from most others in that they don't get off on their own savagery. I've choreographed the action in a very stylized, comic way.''
Wait. Stylized action? Choreographed? This in a movie featuring a leading lady whose girth had, as tabloid and mainstream reporters alike mercilously pointed out, ballooned? Who, exactly, told Turner to knock off the blini? "I did," Ross declares. ''We asked Kathleen to get into physical shape and lose weight and she worked with a trainer, harder than anyone I've ever known to do that. She lost an astonishing amount of weight, over 30 pounds, looks splendid and is a much better actress than I knew, based on her other work. She knew that I cared about how she looked, how she photographed.
Turner, for her part, brushes aside the fuss being made about her looks. "When I leave the makeup trailer, it's not my job how I look," she says, laughing throatily. "It's somebody else's. The last thing I want to do is think about that. Herb's wanting me to look good all the time was a lovely feeling. It's just not paramount to me." What was paramount to Turner was rapport and directorial smarts. "Word of mouth about Herbert," she says, "is that he's difficult, temperamental. If somebody yells at me, I dissolve into a quaking puddle. He knew that and was very protective. We met before the filming to sort of see if we'd like to work together and we both admitted that we'd come off a couple of films that made us wonder if we loved the work as much as we used to. We both wanted a good movie, but also to remember what a gas making movies is. That happened. He has such a great understanding of style that he melded a very diverse group of actors into a single, precise comic playing style."
According to Ross, Quaid "is not at all what you'd imagine. He's complicated, private, very intelligent, gifted, a very nice man, when you get to understand how he thinks. This role was very different from anything he's ever tackled, so he was very nervous. It was my job to get his confidence and, ultimately, I did. He's a real star in this movie."
In a parallel, more interesting universe, Ross might be trying a Pennies From Heaven every other time out of the box. One for them, one for him. He says that although his training as a dancer prepared him for the gun-for-hire aspects of his trade, he's lost no sleep over having passed up chances to direct The Bodyguard (eight years ago), Ruthless People, Outrageous Fortune, Doc Hollywood, Life With Mikey or a remake of the classic 1939 comedy Midnight. Other of his near-misses sound more like Ross catnip. Like Bruce Willis in a film version of Lanford Wilson's Burn This, a role John Malkovich originated onstage. Or filming Bob Fosse's brassy Broadway musical Chicago about a '20s murderess who becomes a media monster. What happened with these projects? "Bruce was very anxious to do Burn This, before he became so celebrated. Though he couldn't have been more generous with his time, we just couldn't get it on. With Chicago, I rewrote the script by going back to the uproariously funny original play, but Madonna, to whom I first sent it, let me know that she didn't want to do a period musical. Very shortsighted. She wants to expand, you see. A big problem with musicals now is, if your star turns you down, who else do you get?"
And another big problem with any kind of movie is when your director turns you down. That's what happened to Disney on Neil Simon's The Marrying Man, which Ross was to direct. "I found it very charming, different for Neil," recalls Ross. "We had a very successful script reading with Alec Baldwin and Meg Ryan, who were exceptional. Then the producer brought it to Disney, and they wouldn't pay my price. So, I didn't do it.
That, as it turned out, was extremely lucky. Disney has asked me to do several things, but I fail to understand why they don't pay what everybody else is paying." Simon, who calls The Marrying Man his "worst professional experience," claims Disney was "foolish not to want to pay Herbert. We had interest from Jodie Foster and Julia Roberts, but Disney ended up losers, as I did, because they hired an inexperienced director and wound up with a much more expensive movie than Herbert ever would have made.''
I ask Ross, who once considered Madonna for Footloose and nearly landed Tom Cruise for the lead in the same movie, whom he'd like to work with among Hollywood's new breed. As he reels off a number of them ("Robin Wright, Julia Roberts, when she's there, Brad Pitt, Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, who's fascinating''), I wonder, now that he's approaching 70, whether ageism ever fouls him up for jobs. "When did Footloose, people said, 'I didn't know you had a son.' I found the so hilarious, it made me think, 'For certain movies, why don't I jus change my name to Herbert Ross Jr.?'"
Ross may, in fact, have another "Ross Jr."-type project in Boys On the Side, a Whoopi Goldberg movie he's due to shoot in the fall. He'll also do another ''Ross Sr.'' project by staging La Boheme for The Los Angeles Music Center Opera. Aside from a play he and Kathleen Turner hop to mount together, Ross says his having recently become enamored of Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 ''made me want to choreograph again, a urge I haven't had in a very long time.'' Meanwhile, despite the fact that Undercover Blues has earned some of what he calls his "biggest laugh ever in previews," Ross isn't counting on it to rocket him back to the to of anyone's A-plus list, or to guarantee him power seats at next year' Oscars. 'That 'halo' we were talking about earlier? It will go right back on if I have another great success. Or stay off if I don't."
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Sharon Stone for the June Movieline.