I Blame Dennis Hopper Read online

  And then came The Goodbye Girl (1977). When you talk about the qualities you want to see in a romantic comedy, The Goodbye Girl has them all. It is the epitome of a feel-good movie: It has humor and heart and at its center it has a tour de force comedic performance by Richard Dreyfuss. He is not your typical romantic lead, but he is so charming and funny and confident that you just fall for him. I fell for him. Big time. Who didn’t? Richard Dreyfuss manages to make both the mother, Paula (played by Marsha Mason), and her precocious twelve-year-old daughter, Lucy (Quinn Cummings), fall for him. He was that funny prince, that nice guy that all girls are looking for. He shows up, and he comes through. He had something in that movie that a typically handsome guy doesn’t have: confidence that his inner self is as attractive as his outer self.

  Dreyfuss does an interesting thing as Elliot in The Goodbye Girl. He chases the girl by not chasing the girl. There’s a terrific scene where he is eating spaghetti with Lucy. He’s being very cute and charming with her because he knows that she has a crush on him. All the while, he is also interacting with Paula. He also knows that she has a crush on him, too, but she’s scared because she has had a bad history with men. Paula’s acting like she’s not interested in him, but he senses she is watching him, so he starts watching her back, all the while interacting with Lucy. He’s innocently eating spaghetti with a twelve-year-old, but he’s flirting through her to get to her mom. Remember what I said about the on-screen thinking. As the romance progresses, Paula is washing off her white “kabuki” makeup, as he calls it. She starts nervously pulling on her robe, getting all hot and bothered, because he’s thinking sexy thoughts about her. You can see it on his face. What I love about the scene is that he’s not overtly sexual, but he is sexually confident. His sexiness comes not from looks but from sexual know-how. He knows he’s charming the pants off her, because he knows she wants it as much as he does. Maybe more.

  There are scenes in The Goodbye Girl in which Dreyfuss actually makes Marsha Mason blush, yet they have all their clothes on. That’s chemistry. That’s great romantic comedy. His performance harkened back to the golden age of screwball comedies, but he brought to it a modern sensitivity. At thirty years old, he was about to become the youngest person to receive an Academy Award for Best Actor. There have only been a few times in Oscar history that an actor won in the Best Actor category for a comedy. In 1934, Clark Gable won it for It Happened One Night; in 1940, Jimmy Stewart for Philadelphia Story; in 1965, Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou. Now, you could argue those actors won for a variety of reasons, but anyone who has seen The Goodbye Girl knows Richard Dreyfuss won an Oscar for his comic staccato delivery of “I sleep in the nude, au buffo” and, of course, the much repeated “… and-I-don’t-like-the-panties-drying-on-the-rod.” Here was an actor who won an Oscar for being singularly funny. It hasn’t happened since.

  The Goodbye Girl formed a lot of ideas I had about how to do physical comedy. I find that I can’t do a scene with physical comedy in it without thinking of Richard Dreyfuss. He packs funny. He sits and does yoga funny. He cracks his neck funny. His Goodbye Girl character’s effeminate portrayal of Richard III in his Off Broadway debut was inspiringly funny. But he also has pathos. There’s a scene in the film in which Elliot comes home drunk after he’s bombed on his opening night of what is billed as the first gay portrayal of Richard III. He’s crying, “I was an Elizabethan fruit fly … I was putrid. Capital P. Capital U. Capital TRID!” We are laughing at his humiliation. Then he makes an unexpected turn and we see the tears are real. I love this scene, because you never see it coming. You never see a hint of vulnerability in Elliot, underneath his confidence and bravura, until the moment he lets his guard down and shows us that his humiliation has been real. In that moment you realize that maybe Elliot’s smart-ass routine has been an act all along. Maybe that cockiness hides a lot of doubt and insecurity and pain. Maybe, in that moment, we are given a glimpse inside the real Richard Dreyfuss who once said to me, “I like to play characters that are self-aware.” I knew that without his even telling me, because it reminded me of the night I saw American Graffiti, when I was in the backseat of someone’s car and I thought, I want to be like him. Both the character and the man who is playing him. I want to be all those things that Richard Dreyfuss is: funny, confident, outspoken, sure of myself.

  Not long after I first saw The Goodbye Girl, I made my grandmother take me to the actual location of the apartment in the movie—at 78th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, in New York City. Someday I will get here myself, I thought.

  Trying to emulate Richard Dreyfuss didn’t just help my acting career; it also helped me in my real-life teenage world. One night, four of my friends and I were driving around our small town, doing nothing. I was in the backseat, as usual. It was too late to do anything, too early to go home. Eventually we settled on just parking our car in the town green. Pretty soon other kids in their cars started to gather, until there were about ten or fifteen cars parked on the green. Kids were sitting on the hoods of their cars, not smoking, not drinking—it was just a spontaneous gathering of kids talking, having fun, and being kids. I was just about to get up the courage to talk to a boy I had a crush on when suddenly we were surrounded by two police cars. Nobody knew what was happening. Lights were flashing. Sirens going. The police jumped out of the car, hands on guns, and the kids were just stunned. I guess they thought we were doing something illegal. What they found was just a bunch of kids doing absolutely nothing! They spent some time interrogating us, searching our cars, and then told everyone to go home or we would be arrested for what they called “illegally gathering.” Kids were getting into their cars, but I was just furious. I spoke up loudly, trying to stop kids from going home.

  I said with a great sense of moral outrage, “You know we don’t have to go anywhere. This is the town square, of our town where our parents pay the taxes. We’re not doing anything illegal. We’re just talking.”

  And I began to rally everyone. “Do you understand the outcome of the police arresting a bunch of kids for talking to each other? We should let them arrest us. This will be front-page news. Nice kids being arrested for talking to each other in the town green. The town meeting place, going back to Colonial times!”

  I had found my voice, and it sounded an awful lot like Richard Dreyfuss’s. Just like Hooper, I was speaking up for my beliefs, confronting local authority.

  I think I even impressed the police when I came up with, “And there isn’t even a prison in our town. How would we all fit in the car? There are twenty kids here.”

  I really wanted the police to arrest me, because I knew I was right, but I was so Richard Dreyfuss-y that I managed to convince the police officers that arresting us was a really bad idea, and eventually they just got into their cars and drove off. I was a hero for about an hour. It was the first time that I remember being noticed for something other than just being funny. The cute boy I had wanted to talk to came over to me. I still remember the way he kind of nodded his head at me, as if he couldn’t believe I had spoken that way to a cop. What he didn’t know was that I had nothing to be afraid of. I couldn’t wait to shake the dust off this town and get to New York, where I would claim my destiny as an actress. Eventually one of my girlfriends told me she needed to drive me home. I still had to get in the backseat, but that night and for a long time after, I could tell the girls in the front seat thought, She’s going somewhere we are not. From the quiet dark of the backseat I looked up at the moon and smiled. I had become, for a little while, Curt from American Graffiti.

  When I moved to New York, I actually tried to get an apartment in The Goodbye Girl building. It’s a movie about hopes and dreams and emotional triumphs. I had come to New York City to follow my dream to become an actress. I had known all the time I was sitting in that backseat that I would get there.

  Years after I had moved away from New York to Los Angeles, I had the privilege of working with Richard Dreyfuss. The film was Lansky, and I was playing his wife.
We were filming a scene in the bedroom. Richard was giving me some direction about how I should cry while he opened some drawers to pack for a trip. He said, “Now, when I open the first drawer, I want you to give me a little cry, and I’ll be taking the clothes from the drawer and putting them in the suitcase. Then when I open the second drawer, you’ll give me a big cry and I’ll slam the first drawer, then you’ll give me a big cry and say, ‘Meyer, please!’ and I’ll slam the second drawer and turn around…” I was lost. All I could think of was Richard Dreyfuss packing and being funny in The Goodbye Girl. My tears dried up and turned to laughter. I just covered my face with my hands and pretended I was crying. The director came in and pulled me aside, and said, “Is there a problem? It looks like you’re laughing.”

  “Yes, there’s a problem,” I said. “The man packs funny! He won an Oscar for packing funny!”

  Richard Dreyfuss said, “I wanted to be Spencer Tracy because I knew I would never be Errol Flynn.”

  I wanted to be Richard Dreyfuss because I knew I would never be Farrah Fawcett or Christie Brinkley. So my question is, Now do you see why it’s so important to know who Spencer Tracy is?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Screaming for Marty

  “Look at how good I look in a turban. I need to be in The Last Temptation of Christ.” Funny, I never got the call.

  When I was at my first acting school, the faculty would ask first-year students to play minor parts in some of the senior stage productions so the teachers could chart our progress. I was tapped for a small role in a William Inge play called Natural Affection. Natural Affection told the story of a juvenile delinquent violently acting out against his mother. I played the neighbor who lives across the hall. I was thrilled. Then I actually read the play. I had two scenes. In the first, I’m coming home from a date. I had a couple lines. My second scene was the last one of the play. I enter their apartment looking for the mother’s boyfriend, calling out “Bernie! Bernie!” The boy—angry because he has to go back to reform school—picks up a kitchen knife and stabs me to death. Then, as I lie dead on the living room floor, he drinks a glass of milk. Curtain. The End.

  Now, William Inge wrote some great plays and films: Picnic, Come Back Little Sheba, Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Splendor in the Grass … Natural Affection was just not one of them. The last scene was just about the worst, most mixed-up ending of a play I had ever read. I also had proof. There were only thirty-six performances of it on Broadway. Something needed to be done to fix this turkey.

  Have I mentioned I was a know-it-all? I’m a know-it-all. But only about one subject: the movies. I know the movies. I love the movies. So I knew what needed to be stolen from the movies. I said to the director, “What if the neighbor is like a darker version of Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s? She’s Holly a few years after the movie. Things haven’t worked out for her; she’s kind of beat-up, a boozer, living next door in a sea of bottles.”

  The director was pretty busy, you know, actually directing the play, and this was a walk-on role, so he didn’t much care what I did. “What, Illeana? I guess so … we’ll be getting to you soon.” I immediately took this as a yes and went backstage to get into character. Mainly by fastening a gigantic rhinestone clip in my hair à la Audrey in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I waited, and I waited.

  There was one problem. We could never get past the intolerably long first act to get to my entrance. It portrayed the mother’s adjustment to her delinquent son, his Oedipal complex, her abusive boyfriend Bernie, and, somehow, her obsession with polishing inlay furniture. As I said, thirty-six performances on Broadway. Since I had to sit there, waiting for my entrance, I had a lot of free time to come up with other ideas I thought would save this play. I sidled up next to the director and whispered, “Have you thought about how we are going to do the ending?”

  He stared at me, as if trying to remember who I was. “What, Illeana?”

  I said, “The ending? The ending where I’m killed by the son?”

  He scratched his head as if he hadn’t even thought about it, so I said, “What if it’s like a Hitchcock movie?” assuming he would just know what I meant.

  I discovered Hitchcock through a wonderful book and series I saw growing up called The Men Who Made the Movies, by Richard Schickel, and I am proud to say I still have my first-edition copy. It was through this documentary—a series of interviews with directors from Hawks to Hitchcock—that I began to understand the process of moviemaking that I had first experienced on the set of Being There.

  In The Men Who Made the Movies, Hitchcock shows examples from his films to illustrate how to create drama and suspense. He describes the film Frenzy, which features a murder scene and is a great example of how to create almost unbearable tension. He doesn’t show the girl’s death, but rather shows the killer enter the building where she works. The audience knows he’s the killer. She doesn’t. He cuts to the outside street, and the camera pulls out. Imagining the girl’s demise is much worse than actually seeing it. This lesson stayed with me and was invaluable when it came to pitching a new ending to Natural Affection.

  I said to the director, “What if I come over looking for Bernie, Mom’s boyfriend, but he’s not there. I start flirting with the boy. I start taking my dress off. But the dress gets caught over my head. While I’m laughing and stumbling around, the kid picks up a knife and starts to come at me. I don’t see the knife coming at me, but the audience does.”

  I saw the wheels turning and the director starting to get excited. “Yes,” he said. “We do have the issue of him stabbing you, and this would solve that because we wouldn’t have to see it. I like it. We’ll get to you soon.”

  Every day I would engage the director about the ending. He seemed to enjoy my enthusiasm for planning my own murder. Then, during one rehearsal, I was talking about the ending, which, by this point I had all worked out, and he snapped at me, “Illeana, you can stay and watch, but you have to stop talking to me; it’s very distracting. We will get to you.” I was so hurt; I decided I wouldn’t come to rehearsal for three days. When I was called to return to finally do my scenes I would simply act my part as written. I’d just sit there, read my Ruth Gordon autobiography, and just get on with it. No fanfare, nothing. Fine. I was leaving rehearsal, and the director stopped me. He wanted to talk to me because he was hurt that I had stopped coming to rehearsal!

  “Where have you been?” he said.

  I was flabbergasted. “I thought I was getting on your nerves?”

  “You were,” he said, laughing. “It’s funny; you are so irritating when you’re here, but when you aren’t here I really miss you. Please come back!”

  I have since identified this as one of my most lovable traits: You can’t stand me when I’m around, but when I am not around, you really miss me! Anyway, I came back, and the ending, lucky for me, was still el stinko. With just days before our opening performance, we rewrote and restaged it—with some help from the master, Alfred Hitchcock. I am not being facetious when I say this was probably one of my first great collaborations with a director.

  We couldn’t have real blood onstage, since it would of course stain everything, so we came up with this idea that the boy would stab me with the dress over my head, and I would immediately fall behind the couch. Behind the couch, where no one could see, were a bucket of stage blood and some thick pillows. We timed it so that I would scream and stab the pillow while he dipped his knife into the bucket of blood. Every time he raised the knife, there would be more and more blood on it. The effect was chilling, and you never saw anything except the bloody knife and my legs thrashing around from behind the couch. What you imagined was happening was so much worse than seeing it. Thank you, Alfred Hitchcock!

  The first night we did the show was crazy. The minute the dress was twisted over my head and the boy started walking toward me with the knife, the audience went nuts. They started screaming, “No! He has a knife! Get out!” It was so intense it actually scared me.<
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  I refused to do the curtain call, because I didn’t want to ruin it for the audience. How could I get up and take bows after I’d just been killed? The director, who had by this time become my biggest ally, shook his head at me. “Fine, Illeana; you’re the director.”

  When the play was over—and it was a big success, by the way—he said, “You know, you have one of the most bloodcurdling screams I have ever heard. You could make money with that scream.”

  I joked, “Yeah, Special Skills: bloodcurdling screams!” Little did he know that I would take his advice and that scream would take me far.

  A few years later, I had graduated from the Neighborhood Playhouse and had become involved with a company called Goodwater. We were doing an Off Broadway showcase comprising mostly actors and writers who happened to be assistants to many of the great filmmakers in the Brill Building in Manhattan. The Brill Building—at 1619 Broadway—had once been Tin Pan Alley. Then it became a notable film and production house. Directors such as Jonathan Demme, Spike Lee, Paul Schrader—you name it—all had offices there. A friend in our show was working as an assistant for the film director Frank Perry. He had an office next to Peggy Siegal’s and was also a client of hers. Peggy was a very famous publicist—still is—handling all the biggest movies of the era. He had overheard that she needed a new assistant because hers was moving on to work for Martin Scorsese, who was also in the building. My friend recommended me. I passed my interview, and pretty soon I had my dream job. Every day I learned something invaluable about show business. Like, be prepared.

  On my first day of work, I rode the elevator with Warren Beatty and Elaine May. They were actually discussing Ishtar, which they were editing, in the elevator. I thought, Man, an elevator ride with the right director might land you in a movie.