Jessica Lange: An Adventurer's Heart 0813197252, 9780813197258

Table of contents :
Cover
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Plates
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Screen Classics

Citation preview

Jessica Lange

JE S S ICA L A N GE AN ADVE N TUR E R ’ S HE ART

ANTHONY UZAROWSKI

Copyright © 2023 by Anthony Uzarowski Published by the University Press of Kentucky, scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Spalding University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, University of Pikeville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com Unless otherwise noted, photographs are from Photofest. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Uzarowski, Anthony, author. Title: Jessica Lange : an adventurer’s heart / Anthony Uzarowski. Description: Lexington, Kentucky : University Press of Kentucky, [2023] |   Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022051889 | ISBN 9780813197258 (hardcover) | ISBN   9780813197265 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813197272 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Lange, Jessica. | Actresses—United States—Biography. Classification: LCC PN2287.L2834 U93 2023 | DDC 791.4302/8092  [B]—dc23/eng/20221223 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051889 This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. Manufactured in the United States of America. Member of the Association of University Presses

To the fools who dream

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

Contents Chapter 1  1 Chapter 2  12 Chapter 3  25 Chapter 4  35 Chapter 5  45 Chapter 6  53 Chapter 7  63 Chapter 8  72 Chapter 9  83 Chapter 10  95 Chapter 11  103 Chapter 12  112 Chapter 13  121 Chapter 14  131 Chapter 15  140 Chapter 16  150 Chapter 17  158 Chapter 18  168 Chapter 19  177 Chapter 20  185 Acknowledgments 193 Notes 197 Index 215 Illustrations follow page 136

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n warm summer evenings, she liked to sit on the front steps or the porch of whatever house they happened to be living in at the time. They had moved so many times through the course of her childhood that by the time she was about to graduate from high school, she had lost count. Was it ten or perhaps a dozen times? The towns and the houses kept changing, but those magical moments before dusk remained familiar—sunset, small town, distant noises of the countryside. This was an hour to dream, to sit still and imagine faraway places and wild adventures. Some of them were borrowed from novels, others from movies she had seen—many were unique creations of her own vivid imagination. The daydreaming was often accompanied by an acute sense of longing—exactly for what, she never really knew. One thing she was certain of, though, was that somewhere beyond the golden-red horizon was a promise of a different kind of life, one filled with romance and excitement. It was a lonely country: dense forests of birch and pine punctuated by small towns, family farms, mills, and factories, with lakes of clear, cold water dotted around the vast land. In the winter, a silent blanket of snow would cover it all, with freezing northern winds howling through the sparsely inhabited neighborhoods. This was the country to which she was born, where her parents had met and gotten married, where all her relatives, close and distant alike, had lived their whole, very private lives. She felt herself a part of the clan, as she liked to call it, but at the same time there was something that set her apart from this land and even from her own people. To grow up in northern Minnesota was to grow up lonely, with a sense of haunted melancholia that seemed to permeate the towns, the forestlands, and the faces of the people. Many years later she would reflect, “I believe now that there is something in those North Woods of Minnesota that just seeps into the marrow of your bones. There is a loneliness to that land up there that I think 1

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inhabits the people.” While in time she would come to appreciate and even crave the solitude of her birthplace, as she was growing up, her only wish was to get away from it, the farther the better. At least part of this restlessness was no doubt inherited from her father. Albert John Lange, known to all as Al, was a man of extreme moods. A dreamer with a deep sense of disappointment and unfulfilled ambition, he spent his life in pursuit of an invisible and undefinable goal. It was that quest that moved Al and his family along with him from one small town to another and from one dead-end job to the next. Al’s father, George Oscar Lange, was born in 1882 in the German town of Sagan, Prussia, now modern-day Poland. His exact ancestry is somewhat unclear. While he was most probably ethnically German, Sagan was in the nineteenth century an important hub of the Polish community, which had been settled in these parts for centuries. George’s mother’s maiden name, Jung, seems to further reinforce the theory that the family was German; however, certain sources suggest that George was also partly Polish. George became an orphan at the age of six, both of his parents dying within days of each other and leaving the little boy and his two sisters at the mercy of relatives. In 1903, George left Sagan and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a better life in the United States as part of a large wave of European immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After wandering aimlessly and taking a string of odd jobs, George finally settled in Minnesota, where he would find work in the railway business. Here, he met and fell in love with Trientje Eitens, an émigré from Holland. Trientje was the daughter of a foreman in a sand quarry in St. Paul, where George worked upon his arrival in Minnesota. The two married in 1911 and went on to have four children, including Al, who was born in Sandstone, Pine County, in 1913. Al grew up to be a restless young man, highly intelligent and equipped with a quick wit and a great gift for storytelling. By the time he reached his twenties, struggle for survival became the main focus of his young life, as it was for so many others during the Great Depression. He took any job he could find, moving around a great deal—the beginning of his wandering life. An army registration card from 1940 shows Al working for Universal Credit Company in Montana; however, he continued to give his father’s address in Pine, Minnesota, as his main residence. Besides his family, he also had another important reason to keep returning to Minnesota. Her name was Dorothy Sahlman. Dorothy was born in Cloquet in the same year as Al. Her people were of proud Finnish stock; her father (incidentally also called George) was born in 2

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Kuopio, Finland, in 1890, immigrated to the United States as a young man, and settled in Cloquet, where he quickly established himself as a respected and well-liked figure. His marriage in 1911 to Lillian Buskala, a daughter of Finnish immigrants, was hailed by the local paper as “the largest Finnish wedding ever taking place in Cloquet,” with more than four hundred guests present. Both bride and groom, stated the news item, “are well known in Cloquet.” Their daughters, Dorothy and Phyllis, grew up comfortably as part of a well-to-do family. Although the Depression wreaked havoc across the Midwest, the Sahlmans managed not only to stay afloat but even to prosper. When Dorothy married Al Lange over the Christmas holidays of 1941, just weeks after the United States entered the Second World War, however, her life of relative comfort would change. From then on, her husband’s mercurial nature would dictate the pace of their lives, which meant frequent change as well as a lack of stability and economic security, but through it all Dorothy would stand by Al’s side, supportive and unwavering. She would be the one stable thing he had to hold on to, and, like so many women of her generation, Dorothy Lange became the thread that held the fabric of her family together.

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“And out of all this, I arrived,” she would later reflect on her family history. “America’s very strange.” Jessica Phyllis Lange, Al and Dorothy’s third daughter, was born in Cloquet on April 20, 1949. Her parents had been married for several years and, thanks to Dorothy’s folks, managed to build a semblance of a regular, middle-class life within the close-knit community of Cloquet. But the restlessness that had lain dormant in Al’s soul during those early years of marriage was bubbling up to the surface again. He had a young, adoring wife and three little girls to think of, and yet there were still the specters of old dreams, long buried but never completely forgotten. A ranch in Montana, adventures to be had, places to explore—all these plans had to be abandoned on the threshold of adulthood. A mundane, well-ordered, small-town life filled him with dread, and yet there were few options for change, particularly with a young family to provide for. In early 1951, a few months before Jessica’s second birthday and some months into the Korean War, Al enlisted in the army, and the family moved to a base down South. Jessica’s hazy memories of hot summer afternoons spent on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico might have accounted for her lifelong nostalgia for the Deep South, but the Lange 3

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family, which by now also included a baby boy, didn’t stay in the land of Dixie long enough for her to have any concrete recollections of that time. By the summer of 1952, they were back in Minnesota; this time, however, Al was determined to move away from Cloquet and the stifling family ties, to try instead to make it on his own. For the next fifteen years, he would change jobs and move his family from one small town to another countless times, seemingly unable to find peace in any one place. He tried his hand at being, among other professions, a traveling salesman, a history teacher, and finally, following in his own father’s footsteps, a railroad worker. Along the way, alcohol became a reliable escape. For the Lange kids—the three girls, Ann, Jane, and Jessie, and their baby brother, George—their father’s changing moods and, as Jessica later put it, his “extreme personality” were to become main points of reference. “He was the kind of person that, when they walk into a room and it’s good, it’s so good that it makes you come alive,” Jessica remembered many years later, “and when it’s the flipside, it’s really scary.” By the time she was old enough to record memories, frequent arguments between her parents were part of her daily experience. Jessie was a shy, dreamy girl, often withdrawn and lost in her own world. She was slow to speak, preferring instead to rely on her older sister Jane to communicate her needs for her. When she finally spoke at two-and-a-half years old, she stunned the family by ordering a salesclerk at a local store to “charge it.” She lived largely in the world of imagination and make-believe. Because the family never stayed in one place for too long, she quickly learned that things were not permanent—the only place where she could feel truly safe was her inner world, populated by characters and landscapes she loved and trusted. A sensitive child, she keenly absorbed the beauty and wonder of the world she was discovering, all her senses heightened: the smells coming out of the kitchen where her mother baked bread or cooked dinner; the sounds of lazy, summer afternoons, distant and mysterious; the taste of fresh strawberries still warm from the sun; the evening light peeping through the dark Minnesota pines. She adored listening to Al’s stories, which he could spin like no one else. Jane Lange recalled years later: “He was a great storyteller. He sort of held court, and people loved listening to him; even if you heard it many times before, you sat down and listened because it was such fun.” Yet young Jessie sensed the “profound sadness and disappointment” that haunted her father despite his charisma and talent for telling amusing stories. She would one day reflect: “I think when you live with somebody like that, you’re always trying to fulfill something in their life, to give them that thing they’ve always been in quest of.” 4

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Trying to please her father would become a lifelong mission, and while such a burden was way too heavy for a little girl to carry, her mother did her best to offset Al’s unreliable and shifting behavior, making it her life’s work to give her children as much warmth and stability as she could. Jessica would years later describe her mother as “absolutely precious, so gentle.  .  .  . I’ve never heard her say an unkind word about anyone.” Dorothy’s devotion to her children was absolute—she was the kind of mother who baked cookies and brushed her daughters’ hair, but all the energy she dedicated to her family came “at the expense of her own life,” as Jessie would one day realize. “I never remember her out of the house.” As soon as Jessie learned to read, the world of literature provided yet another escape and a galaxy of characters and lives into which she could immerse herself. The classic fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen set her imagination on fire, but she would pretty soon move on to more mature titles, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and the novels of Jane Austen. The line between everyday reality and the world of make-believe, where she could exist as any of her favorite heroines, was often blurred. Jessie would amuse herself by creating elaborate scenarios, reenacting scenes from novels, often alternating the parts she played; other times she would spend days as one character, experiencing her life through the prism of an imagined reality. Her parents would sometimes find her tucked away in a remote part of the house, carrying on conversations with herself in several different voices, engaged in an imaginary scenario. “I remember my father saying to me, ‘You’re going crazy,’” she recalls with laughter. Aside from books, movies became an important medium that shaped Jessica’s young mind. She would sometimes go to a local movie theater with her sisters if the town was large enough to have one. Most often, she would lose herself in the old classics shown on television. “MGM was always my favorite studio,” she would remember years later. “Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. And I loved the old Warner Bros. movies, too. Bette Davis. Joan Crawford. Humphrey Bogart. But most of all, I was absolutely hypnotized by Vivien Leigh.” Like most movie lovers, Jessica first became aware of Vivien Leigh in her role as Scarlett O’Hara, the willful and manipulative heroine of the 1939 classic Gone with the Wind. Catching it on television one afternoon, Jessie was captivated by Leigh and the lavish epic. The story was full of passion and fury as well as the kind of excitement and heightened emotions that instantly captured young Jessie’s imagination. The film and subsequently the Margaret 5

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Mitchell novel on which it was based became a kind of obsession—she read the book countless times, often selecting her favorite passages and re-creating the scenes in her bedroom. Too young to be fully aware of the historical bias and racial prejudice the iconic book perpetuated, young Jessie responded to the “idealism of the South.” She would one day reflect that although the Old South was built on an “inexcusable, obviously unacceptable” system, she had always “found a kind of mysterious connection with that time in history— especially sitting out there in the woods of northern Minnesota.” She was also drawn to southern women, who, in contrast with the very reserved and subdued women who surrounded her, seemed expressive and impulsive. Growing up in a place where “privacy and silence” were the most highly prized commodities, Jessica was seduced by the literary South, where emotions and words seemed always to fly free. Through Vivien Leigh, Jessica also arrived at another masterpiece of the Sothern Gothic genre that would come to play an important role in her life. At the age of twelve, she discovered Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Reading the play and watching the 1951 Elia Kazan film version starring Leigh and Marlon Brando opened up a whole new world to her. Williams’s “muscular language,” as she later described it, and the inspired complexity of the character Blanche DuBois had a profound effect on her own emerging sensuality and artistic sensibility. She wrote a paper on The Glass Menagerie for her English class, but she soon found herself devouring anything else by Williams she could lay her hands on. There was a magic to him, and for a young and sensitive girl his plays served as a pass to what seemed like a privileged dimension. Even if acting was not yet something she seriously contemplated, these monumental discoveries in the sphere of literature, drama, and film no doubt had a decisive effect on shaping the course that her life would eventually take.

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Although the majority of her early years played out within a relatively small area across several counties in northern Minnesota, to young Jessie it felt as though her family were constantly on the road: moving, packing and unpacking, making new friends, only to say good-bye and move on again. Al would often pack up the family and go driving down Highway 61 to visit relatives, all of whom lived somewhere in one small town or another along that stretch of road. Jessica would find herself peering into the landscapes unfolding before her, pressing her face to the car window, imagining the lives led on the farms 6

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and in the villages they passed through. They would go on shopping trips in the port city of Duluth, situated on the shores of Lake Superior, and Jessica would walk around the streets lined with brick buildings and family-run stores—it was here that she felt most at home; as the towns they lived in changed, Duluth remained a frequent destination throughout her childhood. In the years before the big shopping malls and the interstate were built, the communities along Highway 61 teemed with life. The Lange family would take the now-iconic route to “the country fair, to Memorial Day and Fourth of July Parades, to the Harvest Festival,” and, as Jessica would remember decades later, “on very special occasions, to the big cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. If you lived here, you’d be home by now, read a billboard just outside the Twin Cities. Reading that as a child, I always thought, ‘But if I lived here, I would have a different family, a different life. I wouldn’t even be myself. I would be someone else.’ And I’d be lost in the next chapter of my endless daydreams.” By the time Jessica entered high school, she had become adept at change, a master of making the most of whatever place or school she found herself in—for how long they would stay, she never knew. Despite this adaptability, she found it hard always being the new kid, navigating her way through established cliques, and finding her place in the world of high school politics. Although her striking beauty was slowly emerging through the disguise of a retiring, geeky teenager, few who met her at that time thought her to be remarkable looking. She always felt herself to be on the outside, somehow a visiting observer rather than an active participant. “As I grew older, this thing about being on the outside propelled me into rebellion: OK, if I’m going to be on the outside, if you don’t want me to be a cheerleader, then I’ll be the most radical I can be,” Jessica later reflected. In 1963, Al moved the family farther west, about four hours’ drive from Duluth, where they settled in Shoreham, a tiny village situated between two picturesque lakes. Jessie was enrolled at a high school in the nearby town of Detroit Lakes, where she was to spend the next two years. It was here that her rebellion really started to take shape, and as she gravitated more and more toward the arts, she began feeling more confident. Sure, she might never be the homecoming queen or the most popular girl in the class, but who needed that when you could be the most mysterious and interesting instead? It was in Detroit Lakes High that Jessica got her first taste of the stage thanks to the school’s drama club. She was at first shy, slow to come out of her shell, and the parts she played were mostly secondary. The star of the group 7

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was Rita Ruona, a girl in the year ahead of Jessica’s who had all the confidence and rebellious charisma Jessie admired. The two became fast friends and would remain close for years, long after Jessica left Detroit Lakes. Under Rita’s influence, Jessie began experimenting with her look—highlighting her eyebrows with a black eyeliner and dressing in a way that reflected her individuality. Money was short, and it took ingenuity for the Lange sisters to find ways to express their respective styles. Regardless of their fashion, the trio were noted as striking, in particular Ann and Jane, who were by then already entering young adulthood. If Jessie felt somewhat overshadowed by her older sisters, she buried her insecurities in schoolwork and art. She had become an accomplished painter, and by her second year in Detroit Lakes she also started to emerge as a star of the drama class. Kevin Mahoney, who acted with Jessica in several of the school plays, including one titled Love Rides the Rails in which Jessie played the lead, still remembers her vividly. “She was a pure, natural beauty,” recalls Mahoney. “She was quiet and reserved but very active in the drama club. Rita Ruona was the outgoing, outspoken one, and they were best friends. Gradually Jessie blossomed, though, and when we did Love, she was wonderful.” Her drama teacher, Terry Knutson, was particularly impressed by Jessie and, as Mahoney notes, “sort of took her under his wing.” Knutson later remembered that whereas “most high school kids are interested in flirtations and sporting events, Jessica was already beyond that. She liked to read, was well aware of world affairs and socially concerned.” Acting, it seemed, came naturally to her. Knutson remembered that she came into the play “kicking and screaming,” giving her all to her performance. Under the disguise of a character, she was able to let her guard down and freely express many of the emotions she felt unable to communicate in real life. When not busy with academic work and extracurricular activities, Jessie would enjoy carefree days by the lake. She was an excellent swimmer, and she loved the feeling of being submerged in the cool water, millions of glimmering dots of sunlight dancing around her. On summer evenings, she could be seen with Rita or her sister Jane, driving the family’s old 1952 Chevy sedan to watch the sunset on the lake or to go into town for a dance. The easy, slow pace of life in Detroit Lakes might have appeared idyllic to some, but to the young Baby Boomers it signified all the boredom and conventionality they came to associate with their parents’ generation. “We all wanted to get the hell out of town,” remembered Rita Ruona with a laugh decades later. “And what I remember more than anything about dreams and plans is that we never had anything specific in mind; it was more like, ‘Wouldn’t it be inter8

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esting to try that?’ or ‘Wouldn’t you love to go to Paris?’ It was just dreams, teenage girls lying in bed and sharing fantasies and dreams.” In the summer of 1965, Jessica discovered Bob Dylan. His album Highway 61 Revisited came out in August, and it was the first record she bought. Dylan was a fellow Minnesotan, he sang about the places she knew, and although, as she would note one day, “Dylan’s Highway was different from mine,” the very fact that he put it out there “made it seem important”—and, suddenly, less invisible. For a teenager growing up in the rural communities of northern Minnesota in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was all too easy to feel insignificant, somehow on the outside of what mattered. Dylan changed that. More than just the music, the feeling in the air was also shifting. The war in Vietnam was intensifying and with it a growing antiwar movement, led mainly by young people. For Jessie, swept up by the music of Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joan Baez, and other musicians active in the movement, being antiestablishment was becoming the main building block of her emerging, mature identity. She would also start to question her own family environment, particularly in relation to her father. “My family was all pretty wacky. I don’t know if they would have noticed me,” she confessed many years later. “My father was a drinker, which is always schizophrenic.” Although there had always been a great deal of love between Jessica and her father, for her there was also fear and uncertainty as well as the constant battle for his attention, his approval, and, ultimately, his affection. “He was a hard man to please,” Jessica admitted years later. “To get a compliment from my father was—I mean, I can probably count on one hand how many times he said to me, ‘You’re a good kid.’” Kevin Mahoney remembers that Al was certainly a formidable presence: “He was the boss man of the family, a really big personality.” Just as Jessica was beginning to feel at home in Detroit Lakes, her father decided it was time to move again. The move came just as she was about to enter her senior year of high school. This time they went back to where they had started. Al, by now in his midfifties, was resigning himself to the idea that perhaps returning to the town where Dorothy had family connections would be easier than constantly drifting and trying to make ends meet on their own. For Jessica, it meant going back to her birthplace, a town she knew well from visiting her grandparents, but leaving Rita and her Detroit Lakes drama club was hard. Yet another change, but this was to be the last time she would ever be the new kid. This transition was somehow easier than many previous moves. Jessica was now mature and confident enough in herself that she was able to hit the ground running and almost instantly assimilate into 9

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her new school environment. “Artistic, dramatic, and fun is she, a new girl Cloquet was glad to see,” read the caption under Jessica’s yearbook photo. Jeannie Corcoran, a classmate from Cloquet High, remembers the first day Jessie arrived in school: “One of our English teachers told us, ‘There is a new girl, and she looks like a college girl.” Jessica possessed an air of sophistication and seriousness that exceeded her years. Knowing that it was senior year, everyone in her class lived on the excitement of the future waiting ahead of them, and it was easy to make new friends. Jessica threw herself into schoolwork, especially her art. Dawayn Johnson, Jessica’s art teacher, later remembered her to be “a little different” from other students. “She seemed more sophisticated, elegant,” said Johnson. “She had that artistic ability.” She was quickly recognized for her creativity and was appointed the decorations chairman responsible for decorating the prom. The yearbook notes that the decorations were “particularly creative and original,” incorporating “modern art, wild paintings, and flashing lights—thus the theme, Psychedelic.” Jessica was increasingly influenced by the more radical art and music of the time as she was drawn more and more toward the antiwar movement and hippie culture. Still an avid reader, she also became part of the school’s book club as well as a reporter for the school paper. Acting also continued to be on her mind, and she soon joined the drama club. After auditioning for the fall play, she won the female lead in the production of Rebel without a Cause. She was to play the part portrayed by Natalie Wood in the iconic film from 1955. Jessica was excited to be involved in the production, and she quickly bonded with other club members. The opening night was set for November 17, but just hours before Jessica and her fellow players were to perform, unimaginable tragedy struck Cloquet High. That morning a student walked into the school’s music room to discover a horrifying crime scene. At first confused, believing it was part of the stage set for the upcoming play, school officials soon realized that it was in fact a gruesome murder scene. A female student had been brutally attacked, raped, and murdered by one of her male classmates, as was later revealed. The small community of Cloquet was completely unprepared to deal with something so horrific. Former students still recall the collective trauma they experienced. “Even today this tragic event still haunts me,” reflects one, who was at the time in eighth grade. “The school administrators never closed the school at any time, there was no grief counseling, and there was never any counseling or information given by any of the teachers. The only support we got was from each other, from other students. You would think there would have 10

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been some kind of community, or school service for the victim. You would think that a scholarship honoring this wonderful girl would have been established. There was nothing. The adults in control at the time did a terrible job.” For a brief moment, Cloquet gained country-wide notoriety, some papers dubbing it the “Sin City of the North.” But the episode had a longerlasting effect on the young people in the town. The shocking tragedy served as proof of the dismantling of the American dream they had grown up with: middle America, with its white fences, unlocked doors, righteous fathers, and worthy causes. If an innocent girl could be murdered right there inside her own high school in broad daylight, was anyone really safe? The Cloquet High yearbook for 1967 notes briefly that the production of Rebel without a Cause was canceled due to “unforeseen circumstances,” but it, too, fails to honor the memory of Kathleen Bodie in any way. It is hard to speculate just how profoundly the traumatic event affected Jessica. Jeannie Corcoran remembers that “it was very disappointing for Jessie and all of us to have the play canceled. Of course, we were all terrified and saddened by the tragedy, so we understood why it had to be canceled.” Jessica completed the year with good grades and an impressive portfolio, which secured her an art scholarship from the University of Minnesota. Finally, after years of dreaming, she saw the door to the wider world opening before her, and she was more than ready to go forth and experience it. The old sense of restless longing for something more was now stronger than ever. The final paper she wrote for her English class, an autobiographical thesis that reflected her rebellion and disdain for all that was conventional, prompted the teacher to caution her in the feedback, “Not all traditions in life should be disregarded.” That summer she would again sit out on the front steps of the house, gazing at the Minnesota sunset. Somewhere a screen door slammed closed, and elsewhere in the distance she could hear a lawn mower—the familiar sounds of her young life. As she would remember years later, all of it made “her heart ache” with inexplicable yearning. “I felt, if I had to live there any more it would kill me.” And so one afternoon in the late summer of 1967, carrying only a modest suitcase filled with clothes and books, she boarded a Greyhound bus at Cloquet’s own Tulip store and headed south, down Highway 61 toward the unknown.

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lthough only a couple of hours’ drive from Cloquet, the city of Minneapolis might as well have been on the moon. To Jessica, who had spent years longing for excitement and freedom, arriving in this bustling metropolis to start an independent life as an art student was a dream come true. At least it seemed that way—for a while. She settled in the Dinkytown section, a vibrant area of the city, situated close to the University of Minnesota campus. It was a neighborhood populated by students and bohemians, infused with creative ideas and radical politics. It was also where Bob Dylan had lived only years earlier while he attended the University of Minnesota, a fact that Jessica was more than likely aware of. She approached her college work seriously—it was her initial ambition to work diligently on her painting and slowly climb her way up the academic ladder. She saw before her many years of gradual progression and perhaps a career in academia. What she found in the art department, however, was very different from her expectations. David Husom, who started the course at the same time as Jessica, remembers a serious young woman dedicated to her art. “It seemed to me that she was a serious artist; she took her work very seriously,” recalls Husom. “While the rest of us were slobs, throwing paint at the walls and hoping for the best, she carried her paints and brushes in a fisherman’s box; she had a flair for clothes, she carried herself with real style. I don’t think I was aware at the time that she came from up north, from the Iron Range. Not that it would have made any difference to me, but while most of the students came from the suburbs, she was the only one, as far as I’m aware, to come from the North Woods. To some degree, I think she might have felt slightly on the outside or somewhat excluded from the rest of the us.” If Jessica struggled to blend in with the rest of her course mates, it did not take her long to find other company. Up in the small towns of northern Minnesota, the anti–Vietnam War movement had been more of an abstract 12

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notion, something she heard sung about in the protest songs of the era. Here, amid a diverse community of students, artists, and hippies, Jessica suddenly found herself in the very heart of the movement she had been drawn to, albeit from afar, for the past few years. She became involved with the Students for a Democratic Society, a nationwide left-wing activist organization that was deeply opposed to the war and called for free college education and a radical restructuring of the existing sociopolitical order. She would later describe its members as a “very interesting group of fringe people, the whole credo of the hippie lifestyle.” Her personal style soon came to reflect her new surroundings as she glided through campus wearing long, floral dresses, ropes of beads, her blond hair floating freely about her. Even if she lacked the commitment to become a full-fledged activist, she couldn’t help but be seduced by the electrifying atmosphere and frantic energy of that particular moment. The University of Minnesota, despite its geographical distance from the main battlefields of the various movements gaining traction in the late 1960s, was nonetheless a politically charged campus. In April 1967, just months before Jessica’s enrollment, Martin Luther King Jr. visited the St. Paul campus and delivered a historic speech in front of a massive crowd of more than four thousand. Beyond the issues concerning civil rights, he expressed his opposition to the war and called for the creation of a new, free society. Across the country, people had been organizing at the grassroots level, adding fuel to the fires of discontent that had been flickering dimly for a long time. Racism, gender inequality, poverty, homophobia, and the ongoing disastrous foreign conflict were just some of the problems tackled by the countless activist groups. In the summer of 1967, shortly before Jessica moved to the Twin Cities, riots erupted in northern Minneapolis over police brutality, with Black residents taking to the streets to protest the violence and racist abuse they had suffered for way too long. Those months would come to be known as the “long, hot summer of ’67,” and as fall arrived, with it came new, idealistic students ready to shape the future. “The problem was, we were too late to really make the revolution,” reflects David Husom. “Most of the real figures driving change were about a decade older than us. We were too young. All we could do is observe. We went to all the war protests, to the riots, we filmed and photographed them. But we were never truly part of those movements.” If revolution wasn’t the way to make their mark, art would be. There was among the art students a distinct disillusionment with authority, a resentment of hierarchy, and a deep mistrust of the traditional social models. For 13

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Jessica and her peers, experimenting with art, more as an expression of feeling than as a means to present a vision of the world, became an escape. “The more experimental and outrageous, the better,” laughs David Husom. During those first months at college, Jessica was slowly realizing that a career in academia might not be the path she was destined for. The work continued to fascinate her, but it was also becoming clear that academia was a man’s world, something she never had to take into account before. The academic establishment was slow to open up to new and unconventional ideas and to the young people who represented them, in particular women. This very pronounced conflict extended to the faculty—as David Husom remembers: “Those who rebelled against the established ideas and ways things had been done were all fired, eventually.” It was in this heated atmosphere that in the winter of 1967 Jessica signed up for an introductory photography course. It was a second choice; the painting class she had preferred was full, and so she decided to give photography a try. As fate, destiny, or pure chance would have it, this decision would significantly alter the course of her life.

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“On the first day of the beginning photo class, the teacher, a young grad student named Jay Hines, came in wearing jeans, a work shirt, boots, and love beads. He sat down crossed-legged on top of the desk and announced: ‘Brothers and sisters, this is photography!’” Jessica was immediately seduced by this revolutionary approach and by the new medium. More than photography itself, though, it was Hines and his circle of friends that impressed her. He was a free-spirited drifter with a “popart sensibility” who encouraged his students to express themselves freely and experiment with the camera. He also taught them to look rather than just capture, to witness what they photographed, to respect their subjects. “We learned respect for photography, for people,” reflects David Husom. Jessica loved her time in the darkroom, the magic of each new image emerging before her eyes. Although she would later confess that she “didn’t stay in the class long enough to get much out of it,” there is no doubt that this first encounter with photography and with the bohemians who surrounded Hines permanently changed her outlook on art and the ways in which it would influence her life. Up until then, she had viewed art as a career choice, a well-structured path to achieving eminence in the field of academia. She 14

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could now see that art could serve as a pass to a very different kind of life— Minneapolis was not to be the end of the road for her but rather the starting point of a new journey.

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Out of the crowd of photographer friends who hung around Jay Hines’s class, two stood out from the rest: Paco and Danny, as they were known to those who knew them, were a fascinating duo—one was dark and sexy, with a mysterious, European aura and a slight hint of a Spanish accent; the other, slim and distinct looking, sporting a Che Guevara–style beret, carried himself like a bohemian prince. They were best friends, and together they drifted, experimenting with various art forms and anything else life had to offer. Photography was their greatest passion, but they had also decided to branch out into making experimental films. Paco had just left the army and had only recently returned to Minnesota, and, as he reminisced more than five decades later, it was Hines who told him about “a really great-looking and interesting girl in his photography class.” Upon meeting her, Paco was immediately spellbound: “She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen and also the most intelligent, fascinating.” For her part, Jessica would recall “this unbelievably handsome Spaniard who never took his sunglasses off—he would just sit there in the photography class, watching. I thought, well, this is really very interesting.” Francisco “Paco” Grande came from a distinguished family of Madrileños. His father had been a doctor, working for the Spanish Health Ministry, while his mother had also graduated from university—still a rarity for women in those days. Paco moved to the States with his parents in 1954, and although only a child at the time of their arrival, he would retain a very pronounced Spanish character. For Jessica, whose experiences with men had up till then been limited to the high school boys from back home, meeting Paco was a life-changing event. “I’ve never met anybody like Paco. He’s always lived exactly the way he’s wanted to, never worked, always been involved in an artistic endeavor,” she would say later. Although in the years to come she would be reluctant to talk extensively about this first, important romantic relationship, Paco would continue to be a significant presence in her life, even to this day. “It was a huge deal for Jessie to leave college, to leave her family, to leave everything behind, and run off with me. I knew that. But that’s what she did. She abandoned everything, and off we went,” he recalls today in a voice that still carries all the excitement of that moment in time. 15

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In the winter of 1968, after being courted by Paco, who, as he describes it, “chased her like a missile,” Jessica decided to drop out of college and, along with Danny Seymour, Jay Hines, and a number of hangers-on, follow Paco on a trip to Europe. The idea was to “learn about filmmaking,” as Paco explains today. “It was wonderful, that window of time in the ’60s when you could still travel, live on next to nothing, just float. Those old cultures still existed and were authentic, untouched. We wanted to capture that on film. We went to Spain to film flamenco [communities] in Andalusia.” Before they set off for Europe, they made a stop in New York, where Paco and Danny had friends in the bohemian art circles of SoHo. “In those days, all our art teachers were very New York; the whole art scene was very much influenced by New York City,” recalls David Husom. “Of course, Paco and Danny would know people there.” Many of Danny’s connections came via his family. His father, Maurice Seymour (Zeldman), was a Russian-born photographer who, along with his brother, found success in the United States by taking glamorous portraits of Broadway stars and ballet dancers in the 1930s and 1940s. Danny’s mother, Isabella Gardner, was a noted poet who had also at one time dabbled in acting. She was the grandniece and namesake of the famed art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. It was through his mother’s family that Danny came to inherit a large fortune, which enabled him to travel the world and fund his artistic ventures. It would also eventually spell his downfall. Danny was extremely generous, inviting Paco and Jessica to travel without having to worry about expenses. Paco was his oldest and closest friend, so the arrangement came without saying. His fortune was not something Danny preoccupied himself with—it was there to be spent, whether on art, on travel, to help friends, or to buy drugs. To Jessica, the experience was like a dream. She was in love with a passionate, interesting man, traveling the country with a troupe of artists, thinking only about making their life into a work of art—there was no consideration for such things as jobs or careers or money or settling down. The future was measured only by the next stop on the road, the next adventure to be had, the next experience to immerse themselves in. “It was exciting,” she reflected with a smile many years later. “We were happy, for a time.” It seemed her dreams of escape had finally come true—and the reality was more fantastic than anything she could have dared to imagine. The idyllic trip, though, came close to ending for Jessica before it truly began. While in New York, where the group was staying at the Chelsea Hotel, Jessica received a frantic call from Cloquet. Her mother was in the hospital 16

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after suffering an extensive cerebral hemorrhage, and it was unclear if she would survive the massive stroke. Jessica rushed to her mother’s side, leaving Paco and her bohemian troupe in New York, where they promised to wait for her. Dorothy Lange survived but was in critical condition, having lost the ability to speak and walk. To Jessica, seeing her beloved mother in a state near death was terrifying—Dorothy had always been there for her children. She had been the anchor, the steady, warm presence, shielding them from the instability of their peripatetic existence. “She really saved us through our childhood,” Jessica would one day state. As Dorothy was moved home to undergo a long rehabilitation, Jessica was faced with a hard and painful decision—she felt that her mother needed her and that she should stay. But, having just tasted the freedom she had longed for all her life, the thought of becoming stuck in Cloquet was almost unbearable. “There was this horrible yearning to break away, and this tremendous love and responsibility I felt toward my mother,” she later remembered. In the end, the desire to rejoin Paco and continue their journey was too strong to resist. She reluctantly left Dorothy under the care of her father and her brother, George, and made her way back to New York. From there, she departed for Europe.

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In Spain, Danny Seymour invited Paco and Jessica to stay with his half-sister, Rose Van Kirk, at a house she shared with Anzonini Del Puerto not far from Seville. Del Puerto was a musician and flamenco legend, and he became an inspiration for Danny and Paco, who were filming material for their documentary on the dying art of flamenco. Danny would eventually complete the film under the title Flamencologia (1970), and the rarely seen footage remains one of the only documents of a bygone era. When not filming, they would take photographs of the Andalusian peasants and Roma who lived in makeshift shacks built inside caves. “People lived in these ancient caves; they were poor but proud people. They danced flamenco, drank wine; it was an incredible thing to witness. Of course, that world is gone now,” reminisces Paco today. After a couple of months in Spain, they decided to get back on the road and head for Paris. They arrived in May, and the city’s beauty immediately seduced Jessica, who had dreamed about coming here for years. “The first time I saw Paris was in May of ’68,” she recalled decades later. “The streets 17

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were like, wow! It was the most thrilling thing in the world to me.” Beyond the city’s romantic aura, there was a heightened feeling of unrest in the Parisian air that spring, and the revolutionary spirit was intoxicating. France had been shaken to the very core by nationwide protests. From students to factory workers, the French were united in showing their discontent with the status quo. By the time Jessica, Paco, and Danny arrived in Paris, its streets had been turned into a battlefield. On May 13, more than a million people marched through the capital. “People were parking their cars in the middle of the narrow roads around Arc de Triomphe, just to make a barricade,” remembers Paco. “It was quite a sight.” Jessica would later recall being accidently sucked in by the demonstration: “All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the students and the workers, everybody, started coming from the side streets. And I thought, ‘This is great! This is the greatest thing in the world!’ It was.” Paco was disturbed by the police violence they witnessed, particularly by the sight of water cannons being fired at a group of First World War vets, and he often chose to stay indoors. Jessica, however, was full of frantic energy, determined to soak it all in. Along with Danny, she would spend their days walking through the unsettled city, “coming back hours later smelling of tear gas.” “The city was under siege,” Jessica recalled later. “It was as close to a revolution as anything I have ever seen. So I thought, ‘This is where I want to be!’” On one of their ventures, Danny picked up a toothless street peddler and offered to pay for a new set of teeth for him should he decide to join them on their travels. The man agreed, and soon the four of them left Paris in an old Land Rover and drove to Amsterdam. Although they had stayed in Paris for only a few weeks, the city left enough of an impression for Jessica to make a promise to herself to return one day and live there. In Amsterdam, they stayed at an artist’s loft, and Danny busied himself filming the street scenes and homeless people he encountered. One of the people who stayed with them in Amsterdam was the Englishman Peter Wynne-Willson, who had worked as a lighting engineer for several rock bands, including Pink Floyd, and was at the time living a quintessentially nomadic, hippie lifestyle. He still recalls the day Danny picked him up and took him to the loft to meet Paco, who was surrounded by his “artsy courtiers”: “As I walked in, Paco took one look at me and laughed over his shoulder, ‘Hey Jessie, look at this barefoot hippie we found.’ I looked up and saw this beautiful, young woman looking in the mirror. Come to think about it, she was always looking in the mirror, but it wasn’t vanity. She was really fas18

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cinating; I could immediately see that her beauty came from the inside as well as being gorgeous on the outside.” Wynne-Willson remembers staying in Amsterdam with the group for a few weeks. “I was broke then, and they were really a nice group of people. At the time, you could collect used bottles and get money for them if you brought them back to the shop. Let me tell you, these lot went through a lot of bottles: beer, yogurt, you name it. So that’s how I made my living for those few weeks: I collected and sold their bottles.” Peter went on to have a highly successful career as a lighting director, and for decades he remained blissfully unaware of the fact that the beautiful girl he had shared a loft with in Amsterdam in the summer of ’68 became a world-famous film actress. “I just didn’t put the two and two together, not until years later,” he laughs about it today. “I knew her simply as ‘Jessie,’ not as ‘Jessica Lange, the actress.’ Many years after, Jessica was in London doing a play, and I read in the Evening Standard that she had once lived in Amsterdam with Paco Grande—suddenly it clicked!” From Amsterdam, the group traveled to London, where, as Paco remembers, they hung around the Round House with rock musicians of the Camden Town scene. They lived in Soho, just off Carnaby Street, which was at the time the epicenter of fashion and the British brand of cool that was conquering the world. The three of them, Danny, Paco, and Jessica, also decided to start a film company and dedicate themselves to making experimental films. Although swinging London provided all the excitement Jessica relished, she could not stop thinking about her mother, all those miles away, recovering from her stroke without the care of her daughter. Paco recalls that while they were in London, Jessica flew back to Minnesota. More than just worrying about Dorothy’s condition, Jessie also missed the comforting shoulder and motherly wisdom she was so in need of. “I was just starting out on my own, and my mother figure disappeared. It was like an anchor was let loose,” she reflected on that time. “I took a lot of chances that maybe I wouldn’t have otherwise.” When Jessica and Paco reunited, they decided to move to New York, where at first, along with Danny, they lived from place to place, mainly in lofts they shared with friends. The first one, located on the corner of Broadway and Prince Street, was where Jessica first met Ellie Klein, a contemporary dance artist who had come out of Merce Cunningham’s company. She had just established an experimental, avant-garde dance company of her own, and she encouraged Jessica to join it. Ellie “had this wild, exotic imagination, 19

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so it branched into all sorts of other things,” Jessica later reflected on these early experiences with performance art. Klein was the first woman Jessica met in the bohemian circles of the time who had not only a clear vision of what she wanted to do but also the guts and charisma to go for it. In later years, Jessica would remember struggling with anguish and mental-health issues during their early days in New York, and she credited Ellie with helping to pull her out of the darkness. “There was a time in my life when I didn’t speak. For months and months, I didn’t speak, except to the person I was living with, Paco. This was when I first came to New York. . . . When I think about it now, I think that’s a lot crazier than I let myself believe at the time.” In this largely macho world where women were often treated more as decorative objects than as artists of equal value, Klein was precisely the kind of influence nineteen-year-old Jessica craved. Having left college and her painting ambitions behind, she was struggling to find an outlet for her creative energy beyond being a participant in Paco and Danny’s ventures. She joined Klein and her small troupe of dancers to put on a mime performance at Twenty-Third Street and Union Square. They also organized small performances in the lofts of other artists, including at Alan Shields’s on Leonard Street. Shields, who was a noted, flamboyant figure on New York’s art scene, would become a good friend to both Jessica and Paco. Some of the places they stayed were not meant for human habitation, and Jessica remembers with excitement the thrill with which they had to sneak in and out. It was a different New York then, before the major cleanup and gentrification of later years; the streets of Lower Manhattan were seedy, dangerous, and exciting. “New York City was a great place to be then,” reflects Paco today. “Everybody could declare themselves artists and somehow exist there. It was a small world; most people knew each other—if you couldn’t afford rent, you stayed here or there for a few weeks. It was less complicated just to live.” Over the years, Jessica would often look back at those New York days with nostalgia: “Well, there’s that period of time—that whole sense of being down there in SoHo in the sixties when everything was just beginning to happen. The smell of summertime in the streets of New York. That moment in my life where everything started to really come alive, when you begin to sense the possibilities of things.” At the end of 1968, Danny Seymour bought three lofts at 184 Bowery, and he invited Paco and Jessica to move in. Ever generous, Danny offered them the sixth-floor loft as a gift. Ellie Klein would also live on one of the floors for a time. Danny himself settled on the top floor, while giving the 20

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remaining space to the photographer Robert Frank, his good friend. Although born in Switzerland, Frank became an American icon after the publication of his groundbreaking book of photography The Americans in 1958. By the end of the 1960s, he had moved on to making documentary films, and in 1968, having just split from his first wife, Mary, he was struggling to make ends meet. True to form, Danny extended a helping hand to his friend, and the two would form a close working relationship as well as a sort of father–son bond. Jessica loved Robert’s photographs, and many years later she would cite him as one of the major influences on her own style of photography. At the time, however, she was not taking pictures. Determined to fit into the artistic world of SoHo, she tried to go back to painting. She began creating unique Formica boxes, which she hand-painted in primary colors. Pretty soon she became discouraged, though, feeling restless and uninspired: “I didn’t have this emotional commitment to paint that I saw all around me. I don’t think I was ever that good. Oh, I pretended to be. I did very abstract stuff, these awful minimalist sculptures. I don’t know where any of them are now. The last thing somebody told me was that they had found one of my Formica boxes, which I considered my greatest work of art, and had used it a while as a coffee table, and then thrown it out when it got dirty. That’s an appropriate demise for my art career.” Aside from painting, she was also still involved in filmmaking. Paco and Danny continued to experiment with the camera, making a number of short films, all of which are today considered lost. Paco recalls that in one of them, entitled Discovery of America, Jessica appeared nude, emerging from a lake in Hedy Lamarr fashion. “We didn’t really know what the hell we were doing,” he laughs today. “We had no money; we shot the film silent. It was all about experimenting with the medium.” Jessica also continued to dance with Ellie Klein. Dance and movement were becoming increasingly fascinating to her, especially as a means of communicating emotion and performing scenarios. They performed in parks, in small venues, and in private lofts, wherever people gathered to put on art exhibits and perform. By the summer of 1969, Paco and Jessica were tired of New York and began to long for the freedom of the open road. They shared a wanderlust that seemed to stem from a nagging sense of restlessness, buried somewhere deep in the shadows of their childhoods. “What we wanted, more than anything, was to be free. To keep moving,” muses Paco. “Finding adventure, driving into the night. It was a great time. I wouldn’t change a single thing.” The two lovers sold their loft, bought a used Ford Econoline van, and hit the road 21

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with the vague plan of heading for California. What followed was a truly Kerouacesque journey that lasted for months. This was the summer of Woodstock, the culmination of the ’60s counterculture, and in many ways Jessica and Paco embodied all the escapism of the time. The idea was to keep moving, to leave the past behind, to attempt to find a new America, a physical or imaginary place where they could exist. Along the way, they stayed in communes, they visited musicians, they smoked, they experimented with various drugs, they took photos. Some days would pass when they wouldn’t interact with anyone but just drove through the changing landscape. They became closer than ever, almost entirely dependent on each other: “Most of the time it was just the two of us, and this capsule moving through space. It was a great time,” Jessica would one day remember. “When I think back, there are a couple of periods of time in my life that I really love, and that’s one of them.” As Joan Didion so eloquently describes the ’60s in Slouching toward Bethlehem, they “drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins.” They arrived in San Francisco just as the summer was ending and walked the littered streets in the warm light of the setting sun. This was the place to which all the “lost children” gravitated—the hippies, the junkies, the musicians, the “fairies,” the free lovers, the freedom seekers. Jessica and Paco stayed on for a while; they mingled with the bohemians, including the guitarist Michael Bloomfield, who, to Jessica’s amazement, had played for Dylan on Highway 61 Revisited. They wandered in the hazy sunshine of San Rafael and photographed the San Quentin Prison. From San Francisco, they headed south, encountering an array of colorful characters along the way. In Mill Valley, they visited Jane Lange, who had settled there, and they decided to stay a while, Jessica briefly taking a job as a waitress to make some extra money. When Danny came for a visit, he convinced them to travel to Oregon to stay in a new commune he had heard about. Paco recalls experimenting with LSD while there and generally having a wild time. That fall, Jessica and Paco were back on the road. They crossed the border into Mexico, where they traveled for weeks, exploring the country’s unspoiled natural beauty. Jessica fell in love with Mexico, and it was to be a lifelong passion that would one day culminate in the publication of her own book of photographs, In Mexico (2010). Paco recollects magical trips to Oaxaca, where they marveled at the Spanish colonial architecture and encountered Indigenous cultures that still thrived in the region. “The coun22

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try was largely underdeveloped, wonderful,” says Paco today. “It was a great adventure.” In January 1970, the idyllic adventure was interrupted. While still in Mexico, Paco met a group of marijuana smugglers and thought it would be interesting to film a drug-smuggling operation as part of a documentary. Without much thought, he boarded a tiny plane, which carried him, the pilot, and forty boxes of weed across the US border. Due to an oxygen shortage, though, the pilot was forced to make an emergency landing in New Mexico. Upon touchdown, the airport police immediately discovered the marijuana, and Paco was arrested on the spot, ending up in what he insists with laugher was the same prison in which Easy Rider was filmed. The bust made frontpage news in the local press, which claimed it to be one of the “largest finds of marijuana in New Mexico—more than 1400 pounds.” Jessica, along with her sister Jane and Paco’s parents, rushed to help. “It was all very dramatic, the women crying, Jessie wearing a black dress—like a Spanish movie,” Paco recalls the entire episode with humor. In the end, it took Danny Seymour to bail out Paco. He was put on probation and on his lawyer’s advice got a job in a local bakery. He was also told that it would look good if he and Jessica were to get married. It was certainly not the turn of events they had planned for, and marriage was not on either of their minds before this, but, hell, why not? Jessica, who was at the time an avid follower of astrology, consulted the stars and was comforted in the knowledge that the fortunes were set to change in their favor. “I was doing everything according to the stars in those days. Isn’t that the best reason for marriage?” she joked years later. They tied the knot in a tiny ceremony at her parents’ house in Cloquet at the end of July, while the sun was still in Leo. The newlyweds moved back to New York in the late summer of 1970 and settled at the home of Alan Shields on Shelter Island. Almost immediately they threw themselves into making an experimental movie with Danny and Robert Frank. The piece was entitled Home Is Where the Heart Is, and it was the group’s first attempt at making a full-length fiction film. “This documentary stuff—it’s just too much work. Who wants to do that again?” laughs Paco. “We thought, ‘Why don’t we script something that tells a story?’ So, you know, you scratch your head, and you come up with a story.” It was to be a film about sex, drugs, and death—“It works for opera, why wouldn’t it work for us?” Danny, who had been abusing drugs for years, was ironically clean during the making of the film, which was essentially a story of a drug addict’s self-destruction. Jessica made what was, in effect, her first significant movie 23

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appearance. Sporting a brown afro, she plays a waitress in a shabby diner, and although her role was small, her performance, when viewed today, carries hints of the expressive, sensual style that was to become her trademark in the years to come. While in New York, Jessica also rekindled her friendship with Ellie Klein, who was at the time further exploring the practice of mime. Jessica became more and more fascinated by performance art, especially after watching the classic French movie Les enfants du paradis (1945). The film and especially the performance of Jean-Louis Barrault left her speechless, and for a time it would replace Gone with the Wind as her favorite movie. It seemed that she finally found something that she could truly dedicate herself to, an art form that she could be passionate about and that could channel her creative energy. Her excitement only grew when she found out that Barrault’s legendary teacher, Étienne Decroux, still lived and taught mime in Paris. Paris! The city she had promised herself to return to and live in. To a girl who believed in astrology, chiromancy, and serendipity, this was too clear a sign to be ignored. She would go to Paris, find Decroux, and study mime with him. While Paco stayed in New York, unable to leave the country under the conditions of his probation, Jessica packed a suitcase and, with the little money she had, boarded a plane for Paris.

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aris in the early 1970s was, in the words of the photographer Bill Cunningham, “a place that was alive with freedom and talent.” As in New York, large areas of the French capital were still affordable to live in, and with Nixon and the war in Vietnam intensifying, American hippies and rebels flocked to populate the city, which had been a refuge for free thinkers for centuries. But not just Americans made their way there—the scene was truly international, with the worlds of art, fashion, dance, literature, and music colliding and mixing. Those who came to Paris seemed at once to be freed from all conventions—even if this utopian state was illusionary, to those who lived through it, it seemed for a time as if they could do anything they wanted. Shortly after her arrival in Paris, Jessica decided to adorn her body with a permanent mark, a lifelong reminder that she had once been that free, that at one point in time she was able to just follow the course of her intuition without worrying about much beyond that. She wandered into a tattooist’s studio in Pigalle, and although the options on offer were limited—“sinking ships, crucifixes and the Last Supper,” as she remembered with laughter decades later—she was determined to find something suitable. Finally, she settled on a small crescent moon, which she had tattooed on her hip—a rebellious act that she could easily conceal, and yet she would always know it was there (many years later she would add a second tattoo—a Celtic knot on her wrist). Once again, Ellie Klein proved a guiding force for Jessica. Klein also gravitated toward the art of mime, and she, too, decided to travel to the source. Already acquainted with a number of Parisian artists and musicians, she was able to introduce Jessica to the avant-garde scene. Together they moved into a small, rundown apartment at number 15 rue des Roseries in the Marais. Paco, who would eventually manage to come for a visit, recalls “a freezing apartment, with a dark stairway leading up to it, no hot water. It was 25

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grim,” he laughs. The area has long been known as the artistic heart of Paris, but in the early 1970s, before the district was redeveloped and rehabilitated, the majority of its historical buildings lay in disrepair, and so rents were still affordable. “It was the ghetto,” Jessica later said. The narrow streets were lined with Jewish delis and small textile shops, yet though the neighborhood was grimy, there was a certain charm in the unspoiled authenticity of it all. Not speaking French and as an American citizen, Jessica would have had difficulty finding any kind of work, so the little money she came with had to last as long as possible. The girls found that being invited places often came with a free meal, so they went to every party they were asked to. They met rock musicians, painters, fashion models, dancers, and acrobats. Everyone was in Paris to learn, to create, to discover something. Time moved frantically and in a nonlinear fashion—nights often seemed to last for days, while days were short and filled with activity. Jessica was naturally seduced by this tantalizing new world, but she never allowed herself to lose sight of the reason she had come here in the first place: the mime. Étienne Decroux was in his seventies, and by that point he had earned a somewhat legendary status. In the 1960s, he was invited to lecture at New York’s Actors Studio, which in itself was a testament to his esteemed reputation within the world of performance art. Born to working-class parents in Paris in 1898, Decroux became interested in politics in his youth, which in turn led him to take a year off from working as a manual laborer to study voice and diction. What started off as a way of advancing his ambitions of entering politics, however, took him in an entirely different direction—the body as an instrument of expression became his obsession. Over the years, he worked as an actor in theater and film (including having a minor role in Les enfants du paradis), but his main focus remained the development of his own style of mime, which went on to become known as “corporeal mime.” Although mime has traditionally been associated with silent storytelling, overtly expressive face and hand movements, and the characteristic white-face makeup, Decroux would have none of that. “If you have something to say why not just come out and say it?” he would snigger. He instead set out to reimagine the human body “in a musically analytical way, breaking it down into a keyboard that could, he hoped, play any melody the actor imagined.” In that sense, a performance wasn’t the end game but rather an exercise, a way to access a higher level of consciousness through the exploration of physical movement. Aspiring artists from various disciplines were drawn to Decroux, and they came from all over the world to join his class. Joining wasn’t easy. 26

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Although there was no formal admission test, anyone wanting to become part of the inner circle was subjected to intense scrutiny from the master himself—no one knew what he was looking for, what worked in one’s favor, and what turned him off. “He definitely didn’t want any Marceau wannabes,” remembers Ross Clay, who was one of the lucky ones to pass the “test.” “He immediately sensed a phony or if someone’s intentions were not honest. He wanted serious, dedicated, disciplined people.” One thing that certainly helped Jessica was Decroux’s absolute veneration of women. “He had a special admiration for beautiful women; he saw them as somehow superior forms of being; he really elevated female beauty as one of the great miracles,” reflects Clay. “He was forever searching for that perfect embodiment of Marianne, the symbol of France.” With her lean figure, high cheekbones, and freeflowing blond locks, Jessica was certainly a very Mariannesque vision. But more than her looks, it was her determination that struck Decroux—here she was, this pale, thin American who didn’t speak a word of French, and yet something in her eyes, in her manner, spoke louder than anything she might have said. She was admitted into the ranks of his disciples on the spot, and the very next day she began her training. Decroux’s studio was located in the basement of his house in the Parisian suburb of Boulgne-Billancourt. To his students, the house and its beautiful garden were an oasis. Entering this tiny world after a forty-five-minute train ride from Paris was like walking into a different dimension. Before going down into the basement, the students were expected to change into what Decroux called their “work clothes”: a plain leotard and a pair of jazz shoes. He would descend the stairs, and the class would begin with the singing of old French songs and a full body warmup. Then they would move on to whatever movement or “attitude” they were working on at the time. “It was not easy work, by any stretch of the imagination,” admits Ross Clay now. “As a new student, you would start by sitting at the back of the class, observing. Gradually, if you were lucky and Decroux liked what you did, you would work your way forward until you ended up in the front row. That was the ultimate goal.” The work was grueling—sometimes they would spend weeks perfecting a single hand gesture or movement of the head. The idea was to achieve perfect coordination of body and intention—to be able to “hold moments,” to showcase with one’s body “things that were not seen but felt.” “Things not seen but felt? What the hell does that mean?” laughs Clay. “But then he would get up and show us. And there he was, this tiny old man, down to his shorts, showing us how it’s done. And by god, it was poetry. Every 27

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movement, every look—it was just something else. We all thought, ‘Ahhh, OK, this is what it’s all about.’” “It was an all-encompassing education,” Jessica would recount decades later. “He would create an entire world of fantasy, and then the whole thing would come to life; he would breathe this art and life and imagination into it all.” Decroux would reference art, music, literature, and poetry, expecting his students to go and study whatever he mentioned during the class. He was particularly inspired by sculpture—the frozen, perfect movement of it was something he strived to incorporate into his own work with mime. Jessica would spend hours in the Parisian museums studying the works of Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin. She also immersed herself in French literature— Zola, Balzac, and Baudelaire were all on Decroux’s reading list. Music and poetry were of particular significance—Ross Clay recalls Decroux reciting poems, some of which he authored, often reducing himself to tears by the power of his own rendition. All great art was connected, and it seemed that the tiny basement was a crossroad where the muses met—“mime is to the eye what music is to the ear,” Decroux would tell his students. On Fridays, instead of the usual class Decroux would give lectures, which he called “conferences.” During those sessions, he would impart his wisdom, sharing opinions on a wide variety of topics—from his disdain for commercial theater and cinema to his reverence for late nineteenth-century art. He also encouraged students to ask questions relating to the week’s exercises and beyond. “He loved good, interesting questions. If you happened to stumble upon a matter which intrigued him, he could talk all night.” Sometimes Madame Decroux would come downstairs, and the students were struck by the tender closeness the two shared. “He would talk to her in verse; it was beautiful,” remembers Ross Clay. “I remember one time the session ran especially long, and Madame Decroux came down to see what took us so long. She said, ‘Étienne, would you dance with me tonight?’ to which he responded in the most charming, old-fashioned way, ‘What would be the dance of your pleasure, Madame? The waltz?’ They had a really magical rapport.” Decroux loved language, speaking in a distinct Parisian dialect, often embellished heavily by literary anachronisms and theatrical jargon. To Jessica and other foreign students who were just beginning to learn French, following Decroux was sometimes a challenge. “He could see when we had no idea what he was saying, but he really appreciated intelligence. We went along with him, and as time went on, we got better and better,” reflects Clay.

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“I knew immediately I was good,” Jessica said of mime some years later. “It came very, very easily.” Indeed, she was soon inducted into the coveted front row of Decroux’s best students. Giuseppe Condello, who joined the group in 1972, still remembers Jessica vividly: “She was in the advanced section; I remember her as this very striking, beautiful young woman, with blond hair and a big smile. Very slender and graceful. I could tell pretty quickly that she had a mission in life; whether she was fully aware of what that was at the time, I’m not sure. But she did everything with intent, with dedication; there was always something cooking in her mind.” Condello was a trained actor who had come from Canada, having studied at the National Theatre School in Montreal. “As far as I’m aware, I was the only professional actor in the group at the time. Jessica was very interested in acting, in traditional theater.” Although still in love with the magic of mime, she was beginning to realize that perhaps there was more to performing than movement. Sometimes after class she would talk to Condello about acting, and he would even give her and a couple of her friends informal tutorials. Her fledgling interest in acting as well as mounting financial pressures led Jessica to audition for acting and dance gigs. She was given a small part that combined dance and elements of mime at the festival of new work at the legendary Opéra-Comique. Becoming part of this renowned company was Jessica’s first taste of being a professional actor, and although she couldn’t boast about it too much in class for fear of Decroux’s wrath, she could be proud of the fact that she was now a working performer. “Whenever any of us got a job in the theater or as a dancer or any kind of paid work, we had to conceal it from Decroux—he had no time for anyone doing vulgar, paid work in commercial entertainment,” remembers Ross Clay. “We would lie and say we swept the streets or whatever else we could think of; he preferred that. He didn’t like the idea of us sharing the secrets of his art, especially to be used in what he saw as inferior disciplines.” Having a steady income allowed Jessica and Ellie to move from their decrepit apartment in the Marais to a larger one located at number 31 rue de Seine. The elegant street had a bygone Parisian feel about it, with numerous art galleries, artist studios, and charming cafés. Their new place felt spacious and bright and had the added grandeur of having at different times been occupied by the novelist George Sand and the legendary dancer Isadora Duncan, whose brother Raymond had until the late 1960s run a dance academy from a studio located on the ground floor. The girls were joined by a

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third roommate, Anne Foster, who was also a dancer from New York. The flat on rue de Seine would become a center for social gatherings and parties, where the young bohemians of Paris would meet late at night after the theaters and galleries closed. “Jessica would throw those wild parties,” recalls Giuseppe Condello. “She loved meeting interesting people, and so you’d have actors, directors, dancers, photographers, acrobats—you name it. It was wonderful. You could always see her laughing and talking to people.” Living life as an independent Parisienne, excelling at her art, and meeting a diverse range of people seemed to have pulled Jessica out of her shell almost beyond recognition. The girl who when living in New York had often preferred to stay silent due to her pathological shyness was gone. By this point, Jessica’s relationship with Paco seemed to have cooled considerably. Although he visited as often as he could, sometimes staying for as long as a couple of months, by Jessica’s second year in Paris they had entered an on-again off-again stage of their marriage. Back in New York, Paco and Danny Seymour continued to make documentaries and busied themselves with introducing John Lennon to Manhattan’s underground art scene. In 1972, Danny and Robert Frank went on tour with the Rolling Stones, filming material for an intimate documentary about the band’s life on the road. The results turned out a bit too intimate for comfort, and the film was never released. During this period, Paco moved back to Minnesota and for a time lived in an artist commune. Although Jessica and Paco were in effect living sperate lives, their bond endured, and as she later maintained, “there was always the idea we’d get back together.” In the meantime, however, marital monogamy seemed like a very bourgeois concept and not something either of them seemed to care to practice. “You couldn’t help but have beaux in Paris,” Jessica would one day reflect on her Henry Miller–like period of sexual liberation. It was through one of her Parisian beaux that Jessica was first introduced to Antonio Lopez, the legendary fashion illustrator and photographer. Lopez, along with a huge entourage, had recently moved to Paris from New York to escape the stifling atmosphere of Nixon’s America and to seek inspiration in the wild flamboyance of the French capital. Eternally on the lookout for unconventional young women who could serve as muses for his famously innovative fashion drawings, Lopez was instantly fascinated by Jessica. He asked her to write down her phone number and promised to call her to arrange for a sitting. Jessica, ever open to new experiences, scribbled down the digits without giving it a second thought. “I was studying mime, I was liv30

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ing in Paris, I’d been there for a couple of years, completely broke. I had no idea who Antonio was,” she reminisced with laughter during a recent interview for a film about Antonio Lopez’s life. When the phone call never came, she forgot all about the meeting until someone drew her attention to a handdrawn poster plastered to a lamppost. Similar posters had been put up on trees and lampposts all over Paris: it turned out that Antonio had lost the piece of paper with Jessica’s number, and he was frantically trying to find the blond American girl—Would she call him? She did, and by doing so, she entered yet another world. The high fashion, the parties, the glamour. It was an alien environment to Jessica, who had little interest in fashion, but as she later confessed, she got swept up into Antonio’s world. “There was something magical about him. He had this way of bringing joy into people’s lives.” Lopez’s magnetic presence and dark good looks made him irresistible to most people who came across him, especially if he chose to use his charm on them. With a dreamy look in her eyes, Jessica admits to having had a “wild crush” on Antonio, who was openly bisexual. “Didn’t everybody?” A genius of nuance and observation, Antonio immediately detected an elusive, fascinating quality lurking behind Jessica’s playful, brown-green eyes. He wanted to bring it to the surface, and he encouraged her to embrace her glamorous, feminine side. He was perhaps the first person to make her aware of her own star quality. After the dusty lofts of New York and the back of Paco’s van, after the spartan rigidity of Decroux’s basement, Jessica couldn’t help but be seduced by the sparkling, chaotic galaxy of the larger-than-life figures who orbited around Antonio. “The girls who were hanging around Antonio’s studio, I just thought they were the most exotic creatures in the world,” she later said, and although she didn’t see herself in the same vein, she was flattered to be included in the inner circle. Too broke to shop for new clothes or cosmetics, she would often visit Antonio after her mime class wearing her customary black outfit and no makeup, only to be transformed by him into a vision of disco-goddess fantasy. He would photograph her or ask her to pose for one of his drawings, sometimes late into the night. Most sessions led to a night out on the town, usually a late supper on the ground floor of the Club Sept, followed by dancing in the club’s legendary basement. Pat Cleveland, a model who was at the time one of “Antonio’s girls,” as they came to be known, remembers those Club Sept nights as having “no boundaries: boys using girls’ rooms, girls using boys’ rooms, dancing in the darkness, touching and feeling and being together, and all these creative people.” Club Sept was at the time possibly the 31

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trendiest nightspot in Paris, particularly among the fashion and gay crowd. Antonio and his partner, Juan Ramos, could be seen there most nights, dining with their collaborator Karl Lagerfeld and the rest of their crew. The upstairs was a favorite hangout for poets, writers, and journalists, who amid the clouds of cigarette smoke drank wine and conducted heated discussions on every conceivable topic. Downstairs, the darkened dance floor turned nightly into the city’s most fabled discotheque. The Paris historian Alicia Drake describes Club Sept as “homosexual in its inclinations and yet radically removed from the clandestine gay clubs of the Left Bank. The greatest innovation about the Club Sept was that it was defined by glamor, not homosexuality. Everybody came—gay, straight, and the undecided.” Jessica admits that drugs were certainly a big part of the scene, but, although she tried things, just like everyone else, she never let it stand in the way of her work. No matter how wild the nights got, daylight would find Jessica back on track—practicing mime, studying, and trying to find out what she really wanted to dedicate herself to. She still loved mime, but it was slowly dawning on her that there was no future in it—at least, not for her. In the crowd of beautiful young women who surrounded Antonio at all times, Jessica managed to establish new friendships. One of them was with a young model named Grace Jones. Born in Jamaica, Jones came to Paris by way of New York, and her career was just starting to take off. Jessica loved Grace, who was charismatic and outspoken, a perfect girlfriend to have by her side on a night out or at a photo session. “I adored Grace, we were great pals, we spent a lot of time together,” Jessica recently recalled. Among Lopez’s other muses was Jerry Hall, a striking blonde who had recently come to Paris from her native Texas. “Antonio loved the new girls constantly coming into town,” reflects Grace Jones. “I didn’t really think I was simply the next girl in line, he had a way of making you seem like the one, his favorite, and in a way, at the moment he was with you, drawing you, he meant it.” Despite a widely repeated legend, Jessica never lived with either Jones or Jerry Hall, as is often reported. In fact, she knew Hall only slightly, meeting her only a handful of times. Although Jessica was reluctant to try modeling, with Antonio’s encouragement she posed for some photographers and even signed up as one of the first models to be represented by the newly established Euro Planning agency. Grace Jones, who was also at Euro Planning, wrote in her autobiography: “We all had ambition, I guess, to be more than models. We wanted to be fabulous in a different way.” Although modeling was not something Jessica 32

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envisaged herself doing over the long term, it was a way to make some money—or so she hoped. In reality, paid gigs were few and far between. Despite that, it was a seductive world, and being part of it was intoxicating. But even at the height of it, Jessica was somewhat removed, never fully belonging. It was the same feeling that went back to her childhood—she was a visiting guest rather than a permanent fixture. As with the hippies and students of Minneapolis, the bohemian artists of SoHo, the mimes of Decroux’s class, and now the fashionistas fluttering around Antonio—she passed through these worlds, enjoyed them, for a time even loved them, but it seemed she still hadn’t found her place, her tribe. By early 1973, Jessica began to consider going back to the States. The Parisian magic seemed somewhat extinguished, at least in part. Back home, the Watergate investigation was in full swing, and Jessica longed to be there to bear witness to the fall of the administration she so despised. Beyond politics, she also felt as though she had hit a dead end in her artistic development—the months of training with Decroux had given her confidence in her abilities as a performer, but now it was time to explore how she could use what she had learned to branch out in a different direction. Then came some devasting news from Paco. In the fall of 1972, Danny Seymour had embarked on a cruise on his newly purchased thirty-eight-foot yacht, sailing off the coast of South America. On his way back to the States, his yacht disappeared at sea. Danny’s accident was a shock to all who loved him—to Paco, who had been his best friend for many years; to Robert Frank, who had come to think of him as a son; to Jay Hines; to Jessica. Although he had danced on the edge, always somewhere between this world and the next, no one was prepared for this tragedy. Jessica joined Paco, and the two flew to Colombia to try and find their friend, still hoping for a miracle. Although his boat had been recovered, his body was never found, and he would ultimately be declared dead in 1981. The loss of Danny Seymour signaled the end of an era. Beyond the trauma of losing a dear friend, Jessica and Paco also lost a vital source of support. Danny’s inheritance had enabled them and so many others to fulfill their artistic dreams and ambitions, to travel and explore, always with the knowledge that they had a generous friend willing to lend a helping hand. His inheritance had been both a blessing and a curse, certainly to Danny himself. Although true friends who had known and loved him for many years didn’t abuse his generosity, Jessica and Paco felt that many of the people who came to hang around him in the last years of his life not only exploited him but also often encouraged his self-destructive behavior. Witnessing 33

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Danny spiral ever deeper into addiction and depression had been incredibly painful for Jessica, who had felt powerless and unable to help. She still remembered the months of living alongside Danny’s demons in New York— blood on the bathroom floor, Danny passing out in his plate during dinner at a busy restaurant. “Coming into that inheritance made things more complicated, more ambiguous,” Jessica told the filmmaker Remy Weber. “Everyone kissed his ass because of his money. Later, people just clung to him.” Now he was gone, and the circle that had formed around him was also breaking. Jessica didn’t want to associate herself with those she saw as Danny’s leeches, and eventually her friendship with Ellie Klein also suffered. Back in Paris, it was time to close this chapter of her life. This magical city would always remain an important part of her story and of her artistry. The colorful people, the artists, the crazy dreamers, the poets. The music playing on the streets late into the night. Crossing Le Pont Neuf, her favorite among the city’s many bridges. Walking home at dawn after having danced all night, Paris slowly waking up around her. It was here that she had found her independence, her confidence as an artist and as a woman. The words, the scents, the gestures, and the people she associated with them—all these treasures were hers to keep, locked inside her memory, to be accessed at will whenever she would need them. Before saying farewell to the City of Lights, she also had to face parting with Decroux. Leaving the master was always hard. “It was not easy,” recollects Ross Clay; “he was not easy. It was always an emotional turmoil. He simply didn’t accept that you might want to move on, particularly not into acting or anything else that wasn’t corporeal mime. You basically just had to go, maybe make up a lie or just say nothing. There would be no blessing from him. You took what you learned and carried it with you, forever. But there were no goodbyes.”

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hat we had in those years, in Paris and when we all first came back to New York, there was a wildness to it, a sense of being able to do whatever we wanted.” Although at the time her decision to leave Paris was an individual move, not dictated by a wider mood, in recent years Jessica has recognized that she was part of a larger wave of expats returning home after a period of self-imposed exile. By the mid-1970s, with Nixon’s resignation and the end of the Vietnam War, the country was entering a new era of euphoria, characterized so profoundly by disco music, flamboyant fashion, hit TV shows, and big-budget disaster movies. The abstract idealism of the 1960s seemed nothing but a vague memory—the pursuit of peace and love gave way to excessive consumption and hedonistic indulgence—a seemingly unstoppable rush that would last only a few short years before the emergence of the deadly specter of AIDS in 1981. For Jessica, the idea of pursuing a career or a well-structured path to success, however it might have been defined by others, was an alien notion. She would, for better or worse, remain a bohemian. In the words of the director Remy Weber, Jessica Lange is “a true, honest-to-god bohemian—one of the last ones remaining.” “Now everybody is so career-oriented,” Jessica told her friend Alan Cumming in 2013. “I just never thought in terms of career or profession. There was nothing deliberate in my path at all—no plans, no deliberation, no determination, no agenda.” What continuously seemed to drive her was the desire to find an art form that would allow her to explore the unexplained yearning she had felt since childhood—in life, in relationships, even in travel, she found, the core of that yearning remained forever inextinguishable. But in art, she believed, in art perhaps it could be quenched. Upon returning to the United States in 1973, Jessica spent time in Minnesota, visiting with her parents. She also reunited with Paco, who had started a filmmaking school in St. Paul, and for a time they were together again; “

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however, the reunion was brief. As good as it felt to see her family again, the old feeling of restlessness soon returned with an even greater force—after having studied mime with the master, after the artists and poets of Paris, she couldn’t wind up back here. This was not her destiny. She considered returning to France, but it just didn’t feel right anymore—that chapter was closed. And so it was New York again; this time, though, she went alone, and she knew exactly what she was going for. Acting. Some months earlier, on a brief visit to the city, friends from Paris had asked her to accompany them to their acting class. To Jessica, who had been seriously thinking about acting for some time, this was another bit of proof that fate was gently nudging her in that direction. During the class, watching the students examine and bare their raw emotions, Jessica had an epiphany. “I discovered I had an immediate passion for acting,” she would remember in 2008. “It seemed to bring everything together for me, everything I had loved, everything I had studied, everything I knew.” She moved into a small, fifth-floor walk-up on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village and joined the vast ranks of aspiring young actors who populated the city. Rather than fret about the stiff competition and the discouraging statistics of success in the acting profession, Jessica approached her newfound passion with her characteristic mix of drive and laid-backness. Perhaps it would be months or even years before she was ready for an audition. She would study, immerse herself in this fascinating art, start slowly, and maybe after some time she would try out for an off-off-Broadway play. After all, there was no rush. The important thing was to find a teacher. Her first destination was the HB Studio on Bank Street in the West Village. Established and run by Herbert Berghof and his wife, the esteemed actress Uta Hagen, the studio was one of the best and most affordable acting schools in Manhattan. To join, Jessica had to interview with Berghof, and although his class was filled with more experienced professionals, he immediately accepted her. Berghof liked to tell the students in his deep, heavily accented voice about his escape from Austria in 1938, fleeing the Nazis, with the help of Karl Jung. Kirk Woodward, who was also in Berghof ’s class in the mid-1970s, recalls that “Herbert’s approach to acting, like that of many other acting teachers in the States at the time, was based on the work of the great Russian teacher and director Konstantin Stanislavsky, with a strong emphasis on practicality.” Berghof, who had worked closely with Lee Strasberg, was a firm believer in authenticity, a complete truth of the moment—“casual” or “natural” isn’t the

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same as “real.” The biggest problem in an exercise was determining what is true and what is false—finding the truth of each scene and having an authentic reaction to a fellow actor were at the core of his training. After having studied with Decroux, for whom every movement had to be precisely thought out and practiced, Jessica relished in the spontaneity of acting. Berghof placed great emphasis on intuition—the actor had to do the work, but in the end the best moments of doing a scene would be intuitive—they would be a result of previous work on the character, but they were never preconceived. For a time, Jessica stayed in Berghof ’s scene-study class before realizing that her lack of experience was perhaps preventing her from getting the most out of the training. She then decided to transfer to another class at the studio, this one run by Warren Robertson. Robertson was young, handsome, and American, which was a significant change from what Jessica came to expect from her teachers. His approach was fresh, energetic, and completely different from anything she had experienced up to that point. “Studying with Warren Robertson opened up a world of possibilities for me,” she would later say. “His support, his criticism, and his unique way of making me listen to my feelings and encouraging this emotional freedom in my work [have] helped me tremendously. His influence has been immeasurable.” Robertson immediately sensed the emotional depth that rested beneath the surface in Jessica and the restless, almost manic sensuality she was capable of projecting. “From the beginning Jessica was going to be an actress,” he reflected years later. “She was attentive, she studied, she really applied herself. She had that focus.” It was in Robertson’s class that Jessica first came across a story that would one day change the course of her own life. For one of the scene studies, someone brought a book published just a year or so earlier. Will There Really Be a Morning? was a posthumously published autobiography of the actress Frances Farmer, who had died in 1970. Robertson selected a scene from the book to be performed in class, and at first Jessica watched another student, Susan Blakely, read the part of Frances. There was an immediate alchemy between Jessica’s own artistic sensibilities and Farmer’s spirit that radiated from the lines. She asked Robertson if she could try it. The scene was a confrontation between Frances and her mother, and as Jessica started reading, according to those present, she instantly became Frances, as though she had been momentarily possessed. After she finished, there was silence. Robertson later told her: “If there is ever a film made of her life, you should play Frances.”

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In the meantime, there were bills to be paid, and although living in New York was less expensive then than it would become in subsequent years, it was still much harder to stay afloat than it had been in bohemian Paris. Jessica needed a job, and she needed one fast if she wanted to continue her acting dream. Someone told her, “Why not try the Lion’s Head? They’re always on a lookout for a new waitress.” Jessica walked the two blocks between Barrow Street and Christopher Street, the very heart of the Village, and then down toward Sheridan Square. The bar was located at 59 Christopher Street, just four doors down from the Stonewall Inn. Jessica was hired by Al Koblin, the co-owner and head bartender. Today in his nineties, Al still remembers Jessica: “What I do recall is that Jess was a very gorgeous young woman. Guys would walk into the dining area, turn to me, and ask, ‘Who is THAT?’ I believe she had a boyfriend at the time; in any case, the flirting got nowhere. She was a very quiet, pleasant girl.” The Lion’s Head—or simply “the Head,” as it was known—was already somewhat legendary as the favorite hangout for writers, journalists, poets, actors, and, according to Koblin, a whole array of fascinating people who had no particular claim to fame. Dermot McEvoy, a writer and a regular at the time, remembers that the Head was “a great place. There was an emphasis on conversation, repartee, of verbal one-upmanship, baseball, and politics. There was no television—Al Koblin declared that a TV could be brought up from the basement only for the World Series or if the President was shot—and thus the conversation ran wild.” Years later Jessica would remember with laughter that she was “the second-best waitress they had,” and if the work was hard, she noticed that observing the colorful characters who frequented the Head was a perfect way to expand her knowledge of people and behavior—something she could later use in her acting classes. The artist Claudia Carr, who had recently arrived from California, started working at the Head around the same time. Carr recalls that the other waiters called Jessica “the beautiful one.” “She told me, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get used to the city.’ She was so sweet.” Aside from working at the Lion’s Head and attending her acting classes, Jessica reconnected with Antonio Lopez, who had also recently returned from Paris. On evenings when she wasn’t working, she would often go over to Antonio’s apartment, where he would ask her to pose for his drawings, or sometimes they would play dress-up. There was something childlike about getting immersed in the world of gorgeous clothes, makeup, and Antonio’s wild illustrations. “If I had to describe those afternoons, those evenings and 38

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late nights up there in that apartment, there was a sensuality to the whole thing and an exchange of energy,” Jessica remembered recently. Lopez would fix his dark, intense gaze upon her, seemingly penetrating her soul with it, extracting what was most beautiful and exciting, and translating it into the language of art. Sometimes they would walk the streets of Manhattan, and he would ask her to pose spontaneously while he took photos of her. On other occasions, she would accompany him on visits to his friends from the world of art and fashion. They would go up to the Chelsea Hotel to see Charles James, for whose collection Antonio was creating fashion drawings. “We would go up into Charles’s strange little studio, this apartment with an obese beagle named Sputnik, who lived in the bathroom,” she recalls with laughter. She had little knowledge or interest in fashion and so remained blissfully unaware of the fact that she was in the presence of a world-renowned designer. With Antonio’s encouragement and help, Jessica decided to give modeling another go. Contrary to the many myths surrounding her prefame years, Jessica was never a top model, nor was she even a very successful one. She would later claim that she had only two paid gigs as a model—in reality, it may have been a handful more than that, but essentially her modeling career never amounted to much. With Antonio’s influence, she was signed by the New York office of Wilhelmina Models, whose other clients included Jessica’s pal Grace Jones. Jessica featured in the Wilhelmina books on both sides of the Atlantic, but the agency staff quickly realized that she wasn’t altogether serious about modeling—from the beginning, it was acting that interested her. “My goal was always to be an actress,” she would admit a few years later. “I was never that serious about modelling. In fact, I made more money as a waitress at the Lion’s Head. But I kept doing it [modeling] because I saw a trend where models like Lauren Hutton, and Ali McGraw, and Cybill Shepherd had made the transition to films, and I wanted to do that too.” Although she was focusing mainly on stage acting, she hadn’t completely discounted the idea of films. Some who knew her at the time recall that she was perhaps shrewder about her ambitions than she liked to admit later. Eugenie Bafaloukus, for instance, who remains a close friend of Paco’s and who also knew Jessica in the mid1970s, said recently that “Jessica was really smart about it and very matter of fact. She knew that if she became a film star first, she could then do whatever she wanted, make the kinds of projects that interested her. I really admired her drive and her intelligence.” What she couldn’t have predicted was just how precisely and swiftly her plan would work. 39

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In the bleak New York winter of 1975, Jessica was getting tired of waiting tables, tired of barely scraping enough money together to pay the rent and buy subway tickets to go to her acting class. Paco had recently come to New York to be with her, and they were sharing the Barrow Street apartment, struggling both to make ends meet and to make their relationship work. Paco had developed a serious vision impairment, diagnosed as retinitis pigmentosa, which would eventually leave him almost entirely blind. For the time being, his vison was heavily affected, but he was still able to go around the city with his camera, taking portraits of street buskers and drug dealers. Jessica would occasionally mime in the park for loose change. Her weight had dropped even further, and with her black, oversize coat and a New York pallor to match, she resembled one of the delicate figures she had often seen in French nineteenth-century paintings at the Parisian museums where she used to spend hours. Then came a phone call that would change everything. It was Wilhelmina Cooper herself, the head of the modeling agency. The movie producer Dino De Laurentiis was looking for an unknown actress to be the leading lady of his new film, a remake of King Kong. Jessica was an acting student, wasn’t she? If she was interested, they would send her out to California for the screen test. What a lark, Jessica thought. She had never even been to an audition before, never mind to one for a major Hollywood production. Realistically, her chances of getting the role were slim, but it was a free trip to California, so what did she have to lose? On top of everything else, her sister Jane would be in Los Angeles at the same time, and this would be a great way to get together. So she said yes; sure, she’ll fly out there and give it a go. It was all like something out of an old movie. The studio sent a car to her Village apartment to pick her up and drive her to the airport. A drag queen neighbor ran upstairs to deliver the exciting news: “Jessica! The limousine is waiting!” Jessica joked later, “They all said, she got in the limo and never came back.” The casting of Jessica Lange in King Kong has become one of those Hollywood stories we lap up—a beautiful girl with a dream but no real expectations plucked out of obscurity, a split second changing her destiny, a chance meeting, the fabled moment of “being discovered.” There are the stories of the discovery of Lana Turner at Schwab’s Pharmacy, of Ava Gardner’s photo in a shop window getting spotted by an MGM scout, of Joan Crawford being fished out of the second line of a chorus, and of Vivien Leigh appearing before David O. Selznick with the glow of the burning set reflected in her green eyes. But all are distant tales, steeped in the hazy magic of the Golden 40

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Age of the movies. The discovery of Jessica Lange has entered the popculture zeitgeist as something that happened in the modern era, a contemporary showbiz fairytale with an old-time flavor, therefore forever granting her a somewhat more glamorous aura that would set her apart from her contemporaries. For all her later accomplishments as a serious actor, the story of her discovery will forever be a huge part of her legend. The sheer unreality of the whole thing did not escape Jessica—she had loved classic films ever since she was a little girl; she knew the stories, the legends, the stars. Now she was being driven through the streets of Hollywood, through the famed gates of MGM, to be screen-tested. How exactly did she arrive there? Today, it is perhaps difficult to envisage a film studio offering a leading role in a major, big-budget release to a complete unknown. It wasn’t standard practice in the 1970s, either, but, then, Dino De Laurentiis was no standard producer. Born in Naples in 1919, he came up the ranks of the Italian film industry first briefly as an actor and then as an important producer. Following the end of the Second World War, he became one of the key figures of the neorealist movement, producing such classics as Bitter Rice, La Strada, and Nights of Cabiria. It was for Bitter Rice that he had discovered the voluptuously beautiful Silvana Mangano, who became not only the star of the film but subsequently also his wife. In the 1960s, De Laurentiis moved on to produce big-budget spectacles such as The Bible: In the Beginning as well as the iconic Barbarella, which made Jane Fonda an instant sex symbol of the era. Relocating to the States in the 1970s, De Laurentiis continued his successful streak with several hits, including Serpico and Three Days of the Condor. The idea to remake the classic King Kong (1933) came to him around 1974, as he later claimed, upon seeing a poster for the original movie in his daughter’s bedroom. From the beginning, the idea was to make it a grand production, its scale matching the size of the producer’s ego. Because De Laurentiis ultimately saw himself as the star of the show, more so than even the mighty Kong, it was perhaps preferable to him that an unknown should be cast as the love interest for the tragic ape. Beyond avoiding being overshadowed by a big name, he could also take credit for discovering a new star—something that has appealed to megalomaniacal film producers since the dawn of the movies. Nonetheless, Paramount, which provided significant financial backing and would distribute the film, put pressure on De Laurentiis at least to consider casting an established star. Barbra Streisand’s name repeatedly came up in the press, but she turned down the role. Another early possibility was Cher, who, while already a successful singer and TV host, was trying to break 41

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into movies. Ultimately, a pregnancy would prevent her from being considered. Among those who tested were Kim Basinger and Melanie Griffith, both unknown at the time. There was talk of Farah Fawcett, Bo Derek, Elaine Joyce, and Britt Ekland. Meryl Streep, then an unknown graduate of the Yale School of Drama, was brought before De Laurentiis by his son, who had seen her onstage and was impressed by her abilities. Upon seeing Streep, De Laurentiis supposedly turned to his son and mumbled in Italian, “Why do you bring me this ugly thing?” To his astonishment, Streep calmy responded in Italian, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, signore; I’m sorry I’m not beautiful enough to be in King Kong.” There is some confusion as to whether the story is entirely accurate, though, as Streep herself has told various versions of it since first mentioning it in a Time magazine interview in 1981. At the time, she said that the audition was actually for a different De Laurentiis movie, King of the Gypsies in 1978, which eventually starred Susan Sarandon. By the end of 1975, pressures were mounting on De Laurentiis to make up his mind, and he came close to signing Deborah Raffin, a model turned actress, before Jessica arrived in LA for her test. According to one of De Laurentiis’s key aides at the time, it was Charles Bludhorn who had first spotted Jessica at an event in New York and, after making inquiries, had followed her trail to Wilhelmina. Bludhorn was the chairman of Gulf & Western Corporation, Paramount’s parent company, but he also happened to be De Laurentiis’s personal friend. By that point, Dino had all but abandoned the hope of finding an unknown to play the part of Dwan, but Bludhorn was convinced that testing the young model would be worth De Laurentiis’s while. In the end, Wilhelmina threw in two more of its models to be tested alongside Jessica, just for good measure. Jessica walked onto the soundstage, all 105 pounds of her, the chill of a New York blizzard still lingering over her. “They took one look at me and they weren’t interested at all,” she recently recalled. “Completely not the type he [De Laurentiis] was looking for.” De Laurentiis later recounted his first impression of Lange: “Terrible! Here’s a girl with nothing at all. But I’m getting desperate now, so I say, okay, give her a screen test.” The second-unit director William Kronick was tasked with filming the test. Jessica was given a couple of pages of dialogue to read for the camera. The first scene she read was that of Dwan, her character, waking up onboard the ship after being spotted drifting in a dingy. She realizes that the yacht she had been traveling on has exploded, killing the entire crew, and that she is the sole survivor. Was Jessica ready? The lights were turned on; Kronick focused the camera on her 42

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pale face. She started reading. She knew this girl. She was drifting, just like that dingy they found her in. She believed in astrology and destiny. Was she thinking of Danny Seymour and his boat as she read the lines? Her eyes welled up with tears. Perhaps she remembered back to the cool, crystal-clean waters of the Minnesota lakes she used to swim in. Now she was a million miles away from there, in Hollywood, auditioning to be in a movie. “Hey! You know, maybe my luck has changed,” the last line echoed around the soundstage. Cut. Kronick sat for a moment, impressed. Perhaps, he thought, she could be the one after all. He called John Guillermin, the film’s director, to come down and take a look. Jessica was asked to read another scene; this time she had to convince Fred Wilson (later played in the movie by Charles Grodin) to let her join the crew in exploring Skull Island. “She moved and performed in a quirky, refreshing manner that instantly told me she could bring color and life to the role,” Kronick remembers. Guillermin agreed, and he telephoned De Laurentiis: “Dino, get to the screening room. This girl is sensational on camera.” For her final scene, Jessica was asked to get angry at the imaginary Kong, screaming and punching him on the nose, which for the purpose of the test was a pillow fixed above the camera. The test was over. De Laurentiis, Guillermin, Kronick, and a couple of the production associates gathered in the projection room to go over all the scenes filmed. One of the associates present recalls that Jessica appeared luminous on-screen. A bright light beamed from somewhere within her, the aura characteristic of a star, which is as unmistakable as it is rare. Guillermin was said to be so beside himself with excitement that he ripped the cover of the seat in front of him. “I have found my Fay Wray!” he allegedly exclaimed, although accounts vary whether the words came out of his or De Laurentiis’s mouth. In either case, the two men were in complete agreement: Jessica Lange was the one they were looking for. She had to be in King Kong. She was told she got the part on the very same afternoon. De Laurentiis came up to her with the words, “I’m going to make you a big star.” It was all part of the Dino show; she was meant to be impressed, grateful, ecstatic. In fact, she received the news calmly. Her enthusiasm was further dampened by De Laurentiis’s crude assessment of her appearance: she would have to put on weight, naturally. Her hair—it had to be lightened. And for god’s sake, do something with her teeth. It was the first time Jessica was subjected to the cold, impersonal, and incredibly sexist treatment that women in Hollywood had suffered for decades. She swallowed her pride and put off her rebellion for another day. She smiled and said nothing. A couple of days later, she was 43

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presented with a contract, which beyond the movie itself tied her to De Laurentiis for seven years. It also meant money, a lot of it, at least by the standards to which she had been accustomed. It was this or back to the Lion’s Head. She signed on the dotted line. It was December 19, 1975. That evening Jessica joined Jane Lange, who had been sailing up the coast from Mexico, and along with Jane’s young family, they set off for Minnesota to spend Christmas at home.

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essica spent the majority of 1976 making and then promoting King Kong. Some years later she reflected on that first experience in moviedom: “I was so incredibly naïve about what was business and what was caring in Hollywood. It turns out it was all business. King Kong took one year, including a six-week publicity tour around the world. I was doing 12 or 14 interviews a day. And then, it was over, and I was all alone at the Pierre Hotel in New York, and everybody had gone and left me. It was finished. I got my lesson in the expendability of the human spirit in Hollywood.” Getting the role meant bidding farewell to her life in New York: to acting classes, to friends, to Paco. Al Koblin still recalls with a smile the day Jessica came to him, “rather apologetically,” to tell him that she was leaving her job at the Lion’s Head: “She told me she had to leave New York shortly since she got a part in a film and shooting would begin soon. It was, of course, King Kong.” Her marriage, which had been unconventional from the start, was now all but over. Paco couldn’t see himself as part of the Hollywood machine—it became clear during that year that they wanted different things, that Jessica’s path to self-realization was now leading her beyond the reaches of Paco’s universe. Just as Jessica was preparing to start work in King Kong, Paco and his friend Ted Bafaloukos were planning a trip to Jamaica to make a documentary about the island’s legendary reggae scene. The result of the experiment would become the film Rockers, which upon its release became an instant cult favorite. Ted’s widow, Eugenie Bafaloukos, who has been Paco’s friend since childhood, remembers Jessica from that period: “She was a vivid presence, cool as a cucumber. An impressive person who radiated self-direction, clarity, and a striking ability to navigate the gigantic arena in which she found herself, very much on her own terms. She commanded respect.” Despite some rather nasty items that would over the years appear in the press claiming that Jessica had abandoned her ailing husband just as he was 45

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losing his sight and she herself was on the cusp of fame and fortune, Paco remains fiercely protective of Jessica more than forty years after their split. “It’s like we survived the Titanic together,” he says. “I loved her then, I still love her. I will never say anything bad about her.” Jessica later called the breakup with Paco a very “bad time” because they had “always been such great friends, so crazy about each other.” The final act would play out while they were in Australia during the promotional tour for King Kong. “It was the end; we both knew it,” reflects Paco today. “That’s where the final fallout took place. I didn’t want anything more to do with De Laurentiis, with the whole thing. I liked Silvana Mangano and some of the people we met along the way, but it was not my world. After that, I went to Thailand and spent a couple of years living in Chang Mai, then I came back to the States. I lived in Peru for many years, had a family. But that’s another story,” he explains in his intoxicating voice. For Jessica’s part, although she has avoided speaking at length about Paco to the press, what she has said over the years suggests a deep, nostalgia-filled affection. Paco would forever symbolize the time in her life when she was absolutely free—they were bound to each other and yet allowed one another to explore and experience life to the fullest, without the burden of guilt or regret. When they finally divorced in 1981, Jessica ended up paying Paco a handsome settlement—in her own words, “a big chunk of money.” “There was no reason I had to,” she later said. “There was a moment where it made me really angry. Then I started thinking back and thought, I had the money, he didn’t. This is how we always lived our lives. He would have given it to me if he had had it.” It would be many years before Paco once again entered Jessica’s life— today, decades later, they remain close friends. Aside from her immediate family, Paco is perhaps the one person who knows her better and cares for her more deeply than anyone else. Although he was nothing but kind and generous in his assistance with this book, it was clear that the most precious and intimate details of their love were to be kept closely guarded and would never be revealed—to anyone. Just as it should be.

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On January 14, 1976, Dino De Laurentiis, preoccupied mostly with the technical and financial challenges of the production of King Kong, threw a press conference on the Paramount lot to introduce Jessica Lange to the world. He also hoped that she would help to distract the press from the fact that Kong 46

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himself was nowhere near ready for his closeup because the official construction of the giant ape was not due to begin for another six weeks. Jessica posed in front of a poster and alongside a miniature model of her hairy costar, attempting to smile gleefully when journalists asked just how thrilled she was to have received this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “Could we hear Miss Lange scream?” one reporter asked. “Buy a ticket,” responded De Laurentiis. The following day the cameras started rolling. One of the first scenes Jessica shot was the sequence in which Dwan is spotted drifting in a dingy before being rescued by the Petrox crew, which was filmed just off the coast of Catalina Island. She was required to lie motionless, wearing a wet, skimpy black dress that clung to her body. The scene took many hours to shoot, and Jessica, floating in the rubber raft, was frozen to the bone. Only later did she find out that sharks had been circling the dingy the whole time. In February, the production moved on location to the Hawaiian island of Kauai, which would act as the film’s Skull Island. During the four weeks in Hawaii, Jessica grew in confidence, aided by the fact that she became good friends with her costars, in particular Charles Grodin and Jeff Bridges. Both were experienced actors, and Jessica appreciated their guidance, especially because her relationship with John Guillermin was at times less than easy. The heavy-handed director, who had just come off the highly successful Towering Inferno, had little patience with the newcomer and even less so with her concerns about the character she was playing. Both Guillermin and De Laurentiis saw Dwan as little more than a sex object, and they often encouraged Jessica to imitate Marilyn Monroe. It would not be the last time that she was likened to the iconic star. Although she did admire Monroe’s talent, she deeply resented being reduced to a one-dimensional imitation. It was the same story all over again—although Marilyn had spent the better part of her later career fighting to be taken seriously and proving that she was more than just a sexy body, the only lesson that Hollywood seemed to learn from her life and premature death was that trading in female sexuality was a profitable enterprise. Jessica would later say: “She was a tragic figure who led a tragic life and who wasn’t taken as the serious artist she was. I don’t want to compete with her memory, or with anyone.” Jack O’Halloran, who played Joe Perko in the movie, recalls that “from the first time she [Jessica] walked on the set, you could tell that she had that something special, that she would be a star.” O’Halloran, his character tasked with carrying Dwan onto the Petrox ship in her first scene, remembers working with Jessica as a truly happy experience: “She was a top person, smart as 47

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a whip, and incredibly nice. It was her first movie, you know, and a lot to carry on her shoulders, but she handled it all extremely well.” O’Halloran also doesn’t mince words regarding Guillermin: “He was an asshole. I believe he tried to get in her pants. Or at any rate, he tried to make her look and talk like Marilyn Monroe. She hated it. But we all took care of her, Jeff Bridges, Chuck Grodin, I, the whole crew.” Charles Grodin would tell her, “Don’t worry, not all movies are like this.” Of course, she didn’t know any better, and all she could think was that this was better than waitressing. Jeff Bridges, who at twenty-six was already an established Hollywood name with two Oscar nominations under his belt, was impressed with Jessica’s sophistication and “beatnik” credentials: “She had just come from Europe, was involved with street theater and mime; I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this girl is awful hip, how is she going to play this blond bimbo?’” When the production returned to California in March, shooting resumed at MGM’s Lot 2, where the giant wooden wall that the Skull Island natives used to protect themselves from Kong had been built using telephone poles and more than eight thousand eucalyptus trees. The Big Kong model was still not ready, but the hydraulic hand, which would be used in the majority of the scenes with Jessica, made its first appearance. Jessica was terrified of heights, and the prospect of being lifted twenty feet into the air filled her with dread. The fact that her stand-in was mildly injured during rehearsals did little to reassure her, but she was left with no choice except to trust the technical crew and quite literally put herself in their hands. On the day when she was to be whisked off by Kong’s hand for the first time, Ingmar Bergman visited the set, and he stood watching as the young, unknown actress bravely repeated take after take. Jeff Bridges later reflected, “You’d almost believe that big monkey was real, the way she played it, she had so much conviction.” For the next six weeks, Jessica spent most of her time alone on the set with the director and the technical crew, acting her scenes to the invisible Kong. She drew on all her training with Decroux to breathe life into those scenes, which would have been a virtually impossible task for anyone without her experience. Her enormous physical discipline, confidence in her own body and the power of gesture, and complete synchronization of imagination and movement—all of which she had mastered in Paris—were the tools that carried her through. Charles Grodin later wrote: “Jessica emerged from the 10 months of shooting significantly bruised from Kong, who, squeezing hard on occasion, caused her to cry out for help. Since the script called for her to cry out for help there was real tension and confusion.” Many years later, in conversation with the 48

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film critic Molly Haskell, Jessica recalled the experience with laughter: “You had to be young and naïve to do it. It had to be your first film. I was so completely clueless as to what the situation really was.” Making King Kong was ultimately a lonely and at times traumatizing experience for Jessica. She was too new at the game to ever question the director, who would ask her to perform alone for ten or twelve hours a day. She was the only woman in the cast and often the only female on the set, dressed in what amounted to little more (and at times less) than a bikini. Viewing the movie today makes it painfully clear just how much the film’s visual and narrative structure objectifies and exploits Jessica’s body and sexuality. Unlike the 1933 original, the new Kong became a magnified agent of the male gaze, fetishizing Dwan’s body, turning her into an object of sexual desire. It is solely due to the humor and intelligence Jessica managed to craft into her performance that her characterization of Dwan escapes the most painfully reductive and one-dimensional fate that had been written for her. In June, the company went to New York to shoot the final act of the film, including Kong’s death scene at the World Trade Center. The decision to change the location from the Empire State Building, which features so iconically in the 1933 original, was seen as controversial, but in later years, particularly after 9/11, the remake’s final scene is often viewed as iconic in its own right. Prior to shooting, an ad was placed in all the New York papers, inviting spectators to come along and watch the filming and act as free extras needed to fill the enormous plaza of the World Trade Center. On the first night, only around three thousand people showed up, but the following evening the set was swarmed with a crowd of thirty thousand, all eager to get as close to the action as possible. Jessica was overwhelmed by the crowds and sheer scale of the setup, but there was also something exhilarating about being back in the city she loved, the place where only a few months earlier she had lived and struggled anonymously along with countless other young hopefuls. Now she had made it, or at least she was on her way. Philippe Petit, a friend from the Paris days who had gained worldwide fame after his high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, came along to watch Jessica act in front of the huge crowd. “I drew more people,” he later joked. Jessica spent the summer back in California, completing the film, which eventually wrapped in August, after almost nine months of filming. She was exhausted, but there was no time to rest. De Laurentiis had planned a huge promotional campaign, and Jessica was contractually obliged to appear at every event and to grant each and every interview she was asked to. She 49

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traveled across the country and subsequently around the globe, never seeing much beyond her hotel suites. She was appearing on local TV stations, posing for photographs, and answering a seemingly never-ending stream of questions. What she found particularly upsetting was the way the press manipulated her words, molding her persona to fit the image she was supposed to project. The fact that De Laurentiis seemed delighted at feeding the media monster—telling everyone that she was the next Marilyn, that she would be appearing in the remake, that she had been a top fashion model—only made her more frustrated. Newsweek reported Jessica crying during the filming of the final scene in New York, supposedly proclaiming, “It is sad because I do believe in the story.” She was furious. She had cried because she was meant to be acting. Wasn’t that the idea? She was learning the hard way that the art of acting often had little to do with the business of making and promoting movies. King Kong opened in twelve hundred theaters in the United States and another thousand worldwide on December 17, 1976, in what was at the time the biggest single-day opening for a movie in cinema’s history. There was a great deal of anticipation, and fans flocked to see the film, no doubt aided by the extensive media frenzy surrounding the production. The film historian Ray Morton calls Kong “one of the great pop-culture events of the 1970s,” and in fact it remains for many one of the most memorable cinematic events of the era. Although it didn’t live up to De Laurentiis’s dream of surpassing Jaws at the box office, it was still a financial success, grossing more than $90 million, which made it one of the most profitable films of the year. Critical reception ran the gamut, from enthusiastically positive to stingingly negative. Many reviewers compared the remake unfavorably to the original. “Why, I think we have a right to ask, would anyone want to remake it?” wondered Vincent Canby of the New York Times. “King Kong is a classic but it’s not Hamlet. There is only one way to do it and that’s been done.” Others, however, saw the remake’s merits, with headlines such as “King Kong, Bigger and Better!” Jessica’s performance was largely dismissed or lightly patronized. That stung. She was prepared for constructive criticism or serious critique, but after the year of her life and countless hours of hard work she had given to the film, to be seen as a nonentity hardly worthy of analysis was hurtful. Canby wrote: “Though Dwan sets Kong’s heart aflame, she’s more likely to set everyone else’s teeth on edge. This is no reflection on Miss Lange. It’s the script. In their attempt to update a fairy tale, the film makers have turned a conventional heroine into a pseudo–Marilyn Monroe character who seems less 50

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dizzy than certifiably daft, aggressively unpleasant, and out of place in this sort of movie.” What made the situation worse for Jessica was that the reviews only confirmed her own feelings about the film and De Laurentiis’s treatment of her. Sure, getting the role was a lucky fluke, but it was not a dream come true, as the papers relentlessly suggested. Acting was serious, it was still a dream, and she saw it crumbling before her—the lucky break that so many might have wished for looked likely to destroy the very dream it was supposed to bring her closer to fulfilling. In January 1977, she was featured on the cover of People magazine (after having appeared on the cover of Time in October the previous year), and she used the feature to reshape the image De Laurentiis had been molding for months. She opened by stating that she would have nothing to do with any planned sequel to Kong: “Artistically, it would be redundant.” As the dust following the release of Kong began to settle, though, it was becoming clear that offers would not be flooding in. De Laurentiis still had her under contract, but he had little idea what to do with his big discovery. For the time being, Jessica settled in a rented house in Hollywood, close to the ocean, filling it up with books, records, and a jungle of plants. She was waiting for something to come up, unsure of what her next step should be. The generous salary from De Laurentiis meant that she didn’t have to worry about money, at least for now, but the career limbo in which she found herself was unbearable. She also quickly found out that LA could be the loneliest town in the world—often her only company was her Scottish Terrier, Jake. It was essentially an industry town; she would later reflect that living in LA was not much different than living in Cloquet: everyone knew everyone else’s job, salary, and personal business. Life there was stifling, especially with nothing to do. The few offers she did receive were for movies she didn’t even want to consider. It was bad enough having to explain King Kong to people—if she wanted ever to be thought of as a serious actor, she couldn’t afford another laughable performance. For a time, it seemed that nothing good could possibly come out of Kong. Jessica attended Hollywood parties, often feeling out of place, amazed at how boring the conversations were—hell, there was more creative energy on any given night at the Lion’s Head. Her one and only movie credit embarrassed her, and she often told people more about her mime training than of her big film debut. Ironically, Decroux refused to talk about his famous former student to the press—in private, he would joke with his students that she had abandoned the serious art of mime to “play with monkeys.” 51

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It was during a party at the home of actor Buck Henry that her eyes, restlessly scanning the room, came upon a strangely familiar face. She had never met the man before, and yet there was something about him that made her feel instantly comfortable. He was standing by the pool, and Jessica thought that she had never seen anyone so pale. He seemed just as lost in the Hollywood crowd as she was, and upon an introduction made by Milos Forman, she realized that he spoke very little English. They spent the evening chatting in French, which Jessica found came back to her much more easily than she thought it would. Like Jessica, he had also recently made his film debut in the highly acclaimed drama Turning Point, for which he would soon receive a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. But acting wasn’t his main vocation; he was in fact one of the most famous ballet dancers in the world. Jessica was ashamed to admit she knew nothing about ballet. His name? Misha, better known as Mikhail Baryshnikov.

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hroughout her life, whenever she has felt lost or unsure of what direction to take next, there has always been New York. The city’s energy still fuels her today—it’s the place where she returns time and again, where she has made her home, no matter where else she might roam. Back in 1977, after months in Los Angeles, Jessica decided to take matters into her own hands— which inevitably meant going back to New York. It was clear that neither De Laurentiis nor her newly acquired agent, Michael Rosenfeld of the freshly formed CAA, would do much to further her career, at least not in the direction she had been hoping for. In January that year, she had won a Golden Globe New Star of the Year Award for King Kong (Arnold Schwarzenegger won best actor in the same category). Little more than a year after arriving in Hollywood, she had picked up her first industry award—not bad, she thought, although she saw the entire thing as little more than another publicity stunt. Winning the statuette did little to improve her chances of being taken seriously. She decided to continue the education that the dubious luck of getting discovered had so abruptly interrupted. Acting was still something she wanted to pursue above all else, but she feared that a second chance might be hard to get. Losing hope was not, however, an option. She knew she would get there; all she needed was patience, hard work, and perhaps a little help from her lucky stars. Although in many ways it felt as though she were back at the starting point, in reality she was in a much more privileged position than she had been less than two years earlier. For one thing, a steady income, courtesy of her contract with De Laurentiis, meant that she didn’t have to worry about going back to waitressing or even modeling—neither of which she missed. But beyond financial benefits, appearing in King Kong had put her on the map—perhaps not in the most desired spot, but on it nonetheless. Starring in a movie as widely publicized and as popular with audiences meant 53

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that people would see her—various kinds of people, not just condescending film critics. She would be noticed by those who had the foresight to see beyond the constrains of any particular film, who were able to spot unique talent when it was put in front of them. One of the few critics to recognize Jessica’s potential was the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who wrote that “the movie is sparked by Jessica Lange’s fast yet dreamy comic style.” Kael immediately saw that the young actress was bigger than Kong: yes, the lines written for her made the audience “laugh and moan at the same time,” she wrote, “and yet, they’re in character, and when Lange says them, she holds the eye, and you like her, the way people liked Carole Lombard.” Kael’s unique gift as a critic was her ability to remove herself from the noise, from popular opinion, from whatever the consensus was at any given time. This allowed her to see things more clearly, to view films and performances outside of the climate in which they happened to be released—she was unafraid to go against the grain. Jessica was moved by and grateful for Kael’s review, later stating that Kael’s opinion was the only one that mattered all along. For her part, Kael would continue to champion Jessica with positive notices for years to come, remaining one of her most ardent admirers. Back in New York, Jessica rented an apartment on the Upper East Side and set out to reinvent herself—or, rather, reclaim herself. After spending close to two years in the eye of a publicity storm, which had painted a portrait of her she felt had little to do with her true self, it was time to stop and reevaluate. In LA, she had begun to feel as though she had lost herself, but here amid the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, bumping into old friends, seeing plays, walking to her acting class, she slowly regained balance. She was also seeing Misha. Since their first meeting in Hollywood, they had become something of an item—even though his incredibly busy schedule meant there was little time for conventional dating. In fact, almost nothing about their relationship was conventional—there was the language barrier, often the physical distance, and the reluctance on both sides to make a full-fledged commitment. They enjoyed each other, sharing a deep affection that continued to grow as months went on, but for both of them work came first. Misha, who had been living in the United States for only two years, was quickly becoming the most celebrated ballet dancer of his generation, and it seemed that everybody wanted a piece of him. He was treated like a god, and Jessica often felt like a failure next to him. They would attend galas and fancy afterparties, where she felt all eyes piercing through her. “Who is she again?” “The girl from that monkey movie.” “Ah, yes. And what exactly is Baryshnikov 54

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doing with HER?” The humiliation she felt only drove her harder to prove herself as someone with noteworthy artistic achievements of her own. One rainy day she ran into a friendly ghost from her old life. Since the days when they were struggling models in Paris, Grace Jones had made a name for herself as an icon of alternative style and an emerging diva of the disco music scene. She remembers running into Jessica in New York during the period following King Kong: “There she was, passing me on the street. We hadn’t seen each other for years, not since Paris. We were standing in the rain, talking about what we were going to do with our lives.” Grace invited Jessica to come and see her at her apartment on Fifty-Seventh and Seventh, and the two spent the afternoon reminiscing about the old days. Jessica also shared her anxieties. “She had signed a big Hollywood contract and I could see that the heartbreak had already started,” Grace later wrote. “She said, ‘I was supposed to get this role but someone else got it. Nothing is going like they said.’ You could see the frustration and despair written on her face—on the verge of becoming destructive.” Jones was alarmed by Jessica’s state of mind, advising her to keep as far away from Hollywood as possible. The two shared a rather similar outlook on what “the industry” stood for. Grace would later write, “Hollywood always maintains the illusion that in order to get a job there, you have to live there. That’s the most ridiculous thing ever—My attitude is, if you want me, you know where I am. I don’t have to live among you.” Just like all those times when they would conquer the Parisian dance floors together, Grace’s self-confidence and no-nonsense manner once again helped to boost Jessica’s sinking morale. She would later reflect back on those dark days after her movie debut by calling them “a terribly lonely time,” but, she added, “I never accepted failure at anything. There was no doubt I was going to succeed.” The problem was convincing others that her belief in her own talent was not merely a case of deluded vanity. And yet she knew she wasn’t crazy—after all, Pauline Kael had noticed it. And there were others, too. Some months after King Kong opened, Jessica received a letter from Bob Fosse, the famed director, dancer, and choreographer, who had seen her performance and thought her absolutely mesmerizing. Fosse was by this point at the very pinnacle of success, having over the first half of the 1970s become one of the leading figures on Broadway, in film, and on television (in 1973 he became the first person ever to win an Oscar, Emmy, and Tony in the same year and so far is the only person ever to do so). Jessica was flattered and somewhat bemused as to why someone like Fosse would waste his time with King Kong, 55

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much less with her. It turned out that Fosse had had a fleeting interest in Kong from the project’s inception. Some years earlier, together with his friends the writers Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner, Fosse had joked about approaching Dino De Laurentiis with an idea for a Kong sequel. Although nothing came of the collaboration, Fosse clearly remained sufficiently interested in De Laurentiis’s picture to eventually see it a few times— due mostly to the captivating performance of the film’s leading lady. Fosse’s love of beautiful women was no secret—along with his reputation as an obsessive professional, an artistic genius, a loyal friend, and a generous colleague, he was also known as one of the most notorious ladies’ men in the business. Jessica was likely well aware of Fosse’s track record, but she was fascinated by the man and by his talent. When he suggested a meeting, she agreed, and soon they became close friends and lovers. Although Jessica was also dating Baryshnikov at the same time, her relationship with Fosse seems to have been playing out in a different dimension. Anytime they were together, she would enter his world, leaving on its doorstep anything else that might have been going on in her own life. His was a dark, strange universe, as rich and vivid as the man’s imagination. She could see where the imagery for his iconic settings came from—it was drawn from the world as he saw it in his waking dreams, his nightly escapades, always somewhere on the verge of reality and neon-lit mirage. They would wander the streets of Manhattan late at night after the theaters had closed. Bob always knew where to go, and as seen through his eyes, this city truly never slept. They visited places she had no idea existed. Fosse took her to watch live sex shows and strange European blue movies. They would walk along Forty-Second Street, lined with sex shops and peep-show arcades, and suddenly they would turn into an unassuming doorway, shielded by a heavy curtain, only to find themselves in a sparsely lit strip joint, where all the girls seemed to know him. Fosse was fascinated by the dark side of human nature; he saw beauty in the grotesque and the uncanny, and now Jessica was absorbed by it, too. “I loved Fosse because he was a renegade and there was such a dark side to him,” she would later say. She also sensed that Fosse, not unlike herself, was “profoundly lonely.” It was that familiar sense of longing for something unexplainable that drew her to him—“I understood that loneliness,” she reflected. For his part, Fosse was transfixed by this young woman who, beyond her beauty, had an air of sadness and an elusive mystery that he found irresistible. He was accustomed to women throwing themselves at his feet, be it at a dance audition, on a film set, or on the street. Jessica was unlike anyone he had met before in Holly56

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wood or in the theater. He was later quoted as saying, “With Jessica I never knew where I stood. But I always knew I stood in line behind someone else.” What he also responded to was her almost desperate need to channel her creative energy—it was a distinct kind of hunger only another artist could fully understand. “I just love that hunger, that feeling with people who haven’t quite made it yet, who have all this talent and nowhere to put it,” he once told an interviewer. Jessica’s desire to work would eventually inspire him to write a part just for her that would forever induct her into his cinematic iconography. Beyond the fantastical, nocturnal escapades on the depraved side of Times Square with Fosse and her romantic nights of Russian poetry with Misha, Jessica poured most of her energy into developing her craft. She began studying with the renowned acting teacher Mira Rostova, who had famously coached Montgomery Clift. Rostova would give Jessica individual tuition or sometimes would organize small-group sessions in her Lower East Side apartment. Born in 1909 in Russia, Rostova had trained in Europe before fleeing the Nazis and landing in New York, where she became involved with the Method. Starting in the mid-1940s, she gained notoriety among film directors and actors alike for being a formidable presence on movie sets, chiefly as the private acting coach to Clift, who under her tutelage became one of the most celebrated actors of his time. By the time Jessica came in contact with her, Rostova had somewhat mellowed, but she still maintained her stern persona. Always impeccably dressed, exuding classic European chic, she spoke in a heavily accented voice, rarely smiled, and was generally regarded with fear. The actor and drama coach Jennifer Collins, who was also Rostova’s student around that time, remembers that she was “scared to death” of her. “She was a tough lady,” Collins says. “She certainly wasn’t nice. She hardly ever complimented anyone on their work. I remember once she told me I did good, and I almost fainted. To get a compliment from her was like winning an Oscar.” Although Rostova had come from the Stanislavsky tradition, she developed her own, distinctive technique. Unlike Warren Robertson, who encouraged Jessica to access her own emotional bank to create a character, Rostova insisted that the actor’s inner world was not the key to a good performance—the answer was always in the text. “Always pay attention to the script—What is the writer trying to say?” she would tell her students. “It was always about the language choice that the writer made and about what was the message that the script tried to convey,” says Jennifer Collins. “In that sense, it was healthy; it diverted your attention from yourself and focused 57

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you on what was going on in the story that you’re trying to tell.” Rostova discouraged overacting and excessive mannerism—she insisted that if a play or script were well written, and if actors understood what they were attempting to say with the story, the words would essentially carry them through the performance. Up to that point in Jessica’s artistic development, language had never really entered the picture—first with painting, then with dance and mime, and even in her early work at the HB Studio, she had rarely considered the power of the spoken word. Working with Rostova brought her back to the days when as a young girl she would be hypnotized by the language of Tennessee Williams. She recalled the powerful impression his words had on her, particularly when spoken by Vivien Leigh, whose delivery continued to haunt her for years. Jessica would remain a highly intuitive actor—she never committed herself religiously to any one technique. She instead took what Rostova gave her and added it to an ever-growing kit of experience from which she could later pick and choose the tools she needed to craft her own brand of magic.

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By 1978, Jessica was growing increasingly frustrated by the lack of opportunity for development. Dino De Laurentiis failed to find any suitable parts for her in his movies, despite still having her under contract, and he did little to promote her availability with his competitors. For a time, he considered her for the lead role in Hurricane but eventually gave the part to Mia Farrow. Jessica auditioned for a number of films, although she found the process nerveracking and was further discouraged when all the roles she tried for went to other actresses. These roles included the female lead in Goin’ South, opposite Jack Nicholson, who would also direct—which went to another New York waitress turned actress, Mary Steenburgen. Steenburgen would later remember auditioning in Hollywood and not having enough money for a plane ticket back to New York, when Nicholson told her, “Don’t worry, you’re on the payroll now,” at which point she realized she had gotten the part. Jessica’s audition was good, and she and Jack had good chemistry, but the timing was not right—it would take another project to pair them together in the future. She also read for Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro to play the female lead in Raging Bull. She was encouraged when the two seemed highly impressed with her audition, and for a time she believed she would be cast in the part. As she later recalled, at the last minute “this girl (Cathy Moriarity) walked in, 58

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and she was The Person, and she was great in it.” As with Jack, Marty and Bobby would one day come knocking at her door, but for the time being she remained jobless. She continued to study, and she also tried to convince Bob Fosse to make a movie out of the Frances Farmer autobiography, which she had re-read many times since she was introduced to it in Warren Robertson’s class. Fosse seemed interested, but his cup was already overflowing with projects, including directing and choreographing his Broadway show Dancin’ and preparing to shoot his latest movie, All That Jazz. In March 1978, Jessica accompanied Fosse to the opening of Dancin’ at the Broadhurst Theatre, where the show was rapturously received by critics. He celebrated with a huge party at his favorite restaurant, the Tavern on the Green in Central Park, Jessica by his side. The following day the New York Post published a photo of the two, declaring Fosse the “Dancin’ King of Broadway” and referring to Jessica as his “favorite lady.” That summer, Fosse worked tirelessly on preparing for the filming of All That Jazz, which was due to begin in October. The story of a celebrated director and choreographer, Joe Gideon, who slides down a slippery slope of self-destruction toward a perfectly staged death was essentially an autobiographical piece in which Fosse attempted to recon with all his demons—past ones, present ones currently haunting him, and future ones whose arrival he anticipated. After Richard Dreyfuss dropped out, Fosse cast Roy Scheider in the role of his alter ego. Scheider had fought hard to get the part, seeing in it an opportunity to prove that he could play a character vastly different from his usual incarnations as cops, secret agents, and small-town sheriffs. Others in the cast included Leland Palmer as Gideon’s dancer ex-wife, thought to have been based on Fosse’s real-life former spouse and dance partner Gwen Verdon, as well as Ann Reinking, who despite having been his on-again off-again girlfriend since 1972, still had to audition for the role numerous times. The part of Angelique, the Angel of Death in the disguise of a perfectly beautiful woman, was not originally intended to appear in the movie, but Fosse had been conceiving the character for some time. He planned to offer the role to Jessica as a kind of valentine—in a way, she would always represent the illusive perfection, the one who got away. Who better to scoop him out of this world when the time came? Jessica saw the part as the perfect illustration of Fosse’s irreverence and his dark sense of humor. “That was Fosse, he was really something,” she told Stephen Colbert in 2017. “It was his fantasy of how he wanted to die. It was classic Bobby. A beautiful young woman comes to gather you up when your time is done.” Some also speculated that the character was a 59

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tribute to Fosse’s second wife, Joan McCracken, who died in 1961 at the age of forty-three. Jessica was moved by Bob’s generosity—he would be the first director to hire her after King Kong, and by doing so, she believed, he would somehow break the curse. “He really wanted me to work, and he wanted to create this character for me. He was just a really dear friend, very loyal, and fiercely supportive.” To appear in All That Jazz, though, Jessica had to seek De Laurentiis’s permission, which he initially refused to grant her. Already fed up with the artistic limbo she was in and the fact that in the almost two-year period since the release of Kong De Laurentiis had failed to find any suitable projects for her, Jessica asked to be released from her contract. He reluctantly agreed to let her go. It was a brave move on her part—aside from the few weeks of work with Fosse, she had no other prospects of employment, and parting ways with De Laurentiis also meant that the considerable salary he had been paying her would stop. But the break had to be made—she had always lived her life according to her intuition, without fear. She had found that the best things always happened when she took the leap toward the unknown. “I am not a fearful person,” she once said. If she was ever to become a true actor, she knew she had to let go of her safety net and once more let the course of destiny take her where it may. The production started in October 1978, with Jessica’s scenes to be filmed at the end of the shooting schedule. The film quickly ran over budget, and Fosse struggled to convince Columbia Pictures to keep pouring in additional funding. As the production reached the $10 million mark, the studio flatly refused to invest any more money and told Fosse to wrap things up before he was able to shoot the scenes involving Jessica as the Angel of Death. The situation was becoming hopeless, as Jessica remembered; “every time I came to set, we didn’t know if we’d be able to shoot, [and] they threatened to shut Bobby down every day.” Unbeknown to Fosse, Roy Scheider pleaded with the studio on his behalf, finally securing funding from an old friend, Alan Ladd Jr. of 20th Century-Fox, who agreed to put forward additional funds in exchange for distribution rights to the film. An agreement was finally reached, and Fosse was able to complete the movie in accordance with his vision. Jessica worked on her scenes throughout the early weeks of 1979 at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens. Fosse purposefully waited until the end of the filming schedule to shoot the scenes in which Joe Gideon converses with his Angel because he wanted to capture precisely the right mood and write lines 60

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that would complement the rest of the movie. Jessica was nervous, but she trusted Fosse, and although by this time their romantic relationship had fizzled out, their unique bond remained. He directed her with all the love and admiration he had always felt for her—and through his lens and the masterful cinematography of Giuseppe Rotunno, she truly appears otherworldly on-screen. The movie’s final scene assured Jessica a permanent spot not only in Bob Fosse’s cinematic world but also in the wider context of film history. The haunting dolly shot, with the camera drawing closer toward Angelique and signaling the end of Joe Gideon’s time on the stage of life, remains one of the most iconic moments of 1970s cinema. When All That Jazz was released in December 1979, it became a major artistic triumph. Critics compared it favorably to Fellini’s 8½, and many considered it Fosse’s crowning achievement. Jessica’s part, although vital to the movie’s structure, was too small to receive major critical attention. Nor did it do much to convince her critics that she had something to offer as an actor. Despite the movie receiving some major accolades, including the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and nine Oscar nominations, Jessica’s performance was seen at the time as little more than decorative. Vincent Canby of the New York Times noted rather cruelly that she had played Angelique “prettily and vacuously,” hardly a review she could be proud of. Even before the film’s release, Jessica attempted to take control of her own narrative and her image, such as it was, by hiring a public-relations agent to help her secure some positive press. Myrna Post, who today at nearly eighty is still bursting with infectious energy, remembers the short time she worked for Jessica as a happy experience: “She was beautiful, smart, very intelligent—very liberal politically. We worked really well together; she knew exactly what she wanted. She was frustrated by the way the industry thought of her, how she was treated as this blond bimbo—and let me tell you, she was anything but.” In March 1979, Jessica was featured on the cover of Interview Magazine, and the long article inside centered on an interview by Andy Warhol and Bob Colacello. Post remembers accompanying Jessica to lunch at Interview’s Union Square HQ, where the rather surreal meeting took place. “Jessica was nervous, although she knew Andy a little from her days with Antonio Lopez,” says Post. “It was a big deal to be on the cover of Interview; it was a kind of highbrow, artsy magazine at the time—everyone read it.” Warhol’s rather frantic questioning, which jumped from topic to topic, did little to showcase Jessica as the serious artist she wanted to be seen as, but the conversation, which ends with Fran Lebowitz dropping in and 61

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admitting to having seen King Kong, remains an iconic piece of 1970s journalism. As Fosse was busy in the editing room, putting the pieces of his epitaph together, Jessica found herself drifting on the wide, open waters. As the summer approached with no prospects of employment, she began to weigh her options again—What were they exactly? Keep auditioning, keep trying for plays, regional theater—anything would do. Then she was offered a stint in summer stock—a lead in a comedy titled Angel on His Shoulder, about a beautiful book illustrator who falls in love with a married man. Just as he’s about to leave his family, she receives a visitation from a mysterious hunk who turns out to be her guardian angel. It was hardly the kind of material she was hoping for, but it did mean a slim paycheck and a chance to perform in front of a live audience. As she was getting ready to leave for North Carolina, where the play was to be staged, she received a call from Bob Rafelson. He had been searching for her, and she was not an easy lady to track down, he told her. He was casting his latest movie, a new adaptation of James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, and he wanted to talk to her about the part of Cora, a frustrated Depression-era wife of a drive-in theater proprietor. Rafelson had seen King Kong when it first came out, and he never forgot Jessica. Somehow the image of the young actress stayed with him, stashed away in the back of his mind. Now, more than two years later, she suddenly returned to his thoughts with a new force. Whatever happened to her after the De Laurentiis picture? After making some inquiries around town, Rafelson found out that she had made only one film appearance since—in Bob Fosse’s yet unreleased movie—and that she was now living in New York. She was currently getting ready to appear in summer stock somewhere in the Deep South. Even from such a limited amount of information, it was clear that she was no ordinary Hollywood ingénue, and Rafelson’s interest was further aroused after the short phone conversation with the lady herself. She told him, yes, she would love to talk to him about the part, but she was leaving for North Carolina and would not be back in New York for several weeks. In the meantime, she had also been offered a part in the movie How to Beat the High Cost of Living, which would begin shooting in the fall. It seemed the only way to meet the illusive actress was for Rafelson to get on the plane and head for North Carolina. “If you do, don’t worry about seeing the play,” she told him. “It stinks on ice.”

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t was a humid summer night when the Hollywood director finally arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina. He had been traveling for many hours, hoping to see the play being performed at the local theater. His watch told him it was just past 1:00 a.m., hours after the evening performance had ended. A taxi drove him to the motel where the star of the show was staying. He intended on getting some sleep before meeting her in the morning. The desk clerk informed him that Ms. Lange had been expecting him: “She’s on the telephone right now. Why not go up to her room and see her right away?” Rafelson went upstairs and knocked on the door. A moment went by, after which the door opened, revealing a young woman dressed in a silk negligee, pressing a telephone receiver to her neck. She smiled, told him to come in and wait while she finished her call. Rafelson sat down and observed her carefully. She continued her conversation: her voice was warm and melodic, yet there was an undertone of impatience and an almost manic energy that she barely managed to contain. She moved with feline grace, and he noted that her hands were particularly expressive: she would stroke her neck, put her hand to her chest as she laughed, or lightly touch her lips with the tips of her fingers. He noticed all this first before being struck by how beautiful she was. It wasn’t the kind of ostentatious Hollywood beauty he was used to seeing; there was something distinctly unique about her, a quality of bohemian arrogance mixed with an innocent, almost childlike wonder. Beyond all that, there was an erotic torrent in every move she made, a kind of carnal yearning that turned her telephone conversation into a symphony of seduction. Rafelson was bowled over. Years later he recalled his initial reaction: “I thought, if she can be as natural in front of the camera as she is right now, she will be a gigantic star and a brilliant actress as well.” It was only after Jessica finished talking on the phone that Rafelson realized nearly an hour had passed since he had entered her room. By then, he was completely under her spell, 63

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convinced that should the camera capture even half of what he had just witnessed, he would have his star. A screen test was quickly arranged, but unlike for King Kong there was to be no fuss, no studios. Rafelson shot the test with a handheld camera, with Jessica delivering a selection of lines from a rough version of the script, all adding up to no more than twenty minutes of footage. Rafelson shot two more short tests in the coming days. The hard-boiled classic The Postman Always Rings Twice had been filmed before, most notably in 1946, with Lana Turner playing Cora and John Garfield as her lover, but also in 1943 with an Italian version, Ossessione, the first feature film directed by Luchino Visconti, which Rafelson called “one of the dullest movies of all time.” This new adaptation was Jack Nicholson’s idea. Nicholson, by this point one of the biggest names in American cinema, had already made three films under Rafelson’s direction, including Five Easy Pieces, which had made him a star and brought him his first Best Actor Oscar nomination more than a decade earlier. The part of Postman’s antihero, Frank Chambers, a drifter who gets tangled up in a murderous affair, appealed to him, and the fact that John Garfield had previously played the part made it all the more attractive. Nicholson felt a special affinity with Garfield, and Rafelson agreed that Nicholson’s career and screen presence followed a somewhat similar pattern. They had discussed the possibility of filming the book a few times throughout the 1970s, and along the way different actresses were considered for the part of Cora (MGM insisted they hire Raquel Welch, a suggestion that Nicholson rejected). Both Jack and Bob agreed that this version would have to be radically different from the previous adaptations to justify its very existence, and the main element setting it apart would be a strong, highly visual emphasis on the obsessional nature of the sexual bond between the two main characters. Rafelson later said: “In order for a film like this to work, with the intensity of the relationship, the passion between the actors was key; it is essentially what the film is about. It seemed to me that I had to make absolutely sure that they would have that kind of chemistry.” Once Rafelson became serious about going ahead with the film, he began his search for the right actress to portray Cora. Among the early contenders was Meryl Streep, fresh from her Oscar-winning role in Kramer vs. Kramer and quickly becoming the most sought-after young actress in America. She was initially interested but then rejected the part, reportedly asking whether Nicholson would be willing to show the same amount of skin as she was required to. In any case, 64

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Rafelson wasn’t convinced Streep was right for the part, and if she hoped to be lured by the director, he already had his sights set on someone else. “It was complicated because Jessica hadn’t become a star as yet,” he later explained. “Eventually I persuaded everyone that she was not only sexier than other candidates for the role, but that she was also an extraordinary actress.” Upon returning from his trip to North Carolina, with the video tape of Jessica’s test in hand, Rafelson went straight to see Jack Nicholson. As they sat down to watch the rough footage, Rafelson recalls that about thirty seconds into the recording, Nicholson slowly leaned forward, carefully observing the woman on the screen, before whispering, “Good Lord, this changes everything.” He had not seen Jessica since she had tested for Goin’ South, a role he had passed on her for; now he was seeing something he had failed to notice the first time around. There were other actresses waiting to audition— insisting on it, in fact. A leading role in a Rafelson/Nicholson picture was a highly coveted job, and so in the months that followed Rafelson was swamped with work. Aside from auditioning potential Coras, he also scouted for locations, oversaw preproduction, and revised the script, which was being written by the playwright David Mamet. It was reported that he eventually saw about 130 actresses, including Kim Basinger, but Rafelson later claimed that he had known all along that Jessica was the only possible choice. In fact, in the early hours following their first meeting in North Carolina, Rafelson had written Jessica’s name on a piece of paper, which he had sealed inside an envelope. It was a symbolic gesture, a director wanting to stay true to his initial instinct and to remember it in case things got complicated later.

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The stint in summer stock was hardly a rewarding experience. When not on stage, Jessica spent most of her time alone or on the phone to Misha or to her friends in New York or to her sisters. Nor could she be proud of her work in the play—the material was second-rate and did little to challenge her. To make things worse, the producers, wanting to ensure ticket sales, highlighted her King Kong past in the publicity materials plastered all over town. Jessica was glad when the run was over, and she could put the experience behind her. In late August 1979, she traveled to Eugene, Oregon, to begin work on How to Beat the High Cost of Living, opposite costars Jane Curtin and Susan Saint James. The film told a story of three female friends who, driven to desperation by their respective financial situations, plot to rob a local mall. The 65

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script was as vapid and daft as the story line suggests, and Jessica was well aware that she was not making a masterpiece, but it was a fun shoot, and she was able to use the experience as a chance to practice her skills before the camera. She managed to add a certain amount of wit and charisma to the part, which otherwise required her to do little beyond look gorgeous in a series of stylish outfits. The movie was released in the summer of 1980 and went almost completely unnoticed. Incidentally, only a few months later, another comedy about three women in distress became a huge commercial and critical success. 9 to 5 bore many similarities to How to Beat the High Cost of Living, not least the appearance of Dabney Coleman as the reprehensible male figure, but the Jane Fonda–produced hit had the advantages of a far superior script, an important social message, and a catchy theme song (courtesy of Dolly Parton, whose appearance in the movie was yet another huge advantage). When discussing her early career in 1984, Jessica asked a journalist, “Did you ever see How to Beat the High Cost of Living?” “No,” the reporter admitted frankly. “You’ll live,” she responded with a smirk.

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“When I came off of King Kong, there was this dismissive notion, ‘not a serious actor’ or ‘a flash in a pan’ or ‘What can she really do?,’ and it stung,” Jessica said in 2015. “I certainly then went out of my way to work against it.” When Rafelson first called her about Postman, he filled her with hope. She quickly bought a copy of James Cain’s novel and took it with her on the journey to North Carolina. Using the book and her own imagination, Jessica invented an elaborate back story for the character that would give Cora life and at least in part justify her actions: “This was a midwestern girl, unusually pretty for the little midwestern town that she comes from. She wins a beauty contest, is sent to Hollywood to do a screen test, ends up there, and of course nothing happens. She ends up down on her luck, it’s the Depression, and suddenly there’s this man who offers her a certain kind of security and stability, so she ends up marrying someone she doesn’t like. The key with this film was that it was set during the Depression; that in itself was a personality.” Jessica had been fascinated by the Great Depression since childhood, when she heard stories about it from her father and when she devoured books such as Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. That time of extreme hardship could create stories of both great heroism and, as with Postman, desperation and crime—it was the dark side of human nature that interested Cain. In 66

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many ways, Jessica could relate to Cora—their backgrounds were similar, as were their desire to escape a small town and their reluctance to return home humiliated and defeated. Jessica knew all too well what it felt like to wait tables while dreaming of a more exciting life. They also shared some deeper personality traits, such as a volatile temperament and fervent sensuality. During the months of uncertainty while she waited for Rafelson’s decision, Jessica worked on the part, studying the script and the novel with the help of her new acting coach, Actors Studio–trained Sandra Seacat, whom Rafelson had recommended. Jessica was at first reluctant to work with Seacat. After having studied with at least three different teachers in the space of three years, she was becoming more skeptical about a structured approach to the art of acting: “The problem with a lot of acting teachers and schools is this horrendous thing of trying to teach you to act. . . . And it’s really not that,” she commented at the time. Despite her reservations, she decided to meet with Sandra, not least to appease Rafelson. From their first class, something clicked between the two women. Jessica felt at ease, and there was an almost mystical aura of calmness and serenity about Sandra. The first question she asked Jessica was, “Who are you?” to which Jessica responded without hesi­ tation, “I’m a kid from Minnesota.” She surprised herself with the answer— that the essence of her identity should be so deeply rooted in the place she had run away from with such fervor puzzled her. It dawned on her that perhaps it was time to reevaluate her own origin story—maybe her most precious inner treasures came from the shadows of the North Woods. With the help of Sandra Seacat, she was able to access those previously uncharted inner areas and for the first time truly apply them in her work. Sandra also introduced the importance of relaxation and meditation to Jessica’s evolving process—she was already drawn to the mysticism of the East, and under Sandra’s influence she began to explore the practice of yoga and the teachings of Buddhism. In late autumn, Rafelson asked Jessica to do another screen test, this time with Nicholson. She knew that it was the ultimate challenge—if she and Jack had the necessary chemistry, the part would be hers. A few days after shooting the test, Jessica received an envelope in the mail. Inside was a piece of paper with her name on it. It was the same one Rafelson had sealed in the envelope months earlier, after he had first met Jessica in North Carolina. Now it was official: she would play Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice. “The first time anybody viewed me seriously was when I did Postman. I am forever indebted to Jack and Bob for taking a chance; I’m sure they must 67

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have had some doubts.” If they had indeed harbored any uncertainty as to whether Jessica would be able to carry the part, their doubts were extinguished within days of the production starting in the remote part of Santa Barbara, California, in January 1980. Jessica possessed a kind of natural quality, an electrifying sensuality, that made Nicholson work hard to keep up with her and keep her from stealing all the scenes from him. There was an obvious chemistry between them and a sexual tension that filled the set even when the camera wasn’t rolling. “There’s something extremely sexy about Jack and very attractive,” Jessica would later say. “You get sucked in when playing these parts; I was just wild about him.” Despite the undeniable attraction between them, Rafelson found it hard to relax Jessica before the camera enough to really showcase all the sexual energy brewing under the surface. “You don’t have to work very hard to make Jessica Lange erotic on screen. What I had to do was spend a lot of time to get Jessica to be relaxed about her sexuality.” Particularly worrying for Jessica were the elaborate love scenes Rafelson planned for the film. About fifteen minutes into the movie, Frank Chambers, apparently reading the signs of Cora’s provocative body language, decides to make his move, and through a violent seduction he awakens her longrepressed desire. What follows is one of the steamiest sex scenes ever included in a mainstream film, certainly up to that point. To make Jessica as relaxed as possible, Rafelson closed the set, allowing only himself and the cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, present. They shot the scene with two hand-held cameras, each focusing on different visual elements. The initial seduction took many hours to shoot, with Nicholson following each take with an exasperated, “You gettin’ tired, aren’t ya, honey?” The shooting of the actual sex scene on the flour-covered table went smoothly. The effect was so believable that after the film’s release, some critics alleged that the sex was not simulated and that the actors’ intimate parts are visible. In fact, they aren’t, and Rafelson passionately defended his actors and his film, fighting with the ratings board against giving it an X rating. “Perhaps because the film is so erotic, people tended to see things that they weren’t actually seeing,” he later remarked in an interview. Jessica trusted Jack and Bob, and the sensitivity with which they handled the scene made her comfortable and open to exploration. Some years later, she said of the experience: “It wasn’t hard at all; there was nothing difficult about it. I suppose if you want to get into the whole area of privacy or intimacy, I was always really comfortable with Jack and with Bob, and we set it up in such a way which made me comfortable. I liked it because it was taking a chance. I come from that whole period of time of experimental and 68

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underground filmmakers, trying to do something different, and that film had that feeling.” Jessica had come a long way from those first clumsy steps she had taken on the set of King Kong little more than three years earlier. The time spent in New York, the studying, the desperate uncertainty, and the desire to break out of the mold into which the industry had placed her—all helped to create an actor of great emotional depth and skill that far exceeded her limited onscreen experience. She was cautious to come out of her shell, careful not to embarrass herself in front of the man who was possibly America’s greatest living actor—or at least currently the most celebrated male movie star. She later reflected on Nicholson’s kindness and the spirit of camaraderie that permeated the set and allowed her to shine. “He was really good to me. I hadn’t done that much film before that; he made sure that I knew all the tricks of the camera, how best to utilize it. He was a real great friend.” The shooting of Postman was drastically different from anything Jessica had experienced up to that point. For the first time, she felt as though she were part of an ensemble of artists trying to create something together. Rafelson chose a remote location situated in the picturesque mountains outside Santa Barbara, where the sets were constructed from scratch, with every detail carefully designed to replicate the authentic feeling of the Depression. The cast and crew lived in this isolation for the shoot’s duration, which lasted from January to May 1980, creating something of a commune. Jessica and Nicholson grew very close, a kind of intimate closeness that, at least in Jack’s view, was necessary for their scenes in the film to come across as authentic. He later told Vanity Fair: “To open up the area of erotic acting, we had to establish some kind of on-set society so that . . . I didn’t want to be holding back, and yet I didn’t want Jessica to feel like she had to lock herself in at night for fear I’d be crawling naked through her window.” The right balance was obviously reached for Jessica to feel comfortable because she has never suggested anything other than complete satisfaction with her time on the film. “It was all very mysterious. It was like a dream time. It was great,” she said in 1988, a sentiment she repeated on numerous occasions before and after that. For his part, Nicholson remarked that it was exciting to witness “the birth of a great actress.” After the film wrapped in May, Jessica felt worn out, but there was also a great sense of accomplishment. She believed that they had made a great film, and she was satisfied with her work in it—it was the first time she had walked away from a movie feeling as though she had participated in something that 69

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was worthwhile. She went back to New York to be reunited with Misha, who was now living in the city full time, having been appointed the artistic director of the American Ballet Theater. Jessica used part of her Postman salary to purchase a piece of land in Minnesota, not far from where her parents were living. It was a beautiful plot, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the familiar forests of birch and pine, which signified to her the magical dreams of childhood. She knew that this would be her refuge, a wild escape from whatever life might throw her way. Whether it was the sessions with Sandra Seacat or her own soul searching, she had realized that for better or worse this was the land she came from, a world away from Hollywood and Vine and from the crowded streets of Manhattan that she could always return to and regain balance. In time, she built a spacious log cabin, which remains her chosen place to seclude herself from the pressures of modern life. That summer she also discovered she was pregnant. Neither she nor Misha had planned to start a family, and yet there was no doubt in Jessica’s mind that this baby would be a great gift. Their daughter, whom they named Alexandra (after Misha’s mother), was born on March 5, 1981, in Stillwater, Minnesota, where Jessica had been staying with her family. The girl was nicknamed “Shura,” and for Jessica it was love at first sight. Sure, things would not be easy—for all the love she and Misha had for each other and would subsequently have for their daughter, the transition into being a family unit was one they just wouldn’t be able to make. The Postman Always Rings Twice premiered a couple of weeks after Shura’s birth. Reactions were mixed: some critics felt that Rafelson failed to deliver a movie that justified remaking a Hollywood classic, others that the steamy, exciting first half was let down by the convoluted and confused second. With few exceptions, though, most critics were united in their praise for Jessica’s performance, with some, such as Roger Ebert, stating that she had “overshadowed” Nicholson. She was proud of the good notices but felt annoyed at the overall mixed reception of the film: “People whined about how Postman didn’t live up to the original. But that was so much bullshit,” she later said. “It was actually, I think, an amazing film, and I still see people stealing bits and pieces from it.” Among those criticizing the new version was Lana Turner, the star of the classic version, who called Rafelson’s film “pornographic trash”—although she admitted to not having seen the complete movie. Rafelson, too, was enraged by having his film compared to the earlier versions. He resented it being called a “remake”: “I don’t give a fuck about the 70

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other directors. What do they know about making violent, dirty movies? This is why I made the movie, because they didn’t do it.” In May, Jessica and baby Shura traveled to Cannes, where the film would end up being screened out of competition. The press had a field day. Here was an actress who obviously wasn’t going to play the Hollywood game: she was beautiful, but her glamour was natural, careless, bohemian. She had just had a baby by the world’s most renowned ballet dancer, yet he was not by her side, and there was no mention of a wedding or even of engagement. Furthermore, she was still married to another man, about whom no one seemed to know much. In any case, she refused to discuss either one with the press. She was serious about her craft but made it clear that her child came first—or at least went along with her wherever she went. Fame wasn’t what she was after. And yet fame came, and with the paparazzi shouting her name, crowds pushing up against her, and cameras flashing in her face, she was overwhelmed. This circus had nothing to do with work, with developing her craft, with acting. When Jessica returned to New York from Cannes, she knew exactly what kind of actor she didn’t want to be. Serendipitously, there was a part waiting for her, one that she had longed to play for the past five years, that would allow her to express much of the frustration that had been boiling inside her since King Kong.

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n her conversation with Andy Warhol and Bob Colacello for Interview Magazine in early 1979, Jessica had said: “There’s one project I want to do so badly, I can’t tell you. In fact, last year I tried to get the rights to the book, and it was owned by somebody already, and I met with the people and talked to them, and they said that they were working on the script, and it was now being developed, and sooner or later they were going to do a TV movie of the week. I don’t know if you remember the actress, Frances Farmer? Her story is just incredible.” To her disappointment, nothing came of the project—at least not until 1983, when a TV movie of Frances’s life would indeed be made. It would star Susan Blakely, the actress whom Jessica first heard read from Farmer’s autobiography Will There Really Be a Morning? during their acting class in the mid-1970s. What Jessica was unaware of, though, was that while she was playing Cora in Postman, someone else was putting together plans to film a big-screen version of Frances’s story. Graeme Clifford was by this time one of the most renowned film editors in the business, having worked on such acclaimed productions as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Don’t Look Now. As fate would have it, he also happened to have been hired as an editor on the latest Bob Rafelson film. At the same time, Clifford was busy trying to make the transition into directing. Like Jessica, he had been fascinated by Frances Farmer for some time, and he now felt that directing a film about her life would make for a perfect directorial debut. The film was being developed by Mel Brooks’s production company, Brooksfilms, with a script cowritten by Christopher DeVore and Eric Bergren and later reworked by Nicholas Kazan. In 1972, two years after Frances’s untimely death, the controversial autobiography was published. Many claimed that it was largely fabricated and ghostwritten—it was a scene depicted in that autobiography that both Jessica and Susan Blakely had performed in Warren Robertson’s acting class. A few years 72

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later, William Arnold, a young journalist from Seattle, Farmer’s hometown, conducted his own investigation into Frances’s story and published his findings in a book titled Shadowland. The book has since also been proven to be filled with myths and inaccuracies, most notably in its claim that Frances underwent a lobotomy, which in fact she most probably did not. It was this book that became the basis for the film’s script, which thus subsequently went on to perpetuate many of its falsehoods. Mel Brooks had considered other directors for the film, including David Lynch, who had made The Elephant Man for his company, but he eventually agreed to give Clifford a chance, not least because as a first-time director Clifford would come with a much cheaper price tag. Frances Farmer’s story is an enigma, not so much a Hollywood tragedy as an American tragedy, a shocking fable of wasted talent and crushed spirit. When Frances died in 1970, few people remembered her name. She had once been one of the most promising actresses in America, a rising Hollywood star and a Broadway sensation, equipped with beauty and rare intelligence. What exactly went wrong was something no one could quite agree on. Was it the crushing, vindictive power of the Hollywood studios, an overbearing and narcissistic mother, mental illness, subversive politics? Despite the two books, Frances was largely forgotten outside of Hollywood. There, however, the news of a meaty new role traveled fast. The biggest and in some cases most unlikely names were considered for the part. Agents all over town tried to hunt Clifford down, asking for the script and assuring him that their clients were perfect for the role and committed to the project. It is likely that had Clifford not been editing The Postman Always Rings Twice at the very same time, Jessica Lange would never have made it through the sea of more established Hollywood players. Clifford later remembered: “I was looking at Jessica every day on the editing machines, and it became obvious to me that she was the perfect choice for this part. The more I saw her work, and the more I knew her personality, the clearer it became. She, like Frances, has this sort of allergy to Hollywood. She never really felt comfortable here. And so she had that crucial element built in.” He would tell Brooks that even if he were not chosen as the director, Jessica Lange was the only actress capable of playing the role and that they could not pass on her. He even went so far as to share some rough footage of Postman before its release to strengthen her chances of being cast. For Jessica, this was a dream come true. The one role she had longed to play was suddenly there, offered to her, without even an audition—or at least 73

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that was the way she understood the situation. When Clifford called to ask if she would be interested in the part, she instantly said yes, and when the two went to see Mel Brooks, Jessica was convinced she was going as a star of the film accompanying her director. In fact, Brooks had not yet approved her casting, and with the likes of Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, and Jane Fonda expressing interest, it was far from sure that he would agree to give the role to Jessica, who was at the time still far from a household name. Upon meeting her, however, he was greatly impressed. Here was a woman sure enough of her talent that she wasn’t even trying to convince him to cast her; she instead spoke confidently of Frances, exhibiting a deep and complex understanding of the character. If the part means that much to her, would she do it for nothing? Brooks asked. “Sure,” she responded without hesitation. “I don’t know if she meant it,” he later joked, “but the Jew in me always asks that question. You never know, you can get lucky.” After the meeting was over, Brooks called Clifford: “You were right, she’s the one.” He later told Jessica she got the part because she had been so self-confident during their meeting—a story that would make her laugh for years. Frances became an obsession, a constant presence with whom Jessica felt a tight, almost metaphysical bond. There were many parallels between them—in some ways Jessica was at the same point in her life in which Frances lost control and lost everything. Frances had left her family home as a young woman and had gone on a controversial trip to the Soviet Union before arriving in New York, where she was determined to become a serious actress. Like Jessica, she had been swept away by Hollywood, somewhat against her will and before she really had a chance to spread her artistic wings. Both were restless bohemians, independent thinkers with left-wing affiliations, intelligent and defiant, resentful of authority. Their uncanny physical resemblance contributed further to the almost mystical atmosphere of the entire enterprise. “She touched something in my heart,” Jessica told a TV interviewer. “I really love her. There is something about her spirit, about her soul, that touched me very deeply.” Frances would prove a monumental event in Jessica’s professional and personal life. As an actor, she experienced a totally fulfilling and allencompassing role in which she was able to completely immerse herself. If Cora was an initiation, Frances marked a kind of communion, an induction into the religion of acting. Jessica once again worked on the part with Sandra Seacat, but this time she went deeper than ever before in her exploration of the character. Never having been a member of the Actors Studio, she none74

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theless revered the legendary New York school, and the fact that Seacat had worked directly with Lee Strasberg made her invaluable in Jessica’s eyes. But the Method was brought into Frances even more directly by another messenger, the high priestess of Strasberg’s religion and one of his faithful disciples, Kim Stanley, a legend in the acting world. An elusive presence in Hollywood, Stanley had made only a handful of films, but her reputation as a virtuoso of stage acting was well established. She had signed on to play the role of Frances’s mother, Lillian, and the troubled relationship between the two women would constitute the very heart of the tragedy of Frances. Jessica was both delighted and terrified at the prospect of acting opposite Stanley. From the very beginning, it became clear that Stanley would be no regular costar. She came equipped with the heavy artillery of her Studio training, and Jessica observed and absorbed every last delicate fragment of Stanley’s process. Two weeks before filming was set to begin, the two moved in together to build a kind of intimacy necessary for their on-screen relationship to be believable. Under Sandra Seacat’s careful instruction, they spent hours improvising, creating an emotional past for their characters, a reserve of mutual experiences they could draw on later. “I was in awe of her,” Jessica later admitted. For years to come, she would always say that acting opposite Stanley was the most stimulating experience of her career and that Stanley remained her acting guru. She told David Poland in 2014: “Kim Stanley is the greatest actor I have ever seen. When I am preparing for a film, I always sit down and watch The Goddess. Just to see what perfect acting is. That’s what I aspire to.” Jessica wasn’t the only one who benefited from the collaboration. Stanley later discussed Frances with the writer James Grissom: “Jessie was a ballast for me. She knew the rudiments of filmmaking, as I didn’t. I had always gone into my character and expected—demanded—that I be followed. I had never thought to learn how a film was made or how people conserved and utilized their energies. I felt like that young girl just beginning my studies again.” Their scenes in Frances are filled with an emotional intensity and authenticity that derive from the fact that much of the time they were improvising. Most days Jessica would arrive on the set unsure of what Stanley would do in their next scene. The neighbors who had lived next to the Farmers in Seattle remembered the fights between Frances and Lillian to be extremely vocal, and Jessica and Kim certainly lived up to the legend. In one particularly charged take, which they had been repeating for many hours, Jessica, acting on an impulse, suddenly slapped Kim, which in turn brought forth authentic and unexpected tears. The scene became one of the most disturbing and 75

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powerful moments in the film, a point where both characters realize their relationship is broken beyond repair. Jessica raged through the film’s most difficult scenes, including the one of Frances being dragged out of her hotel room nude and taken to a police station (which due to a fault in the setup she had to play again and again for hours) and the highly upsetting scenes shot on location in a real-life mental institution, where a member of the film crew was attacked and assaulted by one of the patients. The shoot was certainly not easy, and yet Jessica endured, working long hours, often having to repeat extremely difficult takes numerous times. Tensions arose between her and Clifford, who seemed to minimize the toll that the film’s emotional scenes were taking on her. Still an editor at heart, he constantly worried about having enough footage, shooting each scene from numerous different angles, repeating even the most demanding takes many times. Jessica sometimes felt as though she were making more than one film, and when Clifford called her one Sunday afternoon on her only day off asking if she would be willing to meet him to shoot some additional takes, she refused. He would later tell the Los Angeles Times: “Jessica didn’t have to dig deep to find out what motivated this woman. She was Frances Farmer. She just let out the stuff she usually represses.” Jessica was hurt by the comments, seeing them as Clifford underestimating the titanic amount of work she had put in the project. “It was such a weird statement for Graeme to make,” she responded at the time. “He made it sound as though I was nuts too. Whereas the role was an enormous stretch for me. The hardest thing I have ever done.” Besides Kim Stanley, other stars also noticed just how dedicated to her work Jessica was. Darrell Larson, who played the small yet memorable part of the gossip columnist Louella Parson’s two-faced spy, recalls meeting Jessica for the first time just before they were to shoot the scene in which their characters have a charged confrontation at a Hollywood party. “I walked up to her, just to introduce myself and say hi as our scene was coming up,” Larson remembers. “I knew Sam [Shepard], and I also knew that they were beginning to get it on, so as I extended out my hand, and to break the ice I said, ‘I know Sam!’ She just looked at me, stone cold, without shaking my hand. ‘I’m aware of that,’ she said. And that was it. Then we did the scene, in which she was supposed to hate me, and, of course, it went perfectly. The next time I saw her was in the makeup room, some weeks later, as we were about to shoot our second scene together—which in the movie was actually our first meeting, where she doesn’t yet know she hates me. This time she greeted 76

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me like an old friend; she was really sweet. She said, ‘Sam says hi!’ This just tells you, in a nutshell, what kind of an actress she is. There is never a moment when she is not working. Not many actors have the guts to be able to really pull that off, to be so completely absorbed in the work. She’s absolutely brilliant; I have a lot of admiration for her.” Aside from believing in the project and feeling great affinity for her character, Jessica was aided by the fact that she was falling in love. Harry York was a made-up character based in part on a real-life political organizer from Seattle, Stewart Jacobson, who may or may not have known the real Frances. The screenwriters nonetheless employed him as a narrative device to tell Frances’s story. Frances’s voice-over at the beginning of the film is quickly replaced by Harry’s—a phantom voice of reason and a source of possible salvation, which, to the audience’s frustration and bewilderment, Frances keeps rejecting. In one account, a movie reviewer overheard two women talking after having watched Frances: “I know she was independent, but that Harry York fellow seemed so decent. If you ask me, the real tragedy was that she kept pushing him away.” Harry York’s main function, as it turns out, was to distinguish the script from the book Shadowland, which the producers and writers failed to credit as the main source material. The distraction didn’t work: William Arnold, the book’s author, sued, although eventually, after a long court battle, the case was dismissed. Graeme Clifford offered the role of York to Sam Shepard, believing that his “enigmatic sexuality” would make a good on-screen match with Jessica. He arranged for the two to meet in his office because he wanted to see if his hunch was right. Shepard was nervous about the meeting, not really knowing what to expect from this blond, “definitely sexy” actress whose movie work he was not familiar with. Jessica was nervous, too. She arrived pushing baby Shura in a stroller, certainly not dressed to impress, and seemed at first more preoccupied with the baby than she was with her potential leading man. After a few minutes, Clifford decided to excuse himself under the pretense of having to make a call, leaving Jessica and Sam to talk. When he returned, the atmosphere had shifted; the two were “getting along like a house on fire,” and Jessica later told Clifford she really liked Shepard and would be happy if he played Harry. To describe Shepard as just a playwright and actor would be painfully reductive. With his plays, his lifestyle, his persona, he represented all the anguish of his generation, the same disillusioned rebellion Jessica and millions 77

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of other American youths had felt throughout the 1960s, and, like them, he found the transition into the 1970s difficult. When they met, they had already lived many lives. Shepard had become a golden boy of the off-Broadway scene while still in his twenties, and he was hailed as the most gifted young dramatist in the country, winning grants and awards, praised by critics, and adored by the new generation of theatergoers. By the time he was thirty, he felt burned out. Alienated in the very environment that had made him, he was resentful of the establishment and the political corruption tearing the country apart. His plays began to flop, and he struggled to find new ideas. While Jessica was studying mime in Étienne Decroux’s Parisian basement, Shepard wandered around London’s Hampstead Heath, dreaming up ideas for new plays. He spent two years in London, and when he finally returned to the States, he appeared matured, focused, and more anguished than ever. In 1978, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Buried Child, and to the surprise of many he also began acting in films. Jessica found Shepard infinitely interesting and unlike anyone she had ever met before. He was reserved, enigmatic, and even more resentful of publicity than she was. Electrifyingly attractive, he was nonetheless as different from a Hollywood poster boy as one could get; to Jessica, he had the look of a pioneer. The problem was that he was married and had an eleven-year-old son, while Jessica was still with Misha Baryshnikov, and their daughter, Shura, was only a few months old. And yet as they began working together on location in Seattle in October 1981, it quickly became clear to them that there was more to their mutual attraction than a passing, on-set fling. “We are destined,” Jessica would later say. “It’s destiny.” They stayed in the same hotel with the rest of the film’s cast, yet their rooms happened to be next to each other. On the first night, they all went to dinner, and Shepard could not get his eyes of Jessica, who wore a green silk, semitransparent dress, and in his own recollection she looked “astonishing.” When later in the evening their eyes met, and Jessica used her fingers to stir the ice cubes in her drink, Shepard “realized she wanted” him. That night Shepard lay awake, peering into the darkness, unable to get Jessica out of his mind and wondering if she was thinking of him on the other side of the wall. The next day they shot their first scene together, in which Frances and Harry walk along the beach and kiss. Shepard later wrote of his surprise at “how open her mouth was” during their kiss—in fact, he became so flustered that he lost balance and fell on top of Jessica, causing her to laugh and creating a spontaneous moment, which remains preserved in the final film. The scenes they share are the only 78

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instances in the movie where we see Frances at peace, able to be completely herself. The chemistry between Jessica and Shepard is magnetic—it at once transcends the film and constitutes its beating heart. In writing Harry into Frances’s fictionalized reality, the screenwriters unwittingly presented the actress who would portray her with a gift the real-life Frances was never afforded. For the time being, their relationship remained a secret. The part of Frances was all-consuming, leaving Jessica little time to stop and think about her own complicated situation. She dived headfirst into the film and into Frances’s skin, trusting that, as ever, the rest would take care of itself. Makeup artist Dorothy Pearl, who had also worked on Postman and became Jessica’s close friend, remembered later that she detected quite quickly that things with Sam were serious: “I could just tell the way her voice would change a little bit when she would discuss that ‘very interesting playwright.’ Past the organic, physical attraction, I think that there was a very deep attraction to who the other person was.” Darrell Larson, who already knew Sam and who would subsequently work with him many times over the coming years, recalls that the entire company of Frances were aware that things between the two actors were heating up. “They were trying to be discreet, but it was obvious. Everyone could see that there was something truly special between them,” Larson says. “And we also knew that it was the real deal. It was not just a fling, the kind of, ‘we’re making a movie, let’s screw,’ French Lieutenant’s Woman kinda stuff. I knew Sam’s wife, and I also knew Jessica was with Baryshnikov—in fact, he would visit the set sometimes. But I think everyone realized, without having to verbalize it, that whatever these two had going on [the] outside, this was an inevitable thing.” In January 1982, Jessica and Sam were photographed leaving the Port restaurant in West Hollywood together, and the pictures, in which Shepard can be seen throwing his jacket at the camera, caused a certain amount of controversy in the press, although no one thought much of it.

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When Frances wrapped in the early weeks of 1982, Jessica was physically exhausted and emotionally wrecked. She felt as though the filming had aged her, and she found it difficult to regain emotional balance. The pressures of motherhood, the disintegrating relationship with Misha, and the uncertainty 79

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about her future with Shepard were also taking their toll. When Kim Stanley saw Jessica some weeks after they had finished filming, she was horrified. “You should do a comedy as quickly as you can,” she advised. In fact, Jessica had been rejecting an offer to play in Sydney Pollack’s latest comedy for weeks. The film was to star Dustin Hoffman as a struggling New York actor who dresses up as a woman to get a part in a TV soap. Pollack wanted Jessica for the role of Julie, a fantasy woman wrapped in the form of a soap starlet who has a taste for white wine and terrible men and with whom Hoffman’s character falls in love. There were obvious parallels between Tootsie and Some Like It Hot, and Pollack wanted to find an actress who could evoke the kind of allure that Marilyn Monroe had projected on-screen. Having seen Jessica in both King Kong and Postman, he was convinced that she was the only one who could achieve this. Jessica loved Some Like It Hot. In Paris, whenever she had felt homesick, she would go to a particular movie house that played the Billy Wilder classic daily, and she would sit in the dark, admiring the magic of Monroe. “Nobody could play that part the way Marilyn Monroe did,” she would later say. “I must have seen Some Like It Hot a hundred times.” Despite the similarities between the two films, she at first failed to recognize the brilliance of Tootsie and the multidimensional significance of its script, which, at this stage, was still far from the final version. Both Pollack and Hoffman wanted the film to be much more than a hilarious gag—it was to be a unique take on portraying femininity, a comedic yet serious voice in the cinematic discourse on gender roles during the later years of second-wave feminism. Hoffman had been working on developing the project for years, driven by a genuine desire to explore how his life and his career opportunities might have been different had he been born a woman. Jessica saw the film simply as a comedy, a style she didn’t feel comfortable in, and her role as one dimensional and unexciting. Pollack did not give up, though, and whether it was due to his perseverance or Kim Stanley’s advice, Jessica eventually agreed to play the part. Gradually, she managed to find a way to enrich the character, carefully applying layers of nuanced yet understated subtext to Julie’s characterization. “She wasn’t written at all,” she said afterward. “In the script she is sort of roughly sketched, but she came together, I think, because both Sydney and I had similar ideas about her.” One thing she could not rise above was her insecurity about being a comedienne. Particularly coming out of Frances, the concept of making people laugh seemed especially hard, made all the more difficult by the fact that Pollack had assembled an impressive cast of renowned comedic talents. 80

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“I didn’t know how to play comedy, I’d sit there on the set and watch Billy Murray, and Dustin, and Dabney Coleman, and Teri Garr, and they were all doing all these comedic licks, they were all so funny. I’d play a scene, and then walk over to Sydney and say, ‘Sydney, I wasn’t funny,’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, you were so funny!’ And it became this standing joke, after every scene people would say, ‘You were so funny!’” Tootsie was filmed in New York, which gave Jessica the comfort of living at home and being able to look after Shura, whom she would often bring to the set along with a nanny, who watched over the baby while Jessica struggled to be funny in front of the camera. Whereas Dustin Hoffman thrived on the attention of the entire crew and the many guests and the press who frequented the set, Jessica felt uncomfortable and intimidated by the crowds. She had always preferred to work from a place of peace and contemplation, and yet she admired Hoffman and his ability to completely own his showmanship. It was clear that his performance would be marvelous, and Jessica felt painfully upstaged not only by Hoffman but also by the other woman in the company, Teri Garr. Garr, a brilliant comedienne, felt right at home, creating what was to be one of her most hilarious performances. Unbeknownst to Jessica, the emotional dark clouds that had followed her from Frances helped to shape the character of Julie into a woman of unexpected depth. What could have easily become a stereotypical cut-out character instead became a woman lost in the contemporary world, endowed with a certain sadness and vulnerability, in some ways the actual Tootsie of the title. Sydney Pollack observed the young, enigmatic actress with admiration: “You can feel she’s an artist. There’s always a little more going on than expected.” Pollack was extremely pleased with the rushes, later reflecting: “She delivered something everyone understood. You have no difficulty understanding Dustin Hoffman’s character’s immediate attraction to her; there’s something absolutely delicious about her in that role.” Jessica was styled to appear soft and dreamlike—her hair was lightened, and she was dressed in sherbet colors, but all the sweetness was offset by the very authentic aura of melancholic sadness. There’s no doubt that at least part of the anxious longing apparent in Julie came directly from Jessica’s own life at the time. Sam Shepard was in San Francisco filming The Right Stuff, a role that would bring him great acclaim and recognition. Jessica missed him painfully, wandering about the set like a ghostly specter, waiting for a phone call or a chance to fly over to see him, sometimes just for a day or two. 81

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Tootsie was completed in August 1982, and it was set to premiere later that year, along with Frances. Jessica was worn out, physically and emotionally exhausted, ready to finally enjoy some of the hard-earned benefits of her newfound success. She couldn’t have predicted how much the coming winter would change her life, and, for now, she was happy to spend time with her daughter and, whenever possible, with Sam. Just as Kim Stanley predicted, working on Tootsie had helped Jessica regain balance. She later said: “Tootsie really eased me back into real life, got me away from the character of Frances, which was just murdering me.” It seemed as though she was on the cusp of a brand-new chapter. She was a mother; she had found a man for whom she had fallen hard; and after playing Frances Farmer, she finally managed to reach a place where she could be proud of her work. The future was waiting, wide open; all she had to do was reach out and claim it.

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rances premiered on December 3, 1982. The film itself divided the critics, but Jessica’s performance was seen as phenomenal. The sheer power of her work not only carried the entire movie but also refused to be contained by it—the role would exist in the consciousness of many viewers as an entity almost entirely independent of the film to which it belonged. Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times observed that “if the rest of the film were in the same category as Lange’s performance, we would be in fine company, indeed,” while Marilyn Beck of the New York Daily News went as far as to say that Jessica gave “the best performance of the year in the worst movie of the year.” Many noted, rightfully so, that the film’s narrative structure was disjointed and lacked clarity—not to mention the numerous inaccuracies and fabrications it presented, contributing to the decades-long misinformation that continues to pervade Farmer’s story. For all the criticism, however, there is no denying that Frances is also a film of haunting beauty. Clifford’s painstaking efforts paid off in many ways. Not only was he able to capture the enormous range that his leading lady was capable of—which he achieved perhaps to a larger degree than any other director would ever do—but he also framed her performance within a carefully crafted world, which, at least aesthetically, elevates Frances above the category of standard Hollywood biopics, giving it something of an art film sensibility. This framing is due in no small part to the incredible array of behind-the-camera talent he assembled: from the production designer, Richard Sylbert, who meticulously created the movie’s period settings, to Laszlo Kovacs, who crafted the cinematography, and John Barry, who wrote the powerful score, which evokes all the dashed hopes and heartbreak of Frances’s life. In the years that followed the film’s release, Jessica’s performance as Frances would become a touchstone of acting excellence and is still seen as such today. Upon the movie’s opening, and regardless of the mixed reception it 83

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received as a whole, Jessica automatically entered the highest echelon of Hollywood’s female stars. That transition was made even more poignant not only by the fact that just a few short years earlier she had been completely discounted by the industry but also by the sheer power of her own conviction and talent as well as hard work. With a little help along the way from a few good men (and women) who believed in her, she managed to turn things around in an unprecedented way. Still more good news was to come. Just two weeks later Tootsie opened to a rapturous reception by critics, who hailed it as one of the best films of the year. If Jessica feared her performance might get overlooked among the work of the film’s stellar cast, she needn’t have worried. Next to Hoffman’s tour de force in his dual role as Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels, Jessica’s turn as Julie drew the most praise. Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice wrote in his review: “Let it be recorded for the year 2022 that in the year 1982 a bedazzled reviewer for the Voice suddenly decided that Jessica Lange was more a knockout than Frances Farmer ever was, that she was everything Marilyn Monroe was supposed to be in Some Like It Hot, and a great deal more besides, that she lit up the screen with so much beauty and intelligence that she and Dustin Hoffman were able to transform what might have petered out into a tired reprise of Charley’s Aunt into a thoroughly modernist, thoroughly feminist parable of emotional growth and enlightenment.” Pauline Kael noted that “when Jessica Lange appears, the movie changes to something calmer and perhaps richer,” adding that “she has a facial structure that the camera yearns for, and she has talent too.” What struck most reviewers was the fact that Jessica was able to create two such vastly different characters in two movies that constituted the extremes of the genre spectrum. Almost immediately, she entered the award season conversation, with her roles in both films regarded as serious contenders. Despite the mixed reception of Frances, there was no question that it would bring an Oscar nomination for its leading actress, and from the start the only real threat to Jessica’s winning was Meryl Streep’s performance in Sophie’s Choice. Streep’s turn as the Polish Holocaust survivor who tries to pick up the pieces of her broken life while carrying a dark secret was seen as revolutionary, and it had confirmed her growing reputation as arguably the most gifted young actress in America. Already having won an Oscar for her supporting role in Kramer vs. Kramer, Streep seemed unchallenged among her peers, but with the simultaneous release of Frances and Tootsie, Jessica suddenly emerged as Streep’s main rival. The press had a field day comparing 84

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and contrasting the two—and there seemed to be no clear victor in the race. Even at this early stage of her career, Streep was already seen as a master chameleon, able to disappear into a role through any means necessary—not least through her mastery of accents. In Sophie’s Choice, she not only spoke English with a Polish accent but also spoke Polish and German (many noted that she spoke the latter with a Polish rather than an American accent, which added further to the acclaim she received). Jessica, in her turn, demonstrated an emotional authenticity that many saw lacking in Streep’s work: for all her technical craftsmanship, Streep acted Sophie, however brilliantly, while, as many noted, Jessica was Frances. In fact, she had so successfully inhabited the role that to some, including her own director, the performance seemed to have come easily to her. Meryl’s titanic work is never not visible on screen, whereas Jessica manages to make the audience forget that she’s working, acting—she simply is. When the Oscar nominations were announced in February 1983, Jessica became the first actress since 1942 to receive two acting nods in the same year (as best actress for Frances and best supporting actress for Tootsie), and she remains to this day one of only nine actresses to do so. The recognition meant a great deal to her—she was finally seen as a serious artist, something she had longed for since her college days. She was also careful not to let the craze of the moment throw her off balance; although she appreciated the accolades, she saw the award season madness for what it was, later calling it “sentimental bullshit.” Her feet were kept firmly planted on the ground also because few people in her immediate surroundings seemed overtly impressed with her achievements. To folks back home, her acting career would remain something they never dwelled on, and even if Jessica secretly harbored hopes that her success would finally win her father’s approval, for Al the two Oscar nominations were apparently not impressive enough to shower his daughter with praise. Her parents’ house was bombarded by telephone calls from the press, with the ever-kind Dorothy answering as many of the questions as she could, not wanting to offend anyone. “I knew she’d make it,” she would tell them, proudly. “I knew even when she wasn’t working for so many years that she’d make it.” After a while, she grew tired of answering the phone and even considered getting the line disconnected until after the Oscar ceremony or changing the number. But Al wouldn’t hear of it. “Our daughter becomes famous, so we have the phone number changed? No way,” he told her. Some in Cloquet felt proud that Jessica was representing their close-knit community on the world stage, but the general attitude seemed indifference. 85

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Perhaps because she had never really belonged to Cloquet any more than she did to Hollywood—still the new kid at school, still the little girl trying to impress her father. A local newspaperman felt compelled to reflect that “a lot of people thought she was weird. She was very, very creative and this is a labor, blue-collar community. I think still the general feeling about her is, ‘Who cares?’ You’d think the fact that she’s up for two Academy Awards would be a big deal, but she’s never embraced the community.” Many others in town secretly admired the one who got away and “made it.” Leslie Goodell, then a nineteen-year-old sophomore student, remembered watching King Kong and being impressed that Jessica “made it out”—it meant that there was still hope for Goodell, too. “I find Cloquet very dull and narrow-minded,” she added. “The town breeds conformity. Everyone is so aware of what others are doing. You can’t be different very easily. She was different.” If the Oscars were not the main topic of conversation in Minnesota, they certainly were in Hollywood, where the race between Jessica Lange and Meryl Streep was officially on. While many predicted Streep would win, just as many supported Jessica. Andrew Sarris wrote in his Village Voice column: “As for Meryl Streep’s claims for best actress in 1982, let me go on record retroactively to say that if I had been voting for Oscars in 1936, I would have voted not for Luise Rainer, the Viennese Meryl Streep of her time, in The Great Ziegfeld, but for Carole Lombard, the Jessica Lange of her time, in My Man Godfrey. It goes almost without saying that in 1937 I would have voted not for Luise Rainer in The Good Earth, but for Greta Garbo in Camille, but that’s another story. Streep’s Sophie is flawless, prodigious, and yet somehow lacking in fire and music. I tire of her very quickly on the screen. It is now clear that she will never get very far just being, she clearly needs a Polish accent or its equivalent to display her expertise.” For better or worse, Jessica and Meryl would for many years to come be pitted against each other and presented as rivals. Streep privately often expressed her admiration for Jessica, whose expressive, sensual, and deeply intuitive style of acting stands in such direct contrast with her own. The two would get to know each other, albeit not well, and would share a warm and cordial relationship, never missing a chance to greet each other at various industry events. Jessica eventually won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Tootsie—beating her costar Teri Garr. Garr later wrote about the experience with her characteristic sense of humor: “Was it the insufferable Jessica Lange’s 86

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impeccable timing in Tootsie that won her Best Supporting Actress? Incidentally, I thought she was perfectly nice until she won the Oscar and I didn’t. Nothing personal.” When Robert Mitchum and Sigourney Weaver called out her name, Jessica shot out from her seat, her face lit by a smile that reflected both happiness and disappointment. She knew that winning the supporting actress for Tootsie meant that she would almost certainly lose to Meryl for the big prize—which she did. It would take her years to see the accolade as more than just a consolation prize. Although it was great to be acknowledged for her work in Tootsie, she couldn’t help feeling that it was her role in Frances that should have been recognized. But winning an Oscar for either role was still an incredible achievement—just a few short years after she had appeared in King Kong and not that many more since she had waited tables and dreamed of an acting career. Here she was in the same category as her idol, Kim Stanley (who was nominated for playing Lilian Farmer), and she emerged a winner. Later that night, Jessica and the heavily pregnant Meryl Streep posed together for photographers, two of the finest actresses of the moment. It seemed that at thirty-one Jessica had the industry at her feet— with the double nomination and the overwhelming critical praise, there was no doubt that she could now choose any project she liked. As outlandish as Jessica’s plan had seemed to Eugenie Bafaloukos when she had shared it with her in New York only a few years earlier, Jessica had achieved what she set out to do—she was now a movie star.

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If her professional life seemed to be well in order, her personal relationships could not have been farther from that. Simultaneously going through a divorce from Paco, still officially dating Misha, and carrying on a semisecret affair with Shepard were all too much emotional baggage to carry, even for the unconventional, free-spirited Jessica. In March 1983, a month before the Oscars ceremony, she and Misha attended a glitzy American Film Institute gala thrown in honor of John Huston. The star-studded event, with guests including Jack Nicholson, Lauren Bacall, and Ava Gardner, was a bittersweet evening for Jessica. She knew that her relationship with Baryshnikov was over—in fact, this was to be the last time they would appear in public as a couple. Just days later, she left the house they shared in New York and with Shura headed out to her Minnesota cabin. She had been carrying on a passionate affair with Sam for months, and it was becoming clear to both her and 87

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Sam that things would have to change. They tried to end it; they broke up, got back together, fought, and made up—the intensity of their feelings for each other taking both of them by surprise. What started off as a sensual, on-set liaison quickly grew beyond anything either of them had felt before—it seemed inevitable that they would end up being together for the long haul. In the spring of 1983, Sam left his wife, O-Lan, and son, Jesse, in California and, ridden with guilt, headed for Minnesota to be with Jessica. It was not the first time he had left O-Lan; he had had affairs of varying length before now, including a six-month relationship with Patti Smith, who would remain a lifelong friend. But something about this relationship was different. For all the guilt he felt about abandoning his family, Shepard surrendered himself to following what seemed to him a predestined path. His correspondence with friend and O-Lan’s stepfather, Johnny Dark, which the two conducted for more than three decades, reveals much of Shepard’s internal turmoil. From the snow-covered forest of Minnesota, he wrote to Dark that March: “Inside, my world keeps shifting always. I miss the family & Jesse & O-Lan & all of you—sometimes with a terrible sadness that seizes me completely. The thing that hurts me the most is knowing I abandoned everyone.” “Even so, I know I can’t turn back now,” he added a few lines later. “There’s still a ‘rightness’ to this new direction that I can’t deny. I love this woman in a way I can’t describe & a feeling of belonging to each other that reaches across all the pain.” For Jessica, betraying her relationship with the father of her child was also painful. Although she and Misha had never promised each other exclusivity, and she knew for a fact that he had taken advantage of the open arrangement more than she ever did, being with Sam went beyond a minor fling. It wasn’t until later that she found out Baryshnikov was in fact also having a long-term affair with the ballerina Lisa Rinehart at the very same time. Not wanting to return to New York and face having to break up with Misha following the Academy Awards, Jessica and Sam decided to remain in California. They spent their time driving around, discovering small, sleepy towns, the forgotten corners, diners, and cafés where ordinary folks would go about their business without bothering them. Shepard’s dark, poetic nature was to Jessica at once irresistible and alarming. They shared the common legacy of having grown up with an alcoholic, volatile father and within somewhat dysfunctional family dynamics, and for both of them the exploration of the dark side of family would constitute a vital part of their creative search. If the wildness of their relationship sometimes scared Jessica—she would later recall “drinking, getting into fights, walking down the freeway trying to get 88

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away”—she was also realizing that getting away from Sam was the last thing she wanted. The two drove down to New Mexico, where the sight of snow falling silently on the desert stopped them in their tracks. For a moment, they gazed at the landscape, mesmerized by its beauty. Soon they decided to rent a house in Santa Fe while they looked for a place to buy. Their first home together. From New Mexico, Shepard wrote to Johnny Dark: “Jessica just continues to amaze me. It’s as though she’s never really been loved or cared for before. She just keeps opening up to me in a way that causes the same response in me. We’re closer now than we’ve ever been & much of the posing to each other that went on during our hot & intermittent affair has dropped away.” In June, they were photographed together at a fund-raiser in Los Angeles, appearing happy, relaxed, and very much in love—apparently unconcerned about what anyone might think. Jessica knew that she had to be honest with Misha; she telephoned him from New Mexico to tell him that she was in love with Sam and that they had moved in together. “When I called Misha and said I was living with somebody else, that was the ultimate betrayal,” she would later recall. The fact that one of them might be seeing someone else, even on a regular basis, seemed acceptable—setting up housekeeping with that other person was a different matter. Apparently, according to the rather confusing rule book they lived by, she had stepped beyond the line. He hung up, and the two didn’t speak again for a long while. In later years, they would pick up their relationship as friends and supportive coparents to Shura, and they remain so today. Baryshnikov later voiced his regret at having lost Jessica, whom he loved deeply, but he felt the timing was all wrong. “It was a painful situation for all of us,” Jessica reflected on this period some years later. “I would never want to go through that again.” Despite all the turmoil in her personal life, Jessica still found time to think about her work. Although there was no shortage of scripts arriving weekly at her agent’s office, she felt uninspired by the majority of roles offered her. After years of knocking on doors, trying to convince directors to hire her, she felt good to finally be in the position to choose and say no, buffered by the knowledge that more offers would come. She came close to accepting a lead in Places in the Heart, a story of a Depression-era widow struggling to keep her farm going. She had always wanted to do a movie about the Great Depression, and the role was nuanced and interesting—by this point, however, another project was consuming her energies, and so she reluctantly passed on Places. 89

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In January 1983, Jessica was captivated by a photo she saw on the front page of the Los Angeles Times: two women shouting, their faces inflamed by rage, and a man standing beside them, resigned, vacant, defeated. The caption read: “Doug Dailey hears his farm being auctioned as his wife, Pamela Sue, and her mother shout ‘No Sale!’” The struggles of the family-run farms of the Midwest, many of which were being engulfed by the big agricultural companies—a direct effect of new policies introduced by the Reagan administration—were an issue that Jessica had felt passionately about for some time. She believed that not nearly enough was being done to help these people, and she now saw an opportunity to use her newfound influence in Hollywood to do something worthwhile. Naturally, one movie wouldn’t turn the tide of history, but perhaps she could at least shine a bright spotlight on the problem and start a wider conversation. While everyone in Hollywood was telling her that following her success in Frances and Tootsie, she could pretty much pick any role she wanted, Jessica once more decided to follow her instincts and take a gamble—she would produce her own movie. It started with a simple idea: “a family, living on a farm in Iowa, and with all that’s going on, they’re about to lose the farm to an auctioneer.” The first step was to find a writer capable of committing Jessica’s ideas to paper and creating a fully blown story and characters from the vague premise. She turned to the Texas-based publisher and writer Bill Wittliff, who had recently collaborated on a film script with Willie Nelson. Wittliff and Jessica immediately hit it off, and they seemed to have a shared vision for what the film could become. They went through a list of potential directors, eventually mutually agreeing that Hal Ashby, a filmmaker closely associated with the New Hollywood movement, would be the perfect fit. Ashby—who, in addition to having directed such cult classics as Shampoo and Harold and Maude, had also won an Academy Award for editing In the Heat of the Night—liked the idea and agreed to get on board. The three of them set out to find funding for the project. It all seemed almost too easy—they had a meeting with the Ladd Company, during which they pitched their idea, and within hours Jessica got a phone call informing her that the company would put forward the funds to make her film. What followed were months of research and work on the script with Wittliff, who regularly updated Jessica on his progress. Their correspondence from the time shows just how deeply committed Jessica was to the project. The two of them traveled to Iowa, which Jessica found “stunningly beautiful.” She later wrote to Wittliff: “The hills, corn fields, dirt roads, farm stands. Still don’t know if we should shoot there, but it has that thing we 90

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were talking about, being immediately recognizable as ‘Middle America.’ It was actually stunning.” In Iowa, they met with farmers, listened to their stories, and assessed the general mood of the moment. What struck Jessica was the sheer strength and determination showed by the women in the community—something that had captivated her in the Los Angeles Times photo and made her think of her own mother, who had kept their family together all these years. “I think you know, Billy,” she wrote to Wittliff, “I have never seen this film as a showcase for me as an actress. It should be an ensemble piece.” She nonetheless was convinced that the female character had to be the strongest link in the story. She later discussed this with an interviewer: “In doing our research, when talking to these families, we found that, in the majority of cases, it was the woman who struck out first. I’m not exactly sure why, but we found that within these families, the man really turned on himself, whereas the woman recognized it as an external force threatening her. So that was not so much a decision made by me as an actor wanting to play this type of character as what we felt was truthful to the situation.” In making the movie, Jessica wanted to honor the community she came from—the places, the people, the values. She had run from all of it, but now she was ready to speak out for it. What independent family farms meant to her, above all else, was freedom, the currency that defined the American ethos. One of the farmers she met in Iowa told her: “We’re going to be around tomorrow; we’re going to survive. But I tell you, if I lose my farm, then I’ve lost my dam[n] country.” That was something that spoke to her very clearly and something she could get behind. It was also a cause that Sam supported. Throughout the process, he was there for her, and when it came to casting, it went almost without saying that he would play the male lead. By July, Jessica and Wittliff were close to finalizing the script; they had also agreed that Iowa would be the best possible location to shoot. The production was set to commence in the fall of 1983, but then the Ladd Company suddenly withdrew from the project. Jessica was furious but determined to stick to the original plan and capture the corn harvest that year. She finally managed to secure funding from the newly formed Touchstone Films, a division of Walt Disney Company, which decided the film, at this point known only as the ‘Untitled Farm Story,’ would make a good debut feature for the studio. Shortly thereafter, Hal Ashby resigned as director, and Jessica convinced Disney to let her hire Bill Wittliff in his place—this was to be the first film he directed, although he would not get to complete the job. 91

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Jessica and Sam spent their first summer together in Santa Fe, enjoying their new surroundings and continuing to get to know one another on a more profound level. With Shura, they went on day trips and fishing escapades by the Rio Grande. They continued to look for a place to settle down permanently, eventually deciding on a beautiful log cabin that sat on seven acres of land, surrounded by magnificent views of the New Mexico landscape. Jessica wrote to Wittliff, describing her new life, telling him that “everything is good here,” while Sam echoed this in a letter to Johnny Dark, expressing his happiness at how he, Jessie, and baby Shura had entered what he described as “a new phase, where it feels like a little family.” They were reluctant to leave their idyllic new life, but as fall approached, it was time to travel to Iowa to begin filming. Jessica threw herself into work, carrying on her shoulders the heavy burden of being at once the producer and the star of the picture. For Sam, who had always treated filmmaking as more of a sideline, something he would dabble in occasionally when he needed money, it was surprising to see Jessica so focused and determined to oversee every aspect of the production. It was clear that for her it was more than just a job. Within weeks, it became apparent that although Jessica and Bill Wittliff remained good friends, they no longer shared a common vision of what their film should be. He leaned toward sentimentality and a more polished look, whereas Jessica wanted grit and realism—she felt she owed the farmers a movie that presented their plight exactly as they lived it. A mutual agreement was eventually reached that Wittliff would step down, along with his cinematographer, Neil Roach. The production was temporarily suspended, while Jessica searched for a new director to complete the film. Wittliff later said that “he didn’t come away with any sour feelings,” commending Jessica for knowing exactly what she wanted and sticking to her guns. Sam also reworked much of Wittliff ’s script, and when the production resumed under the direction of Richard Pearce, Jessica finally felt as though things were looking the way she wanted them to. By November, everyone was exhausted. The wet and windy weather and the hardships of working on location were taking their toll, and tempers were flaring. Sam wrote to Dark from the set: “I really don’t give a shit anymore. Jessie & me are closer than ever but life in the movies is just not my game so I guess I’ll just have to accept this fact that I’m hooked up with a movie star & allow her to play that out & maybe just ride along beside her on the sidelines somehow.” When not working, they would drive over the country roads, listening to Bob Dylan. On a couple of occasions, they even managed to escape for a few 92

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days, driving all the way up to the Minnesota cabin to recharge their batteries before returning to the set. The production continued to encounter difficulties, especially as heavy snowfall arrived in December. Jessica received many letters from locals who, encouraged by her interest in their issues, asked for work on the film or for support of various local causes. One of the young men who applied to work on the film early on ended up being cast as Jessica and Sam’s on-screen son. Levi L. Knebel had no acting ambitions, but his striking features bore a slight resemblance to Sam’s, and after a short screen test he was offered the part of Carlisle. In the end, he would receive some rave reviews for his performance, but he chose not to continue acting. The extreme blizzards finally forced the company to complete the filming in California, where the Ivy family house was re-created at Disney’s Burbank studio. The filming continued there into the new year, and it finally wrapped in late January 1984, nearly a month behind schedule and $2 million over budget. To Jessica, completing the film felt like a great accomplishment—she managed to deliver something she had set out to do, a picture that felt true to the situation, a tribute to the people she had known in her childhood and to the ones she had met on her recent journey to the heart of America. Her portrayal of Jewell, a woman who holds her family together through disaster, was an acknowledgment of her mother’s sacrifices. She would later say about Country: “This film was very dear to me at the time. It dealt with the Midwest and that kind of disappearing rural life in America. It was a very personal film.” The movie premiered in September 1984, opening the New York Film Festival. It was seen as an important film, especially in the Midwest, where screenings were being organized in community centers of towns too small to have a movie theater. It was also seen as part of a larger wave of films released around the same time that dealt with similar themes—Places in the Heart, which starred Sally Field in the role Jessica had turned down, and The River with Sissy Spacek and Mel Gibson. Films and Filming proclaimed that, out of all of them, Country emerged as the best. Jessica’s performance was widely praised, although some critics observed that Jewell Ivy was not so much a character as a set of virtues. Predictably, the film was not a financial hit, but it achieved what Jessica wanted all along—it opened a conversation. The following spring, she traveled to Washington, DC, to testify before Congress, along with Sissy Spacek and Jane Fonda. The event on Capitol Hill, during 93

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which the press outnumbered members of Congress five to one, was seen as little more than star-studded theatrics. Although it was unlikely that three female movie stars would have any real impact on the policy makers, the honest, heartfelt testimony they gave could not be easily dismissed. “It is heartbreaking to witness their anguish as they watch their lives being stripped away,” a visibly emotional Jessica said of the farmers she had met during the making of Country. Ronald Reagan’s diaries, published twenty years later, revealed his concern and annoyance at the popularity of Country, which he viewed as a “blatant propaganda message against our agri programs.” The film earned Jessica a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Ironically, she lost to Sally Field for Places in the Heart, but missing out on the award did not diminish her pride in the project. She would never again have as much creative freedom in making a film.

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n December 1983, while still on location in Iowa, Sam surprised Jessica by asking her to marry him. They were in a motel, where they always met after a day’s work to look at rushes. Sam swept her outside, and there, among the falling snow, with a cold wind blowing, he declared his love—Would she marry him and have his kids and live with him forever? He sealed the proposal with an antique sapphire ring. Jessica laughed and kissed him, and the two jumped around in the snow—a perfect moment. Not long before that, they had posed for a local photographer, Jessica wearing a white wedding dress and Sam a tuxedo, both borrowed from a local wedding store. The photos were to be used as props in the movie— Jewell and Gill as the typical, Middle American couple. Whether it was posing for the photographs that inspired Sam to pop the question or, as he later wrote, a sudden “overwhelming desire to conform to all the social formalities of being ‘in love’ in the old style,” the romantic proposal was to remain unfulfilled. They would never legally marry.

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In the months following Country, Jessica and Sam spent most of their time in New Mexico, settling into everyday domesticity with little Shura and forming an even tighter bond. They shared parental duties, Sam noting that “there’s a real sense of family and belonging to each other.” He continued to experience profound feelings of guilt, particularly in relation to his teenage son, Jesse, whom he missed painfully. Jessica felt that she had at long last found a place where she could settle—although it was more an abstract space than a physical one. Being a mother to Shura gave her a sense of peace she hadn’t known before, but the restlessness that had always been within her was still very much part of her everyday anxieties. She would surprise Sam by 95

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suggesting that they drop everything and go traveling through Europe or take the Orient Express to the Himalayas. Staying in one place, however beautiful, on some level always meant death. She still remembered Al telling everyone to pack, loading the family and all their belongings into their old Chevy, and driving into the unknown. She could still see his face full of sadness and unfulfilled longing for something he couldn’t define, something that perhaps waited for him around the next bend in the road, in the next town, in another little world. His profound sadness was also hers, even if she had traveled far away from that old life, and even as she filled her own world with so much of what she had never even dreamed of. Both Sam and Jessica had dark moods and deep-rooted anxieties, but she seemed more resilient, more able to keep her demons at bay. For Sam, the happiness he felt with her, this new life, was at times overwhelming. They would fight, and he would sometimes leave and get a motel room, where he would drink and brood for a couple of days before returning home. As time went on, the waters became calmer, the boat set on its course. They agreed to let Bruce Weber photograph them together for Vanity Fair—the first time they allowed themselves to be captured together in an intimate, private setting and what would remain a rare occasion. Weber traveled to Santa Fe, and he captured the two lovers in all the splendor of late summer. Jessica appeared natural, unconcerned with looking glamorous—she was made even more beautiful by the happiness she felt. John Heilpern, who came along with Weber to write a short feature to accompany the images, observed with amazement that during the entire session “Jessica Lange didn’t once check herself in a mirror.” He noted that she is a “movie star without artifice—nothing is contrived about her, in either her life or her work.” For Jessica, whenever she felt the old specters of depression creeping in, the best form of exorcism was always work. Soon after Country wrapped, she was offered the part of Maggie in a TV adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s classic play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The iconic film version of 1958, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, was one of the movies Jessica had loved to watch as a teenager, but this new treatment promised to include all the steamy subtext that had to be omitted in the Taylor film due to censorship. To play Williams was a dream come true—to speak the lines he had written, to exist in his poetic universe. The teleplay would include all the rewrites Williams had made for the Broadway revival of 1975. Before his death in 1983, Williams had seen Jessica’s performances in Postman and Frances, and he had told his friend, the writer James Grissom, “I’m intrigued by Jessica Lange. I 96

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like her relationship with words, which she holds in her mind and in her mouth as if they were either the most delectable sweet, or a particularly noxious substance that she cannot wait to propel towards her audience or an adversary. She has a strong presence that is bolstered by the sense that she knows more than she is revealing: she’s got the goods on almost everyone, but she’s withholding, and this makes her terribly appealing.” Tony-winning Broadway director Jack Hofsiss signed on to make the film, and upon Jessica’s request he offered the part of Big Mama to Kim Stanley, who accepted. Cat was to be Stanley’s final screen appearance, and she would win an Emmy for her performance. Kurt Russell was at first considered for the part of Brick, but eventually Tommy Lee Jones was cast. Jessica felt immediately at ease with Jones—she admired his intellect and noted that he allowed her to spread her wings in a difficult performance, which often required her to deliver several pages of dialogue in a single take—all in a deliciously melodic Delta accent. The restrictions of a TV budget meant that the film lacked the splendid glamour of its MGM predecessor. Shot at a studio in Los Angeles, the production relied entirely on the power of its performances—and in that sense it delivered a rare treat. Aside from Jessica, Kim Stanley, and Tommy Lee Jones, the cast also featured Rip Torn as Big Daddy. Jessica relished working with Torn, who was one of the most interesting and charismatic actors of the New York stage. Torn and his wife, Geraldine Page, who was widely considered an acting genius, resided in an old brownstone in the Village, and their home, which they named “Rip/Page,” was for many years the fulcrum of New York’s theater scene. In 1985, Sam would cast Geraldine Page in his play A Lie of the Mind, and thus Jessica got to spend a bit of time with Page and Torn. She had always been drawn to the world of theater—its mystique, the magic it exuded, the charisma of great female actors she admired, such as Kim Stanley and Geraldine Page. Being with Sam meant that she was now part of that world, even if for now she was just the movie star girlfriend. She knew that one day when the time was right, she too would take to the stage As it turned out, playing the dark-haired, sex-starved, and verbally expressive Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof served as perfect preparation for Jessica’s next big-screen role.

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Some months earlier, Jessica and Sam had been driving from Minnesota down to New Mexico. Sam hated planes, and so they did a lot of driving 97

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around the country. It suited Jessica fine—she loved the freedom of the road, the towns, the people, the landscapes. It had been more than a decade since she had been out on the road with Paco in their van, and it was wonderful to revisit the old routes. On one trip, as the sun began to set, they decided to stop for the night. The town was Winchester, Virginia. It was a typical southern town, full of charm and historic buildings—the kind of place Jessica loved. She decided to take a walk—there was something about wandering the streets of an unknown place—anonymously, purely as an observer—that had always been irresistible to her. It evoked the same feeling she had when as a child she would sit in the backseat with her face pressed to the window, imagining the lives lived in the villages and farms passing before her. She found herself at the gates to the local cemetery, and aside from the usual curiosity that cemeteries had always aroused in her, she suddenly felt an inexplicable pull to enter. It was a relatively new cemetery: no Confederate graves or opulent mausoleums—just perfectly manicured lawns and gardens. She walked around for a while, lost in thought, before returning to the hotel. The next day they were back on the road, heading home.

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In the spring of 1984, she received a script for a movie, then titled I Fall to Pieces, later to be renamed Sweet Dreams. It was the story of country music icon Patsy Cline, told through the prism of her tumultuous marriage to her second husband, Charlie Dick. Jessica had an immediate emotional reaction to the screenplay and to the character of Patsy. She knew some of her songs, of course; everyone did. But the person behind the music was someone she knew nothing about. As written in the script, Patsy was uncomplicated, sexually charged, filled with an infectious passion for life—which made her death in a plane crash at the age of just thirty even more poignantly tragic. To Jessica, Patsy Cline was an irresistible character, and she quickly agreed to make the film. “There’s a whole area of Patsy’s personality I’ve never dealt with in any of the characters I’ve played, never even dealt with in my personal life,” she would later say. “I’ve played so many parts in which everything is hidden or rumbling underneath. But Patsy had a way of hitting life head on. There was nothing neurotic about her, nothing overtly complicated.” Upon doing further research, she learned that Patsy had been born in Winchester, Virginia, and was buried in the very same cemetery Jessica had walked through

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just a few months earlier. Jessica found the coincidence “eerie” and inevitably felt an even deeper connection with her character. The idea for Sweet Dreams came to producer Bernard Schwartz after the success of Coal Miner’s Daughter, a biopic of another country legend, Loretta Lynn. In the latter film, Patsy Cline appears as a secondary character played by Beverly D’Angelo, but the power of her persona, D’Angelo’s memorable performance, as well as the fact that Coal Miner’s Daughter won Sissy Spacek an Oscar and earned a respectable amount of money made Schwartz think that making a movie about Cline would be a worthwhile project. It took him more than a year to research Cline’s life, including meeting with her mother and brother, before he turned over his findings to the screenwriter Robert Getchell. Having previously written the acclaimed script for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Getchell decided that rather than writing a conventional rags-to-riches biopic, he would tell Cline’s life in the form of a love story, dotted throughout with her music. To Jessica, the film also meant a continued exploration of themes relating to small-town American life and the iconography associated with old Americana. Although Patsy became a big star, in many ways her story, particularly as told in the movie, remains a quintessentially all-American tale, infused with midcentury flavors and presented in an old-school style of neon-lit drive-ins and jukeboxes, of fairgrounds and cotton-candied dreams. There was certainly a note of nostalgia involved—a chance to revisit a different time, which in some ways reminded Jessica of her own coming of age. Rita Ruona, her best friend from the Detroit Lakes High days, would later single out Sweet Dreams as a personal favorite—not least because it made her think back to the days when she and Jessica would drive around, dance and flirt with boys, and generally have a hell of a good time. Finding a way into the character was not an easy feat. From the beginning, Jessica felt that music would be her way in, specifically Patsy’s voice. Although she would not be required to sing in the film, she knew that to appear believable she had not only to incorporate Cline’s distinctive tone into her own speaking voice but also to infuse her whole performance with the kind of melancholic moxie Patsy exuded with each note. She immersed herself in Patsy’s back catalog, playing her records in the house and blasting tapes of her recordings from the car radio whenever she was on the road. It was like performing an exorcism in reverse—she conjured up Patsy’s spirit and invited her to join her own, as she later described it, to “become part of her own electrical system.”

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Schwartz hired Karel Reisz, a renowned British director who had recently directed Meryl Streep in her Oscar-nominated performance in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It would prove to be an inspired choice—Jessica trusted Reisz, and he was able to extract the best out of her. Ed Harris was cast in the pivotal role of Patsy’s volatile husband, Charlie Dick. Harris had just appeared in an acclaimed production of Sam’s play Fool for Love, and Jessica knew that he was an exceptionally gifted actor. The two had an electrifying chemistry, and she would later credit Harris with making it possible for her to deliver a confident, riveting performance. In subsequent years, Ed and his wife, Amy Madigan, would become close friends to both Jessica and Sam. Production on Sweet Dreams began in October 1984 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, which was chosen over Patsy’s real-life hometown, Winchester, because it had retained more of the authentic, 1950s look. There was excitement in the air that fall as local residents welcomed the film crew into their charming town, many of them having seen Patsy perform when she was first starting out. “I guess it’s pretty much the biggest thing that’s ever happened here,” said one local woman. People were excited to catch a glimpse of Jessica, who in her brown wig and full costume would suddenly transform into Patsy Cline— although most agreed that out of the disguise she bore little resemblance to the iconic singer. When working, Jessica was totally focused on her character, and as on the set of Frances, her costars took note of her absolute dedication. Ed Harris would refer to her as a “bubble actress”—when she was working, particularly on a real-life character she knew she had to “get right,” there was no distracting her. When not on set, however, Jessica enjoyed exploring the local scene; she could often be seen walking the town’s streets with Shura, visiting small shops, or having lunch at the local Moose Hall, where she chatted with people and even signed autographs—something she usually resented. After a few weeks in Virginia, the filming moved to Nashville, where many of the musical scenes were to be shot, including Patsy recording some of her most famous songs at the legendary Bradley Barn studio. Jessica met with Owen Bradley, who had produced some of the most successful country albums of all time, including most of Patsy’s, and who also agreed to produce the movie’s soundtrack. There was never any doubt about Cline’s own recordings being used in the film—her velvet tones could not be replicated. Jessica nonetheless chose to undergo weeks of vocal training to become familiar with Patsy’s singing technique so that she could appear as believable as possible in her lip-synching. The results were quite mesmerizing. More than simply 100

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mouthing the words, Jessica would “scream at the top of her lungs” into the microphone, perfectly synchronized with each syllable, delivering what remains one of the most masterful lip-synching performances in cinema history. She would later say, “I remember the first time I walked into Owen Bradley’s Barn to do one of the playback scenes, I was all wrapped up, whispering along to the music. By the end of the movie, I would be out there on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, screaming my lungs out, because the music somehow made everything come to life. It was the most liberating experience. I could go through fifteen hours of shooting, especially if we were doing a musical scene, and not want to quit, and get to the end of the day and have more energy than when I got there.” Her director was impressed, stating that Jessica was not only “incredibly hard working” but also “pure joy” to work with. “By the time we went on the floor she knew all the songs backward and forward,” Reisz later said. The combination of Reisz’s nurturing directorial style and the friendly working relationship with Ed Harris gave Jessica the conducive space she needed to create a role she viewed as vastly different from anything she had done before as well as from her own personality. In the end, working on Sweet Dreams would prove to be one of the happiest professional experiences of her career and one of the most rewarding. When the film opened in October the following year, Jessica’s performance was universally lauded. In her rave review, Pauline Kael wrote: “Lange’s interpretation of Patsy Cline’s character is based on the best possible source— her singing—and she creates a hot, woman-of-the-people heroine, with a great melodic gift.” She felt, moreover, that “Sweet Dreams is a woman’s picture of a new kind—a feminist picture not because of any political attitudes but because its strong-willed heroine is a husky, physically happy woman who wants pleasure out of life. Lange’s Patsy Cline doesn’t have to talk about her art: we can see that she’s happiest and rowdiest and most fully alive when she sings, and when she’s rolling in the hay.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss observed that “Lange keeps on astonishing,” before adding that “her Patsy would be a subtle stunner in any season. Right now she is enough to make the moviegoers forget the boys and toys of summer.” In case anyone had harbored any doubts, Sweet Dreams unequivocally proved Jessica’s position as one of the most talented actors of her generation. The film won her yet another Best Actress Oscar nomination, her third— which she lost this time to the great Geraldine Page. Jessica and Sam made a 101

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rare public appearance together on Oscar night; in fact, it was the only time they would attend the ceremony together. One of the most ardent admirers of Jessica’s performance was Meryl Streep, who in subsequent years would praise it numerous times. “I envied Jessica Lange when she got Sweet Dreams. That was such a great movie, she was beyond wonderful in it,” she once told an interviewer. Although Streep had been Karel Reisz’s friend since the time they worked on French Lieutenant’s Woman together, it seems that neither Reisz nor Bernard Schwartz ever had any doubts that Jessica was their first and only choice for the role of Patsy Cline. Streep loved Patsy Cline and at first felt hurt to not have been considered for the role, but she would later say: “I couldn’t imagine doing it as well or even coming close to what Jessica did because she was so amazing in it.”

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ollowing her three, nearly consecutive Best Actress Oscar nominations, Jessica was in an incredibly strong position. Although by no means a reliable box office draw, she nonetheless possessed a certain clout in Hollywood —a fact that did not escape her but that appeared to mean little to her. She was still reluctant to conform to the industry’s norms and expectations— whatever they may have been. She escaped definition—a highly talented actor, she also exuded the luminous screen presence of an old-time movie star. She could be glamorous, but more often than not she appeared at interviews or public functions wearing jeans and soft moccasins, which she favored over heels any day of the week. Moreover, she defied the well-worn rule that serious actresses could not be seen as sexual or vice versa—bringing sensuality and unapologetic lustiness to her work, presenting it as a vital part of the human makeup, but refusing to be defined solely by her sexuality. She wanted to play complex characters in projects that challenged her. While her career looked incredibly promising after she played the honky-tonk goddess in Sweet Dreams, it suddenly became evident that Hollywood had little to offer Jessica Lange—the business was not designed to cater to women in general, and Jessica’s particular set of skills, paired with her absolute disdain for commercial entertainment, meant that finding roles she liked would not be easy. “I’ve gotten used to the fact that my films are not commercial films,” she would tell one interviewer. “It’s just because I’m attracted to things that are somewhat out of the mainstream; the roles, the stories that make it interesting for me to spend six months, or three months, of my life involved in the playing of it are maybe not what’s going to appeal to the majority, which is fine.” Her life with Sam was yet another reason work would often have to take a back seat. She had found a home and a family, a feeling of belonging, and 103

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although their life was not conventional, no matter how hard they might have tried to pretend that it was, she often passed on opportunities for work so that she wouldn’t be away from home for long periods of time. Some of the films she turned down during that time went on to become highly successful, including Romancing the Stone, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Gorillas in the Mist. She would reflect years later: “There are some things that I will see and think, ‘Oh shit, I should have done that, that would have been a great part, that was a great film, why did I say no?’ But there was always a reason, and 99 percent of the time it was because of my man or my kids. I was with a man who didn’t like me to work. I remember I once had this conversation with Lauren Bacall; she said her career suffered greatly because Bogart never wanted her to work.” Jessica also hoped to produce another movie, an adaptation of Jayne Anne Phillips’s best-selling novel, Machine Dreams. She had bought the rights to the book soon after it was published in 1984, and she wrote the screenplay with some help from Sam, but to her disappointment she was unable to secure funding or find any studio interested in backing the project. Another promising opportunity that failed to materialize was a biopic of Marilyn Monroe to be directed by David Lynch. Jessica met with Lynch and his collaborator, Mark Frost, and was intrigued by the possibility of playing Marilyn, to whom she had been compared from the very beginning of her career. Sadly, the financing eventually fell through, and the project remained unrealized. Meanwhile, the family soon expanded as shortly after completing Sweet Dreams Jessica discovered she was pregnant. The pregnancy was a source of great joy for both her and Sam and more reason for her to consider each project offer she got even more carefully before committing. Hannah Jane Shepard was born on January 13, 1986, and her arrival into the world signaled another change for Jessica and Sam. They were getting tired of Santa Fe, which they felt was rapidly changing into what Sam described as a “shopping-mall thing with adobe siding.” Jessica also felt that it was time to move: “Somehow it just didn’t feel right to me. You know you can feel when you’re meant to be in some place and then you know when your time there is past. And it’s time to move on.” They didn’t have a clear idea where to go, but one day Jessica was flicking through the New York Times, and her eyes were drawn to a picture of a farm near Charlottesville in Albemarle County, Virginia. She had already felt a strong affinity with the state, and the place was perfect for breeding horses, 104

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which was becoming one of Sam’s main passions. And so it was decided— Virginia was to be their new home.

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Amid the chaos of planning the move and caring for her newborn baby, Jessica also continued to think about her work. Months earlier she had committed herself to a project that at the time looked less than certain to materialize, at least not immediately: a film adaptation of Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize– winning play Crimes of the Heart. Jessica had first read it before the Pulitzer and even before it was on Broadway, when the script was brought to the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1980–1981, and she had been immediately captivated by the story and its quirky characters. A few years later director Bruce Beresford approached her about playing Meg—the middle of three sisters who returns to a little Mississippi town after a failed stint in Hollywood. Beresford was disarmingly honest with her: no one in Hollywood wanted to make this film, so he couldn’t afford to offer her the star salary she might expect. Ironically, after years of trying, Beresford and producer Freddie Fields found funding with no other than Dino De Laurentiis. It had been nearly a decade since De Laurentiis had cast Jessica in King Kong, and when he heard Beresford’s casting idea, he was amused—she was now a big star and one of the most sought-after actresses in the business. In addition to Lange, Beresford envisaged Diane Keaton as Lenny and Sissy Spacek as Babe. “When De Laurentiis heard who we wanted, he said we’d never be able to afford them,” he later remembered. “I said, why don’t we offer them what we can afford? We did, and they all accepted.” To Jessica, the role was impossible to turn down. The script, which Henley herself wrote, was funny, bizarre, and unlike anything else Jessica had read before. It evoked a languished, southern nostalgia, mixed with a humorous and yet darkly accurate examination of family dynamics and deeply buried traumas—in short, all the elements Jessica found irresistible. Henley was delighted to have the three famous actresses join the cast, and she was additionally flattered when Sam agreed to play the small but important role of Doc Porter. “During the early reading Sam Shepard laughed all the way through,” she later remembered. “He’s my idol. I never thought he would be in it.” “It’s just a joy to have dialogue that kind of rolls off your tongue,” Jessica raved to a journalist. “Usually with film dialogue, you’re fighting to make it work and give it some body or some life. During the first couple of weeks of 105

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shooting, I kept thinking, ‘Why does this all feel so easy? I should be working harder.’ Then I kind of sat back and realized that it is so beautifully written by Beth Henley that it makes the acting extremely easy.” It is easy to see why she felt an instant connection with Henley’s text and particularly with the character of Meg. There was a certain amount of dark, washed-up glamour about this role: a woman who tries desperately to escape a small town and the dysfunctional family dynamic, runs after a Hollywood dream, but, instead of getting a big break, lands in a psychiatric unit with a nervous breakdown. Jessica had always been drawn to parts that in some ways represent what might have been her own alternative reality—the dark side of fortune, which she, thanks to lucky stars, had avoided. What would it have been like to return to Cloquet as a failure instead of a success story? How would she have navigated her way through the sea of broken dreams? While she was grateful that she never would have to find out in real life, she was drawn to the exploration of these alternate scenarios in her work. Crimes of the Heart also afforded her the rare chance to play both comedy and drama at the same time—it was as though Frances and Tootsie met in the warm moonlight of a southern night. “Meg plays it cool,” Jessica said of her character. “She is the one who left Mississippi and went to Hollywood. And yet, her Southern roots reveal themselves all the time. They show in the way she manipulates men in [a] kind of Southern belle, Scarlett O’Hara tradition. And she is genuinely shocked when she learns that Babe [the youngest sister played by Spacek] has had an affair with a black man. She just can’t comprehend such a thing. She’d deny it, but Meg is a real product of Southern womanhood.” The film deals with the issues of the South’s racism in the same manner it does with all the other serious topics it tackles—by veiling them in humor. Yet the marginal character of Willie Jay, a Black teenager who is forced to leave town and head North, constitutes perhaps the most poignant figure of the story but was at the time of the film’s release almost entirely overlooked. In fact, Jessica’s comment here is a rare example of the issue of race relations being discussed during the film’s promotion. In building the character, Jessica drew on her own experiences growing up with two sisters, and, although her own family was far more reserved in showing emotions, in many ways she allowed those memories to infuse her interpretation. “She’s had a tough life. You can tell she’s been ridden hard and put up wet,” she reflected on Meg to a journalist, narrowing her eyes and looking somewhere into space, as though she knew what that was like. 106

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“Jessica certainly had a thorough understanding of the character she was playing,” Bruce Beresford stated recently. “I remember she suggested how Meg should be dressed, and it was dead on. I made sure we found the clothes she proposed.” The filming of Crimes of the Heart began in May 1986, less than five months after Hannah’s birth. Jessica, Sam, and the girls headed for the small coastal town of Southport, North Carolina, which in the movie would act as the fictional Hazlehurst, Mississippi. The quaint resort had once been a fishing village and reputedly a pirate’s town but was now dotted with small marinas, charming, locally owned stores, white-clapboard houses, and ancient oak trees. The De Laurentiis company purchased an old, abandoned house situated on Caswell Street, and it was soon transformed into the McGrath family home. Jessica, Diane Keaton, and Sissy Spacek moved into a house next door, which for the duration of the filming would serve as a home, a communal space, a dressing room, and a make-up department, all under one roof. The shoot was a happy experience for all involved, with the three actresses becoming good friends. They hadn’t known each other prior to filming, and each went into the project with a preconceived idea of what her costars would be like. It was so extremely rare for Hollywood actresses of a certain caliber to be able to find projects that would allow them to collaborate—it is still true today, and it certainly was true back in 1986, although the subgenre of “women’s southern pictures” was a rare exception. “The surprise is that they’re not anything like you expect,” reflected Diane Keaton on her two costars. “They are much more than you imagine, even though you love them, and I’ve loved both of them in their films. I’ve loved Jessica in Sweet Dreams. But once you’re around people, their lives are much richer and fuller than you might have imagined.” “I was worried, initially, about Sissy, Jessica, Diane, and Tess Harper all getting along well,” Beresford explains. “They realized this was essential, and there was a welcome absence of histrionics or conflict. . . . It was tricky for me all the same,” he continues. “Their approaches were very different. Jessica liked a lot of rehearsal and a lot of takes. Diane liked to change her performance on each take, which made editing often difficult. Sissy was always well prepared and had a very definite interpretation of her role from the start.” Interestingly, the actresses themselves saw little difference in their respective methods, and the work went smoothly. Jessica and Sissy Spacek additionally bonded over being mothers to young girls, with Shura and Sissy’s daughter, Schuyler, who were the same age, becoming fast friends. 107

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Jessica, Spacek, and Keaton threw themselves head first into Henley’s world, establishing a tight closeness that mirrored that of the McGrath sisters they were portraying. Standing on the set one warm afternoon that summer, watching the three stars at work, producer Freddie Fields remarked: “There are moments, many moments, when I watch them and I really forget who they are. . . . They have really become these three crazy sisters.” The set of Crimes of the Heart had a communelike feel about it—with kids and dogs running around, the actresses joking and laughing while singing songs or flipping through magazines, waiting for the next scene to be set up, and Sam trying to find a quiet corner where he could write. He had been working on something new for a while, something that was meant to be a gift to Jessica and that would eventually become a script for the film Far North. Beth Henley also watched with amazement as the words and characters she had so lovingly created were coming to life before her eyes and the camera. She was intrigued by Jessica, who despite all the warmth that permeated the set retained a somewhat enigmatic veneer. “Jessica seems sort of distant when you meet her, but she’s probably the most fragile, which is why she puts up a strong outer shell,” Henley observed with her characteristic sharpness. “She seems tougher than she really is. She’s tough, but vulnerable.” Beresford noted that unlike Keaton and Spacek, who were able to let loose between takes, crack jokes, and relax, Jessica had a harder time letting go of her character when the cameras weren’t rolling. She was once again consumed by the material and absolutely absorbed by her part to the point of striking Beresford as “lacking in humor.” Everyone had high hopes for the movie, feeling that they had created something truly special. “We all thought that the film would be a big hit, but for some reason it wasn’t,” Beresford reflects today. “I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was too quirky or too highbrow to be viewed as a comedy.” The reviews were largely positive, especially for the three principals as well as for Tess Harper in her supporting turn, but the film failed to make big bucks at the box office, which inevitably contributed to its reputation as a disappointing yet beautiful flop. Nonetheless, both Spacek and Harper received Oscar nominations in the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories, respectively, and Beth Henley was recognized for her screenplay. Jessica was proud of the film and happy to have found lifelong friends in Spacek and Keaton—to her, that mattered much more than having a box office hit. She threw herself wholeheartedly into decorating her and Sam’s new farmhouse in Virginia, which, as it happened, was situated not far from Sissy Spacek’s farm. Sam continued to write and dedicated much of his time 108

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to horses. Both he and Jessica loved the outdoors, and long walks in the country and hours of gardening were part of their new life. Jessica and the girls spent the Christmas of 1986 in Minnesota, visiting with her family. Soon after finishing Crimes of the Heart, she had become pregnant again and was now proudly showing her bump to her sisters. Sam was alone in New York City, where he was working on a Woody Allen movie. From his lonely hotel room, he wrote to Johnny Dark: “We’ve been apart almost two weeks now. My life is so different without her. When I’m alone I feel lost & stupid & totally useless. I don’t know what to do without her. She’s my whole world. I never thought I’d be this way with anyone.” During her pregnancies, Jessica’s mood swings became more pronounced, and she would often fall into deep, dark bouts of depression, which would last for days. She admitted a few years later that although Sam is a man “who loves you when you’re pregnant, just thinks you look more beautiful than ever before,” after the second time he said he didn’t “want to live through it again.”

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On June 14, 1987, they welcomed their son into the world. They named him Samuel Walker Shepard, a tribute to Sam’s father, who had died in 1984. Perhaps by choosing the name, Sam hoped to repair some of the damage the troubled relationship with his father had caused him. The house was now filled with laughter, with baby cries, and, as Sam wrote in a letter, with a lot of “shitty diapers.” Jessica and Sam would look at each other, babies in their arms, and they would smile in disbelief at just how far they had come since first laying eyes on each other just five years earlier. Jessica loved being a mother. It gave her a sense of peace and purpose she had never been able to obtain before now. And yet she also realized that artistic expression remained important to her. “Here’s the great thing,” she reflected on her life. “We are able to move in and out of these worlds. If I was a mother and housewife only, I probably wouldn’t be as happy as I am. But the fact that I can do that, and do it absolutely, completely, one hundred percent, for this amount of time, but then pack everybody up . . . and go off to some strange place and be somebody else during the day—it’s a great day job. That to me is the best of all worlds. I wouldn’t want to only have this, and I wouldn’t like to only have that—if I had to choose, I’d have to choose family and home and all of that— but I’ve been very lucky because I get to do both.” 109

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That October, just months after little Walker’s birth, the whole family set off for Minnesota. The city of Duluth, that constant destination of her childhood, and the surrounding forests were to be the setting of her new film. She was coming home, and this time she was bringing her art and her man with her. Sam had written the screenplay for Far North not only as a gift to her but also as a tribute to her clan, as he had observed it. Although the story was ultimately fictional, there were enough similarities to Jessica’s real-life family for the film to have at times the appearance of a home movie. In the writing of Far North, Sam walked on thin ice. Although he wanted to capture the unique dynamic of the Lange household, he was mindful not to expose or exploit some of the more private aspects of it, particularly where it concerned Jessica herself. It is perhaps for that reason that the film ultimately didn’t work. The characters were drawn too carefully, and the story didn’t go deep enough to obtain any real substance. The script also revealed one of Sam’s main weaknesses as a writer—his difficulty with creating multidimensional female characters. Although the balance of the story rests mainly on the relationship between the father and his eldest daughter, the other women in the family are supposed to add texture and nuance to the overall picture, but these touches are never fully achieved. If Jessica was aware of the script’s faults from the start, she didn’t have the heart to voice them to Sam. On top of writing the film, Sam was also making his debut as a director, and Jessica knew that had she questioned the material, she would have undercut his confidence. And so they both went into it with the hope that perhaps the icy charm of the North Woods would magically permeate the set and find its way into the movie, somehow bringing it to life. Jessica’s family was closely involved in the making of Far North, with Al especially taking pride in being part of it (in the dream scene, he can be seen by the kitchen table, where the men of the family are enjoying their breakfast). He had always been reluctant to show Jessica his approval, refusing to attend the openings of her movies and usually stating flatly that he would catch them once they came on the TV. This time, though, she brought Hollywood to him. Perhaps she could feel that time was running out and that this might be one of her last chances to prove herself to him or to show him her love. Their relationship had never been an easy one, and in the writing of the movie Sam might have hoped to grant Jessica a form of liberation— the kind of emotional reckoning Jane Fonda had experienced when making On Golden Pond with her father, Henry Fonda. Sam approached Marlon Brando, offering him the part of the family patriarch—the pairing of Jessica 110

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and Brando would have no doubt elevated the film—but Brando politely declined. In the end, the cast consisted largely of actors Jessica had worked with previously, including Charles Durning, who had memorably played her father in Tootsie; Ann Wedgeworth, who played Patsy’s mother in Sweet Dreams and bore more than a passing resemblance to Dorothy Lange; and Tess Harper, whose work in Crimes of the Heart had impressed Jessica enough to suggest her for the role of her on-screen sister, Rita. Jane Lange later remembered the making of Far North to be “a real fun time.” No one in the family seemed offended by the fact that the film was infringing on their privacy or that Sam had exposed some potentially embarrassing details about any of them—Jessica later recalled with laughter that everyone thought that the story was about someone else in the family, and so no one took it personally. Perhaps unintentionally, some of the most touching moments in the entire film occur between Jessica’s character and her mother—Sam’s elegantly subtle way of honoring Dorothy, who, as ever, stood by her daughter. In one scene, Jessica invites her mother to come out and visit her in New York: “Mum, you gotta do something for yourself once in a while. Dad is a fully grown man; he can take care of himself.” The mother is portrayed with a fantastic aura of sadness. Sam subtly captures her devotion to her family and its cost to her own life and sanity. Although in the movie, as in life, the larger-than-life figure of the father dominates the picture, it is the mother’s presence that leaves the most hauntingly lasting impression. The making of Far North caused a great deal of interest in the area, with locals expressing surprise that their most famous daughter chose to return to their little community and preserve some of it on film. Ultimately, they would be among the small number of people who saw and appreciated the movie. Upon its release, Far North was dismissed by critics and sank at the box office. Sam later wrote that he “got fired by the critics” for it; however, it seems that he never regretted making it. He managed to make a small and intimate film, and he made it exactly the way he wanted. Jessica, too, was happy to be able to honor her folks, even if she felt nervous before the film’s release. “It’s such an eccentric, strange film,” she said shortly before it opened. “For me it’s very personal. I’ve never done anything so close, literally and figuratively, to home. I don’t know how I feel about it yet.” Nearly two decades after she had left home to discover the world and herself in the process, she came back and reclaimed this land as her own. But just as snow was beginning to fall silently on the Minnesota pines, it was time to leave once again.

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nly weeks after Jessica completed Far North, she began working on yet another movie she had committed to years earlier. Everybody’s AllAmerican had been in development since the early 1980s, with Jessica becoming attached to playing the female lead during the project’s early life. At the time, she had hoped that Tommy Lee Jones would be her costar; he, however, dropped out somewhere along the way, and for a time Jessica refused to do the film without him. By 1987, the producers had hired Dennis Quaid to star as the football hero and got Taylor Hackford to direct. Jessica was still the first choice for the role of Babs Rogers, a Magnolia Queen turned footballer’s wife, and after some persuasion she eventually agreed to make the film. With Walker less than a year old, and Hannah just approaching her second birthday, going back to work was hard. Jessica traveled with the kids to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to begin what was to be a long and for the most part unhappy shoot. What had initially attracted her to the project was the idea of exploring the arc of a marriage, tracing its story over a twenty-five-year period. She also liked the prospect of getting deeply into the character of Babs, whom she saw as an interesting, multifaceted woman, and of examining the place of women in southern society. The story shared certain themes with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and for Jessica, once again, the prospect of immersing herself in the role of another southern heroine was difficult to pass on. It soon became apparent that whatever ideas she might have had about the film were not shared by her director. Although Jessica was the star of the movie on paper, it was in essence a sports film, and Hackford had little interest in catering to Jessica’s desire for character development. “Instinctively, I knew that Hackford wasn’t worth wasting my time on,” she said later about the experience. “But I loved the story so much, and I thought that the character was drawn so beautifully. But ultimately there’s nothing left of it in the film.” 112

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One reason why she resented the director and ultimately the entire enterprise was that she felt the focus was so drastically shifted away from her character and placed on the movie’s failed hero that her very presence in the film was pointless. Dennis Quaid didn’t share her displeasure, and although he liked working with her, later stating that “she helped me a lot, she actually taught me a lot about acting,” he nonetheless refused to take sides in the conflict. Filming dragged on into the spring months of 1988, and Jessica’s mood darkened with each passing day. She later recalled that there had been “a lot of male ego” on set, and although she had always enjoyed working with men, in this case not only playing the role of a woman who feels invisible in the male-dominated world of football but also actually experiencing it firsthand as an actor on set enraged her. She was glad when the film finally wrapped, and she was able to get back to Virginia and resume her life. Things with Hackford would take an even uglier turn when she saw the first cut of the film later that fall and realized that the finished product was even more disappointing than she had originally expected. She maintained that the director cut some of her strongest scenes and reduced the movie to a cliché-ridden “piece of shit.” When Everybody’s All-American opened with a glitzy premiere in Baton Rouge that October, Jessica was not in attendance, and she subsequently refused to take part in promoting the film. When journalists asked about her absence, she bluntly expressed her disdain for both the movie and Hackford, stating on one occasion that she wouldn’t consider working for him again “for all the money in the world, never in a million years.” She explained, “You do feel betrayed because you devote so much of yourself, and you give so much time and energy to a situation, and it really is like a slap in the face. Obviously, there is not the respect. . . . To be able to just take someone’s work and just throw it out of the window. But then, it wasn’t personal; he threw the whole film out of the window.” For his part, Hackford was careful not to speak out against Jessica while defending his film: “Nobody else complained, but I understand Jessica doing so. She wants to see every ounce of what she did. I still believe it’s the best performance she’s given yet.” The critics tended to disagree; although many praised Jessica and Quaid’s work, the film was generally regarded as a failure, and it subsequently became a huge flop. Some saw Jessica’s open criticism of Hackford and the film as sabotaging her own project, which in the unwritten guidebook of Hollywood is a big no-no, but others viewed it as a confirmation of the authentic and uncompromising nature of her artistry. 113

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Back on the farm, spring was in full bloom, and Jessica was once again immersed in her home life. Raising three children was an all-encompassing, glorious, at times frustrating, but never boring task. Little Hannah adored stories, and the whole family would listen to Sam’s readings. He would also dig out his country records, and they’d sing along to old cowboy songs. They planted rose bushes and a vegetable garden, and Jessica would sit on the porch on those warm, early summer evenings, surrounded by activity and laughter, with muddy boots on and dirt under her nails, and she’d smile thinking about just how glamorous her movie star life was. That summer she once again packed up the kids and headed to another movie set. The script for Men Don’t Leave was an understated, tender exploration of widowhood as experienced by the film’s protagonist, Beth Mcauley, and Jessica was immediately drawn to the project. Written by Barbara Benedek, who had previously worked on the Big Chill, the story promised a full, emotional journey, which was always something Jessica looked for when deciding on a film. Director Paul Brickman had been developing the movie for a number of years, along with his producing partner, Jon Avnet, following their successful debut with Risky Business. Considering the delicately balanced script, they knew that casting would be of the utmost importance. After a rather tense initial meeting during which Jessica remembered thinking, “God, this is going to mean three months of my life working, away from the farm—do I really want to?” Brickman was delighted when she finally agreed to star in the film. He soon added Kathy Bates, Joan Cusack, and Arliss Howard to the ensemble. He also spent considerable time looking for the right child actors to portray Jessica’s two sons, finally casting eighteen-yearold Chris O’Donnell and ten-year-old Charlie Korsmo, both of whom were making their movie debuts. O’Donnell, who was at the time just about to graduate from high school, decided to answer a casting call for the film on a whim. He later joked that he had to think hard who Jessica Lange was, until someone told him she was the blond actress from Tootsie. Jessica and Brickman had been born just days apart, and to Jessica, who still had a soft spot for astrology, that was a good omen. In fact, however, their relationship entered stormy waters early on in the production. He wanted her to be a sexy, attractive blonde, but she felt that would have been entirely wrong for the character. She had a clear vision of who Beth was—a wife and mother whose very identity was defined by small-town life. In accordance with what had by then become a vital element of her process, Jessica created a detailed backstory for the character: “I always saw her as a good 114

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Catholic girl, coming from a small town, who married her high school sweetheart, possibly after his tour of duty in Vietnam. She probably got married after she got pregnant. She’s not aware of her looks. She’s not sophisticated in any way. I always imagined that hairdo is the one she had in the 60s, and it serves her just fine. The clothes? Well, where are you going to shop in a small town? Her husband is a construction foreman, so maybe she shops at a local department store that is a cut above Penny’s.” They also disagreed about the film’s general tone—Brickman wanted to make light of the tragedy at the center, but Jessica was unable to rise above the fact that what happens shatters her character’s entire world. “I could never play it like a comedy, and everything was nice and we were having a good time,” she later said. “If I didn’t play everything coming from this state of grief, then the truth wouldn’t be there.” Brickman would often get impatient with her search for emotional authenticity, later telling a journalist: “Jessica loves grief—that’s her favorite.” In the end, Jessica’s serious approach and Brickman’s focus on the sometimes absurdly humorous aspects of grief merged to create a well-balanced picture, which was aided by the strong comedic performance from Joan Cusack. The movie also worked because of the believable chemistry between Jessica and her two on-screen sons. It was the first time in her career that motherhood constituted such a vital element of her film’s narrative, and Jessica understood that she needed to establish a close relationship with the boys before the cameras started rolling. O’Donnell and Korsmo traveled to Virginia, where, along with Brickman, they stayed in a rented house and spent several days improvising scenes with Jessica. Just as Kim Stanley had done years earlier on Frances, now it was Jessica’s turn to guide the young actors and help them build a reserve of mutual experiences and makeshift memories they could draw on later. Chris O’Donnell later recalled with laughter: “Paul walked around with a notepad watching us. We were having breakfast and he whispered in my ear, ‘Tell your mom you’re going to your girlfriend’s, then leave.’ So I said it and left, and then I sat outside for an hour, waiting for someone to tell me what to do. I didn’t have a clue. I just did what they told me. I figured as long as they didn’t fire me, I didn’t care.” After a couple of weeks in Chicago, the cast and crew traveled to Baltimore, where most of the filming would take place. Despite what Jessica later described as “some scrapes in the middle,” she ultimately had a good time working on the film, striking a friendship with Kathy Bates and working with her on many other occasions in the future. Brickman later said of working 115

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with Jessica: “There is always going to be a certain amount of give and take on set with all your actors, actresses, and crew members. Ultimately you just have to look at the results and see whether they are strong or weak. Jessica’s is an incredibly strong performance, and she just has to get there anyway she can.”

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Jessica returned to Virginia just in time for Shura to go back to school. Sam had spent the summer in Louisiana, shooting Steel Magnolias, and now they were back in family mode, although things were not always going smoothly. Sam’s diary entries from the time reflect his anguish at having done “some stupid things,” and although he was still madly in love with her, he concluded that “things are not going well between me and the object of my desires.” He was still prone to dark moods, which were always deepened by drink, and there were also rumors of his infidelity, which Jessica for the most part apparently chose to ignore. Whatever difficult period they might have been going through, they were still crazy about each other and couldn’t imagine life apart. They loved lunching at the Boar’s Head Inn, a quaint country resort with an intimate dining room where those few celebrated faces who made this neck of the woods their home could enjoy a first-rate southern meal relatively safe from the prying glances of the locals. On one particular afternoon, if any of the patrons chose to look closely, in a booth in the corner of the room sat a handsome, dark-haired man and a striking blonde. She was a frequent visitor, a movie star who often dropped by with her equally celebrated playwright/actor partner. The man was foreign, both to the area and to the country—his thick accent and European air revealed that at once. He had traveled from far to meet with the actress, for, like many a film director before him, he was on a mission to convince her to star in his movie. Just days earlier, he had watched her in Frances, and her performance had blown him away. For the role in his new film, some had suggested Jane Fonda; others mentioned to him Joanna Pacula, the rising star who had recently arrived from Poland. His intuition told him that Jessica Lange was the one he was looking for. “Are you ready to do something completely different?” he asked her. She hesitated. She had read the script the night before, and although she was moved by the story, she also saw certain flaws in the writing, which made her wary. This movie also promised to be dark and daunting, and her role 116

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would require tapping into her innermost resources. But it would be a challenge, a stretch, a new frontier in her artistic exploration, and that was something she found hard to resist. There was something about this man that she immediately trusted. “He’s so smart and intuitive when it comes to plot and moving the story—I knew whatever problems I saw inherent in the script would be worked out,” she later said of that initial meeting. The screenplay for Music Box, at first titled Sins of the Fathers, had been written by Joe Eszterhas, who had collaborated with the Greek-born French director Costa-Gavras before. Eszterhas based the story of a Hungarian American man accused of having been a Nazi war criminal in part on his own experiences with his father and in part on the famous case of John Demjanjuk, who was at the time of the production awaiting a death sentence in Israel. Like Demjanjuk, Mike Laszlo of Music Box is a well-integrated, model citizen, living in the quiet suburb where he had raised his all-American children. There were other similarities in the story—both men had worked in a big industrial plant; both went to church and were active within their expat communities. Eszterhas had been present at the Demjanjuk trial, and it was during the heart-wrenching proceedings that the idea for the film first came to him: “I watched him for four days, and what I saw was this man who I was convinced had done the most heinous, the most horrible things, sitting there twinkly eyed and friendly, as if he had completely compartmentalized this horror and stuck it into a totally separate part of his being. I was watching something so banal, in terms of the way he was acting, and so commonplace and everyday, that it was even more horrifying.” Eszterhas was also inspired by a visit he had received sometime earlier from a woman who had been in the same refugee camp at the end of the war as Eszterhas and his parents and who had just found out the truth about her own father collaborating with the Nazis by leading Hungarian Jews to the trains bound for concentration camps. Deeply moved by her account but not yet aware of his own father’s role in the atrocity, Eszterhas conceived the basic premise of what would eventually become the script: “A modern woman lawyer in Chicago suddenly discovers her own father is accused of war crimes.” Jessica had been following the Demjanjuk case for many months, often wondering what it must have been like for his three children. How well do we ever really know the people who brought us to this world? And to what degree is their fate ours? She had always felt that she was carrying her own father’s sadness and disappointment, never quite able to shed them. What if the burden had been heavier, darker, more sinister? Costa-Gavras saw the 117

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elements of Greek tragedy in the story—the shared fate of the father and the daughter, their lives linked by his crimes. Before going to meet Jessica in Virginia, he wondered whether she had what it took to carry the part and showcase all the emotional turmoil the character goes through. He wanted not only a talented actor but also someone who could “move into tragic dimensions.” After his meeting with Jessica was over, he was convinced that he had found just what he was looking for. Jessica prepared for the part of Ann Talbot by reading every book about the Holocaust she could lay her hands on. She also read legal briefs and spent time in courtrooms, observing proceedings, studying the body language of lawyers, absorbing the atmosphere of this world so distant from her own. “One thing I learned about law is that it’s not synonymous with truth. They do not exist side by side, which is too bad,” she reflected. Once again, she had a clear vision of what her character should look like and who she was. Gavras recalls her insisting on dark, curly hair, perhaps inspired by Irene Demjanjuk, whose sad, delicate face she often saw in the background of the televised saga that was Demjanjuk’s trial. It took many attempts to get the look just right, and finally Gavras flew in a French hairdresser Jessica recommended, who was able to create the perfect wig for her. Again, Jessica knew that glamour was not part of this woman’s armor— the only time her beauty is mentioned is at the very beginning of the movie, when a random stranger at a church dance comments on her good looks. Ann is tough, cerebral, pragmatic—in a sense, a typical cinematic career woman of that period. She is allowed to be successful, even more so than the men around her, as long as she compromises at least some of her femininity. Gavras knew that it would take more than baggy clothes and a dark wig to conceal the electrifying sensuality that Jessica projected, and he allowed for it to subtly shine through the cracks of the somber narrative, adding to the character’s complexity. The cameras were set to start rolling in Chicago in January 1989. For the role of the father, Gavras considered a number of American actors, including Jack Lemmon, Kirk Douglas, and Marlon Brando, but eventually he decided that the story would work best if the part was played by someone with whom audiences were less familiar. Armin MuellerStahl, a German character actor, agreed to play the role, although his own family history made working on the film an uneasy experience. He had come to America to escape the ghosts of the past—only to be confronted by them again. There were also notable actors in supporting roles—Frederick Forrest as the prosecuting attorney, Donald Moffat as Ann’s father-in-law, and the 118

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Polish actress Elzbieta Czyzewska as one of the witnesses. Interestingly, Czyzewska, who had by then become something of a New York legend as much for her eccentricity as for her talent, had been the original inspiration for the titular heroine of Sophie’s Choice (both for William Styron, the author of the novel, and subsequently for Meryl Streep’s film performance). Juggling the delicate story, a sensitive scriptwriter, and highly strung actors required a degree of skill and intelligence not many directors could master, but Jessica knew from the start that Gavras was capable of pulling it off, and for once she felt that she could focus solely on her performance, fully trusting that he would take care of everything else. Like many of her directors before him, Gavras quickly saw that Jessica was not on the set to have fun or play games with the crew. When working, when in character, she could appear distant, frosty, even unfriendly—particularly when preparing for the film’s most difficult scenes. Pierre Gamet, a respected sound engineer, had been a great admirer of her work, and when asked by Gavras if he would like to work on Music Box, he declared enthusiastically that he would do the film for free just to work with her. When on set, however, Gamet, who had to fix a small microphone on Jessica before each scene, found that the woman he had so looked forward to working with was so wrapped up in her own world that any communication he had hoped for was impossible. “It was her way of protecting herself, of staying in character,” states Gavras, who, rather than resenting her for it, made even more effort to make her feel safe. “If I was just doing some frivolous comedy, hell, I could be as friendly as the next person,” she felt compelled to explain. “But ultimately, that’s me on screen, and if I haven’t completed my task, then I’m going to take the rap for it. I’m not being unfriendly; I’m just minding my own business. I don’t go out of my way to joke with the crew, but I’ve never thought of myself as being dislikable. That’s why I like to work with the same people, so I don’t have to explain myself. They just do my make-up, they do my hair, they get me dressed, and they leave me alone—because I’ve got an hour’s worth of emotional, real private work to do before I go on the set.” In March, the production traveled from the ice and snow of Chicago to Budapest, where the winds of spring were gently blowing, both literally and figuratively. Hungary and the rest of the Eastern Bloc had been gearing up for the fall of communism for the past decade, and now, just as the cast and crew of Music Box arrived in town, the euphoric spirit of hope was in the air. The optimism was infectious, and Jessica was invigorated by the revolutionary mood that permeated the country—acts of rebellion and the movements of 119

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people toward freedom and against oppression were things she had always felt strongly about, and now she thought herself privileged to be able to witness history in the making. As the filming drew to a close, Jessica had a profound feeling that she had made an important film—not only because it tackled big, timely, and timeless issues but also because it meant something to her on a very personal level. She saw it, first of all, as a love story between father and daughter. As Gavras headed for Paris, where he would edit the film, Jessica set off for home. Somewhere in the depth of her soul, she felt a strange sense of uneasiness—she wasn’t sure whether it was from all the darkness she had just passed through to portray Ann Talbot or from a kind of premonition. She couldn’t wait to hold her kids, to be home, to feel the warmth and safety of her family. Less than two months later, the bad news came. On June 3, 1989, Al Lange died of a sudden stroke at the family home in Minnesota. To Jessica, his passing was a monumental blow. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through,” she later said. She had always known that he was a huge presence in her life, but it took his passing for her to truly grasp just how profound of an effect he had had on her. He was the one who had instilled in her the passion for adventure and exploration, the one whose own unfulfilled dreams and longings pushed her out of Minnesota and took her to places she never even thought possible. It was in search of his approval and his love that she achieved much of what she had. He had also brought darkness and uncertainty into her life—something she had always wrestled with. But, ultimately, she chose to see his main legacy as love. As devastating as Al’s death was to her, it also meant that a certain period of her own life was coming to an end. She no longer had to please or prove anything to him—whatever she did from now on would be for herself alone. It was a strange kind of freedom that she had not known before and that she at first wasn’t sure how to fully utilize. “My father’s death was a huge turning point for me,” she reflected sometime later. “With his passing, something transpired, that allowed me to move out of an area where I’d been held captive for a long time.”

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he months following Al’s death were difficult ones, but there was also a new sense of peace and harmony. Having worked practically nonstop for the past two years, Jessica was happy to be unemployed for the time being. She was finally able to devote time to her children—to listen to music with them and introduce them to everything from classical masters to Appalachian folk and, naturally, Dylan. They watched movies together—none of hers, for now—but rather the old classics she had always loved. She walked a lot, seeking refuge in nature, which had always had a soothing effect on her. She also had time to look inward, perhaps deeper than ever before. She still read a great deal and was going through anything she could find on Buddhism and the spiritual traditions of the East. Having grown up without any religious affiliation, Jessica had felt a strong pull toward Buddhism since she was young, but now she was mature enough to really give it the thought and reflection she felt the spiritual practice deserved. She had always mistrusted organized religion and the blind devotion that accompanied it, often leading to extremism. The tenets of Buddhism seemed free of this disturbing aspect— they offered what Jessica referred to as “a kind of sanity.” She would continue to explore and deepen her understanding of the practice for years to come, finding in it a spiritual refuge she hadn’t known before. Life on the farm was delightfully simple—driving the kids to school, cooking, looking after the animals, walking, riding horses, and in the evenings reading and watching movies. Sam was busy with his writing, although he seemed distracted and unable to complete any one project, often having several different, unfinished manuscripts on his desk. Despite enjoying the time off, Jessica, too, continued to think about work. She couldn’t help but notice the shortage of good scripts, particularly ones with complex female roles, and she also worried that the few good ones around would be offered to younger, up-and-coming actresses. Together with her friend and producer 121

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Lynn Arost, Jessica was actively seeking to develop scripts that would offer her something challenging to do. Money was also a continual worry because neither she nor Sam participated in commercial projects: “I’m in deep shit again with money,” wrote Sam to Johnny Dark around that time. “Can’t seem to earn enough of it these days.” In December 1989, Jessica flew to Los Angeles for the premiere of Music Box. A great deal was written about the movie in the press, and it was seen as an important cultural event. Jessica’s performance was universally praised, even by those critics who were less enthusiastic about the film as a whole. In February of the following year, she traveled to Berlin, where the movie was entered into the main competition at the first edition of the Berlin Film Festival organized after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Gavras remembers that the screening of Music Box took place on the east side, and he, Jessica, and Armin Mueller-Stahl traveled through the infamous Checkpoint Charlie to get to the event. It was an unforgettable, somewhat surreal evening. Jessica managed to obtain a chunk of the wall, which she would keep as one of her most prized possessions. The film was received with great enthusiasm, its message made all the more poignant by the setting. To MuellerStahl, an East German exile, the opening was also a monumental occasion, marking his first public appearance in the country since his departure years earlier. Music Box eventually won the Golden Bear, the festival’s top prize, tying with the Czech film Larks on a String, which due to Communist Party censorship had remained unreleased since 1968. While in Berlin, Jessica found out that she had been nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Ann Talbot. She attended the Academy Awards ceremony that March, looking radiant, with her brother George as her date. As was widely expected, the Oscar that night went to another Jessica, Jessica Tandy, who won for Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy. To Jessica, working with Gavras would remain one of the most rewarding experiences of her career. She has always demanded a lot from her directors—chiefly for them to be present, to offer her the secure environment she needs to do her best work. Costa-Gavras certainly did that. She later told Molly Haskell that he was one of only three directors she has ever worked with to be present behind the camera, to guide her through the scene, rather than “sit in front of the monitor, glued to that little box” (the other two being Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson). “When you have a director who is absolutely present and there, next to the camera, watching the actors, it actually 122

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really propels you on,” she explained. “You want to do more, you want to do better, you want to somehow satisfy the director.” It would be many years before Jessica and Gavras were reunited at the Deauville Film Festival in France in 2003, where Jessica was honored with a special tribute. It was a happy occasion; the actress and her director, both aged but radiant, greeted each other warmly, as fascinated by one another as they had been upon meeting for the first time at the Boar’s Head Inn.

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In the spring of 1990, the town of Selma, Alabama, was abuzz with excitement as the inhabitants prepared for the arrival of a Hollywood film crew. The town, whose very name is synonymous with civil rights struggles, was used to a certain degree of fame. After all, it was here that in March 1965 Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of other African Americans crossed the town’s Edmund Pettus Bridge during the historic second march to Montgomery. Since then, it had become a place of pilgrimage. Yet although the folks here were accustomed to receiving out-of-town visitors, there is nothing like the impending visit of silver-screen stars to generate widespread anticipation. Since the word had first got out that the production of a new film, Blue Sky, would take place in and around the town, the local newspaper office became flooded with calls from curious citizens: people mostly wanted to know how they could get in the movie. Rumors and fantastical stories began circulating—mainly about the enigmatic star of the movie, Jessica Lange. Where would she stay? Would she rent a place in town? What was she like? Would she bring her children? Local reporter Michele Savage recalled people lunching at the Downtowner, a popular diner, “chatting about ‘Jessica’ as if she grew up down the block.” Every guy in town wanted to meet her. Ladies admired her devotion to her children. “But,” they added in a whisper, “she is not married!” Jessica agreed to do the movie because the script, although small in scale, held great promise for character development. The role of Carly had it all—sensuality, danger, glamour, and more than a hint of madness. Other elements in the story also attracted Jessica to the project: she would get to pay tribute to her own love of old-time movie stars. In a way, she would also have a chance to revisit her own childhood—a mercurial, restless parent, the “packing, moving, new neighbors” aspect of that restlessness, even a southern military base—it all seemed to be there. The role appeared to be 123

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custom-made for Jessica and her talent: perhaps for the first time since Frances, she would be afforded a wide, open plain where she could freely explore a new terrain and fully showcase what she was capable of. The script had been written by Rama Stagner, a Los Angeles literary agent who had decided to venture into writing screenplays. The inspiration for Blue Sky came to her after she had read her father’s unpublished memoir, in which he detailed his life on a military base in the early 1960s as well as his work as a safety officer in underground nuclear tests conducted at the same time in Nevada. Stagner decided to use the memoir as the basis for her first script, which became her exploration of her parents’ troubled relationship, with the character of Carly based on Stagner’s mother, Gloria, who had died in 1982. “My agent read it and said, ‘If I can’t sell this, you should fire me’,” Stagner recalls. “Bob Solo, the producer[,] read it on Thursday, and Friday there was an offer on the table. By Monday, he had sold it to Orion Pictures.” Orion was at the time one of the most beloved studios among Hollywood actors. Although perpetually in financial dire straits, it continued to greenlight smaller, character-driven projects, often taking chances others refused to. Marc Platt, freshly appointed as the company’s president, loved Blue Sky, and he sent it to Lynn Arost with the idea of offering Jessica the role of Carly. What immediately struck Jessica was how different the role was from Ann Talbot of Music Box: “It was one of the few times when I made a conscious ‘career choice,’ where I thought, OK, if I do Blue Sky right after Music Box, what an interesting combination, to do one after the other—what an interesting career choice,” she later recalled, with amusement. “Of course, then it would sit on the shelf for four years, in the meantime I did three or four other films—so enough for my ‘career choices.’” The film was to be directed by the great British stage and film director Tony Richardson, and, to Jessica’s delight, Tommy Lee Jones signed on to play the part of her husband, Hank Marshal. She had wanted to work with him again ever since they had done Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and, finally, they were reuniting, and this time it was to be on the big screen. From the very beginning, it was clear that Jessica and Richardson would work well together. He had regard for her talent, and he invited her input into the interpretation of her character—from the way she would appear to the emotional journey she had to undertake, he gave her the freedom to explore. For her part, she had great respect for him and trusted that however wild she chose to be with this character, he would be there to guide her through it. “She really was like a child, she’s such a childlike creature,” Jessica said of 124

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Carly. “I wanted her to have these personas. And so I chose three of the biggest movie stars of that period, starting with Brigitte Bardot, which was her kind of island, exotic, Mediterranean look. Then moving back stateside, I thought, well, she’d definitely go Monroe, and when she had worn that look bare, then she would move on to Liz Taylor.” The idea of adding the element of imitation to the already multilayered Carly was a stroke of genius, and Richardson immediately recognized it as such, encouraging Jessica to utilize it whenever she felt necessary. Jessica would carefully craft Carly from all the pieces of her own memories, longings, and sexual impulses, adding fine strokes she borrowed from her father and from the movie goddesses she had watched since childhood. Beyond the three most obvious inspirations, there were also echoes of Vivien Leigh’s Blanche, of Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest; as Jessica put it, “Carly borrowed from wherever she could.” The effect would be an explosive performance— nuanced and touching, flamboyant, but never camp or overdrawn. Filming was set to begin in Selma in May. Jessica arrived in town with the kids but without much fanfare and settled in a large, historic house at 331 Church Street. A discreet, temporary fence was constructed in front of the lawn to protect her privacy from the curious eyes of passersby. She immediately set out to work. There was much preparation to do, and with a tight shooting schedule, time was of the essence. There were the costumes to be fitted. Many of Carly’s sexy, 1960s-style dresses had to be redone. Desperate, the film’s costume designer, Jane Robinson, turned to a local seamstress, Sarah Nichols, who was tasked with making the necessary adjustments— sometimes with just hours’ notice. Jessica was at first concerned that the tight-fitting costumes were “too tarty,” but eventually she agreed that they were right for Carly. “There was a lot of cleavage—but I believe that they were just the right amount of sexy,” Robinson declared proudly. Jessica also worked on movement and dance, which she believed were important elements of the story. Upon her request, the producers hired the musical director Art Wheeler and choreographer Greg Rosatti to help her prepare for the film’s dance scenes. Rosatti stayed with Jessica and Sam in Virginia prior to the shoot, and he and Jessica became good friends. She had always used the power of gesture and movement to the fullest—her training in mime had instilled in her the sense of physicality, the idea of using the entire body as an instrument of expression. Now, working with Rosatti, she was discovering a way into her character—if voice was key for playing Patsy Cline, movement would be the basis of Carly. “She’s a beautiful mover. One 125

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minute she’s acting like Brigitte Bardot, and the next she’s Marilyn Monroe,” Rosatti said at the time of working with Jessica. “Her dance is the catalyst for her emotions. It’s the very first thing we see her do [in the film]. She used dance to get out of reality, and each dance is like another spiral into madness.” Later, when reviewing the film, David Kehr of the New York Daily News would write that “Lange smolders, rages and whimpers through Blue Sky, acting with every muscle in her body.” Filming commenced in the stifling heat of the southern sun, with Jessica having to hide under a white umbrella between takes. She was hoping for a slow start, an easing into this complex character she was set to become; Richardson, though, had other ideas. On the second day, he scheduled for the filming of what for Jessica would be perhaps the most demanding scene in the picture—both emotionally and physically. Carly, Hank, and their two daughters arrive at their new home on the army base, which turns out to be a far cry from the romantic picture of white-columned southern verandas Carly had imagined. Exhausted from the trip and frustrated by yet another move, she explodes into rage, breaking things, screaming, and finally taking the family car and setting off for the town center. Here, Hank catches up with her in a fabric store, where, to the relief of the bewildered sales clerks, he finally manages to calm his wife down. Jessica was terrified beforehand— when reading the script, she had imagined that the scene would be filmed toward the end of the shooting schedule. Instead, Richardson knew that throwing her in at the deep end would create a spontaneous, raw effect, and he also had absolute trust in her ability to pull it off. The scene in the film is explosive, even shocking, but it also provides the viewer with a kind of crash course on what the Marshal marriage is. Was Jessica using memories of her own parents arguing, somewhere behind thin walls of yet another rented house they had moved to, all those years earlier? The dark force driving Carly into self-destructive behavior was her personality disorder, paired with the peripatetic life of an army wife. For Al Lange, the trigger had been alcohol. Whatever the source, Jessica was able to capture the essence of troubled, unstable parenthood, creating one of the most nuanced and well-balanced performances of its kind ever captured. Throughout the shooting of this scene as well as for the remainder of filming, the quiet strength of her on-screen partner enabled her to reach the highest peaks in her acting. Tommy Lee Jones’s sharp intelligence, reserve, and decisively masculine appearance constituted the perfect counterbalance to Jessica’s flamboyance. In later years, she would take every occasion she 126

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could to highlight the importance of his performance in the creation of her own: “For me, the greatest thing in that film was what Tommy Lee did,” she told Molly Haskell in 1997. “I think it’s another case, similar to Ed Harris [in Sweet Dreams], where, because the film is perceived more as a woman’s film, the male actor doesn’t get the credit he deserves. And Tommy Lee was so note-perfect in that film, to the extent that, with a lesser actor, I don’t think my performance would have carried.” Jessica also worked well with her on-screen daughters, played by eighteen-year-old Amy Locane and fourteen-year-old Anna Klemp. Locane, who had just appeared with Johnny Depp in the musical Cry-Baby, was immensely excited to work with Jessica—she recalled phoning her agent and telling him he had to get her the role: “I thought, Jessica Lange’s daughter! Who wouldn’t want to play Jessica Lange’s daughter?” For the Minnesotaborn Klemp, Blue Sky was to be a film debut, but the precocious teen managed to rise to the challenge. Both girls watched with fascination as their movie mum prepared for each take, disappearing into her character. “It puts you in a trance to watch her, she’s such an incredible actress,” Locane told a local journalist. Richardson wasted no time on unnecessary takes, and the shoot progressed incredibly quickly. Jessica enjoyed the speed—it meant that, unlike on Frances, she didn’t have to wear herself out by repeating emotionally draining scenes again and again. After just eight weeks in Selma and at the neighboring Craig Field airbase, which had been transformed into the fictional Fort Matthews, the production moved to Florida, where they would shoot the opening scenes of the film, including Jessica’s seductive, topless dip in the sea, which scandalizes the base. The filming concluded with a few days in Texas, which in the film stood in for Nevada and where Jessica was able to utilize her skills as a horsewoman to shoot the scene in which Carly disrupts a nuclear test to save her husband. Jessica had high expectations for the film. She flew to Los Angeles to talk to Richardson about editing—she wanted to be sure that all her best scenes would be kept intact. His health was by this point failing; as it turned out, he was in fact dying of AIDS. Jessica and Sam visited him in his Hollywood Hills home, which he had transformed into a bird sanctuary. They were enchanted by their host and by his birds. As they prepared to leave, Richardson offered them a parting gift: an exotic nightingale. Jessica recalled that “this nightingale had the most beautiful song, and we took it home and it sang for one day and then it never, never sang again.” 127

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Little more than a year later, Tony Richardson died of complications from AIDS. He didn’t live to see the release of Blue Sky, his final film, or the acclaim it would bring his leading lady. Greg Rosatti would also tragically lose his life to AIDS in 1996.

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In December 1991, Orion filed for bankruptcy, putting a big question mark over the fate of Blue Sky. Jessica was extremely disappointed: “There was a period of time where I didn’t think it would even be released,” she later said. To have all the hard work she had put into the project as well as Richardson’s legacy shelved indefinitely was frustrating, but the fall of Orion also signaled broader changes within the industry. Fewer studios were willing to take chances on experimental projects, and Hollywood’s focus was shifting almost entirely toward the making of movies deemed safe in terms of their box office potential. To Jessica, this was certainly bad news, especially in light of the industry’s unequal treatment of women and age. For a woman actor, being older than forty meant that scripts with an interesting, central female character would be almost impossible to come by. After a decade of being able to pick and choose, always certain that even if she passed on one project, another good script would eventually arrive, Jessica suddenly found herself unable to take the availability of quality work for granted. In some ways, Blue Sky can be seen as the last truly great part in her filmography—the end of the golden age for her, at least in terms of cinema. Of course, there would be more interesting roles to come, and Jessica would continue to headline movies for the rest of the decade. But with Blue Sky, she felt, a certain epoch was ending. “Maybe this whole period of my work is grinding to a halt,” she said in 1991. “I began to wonder if it wasn’t time to, maybe, really quit, do something else.” This desire to quit was nothing new. She had been talking of leaving the film industry for many years—and she still does today. But something always lures her back. A good part, a handsome paycheck—the two, sadly, rarely coincide—whatever the reason, she continues to act. Soon after completing Blue Sky, Jessica was once again convinced to accept a part—this time the job was more about the people she would be working with rather than the material itself. For years, she had regretted not being cast in Raging Bull, and now the time finally came for Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro to come to her. The film was to be a remake of the 1962 noir classic Cape Fear and was to star DeNiro as the psychopathic killer Max 128

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Cady. Jessica was at first unsure whether the role of Nick Nolte’s frustrated wife would give her anything substantial to do, but she agreed to make the film because she couldn’t pass on the opportunity to work with “Marty and Bobby.” In the end, making the movie turned out to be a gratifying experience—there were many layers to the character Leigh that Jessica was able to explore, not least the dangerous combination of lust and repulsion she feels for Max Cady. “This was an area Marty and I discussed: How far we could go with that fascination with evil,” she said of the process. “It’s grounded in the character of a woman profoundly disappointed with her husband and her life. Life is kind of lost to her. Some force (Max) comes in and makes her feel things for the first time in a long time. Is it fear? Does it translate into sexuality? Some days we wondered if we went too far.” Scorsese knew that by casting Jessica he would get the best possible take on the character’s complex, sometimes dubious motives. No one but her could infuse a performance with the kind of carnality and yearning at the core of a character’s very being; she had consistently demonstrated this unique quality in her acting since she had played Cora in Postman. Filming took place largely in Florida, to which Jessica traveled in the late weeks of 1990, once again bringing the kids along with her. Having them there at the end of each emotionally challenging day was a great comfort. “My children slept with me every night while I was making the movie,” she later admitted. “I’ve gotten better at being able to not carry over my work to home. I have children who need their mother. They don’t even like it when I dye my hair. I’ve gotten better about it because of the kids.” Working with Scorsese was an exciting, stimulating experience. The legendary director would observe each scene with glee, barely able to contain his delight. His childlike joy of being part of moviemaking was infectious; it was impossible for Jessica not to let herself be carried along with it. She also threw herself into working with DeNiro—something she had wanted to do for a very long time. She found him enigmatic, as private and focused on his process as she was, and utterly unpredictable. “You’d go into a scene with him and really have no clue what he’s going to do—so it really is like real life. When you’re inside the scene, inside that moment, it can really be thrilling just to go places you had no idea it was going to take you [to].” Although the script waited till the very last part of the movie to have Leigh and Cady finally meet, Jessica convinced Scorsese and screenwriter Wesley Strick to write an additional scene that would allow her character to interact with DeNiro’s Cady earlier on. She also made numerous suggestions 129

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for enriching her character, adding layers to what initially seemed like a bland, one-dimensional part. “That’s why casting Jessica Lange was a key element,” Scorsese later explained. “It just completed the entire picture because she contributed ideas and inspiration to Wesley and myself, but also to DeNiro and Nick [Nolte]; she gave as much as we could get with that character. A character with more facades, more complexity, more conflict—she made her more than just ‘the wife.’” Much of the time, Jessica and Nick Nolte improvised in their scenes, particularly in the tense confrontation that occurs between them after Leigh discovers her husband betrayed her. They would sit in makeup together and discuss their motivation, often writing pieces of additional dialogue on scraps of paper. In the end, rather than just being a story of two men, the movie became much more textured than its predecessor. It was the first film Jessica had appeared in since Tootsie to become a smash hit at the box office— although, once again, because she was playing a largely supporting role, it did little to change her status in the eyes of the industry. Her reviews were enthusiastic, with some even suggesting she should have been put up for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but in the end the actress who played her onscreen daughter, Juliette Lewis, received the nomination. .

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hings were not always going smoothly at home. Both Jessica and Sam spent a considerable amount of time apart, working on their respective projects. Sam rarely accompanied her on location—she would always take the kids, but he was not the kind of man to sit around and wait for her to finish the day’s shooting and rub her feet. When they finally reunited in Virginia after Jessica completed Cape Fear, they resumed their simple life, and for a time it seemed that everything was going to be alright again. In May, Sam wrote to Johnny Dark: “Me and Jessie are in love once again & everything is honkey-dory.” “They were crazy about each other, absolutely in love,” Dark says. “But they fought all the time. I didn’t get to know Jessica well; she wasn’t that keen on Sam’s friends from before they got together. I think she thought that I was a bad influence. Anytime I’d come to visit, she would stay away.” As Dark explains further, “Alcohol was the main problem. It affected everything. Sam was a drinker, a moody one at that. He’d go into dark moods; sometimes he’d just take the truck and go off somewhere, just driving around, and he’d stay away for days. It must have been hard for her, although I don’t think she was particularly easy either. They were quite the match.” Sam was a great believer in destiny, and, to him, his love story with Jessica was fated; at times he felt as though some invisible force were always pulling him back to her, no matter how much he tried to run. Dark remembers the time he and Shepard had gone to see King Kong back in the mid1970s and how Sam was instantly smitten by Jessica: “She was just so absolutely his kind of woman,” Dark reflects. “The first time he saw her in King Kong, he turned to me after and said, ‘Oh boy, I have to meet her!’ Fast forward a few years, he called me from LA and said, ‘I just got this gig— Guess who is playing opposite me?’ It was Frances. He saw the whole thing as inevitable, destined.” 131

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Jessica felt the same way, although the dark times were hard to get through. She would withdraw, drifting into what Sam called “endless, solitary walks.” She had been battling melancholia for years—a sadness that went back to her childhood. Having children made it somewhat easier to cope; they were the reason to get out of bed on dark, cold, winter mornings, prepare breakfast for them, drive them to school, and for both Jessica and Sam the rhythm of family life worked as a soothing tonic. “Sometimes, I feel like a borderline schizophrenic because the depressions are so bad,” she admitted at the time. “But it’s something you’ve got to work against—and I have for the last ten years. You have to be diligent, a warrior. It’s a daily discipline, a real concentrated power you have to bring to your life to keep it on track. There are times I feel so close to the edge I could easily tip over. Then, other times, I feel much more centered. If it weren’t for the kids, I could very well be gone, emotionally or physically. These kids have been my salvation.” Neither one believed in seeking the professional help of a therapist—whatever difficulties each faced, he or she would wrestle with them alone.

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“In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death,” writes Joan Didion in South and West, “not violent death but death by decay, overripness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology. The place is physically dark, dark like the negative of a photograph, dark like an X-ray: the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with morbid luminescence. The crypts above ground dominate certain vistas. In the hypnotic liquidity of the atmosphere all motion slows into choreography, all people on the street move as if suspended in a precarious emulsion, and there seems only a technical distinction between the quick and the dead.” This description illustrates quite clearly reasons why Jessica would become so seduced by that city—its crumbling decadence constituting an image, an atmosphere, that closely resembles the feelings evoked by the Southern Gothic literature she had been drawn to since she was a teenager. In the spring of 1991, Jessica traveled to Louisiana. She didn’t have a clear purpose other than to wander aimlessly searching for ghosts of the past, which seemed to be hauntingly omnipresent. She bought a collection of Walker Evans photographs, all dating to the mid-1930s—images of plantations and old southern mansions, abandoned, mausoleums of another time. She was 132

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transfixed by them. “They’re like people, every photograph of a house is like a portrait of a person,” she mused. She had started collecting black-and-white photography, mostly by the great old masters, sometime earlier, and it was by now her passion. But there was another reason for the trip. She was getting ready for an important new chapter in the saga of her artistic search. She would finally be acting on stage. It had been a dream for her, one that filled her with both dread and exhilaration in equal measures. It wasn’t just any play or any part. She was going straight for the holy grail. “Blanche taps into so many different things. . . . Death, sexuality, fears, desires.” It was the part she had been getting ready for since she first read Williams’s play as a fourteen-yearold in Minnesota—now it was time to do it. Before she could immerse herself completely in the world of Tennessee Williams, though, she still had some other commitments to fulfill. In June, she went to Nebraska to film a TV adaptation of Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! directed by Glenn Jordan. It was yet another chance for Jessica to tell a story of connection to the land, and she enjoyed the part of Alexandra, a woman who desperately tries to keep her farm together in the face of many hardships. In the fall, she was back in New York, where she was to reunite with Robert DeNiro for another remake of a noir classic, Night and the City. It was a rather weak part, but upon reading the script and realizing that she would be playing the wife of a bar owner in a locale based on the Lion’s Head, she could not refuse. Martin Scorsese was originally set to direct but in the end decided to pass on the project, which was taken on instead by Irwin Winkler. Returning to the Village and behind the bar was a peculiar experience— so much about the script reminded Jessica of the Head. “It’s weird how things come around,” she would remark. Al Koblin, the co-owner of the Head at the time Jessica worked there, recalls today: “That was a funny little film. Jessica based her character on one of the exwives—there were, I think, three of them—of my partner, Wes Joice. I believe it was Judy Joice.” Jessica confirmed in an interview at the time that Helen was “very loosely based on the wife of the owner of the bar,” adding: “I’ve only been paid for two things in my entire life—waitressing and acting.” Clearly, the few checks she had gotten from modeling were too meager to merit a mention, or, perhaps, even at this stage of her career Jessica still felt compelled to distance herself from any possibility of being seen as model turned actress. Waitress turned actress was much more romantic. Although her screen time in Night and the City was limited, Jessica fully utilized what she was given, making sure that every time Helen appears, she 133

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is the one who draws the viewer’s eye. She made her a bohemian, a 1960s hippie goddess, stuck in that time—she still dressed and wore her hair in the style of that bygone era. Upstaging DeNiro is not an easy feat, and perhaps Jessica hadn’t set out to achieve exactly that, but Night and the City does contain some of the most breathtaking, if fleeting, close-ups of her career. There are moments where she simply exists silently in the frame, busying herself behind the bar, while at the forefront the male actors are doing their thing. And yet she manages to convey so much in those moments of silence, once again a testament to her incredible physicality. She is sad, tender, hopeful; she longs; she is impatient. She is horny, bored. She dreams of a better life. All this she communicates to the camera without uttering a single line of text. “Jessica has a very great sense of truth,” said DeNiro at the time. “She’s a pleasure to work with.” Helen would be another part in which Jessica explored the “what if ” aspect that had always fascinated her. She knew that in an alternative universe she could have easily ended up in her character’s shoes. “I feel incredibly lucky to be where I am,” she reflected, “because I know a lot of actors with tremendous talent who aren’t. Because they simply haven’t had the luck that they need. I think that for every successful actor who’s working, there’s probably ten just as good who aren’t. In my very first acting class in New York, I was just astonished at the level and amount of talent—and not one of those people is known today.” Filming for Night and the City was completed just before Christmas. Jessica, Sam, and the children traveled to Minnesota to spend the holidays with the family. Jane, Ann, their brother George, their families, Dorothy, the aunts, uncles, and cousins—all were there. It was easy to feel part of a clan, a piece in a great puzzle—being back home always felt restorative. And she would need all the strength she could get in the months that followed, for she was about to embark on what would perhaps be the most taxing endeavor of her artistic life both physically and emotionally. In the early weeks of 1992, she was back in New York to begin rehearsals for A Streetcar Named Desire. Director Gregory Mosher admitted that staging a revival of the Tennessee Williams classic was Jessica’s idea. She had wanted to do stage for a long time, and she had dreamed of playing Blanche longer than she could remember. Of course, her movie stardom made it easy to find money for the project—especially when Alec Baldwin was cast as Stanley. Baldwin had relatively recently reached leading-man status and was considered a hot property in Hollywood, but to the dismay of many in the industry he turned down a 134

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number of high-profile film roles in order to appear on Broadway opposite Jessica. The pairing made headlines and was sure to draw crowds to the box office, regardless of the critical reception. Jessica suggested her friend Amy Madigan for the part of Stella. The cast was completed with Timothy Carhart, fresh off his highly unsympathetic appearance in Thelma and Louise, who was to play Mitch. The rehearsal started slowly. The entire company was aware of the weight of history on their shoulders. They were to perform at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre—the very stage where the original production starring Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden and directed by Elia Kazan took Broadway by storm in 1947 and ultimately changed American theater forever. Jessica and Baldwin also knew that because they were seen as movie stars, their performances would receive extra scrutiny. There would be inevitable comparisons with the film version of 1951—few would disagree that Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando were practically unbeatable in their roles. To Jessica, following in Leigh’s footsteps had a special significance: she was the actress Jessica had loved and emulated as a teenager. Her haunted artistry had a profound effect on Jessica’s own creative imagination; two years before doing Streetcar, Jessica paid tribute to Leigh by hosting a documentary film about the iconic star, clearly showcasing just how much Leigh had meant to her. But while traces of Vivien Leigh would unavoidably be felt in Jessica’s performance, she knew that ultimately she had to find her own way to portray Blanche. For Jessica, for Baldwin, and for all the other actors, the key became Williams’s text. “We spent a lot of time in the rehearsal sat down [sic], just reading the text,” said Amy Madigan. “We quickly forgot about the film, about any other versions. It was just us and the words.” Jessica, whose only previous experience of stage work had been her time as an ensemble cast member at the Opéra-Comique in Paris and her stint in summer stock, approached the play the way she had always gone into her film performances. She went deep into the psychology of the character, immersed herself in the words and the magic of Williams, became Blanche. What she didn’t take into account was just how vastly different the experience of performing on stage would be from acting for the screen. On the set, under the lights, the eye of the camera is able to capture the tiniest detail, see into the actor’s soul—subtle moments often completely lost in the vast space of the theater. She still had her superb physicality, the power of gesture she knew well, but her voice, untrained for the stage, had trouble carrying the words, her intimate understanding of Blanche somewhat diluted by the distance between her and the audience. 135

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She went to see the theater early on—it had been closed for a long time, and the air was filled with a musty smell. It was vast and dark but somehow calming in its majesty. The smell would help to transport her to the sultry, humid nights of New Orleans. She also drew on her own memories, distant and romantic—her bohemian life in Paris all those years ago. She had known someone there, a boy, a poet, who evoked the same nostalgic feeling that Blanche’s husband did. She remembered he had always worn Fracas—a heavy, floral, old-fashioned fragrance. The scent of “jasmine perfume,” which Blanche mentions to Stella, became key to Jessica’s nightly ritual—she would spray it on her lace handkerchief and carry it with her throughout the performance, allowing the delicate notes of a long-gone summer night to fill her with a kind of haunted melancholia she felt necessary for the play. When the production opened in April 1992, the reviews were mixed. Most critics were less than kind to Jessica. A critic for the Boston Globe summed up this response by stating that “Jessica Lange is learning a new craft—the theatre—at Blanche’s expense. And ours.” Most agreed that voice was her main problem—her delivery simply didn’t carry. Her performance seemed to lack the sensuality and emotional versatility her film performances were famous for. By contrast, Alec Baldwin fared much better, the New York Times declaring that Jessica, “his unequal partner in unhinged desire,” “imposed limitations” that prevented him from reaching greatness. The criticism stung, especially regarding a role that meant so much to her. Jessica later blamed the production and by extension her director rather than her own lack of experience. “The production was not good,” she told Charlie Rose in 1997. “This is in no way a reflection on any of the actors because they are all wonderful actors, and they all really brought something to the table. But the production wasn’t right. The production was not right. Instead of lifting you up, it was draining. How does that happen? I don’t know. . . . The hard thing is, with stage, when it doesn’t work, you suffer through it eight times a week, and it really becomes laborious. However, I must say, in a lesser play I probably would have blown my brains out.” She refused to let the bad notices and the imperfection of the production stand in the way of her immersing herself in the experience of being Blanche. She loved the play, the words, the character. Nothing could take away from that, even when Alec Baldwin scored a Tony nomination that May, and she did not. In fact, Baldwin would bring the production its only nod, ultimately losing to Judd Hirsch. Jessica was too absorbed in the strange half-reality of life in the play and the hours between each performance to be affected by any 136

Young Jessica on the cusp of a new life, photographed by Paco Grande, circa 1968. Courtesy of Paco Grande.

“They drifted from city to torn city” (Joan Didion, Slouching toward Bethlehem [4th Estate, 2017], 84). Jessica and Paco on the road, late 1960s. Courtesy of Paco Grande.

“She was always looking in the mirror”: Paco photographs Jessica, circa 1968. Courtesy of Paco Grande.

“She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” Intimate portraits of Jessica taken by Paco Grande, late 1960s. Courtesy of Paco Grande.

Jessica with Ellie Klein’s troupe of performers, putting on a mime show in the Village, New York City, circa 1969. Courtesy of Paco Grande.

Jessica, lost in thought, photographed by Paco Grande around the time of the filming of Home Is Where the Heart Is, 1970. Courtesy of Paco Grande.

As Angelique, the Angel of Death, in Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, 1979.

“I am forever indebted to Jack [Nicholson] and Bob [Rafelson] for taking a chance” (interview of Jessica Lange, Inside the Actors Studio, season 2, episode 7, 1995). Jessica in The Postman Always Rings Twice with Jack Nicholson, 1981.

Frances in a rare happy moment, dancing with Harry York. The filming of Frances marked the start of Jessica’s relationship with Sam Shepard, 1981.

Despite her fears of not being funny enough, Jessica won her first Oscar for playing Julie in Tootsie. Seen here on set with director Sydney Pollack, 1981.

Jessica and Sam on the set of Country in Iowa, 1984. The film was seen as an important political statement in support of American farmers. Courtesy of Johnny Dark, Wittliff Collections, Texas State University, San Marcos.

Jessica, Sam, and baby Shura captured by Johnny Dark on his visit to Santa Fe in 1983. Courtesy of Johnny Dark, Wittliff Collections, Texas State University, San Marcos.

Jessica in character as the country legend Patsy Cline on the set of Sweet Dreams with director Karl Reisz, 1985.

Jessica with her screen sisters and real-life friends Diane Keaton and Sissy Spacek in the film adaptation of Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Crimes of the Heart, 1986.

How well do we really know our parents? Jessica as Ann Talbot, a lawyer defending her father (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl), who is accused of war crimes, in Music Box, 1989.

“He really made my performance possible” (interview of Jessica Lange by Molly Haskell, 1997, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN). Jessica with Tommy Lee Jones in Blue Sky, a film that brought her the Best Actress Oscar in 1995.

Jessica with her Blue Sky choreographer Greg Rosatti, who became a close friend, 1991. Like the film’s director, Tony Richardson, Rosatti would tragically lose his battle with AIDS. Courtesy of Lisa Rosatti.

Jessica Lange, the rebellious star, circa late 1980s.

Jessica as Big Edie and Drew Barrymore as Little Edie in Michael Sucsy’s HBO film Grey Gardens, 2009.

Jessica in American Horror Story: Coven with costar and friend Sarah Paulson, 2013. The role earned Jessica the nickname “the supreme.”

Jessica performing Lana Del Rey’s song “Gods and Monsters” in American Horror Story: Freakshow, her final season as a show regular, 2014.

Two legends portraying two legends: Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis and Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford in FX’s miniseries Feud, 2017.

Thanks to her roles on American Horror Story, Jessica became an icon for a new generation of millennial fans. Represented here as Constance Langdon in season 1, Murder House, by artist Alejandro Mogollo. Courtesy of Alejandro Mogollo/ Alejandro Mogollo Art.

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external goings-on. Unable to sleep, she would wander around her apartment at night or lie in a bathtub for hours. At times, she felt as though Blanche’s hold on her soul would never ease. Despite the lukewarm critical appraisal, Streetcar was nonetheless seen as an important theatrical event, and tickets were sold out for the entire run. When the curtain fell for the last time in August, Jessica was absolutely exhausted. Beyond the physical toll the play took on her, she found the emotional residue hard to shake. She went back to the farm. “There are color snapshots of me the first week back home in Virginia, after I had finished my run on Broadway,” she later said. “Those snapshots are frightening. I looked like I was totally insane. It was like, how did this woman get let out for a weekend on the farm?” Jessica spent the months that followed Streetcar quietly at home, trying to regain balance. She was more disillusioned than ever with the film industry, and she turned down the few offers that came her way. She focused her energies on motherhood, on reading and expanding her interests, on being with Sam once again. Then, in the early weeks of 1993 something else caught her attention. Watching television one evening, she was captivated by John Upton’s 20/20 special on the plight of Romanian orphans. In December 1989, the Romanian people had overthrown their Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, who had ruled the country for two decades. As the iron curtain lifted, and the barriers collapsed, Western journalists were for the first time able to shed light on the extend of Ceausescu’s cruelty and bizarre rulings. He had banned contraception, outlawed abortion, and decreed that all women should have at least five children. When the images of the thousands of unwanted children, living in unimaginably dire conditions of the country’s many orphanages, reached TV screens in the West, people were horrified. The Romanian bureaucracy made it especially difficult to aid the children and practically impossible for foreign citizens to adopt them. Jessica watched the TV special, surrounded by her own kids, and afterward could not get the images out of her mind. She telephoned Upton in California on an impulse and told him to count her in the next time he planned a trip to Romania. Less than a week later, she received a call from Upton—he was going back immediately; if she was still interested, she would have to fly out to London right away and join him and his team there. Jessica knew she had to go, although she had no idea what to expect from the trip. Next thing she knew, she was in a car with Upton and an interpreter, driving from Budapest across the Romanian border in the dead of night, a heavy rain beating against the car 137

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windows. It was a precarious venture—although Communist rule had officially ended in Romania, the many oppressive systems leftover from it were still very much in place, including the secret police, which began following Jessica and Upton the moment they arrived in the country. She had hoped that she would finally be able to put her celebrity status to good use, only to discover that “they didn’t know shit about me in Romania.” When they finally reached the orphanage, though, everything else suddenly became unimportant; the fear evaporated. All that mattered was helping these children. To see them in reality, not on a TV screen, was more heartbreaking than Jessica had imagined. “You’d walk into these rooms, and it was enough to make you weep, the way these children were kept,” she later recalled. “They’re all in different forms of deformity and handicaps, and yet they’d just grab on to you and want to touch your hair, your face.” Upton had initially wanted to get a little boy he had met before, but now Jessica was determined to also bring along a little girl she spotted in the corner of the room. She was five years old, blind in one eye, and unable to speak or stand. Although taking the child away immediately, which is what Jessica hoped for, was impossible, she promised herself that she would not rest until she got the little girl out of the orphanage. When they returned to the States, Jessica traveled to Washington to join Democratic senator Bart Gordon of Tennessee at a press conference meant to drum up support for the congressional proposal to impose sanctions on Romania until it relented and made the process easier for aid agencies to access the orphans and for adoption rules to be made more open to foreign citizens. “Our main concern is the children themselves,” she told journalists on Capitol Hill. “To try to move something through a political venue, we try to persuade the powers there to change.” The international pressure eventually worked, and that June, just two months after her visit to Romania, Jessica was at JFK Airport in New York welcoming Ana Kinczllers, the little girl she had met at the orphanage. She and Sam agreed to become foster parents to the girl, with the prospect of possibly adopting her. Jessica was photographed at the arrivals gate, wearing dark glasses, carrying the terrified youngster in her arms. They drove Ana back to Virginia, where a warm family home was waiting for her for the first time in her young life. The difficulties of caring for a child with severe disabilities and suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome soon overwhelmed Jessica and Sam. It was clear that neither had the experience or the skills to help the girl on a level she required. There were small miracles, which made the whole 138

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family happy: Ana’s first shaky steps, the time she smiled for the first time, her joy at hearing Jessica play her the tape of a gospel choir singing “There Is Still Power in the Blood of the Lamb” she had gotten from a friend in New Orleans. But in the end Jessica decided that she couldn’t offer the girl the permanent home and the care she needed. She spoke to Upton, who suggested allowing the California family who fostered the little boy from the same orphanage to take Ana in. Upon assurance that they had experience in caring for traumatized children, Jessica reluctantly agreed to let Ana go. “It was a heartbreaking decision for Jessica,” Upton said at the time. She felt she had failed the little girl, but she was also thinking of her own children, who needed her love and attention—most of which had over the eighteen months of Ana’s stay at the farm been channeled into making her better. “I still don’t know if I made a terrible mistake giving her to that family,” Jessica admitted tearfully in 1995. She, however, had no regrets about helping to get the girl out of the orphanage and out of Romania. “It was an extremely powerful experience; one I wish I could repeat a thousand times.”

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he strain of playing Blanche DuBois, caring for Ana, and simultaneously mothering her own growing children took their toll. As always, Jessica looked to work to defuse tension. She had been turning down scripts, waiting for something that would capture her imagination, finally agreeing to star in Losing Isaiah, a drama that in some ways mirrored what was going on in her own life at the time. She had mixed feelings about the film and the role of a social worker who adopts a Black baby abandoned by his crack-addicted mother in a dumpster. There were red flags all along—the complex issues tackled by the script required a highly sensitive, intelligent director, and even then it would be incredibly hard to avoid turning the film’s narrative into a classic “white savior” trope. When Jessica signed on to make the movie, the script was still incomplete, and the ending was left open. Things at home were tense, Sam telling Johnny Dark that he and Jessica had “another falling out, just as she was going off to Chicago” to begin filming. It was not a great start and a bad omen for the entire enterprise. Jessica arrived in Chicago in early April 1994. The cast assembled for the film was impressive, including Samuel L. Jackson, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Halle Berry as Khaila, Isaiah’s biological mother. Jessica would also reunite with her O Pioneers! costar, David Strathairn. Berry was still relatively unknown, and she had fought hard to get the part. “Anytime a role like this comes up, it’s a battle because we just don’t have opportunities like that very often,” she admitted at the time. The prospect of working with Jessica Lange filled her with a mixture of anticipation and dread—she had been a fan since she saw King Kong as a little girl. Now she would be acting opposite Jessica, having to hold her own. The two shared a cordial but strictly professional relationship—they agreed that it would work better for the film if they kept a distance from each other. As a result, the handful of scenes they end up sharing in the film are filled with authentic tension—neither had any idea what 140

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the other would be bringing to the table. “I learned a great deal by working with [Jessica Lange],” Berry said afterward. “She’s very serious and very controlled. She’s a very strong personality.” Director Stephen Gyllenhaal felt the pressure of the story from the start—in fact, he had suggested the studio hire a Black director because so many of the people already involved in the production were white. After all, this was a story meant to show both sides of the issue, which, he felt, would be impossible to achieve without a significant voice representing the Black perspective. In the end, he agreed to make the film, and, to his credit, he made every effort to present a well-balanced picture. “It’s not my favorite movie; I think I made a lot of mistakes on it,” he admitted in 2009. “We certainly asked some interesting questions—whether we did it entirely successfully, it was certainly our attempt to do that.” Gyllenhaal, whose wife, Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, had written the screenplay, struggled with the ending throughout the production, unsure how to resolve the complex issue at the heart of the story. What the director eventually delivered was an attempt to please both sides of the argument, but in effect this compromise weakened the film’s entire structure. “The ending is problematic,” he observed later. “I don’t think we quite solved it.” Jessica was disappointed with the final result, and, as ever, she didn’t attempt to hide her true feelings. She had had reservations about doing the film from the beginning, but, again, the emotional reaction she had upon first reading the script had made her say yes. It conjured up an image from Robert Frank, the famed photographer she had shared a house with all those years earlier with Paco and Danny Seymour. “I always loved this picture from his book The Americans, of a white nurse holding a black baby,” she remembered later. “When I read the script[,] I thought, if we could get one hint of the power of that Frank photograph in this film, it would be really exciting.” She felt let down by Gyllenhaal. He had promised her a well-developed character, but what she saw in the finished film was a far cry from what she had expected. In the end, she refused to promote the film, despite reviews of her work in it being for the most part positive. In reviewing Losing Isaiah for the Los Angeles Times, Peter Rainer wrote that it was Jessica’s work that gave the film its “core of knockabout sadness,” adding that it was “the kind of film that makes audiences want to talk about it afterwards.” Almost as soon as Jessica finished shooting Isaiah, she was off to Scotland to appear in Rob Roy. She had read the script, and although she had no previous knowledge of the times and people depicted in the story, she was 141

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drawn to the character of Mary MacGregor and to the relationship between her and Rob Roy. There was something pure and uncomplicated about it; based on deep love and trust as well as magnetic sensuality, the marriage, in Jessica’s words, “carried with it none of the neurotic love of the twentieth century.” Scottish director Michael Caton-Jones cast the movie with his friends and people he had worked with previously—including his buddy Liam Neeson in the title role. He wanted Jessica for the film but doubted she would accept the role, although he decided to send her the script anyway. He was surprised when she said she was interested, and he went to meet her in a New York hotel. “From the moment I met him, I just felt a tremendous connection to him,” Jessica later said about Caton-Jones. Any director knows that getting a compliment from Jessica Lange is not exactly an easy feat—she is usually as demanding of the people she works with as she is of herself. “The part needed an actress of a certain weight, and Jessica is the embodiment of the kind of strength I was after,” Caton-Jones explained his casting decision. The chemistry between Jessica and Neeson was crucial, and the director instantly felt that the two would get on together. He was right—for Jessica, Neeson had all the intelligence and masculine allure that made it easy for her to play Mary’s love for him. The most intoxicating thing about making Rob Roy was the location. She flew to Scotland in the early summer of 1994, and to reach the isolated part of the Highlands where the sets had been built, she had to travel by helicopter. Something about this wild, unspoiled, and unforgiving land appealed to her imagination. When not busy on set, she would take her camera and go off on long walks, exploring the misty trails, visiting the tiny, ancient settlements, spending time in the little graveyards with headstones too weathered by time and harsh winds to reveal the names of those buried underneath them. Sam had given her a Leica camera sometime earlier, and although she hadn’t taken photos since the 1960s, she quickly took it up again, and this time she would not let herself be discouraged. She even constructed a little darkroom on the farm in Virginia, and although for the time being she modestly declared that she would “have to get much better” before she would let anyone look at her photographs, taking them was becoming an important part of her creative life. Scotland proved the perfect setting—haunted and mysterious, with few people to distract her from the magic.

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Some good news awaited upon her return to the States. Orion Pictures, which had emerged from bankruptcy in November 1992, was finally ready to release Blue Sky, more than four years after the filming had wrapped. As had happened for other films with an overdue release date, the studio feared a big flop and thus decided to give it a limited run, hoping that the strength of Jessica’s performance and the fact of it being Tony Richardson’s last directorial effort would generate good word-of-mouth promotion and positive reviews. The film premiered at the Lincoln Center in New York in August 1994. Jessica was still in Scotland and unable to attend, but Tony Richardson’s daughters, Joely and Natasha (newly married to Liam Neeson), as well as his former wife, Vanessa Redgrave, were there to celebrate Tony’s final picture. Blue Sky went into limited release in mid-September, and although it never became a box office hit, Jessica received some of the most glowing reviews of her career. Peter Rainer of the Los Angeles Times led the way with an elaborate, rave review dedicated entirely to praising her. “Jessica Lange’s acting in Blue Sky leaves you awe-struck,” he opened. Carly was “probably her best” performance, “even better than her Frances Farmer or her Patsy Cline.” Rainer’s review put Jessica on a course that led straight to award-season glory; after his rhapsodic praise, other national and international publications followed suit, and soon she was seen as the frontrunner for all of the year’s awards, including the Oscar. Jessica detested the notion of a “campaign”—the very idea of campaigning to win an award seemed absurd. But for better or worse, in the winter of 1994–1995 she became the industry’s darling, and it seemed that no one could stand in her way to victory. Some have pointed to the fact that the competition was not exactly fierce. By 1994, the amount of meaty female roles in major movies had hit an all-time low, and although no one could take away from the fact that Jessica’s performance in Blue Sky was exceptionally good, the absence of any other real contenders for the bestactress crown was troubling. In January 1995, Jessica, Hannah, and Walker traveled to Los Angeles. It promised to be a busy time: aside from participating in the Oscar campaign for Blue Sky—which she tried to keep to a minimum—she was also to film a TV adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. After the less-than-enthusiastic reception she had received on Broadway, Jessica saw this as a chance to prove that she was right for Blanche after all. The teleplay was to be directed by Glenn Jordan, who had worked with her on O Pioneers!, and the cast would include Alec Baldwin, reprising the part of Stanley, as well as Diane Lane as

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Stella and John Goodman as Mitch. It was Jessica’s idea to get Goodman, who had appeared with her in both Sweet Dreams and Everybody’s All American. “It’s the finest thing I’ve ever been in,” he said at the time, moved by her generosity. “We act goofy together, but I think of her as a person of the plains— rock solid.” For Jessica, playing Blanche again brought with it a renewed sense of anxiety, although the safety of a film set and the presence of her children made things somewhat easier. “Mother, do you think playing these crazy women is going to make you crazy?” asked Hannah one day. “Well, I suppose you could look at it that way. Or else it’s a great opportunity for me to get rid of all that craziness through someone else,” Jessica responded after some thought. “I don’t know if she was buying that or not,” she later laughed. That January, she picked up the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama, presented to her by Sharon Stone and her longtime friend Rip Torn. She came onto the stage to a standing ovation and was visibly moved by the outpouring of love—something that, as a Hollywood outsider, she was unaccustomed to. When the Oscar nominations were announced a couple of weeks later, there was no surprise that Jessica was among the five nominees for best actress. It was the fifth time she was up for the award, and this time, it seemed, she was on her way to win. She had always appreciated her Oscar for Tootsie, but as much as she enjoyed maintaining that awards meant little to her, the top prize was something she had always wanted. She arrived at the ceremony that March dressed in a black gown by Calvin Klein, more nervous than she thought she would be. Sam was back in Virginia, supervising Shura’s pajama party, while Hanna and Walker stayed at the rented Hollywood house, glued to the TV set. Jessica was once again accompanied by her brother, who enjoyed the glitzy occasions more than anyone else in the family, and by Michael Caton-Jones, who was in town to promote the upcoming release of Rob Roy. Tom Hanks, who won that night for Forrest Gump, declared Jessica the winner. She was cool and collected yet emotional as she paid tribute to Tommy Lee Jones, Tony Richardson, and her children, but notably leaving Sam out. As soon as she was off the stage, however, she hurried to make a telephone call to Virginia. Sam may have not been by her side or in her speech that night, but he was still the first person she wanted to share her triumph with. “People were saying I was going to win, but I had tremendous doubts,” she said a few days later. The win was seen as a resurrection of her career— especially in that it was followed closely by the release of both Rob Roy and 144

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Losing Isaiah. Sadly, even an Oscar win was never going to be enough to overcome Hollywood politics and the wider cultural attitude toward aging. The few attractive female roles available would go to younger, more financially bankable names. The fact that Blue Sky made around $3 million at the box office compared to Forrest Gump’s $300 million just reinforced the notion that female-driven films were high-risk investments. “It’s great to get recognition for that little film, but whether it will change anything for me, I don’t know,” Jessica said at the time. “I can’t say that scripts were stacked up in front of the door when I got home.”

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That spring Jessica and Sam decided on a big move. After thirteen years in Virginia, it was time for a change. Jessica felt that the kids should be close to their extended family—to the clan—just as she had been while growing up. She had a sentimental view of the past, remembering the good, disregarding the bad. She also wanted to be closer to Dorothy, whose health had been declining for some time. Sam agreed to the move—and once again they talked about marriage. Why not get married up there in Minnesota at the height of the summer? The decision was made—they would move, get married, and start anew. They chose an imposing house built in 1892 in Stillwater, a quiet town not far from where Dorothy lived. The place was large enough to accommodate the whole family, and it included a huge garden, which Jessica would in time transform into a breathtaking oasis. There was, however, no space for horses and livestock, and for this purpose Sam soon purchased a small ranch just across the state line in River Falls, Wisconsin. No sooner was the move completed than Jessica found herself in the alltoo-familiar territory of depression. Was this really where she wanted to be? She missed New York, the excitement and diversity of a city, and once again felt stuck in the monotony of a small town. The summer quickly passed by, and the wedding Sam and Jessica had planned did not take place. They did, however, feel closer than they had in a long time. “Me and Jessie are going thru an incredible common realization that we both come from almost identical transient backgrounds, children of alcoholic fathers & that neither of us know where we want to live & call ‘home,’” wrote Sam to Johnny Dark that September. That morning they went for coffee at their favorite local café, where they could be alone and talk. Jessica revealed that all she had imagined Minnesota 145

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to be when she had suggested the move had been a dream and that the actual reality of being back was something “she could not foresee.” They had just put all their money into buying the two properties, and Sam suggested they wait out the coming winter before making any further decisions about uprooting the family. Jessica had to agree that was the sensible thing to do. Money worries were certainly part of the reason Jessica continued to work. She turned down a handful of roles, including in First Wives Club, but as 1996 came around, with Sam struggling to find employment, it was up to her to keep the family finances above water. She accepted the title role in an adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s novel Cousin Bette, which was to begin filming in France in June. She traveled to Bordeaux and was quickly enchanted by the city and the surrounding region. She had always been a Francophile, and it felt good to be back in the country she had once called home. Filming took place in Bordeaux’s historic center, which stood in for mid-nineteenthcentury Paris, and at the beautiful Château du Bouilh, where the cast also stayed during production. Jessica kept to herself, and when not on set she explored the wine country and the sleepy villages around Bordeaux. Members of the crew were unaware until the end of the shoot that Jessica understood French—later joking that at least no one had made any disparaging comments about her while she was on set. The role of a plain, bitter spinster was certainly a stretch for Jessica—she appeared on-screen with no makeup, sporting an unflattering dark wig and dowdy costumes, letting the younger Elizabeth Shue play the movie’s sexy chanteuse. Many thought Jessica had been miscast, but when the film was released in 1998, she received good reviews, although the movie was largely seen as a disappointment. That summer another project Jessica had been developing for a number of years finally came to life, and as soon as she returned home from France, she began getting ready to film the adaptation of Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize– winning novel A Thousand Acres. The idea for the film predated the book’s publication in 1991. Smiley’s agent, Lynn Pleshette, had sent the manuscript simultaneously to Lynn Arost and Kate Guinzburg, Arost’s friend and nextdoor neighbor at the Orion production offices, some months earlier. Arost and Guinzburg, who was also Michelle Pfeiffer’s producing partner, had been on the lookout for a project that would give Jessica and Michelle the opportunity to work together. “I always thought it would be interesting to do something onscreen with Michelle, as sisters,” Jessica said in 1997, “just because I had always felt a certain kind of familiarity with her, even though I didn’t know her at all. And so when this book arrived, we both responded to it immediately.” 146

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It would take another five years for the cameras to be ready to start rolling, but in the meantime Arost and Guinzburg agreed to work together to see the project come to fruition. It was a rare case of a female-driven story being created by women at every stage—from the book itself to the production, to the screenwriting by Laura Jones, and eventually to the directing by Jocelyn Moorhouse. Moorhouse had relatively limited experience; she had directed the highly acclaimed film Proof in her native Australia and only one American feature, How to Make an American Quilt. Yet both Jessica and Michelle felt that the film would benefit from a female director, and they agreed that Moorhouse was the best choice available to them at that time. Following its publication, Jane Smiley’s book was acclaimed by critics, winning both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and suddenly Jessica and Michelle were in possession of a hot property. But the film faced scrutiny before the first scene was even shot: the story and the fact that it was being told by women troubled many people, who feared it to be that most dreaded of things—a “feminist movie.” When the company arrived in the town of Rochelle, Illinois, where the shoot was to take place, some locals approached the film with alarmed skepticism. One concerned resident, Sharon Diamond, wrote a letter to the local newspaper, saying she wanted to warn her neighbors that this would not be “another one of Jessica Lange’s Farm Aid type pictures”: “Unless Hollywood chooses to ignore the author’s intent, A Thousand Acres will portray farming as a patriarchal power structure that subjugates women and exploits nature,” wrote Diamond. Jessica, who had always shown her support for the farming community, didn’t see the film as an affront to a way of life. Both to her and to Michelle it was a story of a family in all its complexity—not only the relationships between a father and his daughters as well as between sisters but also the exploration of transgenerational trauma and abuse. Smiley had based her novel on Shakespeare’s King Lear but chose to tell it from the two daughters’ point of view rather than the father’s. It was a controversial notion, and somehow seeing it on-screen would trouble people more than reading it in a book. Before A Thousand Acres, Hollywood had rarely approached the subject of child sexual abuse, particularly in the context of a family, and the film’s depiction of narcissism, repressed memories, and complex trauma remains to this day one of the most striking examples of such representation ever portrayed in a mainstream movie. Besides Jessica and Michelle, the film’s cast included Jennifer Jason Leigh as the youngest sister, Colin Firth, Keith Carradine, as well as Michelle 147

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Williams and Elisabeth Moss, both in their teens, as Pfeiffer’s daughters. For the crucial part of the father, Jane Smiley had envisaged Paul Newman, explaining: “His good looks would account for theirs—otherwise no one would accept Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer as gritty rural wives!” With Newman unavailable, the producers turned to Jason Robards, who would prove excellent in the role. Although Jessica and Michelle never discussed it, both knew from the beginning which part each wanted to play. “Ginny is an interesting character for me because I never played anybody like her before,” Jessica said of her choice. “She has a big arc in the film, which I like. I always like characters who travel that emotional distance.” Ginny would also be much softer and more docile than most of Jessica’s previous roles—especially when paired with Pfeiffer’s Rose, who is full of rage. Working on location at that beautiful old farm helped both actresses to get into their characters. There was something eerie about the place—the imposing house, the vast cornfields (which replaced the usual soybean because cornstalks were more photogenic), the silence that covered it all. Digging deep into the history of this highly dysfunctional family proved painful. For Jessica, the examination led her back to thinking about Al and her childhood, although, as she told Charlie Rose later, bad temper was “where the comparisons” between the two fathers ended. But the dark heart of the story affected everyone involved in the film. For Moorhouse, who had always loved King Lear, making the film was not an easy experience. “I had a hard time on that one,” she said years later. “I didn’t have enough time to shoot it; I was still relatively young—it was painful for me as a director.” Moorhouse also felt she didn’t have her two stars’ cooperation: “The men on that film were very supportive, ironically. The women were divas. Sometimes I wonder, when I look back at that experience, if they were being ‘Method’ because the characters they were playing were very bitter and twisted, angry women, and, unfortunately, they kind of stayed in character.” Things turned ugly when Moorhouse presented her cut of the movie early the following year. In Jessica’s words, the film was “a complete disaster, incomprehensible from an emotional level, from the storytelling perspective—all of it.” Buena Vista Pictures, the film’s distributor, requested changes, which Moorhouse declined to make, eventually quitting the picture, and asking for her name to be removed from it. Jessica and Michelle saw that request as a betrayal; they refused to let her name be taken off and instead set out to salvage the movie with the help of the film’s editor, the award-winning Maryann 148

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Brandon. “Considering the mess that she [Moorhouse] had left us with, the fact that we got the film out at all I thought was quite astonishing,” Jessica later stated. The discord only gave the already hostile critics further ammunition, so when the film was finally released in September 1997, the reviews were mostly brutal. Many critics failed to distinguish between child abuse and incest; others complained about the film’s unfair treatment of men, with Roger Ebert writing in his review that “the movie repeats the currently fashionable pattern in which men are bad and fathers are the most evil of all; there is not a single positive male character.” At the time, no one questioned the sexist and misogynist undertones in the film’s reception. Today, as we look back, although it’s easy to point to the film’s many faults, it is also vital to appreciate the courage with which it tackled certain themes and the fact that the story is told from an unapologetically female perspective—a perspective that remains elusive in films. Many publications acknowledged the power of the performances, especially Jessica’s, Michelle’s, and Robards’s, with Newsweek proclaiming: “Anyone who wants to see some of the juiciest performances of the year shouldn’t miss it.” Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times disliked the film but admired the two main stars, stating that they “triumphantly share the screen,” delivering “powerful work.” Jessica eventually received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance. Despite that praise, she maintained that the making of the film was “not a good experience—the book was great, the film was a disaster.”

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ondon in December was cold and dark, but the sparkling lights and glorious shop windows carried the promise of Christmas and festive cheer. Jessica traveled to the United Kingdom soon after the filming of A Thousand Acres had wrapped—she was here for one more turn as Blanche. The experience of Streetcar on Broadway had left her less than confident about trying it again, but she also knew that she was able to do it right; she had proven that with the TV adaptation, which was well received and had won Jessica both Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. The stage was something else, though. She could always charm the camera, but doing that with a live audience was another trick altogether. The British stage impresario Bill Kenwright had convinced her to give it another go. “Jessica truly doesn’t understand what a great actress she is,” he raved. “The real greats I have worked with have always simply considered themselves to be doing their job.” When Kenwright secured the legendary English director Sir Peter Hall, Jessica finally agreed to do it. She had trust in Hall and in the fact that with the right production and nurturing director she would finally be able to have the kind of theatrical experience she had always wanted. From the moment rehearsals began in November 1996, she knew that she was in good hands. Peter Hall made her feel safe; he was patient and respectful but also firm when it came to realizing his own vision. “He talked to me about how as an actor doing a film, you have to have a certain quality that invites the camera to come closer, a quality that invites the camera in,” she later said of being directed by him. “When you are doing something on stage, you have to open it all out. Suddenly, everything seemed much clearer.” For the part of Stanley, Kenwright chose the English stage and TV actor Toby Stephens. At twenty-seven, Stephens faced quite a challenge—not only wrestling the immortal ghost of Brando but also doing so opposite an American movie star fresh off Oscar glory. The son of Dame Maggie Smith, who 150

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would also be appearing on the West End stage that winter, Stephens had been used to high expectations, and he approached the job with good humor. Although he and Jessica worked well together, the two-decade age gap was too great—in the play, there’s little to suggest a difference of more than a few years between Blanche and Stanley. Stephens struggled to project the primitive masculinity that would both intimidate and arouse Blanche, and the sexual tension necessary to set the play ablaze was absent. One critic later noted that “Stephens’s Stanley is more a clean-cut college boy than a thuggish, elemental Polak”: the ethnic slur notwithstanding, his observation was sadly accurate. But Stanley’s inadequacies were not going to stand in the way of Jessica triumphing in this production. By now she knew the part better than anyone. She knew how to navigate the play like a skilled sailor navigates a stormy sea. Her voice, now lower and huskier, carried across the Royal Theatre Haymarket much better than it had in New York. The London Blanche was more disillusioned, knocked about, resigned; rather than flirty and manically cheerful, as she had appeared at the beginning of the play on Broadway, she now carried with her the chilling specter of doom from the moment she appeared onstage. That December, Sam and the kids joined her in London to celebrate Christmas together and to attend her opening night. She was thrilled to have the family by her side—Sam, who was still terrified of flying, overcame his fear to show his support. After a few of the previews were canceled due to technical issues, the play had its glitzy premiere on December 30. Jessica was paralyzed with stage fright beforehand—somehow all the confidence she had felt throughout the rehearsal period vanished, and she was convinced that she would fail. The curtain went up, and she stepped out onto the stage. The wounded moth-woman emerged from the fog of Tennessee Williams’s inspired imagination and flew straight to the flame. When the houselights came up, her three children sprang to their feet, cheering their mother, and they were soon followed by the rest of the audience. Various critics nitpicked at aspects of the production they disliked— from Stephens’s Stanley to the minimalist staging, but almost all were united in their praise of Jessica’s performance. The British press was kind to her. Some reviews were raves, like the one in Scotland’s Herald, which stated that “Lange wove a web of supreme understanding and faultless interpretation,” and the papers back home soon carried the news of her success, Variety declaring that Lange’s “is a touching, truthful, at times almost scarily open Blanche, as full of contradictions as Tennessee Williams’s play itself.” 151

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The play ran through the early months of 1997 and was a hit with audiences, a “sold out” sign posted outside the theater on most days. Jessica enjoyed London more than she had on any of her previous times there—she was able to make new friends and felt welcome in this grand city where theatrical tradition was long and illustrious. It felt almost unreal to be playing the part of Blanche in the same city where Vivien Leigh had famously done so under the direction of her husband, Laurence Olivier, five decades earlier. Sam took the children to Ireland for a short holiday before returning to the States in February, while Jessica continued in the play until April. Saying goodbye to Blanche would not be easy. As draining as the part was, it had by now become part of her very being, and Jessica would carry it inside her thereafter, always. She had played Blanche on three different occasions, each time bringing a more nuanced understanding to her performance and each time uncovering different facets of Williams’s creation and, in the process, of herself, too.

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“I never regretted things I didn’t do, but I regret things I did do that were a waste of my time,” Jessica once said of her career choices. Of all the films she might have been talking about, perhaps none could be seen as more of a case in point than Hush. In viewing the film today, it is hard to fathom what could possibly have convinced Jessica to accept the part of Martha, a psychopathic, narcissistic mother who tries her best to do away with her son’s new girlfriend. She found elements of the story attractive—the southern setting, an unhinged, troubled character, the exploration of a family’s dark side. “I love when you have a film family that almost looks like Norman Rockwell perfection,” she explained at the time of the film’s release. “From the outside this family looks just so perfect and lovely. And then you realize that behind these facades and big white houses are these nightmarish stories.” The story might have sounded promising on paper, but it would be no Tennessee Williams. When the director and cowriter of the script, the British-born Jonathan Darby, first approached her, he promised her a complex, psychological thriller with a believable central character. The two even consulted a psychologist to help them paint an accurate portrait of someone with narcissistic personality disorder—a person who is, in Darby’s words, “self-involved, highly dramatic, and might sometimes resort to violence.” He wanted an actress who would bring out, aside from the character’s sinister aspects, her 152

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irresistible charm and glamour—which are also traits often associated with narcissists. “We hope to evoke that old kind of MGM glamour,” said Darby, delighted that Jessica, who had been his first choice for the part, accepted. Instead of MGM glamour, however, the film quickly slid into grand dame guignol territory—there are echoes of Joan Crawford in Queen Bee of 1955 as well as of the psycho-biddies of the 1960s, especially the ones in Die! Die! My Darling! and Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte. But while the movie might have been salvaged had it fully embraced the camp qualities of its references, Darby injected little style or self-awareness into the piece. The production, which began in Virginia in April, almost immediately after Jessica finished her London run of Streetcar, quickly ran into trouble. There were costly delays, and it soon became evident that whatever hopes Jessica might have had for the film would not come to pass. She went along with the various proposed changes to the narrative designed to bend the film toward a more audience-friendly thriller. She would also be asked to return some months later for reshoots, which, according to Darby and the producers, were necessary to make the film work. One reason why she agreed to do the movie might have been once again family finances. That same year Sam wrote to Johnny Dark: “I have no job. I haven’t worked for a year & there is nothing on the horizon.” Hush was released in March 1998, after months of delays. It had been shown at painful test screenings during which audiences laughed or walked out. Darby and the studio tried desperately to salvage the movie, cutting and reshooting, but it seemed inevitable that it would end up a huge flop, which it did. After a few initial interviews, Jessica refused to do any further promotion, understandably wanting to put the experience behind her. Privately, she told people the film was “a piece of shit.” Critics were in agreement—this time, even Jessica’s performance wasn’t spared. Hush would prove the low point in Jessica’s career: the role would bring her a Golden Raspberry nomination for worst actress of the year, which she lost to the Spice Girls. The disastrous reception of the film did little to undermine Jessica’s reputation as one of the most talented actors in the business, though. Her Hush costar, Gwyneth Paltrow, said of working with Jessica: “She’s so brilliant, and it was such a great lesson to just be around her and watch her work.” But the film’s failure did reaffirm the notion that female actors in their forties and beyond were not reliable box office draws—naturally, no one would apply the same logic to twenty-five-year-old Paltrow, whose meteoric rise to stardom was in no way interrupted. Jessica was growing tired of the double standard 153

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and of the offers she was receiving. Was it really worth leaving her home, dragging her kids to distant locations, and wasting months on projects that turned out bad in the end? She was becoming more and more disillusioned with the business of making movies, and, what’s more, she was getting tired of acting itself.

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That April, Dorothy Lange passed away at the age of eighty-five. Although her health had been deteriorating for years, her death still came as “a huge shock.” Sam wrote about it some months later: “[Jessica] was so devoted to her & [they were] closer than any mother–daughter I’ve ever known.” That quiet, unwavering support Jessica had always depended on was gone. The source of strength and unconditional love that had been gently flowing to her since childhood was suddenly no more. “My father was a very extreme personality, and in a sense, it was up to my mother to hold our family together— which she did. I think the reason I was so ripe for motherhood was because I had such an extraordinary mother—she’s always been a haven of peace, calm and protection I knew I could count on.” If Al passed on to her the desire to escape and achieve greater things, Dorothy’s gift was her life of sacrifice. She had once had dreams of her own, long ago, but she had buried them deep to care for her mercurial husband and beloved children. Jessica understood the awesome weight of that sacrifice, especially as she faced choices concerning her own family. As she sat in her kitchen, where warm spring light was coming in, illuminating the many plants and birdcages, and where the kids sat at the table doing their homework and laughing, she contemplated the blessing of having both a fulfilling creative life and this beautiful family—a luxury that her mother and countless women of that generation had not been afforded. That fall, Jessica found herself in yet another stunning location. In September, she traveled to Rome to appear as Tamora, the queen of the Goths, in Julie Taymor’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. The city’s ancient ruins and ever-present works of art immediately seduced her. She settled in an apartment in the charming district of Trastevere, where the ancient narrow streets were lined with vine-draped houses, tiny trattorias, and countless little shops filled with forgotten treasures. The children joined her for the first few weeks but then traveled back to Minnesota and to school, and Jessica found herself alone in this mysterious city. When not on set, she spent hours 154

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wandering the streets, alone, lost in thought, rarely recognized by anyone. She loved visiting the English Cemetery, nestled behind the Pyramid of Cestius, where the poets Keats and Shelley are buried. Situated just off a busy main road, the place exudes a sense of peace and serenity, and Jessica would just sit there, quietly contemplating the ancient tombs scattered between cypress trees. The cemetery is home to a sizable population of stray cats, which sit on top of the gravestones, majestically guarding their secrets. “I often wondered if they were the guardians of those who rested underground,” Jessica later wrote. “Or maybe their spirits come back to life to sit for a time in the warm Italian sunshine.” Although initially intimidated by the idea of playing Shakespeare, which she had never done before, Jessica trusted Julie Taymor and her vision for what the film would become. Taymor, a woman of great intelligence and keen passion for Shakespeare, had won international acclaim for directing operas and theater plays and particularly for her staging of the musical version of The Lion King, which won her two Tony Awards and went on to become a worldwide phenomenon. With Titus, Taymor was making her motionpicture debut, and she assembled an impressive collection of international talent for both behind and in front of the camera. Anthony Hopkins, Taymor’s first choice, accepted the title role, despite having had a less than easy relationship with the Bard in the past. Taymor approached Jessica for the part of Tamora, and it was the mixture of madness, sensuality, desire for vengeance, and maternal primal instinct in the character that made Jessica keen to play her. She also found thrilling the idea of pushing herself into an area so far outside of her comfort zone, and she relished being part of a project that was unconventional and vastly different not only from anything she had done previously but also from any other projects being made at the time. “It was daring of me or foolish, depending how you look at it,” she later joked. Julie Taymor assembled her cast at Rome’s historic Cinecitta studios in mid-September to begin a three-week rehearsal period. Having that time to develop their parts and a working understanding of the material and of each other was a rare luxury for the actors that they fully utilized. Sitting around a huge table with Taymor at its head, the actors read through the script, discussing it at length, sharing their thoughts and experiences. It was a wonderfully bonding exercise that for Jessica conjured up memories of her early days in mime and later in acting classes. She loved the communal, repertory feel of these gatherings and the intimate attention Taymor paid to each individual actor and character. During these rehearsals and subsequently while the 155

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movie was being shot, Jessica struck up a close friendship with Alan Cumming, the Scottish actor who was playing her on-screen husband, the emperor Saturninus. Amid an otherwise grueling shoot, the two found joy in each other’s company, and Cumming’s irreverent sense of humor sparked Jessica’s own mischievous nature to resurface. While shooting a scene during which both appear nude in bed, wrapped in each other’s arms, Cumming was instructed to place his hands on Jessica’s breasts. She had joked beforehand that as time goes on, certain parts of the body unmercifully tend to sag. Now, lying stark naked, intertwined with each other in a manner inspired by the iconic shots of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, he exclaimed with admiration: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, you have wonderful breasts.” To which she responded with laughter: “Oh honey, if you didn’t have your hand on it, that thing would have been halfway down my back.” To conquer the fear of Shakespearian language, which Jessica felt was particularly difficult for American actors, she worked with Cicely Berry—a vocal coach who had been the Royal Shakespeare Company’s voice director for more than three decades. Berry helped Jessica relax and approach the text as her friend rather than as a foe. There was a musicality to the language that, once recognized, would carry the actors along like a wave. Jessica was also able to utilize her remarkable physical discipline and, encouraged by Taymor, equipped her Tamora with dancerlike sensuality, which, when paired with the musical rhythm of the dialogue, created a hypnotizing effect. “We all know that Hollywood and our culture in general are very cruel to women over forty,” Taymor reflected at the time. “But the sexuality that Jessica has is incredible. Every actor on the set was in love with her.” She had been an admirer of Jessica for many years, particularly of her complex work in Blue Sky, and she wanted that same blend of strength, sensuality, and vulnerability for Tamora. “What I didn’t want was a Lady Macbeth—a harsh queen who was just cold and vicious: I wanted that vulnerability that Jessica has.” The filming rolled into December, and Jessica flew to Minnesota for a couple of weeks to spend Christmas at home. In January, she went back to Rome to finish the film and to get the little bird she had acquired during her stay there. She had spotted the little brown canary in a bird shop on one of her long solitary walks through the city, and he had become her faithful companion, brightening the cold, rainy, winter afternoons with his exuberant song. She would later write about the experience of “smuggling” the little bird back to the States in her children’s book It’s about a Little Bird, which she would publish in 2013. 156

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The making of Titus would be one of the more interesting and stimulating chapters in Jessica’s career, particularly in this period as challenging, quality projects were getting harder and harder to come by. Although upon its release the film did not become a hit, and critics remained divided about it, it was nonetheless seen as an important experiment in the cinematic representation of Shakespeare, and the performances, chiefly those by Hopkins, Jessica, and Cumming, were largely praised. After that, it would be a while before she would once again be given the opportunity to flex her creative muscles on-screen in any substantial way. At age fifty, with a wealth of experience and a deep understanding of her craft, at the point of finally knowing what this whole acting thing was about, she was disheartened to realize that few people in the business were interested in what she had to offer.

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ustomers of the little café on the edge of St. John’s Wood might have been forgiven for curiously glancing over at the American family sitting at a corner table, having what appeared to be a late breakfast. The woman wore tiny, round sunglasses, her blond hair carelessly brushed off to the back. The man had the look of a cowboy from one of those old Hollywood Westerns—tall, slender, and brooding. Their two teenage children shared their parents’ striking features as well as their serious, thoughtful manner. Even without realizing that they were in fact the celebrated actress Jessica Lange, enjoying a late brunch after having performed in a particularly exhausting play the night before, her equally famous partner, Sam Shepard, and their two kids, those who came in were drawn to take a second look. Although celebrity sightings are not unusual in this part of London, to see the whole family, seemingly unaware of the interest they aroused, was a rare glimpse into the world of one of the most fiercely private couples in show business. But, then again, it’s entirely possible that most patrons were unaware of their fame—the four could have just as easily been another family of American transplants who had made London their home. They came here most days, enjoyed strong black coffee, flicked through the papers. Afterward, they might walk across Primrose Hill to Hampstead Heath, where the father of the family had lived in the 1970s. Or they might hail a black cab and head into town—maybe visit one of the city’s many galleries. The mother had once been an art student, and she continued to be interested in all things creative—her great passion was photography. In fact, she always carried her camera with her; in a city such as London, opportunities for captivating photos were around every corner. As late afternoon approached, she would have to get ready to leave for the theater again. Her Cockney driver would take her to the heart of the West End, down the back lane to the stage door. She would arrive a couple of hours before the curtain went up—she needed time 158

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to prepare. This theater was magical—the smell, the silence, the faint yellow light in the narrow hallways. Her dressing room had once been used by Vivien Leigh when she had appeared in a Noel Coward play here more than four decades earlier. Now it was her turn. The girl from the North Woods of Minnesota who had imitated Leigh countless times in her little bedroom all those years ago was now taking the stage, the same stage. As opportunities for film work continued to dwindle, Jessica found herself drawn back to the theater. Here, there existed parts for women of any age, and the Hollywood obsession with youth and bankability seemed much less relevant. She had dreamed of playing Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night for a long time, and once again Bill Kenwright offered to produce the play on the West End. After the success of Streetcar in London, Jessica was happy to return to England to appear in the play, which she did in November 2000. The kids and Sam would stay with her for a while, but she would have to complete the run alone: Sam’s own play The Late Henry Moss was opening in San Francisco; Hannah and Walker wanted to be at school with their friends; and Shura had already gone off to college. How quickly time had flown by! “Last I remember she was crawling up the stairs in some Hollywood hotel to discover me, a total stranger, sleeping beside her mother,” wrote Sam on Shura’s eighteenth birthday, as bewildered as Jessica was at how the years had slipped away. Now she found that being away from the kids was hard. “It really was a big mistake thinking I’d be alright for a month or two on my own, I’m not at all,” she complained. But the part made the sacrifice somehow worth it. If there were a character that could rival Blanche, it was Mary Tyrone, although they were also vastly different from one another. Long Day’s Journey, which is famously long, usually lasting around four hours, was a great challenge for Jessica, but one she welcomed with enthusiasm. There were those who were skeptical whether she could pull it off—but, as ever, she refused to let that dissuade her. The nurturing atmosphere of London helped her to ease into the experience and build her characterization of Mary with meticulous precision. In the end, the production was a hit, and Jessica won rave reviews, making this West End return her personal triumph. The Guardian called her performance “magnificently unsentimental” and praised the way she “astonishingly captures Mary’s transition from nervous, handkerchief-twisting tension to dreamy narcotic escape,” concluding: “You go expecting an endurance test, you emerge as if having seen O’Neill’s play for the first time.” On opening night, she received a standing ovation from the audience, which included, 159

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aside from Sam and the children, Meryl Streep. “As Jessica emerged from the wings, Meryl was the first one to jump from her seat, shouting ‘Bravo!,’ and clapping,” recalls film scholar Lucy Bolton, who was also in the audience that night. The two had come a long way since sharing the Oscar stage almost two decades earlier, and while the press had always enjoyed painting them as rivals, their relationship had remained one of supportiveness and mutual respect.

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The year 2001 changed everyone’s lives forever. Jessica and Sam were as shook by the attacks on September 11 as people all over the country and across the world. There was a change in the air, a climate of fear and mistrust, but also a new opportunity to get involved in civic causes, something toward which Jessica had always felt a strong pull. She was fiercely opposed to the invasion of Iraq, and she used every opportunity to make her views known. In March 2003, she marched alongside fellow actors Ethan Hawke and Steve Buscemi at an antiwar rally outside the United Nations headquarters in New York, carrying a banner that called for “Tough inspections, NOT WAR” and delivering a petition opposing the invasion signed by more than a million Americans. Speaking at the rally, she found it hard to hide her anger as she declared: “When I hear our president state that to attack Iraq would be in the great moral tradition of this country and, with the kind of stupefying religious hubris, claim that we have God on our side, I can’t help thinking that we are living in a world gone mad.” Although some saw Jessica’s passionate involvement as a case of yet another liberally minded celebrity getting involved in politics, to her the cause ran back all the way to the University of Minnesota campus in the 1960s, where she had marched in opposition to the Vietnam War. She had felt the same rage during Nixon’s presidency. Now, having children who were entering adulthood, she simply could not stand by without at least attempting to have an impact on the world they were inheriting. She would continue to criticize George W. Bush throughout his two terms in office, including in an inspiring commencement speech she gave on the occasion of Hannah’s graduation from Sarah Lawrence College in 2008. “Some of you might feel that this is not the proper occasion to make mention of politics,” she told the assembled students and faculty. “However, I would be remiss in addressing a group of young adults if I were to deliberately ignore the political realities 160

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that they are faced with.” The speech was far more than just a political manifesto—in many ways, it summed up the very essence of her life philosophy: “The world is waiting for you,” she said with a smile. “Explore it through your own humanity. Be guided by your higher self. Don’t be dissuaded or discouraged but do allow yourself to be sidetracked if that’s what you want. Get off the fast track, off the grid, go out and wander. I hope that you will commit yourselves to the pursuit of peace, to the practice of tolerance and compassion, and be good stewards to our precious Earth. I wish you all the courage to have an adventurer’s heart. And a life lived in a moment.” Driven by the same desire to make a difference, Jessica joined UNICEF in 2003 as its goodwill ambassador, and she committed herself to helping the organization in the areas of HIV/AIDS and immunization. She had wanted to get involved in helping the world’s poorest children for years—ever since traveling to Romania and fostering Ana. Now, as part of a larger network, she felt that she might be able to achieve more. When UNICEF came calling, she said yes without hesitation. Her first trip as an official representative came in April 2003, when she traveled to the heart of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her visit was meant to help draw attention to the systemic use of sexual violence against women and children as a weapon of war. Although Jessica did her homework, reading briefs and talking to UNICEF experts, even having a phone conversation with fellow actor and activist Susan Sarandon, nothing could have prepared her for the heart-wrenching reality she was to witness. The ongoing civil war in the Congo had by 2003 claimed the lives of an estimated three million people—making it the bloodiest conflict since World War II. As the little UNICEF passenger aircraft was preparing to land in Bunia, Jessica played nervously with the wooden beads of her Buddhist mala. “Sam didn’t want me to go,” she told author Jan Goodwin, who was traveling with her. “I was afraid, too. But it’s important. Middle America has no idea what is happening in the Congo.” “She’s really amazing that way,” Sam wrote to Johnny Dark while she was away. “She just takes it into her head to go off and do something like that & she actually does it. She has a pale blue united nations [sic] passport & she’s going right into the heart of the Congo with a bunch of French people to be an Ambassador of Good Will. Me—I can’t even save my own ass let alone the downtrodden of the Dark Continent.” The trip took Jessica from one war-torn city to another, from one overcrowded hospital to the next, and from one heartbreaking story to another. 161

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She was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of human suffering; she met girls the same age as her own daughters scarred by war and violence, hungry and without much hope for the future. “Last night I woke up after a couple of hours and couldn’t get back to sleep,” Jessica told Goodwin after the first couple of days. “So many awful experiences these people have been through. It’s difficult to believe that we are all living on the same planet.” The trip to the Congo would be the first of many such visits she would make over the next decade. She would travel to Russia to visit children with AIDS living in the country’s orphanages and to Mexico to draw attention to the dire conditions that many of the orphans there faced. While in Mexico City in 2004, Jessica addressed world leaders at an Inter-Parliamentary Union Assembly, calling for the protection of the world’s most vulnerable children.

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Things were changing back home, too. The children were suddenly not children anymore. In the summer of 2003, Shura got married, and Jessica and Sam threw her a magnificent wedding in the Stillwater home. White tents were set up in Jessica’s beautiful garden, Hannah played the cello, and Sam wore a white tuxedo for the occasion. At the lavish reception, Sam and Misha, who had mostly been avoiding each other over the years, finally got a chance to share a friendly moment. Sam later wrote that they had got on “splendidly,” with Misha thanking him for helping to raise Shura. With no kids to return home to, their priorities began to shift. Although they were still the best of friends, knowing each other intimately and better than anyone else, and although they still loved each other deeply, Sam and Jessica’s relationship was changing. Neither wanted to stay in Minnesota fulltime, but whereas Jessica longed to go back to the city, Sam wanted to live on a ranch. In 2004, they decided to sell their home in Stillwater—the sale would prove more difficult than they expected—and buy an apartment overlooking Washington Square Park in New York City, which was to become Jessica’s main base, while Sam purchased a ranch in Kentucky, where he wanted to spend much of his time raising horses. That same year he reflected on the rift in his relationship with Jessica in a letter to Johnny Dark: “I’m going through an enormously painful time right now with Jessica & finally beginning to realize all the pain I’ve caused her over the years. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. That’s the hard part. I don’t know why I keep returning to these horrible bouts of drinking & bad behavior.” 162

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Whatever difficult times they were facing, they kept a united front and, as ever, decided to deal with their emotions privately. Although Sam was always first to admit his faults, Jessica appeared to realize that she had not been the easiest person to live with, telling Charlie Rose in 2005: “As a willful person, as Sam says, I bring everybody along in my wake. And I don’t think that’s necessarily good. If I could change things, I would maybe be a little less willful. I’m working on it.” Once back in New York, Jessica agreed to star in a Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie, to be produced by Bill Kenwright. She had some reservations about accepting the role—she knew the play was wonderful and had first introduced her to Williams when she was a teenager in Minnesota, but she wasn’t sure if the play’s message could resonate with modern audiences. She also didn’t know if she could bring the character of Amanda to life with the same passion she had done with Blanche and Mary Tyrone. On re-reading the play, however, she was once again spellbound by its poetic beauty and by the seemingly boundless possibilities it presented. Returning to Broadway made her extremely nervous, and it showed during the rehearsal process. The producers cast Sarah Paulson in the part of Amanda’s shy daughter, Laura. Paulson was still relatively unknown, although she had created a buzz with her performances in the offBroadway productions of Killer Joe and Colder Than Here, and she also had a number of TV and film credits to her name. She described Jessica as having always been her “acting idol,” and the two immediately hit it off, soon becoming pals. The production was to be directed by London’s David Leveaux, who, despite having had ample experience on both sides of the Atlantic, seemed unable to find the right balance to bring this American classic to life. Already lacking confidence in the production and in her own performance, Jessica was further unsettled by her costar Dallas Roberts, who was to play Amanda’s son, Tom. Jessica had pushed for his casting after a personal recommendation from Sam, who had acted with Roberts in the off-Broadway production of A Number. According to Darrell Larson, Sam thought Roberts to “have been genetically programmed to play Tom,” and Jessica initially agreed. But while she started off cautiously, wanting time to find her Amanda and the dreamy magic of Williams’s “Memory Play,” Roberts burst into rehearsals with boisterous self-assurance, quite literally “kicking and screaming,” as Larson puts it. He would often dramatically change his performance, throwing Jessica off guard, and although she usually cherished the unexpected on a film set, on the stage, with a lack of strong support from the director, she 163

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saw Roberts’s behavior as a deliberate attempt to disorient and upstage her. Things between them did not improve, and as the previews approached, it became clear that the production was in trouble. “During his last rehearsal day, Roberts gave this wild, really quite brilliant performance,” Larson explained. “He was so full of rage, he accidently knocked over a table, some glass broke. After the scene was over, Jessica looked at the shattered glass and said, ‘Somebody better clean this up.’ And that was that. He was gone the next day.” It has never been made clear who decided to fire him and why, but an announcement was made on February 21 that Roberts had been replaced by Christian Slater. With less than a week before the first preview, Slater had precious little time to jump onto the running train, which he did admirably well. Although things went on smoothly from there, it was too late to save the production. Jessica’s confidence had been shaken, and she struggled to hit the right notes with Amanda. She delved deep into the life of Williams and his relationship with his mother, Edwina, which she saw as key to understanding her character. She also saw it as an opportunity to pay tribute to her own mother, whose photo sat on her dressing-room table and who, just as she had done in life, continued to be the source of strength and inspiration before each night’s performance. The play officially opened on March 23, 2005, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Sam came with the kids, as did Patti Smith, Sam’s friend and former love, accompanied by her daughter, Jesse. Reviews were mixed, and although some complimented Jessica on her performance and her “exquisitely dreamy” appearance, most critics saw the play as miscast and misdirected. As ever, Jessica refused to be discouraged by the reviews, and she continued working on improving and deepening her performance, which, by the end of the run, she achieved. When two years later she returned to do the play at London’s Apollo Theater, another venue haunted by the presence of Vivien Leigh, she was nothing short of brilliant.

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After Titus, Jessica’s film work decreased considerably. “I think what happened is, there was a moment where I turned off, and, I hate to say it, even got distracted or bored, and my work really suffered,” she said of that time. “And that was about a ten-year period, where the work was negligible. Maybe one or two things here or there, but nothing I could be proud of.” The reality was that, aside from the personal feeling of dissatisfaction with her work, good, 164

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substantive roles just weren’t there. The business had changed beyond recognition. The transformation happened slowly but inevitably. Hollywood had never been an easy place for female actors over a certain age, but with the new millennium an even more unforgiving landscape revealed itself. Despite having won the Best Actress Oscar less than five years earlier, Jessica, like many of her contemporaries, found steady employment in films almost impossible, beyond occasional supporting roles. Meryl Streep seemed to be a rare exception, managing to keep afloat, but even she found the beginning of the 2000s challenging; it was only with the commercial success of The Devil Wears Prada and Mamma Mia! that her status as a bankable mature star was once again secured. Throughout the 2000s, Jessica did appear in an array of projects, but most of them were critical and financial disappointments. In 2003, she was part of the all-star cast in Bob Dylan’s bizarre allegory Masked and Anonymous. She had idolized Dylan since she was a teenager, and she jumped at the chance of working with him. Sam had known Dylan since the late 1960s, and throughout the years Jessica had gotten to know him, too. She was still a huge fan, joking that she knew by heart every single lyric he had ever written, and so it was no surprise that when offered to be part of the cinematic experiment, she accepted without a moment’s hesitation. She agreed to a minimum union wage, as did most of the other actors— which included many of Jessica’s longtime friends and past collaborators, such as Jeff Bridges, Ed Harris, and John Goodman—who treated the project as purely an artistic endeavor; it’s doubtful that anyone at any point expected to make any money from it. Although panned by the bewildered critics upon its release, the film has surprisingly aged better than it had any right to. The actors’ passion and steadfast devotion to the rightness of what they had committed to shine through, and the bleak and often convoluted plot is much easier to view as a commentary on post-9/11 America with the benefit of hindsight. Normal, an HBO movie directed by Jane Anderson from a script based on her own play, also aired in 2003 and proved a more successful venture. Jessica played Irma, a midwestern wife whose husband of twenty-five years reveals the desire to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. It was at the time one of the first major films to deal with the issue of transgenderism, and it did so in a thoughtful and nuanced way. Although the casting of Tom Wilkinson, a cis man, in the role of a transgender woman can today appear problematic, at the time of the film’s release the cultural landscape was vastly different, and the trans community welcomed with enthusiasm the movie’s effort to present 165

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a sympathetic portrayal of a transgender character and an accurate depiction of the transition process. Jessica’s performance was met with universal praise, and she was nominated for her second Emmy Award as well as for a Golden Globe, losing to Meryl Streep for her work in another adaptation of an LGBTQ milestone, Angels in America. The promotion of the film coincided with Jessica’s vocal antiwar activism, which overshadowed much of the discussion about Normal. It nonetheless remains a groundbreaking piece of queer representation in mainstream entertainment as well as a highlight in Jessica’s output in this period. That same year Jessica also had a supporting role as Albert Finney’s loving wife in Tim Burton’s film Big Fish. The film is a beautiful fantasy set in a Deep South sprinkled with the dusting of Burton’s magic. Although Jessica’s part was relatively small, she wanted to do the film because she responded to the love story at the heart of the script. “What I wanted to do was to find a way that you understood immediately that these two people were once madly in love, and after forty years together, they were still madly in love,” she said of her interpretation. The tender scene of her and Finney fully clothed in a bathtub certainly conveyed that love. Originally, the two were supposed to simply face each other, sitting at the opposite sides of the tub. “I thought what was missing was some sort of defining moment between Albert and me, I thought it would be more interesting if I got on top of him,” she later said. Burton loved it, and the sequence remains one of the film’s most memorable. What also pulled Jessica into the project was the similarity between the character of Edward Bloom—a larger-than-life storyteller father—and her own old man. She was still searching for ways to connect with Al, and, thanks to Burton, for a brief moment she was able to achieve that connection through film. In the summer of 2004, Jessica found herself in Sam’s filmic universe for the first time since Far North, seventeen years earlier. It would also be the first time since Crimes of the Heart that they would appear on-screen together. Sam wrote the script for Don’t Come Knocking, and it was, in Jessica’s words, a typical “Sam story.” A washed-up Western star leaves a movie set in the middle of production and sets out on a journey of self-discovery, only to find out that he has a son he had fathered some twenty years earlier. He arrives in Montana to find the son and the mother—the one who got away—both of whom are less than happy to see him. It was a tale of alienation, loneliness, disappointment, and guilt, and, in that sense, it was indeed a Sam story. It also dealt with dysfunctional family dynamics—something he also under166

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stood all too well and always explored in his work. “It’s about estrangement, more than anything else,” Sam said of the premise. “It’s about this American sadness that I find, the aloneness that Americans feel. . . . I’m haunted by that American character.” The film was directed by Wim Wenders, who in 1984 had tremendous success with another one of Sam’s scripts, Paris, Texas. To Wenders’s delight, this time Sam agreed to play the lead role. Jessica’s was a supporting yet wellwritten part, with Sam giving her the chance to scold his character in an emotionally charged scene, shot on the streets of Butte, Montana. She hits him, kisses him passionately, then pulls away with rage, and walks away. It was a fitting on-screen parting for Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard—the last time they would act together. Although her film work during the 2000s was less prolific than in previous years, Jessica was being recognized as one of the industry’s greats. In 2002, she was honored with the Donostia Award for life’s work during the San Sebastian Film Festival. Memories of riding through the Spanish city with Paco on his motorbike some thirty-five years earlier were still as vivid as ever as she radiantly took the stage to accept the award. Then, in the spring of 2006, New York’s Lincoln Center organized a tribute to Jessica, which she attended with Sam and her three children. Also present were her friends and colleagues, including Alan Cumming, Charles Grodin, Amy Madigan (Ed Harris was forced to stay home with the children), as well as Kathy Bates and Joan Allen, who had just costarred with Jessica in the disappointing road movie Bonneville (2006). Misha also made an appearance and later danced with Shura, while Jessica took to the dance floor for a sensual tango with Joan Allen. It was a beautiful evening full of stories, laughter, and love.

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he’s a magical creature,” says director Michael Sucsy. “She’s real. And a deep, sensitive artist.” It was Sucsy who resurrected Jessica’s career after nearly a decade of lackluster projects, offering her the role of Big Edie in his directorial debut, Grey Gardens. As it happened, Jessica’s interest in the bizarre story of Edith Ewing Bouvier and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale, known as Little Edie, had already been sparked before Sucsy reached out to her. She had seen the iconic documentary Grey Gardens (1975), and in the months before being sent the script she had told her agent, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to play Big Edie?” Michael Sucsy had spent years researching the Beals, interviewing family members, going through letters and diaries, attempting to uncover the story beyond what the documentary had shown. “In the first version of my script, the documentary was only a very small element of the story,” he explains. “I was really interested in showing what led these two women to end up in such a dire situation.” From the beginning, Jessica shared Sucsy’s enthusiasm for his idea. They first met at the Soho House in Manhattan in September 2005 to discuss the project. Jessica liked the script and Sucsy, and she said yes almost immediately. “There were a couple of things I needed to get out of the way early on,” he remembers. “First, I told her, you do realize that you will look pretty terrible in the later scenes. She considered it for a while and agreed. Then there was the singing. ‘I don’t sing,’ she told me. That’s fine, I said, but I really think you should try. It was so important for Big Edie to sing, and the thing is, she [Jessica] didn’t need to be the world’s best singer. She eventually agreed to do it all.” “I’d never attempted to sing before,” Jessica said later. “But I just decided that if I was going to do this part, I would do it recklessly.” It would take another two years before Sucsy managed to secure funding and the cameras were ready to roll. In the meantime, he and Jessica developed “

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“a deep trust”: “She’s really smart and intuitive, and she doesn’t suffer fools. She’s always prepared and totally committed, and she expects the same from the people she works with. She knew how passionate and how knowledgeable I was on the subject—and I think that’s why she trusted me; she knew we were on the same page, wanting to tell this story as best as we could.” In 2006, Sucsy secured Drew Barrymore for the role of Little Edie, and by doing so he added another vital element to the puzzle. Drew became obsessed with the part and with immersing herself in Beale’s reality. “Throughout the shoot Drew would avoid having contact with the outside world, to the point where she didn’t want to use her cell phone or watch TV,” says Sucsy. “I think a couple of times I absolutely had to get in touch with her about something, and so she reluctantly agreed to use the phone, but other than that, she was completely absorbed by the film.” Jessica and Drew got on famously, each aware that it was a double act—the right chemistry and boundless trust between them were essential for the film to work. Filming took place in Ontario, Canada, in the autumn months of 2007. Both the exterior and the interior of Grey Gardens had been meticulously recreated and, as the action progressed, was gradually transformed from its heyday in the 1930s to the squalor of the 1970s and beyond. Playing older Edie required Jessica to spend three to five hours in the makeup chair each day, followed by many hours of sitting up in bed, where Big Edie lived out much of her later years. “Jessica is very expressive,” says Sucsy, “and she uses her entire body to craft a performance. Even in the scenes where she is bedridden, she acted with her whole body, it was really quite an extraordinary thing to witness.” For Jessica, finding her way into the character involved putting the DVD of the documentary on as soon as she arrived on the set in the morning and letting Big Edie’s voice just permeate her soul. Working on the film was a thrilling experience, which, as she later reflected, “reminded me what acting was—I remember what this is, I love this!” She threw herself into the part with a wild abandon, which she hadn’t done perhaps since Blue Sky in 1990. The nurturing environment created by Sucsy and the trust she had in her fellow actors made it possible for her to completely offer herself to the role and the project. “We all just got along so well, we never clashed,” remembers Sucsy. “There was no diva behavior from Jessica or from Drew. They supported each other, and they were a dream to direct. While both had strong ideas about their characters, they also knew that I had a clear vision for the film, and they followed it. Particularly with Jessica, I remember asking her to 169

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do a scene differently, and while many times actors will just do it to appease you, but you clearly see their heart isn’t in it, Jessica always gave it her all— even if my suggestion was at odds with her own interpretation.” The supportive atmosphere allowed the actors to contribute their own ideas. “In the scene where Big Edie is having an argument with her husband, played by Ken Howard, it was their idea to improvise the moment with the bracelet. In the middle of a fight, she offers him her wrist, and he unclips her bracelet without a word—clearly something he had always done for her. I did not write that in the screenplay. It was all them. As a director, you live for those kinds of moments. They make all the difference. That’s what great acting is.” Grey Gardens was set to premiere on HBO in April 2009, two days before Jessica’s sixtieth birthday. The TV premiere was preceded by openings in New York and Los Angeles, both of which were attended by Jessica, Drew, and their proud director. In New York, the film was shown at the legendary Ziegfeld Theatre, where, as Sucsy remembers, the star-studded audience spontaneously applauded after Jessica’s performance of “Tea for Two” in the film. “It really was a special thing to witness—it’s so rare for the audience to applaud in the middle of the film,” recalls Sucsy. It was clear that they had a hit on their hands and that Jessica had created one of her most memorable performances. After the film aired, reviews were uniformly enthusiastic, particularly for Jessica and Drew. Grey Gardens went on to receive seventeen Emmy nominations, including two in the Best Actress category. That September Jessica attended the ceremony dressed in a mesmerizing green gown, and she was awarded the top prize, collecting it from Alec Baldwin. “This part was a gift, and they don’t come around that often for me anymore,” she said, overcome with emotion. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away in a little Mexican café in Kentucky a man had just ordered some tamales and an iced tea. The joint had a TV set, and the Emmys were being shown, although the sound was off. He looked on as Jessica walked up to the stage to collect her award. This was the woman he had loved for more than twenty-five years, and there she was, beaming with pride, looking like a million bucks. As the waitress brought his food, he tried to look over her shoulder, to catch one last glimpse of Jessica, although he couldn’t hear a word she was saying.

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The success of Grey Gardens brought Jessica back into the limelight, but it didn’t automatically mean that offers would start piling up. She agreed to take a small part in Sucsy’s next project, a romantic drama titled The Vow, which was to star Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum. She played the role of McAdams’s mother, and Sucsy admits she took the role “as a favor” to him. The film became a surprise box office smash, and Jessica’s few scenes were enthusiastically reviewed by critics, although the film as a whole was not well received. Michael Sucsy remembers that during the shoot, after Jessica completed the scene with McAdams in which mother and daughter have a heated exchange, the crew erupted in spontaneous applause. “You just don’t see that very often on movies sets—the crew are usually busy doing their thing,” says Sucsy. “But Jessica has that hypnotizing power; she just blows you away with her acting.” Jessica was also busy with her photography. After years of keeping her passion under wraps, developing her photos at night after the kids had gone to sleep, and refusing to show them to anyone, she was finally persuaded to let the world see the results of her work. She felt confident about it in part because of Paco. He was back in her life, and they often talked on the phone and visited each other. She trusted Paco. He had known her before she had found her success, back when she was just a young girl trying to express her creativity. She had watched him take photographs for years while they were together, and she now felt that his influence had been a driving force for her all along. All of her photographs were black-and-white, contemplative and somber, mysterious and haunting, evoking a bygone time. They carried with them their creator’s sense of loneliness, whether they depicted people or the desolate landscapes of Russia, Mexico, Scotland, or her home state of Minnesota. She showed some of her work to other friends, the French photographer Brigitte Lacombe and Donata Wenders, both of whom encouraged her to let her work be seen. She picked fifty of her favorites and agreed to have them published in a book, simply titled 50 Photographs, which came out in the winter of 2008. The collection was well received, and Jessica agreed to take part in book signings and exhibits with more enthusiasm than she ever had when promoting her movies. In the summer of 2009, she was honored with an exhibition of her work at the George Eastman House in Rochester, where she was also given a retrospective of her films and was awarded with the George Eastman House Honors Award.

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She continued to exhibit her work both in the United States and abroad, with shows in Europe, Mexico, Brazil, and Russia. In 2010, she published a follow-up book of photography, In Mexico, devoted entirely to the country she had first visited with Paco four decades earlier and had returned to many times since. “I love just having my camera and wandering the streets of some village in Mexico for a couple of hours at night,” she revealed. “I’ve done it all over the world, but probably more in Mexico than any other place.”

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It was around this time that Jessica and Sam finally decided to go their separate ways, although, as everything else in their relationship, their split would remain very private. They had lived largely apart since selling their Minnesota home, and the time had finally come to admit that although they would never stop loving each other and being a family, they were no longer a couple. After nearly thirty years together, the separation was devastating and disorientating for both. It felt as though the deep-rooted visions of loneliness they shared finally came to be realized—no matter how much in love you are and how much of your heart and soul you offer another person, at the end of it all you are always on your own.

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Back in the spring of 1998, a young writer was sitting in the darkness of a largely empty cinema, where the latest Jessica Lange movie was being shown. It was a campy thriller, with Lange playing a psychopathic mother. Certainly not her best work, and yet the writer watched with fascination. He had followed her career closely, seen her on Broadway, and now he was watching as her career slid down the familiar Hollywood slippery slope. He knew his show biz history: Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Baby Jane. And yet to him, rather than signaling an end, this performance carried the promise of a brandnew start for Jessica. Just imagine what wonderful things this woman could do if only given the right material! That evening he had a date, but he couldn’t get Lange and Hush out of his mind. It was fortunate for him that the man he was meeting shared his fascination with the actress. Writer Jeremy Kinser, who happened to be Ryan Murphy’s date that evening, recalls today: “Well, it was twenty-three years ago, but I still remember how Ryan talked about [Hush]. He was always fascinated by big performances, and he seemed very 172

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excited by the film, even though it’s especially bad. He kept referring to Jessica’s character as ‘Hush,’ as in ‘And then Hush slapped Gwyneth.’” At this point, Murphy was still a journalist, and he wouldn’t get his first script made into a film for another year. By 2011, thirteen years later, he was one of the biggest names in television, with successes including Glee and Nip-Tuck. He was now getting ready to start production on his latest series, a passion project he had conceived even before Glee. American Horror Story would revolutionize the horror genre and television in general. It would also establish Murphy as one of the most influential people in the industry as well as one of its most polarizing figures. From the start, Murphy wanted Jessica in the series and with his characteristic determination set out to woo her. She had no idea who he was and had little interest in having a part on episodic TV. But Murphy knew how to seduce her. Having been a fan for many years, he understood what drew her to projects. She liked big characters, emotional scenes, sensuality, madness, and, of course, the old charm of the South. He called her up and told her just what he could do for her. She would win all the awards. She would get to play the best part she had had in years. Whatever she wanted to do—he would make it happen for her. She was in a state of depression, hiding away in her Minnesota cabin, not at all sure what to do next. “When Ryan first called me, it was a very difficult time in my personal life,” she later reflected. “I had just come to the end of a thirty-year relationship. I was completely disoriented. Going into that series somehow revitalized me.” It was a challenge, the promise of a good part, and more money than she could hope to get for any film role she might be offered. She agreed to try it for one season, and the announcement was made to the press in April 2011. Murphy delivered on his promise. The character Constance Langdon consisted of all the elements Jessica found irresistible as an actor. The writers, chiefly Murphy and his collaborator Brad Falchuk but also significantly Jessica Sharzer, who wrote one of Constance’s most beautiful monologues for the season’s finale, catered to Jessica’s strengths and preferences throughout the series. There were elements of camp, often bordering on exploitation, but unlike in Hush the writing was always self-aware, embracing its own campiness and the many references it drew upon. Constance’s lines were infused with anachronisms, flowing with a kind of affected poetry, setting her apart from other characters seen on television up to that point. In the end, Constance becomes a kind of pseudo–Tennessee Williams antiheroine; the echoes 173

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of Blanche DuBois are clearly present throughout the season, never more than in the final monologue: Constance: But my dreams became nightmares. . . . Instead of laurels, funeral wreaths. Instead of glory, bitter disappointment. Cruel afflictions. Blanche: I lived in a house where dying old women remembered their dead men. Crumble and fade. Regrets, recriminations. Legacies and other things, such as blood-stained pillow slips. I used to sit here, she used to sit there, and death was as close as you are. There were also references to Jessica’s other past incarnations. Constance, like Cora of Postman, had gone to Hollywood to become a movie star but failed. Like Carly of Blue Sky, a fellow Virginian, Constance fears the passage of time and the loss of beauty, mourning both while gazing at herself in the mirror as an admiring woman looks on. Jessica was not a fan of the horror genre, and she never watched TV. Murphy initially pitched to her a psychological horror—something along the lines of the classics: Rosemary’s Baby, Don’t Look Now, The Shining. Although he was certainly inspired by all of them, what he created was far gorier and less psychologically sophisticated. But it was the series’ accessibility that eventually made it such a huge success. For all its classical elements and countless references, American Horror Story (AHS) would be ultramodern and revolutionary in its treatment of historically marginalized themes and characters. “Ryan has a kind of uncanny sense of what hasn’t been done and what is going to work at that moment,” Jessica later said. “He’s a rare talent and extremely prescient as to what will be successful. It’s a mysterious thing to watch Ryan work; there is a kind of brilliance in the way he reads the zeitgeist.” Even if Jessica wasn’t keen on all of the elements of the series, from the beginning she chose to focus on what mattered to her—the character she was playing. She would maintain this approach for the entirety of her time on AHS, later commenting: “When I think of these characters, not the genre, not the rest of it, but just concentrate on my characters and what I’ve been able to do—they are all tremendous parts.” Jessica traveled to LA to start filming in the summer of 2011. It was to be a long and demanding shoot that would last until December. She hadn’t spent that much time in California in many years, and she felt less than comfort174

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able in this new Hollywood. With the emergence of social media, reality television, and a whole new brand of celebrity, she found herself lost. She had never particularly liked it here, even when she had first arrived to do King Kong all those years ago. The alienation she felt helped her in the creation of Constance; Constance, too, was an outsider in this town. To get a better sense of what Los Angeles would have been like when Constance first came here, Jessica immersed herself in the writings of Joan Didion. “Of course she came from somewhere else,” Didion writes in Slouching toward Bethlehem, “came off the prairie in search of something she had seen in a movie or heard on the radio, for this is a Southern California story.” Soon after the shooting began, Sarah Paulson came to Los Angeles. A play she was supposed to appear in back east had just been canceled, and so she found herself without employment and free to come and see her friend. The two of them were having dinner one night with Murphy when Jessica complained about having the LA blues, so far away from her family. She threw her arm around Paulson and turned to Ryan: “Can’t you find something for her to do on American Horror Story?” It just so happened that Murphy was casting the small role of Constance’s psychic friend, and he offered it to Paulson, who accepted. Thus began one of the most successful collaborations in the history of television—Paulson would appear in the next ten seasons of AHS, for which she received five Emmy nominations. She would eventually win for the Murphy-produced series The People v. O. J. Simpson in 2016, and Murphy and Paulson’s close partnership continues today. Aside from Paulson, Jessica also got to work with other actors she would come to love acting with, including Frances Conroy and Dennis O’Hare as well as newcomers Evan Peters, Lily Rabe, Jamie Brewer, and Taissa Farmiga. The entire cast had a sort of jolly, repertoire-company spirit, and Jessica enjoyed being part of the troupe. She also surprised herself by enjoying the frantic and unpredictable way in which the show was being made. She never knew where the story would go, where her character would take her, because she was often given her scenes the night before or even the morning of when they were to be shot. This looseness allowed her to let go of any preconceived notions or overintellectualizing of the process—she would rely almost entirely on her instinct and what she felt compelled to do in the moment. When the first season of AHS began showing on FX in October 2011, it was by no means an instant hit with the critics. Many publications expressed shock at just how graphic and gory the show was, questioning its suitability 175

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for television. Many critics dismissed it as narratively weak, pointing out that the show was ridden with horror movie clichés and excessive sex and violence. “The show’s barrage of scary and sexually taunting events is too constant and surreal to have a big impact,” proclaimed the Boston Globe. “After a while the story seems to have no more depth and logic that an artsy music video.” The power of Jessica’s performance seemed to be the one element most critics agreed upon. One called it “piercing” and noted that she “manages to be simultaneously over the top and restrained.” Matthew Gilbert, who called the show “a hot, foolish, insane mess,” also praised her: “And then there’s Jessica Lange. Wow. I watch AHS eagerly awaiting her scenes, as she acts up a storm no matter what the story requires of her. As Constance she is all over the map. But Lange makes it all compelling, playing her as a woman for whom tragic drama is like breathing. She brings a big, welcome slab of Tennessee Williams to this ham and cheese sandwich.” But it wouldn’t be the critics who would decide on the show’s success. It was the audience. Within the first few weeks, something surprising happened. Ratings, which started off decently but not spectacular, were steadily climbing with each episode. Online fandom grew rapidly, and the show quickly became a pop-culture phenomenon. Jessica was not unused to adulation and praise, but she was not prepared for this level of popularity. Suddenly, teenagers too young to be aware of her earlier work idolized her, making her the queen of online memes. Lacking any interest in social media and the virtual word of celebrity worship, she remained largely unaware of the impact her appearance on AHS was having. But the industry took notice. That winter she found herself nominated for every major and minor award, winning the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie and later her second Emmy in the same category. “It all started a little over a year ago with a call from Ryan Murphy, whom I’d never met [and] who, I must admit, made me more promises than any man I’d ever met before,” she joked as she picked up the trophy. “And they all came to pass,” she added with a smile, raising the award up high.

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he was driving through another small town seemingly devoid of life, and yet there were still signs of human presence. Lonely figures, like ghostly specters, would emerge from the side alleys or from run-down diners. She would stop the car, sometimes reverse and go back, just to capture them. She had driven down Highway 61 many times. How much it has changed since her childhood, she often thought. Places once teaming with activity now lay forgotten, shut down, decaying. Where have all the people gone? Moved away to the big cities, no doubt, or died. These trips filled her with a nostalgic sense of sadness, and yet she loved them. She would explore stretches of the road—sometimes driving north from her cabin all the way to the Canadian border, other times making it all the way south to her beloved New Orleans, where she had also purchased a house. Along the way, she would take photos. Hundreds of them, immortalizing people and places. Many times, people would recognize her: Wasn’t she the one from King Kong? Didn’t she once play Patsy Cline? Wasn’t it that actress off that horror show? One time a young girl came up to her and stunned her by singing “Sweet Dreams” acapella. She would stop in little cafés, have lunch, chat with strangers. They would talk about America. Where was it going? Where has it been? These trips were a continuation of all the other ones she had been taking since she was a child. First with Al Lange, hitting the road whenever he felt restless. Then with Paco in their van, crisscrossing the country, searching for something they couldn’t define. For many years with Sam—How many times had they driven up to Minnesota from Virginia, from California, from New Mexico, from New York? Now by herself. Her life played out on the road. And now she was documenting it, capturing images in black-and-white, images of her journey, of her America. Josef Koudelka, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marion Post Wolcott have always been among her favorites, and over the years she 177

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has amassed a huge collection of their photographs. Her Walker Evans images are said to be one of the largest privately owned collections of his work in the world. It was through Evans that Jessica met Julia Reed—writer and connoisseur of southern culture. Reed first approached Jessica with a request to borrow the famous Evans photographs of the Deep South for an exhibition at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans. Jessica agreed, and it was to be the start of a long friendship that led to their taking a series of road trips together to explore the Mississippi Delta. Initially, it was Jessica’s idea. She needed someone to show her the hidden treasures of the Delta, someone who held the key to the secret, disappearing world she was hoping to capture with her camera. Reed, who had grown up in the area and was spending her life writing about it, was happy to oblige. “And then it occurred to me that I was about to spend four days in a car with a woman who is not only the most gifted actress of her generation, but also a full-fledged movie star, the breathtaking portrayer of Frances Farmer and Patsy Cline,” she later wrote. “I needn’t have worried. A road trip through my lifelong stomping grounds is one of my very favorite ways to spend time, and Jessica proved to be the most stalwart of companions.” The two would drive around, smoking cigarettes and talking about life, laughing till tears streamed down their faces. Jessica had just broken things off with Sam—Reed was contemplating her own divorce. It was one of the rare times Jessica was able to share the road with a female friend, and the Thelma and Louise aspect of it appealed to her greatly. Those trips as well as her solitary explorations would result in the publication of Highway 61 in 2019. The title was a reference to the Dylan song she loved, and the book is a visual meditation on her life on the road. “It has been a long drive, wrapped in my story,” she wrote. “She knows the land better than anyone,” said Hilton Als, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. “That’s why this project is so great. It really speaks to her love of America, in all its weirdness, and loneliness, and grandeur. Somebody should give her one of those presidential medals.”

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Meanwhile, Jessica continued her acting renaissance. Following the success of the first season of American Horror Story, which was attributed largely to her critically acclaimed performance, she agreed to return for the second season, entitled Asylum, which Ryan Murphy promised to build around her 178

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character. This time she would play a nun running a mental institution in the 1960s. The role would once again feature many different elements gathered up from Jessica’s past performances—there were inescapable echoes of Frances, particularly in the scenes involving electric shock therapy. The character also bore similarities to Sister Aloysius from the stage play Doubt, which had been turned into an Oscar-nominated film starring Meryl Streep. Murphy listened to Jessica’s suggestions, and yet again the writers worked hard to cater to her specific requests. She wanted to try singing, she wanted to play a drunk. With each new script, she would find herself challenged, and the work was thrilling. There were still elements of the series that she found distasteful or overblown: after a couple of episodes where she was required to cane her patients’ bare behinds, she told Murphy, “Enough with the caning.” “The kind of horror that appeals to me is the psychological, not so much the physical,” she later admitted. “If I had my wish, we would move further and further into the area of psychological horror.” While Murphy took note of her wishes regarding what she would be required to perform, the series as a whole continued to be built on the foundation of physically and sexually explicit visuals. For Jessica, however, playing Sister Jude on Asylum meant a rare opportunity to flex her acting muscles, running the gamut of emotions, demonstrating her enormous range to a truly mesmerizing effect. The second season, which was shot between July and December 2012 in California, turned out to be an even bigger hit with audiences than its predecessor, and it received a more enthusiastic critical appraisal, even if many still disliked Murphy and his storytelling tools. Jessica was again singled out for praise, even from critics who hated the show. “You can be happy that Ms. Lange returns, because there isn’t a whole lot else to hold our interest,” wrote the New York Times. Once more she was nominated for all major industry awards, including the Emmy, and the role only added to the growing cult of Jessica as an icon in social media memes. But it would be the third season of the show, which in the spring of 2013 Jessica agreed to star in, that would earn her the title “the supreme,” by which she continues to be known in the online community. Coven would combine many of the themes Jessica had long been fascinated with. It was to be shot in New Orleans, one of her very favorite places. It was during this time that she decided to purchase a house there. The season would be steeped in the culture and folklore of the South, with the haunting aspects of Southern Gothic constituting its main visual motif. Jessica’s character, Fiona 179

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Goode, was the supreme of an ancient coven of witches, disguised as an all-girls finishing school in modern-day New Orleans. “This is really a portrait of a wasted life,” Jessica said of her character. Working on the season brought her together with her good friend Kathy Bates, who was to play the notorious slave torturer Delphine LaLaurie. It was upon Jessica’s suggestion that Murphy approached Bates. “You know I love a good Oscar winner,” he later joked. Jessica and Kathy’s friendship went back all the way to Men Don’t Leave, more than two decades earlier. Their scenes in Coven would prove electrifying, and Bates would observe Jessica work with the same awe she had all those years earlier. “She is uncompromising when it comes to the work and the truth of what’s going on,” she later commented. “I’m proud to call her my friend after all these years. We have a good sense of humor; I never let her get away with her shit. I just love her. And I love, love, love working with her; I love doing scenes with her.” Jessica was also once again working with Sarah Paulson, who played Fiona Goode’s daughter, Cordelia. By now the two shared a close friendship and an intimate working bond. “As emotional as she is when the camera is on her, she is that emotional when the camera is on you, and I think that’s a very rare thing to have a person being that generous,” Paulson reflected on working with Jessica. The season was another success with audiences, and Jessica became synonymous with the figure of the supreme. Teenagers would point her out as she walked down the street in New Orleans: “Holy shit, it’s the supreme!” She was amused by it—she had never before enjoyed a “cool” status among the youngsters. Most of them were completely unaware of her past accomplishments; to them, she existed solely as the figure from the series. But her growing fandom also contributed to the rediscovery of her earlier work; young people were astonished to see her performances as Cora, as Frances, as Patsy, as Carly. In August 2014, she won her third Emmy for her performance as Fiona Goode. She was stunned at the impact she had—never before had her work had such a wide-reaching appeal. “That’s the power of television,” she liked to say. But her popularity was likely a more complex phenomenon. With AHS, Jessica entered the realm of camp—something she had never dealt in before. Throughout her career, she had played flamboyant women, but even the most extreme of them, such as Carly in Blue Sky, were rooted in realism. Perhaps that constituted the main tragic element in their stories—Frances, Carly, and Meg of Crimes of the Heart found themselves outsiders in the constraining structures to which they were born. The women she played on AHS were 180

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vastly different, chiefly because they existed in the overblown, unrealistic world of camp. And yet as an actor Jessica applied the same rules she always had: she built her characters for realism. When framed within Ryan Murphy’s over-the-top, highly stylized universe, Jessica’s work shone even brighter. Much had changed in the landscape of television since she had complained about it in 1988. “The majority of people are so programmed by television that they cannot even recognize what is truthful on-screen and what is just soap-opera acting,” she had told Vanity Fair. “It’s just maddening to me. Because what’s happened is that because of television and the popularity of television actors in these dreadful sitcoms it’s brought the level of expectation down so low that people don’t even know when they’re seeing an extraordinary performance.” With AHS, though, Jessica was able to bring her best acting game to the table and, thanks in part to Murphy’s creative imagination, could showcase all the shades and colors of her talent using the medium of television. In the fourth season, Freak Show, she once again sang. After the success of her rendition of “The Name Game” in Asylum, she was given the chance to perform Lana Del Rey’s “Gods and Monsters” and David Bowie’s “Life on Mars”— both appearances becoming instant cult classics. For an actress who had throughout her career maintained that she couldn’t sing, this was certainly an unexpected turn of events. Freak Show’s setting was Florida, although the majority of the shoot took place in and around New Orleans. Jessica portrayed Elsa Mars—a failed German chanteuse who runs a traveling curiosity show, secretly still dreaming of a big break. It was a grand part, and it remains Jessica’s favorite among her AHS characters. Elsa was more complex, more secretive, and more ambiguous, with a rich, tragic back story, something Jessica had always loved exploring. She also loved the idea of showcasing the disappearing world of the freak shows; she had always found them fascinating, and, in fact, she had suggested to Murphy the idea of doing a season about the heyday of traveling carnivals at the turn of the twentieth century. He took the idea onboard but decided to set it in 1952 instead, adding the element of decline and the threat of television, which Jessica found even more appealing. It was certainly a part that required Jessica to put aside any reservations she might have had and enter the project with a childlike abandon. “You just have to be brave, more than anything. I think that’s what works best in your favor when you work in situations like this,” she later said. “I had a great time doing it, especially this last season.” 181

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Elsa was the last character she played on the series. After four years, four great characters, two Emmys and four nominations, and a whole new generation of fans, Jessica decided to withdraw from the show. “I want more time to myself, I guess,” she admitted. “I think four years of doing something is a sufficient amount of time.” Many feared that Jessica’s departure would signal the end of AHS, but although ratings and reviews have never been the same, the series continues without her. She would return once more, to the delight of her fans, in an episode of season eight, where she once again played Constance. The episode was directed by Sarah Paulson, and it earned Jessica yet another Emmy nomination.

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Although Jessica’s time on American Horror Story came to an end, her friendship and collaboration with Ryan Murphy continued. One evening in 2014, they were having dinner, and Murphy asked her what parts she still wanted to play. Jessica thought for a second and responded that the one thing she wanted to do more than anything else was to play Mary Tyrone again. Her past experiences on the New York stage had left her with a sense of unfinished business: she had received rave reviews for her West End appearances, but she felt that she had yet to prove herself on Broadway. Revisiting Mary would be the perfect opportunity to do that—she knew the part well and considered it to be the greatest role available, at least to an actress of her age. To her delight, Murphy made it possible, gifting her with yet another opportunity to shine. He agreed to produce the play through the Roundabout Theatre Company, and by late 2015 rehearsals for a revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night were underway. Jessica worked harder than ever before, tirelessly training her voice, carefully considering each inflection, each look, every gesture. This time, she wouldn’t allow any part of her performance to let her down. It would be a perfectly modulated study, a befitting testament to the mastery of her craft, to her talent, and to years of experience both in life and in art. The cast was excellent: Gabriel Byrne, a brooding, handsome Irishman, the perfect embodiment of James Tyrone, as well as Michael Shannon and John Gallagher Jr. as the Tyrones’ two sons. Once again, being in a play meant surrendering her life completely to the rhythms of the theater. “You sleep late, you get up, you start immediately 182

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thinking about this show. Everything is gearing towards this. Everything is gearing towards the curtain,” she told a journalist. But beyond the rigid discipline of theater life, playing Mary Tyrone was particularly taxing. “I found that Mary demands more than any character I’ve ever played,” Jessica confessed. “Blanche comes close. Frances Farmer comes close. This part more than any, and this play more than any, it’s a real step off into the abyss. We realized from the beginning that nobody could hold back.” Previews started in April 2016, and opening night at the American Airlines Theatre was on April 27. It was a highly anticipated event, attended by a string of famous names who came to watch one of America’s finest actresses perform her magic. Sarah Paulson was there to support her friend, as was Ryan Murphy. The close to four-hour-long extravaganza ended with a standing ovation—there was no doubt that Jessica was having her Broadway triumph at long last. The reviews were almost universally rave. Hilton Als of the New Yorker led the way with the kind of praise every actor dreams of: “I don’t want to call hers a definitive performance, because that would imply that her Mary is a kind of fly in amber—which is the last thing you think of as you watch her jump from flirtatiousness to maternal concern, from junkie selfishness to contempt for male self-regard, from deviousness to string of loss [sic].” He admired her voice, her use of gesture, her meaningful moments of restraint and concluded: “The director, Jonathan Kent, handles Lange’s genius the way it should be handled—by stepping to the side, letting you see it’s there but not interfering.” The run was a success, and for Jessica it marked one of the highlights of her career. She felt the experience to be doubly poignant; at this stage of her own life, she understood Mary on a deeply personal level. “I go to the theatre. I play this incredibly lonely woman, I come back to my apartment, and I am this incredibly lonely woman. It’s kind of poetic justice,” she would reflect, laughing. The loneliness was profound, visceral, and yet it helped to fuel the fire of truth: her performance as Mary was born out of a lifetime of loneliness, of passion and loss, the product of a life well lived. That spring she was nominated for her first Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play, one among six other nominations for Long Day’s Journey. The ceremony on June 12 was marred by the horrific Orlando nightclub shooting early that morning, and many of the attendees, including Jessica, wore white ribbons to commemorate the forty-nine victims. Her category was filled with strong performances by exceptionally talented actresses—from Michelle Williams and Laurie Metcalf to Lupita Nyong’o and Sophie Okonedo. When 183

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Nathan Lane announced Jessica as the winner, the theater filled with rapturous applause. Hannah, who had accompanied her mother that evening, threw her arms around her, filled with pride. Jessica was overjoyed—perhaps more so than she had ever been when winning an award. This Tony meant acknowledgment by the community she had wanted to be part of even before she had become a film actress. “This is a dream come true, and it fills me with such happiness, even on such a sad day,” she told the audience. The Tony was to be one of the crowning achievements of her career—and one of the most hard-earned.

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s gratifying as the experience of playing Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night on Broadway was, it was also draining. “I’m so exhausted from this,” Jessica admitted. “I don’t know if it’s age or what it is. But I feel like I have never worked as hard in my entire life.” She longed for sunshine and the sound of birds singing and stillness. She was able to retreat to her farm in upstate New York, which she had purchased some time earlier and which had become a second refuge. Although there was no place like her cabin in Minnesota, the old farm in the Hudson Valley had the advantage of being much closer to the city and therefore an ideal place to escape for a weekend when the pressures of New York life became too daunting. She loved nothing more than spending time on the farm, reading and pottering about, enjoying the idleness. Sometimes friends such as Sarah Paulson would come to spend a couple of days. The children would visit, and Shura often brought her two girls to spend time with their grandmother. This role was also one that Jessica relished—the ability to see life beginning another circle and to be part of it, to be able to do it all again, only this time with less responsibility and more sheer joy. The rest period after completing the run of Long Day’s Journey wasn’t to last. She had agreed to participate in another Ryan Murphy project, a miniseries that was to depict the legendary feud between the screen icons Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Murphy wanted Susan Sarandon to play Davis, and he offered the part of Joan Crawford to Jessica. Initially, the idea was to make a feature film, set around the shooting of the 1962 classic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, but both Jessica and Susan were unconvinced that the project would go deep enough to offer them anything substantial to work with. Now, spreading the story across eight one-hour episodes, Murphy intended to make it into an elaborate meditation on aging, gender politics, and Hollywood’s treatment of women. Jessica and Susan signed on to 185

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play the lead roles, and they would also serve as executive producers of the series. Despite having been a lover of classic movies her whole life, Jessica had limited knowledge of Joan Crawford beyond having seen some of her films. At first glance, she and Joan had little in common. Crawford was all about image, which she had carefully crafted over her fifty-plus years in the business. She had been a Hollywood person—someone who relished being part of the scene, who liked being recognized by fans, and who never left the house looking anything less than the epitome of a glamorous star—which she believed she owed to her public. Jessica was private; she detested publicity and couldn’t care less how she looked when a paparazzo snapped her picture. She had never felt a part of the Hollywood scene. And yet as she began her research, reading all the biographies she could lay her hands on and delving deeply into Crawford’s story, she became utterly captivated by this complicated woman. Joan Crawford died in 1977, only months after King Kong premiered. They had never met, although ironically Jessica did cross paths with Bette Davis at an American Film Institute gala in the early 1980s. Neither could have imagined that Jessica would one day come to portray Davis’s archrival, even if during the 1980s Davis did personally handpick Sarandon to play her in a movie that never materialized. Jessica and Susan had known each other for years, running into each other at numerous events and even spending time together in Mexico, but Feud would be the first time they would work together. Those who hoped that the historical conflict they were portraying would spill over into real life were in for a disappointment. “I loved working with Susan,” Jessica later said. “We had a great time. She is a powerful actor, and I thought what she did with Bette was really extraordinary.” Ryan Murphy recalled that from the start of production he would get questions from reporters about whether his two stars were getting along, which infuriated him: “Go fuck yourself. Of course they’re getting along. They’re great pros. They’ve known each other forever.” Sarandon also echoed the sentiment when she tweeted: “The #1 question I get in interviews is whether Jessica and I get along. Jess and I not only got along great during filming, we’re now dating.” Both were initially intimidated by the idea of playing two such legendary figures. Jessica found it hard to find her way into the character, and she was concerned by the fact that she didn’t believe she resembled Crawford physically. Sarandon was daunted by Davis’s iconic and much-impersonated man186

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nerisms and speech pattern, which she found especially difficult to replicate. But in the end Ryan Murphy put them both at ease. Sarandon later admitted: “In the beginning, Jess and I would turn to each other and say, ‘Are we just doing a series of memes, you know, what’s going on here,’ because we were so afraid of being overpowered by the clichés of who these women were. So how could we make that live?” For Jessica, the key to finding the spine of her character was buried in Joan’s childhood. Since her death, Crawford’s image has suffered greatly. In 1978, Joan’s eldest adoptive daughter, Christina, published a shocking memoir that painted her famous mother as an abusive narcissist. Many who knew Crawford insisted that Christina’s account was at best exaggerated, but the damage had been done, and it seemed that Crawford’s reputation would never recover. The popular perception of Crawford as a grotesque monster was further enhanced by the film adaptation of  Mommie Dearest in 1981, in which Faye Dunaway delivered a deliciously camp, over-the-top performance. The “no wire hangers” image of Crawford has become one of our favorite pop-culture mythologies, and for years it seemed to be the only way the public was willing to view the iconic star. Jessica had not seen Dunaway’s infamous portrayal, and she chose not to watch it before she tackled the role. “I’ve never seen her as monstrous at all,” she later said about Crawford in a conversation with Ryan Murphy. “I don’t want to comment on mothers and daughters, because within any family there’s always a part of a relationship that no one outside can ever understand. But from everything I’ve read, it seems impossible that she was as monstrous as she was made out to be.” Jessica’s rendition would do much to reverse the damage done to Crawford’s image by Mommie Dearest. Her Joan is a vulnerable, complex, somewhat tragic figure but also a survivor. Although Feud was no doubt made with good intensions, many Hollywood historians took issue with what they saw as Murphy playing fast and loose with the truth. Some of the stories presented in the series were based on rumors and unsupported accounts, while others were plain inventions. Although the show was meant to present Davis and Crawford in a new light, which it did, some of the old falsehoods about them and about their relationship were further reinforced. The shoot lasted throughout the autumn months of 2016, and while the cast and crew were immersed in the world of old Hollywood, on the outside of their bubble the real-life drama of the presidential election was playing out. Its eventual outcome made the social messages of Feud more poignantly timely than anyone involved in the show could have expected. “We started 187

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shooting in September, before the election,” Jessica later said. “We were thinking, ‘We’ll make this piece about misogyny, sexism, ageism, but come the beginning of the year, it might just be ironic.’ But of course, we took a different turn and I think it’s more relevant now than it could have possibly been at any other time.” The show achieved iconic status even before the first episode aired. The pairing of Jessica and Sarandon, particularly in the context of playing Crawford and Davis, was seen as a case of icons portraying icons. Some predicted a camp fest and scenery-chewing diva stand-offs; others just looked forward to an unmatched showcase of great acting, especially considering that the stellar cast also included Judy Davis, Stanley Tucci, and Alfred Molina. Many in the gay community awaited the series with great anticipation. Both Bette Davis and Joan Crawford have been seen as original gay icons—they were among the first Hollywood stars to attract a loyal gay following, with press articles describing this phenomenon dating back to as early as the 1940s. Jessica herself has over the years achieved an iconic status in the queer community, a status that was reinforced by her performances in American Horror Story. “Ever since way back when I lived in Paris, gay people have always been my best friends,” she reflected in a conversation with Murphy. “I don’t know where along the way my career created gay fans. I just know that there’s always been a tremendous mutual affection.” “I think of Lange as an ultraromantic figure,” the queer writer and historian Dan Callahan says. “Her rebelliousness has authority and great size. She’s not going to settle for the ordinary, the normal. I think that gay male audiences respond to her so strongly because she is the opposite of repressed. We most of us had to spend our youth in some form of hiding, and so watching this radically free-spirited woman dance or flirt or fly into rage is felt as a release and a real treat.” Jeremy Kinser deepens the connection. “Maybe it’s not a coincidence that Lange’s career coincides with the birth of the gay liberation movement,” he reflects. “If one was asked to nutshell her career into a sentence, it would be this: a beautiful woman sees a place in the sun, goes for it, is repressed by the establishment, then battles her way back into the spotlight, and shines brighter than she ever dreamed. What gay man can’t relate to that?” Ahead of the FX premiere of Feud on March 5, 2017, advanced screenings of the pilot episode were organized in LGBTQ venues across the country. In Great Britain, the Guardian proclaimed: “Last year gay Americans achieved the right to marry in all 50 states. This year, by way of a bonus, Ryan Murphy is bringing us Feud.” 188

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When the show finally started airing, it was universally acclaimed by critics, and it became an instant TV classic. Reviews of Jessica and Susan’s transformative performances were rapturous. The miniseries seemed to get stronger with each new episode, culminating with a breathtaking finale that features a haunting dream sequence beautifully directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton (one of many female directors and crew members Murphy hired for the show as part of his 50/50 initiative). The scene shows Crawford and Davis putting their differences aside, united, and friends at last in the alternative reality of a late-night hallucination. They reflect on the life of stardom, the price of fame, the unforgiving reality faced by women working in the dream factory. “Beyond just exposing the sexism and ageism of the studio system and its enduring legacy on Hollywood today, Feud delivers a bolstering message on the power of female survival,” the writer and film historian Steph Brandhuber points out. “Survival to be seen, to be acknowledged, to keep one’s dignity intact. But also the survival it takes to withstand the brutality of men and their need to pit women against one another.” “Though Feud is a period piece, its resonance in today’s landscape is undeniable,” reflects Brandhuber. “And more than just a gratuitous exercise in voyeurism—to ogle at one woman pitted against another—Feud sizzles with female defiance in a way that feels as timely as it does important in a post-#MeToo era. Unlike many period shows, Feud doesn’t so much romanticize the past as it does expose it in all its brutality. It simultaneously lifts the veil on the treatment of aging female stars and calls on us to see a better future—one where women empower each other and refuse to be defined in the context of men.” To Jessica, performing Crawford’s decline and loneliness was yet again hitting home. She was able to bring her own truth and an extra layer of authenticity to the portrayal, making it particularly moving. As Joan laments in one of the early episodes, “One day you wake up and you find, you’ve no husband, your career is over, the children have grown and left the nest, and all you’re left with is yourself.” “There’s not an emotion that we skipped over in this,” Jessica said while filming. “As an actor, it’s what we dream about, having a character that has this depth and scope to her. It really has been one of the most exciting parts that I’ve played in a long, long time.” Feud went on to receive eighteen Emmy nominations, including two in the Best Actress category; however, that award season was dominated by HBO’s Big Little Lies, which pretty much swept all the accolades. Missing out on trophies did little to diminish the cultural significance of Feud. The show has been seen as part of a major shift in the way aging women are portrayed 189

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on television—something that has been Murphy’s mission for a long time. In resurrecting the careers of Jessica Lange and other female actors of a certain age in shows that have enjoyed critical and popular success, he has sent a clear message to the industry. But Jessica also considered the series’ central message to transcend the confines of show business: “I was really taken with how people responded. It’s not just Hollywood. It’s not just women. When you become disposable and can no longer find the work, that’s a universal thing.”

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In July 2017, Sam Shepard passed away at his Kentucky ranch. He had been ill for some time, suffering from ASL, and yet his death came as a blow—to Jessica, to the kids, to his friends, and to the people who had over the years worked with him and grown to love him. Although Sam and Jessica had not been a couple for close to a decade, the bond between them had remained strong till the very end. They were still each other’s best friends; they were still a family. In the last couple of years before Sam’s death, they were seen riding bikes together in New Orleans, lunching in Manhattan, strolling in Minnesota. Their love remains the stuff of legends—but to them it was more than an American fable; it was their reality. After many years of being together, they chose to pursue separate lives, each a loner at heart, and yet each knew that the other was out there, a phone call away. With Sam’s passing, an epoch ended. In death, Sam remained an enigma to the world. The press called him the greatest American playwright of his generation and a reluctant movie star. He was likened to Gary Cooper and described as a quintessentially American drifter. Friends and colleagues from Patti Smith to Ed Harris and Matthew McConaughey paid tribute to him. Jessica, as ever, chose to deal with her loss in private. That November she attended a memorial service organized for Sam at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the Ellen Stewart Theatre on East Fourth Street in Manhattan. She was with their children and with Sam’s sister, Sandy Rogers. Sam’s son by O-Lan Jones, Jesse, was also in attendance. Sam would have approved of this celebration of his life—theater folk sharing stories and anecdotes, laughing, and remembering. When her book of photography Highway 61 was published in 2019, Jessica dedicated it simply “for Sam.” “I miss him every single day of my life,” she 190

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admitted at the time. “I thought, well, this would be a good dedication, because there was a man who loved the road and spent a good portion of his life driving different highways.” He certainly did. As has she.

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Although Jessica has talked of retirement from acting for most of her career, she loves it too much not to come back to it when an interesting role arises. In 2016, she had made an appearance as an aging barfly in Louis C. K’s web series Horace and Pete. The series, structured like a theater piece, appealed to Jessica, and she enjoyed working with the ensemble cast, which included C. K., Steve Buscemi, and Alan Alda. In 2019, she once again reteamed with Ryan Murphy for the Netflix comedy series The Politician. She was initially reluctant to accept the part, which had originally been intended for Barbra Streisand, but eventually Murphy worked his magic on her once more, and she agreed to appear in the first season. The role of Dusty Jackson, a grandmother and caretaker of one of the show’s main characters as well as a deranged Karen Black impersonator, gave Jessica a chance to showcase her comic timing in a way she has rarely had the opportunity to do, and although the show received mixed reviews, many critics praised her performance.

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With the COVID-19 pandemic, Jessica became isolated, like everyone else. Her family was, as ever, her main focus, but she spent much of her time alone. Paco continues to be an important presence in her life, although he lives far away from New York. “Jessie is a lonely person; she always has been,” he says. “She walks a lot. She lives so close to where we all used to live together back in the day. I think Jessie misses that, that sense of community we all shared back then. It’s a different time now.” There are still good friends to share her walks with. Susan Sarandon is one. And then there are her children and granddaughters and Misha. After a lifetime of loneliness, Jessica has learned to accept it, even to cherish it, comforted in the knowledge that alongside the loneliness there is the love of her people. Her clan. And there’s still the prospect of work to look forward to. In the autumn of 2021, Jessica was able to travel to Spain, where she filmed Marlow 191

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alongside her Rob Roy costar, Liam Neeson. “She is still looking forward to working on a Marlene Dietrich project with Ryan,” says Paco. There’s also another collaboration with Michael Sucsy in the pipeline, as well as a new photography book titled Derive, which will include the pictures she took in New York throughout the months of the pandemic. “I want to live my life with no goal anymore, but just completely free, like I did when I was younger,” she told Alan Cumming some years ago. The time is now. For a girl who dreamed of escaping her small town and living a life of art and adventure, she couldn’t have wished for a more bountiful journey. In the summer of 2021, as the COVID restrictions began lifting, and vaccines finally became available, Jessica was able to leave Manhattan for the first time in months and drive north. It was the same journey she had made countless times before. She was returning home to those familiar forests of pine and birch. Somewhere along the way, she decided to stray from the known route. The summer air was fresh, the birds were chirping, the sun felt warm on her face. She stopped the car, got out to look at the distant horizon. The road ahead was open. And unknown.

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Acknowledgments This book has been a passion project of mine for the better part of the last six years, and to see it finally come to fruition fills me with great joy. It hasn’t always been an easy journey, but it was all worth it. There are many people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for helping me along the way, for offering assistance and guidance, for sharing their stories and memories, or for simply giving me their love and friendship. Jessica Lange chose not to participate in the writing of this book—a fact that naturally disappointed and saddened me at first. But as I got to know her more closely through my research, I began to understand why she would be reluctant to open up to me or any other writer—her secretive side and free spirit are exactly what have made her so fascinating to so many. I am nonetheless grateful to her for offering the world her incredible body of work and for allowing me to conduct my research and reach out to people who have known her. I realize that she could have thrown roadblocks in my path, but she chose not to—and for that, I am grateful. The questions of ethics and good taste are on every biographer’s mind, and they were certainly on mine. My goal was never to write a salacious tell-all or an invasive exposé. Ultimately, I hope that I was able to do justice to Jessica Lange the actor and the woman—this book is meant as a celebration of both. I first became aware of Lange at thirteen, when my mother recorded the documentary feature It’s Only Make-Believe for me on a VHS tape while I was away for the summer holidays, thinking I would enjoy the film when I returned home. I did. In the years that followed, I watched all the Jessica Lange movies I could find, and I eventually saw her onstage in the London production of The Glass Menagerie. My fascination with her unique gift for captivating her audience and creating unforgettable performances never ceased, and it remains just as keen even after months and months of closely studying every film and TV appearance she has ever made. 193

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my late agent, Mitch Douglas, who sadly didn’t live to see the publication of this book. He always believed in this project, and I think he would have been pleased to see it realized. I owe eternal thanks to Eugenie Bafaloukos for her kindness and trust. Thanks also to Marty Watt for this invaluable connection. I am forever grateful to Paco Grande for putting his trust in me and my work and for offering his kindness, memories, and unique photographs. Our phone conversations during the depths of the pandemic were truly special and I will always treasure them. To all those who offered their time and answered my questions and connected with me to talk about Jessica Lange and the good old days, I remain indebted. Thank you, Miquel Amate, Lucy Bolton, Ross Clay, Jennifer Collins, Giuseppe Condello, Jeannie Corcoran, David Husom, Al Koblin, Kevin Mahoney, Jack O’Halloran, Myrna Post, Kirk Woodward, and Peter Wynne-Willson. Special thanks also to Johnny Dark for his time, insightful observations, and kind permission to use his beautiful photographs in this book. My gratitude goes to Remy Weber for his patience and kind assistance, as well as his illuminating knowledge. I would like to offer thanks to Bruce Beresford, Darrell Larson, and Michael Sucsy, all of whom offered priceless insights from their time working with Jessica Lange. Thank you also to Lisa Rosatti for sharing her memories of her brother, Greg Rosatti, and for offering the beautiful gift of a photograph of Greg and Jessica during the making of Blue Sky. Writing this book throughout the months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had to rely greatly on the kindness and cooperation of various institutions and individuals who dedicated their time to digging through archives and sending materials to me digitally. I would like to give my thanks to Katie Salzmann and David L. Coleman from the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University—your assistance has been truly invaluable. Thank you also to the staff of the British Film Institute Reuben Library in London, the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills, and the New York Public Library. And to Henry T. Bink for sending me countless magazine features from your incredible personal archive—thank you. Writing a book can be an incredibly lonely process, and it’s a real gift to have people who offer their expertise and support throughout. Thank you to Dan Callahan and Jeremy Kinser for your advice, insight, and encouragement. 194

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To my agent, Lee Sobel—you believed in me and in this project and you found the perfect home for it. Thank you for that and for your continued encouragement. I am incredibly lucky to have had Ashley Runyon and her entire team at the University Press of Kentucky working on this book with me. Ashley— you are the kind of editorial presence every author dreams of. Thank you for everything. None of this would have been possible without the people in my life who give me love and strength. Steph Brandhuber, my friend, fellow writer, and source of endless love and inspiration—thank you for your support during the writing of this book and always. To Abaigh Wheatley, Greg Windle, Olivia Doutney-Joel, and Kendra Paul—thanks for being there for me. To Tony Walsh—your support and encouragement mean the world. Thank you for being the first person to tell me I could do this. To my brother, Przemyslaw— I’m glad we found each other again. Last but certainly not least, to my partner in crimes of the heart, my Sylvain—thank you for your love and for shining your light. You make everything better.

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Notes Abbreviations

AS Inside the Actors Studio interview of Jessica Lange, season 2, episode 7, 1995 ChR Charlie Rose interviews, sourced from charlierose.com, followed by date of appearance DP/30 DP/30 Emmy Watch interview of Jessica Lange, June 3, 2015, available on YouTube MB It’s Only Make Believe, documentary feature, 1991, available on YouTube MH Interview of Jessica Lange by Molly Haskell, 1997, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN TP Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark, Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark, edited by Chad Hammett (University of Texas Press, 2013) VF Vanity Fair features, followed by date of publication; sourced from archive. vanityfair.com: “Earth Angel” (October 1984); “Jessica Lange: Sex and Subtext” (October 1988); “Full-tilt Jessica” (October 1991); “Lange on Life” (March 1995)

Chapter 1

“I believe now” (ChR, 2005). “the largest Finnish wedding” (Duluth Herald, November 3, 1911). “And out of all this” (VF, October 1984). “extreme personality” (ChR, 1997). “He was the kind of person” (ChR, 1997). “He was a great storyteller” (MB). “profound sadness”; “I think when you live with somebody like that” (AS). “absolutely precious” (VF, October 1991). “at the expense” (ibid.). “I remember my father” (Power House book signing interview, 2019). “MGM was always my favorite” (“Unglamorous Role Was Music to Jessica Lange’s Ears,” Morning Call, January 19, 1990). “idealism of the South”; “inexcusable, obviously unacceptable” (VF, October 1988). “privacy and silence” (ChR, 2005). “muscular language” (ibid.).

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Notes to Pages 7–15 “the country fair”; “on very special occasions” (Jessica Lange, Highway 61 [Power House Books, 2019], 172, italics in the original). “As I grew older” (MB). “She was a pure, natural beauty” (Kevin Mahoney, telephone interview by the author, February 10, 2021). “sort of took her under his wing” (ibid.). “most high school kids”; “kicking and screaming” (Jessica Lange: On Her Own Terms, documentary feature directed by Ken Burns, Biography Channel, 2001). “We all wanted” (MB). “Dylan’s Highway was different” (Lange, Highway 61, 172). “My family was all pretty wacky” (VF, March 1995). “He was a hard man to please” (ChR, 1997). “He was the boss man” (Mahoney interview). “Artistic, dramatic, and fun” (Cloquet High yearbook, 1967). “One of our English teachers told us” (Jeannie Corcoran, telephone interview by the author, March 2, 2021). “a little different” (“Jessie Will Be There for Us,” Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1983). “particularly creative and original” (Cloquet High yearbook, 1967). “Even today” (former student of Cloquet High School, account sourced from city-data .com). “unforeseen circumstances” (Cloquet High yearbook, 1967). “it was very disappointing” (Corcoran interview). “Not all traditions in life” (“Jessica Lange: Film Star Whose Future Is Here,” New York Times, December 20, 1982). “her heart ache” (VF, March 1995). “I felt, if I had to” (“Jessica Lange: Film Star Whose Future Is Here”).

Chapter 2

“It seemed to me” (David Husom, telephone interview by the author, April 2, 2021). “very interesting group” (VF, 1991). “The problem was” (Husom interview). “The more experimental” (ibid.). “Those who rebelled” (ibid.). “On the first day of the beginning photo class” (ibid.). “pop-art sensibility” (ibid.). “We learned respect” (ibid.). “didn’t stay in the class” (“Jessica Lange behind the Lens,” CBS News, January 11, 2020). “a really great-looking” (Paco Grande, telephone interview by the author, February 21, 2021). “She was the most beautiful” (ibid.). “this unbelievably handsome Spaniard” (MB). “I’ve never met anybody like Paco” (VF, October 1991). “It was a huge deal for Jessie” (Grande interview).

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Notes to Pages 16–26 “chased her like a missile” (ibid.). “learn about filmmaking” (ibid.). “In those days” (Husom interview). “It was exciting” (Jessica Lange, interviewed by Remy Weber, c. 2010, private footage courtesy of Remy Weber). “She really saved us” (ChR, 2005). “There was this horrible yearning” (VF, October 1991). “People lived in these ancient caves” (Grande interview). “The first time I saw Paris” (Jessica Lange interview, Evening Standard [London], April 10, 2012). “People were parking their cars” (Grande interview). “All of a sudden” (VF, October 1988, italics in the original). “coming back hours later” (Jessica Lange interview, Evening Standard, April 10, 2012). “The city was under siege” (ibid.). “As I walked in” (Peter Wynne-Willson, telephone interview by the author, April 26, 2021). “I was broke” (ibid.). “I just didn’t put the two and two together” (ibid.). “I was just starting out on my own” (VF, October 1991). “had this wild, exotic imagination” (VF, October 1988). “There was a time in my life” (VF, March 1995). “New York City was a great place” (Grande interview). “Well, there’s that period” (VF, October 1988). “I didn’t have this emotional commitment” (“Jessica Lange, Naturally,” Washington Post, October 5, 1984). “We didn’t really know” (Grande interview). “What we wanted” (ibid.). “Most of the time it was just the two of us” (MB). “drifted from city to torn city” (Joan Didion, Slouching toward Bethlehem [4th Estate, 2017], 84). “The country was largely underdeveloped” (Grande interview). “largest finds of marijuana” (Albuquerque Journal, January 26, 1970). “It was all very dramatic” (Grande interview). “I was doing everything” (VF, October 1991). “This documentary stuff ” (Grande interview). “It works for opera” (ibid).

Chapter 3

“a place that was alive” (Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex, Fashion, and Disco, documentary feature directed by James Crump, Film Movement, 2017). “sinking ships” (Jessica Lange, interviewed by Craig Ferguson, 2011, available on YouTube). “a freezing apartment” (Grande interview). “It was the ghetto” (Jessica Lange, Ferguson interview).

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Notes to Pages 26–37 “If you have something to say”; “in a musically analytically way” (Thomas Leabhert, The Decroux Sourcebook [Routledge, 2009], 52). “He definitely didn’t want” (Ross Clay, telephone interview by the author, May 9, 2021). “He had a special admiration” (ibid.). “It was not easy work” (ibid.). “hold moments”; “Things not seen but felt?” (ibid.). “It was an all-encompassing education” (AS). “mime is to the eye” (Clay interview). “He loved good, interesting questions” (ibid.). “He would talk to her in verse” (ibid.). “He could see” (ibid.). “I knew immediately” (“Jessica Lange’s Latest Life,” Rolling Stone, March 17, 1983). “She was in the advanced section” (Giuseppe Condello, telephone interview by the author, May 12, 2021). “As far as I’m aware” (ibid.). “Whenever any of us got a job” (Clay interview). “Jessica would throw these wild parties” (Condello interview). “there was always the idea”; “You couldn’t help” (VF, October 1991). “I was studying mime” (Antonio Lopez 1970). “There was something magical” (ibid.). “wild crush” (ibid.). “The girls who were hanging around” (ibid.). “no boundaries” (ibid.). “homosexual in its inclinations” (Alicia Drake, The Beautiful Fall [Bloomsbury, 2007], 136). “I adored Grace” (Jessica Lange interview, filmed at the Wing, New York, September 24, 2019). “Antonio loved the new girls” (Grace Jones, I’ll Never Write My Memoir [Gallery Books, 2016], 104). “We all had ambition” (Jones, I’ll Never Write My Memoir, 128). “Coming into that inheritance” (Lange interview by Weber). “It was not easy” (Clay interview).

Chapter 4

“What we had in those years” (Antonio Lopez 1970). “a true, honest-to-god bohemian” (Remy Weber, telephone interview by the author, April 10, 2021). “Now everybody” (“Jessica Lange,” Interview Magazine, October 8, 2013). “I discovered” (Jessica Lange, Sarah Lawrence commencement speech, 2008). “Herbert’s approach” (Kirk Woodward, telephone interview by the author, May 2, 2021). “Studying with Warren Robertson” (quoted in Warren Robertson, Free to Act [Penguin, 1978], testimonial on back cover). “From the beginning” (Jessica Lange: On Her Own Terms).

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Notes to Pages 37–48 “If there is ever a film made of her life” (AS). “What I do recall” (Al Koblin, email interview by the author, November 20, 2021). “a great place” (Dermot McEvoy, “Lion Head Roared,” Irish Central, December 15, 2016). “the second-best waitress they had” (AS). “the beautiful one”; “She told me” (Claudia Carr, interviewed by John J. Winters for Sam Shepard: A Life [Counterpoint, 2017], 248). “If I had to describe those afternoons” (Antonio Lopez 1970). “We would go up into Charles’s strange little studio” (ibid.). “My goal was always to be an actress” (“Jessica Lange: Film Star Whose Future Is Here”). “Jessica was really smart about it” (Eugenie Bafaloukos, telephone interview by the author, February 1, 2021). “They all said” (MB). “Why do you bring me” (Meryl Streep, Graham Norton Show, 2015; for Streep’s first telling of this story, see “Magic Meryl,” Time Magazine, September 7, 1981). “According to one of De Laurentiis’s key aides” (information from Ray Morton, “King Kong,” Cinema Retro, August 2015). “They took one look at me” (“Jessica Lange Breaks Down Her Career,” VF online, October 2019). “Terrible!” (People magazine, January 1977). “She moved and performed” (Morton, “King Kong”). “Dino, get to the screening room” (People magazine, January 1977). “One of the associates present recalls” (Morton, “King Kong”). “I have found my Fay Wray” (Morton, “King Kong”). “I’m going to make you a big star” (MB).

Chapter 5

“I was so incredibly naïve” (“Jessica Lange: Film Star Whose Future Is Here”). “rather apologetically”; “She told me” (Koblin interview). “She was a vivid presence” (Bafaloukos interview). “It’s like we survived the Titanic” (Grande interview). “bad time”; “always been such great friends” (VF, October 1991). “It was the end” (Grande interview). “a big chunk of money” (VF, October 1991). “There was no reason I had to” (VF, October 1991). “Could we hear Miss Lange scream?” (Minnesota Tribune, January 19, 1976). “She was a tragic figure” (People magazine, January 1977). “from the first time”; “She was a top person”; “He was an asshole” (Jack O’Halloran, telephone interview by the author, June 24, 2021). “Don’t worry, not all movies are like this” (quoted in MH). “She had just come from Europe” (Jessica Lange: On Her Own Terms). “You’d almost believe that big monkey was real” (ibid.). “Jessica emerged from the 10 months of shooting” (Charles Grodin, It Would Be so Nice If You Weren’t Here [Vintage, 1990], 146).

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Notes to Pages 49–64 “You had to be young and naïve” (MH). “I drew more people” (“King Kong Plunges as Thousands Gasp,” New York Times, June 22, 1976). “It is sad because I do believe” (“Jessica Lange’s Latest Life,” italics in the original). “one of the great pop-culture events” (Morton, “King Kong”). “Why, I think we have a right to ask” (Vincent Canby, “‘King Kong’ Bigger Not Better,” New York Times, December 18, 1976). “King Kong, Bigger and Better” (Vancouver Sun, December 1976). “Though Dwan sets Kong’s heart aflame” (Canby, “‘King Kong’ Bigger Not Better”). “play with monkeys” (Condello interview).

Chapter 6

“the movie is sparked” (Pauline Kael, “Here’s to the Big One,” New Yorker, January 3, 1977). “There she was” (Jones, I’ll Never Write My Memoir, 294). “Hollywood always maintains the illusion” (ibid., 294). “a terribly lonely time” (VF, October 1991). “I loved Fosse” (ibid.). “With Jessica I never knew where I stood” (“Winning Women,” McCall’s, June 1983). “I just love that hunger” (Bob Fosse, interviewed by Eileen Prose, n.d., available on YouTube). “scared to death” (Jennifer Collins, telephone interview by the author, June 9, 2021). “Always pay attention to the script” (ibid.). “Don’t worry” (Mary Steenburgen at the AFI tribute to Jack Nicholson, March 3, 1994). “this girl walked in” (VF, October 1991). “Dancin’ King of Broadway” (photo, New York Post, March 27, 1978). “That was Fosse” (Jessica Lange on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, CBS, March 15, 2017). “He really wanted me to work” (ibid.). “I am not a fearful person” (DP/30). “every time I came to the set” (ibid.). “prettily and vacuously” (Vincent Canby, “All That Jazz Review,” New York Times, December 20, 1979). “She was beautiful”; “Jessica was nervous” (Myrna Post, telephone interview by the author, March 3, 2021). “If you do, don’t worry” (Bob Rafelson, interview, 1990, Kinolibrary Archive, at kinolibrary.com).

Chapter 7

“I thought, if she can be as natural” (Rafelson interview, Kinolibrary). “one of the dullest movies” (The Postman Always Rings Twice production notes, AFI Catalog, at aficatalog.afi.com).

202

Notes to Pages 64–77 “In order for a film like this to work” (Rafelson interview, Kinolibrary). “It was complicated” (“The Monologist and the Fighter,” Senses of Cinema, April 2009). “Good lord, this changes everything” (MB). “Did you ever see . . . ?” (“Jessica Lange’s Latest Life”). “When I came off of King Kong” (DP/30). “This was a midwestern girl” (MB). “The problem with a lot of acting teachers” (“Queen Kong,” Interview Magazine, March 14, 1979). “Who are you?” (AS). “The first time anybody viewed me seriously” (AS). “There’s something extremely sexy about Jack” (MB). “You don’t have to work very hard” (ibid.). “You gettin’ tired, aren’t ya, honey?” (quoted in AS). “Perhaps because the film is so erotic” (Rafelson interview, Kinolibrary). “It wasn’t hard at all” (MB). “He was really good to me” (AS). “To open up the area of erotic acting” (VF, October 1988). “It was all very mysterious” (ibid.). “the birth of a great actress” (ibid.). “overshadowed” (Sneak Previews, PBS, season 3, episode 24). “People whined” (VF, October 1988). “pornographic trash” (Lana Turner, interviewed on Phil Donahue Show, 1982). “I don’t give a fuck” (“The Monologist and the Fighter”).

Chapter 8

“There’s is one project I want to do” (“Queen Kong”). “I was looking at Jessica every day” (MB). “I don’t know if she meant it” (“2 Films Make Jessica Lange a Superstar,” Pittsburgh Press, April 22, 1983). “You were right” (quoted in “2 Films Make Jessica Lange a Superstar”). “She touched something in my heart” (Jessica Lange, interview for a Frances special, stock footage, available on YouTube). “I was in awe of her” (ibid.). “Kim Stanley is the greatest actor” (DP/30). “Jessie was a ballast for me” (Kim Stanley, interviewed by James Grissom, personal interview archive). “Jessica didn’t have to dig deep” (“The Postman Rings Twice for Lange,” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1983). “It was such a weird statement” (ibid.). “I walked up to her” (Darrell Larson, telephone interview by the author, August 4, 2021). “I know she was independent” (“False Witness,” Arizona Republic, February 21, 1983).

203

Notes to Pages 77–90 “enigmatic sexuality” (from Winters, Sam Shepard, 245). “definitely sexy” (Sam and Jessica meeting and quotes from Shepard’s diary, “Ruthless,” November 5, 1982, Sam Shepard Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Centre, Boston University). “getting along” (Graeme Clifford, Frances DVD commentary, Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2010). “We are destined” (ChR, 1997). “astonishing”; “realized she wanted”; “how open her mouth was” (Sam and Jessica meeting and quotes from Shepard’s diary “Ruthless,” November 5, 1982). “I could just tell” (Jessica Lange: On Her Own Terms). “They were trying to be discreet” (Larson interview). “You should do a comedy” (AS). “Nobody could play that part” (“2 Films Make Jessica Lange a Superstar”). “She wasn’t written at all” (ibid.). “I didn’t know how to play comedy” (ibid.). “You can feel she’s an artist”; “She delivered something” (MB). “Tootsie really eased me back into real life” (AS).

Chapter 9

“if the rest of the film” (Sheila Benson, “Lange’s Performance Soars in Frances Story,” Los Angeles Times, December 3, 1982). “the best performance of the year” (Marilyn Beck column, New York Daily News, reprinted in Battle Creek Enquirer, December 3, 1982). “Let it be recorded” (Andrew Sarris, “Why Tootsie Works and Sophie Doesn’t,” Village Voice, December 21, 1982). “when Jessica Lange appears” (Pauline Kael, “Tootsie, Gandhi, and Sophie,” New Yorker, December 27, 1982). “sentimental bullshit” (MB). “I knew she’d make it” (“Jessica Lange and the Richmond Connection,” Palladium Item, April 11, 1983). “Our daughter becomes famous” (ibid.). “a lot of people thought” (“Jessie Will Be There for Us”). “made it” (ibid.). “As for Meryl Streep’s claims for best actress” (Sarris, “Why Tootsie Works and Sophie Doesn’t”). “Was it the insufferable Jessica Lange’s impeccable timing” (Teri Garr, Speedbumps [Hudson Street Press, 2005], 187). “Inside, my world keeps shifting” (TP, 70). “drinking, getting into fights” (VF, October 1991). “Jessica just continues to amaze me” (TP, 87). “When I called Misha” (VF, October 1991). “It was a painful situation” (ibid.). “Doug Dailey hears” (photo, Los Angeles Times, January 15, 1983). “a family, living on a farm” (MH).

204

Notes to Pages 90–101 “stunningly beautiful”; “The hills” (Jessica Lange to Bill Wittliff, n.d., Wittliff Collections, Texas State University, San Marcos). “I think you know” (ibid.). “In doing our research” (Jessica Lange, interviewed by Leta Powell Drake, 1984, available on YouTube). “We’re going to be around tomorrow” (Country production notes, Wittliff Collections). “everything is good here” (Lange to Wittliff, n.d., Wittliff Collections). “a new phase” (TP, 79). “he didn’t come away” (Country production notes, AFI Catalog, at aficatalog.afi.com). “I really don’t give a shit anymore” (TP, 96). Levi Knebel is one of two former actors known for playing Jessica’s children who are at the time of writing of this book serving a long-term prison sentence—the other one being Amy Locane, who played Jessica’s daughter in Blue Sky. “This film was very dear to me” (“A Winner Never Quits,” Entertainment Weekly, April 14, 1995). Films and Filming, November 1984, BFI National Archive, bfi.org.uk/bfi-nationalarchive. “It is heartbreaking” (“Hollywood’s Glittering Stars Testify about Farmers Plight,” Capital Times, May 7, 1985). “blatant propaganda message” (Ronald Reagan, The Reagan Diaries [Harper Collins, 2007], quoted in Instagram review of Country, at https://www.instagram.com/p/ CPlWik4gWx8).

Chapter 10

“overwhelming desire” (TP, 99). “there’s a real sense” (ibid., 105). “Jessica Lange didn’t once check herself ” (John Heilpern, VF, October 1984). “I’m intrigued by Jessica Lange” (Tennessee Williams, interviewed by James Grissom, n.d., personal interview archive). “There’s a whole area of Patsy’s personality” (Sweet Dreams production notes, BFI National Archive). “eerie” (VF, October 1988). “become part of her own electrical system” (DP/30). “I guess it’s pretty much the biggest thing” (Sweet Dreams production notes, BFI National Archive). “bubble actress” (Harris quoted in Larson interview). “scream at the top of her lungs” (MB). “I remember the first time” (AS). “incredibly hard working”; “pure joy” (“Jessica Lange Portrays Patsy Cline with Vitality,” Arizona Daily Star, October 16, 1985). “Lange’s interpretation” (Pauline Kael, “Sweet Dreams,” New Yorker, October 21, 1985). “Lange keeps on astonishing” (Richard Corliss, “Sweet Dreams Review,” Time, October 7, 1985).

205

Notes to Pages 102–114 “I envied Jessica Lange” (Meryl Streep on “The Talks,” the-talks.com). “I couldn’t imagine” (“Streep Talks,” San Diego Union Tribune, date unavailable, clipping in BFI National Archive).

Chapter 11

“I’ve gotten used to the fact” (“Jessica Lange: Fire and Ice,” Premiere, January 1990). “There are some things” (DP/30). “shopping-mall thing” (Winters, Sam Shepard, 290). “Somehow it just didn’t feel right to me” (VF, October 1988). “When De Laurentiis heard who we wanted” (“Big Stars,” Cosmopolitan, January 1987). “During the early reading” (ibid.). “It’s just a joy” (Crimes of the Heart production notes, BFI National Archive). “Meg plays it cool” (“Filming Crimes Enjoyable for Actresses,” Charlotte Observer, January 2, 1987). “She’s had a tough life” (“Jessica Lange’s Gotten That Monkey Off Her Back,” Poughkeepsie Journal, December 12, 1986). “Jessica certainly had a thorough understanding” (Bruce Beresford, telephone interview by the author, October 14, 2021). “The surprise is” (Crimes of the Heart production notes, BFI National Archive). “I was worried” (Beresford interview). “There are moments” (Crimes of the Heart production notes, BFI National Archive). “Jessica seems sort of distant” (“Henley Likes Cooking without a Recipe,” News Pilot, December 12, 1986). “lacking in humor” (Beresford interview). “We all thought” (ibid.). “We’ve been apart” (TP, 111). “who loves you when” (VF, October 1991). “shitty diapers” (TP, 112). “Here’s the great thing” (ChR, 1997). “a real fun time” (MB). “got fired by the critics” (TP, 123). “It’s such an eccentric, strange film” (VF, October 1988).

Chapter 12

“Instinctively, I knew” (“Unglamorous Role Was Music to Jessica Lange’s Ears”). “she helped me a lot” (Dennis Quaid, interviewed by Bobbie Wygant, Bobbie Wygant Archive, available on YouTube). “a lot of male ego” (“Lange Cuts Up Rough as Love Gets Chopped,” BFI National Archive). “piece of shit” (“Unglamorous Role Was Music to Jessica Lange’s Ears”). “for all the money”; “You do feel betrayed” (“Jessica Lange for Music Box,” 1989, Bobbie Wygant Archive). “Nobody else complained” (“Lange Cuts Up Rough as Love Gets Chopped”). “God, this is going to mean” (“Jessica Lange: Fire and Ice”).

206

Notes to Pages 114–127 “I always saw her” (“Playing It Cool,” Time Out London, August 1990). “I could never” (“Jessica Lange: Fire and Ice”). “Jessica loves grief ” (ibid.). “Paul walked around” (“Growing Pains,” Chicago Tribune, June 14, 1997). “some scrapes” (“Jessica Lange: Fire and Ice”). “There is always going to be” (“Playing It Cool”). “some stupid things”; “things are not” (San Shepard Diary, entry for January 2, 1989, Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin). “Are you ready” (“Jessica Lange: Fire and Ice”). “He’s so smart” (ibid.). “I watched him” (“From the Music Box Emerges the Nazi Demon,” New York Times, December 24, 1989). “A modern woman” (ibid.). “move into tragic dimensions” (ibid.). “One thing I learned about law” (“Jessica Lange Had Input in Music Box,” Pittsburgh Press, January 19, 1990). “It was her way of protecting herself,” description of set dynamics (Costa-Gavras, Va ou il est impossible d’aller [Points, 2021], 251, translated by the author). “If I was just doing some frivolous comedy” (Jessica Lange, interview, 1989, Music Box file, BFI National Archive). “It was the hardest thing” (VF, October 1991). “My father’s death” (“Steeled Magnolia,” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 1995).

Chapter 13

“a kind of sanity” (“A Kind of Sanity,” Star Tribune [Minnesota], November 4, 2001). “I’m in deep shit” (TP, 123). “sit in front of the monitor”; “When you have a director” (MH). “chatting about ‘Jessica’” (Michele Savage, “Kind of Like Hollywood,” Selma Times Journal, April 27, 1990). “My agent read it” (“A Life Magnified,” Tucson Citizen, October 1, 1994). “It was one of the few times” (MH). “She really was like a child” (ibid.). “Carly borrowed” (ibid.). “too tarty”; “There was a lot of cleavage” (“Great Clothes!,” Selma Times Journal, July 7, 1990). “She’s a beautiful mover” (“Music, Dance, Integral Part of Motion Picture Message,” Selma Times Journal, May 28, 1990). “Lange smolders” (David Kehr, “Blue Sky Review,” New York Daily News, September 3, 1994). “For me” (MH). “I thought” (“After All, She’s Only 18!,” Selma Times, June 13, 1990). “It puts you into a trance” (ibid.). “this nightingale” (“Oscar Nominee Jessica Lange Shows Off Her Star Power,” Boston Globe, March 26, 1995).

207

Notes to Pages 128–139 “There was a period” (ibid.). “Maybe this whole period” (VF, October 1991). “This was an area” (“A Tidal Wave of Interest Surrounds Cape Fear,” Pittsburgh Press, November 14, 1991). “My children slept with me” (“Stellar Four Discuss Cape Fear,” Ashbury Park Press, November 15, 1991). “You’d go into a scene” (AS). “That’s why casting Jessica Lange” (Inside Look: Cape Fear, TV special, 1991, available on YouTube).

Chapter 14

“Me and Jessie” (TP, 140). “They were crazy about each other” (Johnny Dark, telephone interview by the author, November 11, 2021). “She was just so absolutely his kind of woman” (ibid.). “endless, solitary walks” (Sam Shepard, unpublished poem, May 1994, Wittliff Collections). “Sometimes, I feel” (VF, October 1991). “In New Orleans in June” (Joan Didion, South and West [Fourth Estate, 2017], 5). “They’re like people” (“Acting Dangerously,” Mirabella, April 1992). “Blanche taps into” (ibid.). “It’s weird how things” (“Jessica Lange Ready to Retire after DeNiro Film,” Daily Oklahoma, November 6, 1992). “That was a funny little film” (Koblin interview). “very loosely based” (“Jessica Lange Ready to Retire after DeNiro Film”). “Jessica has a very great sense of truth” (“Fear Is Out, Romance Is In for DeNiro, Lange,” Morning Call, October 23, 1992). “I feel incredibly lucky” (Jessica Lange, interviewed by Bobbie Wygant, 1989, Bobbie Wygant Archive). “We spent a lot of time” (Amy Madigan, interviewed on Fresh Air, NPR, May 23, 1992). “Jessica Lange is learning a new craft” (“Latest Streetcar in NY Is on the Right Track,” Boston Globe, April 16, 1992). “his unequal partner” (“Alec Baldwin Does Battle with the Ghosts,” New York Times, April 13, 1992). “The production was not good” (ChR, 1997). “There are color snapshots of me” (VF, March 1995). “they didn’t know shit about me” (ibid.). “You’d walk into these rooms” (ibid.). “Our main concern is the children” (“Actress Lange Seeks Aid for Orphans in Romania,” Californian, May 6, 1993). “It was a heartbreaking decision” (“I Grieve Orphan I Fostered and Then Gave Away,” Mail on Sunday, December 31, 1995). “I still don’t know”; “It was an extremely powerful experience” (ibid.).

208

Notes to Pages 140–149

Chapter 15

“another falling out” (TP, 133). “Anytime a role like this comes up” (Halle Berry, interviewed by Bobby Wygant, 1995, Bobby Wygant Archive). “I learned a great deal” (“Halle Berry Topples Stereotypes in Isaiah,” Virginian Post, March 19, 1995). “It’s not my favorite movie” (Stephen Gyllenhaal, August 14, 2009, stephengyllenhaal .com). “The ending is problematic” (ibid.). “I always loved this picture” (“Steeled Magnolia”). “core of knockabout sadness” (Peter Rainer, “Lange, Berry Passionately Claim Losing Isaiah,” Los Angeles Times, March 17, 1995). “carried with it” (Legend of the Mist—Rob Roy behind the Scenes, documentary feature, 1995, available on YouTube). “From the moment I met him” (ibid.). “The part needed an actress” (“Steeled Magnolia”). “have to get much better” (ibid.). “Jessica Lange’s acting in Blue Sky leaves you awe-struck” (Peter Rainer, “A Glamorous Hothouse Violet,” Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1994). “It’s the finest thing” (“A Winner Never Quits,” Entertainment Weekly, April 14, 1995). “Mother, do you think” (ibid.). “People were saying” (ibid.). “It’s great to get recognition” (ibid.). “Me and Jessie are going thru” (TP, 140). “she could not foresee” (ibid.). “I always thought” (ChR, 1997). “another one of Jessica Lange’s Farm Aid type pictures” (“Lear of the American Heartland,” Sydney Morning Herald, December 10, 1996). “His good looks” (ibid.). “Ginny is an interesting character for me” (A Thousand Acres, production notes files, BFI National Archive). “where the comparisons” (ChR, 1997). “I had a hard time on that one”; “The men on that film were very supportive” (Joselyn Moorhouse, 2019, ACMI Conversations, available on YouTube). “a complete disaster” (MH). “Considering the mess that she had left us with” (ibid.). “the movie repeats the currently fashionable pattern” (Roger Ebert, review of A Thousand Acres, rogerebert.com). “Anyone who wants to see” (Newsweek quoted in “Hot Tickets,” Evening Standard, October 10, 1997). “triumphantly share the screen” (Kenneth Turan, “Pfeiffer, Lange Stand Apart from Rest of Acres Film,” Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1997). “not a good experience” (“Jessica Lange Interview with Ann Roth,” Interview Magazine, April 2006).

209

Notes to Pages 150–163

Chapter 16

“Jessica truly doesn’t understand” (“Tennessee Williams’ Women,” Sunday Times [London], April 2005). “He talked to me” (ibid.). “Stephens’s Stanley” (“Jessica Lange Breaths Life into Tragic Blanche,” Evening Standard [London], December 31, 1996). “Lange wove a web” (“Streetcar Review,” Herald [Scotland], January 6, 1997). “is a touching, truthful, at times almost scarily open Blanche” (“A Streetcar Named Desire,” Variety, January 11, 1997). “I never regretted” (DP/30). “I love when you have a film family” (“Ever Alluring Lange Gets a Rush Playing the Villain in Hush,” Sacramento Bee, March 6, 1998). “self-involved” (Hush production notes, BFI National Archive). “We hope to evoke” (ibid.). “I have no job” (TP, 154, emphasis in original). “a piece of shit” (Hush, reviewed on Bomb Report, bombreport.com). “She’s so brilliant” (Hush production notes, BFI National Archive). “a huge shock”; “[Jessica] was so devoted” (TP, 167). “My father was” (“Steeled Magnolia”). “I often wondered” (Jessica Lange, It’s about a Little Bird [Sourcebooks, 2013], n.p.). “It was daring of me or foolish” (ChR, 2000). “I don’t know what you’re talking about”; “Oh honey” (Alan Cumming, Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life [Dey Street Books, 2021], 186). “We all know”; “What I didn’t want” (“Julie Taymor Interview by James Kaplan,” US Weekly, January 2000). “smuggling” (on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, March 15, 2017).

Chapter 17

“Last I remember” (TP, 215). “It really was a big mistake” (“Lange’s Day’s Journey,” Times [London], November 13, 2000). “magnificently unsentimental” (“Jessica Lange’s Fresh Journey,” Guardian, November 22, 2000). “As Jessica emerged” (Lucy Bolton, interviewed by the author, London, June 2020). “When I hear our president” (footage used in ChR, 2003). “Some of you might feel” (Sarah Lawrence commencement speech, 2008). “Sam didn’t want me to go” (Jan Goodwin, “Jessica Lange, Actress and Activist,” AARP, March 2004). “She’s really amazing that way” (TP, 233). “Last night I woke up” (Goodwin, “Jessica Lange, Actress and Activist”). “splendidly” (TP, 241). “I’m going through an enormously painful time” (ibid., 265). “As a willful person” (ChR, 2005).

210

Notes to Pages 163–175 “acting idol” (“Sarah Paulson Credits Jessica Lange for Her Big Break,” Sirius XM, October 6, 2020, available on YouTube). “have been genetically programmed to play Tom” (Larson interview). “kicking and screaming” (ibid.). “During his last rehearsal day” (ibid.). “exquisitely dreamy” (“A Menagerie Full of Stars, Silhouettes, and Weird Sounds,” New York Times, March 23, 2005). “I think what happened is” (DP/30). “What I wanted to do” (Big Fish: Behind the Scenes, Meet the Stars special, Hollywood .com). “I thought what was missing” (“Jessica Lange Makes a Big Splash,” Time Indiana, January 9, 2004). “Sam story” (ChR, 2005). “It’s about estrangement” (“Sam Shepard: Actor, Playwright, Cowboy,” Cowboys and Indians, April 2006).

Chapter 18

“She’s a magical creature” (Michael Sucsy, telephone interview by the author, December 12, 2021). “Wouldn’t it be” (ibid.). “In the first version” (ibid.). “There were a couple” (ibid.). “I’d never attempted” (Inside Grey Gardens, HBO special, April 12, 2009, available on YouTube). “a deep trust”; “She’s really smart” (Sucsy interview). “Throughout the shoot” (ibid.). “Jessica is very expressive” (ibid.). “reminded me what acting was” (DP/30). “We all just got along so well” (Sucsy interview). “In the scene where Big Edie is having an argument” (ibid.). “It really was a special thing to witness” (ibid.). “This part was a gift” (acceptance speech, Emmy Awards, 2009). “as a favor” (Sucsy interview). “You just don’t see that very often” (ibid.). “I love just having my camera” (“Shooting Solitude,” Santa Fe New Mexican, December 12, 2008). “Well, it was twenty-three years ago” (Jeremy Kinser, telephone interview by the author, November 12, 2021). “When Ryan first called me” (Jessica Lange, Gold Derby interview, 2019, available on YouTube). “Ryan has a kind of uncanny sense” (ibid.). “When I think of these characters” (ibid.). “Of course she came from somewhere else” (Didion, Slouching toward Bethlehem, 76).

211

Notes to Pages 175–186 “Can’t you find something” (“Sarah Paulson Credits Jessica Lange for Her Big Break”). “The show’s barrage” (“AHS Is Frighteningly Familiar,” Boston Globe, October 5, 2011). “piercing” (“Horror Story,” Spokesman Review, December 30, 2011). “a hot, foolish, insane mess” (Matthew Gilbert, “The House Where Nightmares Come True,” Boston Globe, November 22, 2011). “It all started a little over a year ago” (acceptance speech, Emmy Awards, 2012).

Chapter 19

“And then it occurred to me” (Julia Reed, “Roll of a Lifetime,” Garden and Gun, December 2017–January 2018). “It has been a long drive” (Lange, Highway 61, 173). “She knows the land” (quoted in Reed, “Roll of a Lifetime”). “Enough with the caning”; “The kind of horror that appeals to me” (Jessica Lange, Gold Derby interview, 2013, available on YouTube). “You can be happy that Ms. Lange returns” (Mike Hale, “Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hellish Sanitarium?” New York Times, November 16, 2012). “This is really a portrait of a wasted life” (Jessica Lange, interview, Tavis Smiley Show, September 30, 2014). “You know I love a good Oscar winner” (Ryan Murphy, interview at Poley Fest, March 15, 2013, available on YouTube). “She is uncompromising” (Kathy Bates, “Women of AHS Panel Discussion,” Television Academy, 2015). “As emotional as she is” (Sarah Paulson, ibid.). “That’s the power of television” (Jessica Lange, Gold Derby interview, March 29, 2015, available on YouTube). “The majority of people are so programmed” (VF, October 1988). “You just have to be brave” (DP). “I want more time to myself ” (“Jessica Lange Talks Leaving after Season 4,” Entertainment Weekly, November 22, 2013). “You sleep late” (“Jessica Lange, Byrne Train for the Broadway Marathon,” Variety, April 28, 2016). “I found that Mary demands more” (“Of Booze, Brutal Honesty, and Family,” New York Times, April 19, 2016). “I don’t want to call hers a definitive performance” (Hilton Als, “Jessica Lange’s Harrowing Journey,” New Yorker, May 2, 2016). “I go to the theatre” (“Jessica Lange Revisits an Extraordinary Play,” Springfield News Leader, April 29, 2016). “This is a dream come true” (acceptance speech, Tony Awards, June 12, 2016).

Chapter 20

“I’m so exhausted from this” (“Jessica Lange Revisits an Extraordinary Play”). “I loved working with Susan” (Jessica Lange, Gold Derby interview, 2017, available on YouTube). “Go fuck yourself ” (“The Indomitable Jessica Lange,” Out Magazine, April 2017).

212

Notes to Pages 186–192 “The #1 question I get” (Susan Sarandon, tweet, April 3, 2017, Twitter). “In the beginning” (“Susan Sarandon Feud Interview,” Los Angeles Times video, May 10, 2017, available on YouTube). “I’ve never seen her as monstrous at all” (“The Indomitable Jessica Lange”). “We started shooting in September” (Jessica Lange interview, Hollywood Reporter Roundtable, July 17, 2017). “Ever since way back” (“The Indomitable Jessica Lange”). “I think of Lange” (Dan Callahan, telephone interview by the author, November 3, 2021). “Maybe it’s not a coincidence” (Kinser interview). “Last year gay Americans achieved the right” (“Ryan Murphy’s Feud Promises to Be as Camp as TV Gets,” Guardian, May 6, 2016). “Beyond just exposing the sexism and ageism” (Steph Brandhuber, telephone interview by the author, November 15, 2021). “There’s not an emotion that we skipped over” (Feud: Inside Season 1, FX special, May 18, 2017, available on YouTube). “I was really taken with how people responded” (“Through Feud Jessica Lange Tapped into a Universal Need—to Be Valued,” Los Angeles Times, August 17, 2017). “I miss him every single day” (“The Last Word: Jessica Lange on Buddhism, Photography, and AHS,” Rolling Stone, October 3, 2019). “Jessie is a lonely person” (Grande interview). “She is still looking forward” (ibid.). “I want to live my life with no goal anymore” (“Jessica Lange,” Interview Magazine, 2013).

213

Index Actors Studio, 67, 74 Alda, Alan, 191 Allen, Joan, 167 Allen, Woody, 109 All That Jazz, 59–61 Als, Hilton, 178, 183 American Film Institute, 87 American Horror Story (AHS), 173–76, 178–82, 188 Americans, The (Frank), 141 Anderson, Jane, 165 Angel on His Shoulder, 62 Angels in America, 166 Arnold, William, 73, 77 Arost, Lynn, 122, 124, 146, 147 Ashby, Hal, 90, 91 Avnet, Jon, 114 Bacall, Lauren (Mrs. Humphrey Bogart), 87, 104 Bafaloukos, Eugenie, 39, 45, 87 Bafaloukos, Ted, 45 Baldwin, Alec, 134–35, 136, 143, 170 Balzac, Honoré de, 146 Bardot, Brigitte, 125, 126 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 24 Barry, John, 83 Barrymore, Drew, 169, 170 Baryshnikov, Alexandra “Shura,” 70, 89, 92, 95, 159, 162, 167 Baryshnikov, Mikhail “Misha”: breakup with JL, 78, 79, 87–89; courtship, 52, 54–55, 56, 57; lasting friendship with JL, 162, 167, 191 Basinger, Kim, 65

Bates, Kathy, 114, 115, 167, 180 Beale, Edith Bouvier “Little Edie,” 168 Beck, Marilyn, 83 Benedek, Barbara, 114 Benson, Sheila, 83 Beresford, Bruce, 105, 107, 108, 122 Berghof, Herbert, 36–37 Bergman, Ingmar, 48 Bergren, Eric, 72 Berlin Film Festival, 122 Berry, Cicely, 156 Berry, Halle, 140–41 Big Fish, 166 Big Little Lies, 189 Blakely, Susan, 37, 72 Bloomfield, Michael, 22 Bludhorn, Charles, 42 Blue Sky, 123–27, 128, 143, 145 Bodie, Kathleen, 11 Bogart, Lauren, 104 Bolton, Lucy, 160 Boston Globe, 136, 176 Bouvier, Edith Ewing “Big Edie,” 168 Bowie, David, 181 Bradley, Owen, 100–101 Brandhuber, Steph, 189 Brando, Marlon, 110–11, 135 Brandon, Maryann, 148–49 Bravo, Manuel Alvarez, 177 Brewer, Jamie, 175 Brickman, Paul, 114–16 Bridges, Jeff, 47, 48, 165 Brooks, Mel, 72, 73, 74 Buena Vista Pictures, 148 Burton, Tim, 166

215

Index Buscemi, Steve, 160, 191 Bush, George W., 160 Byrne, Gabriel, 182 Cain, James, 62, 66 Callahan, Dan, 188 Camille, 86 Canby, Vincent, 50, 61 Cape Fear, 128–30 Carhart, Timothy, 135 Carr, Claudia, 38 Carradine, Keith, 147 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 177 Cather, Willa, 133 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 96–97 Caton-Jones, Michael, 142, 144 Ceausescu, Nicolae, 137 Chayefsky, Paddy, 56 Clay, Ross, 27–28, 29, 34 Cleveland, Pat, 31 Clifford, Graeme, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 83 Clift, Montgomery, 57 Cline, Patsy, 98–102 Club Sept, 31–32 Coal Miner’s Daughter, 99 Colacello, Bob, 61, 72 Colbert, Stephen, 59 Coleman, Dabney, 66 Collins, Jennifer, 57–58 Columbia Pictures, 60 Condello, Giuseppe, 29, 30 Conroy, Frances, 175 Cooper, Wilhelmina, 40 Corcoran, Jeannie, 10, 11 Corliss, Richard, 101 Costa-Gavras, 117–18, 119, 120, 122–23 Country, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96 Cousin Bette, 146 COVID-19 pandemic, 191, 192 Crawford, Christina, 187 Crawford, Joan, 185–87, 188 Crimes of the Heart, 105–9 Cumming, Alan, 35, 156, 157, 167, 192 Cunningham, Bill, 25 Cunningham, Merce, 19 Curtin, Jane, 65 Cusack, John, 114, 115 Czyzewska, Elzbieta, 119

Dailey, Doug, 90 Dailey, Pamela Sue, 90 D’Angelo, Beverly, 99 Darby, Jonathan, 152–53 Dark, Johnny, 88, 89, 92, 109, 122, 131, 140, 145, 153, 161, 162 Davis, Bette, 125, 185, 186, 187, 188 Davis, Judy, 188 Deauville Film Festival, 123 Decroux, Étienne, 24, 26–29, 34, 51 De Laurentiis, Dino, 40, 41–42, 43–44, 46–47, 49–51, 58, 60, 105, 107 Del Puerto, Anzonini, 17 Del Rey, Lana, 181 Demjanjuk, Irene, 118 Demjanjuk, John, 117, 118 DeNiro, Robert, 58, 128, 129–30, 133, 134 Derive, 192 DeVore, Christopher, 72 Diamond, Sharon, 147 Dick, Charlie, 98 Didion, Joan, 22, 132, 175 Donostia Award (San Sebastian Film Festival), 167 Don’t Come Knocking, 166–67 Drake, Alicia, 32 Driving Miss Daisy, 122 Dunaway, Faye, 187 Durning, Charles, 111 Dylan, Bob, 9, 22, 92, 165, 178 Ebert, Roger, 70, 149 Eitens, Trientje, 2 Emmy Awards, 150, 166, 170, 176, 179, 180, 182, 189 Eszterhas, Joe, 117 Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 164 Euro Planning, 32 Evans, Walker, 132, 178 Everybody’s All-American, 112–13 Falchuk, Brad, 173 Farmer, Frances, 37, 59, 72–73, 74, 77, 79, 84. See also Frances Farmiga, Taissa, 175 Far North, 108, 110–11 Feud, 185–89 Field, Sally, 93, 94

216

Index Fields, Freddie, 105, 108 50 Photographs, 171 Films and Filming, 93 Finney, Albert, 166 Firth, Colin, 147 Flamencologia (1970), 17 Fonda, Henry, 110 Fonda, Jane, 66, 93, 110, 116 Forman, Milos, 52 Forrest, Frederick, 118 Forrest Gump, 144, 145 Fosse, Bob, 55–57, 59–61, 62 Foster, Anne, 30 Frances, 74–80, 82, 83–85 Frank, Robert, 21, 23, 30, 31, 33, 141 Frost, Mark, 104 FX, 173–76

23–24; marriage to JL, 23, 30, 45–46; and photography influence on JL, 171; on the road, 16–18, 19, 21–23; and vision impairment, 40 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 66 Great Ziegfeld, The, 86 Grey Gardens, 168–71 Grissom, James, 75, 96 Grodin, Charles, 47, 48, 167 Guardian, 159, 188 Guillermin, John, 43, 47, 48 Guinzburg, Kate, 146, 147 Gyllenhaal, Naomi Foner, 141 Gyllenhaal, Stephen, 141

Gallagher, John, Jr., 182 Gamet, Pierre, 119 Garbo, Greta, 86 Gardner, Ava, 87 Gardner, Herb, 56 Garfield, John, 64 Garr, Teri, 81, 86 Gavras, Costa, 117–18, 119, 120, 122–23 George Eastman House Honors Award, 171 Getchell, Robert, 99 Gibson, Mel, 93 Gilbert, Matthew, 176 Glass Menagerie, The, 163–64 Goddess, The, 75 “Gods and Monsters,” 181 Goin’ South, 58, 65 Golden Globe Awards, 53, 144, 149, 150, 166, 176 Golden Raspberry Award, 153 Gone with the Wind, 5–6 Good Earth, The, 86 Goodell, Leslie, 86 Gooding, Cuba, Jr., 140 Goodman, John, 144, 165 Goodwin, Jan, 161, 162 Gordon, Bart, 138 Grande, Francisco “Paco,” 15–16; and current relationship with JL, 191, 192; and Danny Seymour, 15–23, 33; drug arrest, 23; and filmmaking, 16, 19, 21,

Hackford, Taylor, 112–13 Hagen, Uta, 36 Hall, Jerry, 32 Hall, Peter, 150 Hanks, Tom, 144 Harper, Tess, 107, 108, 111 Harris, Ed, 100, 101, 165, 167, 190 Haskell, Molly, 49, 122, 127 Hawke, Ethan, 160 HBO, 165, 168–71 HB Studio, 36–37 Heilpern, John, 96 Henley, Beth, 105, 106, 108 Henry, Buck, 52 Highway 61, 178, 190–91 Highway 61 Revisited, 9, 22 Hines, Jay, 14, 15, 16, 33 Hirsch, Judd, 136 HIV/AIDS, 127–28, 161–62 Hoffman, Dustin, 80, 81, 84 Hofsiss, Jack, 97 Hollywood, culture of, 43, 47, 103, 128, 153, 159, 165, 175, 189–90 Hopkins, Anthony, 155, 157 Horace and Pete, 191 Horder-Payton, Gwyneth, 189 Howard, Arliss, 114 Howard, Ken, 170 How to Beat the High Cost of Living, 62, 65–66 Hush, 152–53, 172 Husom, David, 12, 13–14, 16 Huston, John, 87

217

Index In Mexico, 172 Inter-Parliamentary Union Assembly, Mexico City, 162 Interview Magazine, 61, 72 It’s about a Little Bird, 156 Jackson, Samuel L., 140 Jacobson, Stewart, 77 James, Charles, 39 Johnson, Dawayn, 10 Joice, Judy, 133 Joice, Wes, 133 Jones, Grace, 32–33, 39, 55 Jones, Laura, 147 Jones, O-Lan, 88, 190 Jones, Tommy Lee, 97, 112, 124, 126–27, 144 Jordan, Glenn, 133, 143 Kael, Pauline, 54, 55, 84, 101 Kazan, Nicholas, 72 Keaton, Diane, 105, 107–8 Kehr, David, 126 Kent, Jonathan, 183 Kenwright, Bill, 150, 159, 163 Kinczllers, Ana, 138–39, 161 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 123 King Kong, 40–43, 45, 46–51, 53, 86, 87 King Lear, 147, 148 Kinser, Jeremy, 172, 188 Klein, Ellie, 19–20, 21, 24, 25, 29–30, 34 Klemp, Anna, 127 Knebel, Levi L., 93, 205 Knutson, Terry, 8 Koblin, Al, 38, 45, 133 Korsmo, Charlie, 114, 115 Koudelka, Josef, 177 Kovacs, Laszlo, 83 Kronick, William, 42–43 Lacombe, Brigitte, 171 Ladd, Alan, Jr., 60 Lagerfeld, Karl, 32 La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, 190 Lane, Diane, 143 Lane, Nathan, 184 Lange, Albert John “Al” (father), 2–5, 6–7; death of, 120; JL seeking approval of, 9,

85, 86, 110, 111, 120; restlessness of, 2–3, 6, 96, 123 Lange, Ann, 4, 8, 134 Lange, Dorothy Sahlman (mother), 2–4, 5, 85; cerebral hemorrhage, 16–17; death of, 154; and family devotion, 3, 5, 111, 154 Lange, George (brother), 4, 134, 144 Lange, George Oscar (paternal grandfather), 2 Lange, Jane, 4, 8, 23, 40, 44, 111, 134 Lange, Jessica Phyllis: and Broadway, 134–37, 159–60, 163–64, 182–84, 185; and character realism, 91, 180, 181; and Cloquet, 2–4, 10–11, 85–86; and comedic roles, 80–81; “discovery” of, 40–42; first paid performances, 29, 33; and foster parenting, 138–39, 161; free lifestyle of, 16–18, 19, 21–23, 30; as Hollywood outsider, 51–52, 185–86; and language in acting, 57–58, 156; and the LGBTQ community, 32, 165–66, 188; in London, 19, 150–52, 158–60; and the Method, 57, 75, 148; and Mexico, 22–23, 172; and Middle America, 90, 91–92, 95, 99; and mime, 20, 24, 26, 28–32; and modeling, 32–33, 39; and New Mexico home, 85, 92, 95, 104; and New York, 16–17, 19–21, 23–24, 53, 54, 162, 163; parenting and motherhood of, 92, 95, 103–4, 109, 121, 132, 138–39; in Paris, 17–18, 25–34; and photography, 171–72, 177–78, 192; playing Shakespeare, 154–57; popular image of, 61; published works by, 156, 171, 172, 178, 190–91, 192; Sarah Lawrence College commencement speech, 160–61; and Scotland, 141–42; seeking father’s approval, 9, 85, 86, 110, 111, 120, 123; self-reflection by, 163; and sexism in Hollywood, 47, 48, 49, 103, 128, 153, 159, 165; and singing roles, 99–101, 168, 179, 181; and social media, 175, 176, 179–80; and southern romantic culture, 3, 5–6, 106, 132, 173, 178, 179; and stage performances, 134–37, 150–52, 159–60, 163–64, 182–84, 185; and television

218

Index performances, 96–97, 133, 143–44, 168–71, 173–76, 178–82, 185–89; at University of Minnesota, 12–15; and Virginia home, 104–5, 108, 116, 121; and women’s strengths, 91, 101 Lange, Jessica Phyllis, childhood of, 1–11; in Cloquet, 2–4, 10–11; in Detroit Lakes, 7–9; early dreams and plans of, 8–9; family life, 2–5, 6–7, 9; fantasy worlds of, 5–6; and high school drama productions, 7–8, 10–11; moving, 4, 5, 6, 9 Lange, Jessica Phyllis, personality of: adaptability, 7; confidence, 9, 34, 47, 48, 74; and dark moods/depression, 109, 132, 145; focus and dedication, 37, 92, 100, 101, 119, 174; Minnesota identity, 67, 70; and nonconformity, 103; political activism, 9, 18, 137–39, 160–62; restlessness, 11, 17–23, 36, 95–96, 104, 177–78; sensual/sexual energy, 24, 63, 67–68, 78, 86, 103, 156; sophistication of, 10, 48; and spirituality/Buddhism, 67, 121 Lange, Trientje Eitens, 2 Larson, Darrell, 76–77, 79, 163–64 Late Henry Moss, The, 159 Lebowitz, Fran, 61 Leigh, Jennifer Jason, 147 Leigh, Vivien, 58, 125, 135 Leveaux, David, 163 Lewis, Juliette, 130 “Life on Mars,” 181 Lincoln Center tribute to JL, 167 Lion’s Head, 38–39, 45, 133 Locane, Amy, 127 Lombard, Carole, 86 Long Day’s Journey into Night (Broadway), 182–84, 185 Long Day’s Journey into Night (London stage), 159–60 Lopez, Antonio, 30–33, 38–39, 61 Los Angeles Times, 76, 83, 90, 91, 141, 143, 149 Losing Isaiah, 140–41 Louis C. K., 191 Lynch, David, 73, 104 Lynn, Loretta, 99

Machine Dreams (Phillips), 104 Madigan, Amy, 100, 135, 167 Mahoney, Kevin, 8, 9 Mamet, David, 65 Mangano, Silvana, 41, 46 Marlow, 191 Masked and Anonymous, 165 McAdams, Rachel, 171 McConaughey, Matthew, 190 McCracken, Joan, 60 McEvoy, Dermot, 38 Men Don’t Leave, 114–16 Metcalf, Laurie, 183 MGM, 64 Mitchum, Robert, 87 Moffat, Donald, 118 Molina, Alfred, 188 Mommie Dearest (1981), 187 Monroe, Marilyn, 47–48, 50, 80, 84, 104, 125, 126 Moorhouse, Jocelyn, 147, 148–49 Moriarity, Cathy, 58–59 Morton, Ray, 50 Mosher, Gregory, 134 Moss, Elisabeth, 148 Mueller-Stahl, Armin, 118, 122 Murphy, Ryan: and AHS, 172–76, 178–81; and Feud, 185–90; and Long Day’s Journey into Night, 182–83; and The Politician, 191; and portrayal of women on TV, 190–91 Music Box, 117–20, 122 My Man Godfrey, 86 Neeson, Liam, 142, 192 Nelson, Willie, 90 Newman, Paul, 96, 148 Newsweek, 50, 149 New York Daily News, 83, 126 New Yorker, 54, 183 New York Film Festival, 93 New York Post, 59 New York Times, 50, 61, 136, 179 Nichols, Sarah, 125 Nicholson, Jack, 58, 59, 64–65, 67–69, 70, 87 Night and the City, 133–34 9 to 5, 66

219

Index Nixon, Richard, 160 Nolte, Nick, 129, 130 Normal, 165–66 Nykvist, Sven, 68 Nyong’o, Lupita, 183 O’Donnell, Chris, 114, 115 O’Halloran, Jack, 47–48 O’Hare, Dennis, 175 Okonedo, Sophie, 183 O’Neill, Eugene, 159 On Golden Pond, 110 Opéra-Comique, 29 O Pioneers! 133 Orion Pictures, 124, 128, 143 Oscars, 84, 85, 86–87, 94, 101–2, 108, 122, 143, 144 Pacula, Joanna, 116 Page, Geraldine, 97 Palmer, Leland, 59 Paltrow, Gwyneth, 153 Parton, Dolly, 66 Paulson, Sarah, 163, 175, 180, 182, 183, 185 Pearce, Richard, 92 Pearl, Dorothy, 79 People magazine, 51 Peters, Evan, 175 Petit, Philippe, 49 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 146, 147, 148, 149 Phillips, Jayne Anne, 104 Places in the Heart, 89, 93, 94 Platt, Marc, 124 Pleshette, Lynn, 146 Poland, David, 75 Politician, The, 191 Pollack, Sydney, 80–81 pop-culture, 50, 176, 179–80, 187 Postman Always Rings Twice, The, 62, 64–65, 66–68, 69–71, 73 Post, Myrna, 61 Quaid, Dennis, 112, 113 Rabe, Lily, 175 Rafelson, Bob, 62, 63–65, 66–69, 70

Raffin, Deborah, 42 Raging Bull, 58 Rainer, Luise, 86 Rainer, Peter, 141, 143 Ramos, Juan, 32 Reagan, Ronald, 90, 94 Reed, Julia, 178 Reinking, Ann, 59 Reisz, Karel, 100, 101, 102, 122 Richardson, Tony, 122, 124–25, 126, 127–28, 143, 144 Rinehart, Lisa, 88 River, The, 93 Roach, Neil, 92 Robards, Jason, 148, 149 Roberts, Dallas, 163–64 Robertson, Warren, 37, 57, 59 Robinson, Jane, 125 Rob Roy, 141–42 Rogers, Sandy, 190 Rosatti, Greg, 125–26, 128 Rose, Charlie, 136, 148, 163 Rosenfeld, Michael, 53 Rostova, Mira, 57–58 Rotunno, Giuseppe, 61 Roundabout Theatre Company, 182 Royal Theatre Haymarket, 151 Ruona, Rita, 8–9, 99 Russell, Kurt, 97 Sahlman, George, 2–3 Sahlman, Lillian Buskala, 3 Sahlman, Phyllis, 3 Saint James, Susan, 65 San Sebastian Film Festival, 167 Sarandon, Susan, 161, 185, 186–87, 188, 189, 191 Sarris, Andrew, 84, 86 Savage, Michele, 123 Scheider, Roy, 59, 60 Schwartz, Bernard, 99, 100, 102 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 53 Scorsese, Martin, 58, 128, 129–30, 133 Seacat, Sandra, 67, 70, 74–75 Seymour, Danny, 15, 16, 17–20, 21, 23, 33–34 Shadowland (Arnold), 73

220

Index Shannon, Michael, 182 Sharzer, Jessica, 173 Shepard, Hannah Jane, 104, 114, 144, 160–61, 162, 184 Shepard, Jesse, 88, 95, 190 Shepard, Sam: dark moods of, 96, 116, 131, 162; death of, 190–91; and financial issues, 122, 146, 153; Highway 61 dedicated to, 190; and JL courtship, 76–79; and JL relationship difficulties/separation, 131–32, 140, 162, 170, 172, 178; and JL’s family, 110–11; lasting bond with JL, 190; parenting and family life, 92, 95, 103–4, 109, 121, 132, 138–39; selfreflection by, 162 Shepard, Samuel Walker, 109, 159 Shields, Alan, 20, 23 Shue, Elizabeth, 146 Slater, Christian, 164 Slouching toward Bethlehem (Didion), 22, 175 Smiley, Jane, 146, 147, 148 Smith, Maggie, 150 Smith, Patti, 88, 164, 190 Solo, Bob, 124 Some Like It Hot, 80, 84 Sophie’s Choice, 84–85, 86, 119 South and West (Didion), 132 Spacek, Sissy, 93, 99, 105, 106, 107–8 Spice Girls, 153 Stagner, Rama, 124 Stanley, Kim, 75, 76, 80, 82, 87, 97, 115 Steenburgen, Mary, 58 Steinbeck, John, 66 Stephens, Toby, 150–51 Stone, Sharon, 144 Strasberg, Lee, 75 Strathairn, David, 140 Streep, Meryl, 42, 64–65, 84–85, 86, 87, 102, 119, 160, 179 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Broadway), 134–37 Streetcar Named Desire, A (London stage), 150–52 Streetcar Named Desire, A (TV adaptation), 143–44

Strick, Wesley, 129–30 Styron, William, 119 Sucsy, Michael, 168–70, 171, 192 Sweet Dreams, 98–102, 103 Sylbert, Richard, 83 Tandy, Jessica, 122, 135 Tatum, Channing, 171 Taylor, Elizabeth, 96, 125 Taymor, Julie, 154, 155–56 “Tea for Two,” 170 television, power of, 180–81, 190–91 Thousand Acres, A, 146–49 Time, 51, 101 Titus Andronicus, 154–57 Tony Awards, 183 Tootsie, 80–81, 82, 84–85, 86–87, 90 Torn, Rip, 97, 144 Touchstone Films, 91 Tucci, Stanley, 188 Turan, Kenneth, 149 Turner, Lana, 64, 70 20th Century-Fox, 60 20/20 (TV program), 137 UNICEF, 161 Upton, John, 137–38, 139 Vanity Fair, 69, 96 Van Kirk, Rose, 17 Variety, 151 Verdon, Gwen, 59 Village Voice, 84, 86 Visconti, Luchino, 64 Vow, The, 171 Walt Disney Company, 91, 93 Warhol, Andy, 61, 72 Weaver, Sigourney, 87 Weber, Bruce, 96 Weber, Remy, 34, 35 Wedgeworth, Ann, 111 Welch, Raquel, 64 Wenders, Donata, 171 Wenders, Wim, 167 Wheeler, Art, 125 Wilder, Billy, 80

221

Index Wilhelmina Models, 39, 42 Wilkinson, Tom, 165 Williams, Edwina, 164 Williams, Michelle, 147–48, 183 Williams, Tennessee, 6, 58, 96, 133, 134, 135, 151, 152, 163, 164 Will There Really Be a Morning? 37, 72 Winkler, Irwin, 133 Wittliff, Bill, 90–91, 92

Wolcott, Marion Post, 177 women: Hollywood’s attitude toward, 43, 47, 103, 128, 153, 159, 165, 189–90; sexist reviews and, 149; strength of, 91, 101, 147, 189–90 Woodward, Kirk, 36 Wynne-Willson, Peter, 18–19 Ziegfeld Theatre, 170

222

Screen Classics

Screen Classics is a series of critical biographies, film histories, and analytical studies focusing on neglected filmmakers and important screen artists and subjects, from the era of silent cinema through the golden age of Hollywood to the international generation of today. Books in the Screen Classics series are intended for scholars and general readers alike. The contributing authors are established figures in their respective fields. This series also serves the purpose of advancing scholarship on film personalities and themes with ties to Kentucky.

Series Editor

Patrick McGilligan

Books in the Series Olivia de Havilland: Lady Triumphant Victoria Amador Mae Murray: The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips Michael G. Ankerich Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood’s Zen Rebel Joseph B. Atkins Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film Ruth Barton Rex Ingram: Visionary Director of the Silent Screen Ruth Barton Conversations with Classic Film Stars: Interviews from Hollywood’s Golden Era James Bawden and Ron Miller Conversations with Legendary Television Stars: Interviews from the First Fifty Years James Bawden and Ron Miller You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: Interviews with Stars from Hollywood’s Golden Era James Bawden and Ron Miller Charles Boyer: The French Lover John Baxter Von Sternberg John Baxter Hitchcock’s Partner in Suspense: The Life of Screenwriter Charles Bennett Charles Bennett, edited by John Charles Bennett Hitchcock and the Censors John Billheimer A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Violence in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch Edited by Michael Bliss

My Life in Focus: A Photographer’s Journey with Elizabeth Taylor and the Hollywood Jet Set Gianni Bozzacchi with Joey Tayler Hollywood Divided: The 1950 Screen Directors Guild Meeting and the Impact of the Blacklist Kevin Brianton He’s Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly Cynthia Brideson and Sara Brideson Ziegfeld and His Follies: A Biography of Broadway’s Greatest Producer Cynthia Brideson and Sara Brideson The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico Larry Ceplair Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo Warren Oates: A Wild Life Susan Compo Improvising Out Loud: My Life Teaching Hollywood How to Act Jeff Corey with Emily Corey Crane: Sex, Celebrity, and My Father’s Unsolved Murder Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer Jack Nicholson: The Early Years Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer Anne Bancroft: A Life Douglass K. Daniel Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel Nick Dawson Bruce Dern: A Memoir Bruce Dern with Christopher Fryer and Robert Crane Intrepid Laughter: Preston Sturges and the Movies Andrew Dickos The Woman Who Dared: The Life and Times of Pearl White, Queen of the Serials William M. Drew Miriam Hopkins: Life and Films of a Hollywood Rebel Allan R. Ellenberger Vitagraph: America’s First Great Motion Picture Studio Andrew A. Erish Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn’t Help It Eve Golden John Gilbert: The Last of the Silent Film Stars Eve Golden Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story Mollie Gregory Jean Gabin: The Actor Who Was France Joseph Harriss Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, updated edition Foster Hirsch Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design Jan-Christopher Horak Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy Burt Kearns Hitchcock Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films Alain Kerzoncuf and Charles Barr Pola Negri: Hollywood’s First Femme Fatale Mariusz Kotowski

Ernest Lehman: The Sweet Smell of Success Jon Krampner Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films Daniel Kremer Albert Capellani: Pioneer of the Silent Screen Christine Leteux A Front Row Seat: An Intimate Look at Broadway, Hollywood, and the Age of Glamour Nancy Olson Livingston Ridley Scott: A Biography Vincent LoBrutto Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen David Luhrssen Maureen O’Hara: The Biography Aubrey Malone My Life as a Mankiewicz: An Insider’s Journey through Hollywood Tom Mankiewicz and Robert Crane Hawks on Hawks Joseph McBride Showman of the Screen: Joseph E. Levine and His Revolutions in Film Promotion A. T. McKenna William Wyler: The Life and Films of Hollywood’s Most Celebrated Director Gabriel Miller Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director Marilyn Ann Moss Veit Harlan: The Life and Work of a Nazi Filmmaker Frank Noack Harry Langdon: King of Silent Comedy Gabriella Oldham and Mabel Langdon Charles Walters: The Director Who Made Hollywood Dance Brent Phillips Some Like It Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder Gene D. Phillips Ann Dvorak: Hollywood’s Forgotten Rebel Christina Rice Mean . . . Moody . . . Magnificent! Jane Russell and the Marketing of a Hollywood Legend Christina Rice Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir Victoria Riskin Lewis Milestone: Life and Films Harlow Robinson Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film Alan K. Rode Ryan’s Daughter: The Making of an Irish Epic Paul Benedict Rowan Arthur Penn: American Director Nat Segaloff Film’s First Family: The Untold Story of the Costellos Terry Chester Shulman Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice David J. Skal with Jessica Rains Barbara La Marr: The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful for Hollywood Sherri Snyder

Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley Jeffrey Spivak Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master Michael Sragow Aline MacMahon: Hollywood, the Blacklist, and the Birth of Method Acting John Stangeland My Place in the Sun: Life in the Golden Age of Hollywood and Washington George Stevens, Jr. Hollywood Presents Jules Verne: The Father of Science Fiction on Screen Brian Taves Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer Brian Taves Picturing Peter Bogdanovich: My Conversations with the New Hollywood Director Peter Tonguette Jessica Lange: An Adventurer’s Heart Anthony Uzarowski Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ordet: My Summer with the Danish Filmmaker Jan Wahl Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel William Wellman Jr. Harvard, Hollywood, Hitmen, and Holy Men: A Memoir Paul W. Williams Clarence Brown: Hollywood’s Forgotten Master Gwenda Young The Queen of Technicolor: Maria Montez in Hollywood Tom Zimmerman