Piper Laurie Keeps Her Chin Up
By Alex Simon
Few living actors can claim to have experienced the Hollywood machine in all its iterations more than three-time Oscar nominee Piper Laurie. Signed by Universal Pictures at 17, their youngest contract player in years, she was in the last generation that were part of the Hollywood “factory,” pushed into “cheesecake” roles that accented physical attributes, as opposed to talent. It was the beginning of a journey.
She was born Rosetta Jacobs in Detroit, Michigan, on January 22, 1932, to immigrant parents of Polish and Russian Jewish descent. When she was still five, the family sent her and her sister to a children’s sanatorium in the mountains to see if her sister’s asthma could be cured. Three years later after being reunited with her family she decided she wanted to become an actress and studied with Benno and Betomi Schneider for several years where she first met Tony Curtis. Signing with Universal while still in high school. Rosetta was rechristened with the more Anglicized moniker of Piper Laurie (just like her frequent Universal co-star, Bernie Schwartz, was renamed Tony Curtis). The shy little girl who had trouble raising her chin from her chest would quickly learn to keep it up, literally and figuratively.
The next five decades involved a series of rebirths for Laurie as she continued to rediscover herself as an actor, an artist and a woman. Her autobiography, Learning to Live Out Loud, was published in November of 2011, with Piper Laurie providing a warts-and-all account of her life, including relationships both platonic (Paul Newman, Tony Curtis, Jean Simmons) and romantic (Ronald Reagan, ex-husband Joseph Morgenstern— Pulitzer Prize winner for Film Criticism, and director John Frankenheimer).
She also discusses in detail, her iconic, Oscar-nominated roles in films like The Hustler, Carrie, Children of a Lesser God and her landmark television work in the early days of live TV in productions such as Days of Wine and Roses, and The Ninth Day (both directed by John Frankenheimer) as well as the modern television classic Twin Peaks.
Piper Laurie has just released the audio version of Learning to Live Out Loud, which she reads herself, and is available on platforms including Amazon/Audible and iTunes. More info about the print and audio versions of the book can be found at http://piperlauriememoir.com/.
Piper Laurie sat down over lunch with The Hollywood Interview recently to discuss her remarkable career and life. Here’s what followed:
I’ve read many show business biographies and autobiographies over the years, but your is one of the most, for lack of a better word, “naked.” You just lay it all out, warts and all. I imagine it must have been a cathartic experience to write.
Piper Laurie: It was. A lot of it was quite difficult at times. I had no idea if I’d ever publish it, but I knew it was something I had to write. It took about three years, from start to finish.
When you did the audio version was it a re-catharsis?
Yes, totally different, brand new experience. I had objectivity about the things I’d written several years ago, and many things were very difficult for me to say, even more than they were to write.
What were some of those?
One of them was talking about John (Frankenheimer)’s death. Another also concerned a death: my first real friend, (producer) Leonard Goldstein. I was reading it and all the air went out of me and I couldn’t breathe or speak, for a long time.
Two things really hit home for me in the book: first, how mercurial so many of the personalities are in show business, and second, how much abusive, bullying behavior is allowed to go on, unchecked. I imagine it was even worse for women, particularly back then.
Abusive, bullying behavior is not exclusive to show business. I was so young and frightened and stupid at the time, just 17 when I started out. But people were actually quite protective of me.
Basically your time at Universal was college for you, those six years you were under contract. It must’ve been an incredible learning experience. What were some of the most valuable lessons you took away from it?
Much of it is only becoming clear to me now. Lately, after watching some of my very first performances on screen, I see I was too scared to simply trust myself and was just imitating what other young actresses were doing. I tried to look and sound like them. It never occurred to me that it was safe to use my talent whatever it was. Unfortunately the lessons I learned didn’t become clear until many years later. I did learn to have physical endurance, patience, traveling from town to town selling the movies I starred in and I learned to dance a little. I certainly didn’t find the work they gave me very challenging, but it taught me how to survive without falling apart. I think my experience in the sanitarium without my parents taught me a little about that... My parents were overly- protective of me later on, particularly my mother. When I was a kid at Universal, where I was so bored with the work I was doing, I enjoyed horsing around with the other actors: playing catch or what have you between takes or during a break. But later, when I got real work, on stage or in live TV. I was completely focused and involved in the work, because I had respect and satisfaction in the work.
Those early years in the sanatorium with your sister also must have helped you develop resilience.
Absolutely. We created all our own entertainment. We had no games or toys. There was no television or movies. Only books, climbing trees, a swing, and on Saturday listening to only fifteen minutes of the children’s radio show if we were good.
Speaking of mercurial, did you ever find out what caused Tony Curtis’ complete about-face from your friendship?
Well, just a lot of gossip that makes me feel a little dirty talking about it. It sounds so petty. Certain famous actors and personalities who were grooming him and giving him guidance started whispering things about me, I think they were making him feel competitive with me. It was too bad. He was a lovely guy when we first met. He once told me he didn’t expect to live to be thirty. But he was also capable of being the most charming person I’ve known in my life.
If Universal was your college, is it fair to say live TV was your graduate school?
Probably. It was the first time I received money for acting. I was very lucky to have that opportunity.
I got to interview people like Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet and Sydney Pollack, all of whom got their start in live TV, so I’ve heard what it’s like to be the director. What was it like being an actor on those live broadcasts?
The moment we went live, suddenly, the air changed in the room and I was totally focused. The panic, the terror, the preference to have a truck hit me was gone. I was very calm. And I was in control of everything found in rehearsal, and full emotionally, when I needed to be.
How much rehearsal would you usually have?
Usually two or three weeks, depending on the production. Playhouse 90 was three weeks.
How was the experience different from doing a stage play?
The actual performance on live TV had the intensity of three or four opening nights on Broadway all smacked together.
Watching those episodes of Playhouse 90, Climax, all the great live shows, the choreography between the cameras and the actors was just flawless. It absolutely flowed. I’m sure there are very few directors alive today who could pull that off.
Well, you know the few expert directors did so many of them over a short period of time, so you don’t come to that facility overnight. They had lots of practice!
Your big movie break was The Hustler. What struck me watching it last night was the moment we see your character, Sarah, sitting in that luncheonette, we know she’s damaged goods. I just wanted to scream at Eddie: “Run!”
(laughs) Yes, that’s interesting.
The other thing that struck me was that Days of Wine and Roses and The Hustler are first cousins: both deal with people who live on the fringes of society. You talk very frankly in the book about many things that were going on in your life which were troubling you at the time. Is that what drew you to both of those particular parts?
Yes, probably. Truthfully, I don’t know what drew (director) Robert Rossen to me. He saw me in a stage performance at The Actor’s Studio, a one act that Molly Kazan wrote. He saw it twice, and it was nothing like the character in The Hustler. I found out years later that one of Bob’s daughters brought him to see the Actor’s Studio production, and then he came to see it again when we did it off-Broadway, which was when he brought me the script for The Hustler and we were introduced for the first time. His daughter Carol has just finished a massive book on her father that she’s spent years compiling.
It’s sad that Rossen has been virtually forgotten over the years and he did such stellar work, very similar to what’s happened with the great Richard Brooks. Nobody ever mentions him anymore.
I met Shirley Jones recently, for the first time. She told me that I was Brooks’ first choice for the part she played in Elmer Gantry. I was so flattered by that. I met with Burt Lancaster and I met with Brooks. It was during the period right before The Hustler when I wasn’t really wearing make-up and doing my hair in a pretty awful way, so apparently they thought I “wasn’t sexy enough.” That’s the word I got back from my agent, anyway.
The Hustler must’ve been a draining story to act out: there’s not one light-hearted moment in the entire film. It’s heavy.
Yeah, it was. It’s funny, one time we tried to improvise a light-hearted moment, me and Paul, because it was so heavy, and it was terrible! (laughs) Bob Rossen didn’t use it, thank God.
I also heard that Newman had an amazing monolog in the pool room at the end of the film, which they cut, because it didn’t move the story forward. Newman was a good solider about it, kept his mouth shut, but later said he felt that cost him the Oscar for playing Fast Eddie the first time.
That seems out of character for Paul to say, and I don’t recall any speeches in the script that were cut. I don’t know what they would have been, but I do remember there were some long speeches in the script but I thought they were used. Dede Allen, the editor, had amazing taste. A good editor will make or break a movie, and she was one of the greats. I directed a short film once and I called Dede Allen for some advice before starting to edit. She said: “Put it all together. Use everything you have. Everything. Start that way.” The masters always seem to have the simplest, most straightforward advice.
What were your impressions of Brooks and Lancaster?
Brooks was very interested, engaged, accessible. Burt Lancaster, as I recall, didn’t sit down. He was walking around a lot, seemed preoccupied, like he wasn’t there.
And what about your impressions of Robert Rossen? I imagine you became close with him during the shoot, since it was such an intimate story.
Yes, more so before the film, just because he was so busy during the actual shoot. I saw a lot of him beforehand. He came to my apartment, which was unfurnished, but I did have a chair for him. We talked about the story and about the character. But mostly in very obscure ways, nothing specific. One interesting thing he told me is that he felt he didn’t know how to talk to actors. I thought the walks we’d take, going to see George C. Scott in a play, then visiting him afterwards, I thought it was all for my sake that he wanted to spend all this time, to make me feel more comfortable, but it was just the opposite. He wanted to learn the vocabulary of how to communicate with an actor. But he really left us alone once we started to shoot.
Every great director I’ve ever interviewed, including John Frankenheimer, told me the same thing about their secret of directing: cast well and get the hell out of the way.
Yes, exactly. I really came to appreciate that approach more as I got older. I’ll tell you something else John told me once: he was balking because a studio wanted him to hire a certain actress who we saw that night in a restaurant. He said he needed to feel, not a crush necessarily, but a certain kind of chemistry with an actress or even actor, to work with them really well. He asked me what I thought Bob Rosen’s feelings were for me, work respect or personal? I said that I thought it was both and John said “that’s great, that’s the best kind of relationship. You’ll be in great hands. It’s not that either of you have to act on it, but you’ll have that chemistry, that connection.” Very interesting.
When you work with someone that you’re involved with personally, like you did with Frankenheimer, does that change the dynamic of your work as an actor?
Well, I haven’t been involved with most of my directors, except for John. I knew that Sidney Lumet really liked me. It was never acted upon, until years and years later. Rossen and I were friends. I’d take his arm to cross the street or he’d come visit, but it was never an overt kind of relationship.
I thought it was very funny that early on you found George C. Scott so intimidating you were afraid to speak to him, but when you worked together years later, you found you really liked him.
Oh yes, he was a pussycat. We never had a conversation in the early years. We almost did on the last thing we did together. He had a piece he’d written about the Vietnam War and he brought it in one day for me to look at. But the night I had dinner at his house, a mutual friend brought me there and it was the first time I’d seen him in twenty years, he was just so warm and relaxed, and wasn’t drinking at all. I think his sobriety really made him a different person. The last thing we did together was a television production of Inherit the Wind, where I played his wife. We were walking outside of this grocery store. I had trouble with my line and I blew it. We both laughed a lot about that. It was very touching working with him then, because he was so sick. If I had to take his arm in a walking scene or something, there was just nothing there, and he’d been such a physically powerful, strapping guy as a young man. That was the last thing he did. He died not long after it was broadcast.
After The Hustler, you took some time off, got married, moved up to Woodstock, NY and adopted a daughter. You also started stone carving and became quite good at it.
I studied at The Art Student’s League in NY. I don’t have a studio with a cement floor anymore, and it’s impossible without a floor that can be wet while polishing the marble. I work in clay right now, which doesn’t require a special studio.
If we’re going to stick with the education metaphors, is it fair to say your time in Woodstock was your PhD?
(laughs) Sure.
What did you learn during that time and how did it inform your work as an artist?
It allowed me to look at and be part of the real world. It’s interesting, I used to think my book was about someone who couldn’t literally speak who became someone who found her voice. And I did it through this passion and desire to be a movie star or fine actor. But lately I’m thinking that isn’t really what my book is about. It’s difficult to put into words.
Well, maybe you can’t put it into words, in terms of a single sentence, but let’s face it: you did put it into words and words are open to interpretation.
Yes, I’ll stick with that. (laughs) I think to be sort of clear about what I realized is that I found my true voice through other things, not through the acting that I thought had defined me for so long. Being a mother and a stone carver really helped me to find my voice.
This brings us to the first film of yours I saw in the theater: Carrie. I was far too young to see it, but my babysitter and her boyfriend took me to the drive-in, put me in the front seat to watch the movie, while they smoked weed in the back seat and necked. So not only did I get my first contact high, I did so while watching Carrie, and I’ve never been the same.
Oh my God, how old were you?
Nine. That movie, and especially you, scared the bejesus out of me!
(laughs) Oh my, that was way too young.
Tell us about working with Brian De Palma.
I adored Brian because, as we discussed earlier, he left me alone. When we did interact, it was usually for me to ask if I could try something. I don’t like stopping in the middle of a take and being told it’s not working. It happens more than you’d think, honestly. Whenever I saw something I wanted to interpret differently than as in the script, I would ask him first, then try it. I think directors today are more used to actors who improvise a lot.
An example you gave of that in the book is when Margaret is killed by all the kitchen utensils in the end, and you had the idea to not react in pain, but in ecstasy.
Exactly. She’s finally going to meet her maker, which is what she wanted.
With the exception of the one scene you had with Priscilla Pointer, all your scenes were with Sissy Spacek. What was she like?
Just lovely. We worked together again later, on The Grass Harp. During Carrie, Sissy was quiet, serious, very focused. Different from Amy Irving, who was also in Brian’s apartment when we first started rehearsing together. Amy was someone I never really got to know.
What was it that drove Margaret White? Did you come up with a backstory for her at all?
I would no more think to makeup a back story for her than I would a character in a fairly tale. She was just the bad insensitive witch. A witch is a witch. A backstory wouldn’t have helped with the deep emotional stuff. That has to come from me and my imagination. Margaret did love God. She loved Jesus. She wanted them to embrace her daughter and herself as the ultimate joy in the Lord. She was a true believer.
A few years later you co-starred with a new actor named Mel Gibson in Tim, a lovely film.
I saw Mel years later after he’d won his Academy Awards, at a lifetime achievement award for him. Afterwards, my daughter whom he had played with sweetly in Australia when she was eight years old and he was 23, we were invited up with a group of people to his suite where he had old friends, and I was just amazed at how this essentially confident fun loving kid had become so nervous, so ill-at-ease, since his great success. On Tim, he was like a mischievous schoolboy: he liked to be naughty, daring, but there was never anything mean-spirited about him. Quite the opposite. And the things I read about him later on didn’t make sense to me at all. It sounded to me like perhaps the mischievous school boy had been caught publicly having had more than a couple of beers. Mel seemed to love any kind of physical challenge. I drove an open Jeep in some of the scenes and in his off time, he loved to drive it off-road and was just filled with joy when he did things like that. He had a strong need to express himself physically.
Something I noticed you mention in your book, and many other people in the biz have told me this over the years as well, it seems most of your close friends aren’t in show business.
Yes, that’s true. There were just a few. Jean Simmons was a good friend. Maureen Stapleton was for a time. It’s crucial to have a life outside of the business, at least for me. I like to forget that I’m in show business when I’m not working.