Ceilings and Side Exits

When I was still in grade school, not yet knowing what to do with even a fantasy celebrity crush, I had one on Jill Clayburgh. I had never heard of Clayburgh before I saw her hosting Saturday Night Live during its first season, in the spring of 1976, but she was funny, game, and sang Huey "Piano" Smith's "Sea Cruise" while wearing a sailor hat and a shirt that was tied off above her navel. (As a child, I always had a thing for exposed midriffs.) At the time, Clayburgh was about thirty-two and had just had her first starring role in a movie, playing Carole Lombard to a prosthetic-eared James Brolin as Clark Gable in Gable and Lombard, possibly the stupidest movie ever made about Hollywood and probably still one of the worst movies of all time. (Please, whatever other mistakes you make in your life, do not mistake this for any kind of recommendation. It's not "so bad that it must be kind of good." It's just a pile of shit.) The closest thing to something interesting about it might actually be the scale of the miscasting. As a comic actress, Lombard was a glamorous, adorable ditz; Clayburgh had strange, half-asleep eyes that often looked clouded over with desire, but she also came across as dry and grounded, as if she were trying to regain her footing after having let passion carry her away. In half the TV and movie roles I've seen her in that preceded Gable and Lombard, she played likable prostitutes, and in the other half, she played the hero's ex-wife.

The movie that made Clayburgh a star was Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman (1978). In its day, it was a zeitgeist movie, and it's a prime example of the phenomenon where an artist has his biggest commercial and critical success with a work that doesn't really show his talents at their best. I'm a fan of Mazursky's; I think that, at his best, he knows how to satirize characters and the moment they're living in without trivializing or condescending to them, but An Unmarried Woman, in which Clayburgh played a single mother in her mid-thirties trying to put her life back together after her husband has confessed an affair and walked out on her, isn't satire, and it isn't really a character portrait either: it's the work of an intelligent man who grew up in the pre-feminist era bending over backwards trying to show that he gets it, and afraid to use what's always been his best tool in these matters, his sense of humor, for fear of appearing unserious.

It did make sense that Clayburgh--not a kid anymore, brainy-seeming, and radiating both a longing for sensual pleasures and the scars of past frustrations--should become the poster child for urban women of the consciousness-raising era. But there are limitations in being a culture hero, and it can also make you a target. Newsweek used to have a sports columnist named Pete Axthelm who had trouble keeping his mind on sports, and who often came across as so anxious about the passing of an American where gender lines were clearly defined and set in concrete that his black and white photo accompanying his copy almost seemed to be trying to grow out its chest hair right there on the page. As I recall it, Axthelm was very upset with Newsweek's zeitgeist-conscious movie critic, Jack Kroll, for having loved An Unmarried Woman, and wrote a column saying so, which tended to jump out at you, because when you turned to the magazine's regular sports columnist, you didn't expect to see a photo of Jill Clayburgh wearing a T-shirt and bikini panties.

Again, keep in mind that I'm relying on thirty-two-year-old memories here, but I swear that a big part of his problem was that he saw the movie in a theater where the concession stand sold chocolate chip cookies, which, as a manly man who was very concerned about the continued manliness of his country, offended his understanding of movies as manly entertainments made to be experienced in manly theaters, with manly concession sellers who, if you asked for a cookie, would strap you down and stick a funnel in your mouth and jam popcorn and Milk Duds down your gullet until you grew a pair. I know, I know. But if there were guys like that writing for Newsweek in 1978, you can bet that there were guys like that who were in charge of deciding who got cast in certain movies, and that it couldn't have been a great thing for Clayburgh's career that her biggest hit made her synonymous in their minds with why their wives suddenly wanted to go back to school. Not that a male chauvinist pig conspiracy among movie executives was necessary to explain why Clayburgh's career hit the wall so fast. But when things started going wrong for her, I wonder how many people who might have been in a position to help her out climb of the rut she was in were too busy taking satisfaction from it.

In the New York Times obituary for Clayburgh, who died yesterday at 66 after a long bout with chronic leukemia, there are upbeat quotes from an interview that Clayburgh gave the Times in 1982. (“People think about me, ‘This wonderful lucky woman, she’s got it all. But gee, that’s how I feel about Meryl Streep.”) The obituary itself doesn't stress that 1982 was exactly as far as Clayburgh's movie star career got. She had her big fling as an international art movie diva in the ambitious Bertolucci flop Luna (1979), in which she was physically and temperamentally miscast as a famous opera singer who hits on her son, who looks like a little Joe Dallesandro. She was the woman to Burt Reynolds's "the man" in Starting Over, one of those picking-up-the-pieces-and-getting-back-out-there sensitive post divorce romances, had to decide whether to dump Charles Grodin after she meets Michael Douglas (give me a break) in Its My Turn, made Walter Matthau grumpy by becoming the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court in First Monday in October, got addicted to Valium in I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can, fretted about being the child of Holocaust survivors who'd been appointed to defend a Palestinian accused of terrorism in an Israeli court in Costa-Gavras's Hanna K, and, after a three-year absence from the screen, wondered where the hell her kids were in Where Are the Children? That was pretty much it. It's an amazing list, all the more so for the fact that none of these--none of them--were Lifetime television movies, which would be the first thing you'd guess if you only the titles and plot synopses to go by. At some point, the erotic charge in Clayburgh's squint died, and her eyes looked as if they were clouded not by desire but creative frustration.

Sometime around 1990, I saw Clayburgh on Bob Costas's old late night talk show. He made no attempt to conceal his bewilderment over where her career had gone, and she made no attempt to pretend that he had reason to be confused. She, in turn, made no attempt to pretend that she didn't understand the question. Her only answer for it was to point out that it was not, even in retrospect, clear why she should have said no to some of the choices that didn't work out: why, at that point in her career, would she have turned down the chance to star in a movie for Bernardo Bertolucci? Anyway, what the hell, right? She spent the next twenty years working steadily, and if the movie roles were mostly even more forgettable, she did some good work on TV and returned to the stage and had two children with her husband of thirty years. I'm still a little haunted by Clayburgh's stalled movie stardom, though. Not because I think there was anything sinister about it, but because it points up the fragility of success and the thin, flickering line between the right and the wrong choices. Consider Clayburgh's own comparison of herself to Meryl Streep; in roughly the same time frame that Clayburgh hit and faded, Streep had her own big zeitgeist success, Kramer vs. Kramer, then followed that up with a handful of high profile film that ranged from lame (The French Lieutenant's Woman, Silkwood, Falling in Love) to unwatchable (Sophie's Choice, Still of the Night), and came out on the other side firmly established as The Official Greatest Actress in Movies. Okay, some of them sold more tickets than any of Clauyburgh's movies, even if none of them were exactly Back to the Future. But there's also some hard-to-pin-down quality dividing Streep's choices from Clayburgh's. To put it bluntly, making a dud with Mike Nichols about Karen Silkwood was, in the early '80s, a certifiably Oscar-bait A-list-movie kind of bad idea; playing a Valium addict in a based-on-a-true-story melodrama was a shouldn't-this-be-a-TV-movie? kind of bad idea. Some kinds of bad ideas are better for establishing your career than others, and at a crucial moment, Clayburgh made a steady stream of the wrong kind.