Long before I ever heard of her, Jill Clayburgh was making a name for herself in Broadway musicals like Pippin and The Rothschilds, and guest spots on TV shows like N.Y.P.D. (with her then boyfriend, the unknown Al Pacino), Maude, and The Rockford Files. Like a lot of people, I first remember seeing her with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor in Silver Streak.
It's hard to know just exactly why certain performers grab your heart and others don't. I like Meryl Streep well enough, and Glenn Close, for instance. But they don't particularly touch me or make me root for them on screen. Maybe it has something to do with timing. Jill Clayburgh's career really heated up in the late 1970s, before I was going to the movies by myself but just as my family got cable television. Her string of performances as independent women (even reluctantly independent women, like her visceral work in An Unmarried Woman) seemed to play on an endless loop from about 1979 to 1984.
My mother and I (yes, I know, my mother again; it is not lost on me that these memories are as tied to her as much as to Clayburgh or anyone else I write or dream about) particularly loved her in Starting Over, a comedy about finding love after divorce with Burt Reynolds and Candice Bergen. Bergen's off key singing is a hoot, but we always laughed the loudest when, taking a turn in a charity dunk tank, Jill's character, kindergarten teacher Marilyn, is dunked repeatedly by Reynolds and finally loses her cool, screaming in front of her shocked students, "CUT IT THE FUCK OUT!!!"
There's also a fine example of her natural approach, when during a scene shot at night in clearly frigid weather, a long, glistening string of snot runs from her nose, and instead of stopping she's so "in the moment" she simply wipes it away as any real person would do.
The next several years brought her roles as the first female supreme court justice in a stagy but fun First Monday In October with Walter Matthau, a lovelorn mathematician in It's My Turn with Michael Douglas, and a harrowing portrait of a Valium addict in I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can, all of which I watched repeatedly.
After that her career slowed down considerably as she chose to devote her time to raising her kids. She was also waging a battle with chronic leukemia, which she managed to keep private for over two decades, until after she passed away in 2010.
In 2005 she returned to the Broadway stage for the first time since 1985. In little more than a year, as if making up for lost time, she managed to appear in four different plays in New York. I saw two of them and was lucky enough to meet her twice. I told her I'd waited my whole adult life to see her on stage. "Oh God, I hope it was worth the wait," she laughed. She also told me a funny story about how the company releasing the new DVD of An Unmarried Woman didn't think she was buxom enough in the original movie poster and pasted her head on another woman's body. I had my picture taken with her and proudly displayed it on my desk.
Here's where the story gets a little embarrassing for me, but fuck it. If I can't be truthful then there's no point in writing anything at all.
In the fall of 2006, a few months after I met Jill, she appeared in the film version of Augusten Burrough's Running With Scissors. She played Agnes, the dog food eating, agoraphobic wife of an eccentric therapist, who becomes a mother figure to the film's teenage lead. I was dating a new boyfriend at the time, and even after reading Burrough's memoir, I was wholly unprepared for what happened when we went to see the film.
About three quarters of the way through the film Agnes breaks out of her stupor and makes the young man, clearly in need of some mothering, a plate of Hamburger Helper. I burst into tears. And not pretty, quiet tears. I was pretty much sobbing, heaving for each breath. I was on a date with a new beau and I was sobbing uncontrollably in a movie theatre.
Truthfully, lots of movies make me cry. Pretty much anything with a sick or dying mother, or anything with a mother/son relationship can wring tears out of me the way Field of Dreams can for most straight men. But this was different, like the difference between a run of the mill toothache and a tooth with an exposed nerve.
I did manage to pull myself together, but then in the last scene of the movie Agnes once again finds the strength to put aside her own neurotic mishegas and be of real service to the boy. The credits roll. I am unable to move. I can not stop crying. The theatre clears out and the staff sweeps around us. My beau (I'll call him Jonathan 'cause that was his name and he's not the one whose identity needs protecting in this story) is very understanding. After about ten minutes I catch my breath and am able to get to my feet.
We walk out into the brisk Autumn air as dusk is falling in Chelsea. We head south from the theatre on 23rd Street, alternating between discussing the movie and silence. By 21st Street I am consumed by a new flood of tears and mortified beyond belief.
My childhood was not nearly as eccentric as the one portrayed in Running With Scissors, but there are parallels, and Jill Clayburgh's beautifully etched performance stirs memories and shakes me deeply. I have not watched the movie since, as much as I'd like to; I'm a little afraid of anything that has that much power over my emotions.
On the first Saturday of November 2010, I awoke to the news that Jill Clayburgh had died the day before at her home in Connecticut. It was stunning news, considering how well she'd hidden her illness over the years. I did the only thing I felt I could do, which was to sob for ten solid minutes.
I am not delusional; I know that meeting someone twice does not constitute a relationship anymore than watching them on screen or on a stage does. I know that Running With Scissor's Agnes was not my mother. I know that Jill Clayburgh was not my mother. I know and accept all of these things to be true. And yet...and yet...and yet...two years after her death I still dream about her and wake up startled and saddened to realize she's gone.
Only one other person's passing has ever affected me quite so strongly, and that was, of course, my mother's. It is sad that someone whose work I admire and who was polite and engaging in the brief time I spent with her is no more. But more than that, most of my memories of Jill Clayburgh are so interwoven with happy memories of my mother (of which I don't really have many) that I think her sudden death sort of tore open a wound that I had thought was healed.
They say that when someone close to you dies it takes a while to really absorb the loss, but that eventually you do, and you begin to carry your grief, to wear it like an article of clothing, and that it gradually becomes bearable, almost comfortable. With varying degrees of success I found this to be the case after the deaths of both of my parents, but I never imagined I'd go through a similar process for someone I only met twice.
2 comments:
Thank you for sharing. Jill was a great women and mother. I miss her too.
Thanks for the comment, Anoymous. I appreciate that you took the time to write. I can't help but wonder if you knew her, but I don't want to intrude on your privacy.
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