Shelley Winters, 1991, by Max Sparber
From MemoryArchive
Who: Max Sparber What: Working with Shelley Winters When: 1991 Where: Los Angeles
My first play was written for a program for homeless teenagers in Hollywood begun by Shelley Winters, who died today at age 85.
I knew her for about ten months back in 1991 or thereabouts, when she began teaching classes at the Teen Canteen on Hollywood Boulevard, which was a program administrated by Travelers Aid. I had stayed for a short while at a shelter in Hollywood when I moved out there at age 21, and was renting an apartment through the Teen Canteen when Miss Winters started the her acting course. I had moved out to Hollywood in the hopes of being a screenwriter, and my caseworker knew it, and invited me to participate in the program. "What's Shelley Winters like?" I asked.
"She's like a bag lady," my caseworker told me. "With money."
Her acting class met weekly at the Teen Canteen, which was then located just off Hollywood and Vine. The class consisted mostly of improvisational exercises, which were enjoyable. Miss Winters persisted in calling me "Mac," which she would then apoloize for, explaining that she once had a husband named Mac. According to her biography, she never did, but perhaps it was instead a nickname for one of her several husbands. Her students were a dozen or so homeless teenagers, most living either in shelters or empty buildings in the Hollywood area, and it was never the same group from week to week, but for me.
She regaled us with tales of old Hollywood. I remember one story about her going to Las Vegas with Anthony Quinn and winning an enormous amount of money. Qunn offered her some advice about her winnings: "If you ever want to win again in Las Vegas, you have to leave the money here," so she bought herself something terrifically expensive -- A car? A fur? My memory fails me. Spending the money seemed to work, as Miss Winters declared that she continued to win every time she went to Vegas.
Miss Winters wanted to do a production of Clifford Odets' pro-union play Waiting for Lefty starring homeless teenagers. She explained that she viewed the early 90s as comperable to the Great Depression, and she saw Hollywood's homeless as being akin to the Depression's Hooverville residents. We would occasionally read from the script for Lefty in class, and Miss Winters brought in several people to assist her, two of them being Clare Carey, a young actress who was then appearing on the sitcom Coach, and singer/songwriter Bonnie Bramlett, who was then appearing in a recurring role along with Miss Winters in Roseanne. Shelley Winters took a several month leave of absense to work on a movie called The Pickle, leaving the program with the instruction that we should work on Lefty, and also develop a second one-act based on the actual experiences of the homeless teenagers in the program.
I was approached about writing the second script, and agreed, and through a laborious, unsatisfying, often contentious process involving improvisational exercises I wrote a script initially titled Mondo Abode, but later retitled Santa Muerte, after the death card in the Sapnish tarot deck. I needn't detail this any more, as I have written about it somewhat in the notes for The Substitute Bride, except to say that Miss Winters demurred to continue with the project and abandoned her own acting program when we seemed determined to continue with it.
I will say that my memories of Miss Winters are mixed. She was mercurial, at one moment doting, in mother hen-fashion, on the teenagers in the program, at other times exhibiting a lack of concern for them that was positively shocking. I remember one incident that to this day galls me, in which a young girl in the program complained of severe stomach pains during an acting class. She was in such agony that she could hardly stand, and, grudgingly, Miss Winters offered her a ride to the hospital. I agreed to accompany her. Winters took us to Beverly Hills, where the Cedars Sinai Hospital is, not far from where she lived. However, as it turned out, the hospital was a little too far from where Winters lived. When we reached the turn to her home, she uncerimoniously stopped the car and informed us that this was as far as she felt comfortable taking us. The hospital was just a few blocks away, and we would have to walk the rest.
We did so, the girl groaning in agony, leaning heavily on me the entire way, stopping every few steps and grimacing. When we got to the emergency room, the doctors took over, and I waited for several hours to get word on the girl. Finally, a doctor told me I needn't wait around any longer, the girl was going to spend the night in the hospital. She was all right, the doctor informed me, but she was having a miscarriage.
Miss Winters was very upset about the scipt I had written for the program, protesting that it was "psychodrama" and the script, which detailed some of the actual violence teenagers experienced on the street, would damage the homeless teenagers who might perform the role. We went to her house for a meeting about it, and she repeatedly sent me out of the room to perform little tasks for her, such as making tea, while she talked in a lowered voice with the Teen Canteen people about her concerns about my script. I remember that the mantle to her house had a photo on it of Miss Winters with Marilyn Monroe. Next to it was an Academy Award and a menorah. When we left Winters' house that night, she hugged me and wished me a happy Hannukah. We had managed to talk Winters into coming to, and participating in, several rehearsals of my play. She came to one and then washed her hands of the program.
I remember walking down Hollywood Boulevard with Miss Winters. While we walked, she leaned on me for support. A think black man saw us approaching and began shouting, pointing at her. "Oh, no!" he shouted. "It's not you! Is it you? It's not you!" Winters seemed flustered by this, throwing up an arm defensively. "It's me!" she shouted, and the black man followed us as we walked, pointing and saying "It's you! It's you!"
I remember that Miss Winters often seemed to be in bad health and terrible pain. She came to one of our rehearsals with an inflatable mattress. She usually had a few young women working as assistants, and one of them set up the mattress for her, and Winters lay on it. She seemed to be asleep throughout the rehearsal, which was for the script that I had written, and she despised. I had written a small role for her in it, and, when it was time for her character to speak, she read the dialogue feebly, in a small voice, never moving from her near-catatonic state on the air mattress.
I had based Winters' dialogue on things she had actually said to me, so her character often complained. "Oh, my back," her character would cry out. "It's very difficult for me to walk, dear, because I have this very sharp pain in my back." When Winters feebly read this dialogue, her assistants burst out laughing, and then looked embarrassed. One of them shot me a conspiratorial look. "You're very naughty for writing dialogue like that," this assistant later told me.
Shelley Winters always dies in her movies. I am sure that there are some exceptions, but not many. Quite a few of these films are great: As an example, there is Night of the Hunter, which includes the astounding image of Winters seated in an old jalopy at the bottom of a lake, her throat cut, her hair swirling around her in the water. Some of her other films, cuh as The Poseidon Adventure, are camp spectacles -- to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, in this movie you would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Shelley Winters. But her deaths were always memorable, perhaps a bit too memorable: When I knew her, if I mentioned the fact, people disbelieved me. "She's dead, isn't she?" they would ask. Perhaps this is why the black fellow on Hollwyood Boulevard was so astounded to see Winters. Up until that moment, he was sure she was dead.
Well, she really is dead now, and she leaved behind a fascinating legacy. It's hard to think of another actress who was willing to be as shrill onscreen as she was. Her character in Lolita is so phony, so needy, so nauseatingly insinuating that it is hard not to wish for ger death, as Humbert Humbert does. She shrieked her way through untold exploitation films in the Sicties and Seventies, playing characters so unrepetentantly grating that they were almost always villains. In one of her Academy Award-winning performances, she appeared in The Diary of Anne Frank, her character was doltish, selfish, whining, and dangerous, in that nobody could spend any time secreted in a hidden annex with her without wanting to flee and turn themselves over the the Gestapo. And one senses that these acting choices were deliberate, and therefore courageous. Winters was not oblivious to the fact that her characters were often monsters, neither she afraid to exaggerate those elements that made them monsterous, and there are very contemporary few actresses today willing to be so beastly and unattractive onscreen.
In fact, she could often be relied on to go too far, which is why her exploitation vehicles, such as Wild in the Streets and Cleopatra Jones so hysterical. Watch these films to see Winters' typical acting tic, which include bellowing, wheedling, and whining, at full volume. It's like her goal in these films was to create some sort of epic, unmatched archetype of the obnoxious female -- and she hasn't been topped to this day.
I would never have worked with her again, as she had some of those same exact obnoxious habits in life. But, God, am I glad others were willing to, because she was such a fantastically watchable character. Who else could be as appallingly neurotic and so massively shrill onscreen? Who will play these roles now that she's gone?
Today, American film lost a giant. A vulgar, husky, self-absorbed, blowsy, caterwauling, churlish, magnificent giant.
Re-published with permission from Max Sparber's blog, The Plays of Max Sparber
