The Independent Interviews Diane Keaton

Diane Keaton: She wears the trousers

She became a star 30 years ago in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Lesley O'Toole meets the resolutely kooky actress

The Independent, 09 February 2007

Diane Keaton is famous for many things: for her eclectic work as an often comedic actress; for her relationships with high-profile men (Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Al Pacino); for adopting a baby as a single mother at the age of 50, and then, at 55, another; and perhaps, most notoriously, for her dress sense. It was Keaton's Oscar-winning turn in 1977's Annie Hall that turned the trouser-suit into a high fashion item. Since then she has often found herself on "worst-dressed" lists.

Her appearance, then, today, in Beverly Hills, the day after her 61st birthday, is a revelation. She is a vision in a tight-fitting white Gucci trouser-suit, her legs long and very skinny, with strings of clear crystal beads stacked around her habitually covered neck. Keaton's new glamour-puss image is surely a holdover from easily the best film she has made this decade, Something's Gotta Give (2003), with Jack Nicholson. It is surely no coincidence that she is on American television as the older face of L'Oréal.

"I don't know if that means society is changing, but I'm so happy to be a part of it," she says. "People my age do buy products. Give me some lipstick! Give me some powder!" L'Oréal revelled in her being famously anti-cosmetic-surgery. "I need to be authentic. My face needs to look the way I feel."

She says that she signed on for her new movie, Because I Said So, because it was "full of fun situations" that she doesn't often get to play. "I loved being able to play someone drawn from all the great wacky comedy characters like Lucille Ball, constantly interfering with everyone and destroying their lives with wonderful intentions."

Unsurprisingly, given the industry's ongoing allergy to women over 40, Keaton says that she receives hardly any scripts. "But then I don't think anyone does. I don't think there are that many films being made, so it seems that even if you're at the height of your career - if you're Will Smith - you still maybe have only five or six options."

Yet with two children at home (11-year-old "Dexter the girl" and Duke, six), Keaton apparently needs the work, and is unusually frank about what it takes to hire her for your film: "Financing."
Her children do not see her films, even perfectly suitable family fare like 1987's Baby Boom. "I don't want to have that infringe on their lives." She would rather have the family play Scrabble, Old Maid and Monopoly. "And I do like reading with them. I think that's been the most fun for me in a way, just guiding them and watching how they learn to read."

There is a certain irony to Keaton's Because I Said So character meddling in her unmarried youngest daughter's love-life. Daphne, apparently, doesn't want Milly to end up alone, like her, yet Keaton has spent much of her life solo. And if she has not always loved it, she appears fully functioning and undeniably happy without a man.

"Oh, falling in love feels much better, less frightening in the movies," she laughs, deflecting the subject. "I loved kissing Jack. And I loved telling him how upset I was that he didn't love me as much as I loved him." Keaton insists that Nicholson invented the widely-reported tale of their real-life fling as a ticket-selling scam, though she patently adores him. "I fell in love with him when we were making Reds. No. Not in that way. [Keaton was dating the director and star Warren Beatty when she made the film]. But I have always loved him. Look at him. Oi! He's the greatest. That smile!"

Since she's not a touchy-feely person, do movies also provide her with a bit of human touch? "Yeah, maybe I'm getting my fix in the movies." She is at it again in Because I Said So."
The particularly grating Dorothy is, mercifully, far removed from her own mother. Keaton was born in Los Angeles to Dorothy (a housewife and amateur photographer - Keaton's own photos have been published many times) and Jack, a civil engineer. She knew early on what she would be when she grew up. "I wanted to be a performer on so many levels, but I failed so often. No one was interested in my talent when I was 12. I was constantly heartbroken because, even at school, I couldn't accomplish what I wanted. But my mother was my co-conspirator. She enabled me all my life. She would always step back and let me find my way. I think you have to have some failure in your life. It makes you stronger."

At high school, she played Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire and later studied acting at two California colleges before dropping out to try her luck on stage in Manhattan. "It wasn't that I loved cinema right away. It started with certain pictures. I can remember loving To Kill A Mockingbird as a teenager. And when I got older I started liking foreign films because that was really exciting. I liked actresses: Jeanne Moreau, Anna Magnani and people like that. I identified with and cared about them. I loved Vanessa Redgrave. I thought, and think, she's great. There were certain actresses I clung to because I thought they had such powerful emotional lives and they were such compelling people. Such humanity."

She spent her New York nights singing for her supper in nightclubs. In 1968 she performed as an understudy in the Broadway musical Hair and caused something of a ruckus by refusing to get naked (despite the offer of a $50 bonus if she did). And then she got the job which changed her life, in the theatre production of Play It Again, Sam opposite its writer and star, Woody Allen.

On film, she appeared in The Godfather 35 years ago. Annie Hall, meanwhile, is 30 years old. "La-de-dah," coos the real Annie, as she does in the film. "The passing of time is mysterious. But I think that's what life is. There's nothing you can hold on to."

Keaton says she has never been proposed to by any boyfriend, famous or not. I ask if having dated some pretty spectacular talents means that she has high standards now when it comes to lovers. "I have no standards at all. It's just about what anyone needs, a connection. " She is still in touch with Allen and Beatty but can't quite put a finger on why she is resolutely single. "My mother never really gave me any direction about men, which has made it interesting. So I think I picked people I admired. And it's too hard to manage people like that."

Okay, so it's not a very deep interview. I hated Something's Gotta Give and have no intention of seeing Because I Said So, but any interview with Diane Keaton is worth reading.

New Boxed Sets A-Comin' Our Way!!!

The Gloria Swanson Collection (Passport/Koch, 2/13/07)
Male and Female (1919, Cecil B. DeMille)
Don't Change Your Husband (1919, DeMille)
Why Change Your Wife? (1920, DeMille)
The Affairs of Anatol (1921, DeMille)
Sadie Thompson (1928, Raoul Walsh)
Indiscreet (1931, Leo McCarey)

Smiles and Spectacles: A Harold Lloyd Treasury (Passport/Koch, 2/13/07)
(That link will take you to a list of all 23 titles in the collection.)

The Ultimate Adventure Collection (Passport/Koch, 2/13/07)
(That link will take you to a list of all 12 titles in the collection.)

Joan Blondell: 5 Decades, 5 Movies

Joan Blondell's first feature film was in Lloyd Bacon's The Office Wife (1930), where she stole the show from star Dorothy Mackaill. Her last role was in Joseph Van Winkle's The Woman Inside, which was released in 1981, but obviously filmed sometime before Blondell died in 1979. Her career didn't just span five decades, it lasted five decades. The longest she went without working was between 1947's Christmas Eve and 1950's For Heaven's Sake...years she spent married to theatrical impresario Michael Todd, who filed for bankruptcy and then ditched Joan for Elizabeth, who left him after she stole Eddie from Debbie.

So this Friday, I salute Joan Blondell, one of the very first and very best of the wisecracking blondes.

1930s: Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, Mervyn LeRoy). Despite the fact that she didn't really sing, Blondell was cast in musical after musical at Warner Brothers in the 1930s. In this one, she pretends to be her roommate, Ruby Keeler, in order to teach Warren William a lesson or two about chorus girls so the real Keeler can keep dating William's younger brother Dick Powell (who was married to Blondell at the time in real life) behind his back. It's a very lightweight Busby Berkeley musical until the finale, "Remember My Forgotten Man," when Blondell leads the entire company in a grandly staged indictment against Herbert Hoover. I miss the 30s.

1940s: Nightmare Alley (1947, Edmund Goulding). Blondell plays a fortune telling carny/scam artist alongside Tyrone Power, who eventually descends into drug-addled madness and is forced to take a job biting the heads off of live chickens. The film did not do well at the time.

1950s: Desk Set (1957, Walter Lang). Blondell works with Katharine Hepburn in the research department at a TV network. Enter computer man Spencer Tracy, who the women suspect of trying to automate them to the unemployment line. Joan and Kate have a terrific scene together getting drunk at the office Christmas party.

1960s: The Cincinnati Kid (1965, Norman Jewison). Blondell plays Lady Fingers, a card dealer who really gets under Edward G. Robinson's skin.

1970s: Opening Night (1977, John Cassavetes). Blondell plays a playwright who has very little patience for Gena Rowlands's existential crisis.

Every single one of these movies is available on DVD, so I just planned your weekend for you. You're welcome.

Inland Empire

The movie: Inland Empire

The director: David Lynch

The year: 2006

The cast: Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux

The confession I made to my friend Paul afterwards: "I think I lasted about an hour. After that, I didn't know who anybody was, what was going on, or why it took three hours to get there. Actually, I think it was more like 45 minutes. I only said 'an hour' to give myself more credit."

The first 45 minutes of the plot: Dern and Theroux are making a movie directed by Irons. It's a remake of something that never was finished because the leads were both murdered. And a strange German woman just moved into Dern's neighborhood. Julia Ormand watches human-sized rabbits dressed in people clothes on TV. Harry Dean Stanton, the AD, is broke and shamelessly borrows money from everyone in the cast. That covers the first 45 minutes.

The Point: um...it had Laura Dern? Does that count? And Justin Theroux and Jeremy Irons are both pretty hot. And it looked cool. But what the hell was up with those rabbits?

The score: 5.5/10

Why a 5.5 for something so baffling? I want to give Lynch the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure he thinks the movie makes sense. And maybe I will, too, someday. And it had Laura Dern. And Justin Theroux and Jeremy Irons are both pretty hot. And it looked cool. And I'd rather sit through Inland Empire two or three more times before a Date Movie/Epic Movie double feature.

Review: The Cincinnati Kid

The Movie: The Cincinnati Kid

The Director: Norman Jewison

The Screenplay: Ring Lardner, Jr. & Terry Southern.

The Cast: Steve McQueen, Eddie G, Karl Malden, Joan Blondell, Ann-Margret, Tuesday Weld, Cab Calloway and a surpringly hot young Rip Torn.

The Year: 1965

The connections: Jewison would direct McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair three years later.
McQueen and Weld played opposite each other two years earlier in Soldier in the Rain.
Robinson and Blondell co-starred in Bullets or Ballots 29 years earlier.

Let’s pause a moment to consider: Only someone as cool as Steve McQueen could pull off the name Steve McQueen.

The plot: Everyone gathers in New Orleans to play poker. More to the point, to pit McQueen, the Kid, against Robinson, the Man, to see who comes out on top. Malden sets it all up and acts as dealer. He’s married to a very unfaithful and expensive Ann-Margret. Torn tries to fix the game by promising Malden a cut. Weld is McQueen’s fresh-off-the-farm girlfriend. Calloway sits in on the game. Joan Blondell is called in to spell Malden and needle the hell out of Robinson.

The point: Death before dishonor. What’s the point of honor if your dead? What’s the point of a life without honor?
Also intergenerational warfare and a good old-fashioned virgin/tramp showdown.

Double Feature Fun: The Sting.

Rating: 9/10. The cast, director and authors raise expectations before the opening titles are over and they all deliver. What makes the film great is that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Credit Jewison, cinematographer Philip H. Lathrop, editor Hal Ashby and especially producer Martin Ransohoff for bringing them all together.

5 Movies With 5 Different Bears

(because I'm from Chicago)

Real: Grizzly Man (2005, Werner Herzog)

Toy: A.I. (2001, Steven Spielberg)

Chicago: Brian's Song (1971, Buzz Kulik)

Animated: The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh (1977, Wolfgang Reitherman & John Lounsbery)

Billy Bob: Bad Santa (2003, Terry Zwigoff)

Happy Birthday, King!

When I started this thing, I made a conscious decision to ignore birthdays. Too many, too often. I can't even keep up on the weekly DVD updates that I'm pretty sure nobody cares about anyway.

But this is the King.

Clark Gable earned that nickname when he was voted the King of Hollywood by some poll; Ed Sullivan crowned him in 1938 and it stuck.

I recently finished the book Deadly Illusions: Jean Harlow and the Murder of Paul Bern by former MGM story editor Samuel Marx and a dancer named Joyce Vanderveen, who was presumably his girlfriend at the time. The book, published in 1983, isn't great. MGM Producer Paul Bern married Jean Harlow in July of 1932. Two months later, his body was found in their home with a bullet through the brain. Officially, his death was labeled a suicide, though that conclusion has been under scrutiny since day one, mostly because several MGM executives (including LB himself) were at the scene several hours before the cops were called. The situation grew even fishier when Bern's brother announced that Paul had never had a secret first wife - even though no one had asked.

It's a fascinating subject for a book, and Marx & Vanderveen uncover a great deal of evidence that the secret first wife - who was scizophrenic - probably killed Bern. But a lot of their evidence is hearsay. The not-entirely-reliable biographer Charles Higham calls Marx out of the blue to say that Howard Strickling, MGM's head of publicity at the time, called him out of the blue about writing his (Strickling's) memoir. Strickling showed up at Higham's and confessed everything about the Paul Bern cover-up - after insisting that Higham neither record the conversation nor take notes. And of course, Strickling died before Higham revealed anything to Marx. Please.

There's a lot of extraneous information (Joyce lost her appetite when the restaurant they went to was decorated with hunting trophies! Parking is hard in Los Angeles!) that has nothing to do with Paul Bern or Jean Harlow. What is ultimately an occasionally dull 260-page book, could likely be trimmed to the length of a fascinating article in Vanity Fair. (Of course, it didn't help matters that I started Deadly Illusions right after reading James Ellroy's My Dark Places, a much better book about a man digging into the past to solve the death of someone close to him.)

And why do I bring all this up on Gable's birthday? Because reading about Jean Harlow made me want to see her in action, so I watched Red Dust last night. Directed by an uncredited (for some reason) Victor Fleming, Red Dust is the film Baby Jean was making when Bern died, but I chose it because it's my favorite Harlow movie and the best of the six films she made with Gable. He owns and runs a rubber plantation in Indochina. She's a "hostess" in trouble with the law in Saigon, hiding out until the heat dies down. Neither can resist the other's raw sex appeal and the sparks and banter fly.

Trouble ensues when the new surveyor shows up from the States with his wife (Mary Astor) in tow, but everything works out in the end. John Lee Mahin's script is packed with indelible dialogue, none of which I can remember at the moment. And if I have to re-watch the movie, I won't get this damn thing posted until tonight and no one will read it until after the King's birthday is over. Suffice it to say that never has a debate between roquefort and gorgonzola been so delightful.

Red Dust is not available on DVD yet (though it does show up occasionally on Turner Classic Movies), but two other Gable/Harlow vehicles are: China Seas and Wife vs. Secretary. Both are included in the divine Clark Gable Signature Collection, as is John Ford's 1953 remake of Red Dust, Mogambo. Re-set in Africa, Mogambo features Gable in the same role, with Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly in for Harlow and Astor. Unlike Red Dust, Mogambo was made under the strictures of the production code. And it shows.