→ A Movies By Women.com Article

→ Woman of the Years: An interview with Fay Kanin

Fay Kanin's career achievements are rooted in character: her own.

by Cari Beauchamp

The first time I laid eyes on Fay Kanin, some 300 million other people were watching her, too. It was the 1980 Academy Awards, and she was speaking as the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I distinctly remember her poise and calm elegance as she spoke of the "privilege" of working in movies and the importance of preserving our films. With her tone and content, she elevated our profession. She bore a striking resemblance to Ava Gardner and radiated an attitude that said, "Let others be surprised a woman is president of the Academy--it is natural to me." I felt a vicarious sense of pride.

It turns out that impression is shared by many others, including Paramount chief Sherry Lansing, who calls Fay Kanin "one of the great women of our time. She is an excellent writer, an exceptional leader, an extraordinary role model, and a personal inspiration to me." And it seems that Fay knew exactly the impression she was making at her first Oscar appearance. "[Fashion designer] Bob Mackie made me a wonderful red dress and I thought, “Oh, boy, we are going to show them a woman is president."

Fay makes knowing exactly what she is doing look remarkably easy. Even a partial listing of her accomplishments bears this out. On her own, or with her late husband, Michael Kanin, Fay has written nearly two dozen films for the screen or television, was nominated for an Academy Award for writing Teacher's Pet, and won two Emmys (for Tell Me Where It Hurts and Friendly Fire). She also worked in radio and triumphed as a Broadway playwright. Yet it is not only her achievements that make her so special; her talents are combined with a demeanor and commitment that lifts the bar, personally and professionally, for everyone she has come in contact with--and that is a lot of people.

Today, Fay Kanin might not be quite as visible as she was during her four terms as president of the Academy, but she remains just as committed. To name some of her current activities: chair of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, an officer of the Writers Guild Foundation, a member of the Board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute. She served as president of the Writers Guild Screen Branch in the year before the Guild was amalgamated and has been elected to every office at least once. In fact, she has been putting her passion and perseverance to work for the Writers Guild so consistently that she has held multiple-year terms on more than 25 different committees. (Even the usually unflappable Fay is taken back a bit by that statistic.) And then there is the more or less regular Saturday night poker group she has been playing with for more than 30 years.

Born Fay Mitchell in New York City and raised upstate in Elmira, the assumption of achievement was ingrained at an early age. Before she was even a teenager, she had won the New York State Spelling Championship (presented with a silver cup by then Governor Franklin Roosevelt) and had learned the "joy of being paid to write" by supplying the local newspaper with a series of essays. In high school she wrote and produced a children's radio show. On full scholarship, she attended the private, all-female Elmira College, where she edited the yearbook and divided her studies between writing and acting.

Fay is an unabashed movie fan. While she frequents LACMA, UCLA, and other retrospectives several times a week, Fay puts current moviegoers to shame when it comes to keeping up with the latest releases. Still, she rarely goes into a screening before five in the evening because "I always feel if it is daytime I should be doing something." Her stamina and her unflinching enthusiasm are infectious.

She is a resolute advocate for film preservation and expanding roles for women in front of and behind the camera, yet her quiet elegance (and elegant is the word most often heard when you ask about Fay) belies her bulldog effectiveness. Wasting time on any kind of angst is an anathema to her, and she simply refuses to be negative. She is without pretension or false modesty. It is close to impossible to get her to "dish" (at best you will get a knowing chuckle at a good zinger, but it ends there). Terrific is her most frequent and highest accolade. Just driving through town with her is an education; she knows every shortcut, and a little prodding will bring forth a well-told vignette of what happened to whom at this or that location as you pass by. Yet there is rarely a moment spent living in the past; with Fay the subject at hand is usually what is next to be seen and what needs to be done. However, in preparation for the film series honoring the Kanins, Fay agreed to sit down and talk about her career.

→ Cari Beauchamp: When did you know you wanted to work in film and theater?

→ Fay Kanin: I don't remember a time when I wasn't crazy about the movies. As kids, we didn't care what movie was playing--every Saturday we just went to "the movies." As for theater, I clearly remember my first Broadway experience. My mother and I used to visit my maternal grandmother, who lived in the Bronx, and I was a teenager the first time I took the subway downtown by myself to go to a matinee. It was Idiot's Delight starring Lunt and Fontaine. I paid $1.65 for a loge ticket, and when the curtain went up, the magic started and I was hooked.

→ How did you get to Los Angeles from Elmira, New York?

→ Los Angeles was where movies were made, and my parents knew that's what I wanted to do. Looking back, I realize they turned their lives upside down to make it happen, but I'm not sure at the time I appreciated how special they were. My father came out first and secured a job managing a clothing store in Huntington Park. Then my mother and I packed up the essentials, sold everything else, and boarded the train for Los Angeles. On the third night, the porter told me, "Now, little miss, when you wake up, you will be in California." Well, I could hardly sleep I was so excited, and the next morning I raised the shade at daylight. We were in the middle of an orange grove--orange trees and those skinny palms that look like feather dusters. I fell in love that moment, and I've felt that way ever since.

→ And how did you get your first job in films?

→ I finished my senior year in college at USC, and after graduation an uncle who lived in Los Angeles arranged some appointments for me. He wasn't in the movie business, but he knew people who were. I put together a portfolio of the stories I'd written in college, and my first appointment was at MGM with Sam Marx, the head of the story department. I had just read Gone With the Wind, and I told him, "I think I could write a wonderful script." I must say he kept a straight face. "I think they have in mind a more expensive writer," he said. I just love that: not more experienced, but more expensive.

Being young was a liability in those days, not like today. At the other studios, they all patted me on the head and told me to come back when I had more experience. Where I was to get experience if no one would hire me was the problem. But I didn't give up, and luck brought me to the story editor at RKO, Bob Sparks. He liked my stuff and sent me to Al Lewis, the one producer on the lot who he said might give me a chance. Wonder of wonders, Lewis hired me as a junior writer at $75 a week.

My success was short-lived. Not unlike today, studio heads kept getting canned and their producers with them. Lewis was out, and so was I. But Bob Sparks came to my rescue and suggested that I could stay on as a reader. "What's a reader," I asked him. "You read scripts and write one-page summaries," he said, "and you'll learn more about movies than you ever could stumbling around for years trying to get another writing job." My salary was cut to $25 week, but I would have paid them to be there. I read the best and the worst, and it honed my skills.

My real excitement came during the lunch hour. I would take my brown-bag lunch to the patio and watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant go by on their way to the commissary. Then I would go to their empty sets and nose around, talking to anyone who happened to be there--the art directors, the editors, the cinematographers, and all the remarkable collaborators in movie-making. I gave myself a film education at RKO.

→ Wasn't RKO where you met Michael Kanin?

→ Yes. We had a small theater at the studio where the contract players put on plays. I was acting in Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead, and Michael, who had just been hired as a writer in the B unit, came to see it. I can't imagine what he saw in me because my character cried the whole time I was on stage. But he asked a mutual friend to introduce us. Michael's version was that the first thing he said to me was, "Hello, how are you, will you marry me?" and I said, "No, not yet." The fact is, I wasn't looking for a husband. I loved my job and was learning from it. It took a while for me to realize that Michael was that rare bird who would not only support my ambitions, but would enrich my life.

Michael was trained as an artist, but because of the Depression, he turned to commercial art and painting scenery for burlesque houses to help support his parents and put his younger brother, Garson, through drama school. Gar was the first to come to Hollywood as a director for RKO and when Michael wrote a successful off-Broadway play, Gar encouraged him to come out here. Soon the whole Kanin family was ensconced in a roomy house on Rexford Drive. Mom Kanin's coffeepot was going all the time, and showbiz friends were always in and out. As an only child, a big fun family was something entirely new to me, and I reveled in it.

→ When did you and Michael start writing together?

→ On our honeymoon. We rented a house in Malibu and bought the rights to an A.J. Liebling New Yorker short story about a boarding house for boxers. We spent the next six months writing a script. The result was Sunday Punch, and when MGM bought it, we knew we had the possibility of a career together. But then Michael had the opportunity to work with Ring Lardner Jr., [writing the Oscar-winning Woman of the Year for Hepburn and Tracy]. I decided to use the time to write a play, Goodbye My Fancy.

→ Like so much of your work, Goodbye My Fancy is a comedy, but it addresses serious issues and the protagonist is a strong, accomplished woman. [The story of a Congresswoman who returns to her alma mater, Goodbye My Fancy was a Broadway smash starring Madeleine Carroll, Conrad Nagel, and Shirley Booth, produced by Michael Kanin.] I know you didn't write the script for the film made from your play because by then you were involved in another project, but that brings up the fact that in the '40s, women stars playing independent women were not a rarity.

→ That's true. When I first started working in Hollywood, women were big stars--Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn--and they played complex, accomplished characters. And many of the writers were women. Then came the end of World War II; the men came home and took over to a larger degree than ever before. Female characters became either passive or sex objects, not much more than wallpaper around men's lives. In the past 20 years we have begun to see a change--women producers, writers, a few directors--but there is still a lot to do, both behind the camera and up on the screen.

→ After all the years of writing for the big screen, how and why did you switch to writing for television?

→ In the early '70s, it seemed to me that movie subjects were changing--more about sharks and aliens, less about people. I like to write about relationships and people searching for answers to the complexities of their lives and television seemed more open to that, so I thought, Maybe this is where I should be now. My first film for television was [1972's] Heat of Anger about a strong, older woman lawyer, played wonderfully by Susan Hayward, and a younger male lawyer. That sounds familiar now, but at the time it was a first and television let me tell that story. On the night Heat of Anger was on, Michael and I sat in our living room and watched. When it was over I turned to him and said, "I hate this! I don't hear anyone laughing or crying. I even miss the silence you hear in a theater with an audience. No more television for me!" The next day I went out on my usual errands--the drugstore, the market, the cleaners--and everywhere I went, I heard people discussing the movie. I realized that in this one night, more people had seen that movie than would have seen it in theaters if it played a year. Because it came into their homes, they related to it in a personal way, accepting or debating its themes, arguing or agreeing. After that, I wrote five more films for television.

→ Some of your most cutting-edge characters were written for television--for instance, the protagonists in Tell Me Where it Hurts and Hustling are very different, but they are similar in that they are older, complex women.

→ In each case I was writing about women different from me but who interested me. I love the research part of writing. I like to fill myself up with everything about the subject until the barrel is overflowing. Tell Me Where it Hurts started from a small newspaper article about a group of women in Queens who got together to talk--it wasn't called "consciousness raising" yet--and how it had affected their lives. A friend of mine in Queens brought together a group of housewives from her PTA. At first, they were hesitant to talk with me, but I assured them they would not be recognizable, that I would be creating composite characters. I started by telling them some stories about myself; then one woman began to talk, and then another chimed in, and before long they were revealing the most intimate details about their lives. We were all surprised later that year when this small movie won two Emmys.

→ How did Hustling come about?

→ In New York I stay at a hotel near 58th and Sixth Avenues, a favorite hunting ground for the street girls. I'd watched them for years and always wondered, Who are they? Where do they come from? How can they do that and I can't?

Gail Sheehy had written a book on the prostitution scene called Hustling and when it was offered to me, I realized it was an opportunity to find out. Gail introduced me to the police she had worked with at Midtown North, and they allowed me to come with them on the raids when they picked up the girls and jailed them overnight. Every night for weeks, I would go to the theater with Michael, come back to the hotel, change my clothes, and "go to work" at the jail. At first, the girls taunted me. They asked the cops, "Who is this 'straight' woman hanging around?" But when they began to understand that I was a writer who wanted to do a true picture of them, they began to open up and talk to me--they even enjoyed it. After the movie aired, I got some terrific letters from several of them, complimenting me on the way I had treated them. That's one of the joys of television, the letters you get from people telling you how your films have affected their lives.

→ And then there was Friendly Fire, seen by an estimated 60 million people on ABC in 1979.

→ Up to that time, there had been no movies about Vietnam. It was a war the country had not been willing to look at. When producer Phil Barry said he wanted to send me a book by C.D. B. Bryan about a family discovering their son had been accidentally killed by American troops, I begged him not to. I'd just finished a tough assignment, and I wanted a break. But he insisted and once I read it, I was hooked. For me, the Mullen family were American heroes. Vietnam ended because people had the courage to speak out, and Peg and Gene Mullen had the courage earlier than most.

Courty Bryan generously shared all his interview tapes with me. I listened to them day and night, even in bed, during the five months I spent in hibernation writing the movie. The Mullen children were very supportive and even came to the set during the shoot, but Peg and Gene stayed apart from it, unwilling to open the wounds. The night it aired Mike and I watched it at a friend's house, and at the end the phone rang. It was Gene. "We weren't going to look at it," he said, "but I couldn't resist, and after a few minutes Peg heard the sounds from the other room and came in and sat beside me. We want to thank you. I think we can stop crying now." Let me tell you--that may be the best reward a writer can get.

→ Do you write differently for television than for the big screen?

→ Not at all. I write a movie. For television I might have to go back and adjust a line or two for commercial breaks, but that comes afterward. I deplore snobbery--theater people putting down movies or movie people putting down television. When I lecture to young people, I tell them not to limit themselves. Write whatever you can, when you can.

→ Any other advice for writers?

→ I recall being at a tribute to Orson Welles some years ago. One after another, young filmmakers rose to tell about seeing and studying and emulating his movies. Welles sat quietly listening, and when they finished, he nodded and thanked them for their gracious words. "But I have one piece of advice to offer you," he said. "Stop looking at my movies and start looking at life." With a bow to Orson Welles, I can't think of any better advice than that.

→ I'd like to ask you about some of the films that will be screening in the five-night LACMA series tribute to you, such as Teacher's Pet.

→ Teacher's Pet almost didn't get made. Michael and I never took a studio contract. We liked being independent and writing original screenplays, and we had good luck selling them. Teacher's Pet was about inverted snobbery--the self-made man's contempt for the intellectual, and it was a serious exploration of that theme. We sent it around, got back positive responses, but nobody bought it. This hadn't happened to us before, so we decided to put it away and think about it. In the meantime, Gar did Born Yesterday on Broadway, which addressed some serious issues but as a comedy. That gave us the idea to rewrite Teacher's Pet, keeping the strong woman character and most of the points we wanted to make about journalistic integrity, but as a romantic comedy. The day after we sent it out, it sold to producer Bill Perlberg and director George Seaton.

→ How did you actually go about the writing when you worked as a team?

→ We would make a story outline together with rather detailed descriptions of the scenes. Then we divided up the writing, each taking the scenes we felt strongly about. Then one or the other of us would put it all together into a single draft. We did find a common voice, though we had different strengths. As an artist, Michael brought a great visual sense to the process. I was a people person who loved the characters and the dialogue. Through the collaboration, we learned a lot from each other and about each other. But the time came when I felt as if we were together 48 hours a day. Writing with someone else always requires some degree of compromise, as does marriage. When it came down to the question of which would survive, the marriage or the writing partnership, it was a pretty easy decision. But I remember that it was a challenge convincing the powers that be that we had been successful writers individually and would be again. We were hyphenated in people's minds: Fay-and-Michael Kanin. To again become Fay Kanin and Michael Kanin took some doing.

The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art film department, co-sponsored by the Writers Guild of America, west, presents a four-night sampling of their films with a fifth-night special screening of Fay Kanin's Emmy-winning Friendly Fire at the Museum of Television & Radio.

Brothers Michael and Garson Kanin married two extraordinary women, Fay Mitchell and Ruth Gordon, and during the next 40 years, individually or in combination, the four of them wrote, directed, produced and/or starred in a tremendous range of films. Comedies, dramas, romances, who-done-its, and noir, but all with the common thread of sophisticated wit and complex characters. As Fay Kanin, who will appear in person on September 8, says "I like writing people who know who they are."

→ You always make those challenges sound as if they were not that difficult, yet they had to be. The only time I have heard you talk about something that was truly devastating professionally was the McCarthy era.

→ It was devastating. Michael and I were enjoying our first trip to Europe, and in Rome we stopped to have dinner with our friend William Wyler. He was so insistent that we were to be the ones to work on an unfinished script he was preparing that he followed us to Florence and persuaded us to return to Rome when we completed our trip. In the meantime, he was to phone the studio and our agent and make the deal. A day later, he reached us in Paris. "I'm not supposed to tell you this," he confessed, "but you are good friends. When I told Paramount I wanted you, they kept giving me excuses, but finally they fessed up. You're on the Blacklist."

It was a total shock. We went to see a lawyer when we returned home, and he asked us straight out, "Are you communists?"

"No," we told him, "but we sure as hell are that other dirty word, liberals. What is this nonsense all about?"

After several weeks, he reported to us that it wasn't nonsense at all. We were listed as unhireable. What they had against us was that I had taken classes at the Actors Lab in Hollywood where some of the teachers were from the Group Theater and therefore suspect, and we had been members of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, an organization in support of World War II to which almost all of Hollywood's writers belonged. It was ridiculous, but it was very real, and there was nothing we could do about it. We took a larger mortgage on the house and started writing a play, but we didn't work in films for almost two years. The reason it wasn't longer was because Charlie Vidor wanted us for Rhapsody. We told him that he would hit a stonewall, but he just said, "Let me see what I can do." He went to MGM and said if they wouldn't let him hire the Kanins, he would go to the press and blow the lid off. It worked, and we were hired to write Rhapsody. Compared to so many others whose lives were ruined, we got out of it lightly, but it was a dreadful time.

→ As a veteran of several Writers Guild negotiating committees and two strikes, what do you think of the recent settlement?

→ I always say the Writers Guild is the feistiest union, and I've been proud to walk the picket line. We have had to strike for many of the major improvements during the past 20 years, but this wasn't the year to strike for a variety of reasons. Still we were able to negotiate some important changes. You know, Michael's mother used to say, "Do cows give milk? No, you have to squeeze it out of them." And I always remember Mama's words at contract time.

→ You say that with your familiar, almost demure, smile, still the phrase "iron fist in a velvet glove" comes to mind. You have served on so many committees and boards and are so respected, not just for what you do but how you do it. Can you tell me what you credit with your effectiveness?

→ Well, I listen. I genuinely like people--all kinds of people. And I respect the opinions of others. But when I think I'm right... Well, I remember a director telling me once, with some surprise in his voice, "You are tough. You're really a fighter." I think that is one of the nicest compliments I have been given.

This article first appeared in the September 2001issue of 'Written By' the magazine of the Writers Guild West

→ Go back to the rest of our articles.