It's nearly Oscars Time
HOLLYWOOD, California---- With the Academy Awards just around the corner, I thought it might be fun to look back at some memorable moments from my many years of covering the Oscars.
It was 1985 and I was taking a quick coffee break in the press lounge backstage between awards. My eyes were glued to the TV monitors when a timid voice asked, ‘Is anyone allowed to come in here?’
I looked up and saw a hesitant stranger leaning over the sofa on which I was sitting alone. She looked a little forlorn and I recognized her as an unsuccessful Oscar nominee for her performance in Steven Spielberg’s The Colour Purple. I didn’t know much about her. How soon that would change. A few years later she would become the most powerful celebrity in the world.
“Sure, come and sit down,” I told her. “Have some coffee and a sandwich with me and relax.”
“Thanks,” she whispered as she sat next to me. “I think I got lost backstage!”
That was the only time I ever watched television with Oprah Winfrey.
Such encounters at the Academy Awards are not unusual. The backstage area is a maze of hospitality suites for the stars and various press rooms for the different media. I once came across a bleary-eyed Jack Lemmon staggering around the press corridor, trying to find the men’s loo. I gave him directions, but after listening to my complicated instructions, he threw up his hands. “Do me a favour,” he begged. “Just take me there!”
After I had dropped Jack off, I made my way to the ladies’ room. As I walked through the door, I almost tripped over a jewelled apparition on all fours, her hands methodically sweeping the floor. This being Hollywood, where peculiar sights are hardly unusual, there didn’t seem much point in asking what she was doing. Until I heard faint groans for help coming from beneath the voluminous ballgown.
I bent over her. “Can I help you?” I asked, feeling sympathy for the poor woman. She turned. And I found myself staring into the face of a mega superstar. “I lost my contact lens while I was in the toilet,” she bleated. “And now I’ve lost the other one. I’m blind as a bat without them.”
I joined her on the floor and heard an ominous rip in my tight lurex gown. But I found the contact lens. One of them anyway. And you would never have guessed a short while later, when this superstar was presenting a major award onstage, that she was doing it half-blind.
We never did find the other contact lens. Nor did I ever get to interview the superstar, who was notorious for rejecting press advances. Maybe she owed me, but when it came down to it, I couldn’t bring myself to remind her how we had met. It just seemed too bizarre.
Incidentally, that wasn’t the same year that Meryl Streep was named Best Actress for Kramer vs Kramer and dashed off to the ladies’ room in between addressing the world’s media in the various press rooms. She was on her way back when a voice yelled from the loo she had just vacated “Hey! Someone’s left an Oscar in here!”
Since its inception, the Academy Awards have symbolized the ultimate prize in the acting world. Despised by some (2-time winner Glenda Jackson: “I felt disgusted as though I was watching a public hanging. No-one should have a chance to see so much desire, so much need for a prize and so much pain when not given it”); shunned by others (Woody Allen who calls the Oscars “meaningless” and has steadfastly ignored his 24 nominations and instead plays not a fiddle but his clarinet in a New York nightclub while Oscar sizzles).
And there are those who have vacillated in their approach. Dustin Hoffman after boycotting the awards and calling them “obscene, dirty and grotesque, no better than a beauty contest”, had a change of heart five years later when he showed up to accept his Oscar for Kramer vs Kramer and even managed to thank his parents “for not practicing birth control”. Perhaps Paul Newman was the most honest when after finally winning on his 7th nomination he said: “It’s like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years. Finally she relents and you say ‘I’m terribly sorry. I’m too tired.’”
Television viewers can miss a lot of what goes on at the Oscars backstage, where security couldn’t be tighter if it was the Pentagon. Even with social media and live network feeds, there’s still much that remains hidden. The press are segregated into different rooms for print, tv, radio and photography; the winners and presenters are shepherded among them after each award. It’s a frenzied annual affair where everyone catches up with colleagues they haven’t seen in a year.
Every member of the press is allocated a badge, the colour of which denotes the room to which they have access. And woe betide any reporter who tries to sneak into one where he or she doesn’t belong. The doors are manned by hefty armed security guards and their eyes remain fixed on everyone’s badges. Rarely does anyone sneak past this sternly protected operation. But there have been notable exceptions.
The year of Streep’s win for Kramer marked a coup for this intrepid reporter, who still has the picture to prove it. While security was busy accosting one individual, wearing a ‘radio‘ badge, I sneaked into the photographers’ room as Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman finished posing for pictures. By then, they were so exhausted that they flopped down on the floor, their Oscars upright between them. I whipped out my camera from beneath my billowing evening gown to capture a memorable moment of exquisite informality.
There is something marginally incongruous about the sight of an army of journalists clad to the nines in mandatory formal evening dress, clacking away at laptops and tablets. With the press carpark several blocks away from the venue, imagine having to schlep laptop, camera and tape recorder for several hundred yards while your evening gown insists on getting caught in your high heels. A reporter’s lot is not always an easy one.
Memories….Sylvester Stallone’s words to cover his Oscar-loss disappointment over the film for which he mortgaged his home – “I’ve got a feeling they’ll be talking about Rocky for a long time to come.” Wishful thinking or a genuine psychic flash? Richard Burton, after notching up a seventh Oscar loss – “My lucky number is 9, so if I’d won I’d have broken the superstition.” He had two more to go, but he died too soon.
Peter Finch’s posthumous win for Network was greeted with resounding cheers in the press room when his name was announced. I had known Peter well, he was a friend (and my next door neighbor), and when I told his widow, Eletha, of the reaction from the hardened reporters, her eyes filled with tears. She said she would display the Oscar among the actor’s antique teapot collection which he cherished.
Charlie Chaplin’s appearance to receive his honorary Oscar caused such paranoid concern over security for the reclusive star that, on his arrival, the building went into lockdown. All the doors were locked and bolted, trapping Oscar-winning director William Friedkin (for The French Connection) inside a double-glass entrance, from which he was unable to escape until someone heard him banging his Oscar against the glass and yelling for help.
Barbra Streisand’s late arrival left her cooling her heels in the lobby with another tardy guest, Lauren Bacall, until the doors were reopened for smokers during the first commercial break.
My own favourite moment? I guess the one that stands out the most – and which proves this is a small town where everyone knows or knows about everybody else – was the time I ran into Gregory Peck having a huddled chat outside the press lounge with a friend who I had not yet met. Peck broke off his conversation to greet me, then introduced me to his pal.
James Stewart, for it was he, cocked his head on one side and stared at me for a second, then drawled inimitably, “Oh yuh, uh, you’re that BBC girl who Kirk (Douglas) was telling me about. Uh, good to meet you.”
Like I said…it’s a small town.
Till next time, happy Purim and Shavua tov.