Actress Piper Laurie is in a perfect place these days.
She`s onscreen in ”Storyville” at movie theaters across the country, and has another film, ”Rich in Love,” poised to open in late winter. She just opened in an off-Broadway production of Larry Kramer`s ”The Destiny of Me,” sequel to his AIDS-themed ”The Normal Heart.” And her performance as Gregory Peck`s wise associate and companion in the comedy ”Other People`s Money” is on HBO this month.
However, the route taken by this survivor of the old Hollywood system in which young actors were placed under contract by one studio and then were totally controlled by that studio-has been jagged.
Laurie was the typical ingenue of the early 1950s-the girl who broke into the business by playing perky, dewy-eyed love interests opposite Tony Curtis, Tyrone Power, Rory Calhoun and Donald O`Connor. But Laurie had loftier dreams, and eventually found the courage to bolt.
She worked in theater and TV for several years, then quit again. After a 15-year hiatus, Laurie returned in 1976 in ”Carrie,” a film through which she found herself, her craft and her potential once more.
Laurie (born Rosetta Jacobs) lives today in a modest home in the Hollywood hills. Her own striking stone carvings are a part of the decor.
In a whispery voice, Laurie, 60, says she secretly wanted to be a stage actress when she was 5, thinking ”it was very glamorous and exciting to have everyone looking at and admiring you.”
But when she was 6, her life underwent a sharp change. Her parents sent her from their home in Detroit to Reslocks, a sanitarium in the mountains above Los Angeles, as companion for her older sister, Sherrye, an asthmatic, who required treatment.
”My father had a job (as a furniture salesman), and he was afraid to leave it-the times were very bad (in the late 1930s),” she explains. Except for occasional visits from their grandfather, who would bring chewing gum, they were on their own for three years-until their parents moved out when Rosie, as Laurie is called by family and friends, was 9.
”It taught me a lot,” she says of living at the sanitarium. ”It taught me to be self-sufficient in inner ways. I was exposed to a lot of needy children, interesting children. A lot of the kids had epilepsy. My best girlfriend was retarded. It made me very sensitive to a lot of things.”
To combat her shyness, she began elocution lessons in grade school. In her junior year of high school, she discovered an acting school in the area-” the closest thing to the Method that I ever dealt with.” Lying about her age, and telling no one at school, she was admitted to this group of ”young, talented people who were very serious.” For her senior year, with her parents` consent, she switched to the Hollywood Professional School.
Her mother, Charlotte, supported her efforts.
”She was not pushy, yet very careful,” Laurie says. ”I think she overcompensated for those three years when my sister and I were alone together. She became very protective, very watchful. My father, Alfred, on the other hand, couldn`t care less.”
At first, the contract system was a heady phenomenon for Laurie. It meant work and off-screen glamor and attention. But it soon turned sour.
”I had expectations for myself about being a really fine dramatic actress,” she says. ”And I thought I had a pretty good grounding. I planned to go to New York after graduating high school, and study and be in the theater. I sort of went through the motions of the audition routine, and was amazed that I got the contract. I was always a great movie fan, and to be paid to be in the movies just overwhelmed me. So I was swept into it.
”I got lucky-they had a movie for me immediately (”Louisa,” 1950), even before the contract officially started. And then I just went from movie to movie, and in between they`d send me out on the road to sell the movies. So I couldn`t take acting classes on the lot very often.”
She can`t explain the origin of the name Piper Laurie. ”I don`t know-I think it was picked off a list.”
Unlike today, the studios at that time controlled contract players off the set as well as on.
”You didn`t dare hold a cigarette, or a glass of something to drink,”
she recalls. ”And when we were sent on tour to sell movies we didn`t dare express a political opinion.”
The one-dimensional roles she was given appalled her-as did her inability to step off the studio`s treadmill.
”I didn`t really have the guts or the self-worth to do anything about it,” she says. ”I was tied to them (Universal), and when I did speak up and ask for something decent instead of caricatures as parts-I mean, I was misused.”
Finally, at 23, Laurie broke her contract amid threats of lawsuits, and moved to New York City. Eventually, she made one more movie for Universal, but by then, she was a fixture off-Broadway and in live television drama during TV`s ”golden age”-the late `50s and early `60s-delivering her most memorable performance opposite Cliff Robertson in ”Playhouse 90”`s ”The Days of Wine and Roses” in the fall of 1958.
After reading the script for the 1961 film ”The Hustler” at director Robert Rossen`s request, she returned to Hollywood, and for her performance as Paul Newman`s disabled girlfriend, a prostitute, Laurie gained her first Oscar nomination. But when Rossen, with whom she hoped to work again, died, so did her hopes. All she was offered-other than some New York stage work, which she pursued-were imitations of ”The Hustler.”
”I`d finally done something good, and people respected it,” she says, and yet she was offered nothing challenging.
There was one pleasant result of ”The Hustler,” however. As the film was about to be released, a journalist named Joseph Morgenstern interviewed her. That encounter led to romance, and they were married. The marriage lasted about 20 years (Laurie still uses the name Rosetta Morgenstern in private life). They were divorced in 1981. Their daughter, Annie, 21, is a full-time mother and part-time college student in Santa Monica.
After playing the role of Laura in the 20th anniversary production of Tennessee Williams` ”The Glass Menagerie” on Broadway in the spring of 1965, Laurie gave up acting again.
She learned to carve stone and to bake. In the late `60s, she and Morgenstern (by then movie critic for Newsweek magazine) moved out of the city to Woodstock, N.Y.
How did Morgenstern feel about her change? ”I don`t know,” she says.
”Sometimes I thought he wanted me to be an actor, and sometimes I think he didn`t. And maybe he didn`t know himself.”
Every once in a while, though, she felt a tug, but she didn`t work very hard at returning to acting. She had no agent. Every couple of years someone would call, offering her a part, which she routinely declined. Then, in 1976, she was sent a script for a film titled ”Carrie.” This was followed by a call from an agent, who asked her to come to a meeting with director Brian De Palma, who at the time was relatively unknown. Laurie later learned that the invitation was prompted by old friendships-hers with critic Pauline Kael, Kael`s with producer Marcia Nasatir, Nasatir`s with a casting agent who was working for De Palma.
”After I read the script, I was going to turn it down. I was washing the dishes one night, and I told Joe that I thought it . . . was so cliched. He said, `Well, you know, De Palma has a comedic approach to everything he does.` So I said, `Oh, well, maybe that`s what it is-it`s a satire!` And on that basis, I went in for the meeting, and I liked Brian enormously. By the time I got back to Woodstock, the agent was calling to tell me I had the part (of Carrie`s mother, a religious fanatic) if I wanted it.”
A month later, during a rehearsal period, Laurie learned that the project was not a comedy: ”I`d worked out something very carefully-a physical thing- that I thought was very funny, and I did it. Brian stopped me and said,
`Piper, you can`t do that-you`re going to get a laugh!` I was so embarrassed! I never said a word. But ultimately I didn`t change my performance much.”
”Carrie” not only won Laurie a second Oscar nomination, but also wooed her back to the business.
”I just thought I was going to do this one movie, really. But I had such a good time, and it was also so much easier to work,” she says.
She denies at first that it was a career move, then catches herself: ”I never thought I could have a career-well, I can`t say that. I always felt that if I really wanted to, that I could have a career again. Joe didn`t agree with me.”
”Carrie” proved to her that she was ready to return: ”I felt like I wanted to act again, and somebody magically gave me something to do. And I thought, `Well, if there`s going to be more, there`ll be more.` ”
Over the last 15 years, Laurie has had roles in serious projects (a third Oscar-nominated performance in the film version of ”Children of a Lesser God”) and audience-pleasers (TV`s ”The Thorn Birds” and as eerie, calculating Catherine Martell in ”Twin Peaks”). She has performed onstage in a one-woman show as Zelda Fitzgerald and alongside talented costars (winning an Emmy opposite James Woods and James Garner in ”Promise”). With her share of darker, scheming, flawed-women roles, she also has played sunnier, healthy characters, like Albert Finney`s hairstylist girlfriend in ”Rich in Love”-a character she describes as ”an unneurotic, funny healer of the world.”
Of the woman who left movies at the outset of the `60s, only to return a decade and a half later, she says, ”The one who left the business was superneurotic, on the edge of depression, very demanding, unable to compromise in the work, and self-absorbed. The woman who came back, I think, had started to become an adult, had a much broader spiritual sense, and was capable of enjoying what was offered, what was there.
She reflects at times about her motivation. ”I keep going back lately, thinking about why I became an actress,” she says. ”I remember moments with my sister at night, in the dark. She`d be in one bed, and I was in the other. And I was desperately asking questions about what it was like to be her.
”I always had that burning curiosity, that desire to understand what it was like to be someone else, to know what it felt like, to be that person. It always fascinated me. Without that curiosity, I don`t know how you would build and sustain an interest in other people . . .insight into what it`s like to be another person.”
