Harling, who
grew up in Natchitoches, Louisiana, did not set out to be a playwright.
While a student at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, he sang
with a big band and performed in summer community theater. When he
graduated, he chose acting over lawyering—“He didn’t even pick up his
diploma,” says his dad, Bob Harling—and moved to Manhattan with a
promise of a month or two of support from his parents. He arrived in
1977 without a coat in the middle of a snowstorm. “I cried for an
afternoon,” he says, “and then I got the list of auditions.” He had some
success in regional theater and was cast in lots of commercials (his
agent told him he had a great “food face,” meaning he was photogenic
even while eating). Then, eight years after his arrival, his beloved
younger sister, Susan, who had been a diabetic since she was twelve, got
sick. Harling’s mother donated one of her kidneys, but in the end, the
transplant couldn’t save her daughter.
ROBERT HARLING Susan
was incredibly supportive after I came to New York. She was familiar
with my frustration in terms of auditions, and she used to say, “You
know what really makes me mad is the fact that I can’t do anything for
you. I can make food for Johnny [Harling’s younger brother], I can whip
Mama and Daddy into line, but I don’t know how to help you, and I wish I
could.” Even when she was sick, she’d come home from the hospital and
make a box of brownies and send them to me.
Everything they talk about in the play is
true. Not every diabetic is the same, but because of her particular
condition, the doctors were concerned that carrying a child would affect
her. But she wanted a child, she went ahead and had a child, and then,
sure enough, her metabolism started to fail—circulatory system, kidneys,
the whole thing. It was much grimmer than I portrayed it in the play.
Nobody could sit through the actual health dilemmas that my sister went
through. It was so powerful to me because here was this incredibly
strong woman—my mother—who had really fought Susan when she said she was
going to try to have a baby. And now here was Susan having to turn back
to her and say, “Mama, you need to help me now.” When she needed a
kidney, we were all tested to see if we were matches, but my mom
basically said the buck stops here, and that’s how it was.
The last time I talked to Susan was on her birthday,
October 7 [1985]. She was on dialysis and they were going to put in some
shunts to facilitate it, and that required some minor surgery. I
actually had to get off the call because I was going to an audition. She
said, “Good luck,” and they rolled her down to the operating room. She
never woke up, and I told her story.
ROBERT HARLING So I put these
ten characters in a beauty shop, and it only took me ten days to write
it. When I finished the play, I took it to the receptionist at a
literary agency, and she gave it to one of the agents. The feedback was
“It’s not commercial because it’s a bunch of women and it takes place in
a beauty parlor, but we’ll send it out.” Well, all these people wanted
to do it. We did a reading of it at a small off-Broadway theater, the
WPA, which had an amazing reputation—Little Shop of Horrors
started there. And there was an equally amazing director, Pamela Berlin,
who totally got it. She would tell me things like, “You’ve only allowed
a minute and fifteen seconds to wash and set a woman’s hair. We have to
move the dialogue around so we have time to do these things.”
MARGO MARTINDALE I
tried to quit several times during rehearsals because the actresses
would piss me off, saying, “Oh, you’ve got to roll my hair like this,
don’t do that.” I said, “I am playing a hairdresser. I’m not a
hairdresser. I’m leaving.” Thank God it didn’t stick.
ROBERT HARLING Margo’s
hometown is just over the border from Natchitoches, so it’s kind of the
same world. All I’d have to do was listen to her read the lines to
realize when things were too verbose. Also, I had the voices of the
women I grew up with. It takes your breath away how quick they are. It’s
the kind of humor that would sear through treacle. The default was not
to break down, the default was to change the conversation or lift it somehow.
MARGO MARTINDALE But
we played it like a drama. We all thought it was a drama, and then the
first night it was in front of an audience, we were shocked. It was
riotously funny and played straight as an arrow. It was never like any
of us thought we were doing jokes. We thought we were just talking like
the people from that part of the country talk.
ROBERT HARLING It’s
like the line “There is no such thing as natural beauty.” That was
something somebody said who sold makeup in Natchitoches. That was a
statement, not a joke. But when you put it in a theatrical situation,
people respond to the honesty of it.
As the years have gone by, there are a
lot of lines that get quoted back to me. There’s a moment where Ouiser
has just had a tirade about how she hates kids, and people are parking
on her lawn, and she’s really spewing anger, and M’Lynn says, “Well,
Ouiser, if that’s really the way you feel, you should come down to the
mental guidance center and talk to somebody. We’re there to help.” We
were in previews, and the actress who played Ouiser, Mary Fogarty, God
bless her, came to me and said, “I need to say something. I’m the
meanest woman in town and you hurl the biggest insult so far to me, I’m
going to say something.” I’d written no line there.
I said, “Okay, say, ‘Oh, I’m not crazy, I’ve just been in a very bad
mood for forty years.’” She wrote it on her hand. We were literally
going into performance. So Pam and I are standing in the back and M’Lynn
says her line, and then Mary, kind of glancing at her hand, said, “I’m
not crazy…” The house detonated. It stopped the show.
Harling did not tell his parents he
had written the play until just before it opened at the WPA, but he’d
sent versions back and forth to his brother, John, who was working in
Philadelphia.
ROBERT HARLING As
we were going into production, Michael and Kathy Weller asked me what
my parents thought about the play, and I said I hadn’t told them. It was
the only time I’d ever seen Kathy get riled at me. I said, “It’s got to
be a painful thing for them. We’ll do the play, it’ll come and go, and
they won’t know anything about it.” I was just chicken. Kathy said, “You
weren’t there through all of that pain, you didn’t watch your child
die. If there is one moment of joy to be gained out of this experience,
you cannot deny them that. If you don’t tell them, I will.”
They came to New
York to visit a week before we went into rehearsal, and I got up some
courage. They were just flummoxed—I wasn’t a writer. When Mama asked me
if she could read it, I said, “You don’t want to. It’s about you and
Susan and the whole thing.” But she’s a Steel Magnolia—she was going to
read it. I gave her the script, and I’d walk past and she’d be sobbing,
and I felt terrible. Afterward, I said, “Mom, we’ll just kill it, I
can’t put you through this.” And she said, “It’s wonderful because it’s
true.” She just closed it and that was it, end of topic.
JOHN HARLING Daddy
never read it, so he didn’t know what the hell was going on. When we
sat down in the theater on opening night, I was the most nervous I’d
ever been in my life. Mama and Susan locked horns. They were both good
strong Southern women—that’s what makes the play so good. But you never
know how people are going to react having that kind of personal
information up there onstage. So we sit down, and early on Truvy says,
“We’re gonna be busier than a one-armed paperhanger.” I looked over at
my dad, and everybody’s laughing and he’s not laughing, but he’s beaming
because that’s his expression. I could visibly see his chest rise up.
From that point on, the cathartic experience of Steel Magnolias
started in our family. What people don’t understand is that it’s honest
even below what they see as a story. It’s honest all the way down. The
play really did work miracles, and I don’t use that term lightly. It
helped us grieve. We were basically grieving with the world.
BOB HARLING I
felt happy, I felt sad, I just couldn’t believe what was happening. But
I was mostly feeling good, proud. It was a memorial to my daughter.
MARGO MARTINDALE
In the second act, when I talk on the phone to somebody, I would always
put in, “See you then, Susan.” I think that finally got published in
the play. It only ran for four weeks at the WPA, and we all wanted to
figure out how to keep it going. I put money into it and Connie Shulman
[the actress who played Annelle] did, and Bobby’s family did too. We
moved the play to the Lucille Lortel.
ROBERT HARLING My
father, my uncle, and our next-door neighbor all invested, and I was
horrified—you almost always lose money in theater, but there was no
stopping them. And then another neighbor told me, “You know it’s not
about you, it’s about Susan.” And I realized that’s why they wanted to
do it. They weren’t looking to make money, they wanted to support the
continuation of the saga.
Shortly after the play moved,
Hollywood came calling with offers for a movie, and every big-name
actress turned up at the theater to see if there might be a screen role
for her.
ROBERT HARLING Joan
Rivers came, Lucille Ball came, Cher, Bette Davis, all of the Golden
Girls. It became a nightly thing to see who was the huge star in the
audience. Somebody had told Elizabeth Taylor that M’Lynn was the perfect
role for her, and when word got out that she was coming, they had to
shut the street. I was thinking at the time, “Elizabeth Taylor’s going
to sit there and hear the line ‘When it comes to suffering, she’s right
up there with Elizabeth Taylor.’” No one laughed harder than she did. It
made the nightly news.
When the producer Ray Stark made an offer
to buy the rights, Harling was thrilled. Stark had made the hit The Way
We Were, and the plays he’d made into movies included Funny Girl and
Chapter Two. Stark not only understood strong women, he also had a long
working relationship with Herbert Ross, with whom he’d done eight films,
including Funny Lady. Ross was hired as director.
ROBERT HARLING Part of the deal was that I would get the first
crack at the screenplay. Herbert gave me the greatest, simplest advice:
“Always remember who the important person is here,” meaning my sister.
“Go back and ask what would amuse her, how she would edit, what would be
too vulgar, where she would put her foot down.” So we got a draft of
the script together, and Ray was happy.
SHIRLEY MACLAINE Herbert called and said, “I’m
going to send you this script, and you can play any part you want,
except for M’Lynn and the daughter.” So I read it and I said, “I want to
play the really bitchy one.” I think I was rehearsing for my old age. I
was seeing if I could get away with saying what I negatively felt and
still be funny. And it’s kind of turned out that way, actually.
ROBERT HARLING Herbert had this way—he was from
Brooklyn and started out as a chorus boy, but he became this acclaimed
director and managed to talk like British gentry. So over dinner one
night at Orso [the evergreen New York theater district restaurant], he
said, “Rawbuht, how would you feel about Sally Field playing your
muthuh?” I couldn’t speak. Then he said, “I was thinking that I’d love
to see Dolly do Truvy.” And I almost choked on my pizza bread.
MARGO MARTINDALE I think they actually did see me
for the role of Truvy, but that was just a courtesy, and I was not upset
that Dolly got the role. Truvy’s all about heart, and Dolly Parton has a
big heart.
ROBERT HARLING Just after my dinner with Herbert, Olympia Dukakis won the Oscar for Moonstruck.
Ray called and said, “Olympia’s doing Clairee.” I knew Olympia from her
work in New York theater, so I knew she could do anything, but I was
worried that she wasn’t Southern. Shirley is from Virginia, and Sally
had done Places in the Heart and Norma Rae, and then of course there’s Dolly. But when Olympia came down, all the women in town thought she had the most accurate accent.
Next, Herbert said, “I really like Daryl
Hannah for…” I thought he was going to the Shelby place, but before he
got there, he said Annelle. I couldn’t imagine it. She was one of the
great goddesses of cinema [Hannah had already starred in Splash and Roxanne]. Herbert said, “It’s a wonderful Hollywood move. She will jump at the chance to wear a bad wig and glasses.”
All that was left was Shelby. We’d decided on Meg Ryan, who had just had some success with Top Gun. The day we offered it to her, she came back and said, “I just got offered this movie with Billy Crystal, When Harry Met Sally, and that’s my chance to be a leading lady. In Steel Magnolias I’d
be part of an ensemble.” We went back to the list: Laura Dern, Winona
Ryder, all the hot young stars. Ray said, “You know what, we’ve got a
lot of Oscar winners and stars. Let’s open it up.” The casting director
said, “There’s this girl. She hasn’t been able to audition because she’s
been off making some movie about a pizza.” [Roberts had just finished
filming Mystic Pizza.] Julia came in, and it was like somebody
bumped up the lights. She smiled that smile. She was the essence of the
great Southern gal: spicy, witty, smart, with a layer of compassion
underneath. [Roberts grew up in Smyrna, Georgia.] Lee Radziwill, who had
just started dating Herbert, said, “She’s it. She’s Shelby.” I thought,
“Okay, I can breathe now, my sister’s in good hands.”
SHIRLEY MACLAINE The
moment Julia walked into the reading, I thought, “That woman is going
to be a star.” I called my agent and said, “I don’t know if she has an
agent, but you should handle her.”
During the casting, Stark also made the decision that the movie would be filmed on location, an extraordinary move at the time.
ROBERT HARLING Ray
said, “Why don’t we shoot it where it happened?” That was
unheard-of—normally you’d find your locations in the Valley and in L.A.,
but Ray insisted. It helped that Natchitoches is gorgeous. Anywhere you
point the camera you’re going to frame a good shot. It’s the oldest
town in the Louisiana Purchase. It has a sense of history you could
never capture in Pasadena. But first a lot of stuff had to happen. They
had to start bringing in all these people and all this equipment to this
little tiny place. Finally, the date was set, and we started shooting
at the end of June 1988. The circus had come to town.
The filming lasted through Labor Day, and all the stars lived in houses in Natchitoches.
TOM WHITEHEAD [Natchitoches
resident and then member of the Louisiana Film Commission] There was a
buzz in the community the whole time the shoot was here. There’s a
restaurant called Mariner’s out on Sibley Lake, and every night Dolly,
her assistant, the guy who did her hair, and her bodyguard went to
dinner there. The restaurant was sold out for the duration. People
filled it up to see Dolly Parton eating in the back corner.
ROBERT HARLING Julia
was so eager to have the stamp of approval from Mama and Daddy to play
their daughter. She’d come over, and Daddy would cook hamburgers and
they’d talk, and she’d write poetry and she’d read us the poetry, and
Dolly would come over and sit on the sofa and play her guitar. It was
just beyond surreal. Dolly wrote a song called “Eagle When She Flies.”
It was written for the movie, and Herbert was going to play it over the
credits, but he changed his mind. There’s a line about the “sweet
magnolia” that originally had been “steel magnolia,” and she played it
for my parents as she was writing it.
SHIRLEY MACLAINE
It was really hot. There was Dolly with a waist cincher no more than
sixteen inches around and heels about two feet high and a wig that must
have weighed twenty-three pounds. And she’s the only one who didn’t
sweat. She never complained about anything. Never. The rest of us were
always complaining.
ROBERT HARLING We
were shooting part of the Christmas scene, and this was in the dead of
August, and we were sitting out on the porch of Truvy’s beauty shop. We
were waiting, and there was a lot of stop and start. The women were
dressed for Christmas, and Dolly was sitting on the swing. She had on
that white cashmere sweater with the marabou around the neck, and she
was just swinging, cool as a cucumber. Julia said, “Dolly, we’re dying
and you never say a word. Why don’t you let loose?” Dolly very serenely
smiled and said, “When I was young and had nothing, I wanted to be rich
and famous, and now I am. So I’m not going to complain about anything.”
TOM WHITEHEAD They
all lived life locally. Tom Skerritt [who played Shelby’s father] rode
his bicycle to a restaurant downtown where he ate his lunch most days.
ROBERT HARLING Tom
Skerritt was two houses down from where my father lived, so I had my
fake father, Drum, out picking up sticks from a storm in the yard with
his khakis rolled up, and there was my real father in his yard doing the
same thing. Olympia lived down the street. Michael Dukakis [Olympia’s
cousin] was running for president that summer, so Olympia was all
involved and spoke at the Democratic convention. It’s a very Republican
area of the country, but there were some people who put Dukakis signs in
their yard just to be neighborly.
SHIRLEY MACLAINE I loved studying the townspeople
and walking through their lives a little. I’d go to the ice cream store
and the magazine place and the video store. I just wanted to see how
people acted, how they belonged to themselves.
ROBERT HARLING The L.A. people required things that
you didn’t find at the local Piggly Wiggly. I remember the manager of
the store saying to a local reporter, “Yep, if it hadn’t been for
Herbert Ross, nobody around here would know the difference between
osetra and beluga.”
SHIRLEY MACLAINE We
immediately saw that Herbert was cruel to both Dolly and Julia. I don’t
know why, except he was basically a choreographer, and choreographers
tend to be cruel in the name of art. Julia’s feelings were hurt, and we
lived next door to each other, and she was over every night. We talked
about life, and I tried to help her because I was a dancer and
understood the choreographer mentality. Then one day I basically told
him to go f**k himself and everybody heard it and things got better.
MacLaine hastens to add that Ross was a “good director” and that in some ways the conflict turned out to be a good thing.
SHIRLEY MACLAINE We
became protective. We became one. We really did make fast friends, all
of us, and have been ever since. I don’t know what it is about the
subject matter in the movie, but going through that makes you friends
for life.
ROBERT HARLING I’m
still working out the ramifications of this whole insane journey that
only art can let you move through. Because what is art other than taking
the pieces around you and re-forming them into some vision that
satisfies you and enriches others? My mom and dad had their own kind of
come-to-Jesus moments with all this stuff. But you know, my sister died
and I wrote about it and people look at it and think it’s all limos and
glamour and sitting next to Princess Di at the royal premiere. My sister
had to die for all that to happen. So almost daily I think about what
my life would be if she had lived. It can take you to an
uncompromisingly dark place sometimes. Then I just have to go back to
the honesty of the first impulse, that I just wanted somebody to
remember her.
