Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?: The Truth about Female Power in Hollywood

INTRODUCTION The day of Dawn Steel's funeral was one of those bright, wintry days the smog recedes and the palm trees with their jagged fronds stand like paper cutouts against a cloudless blue sky. It was December 23, 1997, and the studio lots were bare. The phones had ceased to ring. The only members of the Hollywood elite left in town were the eighty who gathered that clear morning at Mount Sinai Cemetery, an unnaturally lush green cliff overlooking the candy-colored buildings of the Disney lot. They had come to bury the diminutive former studio chieftain, a colorful and determinedly outrageous figure, famed for her name, which sounded like a moniker in a trashy novel, her viteruperative mouth, which popped off swearwords like fireworks, and her thick, lustrous tresses, to whom celebrity hairdressers routinely paid homage. The mourners included the billionaire David Geffen, who used to commiserate with Steel about their respective issues with anger; and former beau Richard Dreyfuss, whom she had once bullied out of a depressive funk. There was the director Joel Schumacher, who had made the New Age thriller Flatliners, one of the few hits to emerge from her tenure as chairman of Columbia Pictures; and Ray Stark, the wily, Machiavellian power broker producer who had helped place her in that job. Close to eighty, Stark looked old and withered, while the producer Dan Melnick, the onetime Hollywood smoothie who had deciphered the town's mores for Steel, looked shattered. When Steel arrived in L.A. in 1978, she was a thirty-two-year-old college dropout who wanted nothing more than to be accepted by the men who ran Hollywood. That Dawn Steel would have been overjoyed by the appearance of so many members of the boys' club at her funeral. It was a narcissist's fantasy, the ultimate validation that she had mattered in a town where significance was as fleeting as your last hit movie. That Dawn Steel, however, would have been shocked by the women, the female industry titans arrayed in dark business suits who lined up to carry her casket. In those days, if she thought of women at all, it was usually as competitors. For years Steel had felt competitive with Sherry Lansing, the first woman to be named president of a studio. She had feuded with Lynda Obst over Flashdance and had Ignored Lucy Fisher until the two became the highest-ranking women in the business to bear children. Amy Pascal had been her protege, her kid sister who had grown up and become a studio president in her own right, an inversion of roles that had created its own stresses. Indeed, many of the women present at the funeral had warred at one time or another with Steel, who tended to treat relationships like a high-contact sport, with head-on confrontations representing the only sign of authenticity and true intimacy. Her ten-year-old daughter was the first to speak. She was poised, blunt, and uncannily Dawn-like. "My mother could do anything," she told the well-heeled crowd. "She was the first woman ever to run a studio. She wrote a book. She even found time to have me. That's because my mother thought she could do anything." She paused. "I want to tell you a story about my mother. She couldn't figure out how to work anything. She was never able to turn on the TV. She couldn't make the phone work. She could never make the VCR work. You can imagine what life was like at our house. Every other minute, she would be yelling, 'Rebecca. the TV's broken. Chuck. the phone's broken. Rebecca, the VCR's broken. 'You see, those things had to be broken because my mother could do anything. If she didn't know how to work it, it had to be broken." Steel's death had not been unexpected. When the news had filtered out over a year earlier that Dawn Steel had developed a brain tumor, the town had roiled with shock. For those who liked her, it was unthinkable that someone so vital should be so crueAbramowitz, Rachel is the author of 'Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?: The Truth about Female Power in Hollywood' with ISBN 9780375758690 and ISBN 0375758690.