After Reading Susan Strasberg

Hi, Susan -- can I carry your books?

As I recently mentioned, my interest in the screen career of Susan Strasberg inspired me to finally acquire copies of her two books, BITTERSWEET and MARILYN AND ME, both works of autobiography. I've read them both now and, while I was very pleased to discover that the personality captured in these capably written books was bright and resourceful and good company, it was disconcerting to find out how frustrated, unhappy and tense she was for so much of her short life. These books make the reader want to reach out to comfort someone who is no longer there.

It was appalling to read the details of the constraint that characterised her relationship with her famous parents, the violent ups and downs of her mostly disastrous love life (which began with a teenage affair with older married man Richard Burton), the hellish abuse that rained down upon her during her marriage to Christopher Jones (whose work I fill find it hard to enjoy again), and the additional tears that came with the birth of her daughter Jennifer, who was born with heart and soft palate problems (both eventually corrected by surgery). She writes with enthusiasm about her early successes, especially those on the stage, which suggests she may have been happier as a stage actress; she writes about her films with less feeling, and is surprisingly (but understandably) antagonistic toward two of my favorites, THE TRIP and PSYCH-OUT, for, as she claims, romanticizing a drug culture whose disastrous effects she had already seen at first hand -- Jones had coerced her into trying pot and peyote, but she had steered clear of LSD because it was a chemical, unnatural, and her feelings about it were confirmed when her younger brother Johnny had taken acid in a despondent mood and leaped from a high window in an unsuccessful suicide attempt, the year before she made those two films. (His life was saved by an awning -- which then bounced him through another glass window.)

BITTERSWEET was written in 1980, when Strasberg would have been nearly 40, and it ends on a note of hard-won wisdom and clarity; she has learned to love a man's soul before his flesh (a difficult lesson for her), to act in order to live (not vice-versa), and she is writing the book that her mother always intended to write, making that family dream come true. My only criticism of the book is that it becomes sketchier as it nears the end, rendering many more contemporary episodes as mere vignettes, probably evidence of the working actor's schedule bearing down on a publishing deadline.

MARILYN AND ME, written in 1992 (when she was approximately the age I am now), presents a subtly changed Susan Strasberg, who was by then a drama teacher as well as an actress. While the book delivers an interesting, candid, fully dimensional account of her friendship with Marilyn Monroe, I found it more rushed, less illuminatingly written than BITTERSWEET. The final chapter crams in an unseemly number of epigrams from other people, often applied to subjects they weren't talking about, and it gave me the off-putting impression of a text written by one of those motivational speakers, or by a teacher so insecure or limited in her own eurekas that she must reference and apply the wisdom of others. The only positive news about this book, really, is that its author has finally become her own mother, Paula Miller Strasberg, likewise a teacher, whose 1966 death in her mid-fifties left her daughter feeling so vulnerable and alone. Unfortunately, part of that metamorphosis was that this valiant survivor would also die young, of the same disease that claimed her mother, at the age of 60, in 1999. The dust jackets of both books mention that Strasberg was working on a novel at the time of their publications, but the (at least) 12-year project never came to fruition.

One of the more surprising episodes of BITTERSWEET, for me, reveals that Strasberg's friendship with Noel Harrison and his family got her interested in Reichian therapy. After reading some introductory books loaned to her by the Harrisons -- including Orson Bean's ME AND THE ORGONE (which Strasberg calls the best and most comprehensive general introduction to Reich's theories, and which I'm presently adapting into a screenplay for a romantic comedy) -- she embarked on therapy for herself and her infant daughter, which restored some much needed pink color into the bluish baby and had apparently worthwhile psychological benefits for herself. It amazes me to think that, while Noel Harrison was making episodes of THE GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E and Susan Strasberg was making THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL!, they were both involved in Reichian therapy. The world is a much more interesting place than our entertainment usually lets us know.

"You Can't Buy A Ticket To See This Movie!"

... So teased the posters for THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL! at the time of its 1968 release, and the ballyhoo has somehow adhered as prophecy. This well-crafted horror sleeper has become one of the most difficult to see of its era, though a number of its lesser fellow releases from The Fanfare Corporation -- like SIMON KING OF THE WITCHES and WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS -- have surfaced on DVD in recent years. Last week, I had the good fortune to see it again on DVD-R, for the first time since the early 1970s, when a cut version of this film "Suggested for Mature Audiences" ran on local television.

It stars Jack Lord, Susan Strasberg, Collin Wilcox (so memorable as Thedy in THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR's "The Jar"), Tisha Sterling and T.C. Jones (HITCHCOCK HOUR's "An Unlocked Window") -- and it probably works best if you have no idea who T.C. Jones is (or was; the actor died in 1971). The director was Gunnar Hellstrom, a Swedish expatriate who worked primarily in television (his 1967 WILD WILD WEST episode "The Night of the Running Death" also featured T.C. Jones), and the twisted screenplay was the best effort of Gary Crutcher, author of the subsequent snake melodrama STANLEY and the Joyce Jillson jigglethon SUPERCHICK.

Reviewing THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL! for CASTLE OF FRANKENSTEIN, Joe Dante reported that the film contained "moments of Bava-like brilliance," and indeed it does. The film is obviously the work of a craftsman with a feeling for the genre, and it's regrettable that Hellstrom never made another horror picture. The only circulating copy of the film originated from a dim and faded 16mm print, so it's impossible to determine what cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond was able to achieve with its color, but Hellstrom and art director Ray Markham adorn the story with subtle and decorative scares and a deliberately unsettling mise en scène cluttered with psychologically resonant geegaws like broken dolls. The story involves Lord, playing a Hungarian emigré hitchhiker in the American West, who has the good fortune to be rescued by a beautiful savior (Strasberg), who takes him to the secluded home that she shares with her mother and an older and younger sister, all very strange and unpredicatable women. Their home also maintains a roadside display of rattlesnakes and tarantulas -- Sterling's beloved pets -- which marks the picture as the missing link between Jack Hill's SPIDER BABY and Tobe Hooper's THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. The family name here is Terry, a soundalike to the Merrye family of SPIDER BABY.

What unfolds once Lord gets to the house, where the various daughters proceed to fight over the right to mate with him by circulating disinformation about one another, is what came to be known for awhile as a "horror of personality" film (a term coined by Charles Derry's 1977 book DARK DREAMS: A PSYCHOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN HORROR FILM [A.S. Barnes & Co., 1977]), but which is now termed "psychological horror." Strasberg as Tracey, to whom Lord is most drawn, is said to be a nymphomaniac with a history of violent break-ups; the plainish Willcox as Diz ("Diz N. Terry," perhaps?) is initially hostile to Lord but soon reveals herself to be very attracted and perhaps the most sexually experienced of the group; Sterling as Nan is the youngest and comports herself like Jill Banner's Virginia in SPIDER BABY, doting on a tarantula and acting like a child, unconscious of her own sexuality yet expert at deploying it to achieve her own ends. (In one of the film's most peculiar moments, a miniskirted Sterling dances provocatively to the psychedelic caterwaul of "Shadows," a forgotten song by The Electric Prunes ["I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night"]). The mother (Jones) is seemingly the most normal of the bunch... until we learn that she may have murdered her own husband, an act of extreme violence that drove her and her daughters to this secluded outpost. Everyone gets their own soliloquy, occasionally stopping the story's progress cold but at the same time deepening it and further disorienting the viewer, who receives so many alternate backstories that it's impossible to get one's bearings. The possibilities simply turn stranger and stranger until the film reaches a point where the volatile mixture cannot help but explode.

The film ends with a tantalizing freeze-frame of Susan Strasberg, chilling in its beauty, and in the days since I've seen the movie again, what I've most carried away from it is a greater appreciation of what this neglected actress brought to the cult cinema of the 1960s. The daughter of legendary Actor's Theater coach Lee Strasberg, Susan made this film when she was 30 -- thirteen years down the road from her Tony-nominated stage debut in the title role of the original 1955 production of THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK. (She had done some even earlier small roles in live television drama like GOODYEAR TELEVISION PLAYHOUSE and GENERAL ELECTRIC THEATER.) She worked on the stage, in television, starred in Hammer's psychological horror gem TASTE OF FEAR (aka SCREAM OF FEAR), and spent time making films in Italy before she returned to the States.

In 1965, she married the hot young actor Christopher Jones and, with him, signed a short-term contract with American International Pictures. It was under AIP's auspices that Strasberg made Roger Corman's THE TRIP (in which she is a compelling but almost incidental ingredient as Fonda's ex-wife) and Richard Rush's PSYCH-OUT, in which she played a deaf-mute searching the Haight-Ashbury scene for her lost brother. No one ever has control over what they'll be best remembered for, and one doubts that Strasberg knew while making PSYCH-OUT that she was giving what would arguably become her signature screen performance. After making CHURUBUSCO with Jones, they divorced. Neither she nor Jones went on to fulfill the promise expressed by the performances they gave at AIP, but Strasberg continued to make her presence known in horror and exploitation films. She was featured in episodes of NIGHT GALLERY and THE EVIL TOUCH, and features like SO EVIL MY SISTER, THE LEGEND OF HILLBILLY JOHN and BLOODY BIRTHDAY. And let us not forget (though she'd probably wish us to) she also gave birth to THE MANITOU.

By the time she had reached 30, Strasberg had transformed from the vaguely elfin ingenue of her earliest work, and the prematurely matured star of SCREAM OF FEAR, into a beauty whose sexiness was rooted in an unusual combination of silken good looks, sobriety and confidence. She was the opposite of what passed for sexy at the time, closer to the epicenter of what passes for sexy when one considers The Big Picture. There was something about her that made her better casting as the ex-wife than the wife, and perhaps better still as disillusioned, defensive loners. She made us want to reach out to her, despite the likelihood that our hand would be slapped away, at least initially. Her later career, heavy in guest spots on interchangeable TV shows about doctors and lawyers, emphasizes the trouble she encountered in finding a niche onscreen -- and, as much as I like her and have strived to make sense of her persona, I'm finding it difficult to write about her. Nevertheless, it's a tribute to her work in THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL! that I finally got serious about wanting to know her better, and promptly ordered used copies of her two works of biography -- BITTERSWEET and MARILYN AND ME -- to spend some time inside her head. All that I know now, in my heart of hearts, is that Susan Strasberg mattered -- if only for the vaguely absurd reason that I now find it impossible to hear anything by the Strawberry Alarm Clock without being reminded of her and moved by the memory. She died of breast cancer in early 1999 at the much-too-young age of 60, only a few titles shy of 100 different movie and TV credits.

Bootleg copies of THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL! do circulate online. Google the title and you're certain to find one or two sources.