MARY WORONOV: CULT FILM STARby David Ehrenstein
What makes Mary Woronov so dangerous? Part of it has to do with her physical presence: her husky voice, her imposing figure, and that daunting face whose beauty is too hard-edged to melt (the way the faces of leading ladies always have to melt, at least once per picture). And there is her wonderfully knowing way with the simplest of lines she seems to come at every part from an oblique angle. When she portrays a weak woman like the hilariously ditzy, sexually repressed divorcée in Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills her style of doing so critiques the stereotype. In ways reminiscent of the great female stars of the forties who have become camp icons Mae West, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford Mary Woronov dons the trappings of femininity like the accouterments of a masquerade. She can wield an intense androgynous power. Woronov does appear in the occasional mainstream movie. In Black Widow she plays a scuba-diving instructor. For one mesmerizing moment in Dick Tracy (as a child welfare inspector, no less), there is Mary, with an actual line to read, providing one real threat in the lumbering spectacle of star egos and set-dressing. For the cult fan, Woronov's big-picture appearances provide a special extra kick, a movie within a movie, a delicious reminder that even in the midst of Hollywood at its most predictable, a glimmer of something wonderful can occasionally shine through. The odyssey that landed Mary Woronov in Tracy-town has been a strange one-- her career trajectory traces the outlines of American avant-garde, cult, and marginal film-making of the past twenty-five years. Woronov was a student at Cornell when she first became aware, through friends, that the man who gave new meaning to the Campbell's soup can was starting to make films, and that there might be a part for her. Yet neither she nor Warhol could have anticipated the impact of her performance in The Chelsea Girls. In a part conceived by playwright Ronald Tavel, Woronov played a North Vietnamese radio commentator holed up, for some unexplained reason, in a room at the Chelsea Hotel filled with a group of petulant young women in heavy close-up stealing scenes from one another. It was just one of the highlights of Warhol's three- and-one-half hour double-screen 16mm fresco of New York bohemian life, a work that changed the course of American experimental filmmaking, while unwittingly marking the start of Woronov's acting career. "I was interested in art, and he was an artist," Woronov recalls. "I did not think of it as acting. They had just started doing what's now called 'performance art' then they were called 'happenings.' I thought of it in that way. I was an object that was being used not an actress giving a performance. He went for that. That's why everybody thinks of all of us that were in the films as being freaks. "I had done plays before, so I knew what acting was about. Most of the others were into the 'look' and being a star the fashion kind of thing. Then you had people like Ondine ( who played the 'Pope of Greenwich Village' in The Chelsea Girls ). Now my life wasn't a performance the way his was. I did have another life. I was perfectly capable of being a normal person." Looking back on the scene today, Woronov senses it was her ability to separate working for Warhol from the rest of her life that saved her. "I could go home afterward; others couldn't. But it was really something. There was a whole group of people then that were just incredible. Most of them were gay. Most of them were mad, furious, incensed about something, and they just weren't going to take any shit from anybody. And they all worked with Warhol." "I think Warhol's films are incredibly important," Woronov continues. "They came out at a time when everybody spoke clearly these people didn't. People in films were actors these people were not. It made everything much more intimate, scary, and personal." Scariest and most personal of all were the simple, silent ten minute portrait reels "screen tests" that Warhol did of nearly everyone who worked with him. "l loved the screen tests!" says Woronov. "That was my first movie work for him. I thought they were just brilliant conceptually. I saw Salvador Dali do one. He sat there with this tremendous pose that he had to hold for five minutes, and he couldn't do it. One side of his face dripped, then another. The whole thing was people were faced with having to push their image to the camera. Some of them would completely freak out and not do it. With some others you would see the person fighting with his image trying to project it. You can project your image for a few seconds, but after that it slips and your real self starts to show through. That's why it was so great you saw the person and the image!" Warhol wasn't the only artist of that period interested in the dichotomy of self and image. After making a number of films for Warhol (including Hedy, ****, and Shower), Woronov found herself in demand as a performer on New York's then burgeoning off-off-Broadway theater scene. "Sometimes these shows were really good and sometimes they were god awful," Woronov recalls. "Kitchenette by Ronnie Tavel was wonderful, but his Arenas of Lutetia didn't work at all. Still, the thing about all these shows was they were very scary. They didn't care about the audience at all. Especially the stuff John Vaccaro directed, like Night Club. It was a Ken Bernard script about the end of the world with everyone stuck in a bomb shelter. There was nothing to do 'cause they were going to die soon, so these people started to entertain themselves. They had a juggler without hands, and there was a ventriloquist, and there were these stupid dancers, and this guy who did the lights who was really vicious never putting them on the right person. And then there was the M.C. "All through rehearsal Vaccaro couldn't decide whether Ondine should do the M.C. or I should do it. Opening night came and he still couldn't decide. So we both did it! He was the 'good guy' and I was the 'bad guy.' He spoke first very sweetly, and then I followed in this very menacing tone. It was incredible.
As Woronov sees it today, the timing was excellent. The New York scene she knew in the '60s had just about wound down. But in Hollywood, it seemed, an off- off-Broadway division of moviemaking was just developing at Roger Corman's super- low budget New World pictures. "Death Race 2000 was my first Corman, and I attached myself to it right away because it was just like Warhol very cheap, brilliant people working for nothing, bizarre material, the tackiness of the sets, everything. Tack looked fine to me. I just didn't see it as a 'B' film. I thought it was very amusing and funny. I'm sure the star, David Carradine, thought he was just doing a lousy movie. He certainly seemed to act that way. He didn't like his costume or anything . I didn't see it as stupid, not any of those movies even Hellhole. I thought it was hysterical. It was just like the plays. They were supposed to be terrible. Well, maybe they were, but they certainly weren't boring like A Doll's House by Ibsen!" Still, even Corman had his limits. So when writer-director Paul Bartel, who had shared the screen with Woronov on several occasions, suggested they make a vehicle of their own, she was all for it. The only trouble was lack of funds. But that didn't stop the resourceful Bartel. From a few carefully shot bits and pieces (filmed with ends of raw stock), Eating Raoul was created. "Eating Raoul was the movie you least suspected would ever see the light of day," says Woronov. "It turned out to be my best movie." As Paul and Mary Bland, the strictly platonic married couple who find a way to finance the gourmet restaurant of their dreams by luring sexual "swingers" to their apartment and murdering them, Bartel and Woronov created an instant comedy success. But the attention she was now getting didn't mean that things would be any simpler for the lanky, husky-voiced actress in the future. "I keep getting parts that started out as men's roles," says Woronov, laughing. "I just did The Illusion by Corneille here in L.A., where I played the part of the magician. Well, it was a man's role. Jack Palance was supposed to do it,but he couldn't, so I got it. But it's always been that way. Like Miss Togar in Rock n' Roll High School was originally a man. You know it's funny, but thinking back, the first role I ever got in school was in a production of The Tempest. It was an all-girls school, and I got Caliban. So that was the beginning of my career playing a male monster!" As for the future, Woronov is confident but realistic. There's always the stage, television (she was recently featured in the cult cable series Monsters), and her independent career as an accomplished neo-expressionist painter. As for the movies... "My agents are always saying, 'Oh we're going to pull you out of the cult thing,' but I don't think it's going to happen. Let's face it: women's parts are gone women are gone. They've disappeared from the movie screens! You know when I was working with Warhol there was no problem because it was a homosexual atmosphere. But in Hollywood it's a heterosexual atmosphere, and they do not like to see strong women. So instead of actresses we've got hostesses. 'May I show you to your seat, Mr. Schwarzenegger?' So that's why I keep doing...these other movies."
©1990 |
Mary Woronov is a star in the
world of cult and B movies. In other words, she is not offered
the kind of roles which attract Oscars:
swelling tributes to the indominatability of
the human spirit and the triumph of hearts
of gold over corruption. But for anyone
who has seen Woronov in action, there is
no question that this habituée of the film
world's margins is a powerful actress.
Whether she's playing the dithery Mary
Bland of Eating Raoul, the dynamic Matilda the Hun of Death Race 2000, the
domineering Miss Togar of Rock n' Roll
High School, or any of the other large or
small roles from her twenty-five-odd year
career, Mary Woronov has consistently
offered something that her fans prefer to
romantic reconciliation and moral uplift: a
subversive air of danger.
"After that I got this sort of career in the theater. I did In the
Boom Boom Room at Lincoln
Center. That was the crowning
thing. I got the TheaterWorld
award for that. And I had an
agent by then. He put me in a
soap, Another World: Somerset.
It was hopeless. I didn't know
who I was playing when they
hired me and I still don't know.
They tried to disguise me in the
woodwork because I didn't fit in
at all. I lasted one season. What
that meant was I spent all summer in a dark cement corridor
waiting to go on. After that I just
left New York and came out to
L.A. Paul (Bartel) invited me out and I
never went back."