THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

Balaban is also a film director. His latest effort is Bernard and Doris, which focuses on the close ( though relatively short ) relationship between Doris Duke, one of the world's richest women, and her gay butler, Bernard Lafferty. The nature of the relationship, which ended with Duke's death in 1993, has been the subject of intense speculation as Duke made Lafferty, an alcoholic, the executor of her estate and the head of her charity foundation. Did Lafferty take advantage of his employer's frail health? Or was the friendship of the two intense enough to warrant his stewardship of Duke's vast fortune? Balaban's contemplative film offers subtle clues but immediately points out that some of it is 'based on fact, some not.' No matter. The interplay between Susan Sarandon, as Duke, and Ralph Fiennes, as Lafferty, is a fascinating balancing act. Balaban talked at length with Windy City Times about Bernard and Doris ( which debuts on HBO Sat., Feb. 9 ) and other highlights from his long career. Highlights

Windy City Times: How did you get involved with Bernard and Doris?

Bob Balaban: My friend—Ileen Maisel, who is an executive at New Line Cinema—sent me the script, but just as a friend. She said, 'I came across this; I think you should follow it up; I think it's interesting.' So I read it [ and ] I immediately got interested. I knew about Bernard Lafferty and mostly Doris Duke from headlines that I had glanced at in the paper. I never really knew anything in any depth about her—nor do I still, I would say. But it intrigued me to read a story about the very, very sort of personal workings of what seemed to be an intense relationship between these two people about whom so many headlines were known but I didn't know anything about the interior emotional lives of these people. Then, of course, I discovered that this was basically a fable; that's why in the beginning of the movie we say, 'Some of what you are about to see is based on fact and some not.' I know that Bernard Lafferty came to work for Doris Duke in 1987. I know how much money she had. I know the year she died. I know what her will said and I knew some things about them both from reading headlines and things.

But in terms of what they said to each when they were playing with the orchids, digging and scraping the roots of orchids, who knows what was going on? So basically we invented a story that would carry us from 1987 to 1993 and make an emotional journey from two people who didn't know each other to two people who had gotten very close with each other because Doris Duke entrusted this man with her foundation—with so much of her life. She only gave him $5 million, which may sound like a lot but wasn't in a life the size of Doris Duke's. She gave many people $5 million but he was the executor of her will, and she did seem to come to trust him or he manipulated her into trusting him which may also be the story. We chose to make an emotional journey and not make a biographical journey. I showed ( the script ) to Susan Sarandon right after I read it—I had just finished directing her in The Exonerated for television with Danny Glover, Aidan Quinn, Brian Dennehy and some other really good people. We've been friends for years but we've never worked together, and it was a very nice experience for both of us.

WCT: What about Ralph Fiennes? How did he get involved?

BB: I knew Ralph casually. My friend Ileen Maisel, who had sent me the script, had produced a movie that Ralph had starred in several years ago—in fact, two movies. So Ralph sort of knew that I was an okay guy. Mostly, I believe, what attracted him to the project was the idea of working with Susan Sarandon, whom he had admired for a long time and had never worked with. And Susan and I, obviously, had Ralph as our very first choice for Bernard. We sent it to him, he came over, we all met and talked, and there we were a short time later actually filming this movie in Long Island. Not in New Jersey where Doris Duke's estate was, but in a beautiful estate on Long Island called Old Westbury Gardens built at the turn of the century by the Phipps family, the steel people.

WCT: The relationship between Bernard and Doris is a very familiar one for gay men. This affinity for glamorous older ladies—and he apparently had this relationship with Elizabeth Taylor and Peggy Lee, who he worked for, and then there's a little explanation at the end that Sharon Stone sent flowers to his funeral—is all very intriguing.

BB: I put that in because I love that so many things in this movie are very, very factually accurate—some of them—and the rest of them, God knows what really happened there, you know? I don't know that he ever put on a dress and served dinner, but he might have. But from the research that HBO did on the end crawl—we thought because it's in writing it should be accurate—so we tried to be very accurate about what the Foundation did, how much money Bernard had when he died, what he really gave Doris in the will. And they unearthed some newspaper articles from places better than the National Enquirer that told us those facts about Sharon Stone, Elizabeth Taylor and Peggy Lee.

WCT: Did you have a chance to speak with Sharon Stone or Elizabeth Taylor about this?

BB: I didn't but I knew that Elizabeth Taylor was fond of Bernard because—I'm not sure who knows where this originally came from—part of Doris Duke's foundation was involved in medical research and I know that Bernard got the foundation to give a large amount of AmFar, which is Elizabeth Taylor's charity, am I right?

WCT: Yes, yes it is. She kick started large scale AIDS fundraising in Hollywood.

BB: So Doris Duke and Bernard Lafferty were involved with that as well, which lends credence to the fact that probably they did have a nice relationship and probably she would have come to his funeral.

WCT: Your movie portrays the relationship very differently, I'm sure you know, than the TV movie of several years ago with Richard Chamberlain and Lauren Bacall, where he's much more calculated and works on her loneliness [ and ] keeps her drugged. He's much more benign and you feel much more empathy in your film—is this a truer portrayal?

BB: I was interested in it because I thought since we're basically making up a movie. You know, Susan, Ralph and I thought of this as kind of a love story so we really approached the material as a theatrical movie, not as anything biographically true, necessarily. It was more interesting for our purposes that Bernard at least be … we at least are left with an ambivalent feeling about his character. Because you'd seen the other one and the headlines which decried him as a monster so I thought it would be more interesting for Ralph to play it and to entertain the possibility that the affection between them was honestly won in some way. But I wanted you to leave feeling maybe he did something bad, maybe he didn't. I felt that the more direct approach—hiring the monster who manipulates you, kills you, gets your money, and then its over—didn't seem as interesting to watch as a movie. I have no idea what they really did with each other and I imagine it was one or the other.

WCT: That's another thing that's intriguing about the film—you don't really see a lot of the specific scenes of their becoming closer but obviously that has happened. When he puts on the dress you assume at some point she's said, 'Just be who you are, it's okay.'

BB: You have to remember that emanates from Susan as well. There's a lot of her in this movie. One of the things she brought to Doris Duke was she didn't do the idea of a rich lady who was domineering and complicated. She tried to bring her humanity to this woman. Now I believe Doris Duke had a lot of her own humanity, I just don't know how it transmitted; how it showed itself. But I wouldn't be surprised if that was true but there's a lot of Susan in this and Susan is very accepting of people. She likes honesty. Some of her own qualities emerged because this movie was written by Hugh Costello but a lot of the fine points in it were added and organized by the actors as we along. But in the service of playing two dramatic characters in a movie, not in the service of trying to necessarily be truthful to what Bernard and Doris really were.

WCT: Have you found that as an actor yourself you have an edge in directing?

BB: I don't know. I could say that I've worked with some brilliant directors who never acted and I've also worked with brilliant directors who were brilliant actors. Like Sydney Pollack and Sidney Lumet. It's not uncommon and Mike Nichols is a wonderful actor, although he doesn't do it anymore at all. The only thing that you have as an actor is—in my case—I have watched 75 other people direct movies and I've been sitting there being directed by them up close or, in some cases, standing around for seven or eight months. Other directors who aren't actors never see other movies being made. I mean they could come by and watch if they wanted to but they haven't lived inside another person's movie. So the one thing you do have is you've watched somebody else in a lot of different situations so that you might learn some tricks. But other than that, I don't know. I think people who are intended to be great directors just are and if you're not you could study a hundred million things and learn nothing, right?

WCT: Sure.

BB: So I don't know that I have a leg up, but I meet people. You know there are definitely a lot of actors that I could cast now because I've worked with them or they know my work. A lot of this movie business is about trust and if you were Ralph and Susan you would only go and make this movie if you trusted the director to protect you because you're very vulnerable when you're actor. You could give a terrible performance, you could be encouraged to do bad work, it could be cut badly—these actors don't have control over the final cut—and all they need is some hideous, embarrassing movie that could be dent in a career that in Susan's case she's been a revered actor for 30 years. So they are putting a lot of trust in you and sometimes the fact that you are a fellow actor might help them feel you are a little more in their club.

WCT: Has that kind of trust helped you in working with Christopher Guest on his improv pictures like Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind? I mean, talk about working without a net.

BB: Yes, absolutely. One of the things about working on the Christopher Guest movies—which I adore doing and I hope we do more of them and we never know—but it really is a great lesson to watch people who are almost told nothing but given an interesting situation and character. You already know by being in the room with Christopher what he likes and what he doesn't like. It's amazing how much information can be transmitted from people to people—I feel like we're ants on an anthill and they wave their antennae from a million miles away and all the ants know where to go and how to get there. It's kind of like that with Christopher—the great ant director.

WCT: [ Laughs. ] That makes me laugh.

BB: Good! You do come to learn that there are many magical things that happen when a director sets up a situation and then just sits back and doesn't do too much when it's appropriate. That's really the twelve step prayer, you could say. If you're a director you're just hoping to have the wisdom to know when to step in and save somebody and when to let them be and just let them happen the next time. That's what I'm always thinking of: 'If I say something to him right now will that get in the way of the next take or will is it going to help something?' The Christopher Guest movies really attune you to the fact that sometimes by doing nothing something happens, and sometimes Christopher has to come in and right the boat and tilt it to the side.

WCT: Did you find a similar experience working with Altman on Gosford Park? One of my favorite movies.

BB: Such a highlight of my life was working with Bob. Yes. We'd been friends for years again. That's how that project came to be. I sat around my office one day going, 'Oh my God! What am I going to ever do with my life?,' and I thought I'd better think of a project for Robert Altman because he's one of my favorite directors and I know his phone number. So I thought for a bit and then I called him and I said, 'How about making a movie that's kind of like X,Y and Z?' and he went, 'That's interesting, why don't we sit down and talk?' We did, we worked on it a bit and then I hired a writer guy I knew from London—Julian Fellowes. We developed an Anthony Trollope novel together called The Eustace Diamonds maybe eight or ten years earlier and nothing happened. Julian was not a writer; he was an actor who was in a couple of things but not ragingly successful, but I knew he was kind of brilliant. And that's how we found Julian to write Gosford Park. Was that an answer to a question? Why did I do that?

WCT: Well we're just talking about actors and directors and some of your movies and this certainly fits the bill.

BB: Well, then we went out and made the movie but it only really happened because I could call Robert and it was the right time at the right place and the idea struck him well.

WCT: You play a great character in that film—a gay one. I love how he ignores the swirl of the murder mystery going on around him and how he's always on the phone and has the little boy toy with him, and at the end just invites Emily Watson to get in the car with them. [ Balaban laughs. ]

BB: That's interesting because that movie was obviously not improvised—God forbid what hideous errors we would have done—and, yet when I was on the telephone talking to people, that was all improvised. So I was able to take my Christopher Guest experience and bring it over to my British movie experience but fortunately it's an American character in the movie business. I could sort of not be too inaccurate on the telephone.

WCT: I have to tell you as a classic movie fan that one of my lines in the movie is one that you say as a throwaway—'We got turned down my Una Merkel.' Did you improvise that line?

BB: [ Laughs. ] Yes, but in order to do it I did have to do a little research because I knew I wanted to talk about movies in the period so I wanted to mention people that were alive and working then, [ including ] my friend Peter Stone, who wrote the movie Charade, and many other wonderful things.

WCT: Isn't that a great script?

BB: Yes. He was a friend of mine who died a couple of years ago very prematurely; he was not an old man. Peter Stone's father was a Hollywood movie producer who produced the movie Charlie Chan in London, which my character [ in Gosford Park ] was the producer of, and that's the movie that I was doing research for which had brought me to London. I was like, 'Wow, it's such a small world.'

WCT: Now I know you wrote a book years ago about making Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

BB: I did, and it's now published under a different title—Spielberg, Truffaut and Me—although I think we're going out of print, I'm not sure. But yes that was the one time I would ever write a making of the movie book because I had such an unusual time—an unusually good and interesting time—on that movie and it's not something you would want to do too much or people would be afraid to hire you.

WCT: Well, at some point will you write about your family's background in the movies because it's so fascinating? [ Balaban's family owned a powerful chain of movie theatres and various relatives were movie executives as well. ]

BB: Well, thank you for thinking it's interesting. No—I can't imagine that I would really write about it because my point of view is so limited on it. My dad was the baby of seven brothers. I very generally knew my uncles. I came to California when I was 10 years old and went to MGM and met Cyd Charisse. She signed my cast because I had broken my arm and that's when my uncle or my grandfather was actually the head of production at MGM but that's it. [ Laughs. ] Other than that, I can't tell you very much about any of this, except I enjoyed the fact that it was my background and I never dreamed when I was growing up that I would ever be a part of the movie business. I was just a shrimpy kid from Chicago. I never imagined I would be working with some of these people.

WCT: And for my audience—you play a memorable, classic gay character—starting out as the gay teenager in that men's room trying to pick up Jon Voight.

BB: I was going to say, you haven't mentioned Midnight Cowboy. When you're doing these things it doesn't seem groundbreaking or anything. It didn't dawn on me that this was anything unusual, yet it's what got the 'X' rating for the movie.

WCT: I didn't realize that.

BB: It had an 'X' rating because of implied homosexual behavior. The other stuff didn't trigger it but this seemed to do that and yet when it won the Academy Award for Best Picture it was then re-released with an 'R' rating and they took the 'X' off it but nobody cut anything from it. I was also in a movie called Three to Tango as a gay character.

WCT: I don't think I know that film.

BB: Neither do I. I can't tell you anything about it. I literally don't remember it except Matthew Perry was in it. My friend Oliver Platt was in it. But wait, you know, my boyfriend in the movie was wonderful and he's on [ the TV show ] Scrubs. His name is John McGinley. But back to Bernard and Doris and the question you asked about the attraction of gay man to older women …

WCT: Yes, please.

BB: We didn't want to make it all too easy or anything but we did have Bernard there with his mother dying at a rather early age and really no mother figure—and that's actually true—so I think probably we did get the feeling that may have had something to do with Bernard's interest in older, exotic women. Because they weren't just older women; they were really rare flowers, these women.

WCT: Yes and the metaphor of the orchids in the hothouse—nicely done.

BB: Thank you, and Doris Duke was a pioneer in orchid growing. She evidently had an orchid named after her or she cross-bred some kind of orchid. She did some kind of research into that area.

WCT: Well, I love your acting but also the subtleties you bring to film as a director. I'm always recommending Parents, by the by—that's the coolest movie.

BB: Oooh. I thank you for saying that. It's like the forgotten movie. You can't find it anywhere and I don't know where it went but I had a lot of fun. Mary Beth [ Hurt ] is one of my good friends, still and I thought Sandy Dennis was wonderful and Randy Quaid was spectacularly frightening.

WCT: I'm waiting for the Criterion Collection to pick up that one.

BB: You may have to be very old … and my print of the movie got lost by my agent but I have it on tape somewhere. But thank you, lovely talking to you. I'm from Chicago, you probably knew that?

WCT: I did and look forward to meeting you here at some point.

BB: As do I. It was so much fun talking to you.