Clash of the egos
Money, status or ‘nice girl’ jibes – what really broke Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall? Rosa Silverman reports.
Sex and the City was a show about many things: the complexity of female identity, sexual and otherwise, at the turn of the 21st century; romance and relationships; feminism and freedom; and – the common thread that connected its first, groundbreaking episode on HBO in 1998, through six wildly popular series, to the second (widely panned) film in 2010 – female friendship and sisterhood.
It was this theme that initially attracted Kim Cattrall, an actress then in her early 40s who had previously played a series of supporting roles in films such as
Police Academy and The Bonfire of the Vanities, to the era-defining sitcom. “So many films pit women against one another, and here women are rooting for one another, and I love that,” she told The Daily
Telegraph in 2005.
So it is somewhat ironic that the 61-year-old actress who played Samantha Jones, the most extravagantly libidinous of the four close friends around whose lives the show revolved, called the real-life relationship she had with her female co-star “toxic”. And the poisonous nature of her relations with Sarah Jessica Parker specifically have been dramatically brought into the spotlight in recent days, following the tragic death of Cattrall’s brother Chris, who was found dead at his property.
Parker, 52, who played the show’s main character, Carrie Bradshaw, sent what may have seemed an innocuous message of condolence from one friend to another. Writing to Cattrall on Instagram, she said: “Dearest Kim, my love and condolences to you and yours and Godspeed to your beloved brother. Xx.”
The response from Cattrall was scathing: “My Mom asked me today, ‘When will that @sarahjessicaparker, that hypocrite, leave you alone?’ Your continuous reaching out is a painful reminder of how cruel you really were then and now,” she wrote. “Let me make this VERY clear. (If I haven’t already.) You are not my family. You are not my friend. So I’m writing to tell you one last time to stop exploiting our tragedy in order to restore your ‘nice girl’ persona.”
If the feud between the two co-stars was already public, both had also done their best previously to brush it off, pointing out that the relationships between male stars of TV shows are rarely scrutinised to the same degree. Asked about the rumoured feud in October 2016 on Howard Stern’s radio show, Parker said: “We were part of a family with [fellow HBO series] The Sopranos and no one ever questioned the relationships of the men on that show... This sort of narrative, this ongoing catfight, it really upset me for a very long time.”
This came after Cattrall had told an interviewer in 2010: “People don’t want to believe that we get on. They have too much invested in the idea of two strong, successful women fighting with each other.”
Yet this recent outburst scotches any notion of friendship between the pair far more conclusively than gossip column speculation ever could – especially considering Cattrall has made it clear that her enmity does not extend to her other co-stars. Responding to a message of condolence from Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda Hobbes, she wrote: “Cynthia, hearing your voice meant so much to me. Thank you for reaching out. Love Kim #SexandtheCity.”
So what ultimately led to this very public unravelling of the relationship? The simple answer, it seems, boils down to disputes over money and a clash of egos. According to several accounts, the root of the tensions lies in the personal competition between them. Neither came from privileged backgrounds. Parker grew up on welfare in Ohio, receiving free school lunches from the state. “I remember my childhood as Dickensian,’’ she once told The New York Times. Cattrall emigrated from Liverpool to Canada with her family as an infant and grafted her way up through a stage career to film and television. Both had been working as actresses from a young age, and both had a lot at stake when they took on one of the most iconic TV shows of all time.
According to Clifford Streit, the real-life figure who inspired the SATC character Stanford Blatch (Carrie’s gay best friend), tensions on set stemmed from Cattrall being “a scene-stealer in the best possible sense”. A source who has met Cattrall on several occasions says: “SJP was really jealous of Kim’s character getting more attention than her on the series, when SJP wanted it to be all about her.”
From season two, Parker was promoted to executive producer on Sex and the City at a salary of NZ$400,000 an episode, leaving Cattrall’s earnings trailing behind.
By 2004, Cattrall, it was said, had become distanced from the others, even sitting separately from them at mealtimes. Kristin Davis, who played prude Charlotte York, later dismissed this as “ridiculous”. But, in an interview with Jonathan Ross, Cattrall gave a frank indication that her failure to achieve parity with Parker had weighed heavily on her: “I felt after six years it was time for all of us to participate in the financial windfall of Sex and the
City,” she said. “When they didn’t seem keen on that, I thought it was time to move on.”
The money issue was aired again when it came to the making of the first film, Sex and the City: the
Movie, which became the highest grossing romantic comedy of 2008 and recorded the most lucrative opening weekend for a film with all-female leads. Cattrall was rumoured to be holding things up with her demands for greater remuneration. While Parker told The Daily Telegraph at the time that “no one should vilify” Cattrall for mentioning money, the latter insisted that her initial reluctance to do the film “wasn’t all about the money”; she had also been going through a divorce, and her father had been diagnosed with dementia.
Things appeared to reach a head, though, after plans for a third film were shelved. Parker said: “It’s over... we’re not doing it. I’m disappointed.”
Strongly denying reports that her demands for Warner Bros to produce other films she had in development had been to blame for the demise of the project, Cattrall lashed out at Parker. In an interview with Piers Morgan, she said: “This is really where I take to task the people from Sex and the City, and specifically Sarah Jessica Parker, in that I think she could have been nicer.” Parker said she was “just heartbroken” over how things had escalated.
It was a sad ending to a moment in pop cultural history that had had at its heart a bold willingness to defeat tired old stereotypes of women. The SATC foursome were empowered characters. If they sometimes seemed cartoonish, that was because the show was, don’t forget, a comedy: the amplification of their traits for comic effect did not diminish the iconoclasm of a series that portrayed women’s sex lives in a mould-breakingly vivid way.
So its real-life reflection of the tired old catfight trope was all the more regrettable. Like with the cast of Friends, that other era-defining show of the time, we longed for the characters to be close in real life. The fact that its stars Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox really are best friends surely added to the magic.
In the case of SATC, the curtain has been pulled back to reveal two women negotiating the trickiest of professional relationships. Nevertheless, it remains hard to fathom how Cattrall could unleash such anger in such a public forum, as she has done in recent days. “She struggled enormously with her dad’s death [in 2012],” says one source. “Having to deal with her brother’s death so soon afterwards must be huge.” But Parker, she feels, was not to blame. “SJP is a professional. Some think that her nice girl image is fake but I don’t think it is.”