Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
NAUGHTY BUT NICE
In their new film Book Club, four of Hollywood’s biggest stars play a group of old friends inspired to spice up their love lives
Jane Fonda and her co-stars on making their saucy new film Book Club, about mature love and the power of friendships
Four well-to-do women of over 60 – one widowed, one divorced, one in a marriage that has lost its spark, one who has avoided commitment for all of her life – sit in a luxuriously appointed living room in Los Angeles, attending the inaugural meeting of their book club. And the book they’ve chosen? EL James’ notorious tale of bondage and sadomasochism, Fifty Shades Of Grey.
‘ Oh, no!’ groans the divorcée. ‘We started this book club to stimulate our minds!’
‘From what I hear,’ shoots back the commitment-phobe with a wink, ‘this book is quite stimulating!’
And so begins Book Club, a riotous film that’s a tale of mature love and the enduring power of women’s friendships, brought to us by four actresses who, between them, have seen everything there is to see and then some.
Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Diane Keaton were joined in the cast by the baby of the group Mary Steenburgen, 65. Surprisingly, though they’ve all been working in Hollywood for decades, they didn’t know each other particularly well at the start of filming. But they’ve made up for lost time.
‘ Most of the film was shot in a house in Brentwood, in Los Angeles,’ says Candice, 72. ‘It did double duty as Mary’s character’s kitchen and my character’s living room: the garage was our green room, all of our chairs were set in a circle and whenever we had down time, we’d go in there and just yak and yak and yak. We all knew each other slightly before we started filming but not very well, and just finding out about each other was fascinating. Especially Jane, because I find her remarkable. She’s whip-intelligent and notices everything. Everything.’
Jane, 80, takes up the tale to describe a typical session. ‘Everybody’s drinking,’ she reveals, cheerfully. ‘Mary’s drinking tequila, I’m drinking vodka, Diane is drinking red wine on ice – which she likes to do, please forgive her – and Candi is probably drinking a divine white wine. We’re still getting to know each other, and there’s still so much we don’t know – for instance, I still have to talk to Candi about [her late husband] Louis Malle, I still have to find out about that. And – we’re just having fun. When you go into a movie, you always worry that there’s going to be one or two or even more divas, because actors can be very difficult, and it’s a pain in the **** if you have to work with a diva. But it was such a joy to discover that none of these three were – we were all just regular folk. And we laughed a lot. There’s a particular laughter that happens when women friends get together that comes from somewhere really deep, and it does something to your brain that doesn’t ever happen anywhere else. You can laugh with men. But it’s not the same, it’s really not.’
‘We do laugh,’ agrees Candice. ‘And we talk a lot about politics. Politics and doctors’ appointments, because at our age that’s what we have.’
Surprisingly, Book Club is the brainchild of two people who’ve barely hit middle age, first-time director William ‘Bill’ Holderman – ‘He could be my son or even my grandson,’ says Jane, affectionately – and his friend and writing partner Erin Simms. They had the idea, Erin says, a few years ago, when Fifty Shades Of Grey first came out. ‘Bill sent his mother the book and its two sequels for Mother’s Day, which I thought was completely insane,’ says Erin. ‘How could he have that kind of relationship with his mother where sex is even a topic? Then he tells me his mother is totally open and “active in that area”. I thought that was hysterical so I sent my mother the trilogy, which is sending it to the opposite kind of woman. She thought it was hilarious. I said to Bill the next morning, “What about a movie about a book club with women of a certain age and they’re reading Fifty Shades Of Grey?” So it’s all Bill’s mother’s fault. He can take credit for that.’
The film uses the very naughty book as a catalyst for change in the group’s lives. Having read its tale of a young woman who enters a relationship with a controlling man with some very kinky appetites, they’re inspired to expand their horizons and spice things up – whether that’s injecting a little risqué behaviour into a long-term relationship, in the case of Mary Steenburgen’s character Carol, or pursuing new love interests.
Getting the idea to the screen took a few years, longer than Bill and Erin expected. Candice says one reason was because the studio making it wanted to use four younger actresses. ‘I don’t know how they got this movie made,’ she snorts. ‘The studio said they wanted actresses who were younger and more vibrant... but quite frankly, there’s nobody more vibrant than us!’
Mary says the four women bonded because of the nature of the very first scene they shot, which appears towards the end of the film, where she, Candice, and Diane, 72, are working against the clock to dress and make presentable a just-got- out- ofbed Jane in order to drive to the air-
‘It’s a pain working with divas. These three are just regular folk’ JANE FONDA
port to intercept her long-lost beau (played by Don Johnson) before he boards an aeroplane to fly out of her life forever. ‘She’s got her eyelashes all over the place, her hair is a mess and she’s completely dishevelled. And in one shot, we had to put clothes on her, clean up her face, put her jewellery on, get her handbag, get her sunglasses and shoes, and get her out the door. That’s a complicated thing to do, and it was our first day of doing anything together. My job was the worst because I had to put her dress on – it was a wrap dress, and with Jane Fonda that means you have to wrap it, like, 25 times, and I was looking at it thinking, why did we think this was a good idea? But what instantly became clear once we’d started was this sense of us being a team. We were going for it – we were helping each other do it. By the end of the day, I didn’t want to leave these other women.’
So, there’s no Joan Crawford and Bette Davis-style feuding? ‘I don’t think that ever happened as much as it was made out,’ says Jane. ‘But it does still go on up to a point and that’s because we still live in a patriarchal society, which means that we’re trained to compete. When men lead things it’s hierarchical, there’s somebody at the top and it works down from there. And some women do still feel like that, they feel that in order to get to the top of whatever their ladder is, they have to fight like a man. But what they haven’t yet recognised is that when women are really in their skins as women, they do things differently. We do things in a circular way. There’s no top and no bottom, no leader and no follower. Everybody’s on the same level. And I think that more and more women are leading things differently and looking at each other differently.’
‘There was no cattiness on the set,’ agrees Mary. ‘Just a lot of laughter, and swapping of stories that were moving and funny and sexy and wild and hilarious. Nobody was in competition, nobody felt insecure. And part of that was that Bill Holderman had written four very different characters who had four different story lines – and each one was as strong as the other.’
It no doubt helped that the women were also very pleased with their leading men – starting with Jane and Don, who coincidentally in real life is the father of the Fi f t y Shades f ilms act ress Dakota Johnson.
‘ I’ve known Don since the 1970s,’ says Jane, who in real life is single after splitting with long-term partner Richard Perry last year, and says that she expects to remain so. ‘In 1971 I had started an anti-war organisation called The Entertainment Industry For Peace And Justice – we would meet down on Hollywood Boulevard where we had an office, and one day he showed up. We all thought, “Whoa, he’s cute!” and it was pretty clear he was there to look for girls! I would see him now and then over the years, but by the time he became a star in Miami Vice, I was married to Tom Hayden and I wasn’t working much. Then a few years ago I saw a movie he was in called Alex Of Venice, and first of all, I think he’s handsomer now than when he was young, but also he had a real depth to his acting. So when Book Club came along, I said to Bill Holderman that I’d love to have Don Johnson play my love interest.’
Similarly, Candice – in real life, married for 18 years to her second husband, real estate developer Marshall Rose – says that she, too, made her own request for a partner, in her case, a wryly understated Richard Dreyfuss. ‘I saw him a few weeks before we started shooting and I thought, “Huh, Richard Dreyfuss – he’s so alive, he’s so intelligent, and he’s a great actor, so why not cast him?” And we did, and he was wonderful and really good fun to work with,’ she says.
Meanwhile, Diane – single, like Jane – talks of her own co-star, Andy Garcia, who plays the dashing charmer Mitchell. ‘I don’t think Andy has ever really had that kind of role before, has he?’ she says of her on-screen partner, more usually seen in crime dramas. ‘I think he’s a real discovery and he’s going to be a heartthrob now. I didn’t know what to expect when we first got together, but he was very loose and it just ended up feeling like playing around and having fun with a friend. He couldn’t have been better... and he’s easy on the eyes, too. I think he’s going to have a lot of leads in romantic movies after this – and when that happens, I want a percentage!’
Mary Steenburgen’s journey with on-screen husband Craig T Nelson was different – playing a married couple struggling to re-kindle the spark in their relationship. ‘Craig’s a lovely man,’ smiled Mary, in real life married to fellow actor Ted Danson. ‘And three of us have now been married to him in the movies, all except for Candice. He was a joy to work with, except in the scenes where we dance together and he would lift me into the air. Every time we did it in rehearsal he would groan and go “ugggh”. After a while, I said, “Craig, can I respectfully request that when we actually come to shoot this scene, you just zip it and don’t make that sound?”’
The movie doesn’t shy away from letting us know the women have sex, and as Jane reasonably asks, why should it? ‘A lot of older women do have sex!’ she says. ‘I wrote a book about it – well, it wasn’t just about sex, it was about ageing, but there were chapters on sex, which does get different when you get older – especially when the man is older too. You lose spontaneity because it’s not as easy to say, “Let’s jump into bed and do it”. There are other things that have to go on first, like pills or whatever. But that can be made sexy, the sense of planning and anticipation. For women in particular, it gets better anyway, because we know our bodies better and aren’t afraid to ask for what we want.’
Candice agrees that, in portraying older women as sexual beings, the movie makes a valid point. ‘It’s saying life doesn’t end when we’re programmed to think it does, and that’s great. It’s saying we should leave ourselves open to possibilities. Because what’s the point of putting in an expiry date? Expiry dates are outmoded.’
Not a description you could ever apply to the ladies of Book Club.
‘There’s no-one more vibrant than us, despite our age’ CANDICE BERGEN
Book Club is in cinemas on 1 June.