WEAVER DISHES UP SLICE OF ‘RYE’
Experience was prep for Salinger agent role
Sigourney Weaver is in a familiar place — and a happier time — in her new film.
“My Salinger Year,” in theaters and on-demand Friday, transports the three-time Oscar nominee and native New Yorker back a quarter-century.
Set in 1995, the film allowed her to revisit the playground of “this wonderful period in New York history where books were so important and people in the literary world were so important,” Weaver, 71, told the Daily News.
“It conjured up this whole world for me that I felt was disappearing,” said Weaver, who plays J.D. Salinger’s literary agent, Margaret, inspired by the real-life Phyllis Westberg.
Adapted from Joanna Rakoff’s memoir, “My Salinger Year” centers on a young aspiring writer, played by Margaret Qualley, who moves to the city and takes a job at Salinger’s literary agency as Margaret’s assistant. She ends up with the tedious task of responding to fan mail for the reclusive author of “The Catcher in the
Rye” with stock replies, before taking it upon herself to answer readers in Salinger’s style.
Making the film “was just one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had,” said Weaver, whose long-ago relationship with a book industry employee allowed the then-unknown actress to rub shoulders with “some very flamboyant women,” which eventually informed her portrayal of Margaret.
At a dinner party of one such woman, a cookbook editor, Weaver recalled finally working up the nerve to say something — “because no one knew who I was, I was just a girlfriend” — and complimenting the hostess’ chicken.
“And the woman, who was very imposing like Margaret, said, ‘Well, maybe darling, that’s because it’s veal,’ ” Weaver said, laughing.
Her performance, in turn, was “a love letter to those wonderful, potentially very intimidating women who had great style. They were pretty tough cookies,” said Weaver, who “jumped at” the chance to play someone who represented the idea of these women she “worshiped” but who also “terrified” her.
Weaver has a connection as well to sending fan mail to an idol, who turned out to have a strange tie to Salinger.
“I did write to John Lennon, when I was 13, a very long letter on lavender stationery with purple ink,” Weaver shared with a laugh, noting she asked her father to leave it with the maître d’ of a restaurant she’d heard the ex-Beatle had visited.
Weaver said she was “madly in love” with Lennon — killed in 1980 by Mark David Chapman, whose possession of a copy of “Catcher in the Rye” at the time led Salinger’s agency to check all fan mail.
Though Lennon never responded to her perfumed letter, Weaver imagines it’s “still in a drawer, moldering away.”
But she’d “love to get a letter from [Lennon’s widow] Yoko Ono: ‘We finally opened your letter.’ ”