Lee Grant, the actor and director, generally leaves her apartment, on West End Avenue, once a week, to go to Pilates. In the fall, shortly before her ninety-eighth birthday, she made an exception to attend the New York Film Festival, where the first two films she directed were being shown in the revivals selection. Grant wore a red silky blouse, a black skirt, and a grommeted belt; her silver-streaked hair hung over her forehead in bangs. Her voice was strong and warm, with a hint of rasp. “From my heart to yours,” she told the audience.
First up: “The Stronger,” from 1976, a lightly Sapphic adaptation of a Strindberg one-act about two actresses in a love triangle. Next was “Tell Me a Riddle,” about a Jewish immigrant couple who met as revolutionaries in Russia and find themselves at embittered odds in their old age.
Afterward, in a panel discussion led by the Turner Classic Movies host Alicia Malone, Grant talked about how her directing career came to be. “I was in a movie called ‘Shampoo,’” Grant said. The audience cheered. “And Warren Beatty turned to me and said, ‘Lee, you’re forty-nine.’” Never mind that she went on to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as a Republican housewife smitten with Beatty’s horndog hairdresser. “He was saying, ‘So long, baby! This is Hollywood!’ And I was really fifty.” The next day, she got a call from the American Film Institute. “They said, ‘Do you know any actors who would like to take a directing workshop?’ And I go, ‘Me!’”
When the moment came, Grant felt underprepared. “I didn’t know which end on the camera was up,” she said. She turned to Fred Murphy, the cinematographer on “Tell Me a Riddle,” who was sitting to her left. “So it was Fred who said—well, what did you say?”
“I just told you it was simple trigonometry,” Murphy said.
Grant decamped to Café Paradiso for a celebratory dinner. Brooke Adams, who appeared in “Tell Me a Riddle” as the vivacious granddaughter, and is now a grandmother herself, was there. So were Mary Beth Yarrow, Grant’s friend and producer, and Joe Feury, Grant’s husband, whom she met in the sixties while doing a musical. “She had on sailor’s boots, a sailor’s top,” he said.
Over steak and ginger ale, Grant reminisced. She was born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal, and grew up on 148th Street and Riverside. “My father was the head of the Bronx Y,” she said. “My mother and her sister, Fremo, came from Odessa, because they were killing the Jews.”
In her memoir, “I Said Yes to Everything,” Grant writes that her mother “was determined to plunge her hands into my baby fat and model me into a superior, beautiful being, who would either marry rich or rise above all others in the arts: ballet, theater.” Grant went with option two. As a teen, she studied acting with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and made her Broadway début, in 1949, as the Shoplifter in “Detective Story.” When she reprised the role in William Wyler’s 1951 film adaptation, she won a prize at Cannes and earned an Oscar nomination. “I was twenty-two,” she said, laughing her throaty laugh. “I didn’t know what the Oscars were.”
The same year, she was asked to speak at a memorial service for a blacklisted actor whom she had worked with onstage: “J. Edward Bromberg, who was part of the Group Theatre,” she said. “He was in a play that I was in that my husband”—her first, Arnold Manoff—“had written. My husband was a Communist, and I guess Bromberg was, too.” Grant told the mourners that Bromberg had been terrified of appearing in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee; he had a bad heart and worried that the stress might kill him. “The next day, I was blacklisted,” she said. “And for twelve years I didn’t work.”
She was summoned by HUAC, too. “Macho, fat, skinny, old men asking me the stupidest questions,” she recalled. She refused to name names. “They wanted to know if William Morris was a Communist. And I laughed!”
She was finally taken off the blacklist in 1964. “My first film job was ‘In the Heat of the Night,’” she said. “Norman Jewison, Hal Ashby, they knew all about me. They called me in and said, ‘Lee, this is your job if you want it. It’s about a woman who lost her husband.’ And I had lost mine.” (Divorce, in her case, not murder.)
Dessert arrived. Yarrow got up to make a toast. “To our dear, remarkable Lee, my dearest, dearest friend,” she said.
“What about me?” Feury said. Grant cracked up.
“Actually, right now, this is not about you,” Yarrow told him.
Grant rose. “This is like a dream to me,” she said.♦
