There are two scenes in the new documentary “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me” (which opens this weekend) that show its eighty-nine-year-old subject’s ferocious dual nature.
In one, Stritch is putting away a pack of English muffins at her apartment at the Carlyle Hotel, where she lived and performed for many years. She’s in her standard uniform: moon-shaped glasses, oversized dress shirt, tights instead of pants. As the cameraman observes from the next room, she stops and looks over her shoulder. “I’m going to do this again,” she tells him. “I think you should be watching me unpack the muffins.” The cameraman explains that he wants a clean exit, and she scowls, “I don’t want a clean exit!” So he follows her into the kitchen, and she does a second take. Wielding a fearsome chef’s knife, she stabs open the plastic packaging of the muffins like Norman Bates.
That’s killer Elaine.
In another, she’s visiting the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, which is naming a rehearsal room in her honor. “I feel lousy,” she announces as she steps off the elevator. (She had just been in the hospital after a diabetes attack.) The staff shows her into a large, sunny studio, and she looks around. “I think this is too big, don’t you?” she says. “I think it’s calling too much attention to Elaine Stritch.” So they walk her down the hall, into a different room. “Much better,” she says, until she turns around and sees the rest of it. “I think this is too big.” Finally, the beleaguered staff leads her into a tiny, windowless studio scattered with folding chairs. “This is more the size room I should have,” she says.
That’s self-doubting Elaine.
Throughout her career as an entertainer and world-class sourpuss, Elaine’s two personas have been at perpetual war with each other. There’s the indomitable growler of the Sondheim anthem “I’m Still Here,” the biter-off-of-heads who gives as good as she gets. (Oh, to have seen her Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”) And there’s the recovering alcoholic who seems always on the verge of losing control, whether from the lure of booze (she says she now allows herself one drink a day) or from her dicey memory when it comes to lyrics. That the filmmaker Chiemi Karasawa (who met Stritch because they share a hairdresser) captures both sides so eloquently is to her credit, but Stritch has never been one to hold back, even about her insecurities. In 1970, another documentarian, D. A. Pennebaker, filmed the making of the cast recording of “Company.” Stritch provided him with a nail-biting climax, as she struggled through take after take of “Ladies Who Lunch,” screaming the song more than singing it.
The new film begins with Stritch perambulating the Upper East Side in a fur coat, and Karasawa could have made an entire movie of this salty brand of street theatre. “You’re still the best,” a stranger tells her, to which Stritch gives a side glance and grunts, “Still, eh?” Karasawa pokes at the self-deprecation until it reveals itself as something far more perilous. When she asks Stritch what scares her, Stritch says drinking, then wipes away tears, adding, “It’s such an escape. It’s such a warm, inviting heaven.” As a friend from Alcoholics Anonymous says, “She’s a Molotov cocktail of madness, sanity, and genius.”
What Stritch gives her audiences—at the Carlyle, on Broadway, on “30 Rock”—is a Molotov cocktail, too, one of strength, fear, frustration, and biting humor. Watching her, you’re not quite safe, and never off the hook. “If I forget my lyrics, fuck it!” she tells the tony crowd at the Carlyle. “I’m happy!” But is she? Last April, when Stritch gave a farewell concert and relocated to Michigan, where she grew up, it was like Tavern on the Green closing all over again. It’s good to see her back in New York, both in the film and during this past week, while she’s been in town promoting it. Clamorous and brittle as the subway system, Stritch is a New York institution. Let’s hope we never get too soft for her.
