The 89-year-old stage and screen legend reveals all in the new film Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
"If somebody doesn't understand me, they can just go fly a kite," drawled Elaine Stritch, star of stage and screen. "Their loss, my gain, because I get rid of them!"
While well-known and beloved for her prickly, brassy demeanor; characters like Alec Baldwin's mother, Colleen, on 30 Rock; and raucous one-woman shows, the Detroit-born Stritch reveals a new, vulnerable side in the new documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me. She threw herself fully into the documentary experience, she noted, and is pleased with the results and humanity depicted.
"When I started doing club work, what interested me was I was still playing a part," she recalls. "I was doing a woman who was doing a club act and its very lonely to do. Believe me. You get up and you're 70 and singing, 'someday he'll come along, the man I love.' It cracked me up!"
Covering her beginnings, diverse career and collaborations, and recent struggles with diabetes-related health problems, it paints an affecting, entertaining, and emotionally affecting portrait of a stage and screen legend while tackling universal issues like aging, mortality, friendship, and legacy.
Two days following her 89th birthday, Stritch is in her trademark feisty spirit ( although on the mend following an unfortunate series of falls ), and game for questions about anything and everything. On co-star/friend Rock Hudson's closet-ness: "I don't know what problems were going on inside of him, but I was on his side, he was a darling man." Regarding President Obama, she said, "What I think his biggest fault is, he's trying to please everyone—it took me 89 years to prove to everyone around me that that's impossible."
And there's the Woody Allen controversy. "I love Woody Allen," she admitted of the latter, polarizing topic of late. Stritch starred in Allen's 1987 drama September, and later popped up in his 2000 comedy Small Time Crooks. "I love a lot of people, whom I don't find out these things about until [later], and it's none of my business. It's gossip! I'm not going to get mixed up with it. I just love the fact he writes the material he writes. I worked with him on an artistic level and love him. What Woody does, says, thinks, whatever he wants to live his life, I only know this—he's a great artist. The conversation is over."
Directed by Chiemi Karasawa, Shoot Me follows Stritch ( who just started tweeting under @ElaineStritch ) as she works on a number of productions, including the cabaret show, "Singin' Sondheim… One Song At A Time," at the Carlyle. In the process, we look back on her extensive life and career, including the one-woman Broadway production Elaine Stritch at Liberty. A bevy of contemporaries and colleagues share anecdotes, like the late James Gandolfini, Alec Baldwin ( whom also served as an executive producer ), Nathan Lane, composer Stephen Sondheim, and Cherry Jones, while we savor archival and behind the scenes footage from her films and TV appearances, including 30 Rock, for which she won her second Emmy award.
One entry in her filmography we don't delve into at length, however; in 1965's Who Killed Teddy Bear, in which Stritch played a "dyke" against queer icon Sal Mineo. "Someone called me one day from an agent's office and said, 'Would you like to play a lesbian who runs a disco and is strangled on Second Avenue by Sal Mineo using a silk stocking?'" she recalled, amused. "I said, 'Are you kidding? Who wouldn't want to play that? I'll kill to do that part!' The director loved me because I rewrote a scene with co-star Juliet Prowse and myself so I would play this lesbian as a woman who tries to come off like straight. Go see it—you'll love it."
One major personal revelation in Shoot Me is the extent to which diabetes and alcohol have complicated her health and aging: At one point, preparing for a gig, she loses the ability to articulate due to low blood sugar and is rushed to the hospital. She's also frank and accepting about her age, and feels that revealing this side of her life was part and parcel of agreeing to take part in the documentary that she lauded, incidentally, as "excellent."
"I had no fear of revealing myself to people around me," she insisted. "No fear at all. If I had to go to the hospital, nothing was too personal, nothing was too 'inner' me. It didn't frighten me at all and I like that quality about myself."
The documentary ends—spoiler alert!—as Stritch debates retirement and finds an abode in Birmingham, Mich., which she describes as a Midwest version of the Hamptons. Evincing that wonderful, who-the-f*ck-cares bravado again before the interview concluded, she insisted we have a drink if I get out that way.
"We'll go to the corner saloon and lift a few," she said. "Just a few, though [because it gets expensive]. I'm afraid I'm gonna live forever, and it will cost me money to stay alive. I'd hate for that to happen."
