It did not surprise me that an interview with Carol Kane was much like one of her performances: Delightful, quixotic, energetic, and alchemical. I do not approach a performance by Carol Kane with expectations—I know that she will surprise me; startle me—and so she was in person. Fully open, agreeable, but willfully swift and off to a new observation or opinion before I could ask a question or write anything down.
I met with Kane because she had captivated Tennessee Williams in 1975, when, he claimed, she possessed him on a rainy October afternoon in Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street. Tennessee confessed that he would “haunt” a film or an actress, and he claimed he did this, at the Plaza Theater, on a day when the words would not come. Carol Kane provided him with some words.
Here is what Tennessee said about her, and what I wrote from his memories:
On a rainy October day in 1975, Tenn sat for four consecutive viewings [from various sources this seems unlikely; more likely two viewings] of Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street, convinced that a film, partially in Yiddish, about Jews making a life for themselves in turn of the century New York, would remove him from the clutter and disarray that his life and mind had become. “Black and white,” he remembered, “like a photograph.” The images of the film reminded him of the photographs he had stood before in museums, of an earlier New York, of an earlier country. Alien country, he called it, one he could invest with any emotion he chose, or in which he could deposit new types of characters. He fell in love with the film’s star, Carol Kane, who looked to him like an early sketch for a painting by Hans Memling, alabaster, with huge eyes. He found her “pregnant with peril and possibility,” and recalling that day, and all of those viewings, he remembered that he didn’t know if she was “a benign or a malignant presence,” but “she is like an angel, a spirit of some kind, that sits on the ledge of your window or your shoulder, and can’t be ignored.” Tenn had recalled the few seconds in which she had appeared in what he called “that Gilroy thing” [the film Desperate Characters, which also featured his “beloved, glorious” Sada Thompson], and he thought that she “vibrates and glows, as she did in Carnal Knowledge, where she speaks volumes with her body and her eyes. Her hooker [in Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail] is degraded, abraded, exhausted, but still up for the lubricous necessities, and I wanted more of her and less of the dismal jocularity.”
In Hester Street Kane did “so much without any of the trappings I usually want in a transforming performance--no big scenes, no breakdowns, no ‘come-of-age’ moments. She is simply, amply human, and grows in that incremental way that people we see every day, people we take for granted, do all the time. The film snatches her in time, freezes the development of this woman, and displays it for us.”
"I am hopeful for her," Tenn told me. "Marvelously and manically gifted, I would like to write for her, and I will." At the end of our visit, Tenn handed me several jagged pages--from various sources--on which he had begun a play for this "divine image that we've been blessed to host--Carol Kane."
Kane was terribly moved to learn that Tennessee admired her. “I can’t believe he even knew about me,” she confessed, but then she let me know that her mother, Joy, had seen the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire with Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy. I cannot remember what Ms. Kane shared with me that day, but I saw what her mother saw and could hear the words of the play again. Kane not only subsumed the words of the Williams play, but she subsumed the words and emotions of her mother.
And then…off to pull a collection of plays off a shelf. Beth Henley. Kane loved the playwright and read to me from some plays—a quote here, a quote there. She finds words magical, transporting. Joan Micklin Silver told me that Kane “rides words all the way to the end of the line for which they were intended. She is not like any other actress, and I’ve worked with good actresses. How do you describe Carol Kane?
In her Park Avenue apartment, Silver pulled out production photographs of Hester Street, some with 1970s New York a blur at the edges of the carefully—and economically—created 1890s, and that one horse that was painted and dressed to mimic the multiple horses Silver’s budget could not afford. In every photograph, Kane caught the eye, glowed as if specially lit. “Look at her,” Silver told me. “She was laughing and joking and very much present for everyone, but also distant, deep into her character. I trusted her completely. She loved the work, and I think she liked and respected me and my husband (producer Ray Silver). I say that because I don’t think she can fake much, and she soaks up everything. I could see her look at a costume or a set and you could almost see it entering her, becoming everything to her. She can be utterly lost in her character and yet fully alive and present in her acting. I think it’s a kind of genius.”
Kane earned an Oscar nomination for Hester Street, but confesses that she sat at the ceremony with no prospects on her horizon. “I didn’t work for a year, I think,” she told me. Did you have hope that things would change, I asked. “No,” she said, simply, sweetly. “I was grateful for what had happened, my generous friends, and maybe I thought it would work out—the career, I mean. I might have been afraid to say ‘I will work,’ but I wasn’t dark. I didn’t go to a dark place. And the work came.”
Kane would earn two Emmy Awards for her work on the television series “Taxi.” (The Emmys are on display on the Paramount lot. Kane’s apartment, on Central Park West, when I met her, had an enviable terrace, open windows, a book on the films of Gena Rowlands, and clean, open space. No clutter. No detritus. No hardware.) You can find “Taxi” online, and what Joan Micklin Silver called her “shattering fragility that then explodes in passion” is evident. A funky magic arises when Kane and Andy Kaufman work together. Manic and heartbreaking, you think that what they were showing us was how we all feel when we are in love, as inexplicable and mysterious as it is.
During the time I spoke with Carol Kane that sunny afternoon, we were entertained by her dog, named Dainty, who appeared to be the reincarnation of an architect. The dog meticulously and regularly organized pillows and blankets into new shapes, darted in, rested, and then came out, re-evaluated, and began to design again. Between discussions of actresses as diverse as Gena Rowlands, Eileen Brennan, Lois Smith, Shirley Knight, and Geraldine Page (Kane was, at the time, in possession of the bathrobe that Page wore in Woody Allen’s Interiors), she served me glasses of EMERGEN-C, to which I remain addicted. Does it boost my immune system? Keep me from catching colds? I don’t know. It reminds me of a day with Carol Kane.
Before I visited Kane for our interview, I had seen her once before, at the memorial service for Maureen Stapleton at the Circle in the Square Theatre. Kane captured attention there as well. Elizabeth Wilson was delighted to see her, and after Kane spoke to Zoe Caldwell, complimenting her on her work, then politely drifting away, Caldwell, who had looked vaguely as if she had been slapped by a mackerel, turned to me and said, “She’s remarkable! Did you see her? I never dreamed I would see her! Well,” she said, after a service for one of her closest friends,” that visitation makes up for a lot of bad things today.”
Did I do well in my interview with Carol Kane? No, I didn’t. I couldn’t design a form for the day. I was in submission to her, and she was extraordinary. She educates and illuminates, and she sent me off to read new writers and to see films I hadn’t thought of in years. I could now see them through her eyes. Joan Micklin Silver said she tried to learn to see and to edit through the eyes of Carol Kane.
About those eyes: Several days after meeting with Carol Kane, I was speaking to the actress Betsy Palmer, who lamented that game shows had hindered her career, but who was so happy that Tennessee Williams had “saved” her, through a production, in 1976 of Eccentricities of a Nightingale. “No one thought much of me as an actress” Palmer told me, but Tennessee believed in me. They would share stories and joints together, and “he made me believe in myself.” I told Palmer about my day with Carol Kane.
“Oh, her!” she exclaimed. “Talk about belief. She was in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with me [I failed to confirm this, but it might have been at the Cape Playhouse, in 1969]. I fell so in love with her. The way she looks at you. Her stillness. Her beauty. She is not of this world. While she was sweet, I thought, She’s looking at me like she knows me totally, and she knows where we’re all headed.”
Carol Kane gives fully. Joan Micklin Silver told me I had enjoyed a magical visit with an artist. I did. I didn’t get the story, but she changed my life.
WATCHING CAROL KANE
Carnal Knowledge, 1971. Kane arrives for a blistering scene toward the conclusion of Mike Nichols’ film, a toxic comic strip (note all the white walls, empty panels waiting for content) about sex and love and the lack of both. Kane is the very young new girl (as Nichols put it) of Art Garfunkel, and she sits, shocked and hopefully awakened, by Jack Nicholson’s blistering account of the women in his past, whom he labels Ballbusters.
The Last Detail, 1973. Kane is a prostitute possibly as nervous as the gangly and wonderful Randy Quaid in this often overlooked film from Hal Ashby.
Dog Day Afternoon, 1975. In a 1991 interview I conducted with Arthur Penn, he spoke of Carol Kane. “Frank Pierson wrote an excellent screenplay. Tight and complete, and among the bank employees were, as in real life, an assortment of types, a gallery of riches to mine. There was the aggressive, strong woman; the neurasthenic woman who seemed most likely to be picked out and silenced by the bank robbers; the vulnerable manager; and Carol, who was ideal as the employee we most want to protect. I mean she is found, like a lost and frightened pet, in hiding, pulled out, startled by exposure. You want—I wanted—to protect her. The scene where she places a cool can of soda to her head? That was her. Just as Chris Sarandon devised his performance and his gestures, so did Carol. I was determined for comfort to arrive for the women in that bank, and it did. They began to joke, to jostle, and in early screenings, you could hear the relief when Carol’s character breathed, smiled, thought she might live.”
Annie Hall, 1977. Reduced to a stereotype (Brandeis, Upper West Side, Socialist summer camps, Ben Shahn artworks) by Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer, Kane is at first aroused and then confused as an obsession with the Kennedy assassination leads to a fissure in her life. Douglas McGrath marveled at all of Kane’s work, but particularly admired how distant she was from the comedy in this performance. “She doesn’t dare head toward the comedy of the scenes,” McGrath told me. “She is utterly real and hurt and bewildered, and that is where the most sublime comedy can be found.”
Between the Temples, 2024. Kane earned the New York Film Critics Award as Best Supporting Actress for this Nathan Silver film, in which she is both sweetly funny and heartbreaking. Kane and Jason Schwartzman engage in a dance of artists that brings to mind the salad days of Kane and Andy Kaufman.
