Dan's Papers - April 25, 2008

When Kathleen Turner finished filming the intense, hot, sexy scenes in the 1981 movie Body Heat, she went back to her trailer each time and sobbed.

"It wasn't that it felt degrading to do these scenes, it's just that it was so powerfully emotional for me," said the 53-year-old actress who made a personal appearance at Bookhampton's new Amagansett store on April 12. She was there to speak about her new memoir, Send Yourself Roses - Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles. "When I'm on camera I don't feel like it's me that's actually being filmed; I feel like I'm just playing the character. But when the director says, 'Cut!' I'm snapped back to being a young woman who has exposed my body to these (mostly) men [on the crew]. They were courteous and considerate and we had the minimum amount of crew in every set...but, my God, it was so raw," said Turner, reading from the memoir, which was released in January and written the previous year.

About 50 people gathered to hear Turner, a long-time Amagansett resident whose house here will be sold during divorce proceedings from her 21-year marriage to Jay Weiss. She and Weiss legally separated about two years ago and Turner now makes her home permanently in New York City and has one child, 20-year-old daughter Rachel.

In the book and during her talk, Turner dished about the leading men she's worked with, including William Hurt, her co-star in Body Heat. "In those days he was pretty wild," she wrote. Of Burt Reynolds, with whom she starred in Switching Channels (a film she told the crowd was her least favorite to work on), she said, "Burt was just nasty. I don't do well with nasty people." About Jack Nicholson, "He was fun and he was outrageous and I enjoyed working with him very much." She starred with Nicholson in Prizzi's Honor in 1985. She speaks of an almost-affair with Michael Douglas on the set of Romancing the Stone in 1984. Douglas was separated but still married at the time. "We couldn't keep up the romance. But we kept our friendship," she said.

Turner told the audience she almost didn't write the revealing memoir. "I just didn't feel right about the idea," she said, "it seemed kind of egotistical to write the book, but then I realized that I do have something to pass on - my values, and my hope."

She wrote, "I do have stories to tell, and I believe in the power of sharing them...I've had personal tragedies, rocky relationships, out-of-control drinking, and snarky critics to deal with. I've come back from a debilitating illness...I've experienced the joy of motherhood and the sadness of infertility, a happy marriage that eventually became a necessary separation. I've learned from it all."

Turner co-wrote her book with Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood and author of The War on Choice and Every Choice is a Story. (Turner's philanthropic efforts include Planned Parenthood, as well as People for the American Way and New York's Citymeals-on-Wheels.) Feldt worked on the book from 30 hours of tape Turner recorded.

"Gloria and I had worked together for years. When she left Planned Parenthood she came to me with the book idea. We got the contract after I finished doing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway," she told the group.

Turner knew from the age of 20 that when she turned 50 she would like to play the role of Martha in the Tony-winning play, which made its original debut on Broadway in 1962. With the determination that has been a hallmark of her life, just before she turned 50 in 2005, she had lunch with Edward Albee and asked him if she could read the part of Martha for him in hopes the play could be revived on Broadway. It hadn't been performed there since 1975.

The day she read for him, he called to tell her she got the part. The next week, she turned 50. Though Turner was fairly confident she could handle it, landing the role gave her the shakes, she said.

"I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to pull off all my boasts. It was a huge undertaking. A huge test," she said. She told Albee she saw the dark humor in the play, and wanted to be able to drive that to the surface.

"That humor is part of the characters' deep, deep hurt," she wrote. "They make each other laugh and they make each other laugh at themselves. Martha tries something and doesn't pull it off. George [her husband in the play] caps her, and she appreciates his effort. It's cool. It's part of their relationship. Honestly, I never understood why people didn't understand how funny this was."

Turner was nominated for a Tony award, and though she didn't win, critics hailed her and the play as great successes.

Turner was born in June of 1954, the third of four children, to Richard and Patsy Magee Turner. Her father was in the U.S. Foreign Service and the family moved from Canada to Cuba to Venezuela to England during her childhood, which she describes as "happy and adventurous." While attending high school in London, Turner became enamored of the theater. It was also there that she developed her trademark - that sexy voice.

Following the devastating death of her father during her senior year, she moved back to her mother's family home in Missouri. "Talk about a culture shock," she quipped. She studied theatre at Southwest Missouri State University and later transferred to the University of Maryland, where she graduated with a degree in theatre arts in 1976. Turner boldly moved alone to New York in 1977 with $100 in her pocket. Working as a waitress, she soon got an agent and landed two roles, one on Broadway in Gemini, the other on the NBC daytime serial "The Doctors." Turner's voice persuaded Lawrence Kasdan that she should be Matty Walker, a manipulative femme fatale in Body Heat, his directorial debut and her film debut, which made her a star.

She starred in one movie after another in the 1980s and into the 1990s, including The Man with Two Brains with Steve Martin, and later Crimes of Passion with Anthony Perkins, The Jewel of the Nile and so many others.

While filming the comedy Serial Mom in 1994, Tuner began having "inexplicable pains and fevers." After the film wrapped, she began noticing she couldn't get into any of her shoes - her feet had suddenly grown two sizes. "I went to a podiatrist who said there was nothing wrong, expect that maybe I was vain. But then later I couldn't turn my head or move my arm and I went to my general practitioner who took blood and told me I had rheumatoid arthritis," she said.

With serious joint pain, Turner suffered from the disease until recently when new drugs with fewer side effects came onto the market. Side effects of earlier medications proved debilitating and caused weight gain. People gossiped that Turner was letting herself go - drinking and using drugs and eating too much.

"Still I did not reveal what was happening to me," she wrote, adding that until she went public about her illness, she preferred the gossip to admitting she had a chronic disease.

Today, Turner has battled back from RA and is doing well. After her successful run in Virginia Woolf and some recent TV appearances, in February she got the thumbs up from critics for her direction of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern drama Crimes of the Heart at the Laura Pels Theatre in New York.

And now she has events around her book, which got its title from a long habit. Whenever she's in the theater, particularly as an actress, when all the flowers are gone after opening night, Turner rewards herself. "Every two weeks, I simply send myself roses," she said.