MOVIES : A Look Inside the Studio Gates : Dawn Steel was the first woman to head a movie studio when she took over Columbia Pictures in 1987. In a new book about her trip to the top, she wants to show other women how to scale the heights of Hollywood

Her living room looks a little like the house in “Out of Africa.” The late afternoon sun, fractured by a massive banyan tree on the lawn, streams through the French doors, splays across the Aubuisson carpet, the overstuffed sofas with their faded linen pillows, the pair of leather club chairs. In the distance, the small, high voice of a child is heard.

You might just take a nap, except the serenity is shattered when Dawn Steel--the woman who was once described as “The Queen of Mean”--clatters in wearing jeans and a T-shirt, scuffling her heels, flinging her leather satchels to the floor.

She is here to talk about her autobiography, “They Can Kill You. . .but They Can’t Eat You,” her chronicle of her career as the first woman to head a major studio, due out next month from Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books. In addition to her book, Steel is also overseeing the release this fall of “Cool Runnings,” her first film as a producer since leaving Columbia three years ago.

“I have to be somewhere at 7:30,” she says. “Oh, where did you get those shoes? Let’s talk about what’s important. Do those come in other colors?” Eventually, she settles, barefoot, on one of her sofas, and begins to play with her fabled hair. Despite her casualness, Steel seems to have as much relationship to her living room as one would have with a nicely appointed hotel lobby. And for a 45-year-old former studio head, responsible for such films as “Awakenings,” “Casualties of War” and “Flatliners,” Steel is oddly insouciant.

“I asked my kid, ‘Do you think I’m an adult?’ ” Steel says, relating a recent exchange with her 6-year-old daughter, Rebecca. “ ‘No, Mommy.’ That’s my proudest accomplishment, that I don’t feel like a grown-up.”

There are other definitions of Steel, who since her arrival in Hollywood in 1978 after working at Penthouse and running her own direct-mail business, earned a controversial reputation as a studio head. Prior to her appointment at Columbia, Steel worked at Paramount Pictures, first in the merchandising department and eventually as president of production, where she oversaw the films “Flashdance,” “Footloose,” “Top Gun,” “The Accused” and “Fatal Attraction” among others. Although she became the first female studio head with her appointment at Columbia in 1987--and took some hard knocks along the way, like learning she was ousted from Paramount while on maternity leave--her reputation was such that California magazine put Steel on its cover for a 1988 story about the state’s worst bosses.

Not that her pugnaciously titled autobiography will relive those years in a gossipy, crash-and-burn narrative a la Julia Phillips’ “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.” If her memories seem to have been carefully edited--some of the better stories she has kept to herself--it is perhaps a judicious career move by someone who is no longer one of the industry’s top powerbrokers.

Although Steel has two other films to come after “Cool Runnings” this fall, her three-year development deal at Disney, under the aegis of her former Paramount colleagues Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, has ended out of mutual frustration. She is shopping for alternative financing and even, surprisingly, contemplating a move into television. There has been some talk that she may set up an independent production company and partnership with her husband, producer Chuck Roven. Even those producers and executives with whom Steel once butted heads--most notably former Paramount executives Ned Tanen, David Kirkpatrick and Frank Mancuso, who is currently head of MGM/UA--declined to comment on her forthcoming memories. Says one, “It’s her memory, her moment in the sun.”

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Question: Your book, despite its suggestively combative title, isn’t really very candid.

Answer: How can you say that? The book is completely frank.

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Q: I was going to say it isn’t terribly candid about other people. Unlike Julia Phillips’ “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” you’re very circumspect about a number of individuals who have less than terrific reputations.

A: You know why? Because it’s not about them. The book is aimed at young women coming up the ladder. My editor asked me to write a book like all those written by male executives like Don Trump, Iacocca, on how to succeed in business. So any time I came across one of those kind of gossipy incidents I asked myself, “Does that kind of story teach anybody anything?” I didn’t want to write a let’s-dissect-every thing-that’s-bad-about-Hollywood book, because I think there is a lot that’s really great about it and I wouldn’t be where I am today without it and I wouldn’t be sitting here trying to be a mentor.

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Q: A mentor? I think a number of people might be surprised to hear you describe yourself that way. For a long time you had one of the worst reputations as a boss.

A: I’m not going to tell you that I wasn’t demanding and an absolute perfectionist to work for, which isn’t easy. But do you think Jeffrey (Katzenberg) is any different? When I was at Columbia, I was very inaccessible and if I had that to do over again, I would change that because I’ve made friends with journalists so I know it’s all about “How are we going to kill Dawn.” I think a lot of it just sold newspapers, and the most difficult thing was that so much of it was made up and only I know that. But I have to tell you, my reputation was such that when I had dinner (last year) with (President) Clinton, he looked at me and said, “You’re not as bad as I thought you’d be. You’re just straightforward.”

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Q: Yes, but would you work for yourself?

A: Yeah, I would. I have to tell you, I’m a great teacher. Ask anybody who worked for me, except some secretaries who weren’t very good. And by the way, how come that never gets discussed--that some of them weren’t any good?

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Q: So I take it that you’re a different kind of executive today.

A: First of all, I wouldn’t be an executive today. I want you to print that. But the truth of the matter is yes, I would be different. Those jobs are so stressful, so time-consuming, that it brings out the worst in people. I like myself a whole lot better today. I’m not nearly as obsessed as I was. Success frees you from a lot of obsessions and writing this book was an exorcism in some really profound ways.

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Q: I’m sure many people will be glad to hear that. But in your book, you trace a lot of your unhappiness to your childhood--growing up poor in a rich town, Great Neck, Long Island, where your mother had to work and you didn’t have the educational opportunities that some of your friends had.

A: Some friends of mine had parents who made school a treat, a gift, not something to be endured. In my family, education was something you endured. My parents weren’t educated past high school and the only book in our house was a Reader’s Digest condensed book. Can you imagine? Also, at the time I thought my parents were the most selfish people in the world. What I didn’t understand was that they were so preoccupied with survival, with getting food on the table, that they couldn’t be focused on me and my brother.

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Q: You say in the book that you were not a feminist, yet you became the first woman to head a studio.

A: The beginning of the feminist movement in the ‘70s was too militant for me and I didn’t relate to it. I will tell you that today I am a feminist. I don’t know any woman who isn’t. But I wasn’t conscious enough or militant or angry enough in the ‘70s. I was angry at my parents, angry that we were broke, but I wasn’t angry about being a woman. Because my mother worked and my grandmother had been the matriarch of the family, it didn’t occur to me that women weren’t equal.

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Q: You studied marketing at both Boston University and New York University, but you never graduated.

A: I was broke and impatient. In Boston I was lonely--I was living in a dorm with phys-ed majors--and the pressure of not having money when everyone else had money. And in classes, I didn’t do great. I was an uninspired student. Today, I think it is a big, huge hole in whatever I’ve become, that I’m not better educated.

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Q: So you went to work, first for a publisher of sports books and then at Penthouse magazine, two fairly macho environments. As a woman, did you have mixed feelings about the magazine?

A: I was embarrassed about it, so I told my parents I worked at Mademoiselle. But Bob Guccione gave me a chance to do every job at a magazine and nobody else was offering me that, so I got a great education. Bob loves women and he never treated anyone, including me, disrespectfully. And if I, along with other girls who worked there, were harassed because we were paid less, who knew?

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Q: Well, you did, because you say in the book that you tried to get him to increase your salary and he refused--an incident that eventually led to you starting your own direct-mail business selling designer toilet paper. Why didn’t you follow that success with a career in retailing?

A: I only wanted to run Bloomingdales, but I didn’t know anybody. I only knew the buyers and it’s very difficult to be noticed at that level.

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Q: So you came to Los Angeles in 1978. Did you have any real interest in filmmaking then?

A: No, I was not a film buff. I liked movies like anybody else, but it wasn’t until I saw “Rocky” that I realized movies could affect people beyond mere entertainment.

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Q: Your first job was in the marketing department at Paramount, where you made quite a splash with your campaign for “Star Trek.”

A: I wish I could tell you I was a genius. . .but what I was not prepared for was Michael (Eisner) calling me into his office and asking me, “What do you want to do with your life?” and he moved me into production (in 1980).

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Q: That was a heady time at Paramount--the Killer Diller era--where executives like Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Don Simpson would go on to be some of the most influential people in the business. (Eisner and Katzenberg, who previously headed Paramount, currently run Disney; Diller, onetime chairman of Fox Inc., now heads cable company QVC; Don Simpson, formerly head of production at Paramount, is now an independent producer). Did you feel out of your depth?

A: I had always felt that television was more accessible to me, and I was more comfortable with those people, because the people who were making movies in Hollywood at the time were very well-educated, politically erudite, passionate people and I didn’t feel part of them. It wasn’t until I was in production that I understood what an extraordinary group (Paramount) was and that there was this run of hits that was just amazing. But this is how stupid I was: Because I had so much reading to do I took this Evelyn Wood speed-reading course, which, schmuck me, you cannot use to read a script. That’s how much I knew about scripts and making movies.

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Q: You had a tough time for a while, even threatening to quit because they wouldn’t even read “Flashdance,” which became your first produced movie.

A: Well, it’s about getting someone to pay attention to you. It didn’t matter how much Michael Eisner bet on me, what mattered were the people who worked for him and it was up to me to make them listen to me. And (at Paramount) it was all about passion. Diller used to say, bored executives make boring movies.

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Q: After Charles Bluhdhorn died and Martin Davis took over Paramount and the exodus of executives occurred, why didn’t you go with Eisner to Disney?

A: Michael and I still have this argument. I said, “You never invited me, you never asked me, you never even asked me come with you.” But the truth of the matter is I wanted to be head of production and because Jeffrey (Katzenberg) was essentially doing everything at Disney, there was no job for me there.

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Q: Although it was Diller’s successor, Ned Tanen, who eventually named you head of production in 1983, that whole transition was fairly rocky.

A: Ned and I were friends and had dated a couple of times so I thought it would all be much easier than it was. But it was very common knowledge that he was looking around and that there were other people he would have preferred in that job and that I was not his first choice or even his second choice. And I was humiliated, which is the one thing I will do anything to avoid, feeling humiliation.

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Q: Did that less-than-hearty endorsement lead to your becoming a tough, demanding boss or was it more of a feeling you had to fall in line with the testosterone-heavy Hollywood of the early 1980s?

A: Susan Faludi wrote recently about women in Hollywood that we came up the way men came up and that we did what they did rather than doing it our own way. So the whole testosterone thing, well, I loved being around men, all these really male guys, because in a way it made me feel more feminine, more like a girl, and I loved it. But in some ways I wanted to be a man because of the power. Because although I never felt discriminated against, it was in the water. I think that has been my biggest transformation, in a Jungian sense, from the male to the female.

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Q: When you were in the hospital giving birth (1987) to your daughter and learned about your de facto replacement, Gary Lucchesi, from a headline in Variety, were you really surprised?

A: I knew it was over and I was completely preoccupied by the birth of my daughter and the death of our closest friend, actor Dean Paul Martin. I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to be left alone. And I didn’t want to go back to a job where people didn’t like me.

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Q: Anything you would have done differently in hindsight or do you simply blame Frank Mancuso for your departure?

A: Politically I should have been friendlier to some people. . .and I wish I knew then that Ned hated his job as much as I hated my job. Those jobs are brutal and after 27 years he had been brutalized. . .I thought of myself as part of the (Mancuso) family. I wasn’t.

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Q: Were you surprised at Mancuso’s appointment at MGM recently?

A: Yes, but the big problem in this town is that there is a huge dearth of executives qualified for those jobs who want to do those jobs. So I’m not that surprised. Like when (producer) Ray (Stark) called me about Columbia, I said, “Leave me alone.”

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Q: Your tenure as the first woman to head a studio involved a number of unusual challenges after David Puttnam’s abrupt departure.

A: Columbia was like Fox today or maybe even Paramount, which is beginning to turn a corner. It was a major studio but it was suffering. David had made like 33 movies and most of them were in languages other than in English.

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Q: You were criticized for making a lot of expensive deals with stars that made people like (Creative Artists Agency chairman) Mike Ovitz very happy. Did you feel you sort of had to toe the line because he and Ray Stark had been so instrumental in your appointment?

A: It was a public relations move and yeah, it made Ovitz happy. It made (International Creative Management chairman) Jeff Berg happy and some other agents whose names you may not recognize happy. But we wanted to say, we’re back in business, we’re mainstream movie-making.

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Q: You gloss over those 2 1/2 years in your book. How do you assess your time at Columbia?

A: I was lonely. (Former Columbia/TriStar executive) Victor (Kaufman) and (investment banker) Herb (Allen) were in New York and I was here so I didn’t have the kind of partnership that Jeffrey has with Michael at Disney. My husband went out of the country to make a movie. I had an infant and a house under construction and I was overwhelmed. And the money is enormous. When they gave me the marketing and production budgets, I couldn’t even conceive of how much money that was, so I stopped dealing with it in real terms and dealt only in abstract terms.

But one of my great assets is that I asked for help while I was there. Victor was unbelievably smart and I would call Jeffrey. What do you think, that I’m a schmuck and would not call? I called Jeffrey and said, “What do I do?” But at Columbia, I had much less time than what I had at Paramount and I think that with all the obstacles--the writers’ strike and Puttnam’s films--I did fine.

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Q: What impact do you think your being a woman had, if any?

A: I think it affected it in some negative ways. A woman in that job is a lightning rod for criticism and judgment and I got my share. But there were also people who came to Columbia or Paramount, not because I was a woman, but because I would fight for their movies, which is the most important thing a studio executive can do. I have great instincts about people and I felt my most important asset was to be collaborative and to pick great people. I didn’t always have a feel or great ideas for each one of the movies, but I wanted to be as helpful as I could creatively.

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Q: After Sony bought Columbia from Coca-Cola and brought in Jon Peters and Peter Guber, why didn’t you stay on, since you had worked together at Paramount?

A: They asked me to stay. I didn’t want to stay. I didn’t want the job. Sony had bought my stock and Peter made it easy for me to get out of my contract.

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Q: After you left Columbia, Disney offered you a development deal, which apparently wasn’t the happiest of arrangements.

A: What time is it? I have to be somewhere at 7:30 and I have to kiss my kid and wash my face. You know, I have to tell you , I don’t blame things on other people and I’m not going to say any of those difficulties had to do with Disney. I went to them without any staff or material and I had a lot to learn on the other side of the desk. People said it would take three years to make a movie and I didn’t believe it, but you know that’s how long it takes.

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Q: Were you frustrated by their hands-on development process?

A: I was fortunate that I had discretionary funds, more freedom than some producers, but I still felt like I had to prove myself all over again. I don’t want to be at the mercy of having to convince people to make my movies. I had greenlighted “Cool Runnings” at Columbia and when they didn’t want it, I took it to Disney and initially they said yes and it got off to a false start and then we weren’t making it and then we were and it took three years.

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Q: Now you’ve left Disney and you’re looking elsewhere for development funds.

A: I didn’t actually leave Disney. I moved off the lot to offices on Maple Drive (in Beverly Hills) but I’m finishing “Cool Runnings” and then there is “The Power of No,” and there’s two movies after that, so I don’t know that I’ll ever leave Disney, but in terms of my freedom and exclusivity I left there in April.

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Q: Are you frustrated by being an independent producer after running a studio?

A: I missed it for a couple of months after I left Columbia, but when you’re in production, there are hundreds of people involved so that seems familiar. But I’d love to do television. It’s writer-driven and producer-driven and it’s fast and immediate and people aren’t so full of themselves. You have to make a show every week so you can’t sit there and be pretentious the way a studio is.

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Q: Besides a new respect for TV, what other lessons have you learned?

A: I have to tell you it is no small thing to find something that you love to do professionally. Also, and people disagree with me, but I look around at every major studio, network and independent production company and there are women all over the place and when I started that was not the case. Now there are (producers) Lynda Obst, Lauren Schuler-Donner, Paula Weinstein and (studio executives) Lisa Henson, Nina Jacobson and Sherry Lansing, all women in the movie business who are really positive role models.

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Q: Are these women free of the kind of pressures you faced? Did you experience a unique kind of prejudice?

A: I hate answering that, because if I say “yes,” I sound like a victim and if I say “no,” I’m dishonest.

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Q: Did you feel you were victimized as a woman?

A: No. There were nights I would come home feeling miserable and beaten but not victimized. I always say if you see yourself as victim other people will too, and I never saw myself that way. I took everything that was written about me as a personal insult. But Jeffrey always tells me, “You can’t take it personally.” Men seem to have (an understanding of this) in their genes. It’s not in our genes. And that’s been the hardest lesson--that none of it’s personal.