Detective Sullivan on the Case

Jenny Sullivan has a mischievous glint in her eyes as she pulls an actress aside and whispers in her ear.

Sullivan, the director behind such enthusiastically received Los Angeles productions as “The Baby Dance” and “Ad Wars,” is at work on the new play “The Cat’s Meow,” a fictionalized account of silent film producer Thomas Harper Ince’s suspicious death aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht in 1924.

She sends the actress, Kimberly Bieber (playing Marion Davies, Hearst’s mistress), back into the scene they’ve been rehearsing. Davies is trying to entice Hearst into dancing with her, and this time through, Bieber adds some particularly suggestive moves. Albert Stratton, playing Hearst, laughs with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement--a genuine response that enlivens their previously awkward interplay.

Sullivan grins.

Her authority in the room is unquestioned, yet she wields it gently, prefacing many of her comments with, “I liked it best when . . . “ or “You could . . . “ or “Just a thought . . . .”

“In the balance of things, I’m a collaborator, not a dictator,” she says.

Turning philosophical, the 50-year-old director adds: “I’ve managed to get to this point in my life and not have kids. I always thought I’d do it; it just never happened. But somebody said a really lovely thing to me once: ‘You treat all your work like your children. You take such good care.’

“It made me feel really good, because I knew that I had that kind of energy about me, that mothering instinct.”

Stephanie Zimbalist, who acted (post-”Remington Steele”) in Sullivan’s stagings of both “The Baby Dance” and “Ad Wars,” speaks about the director with obvious warmth. “She’s a director who provides a very safe home for her actors. She gives us great comfort and safety for our imaginations, and yet she has a wonderful gentle hand that comes in and shapes us and colors us.

“It’s all about giving--giving to her actors and giving to the audience.”

“The Cat’s Meow,” which opens Friday at the Coast Playhouse in West Hollywood, weaves together fact and speculation about one of Hollywood’s enduring mysteries. Ince--innovator of silent film’s “they went that-a-way” westerns--was still in his early 40s when something deadly occurred during a birthday cruise in his honor along the Southern California coast. Officially, his death was attributed to a heart attack brought on by acute indigestion. But many doubted that explanation, and the story lives on, in part, because of the luminaries aboard the yacht--not only Hearst and Davies, but also Charlie Chaplin and a then-fledgling gossip columnist named Louella Parsons. Rumor of the day had it that at least one screen legend aboard the boat was making whoopie with Hearst’s mistress.

Steven Peros, the Silver Lake playwright-screenwriter who penned the play, has been at Sullivan’s arm at most rehearsals. “She’s a great respecter of the text,” he says. But she also “keeps pushing the scenes and pushing her actors and pushing me.”

Rehearsal over, Sullivan settles in at home in Sherman Oaks. Her dog Pablo, a jet-black, 170-pound Newfoundland, lies sprawled on the floor--a panting bearskin rug. The afternoon sun filters through tall windows, lending a warm glow to Sullivan’s tumble of reddish-brown curls and smiling, animated face.

She says a director’s job is seeing the big picture, “knowing the whole feeling that you want to elicit from the audience.” Getting the balance right, she says, is “such a fragile thing. It can’t be about just the designs, or just this actor, or just the playwright’s words,” she says. “It’s like being on a boat. If everybody goes to one side, it’s going to tip over.”

She sits at a rustic, round dining table built by her actor father, Barry Sullivan. It’s an almost symbolic image, for she has always been fed by the arts.

Her father, who appeared in numerous gangster films and westerns, is perhaps best remembered for his role as a film director in the 1952 classic “The Bad and the Beautiful.” Her mother, Marie Brown, was also a stage and film actress before setting aside her career to be a full-time mom. Writers, actors and others in the entertainment business frequented their home.

And then there were the rock ‘n’ rollers. In the ‘70s, Sullivan was married to singer-songwriter Jimmy Messina of Buffalo Springfield, Poco and Loggins & Messina fame.

“I have always had a huge cross-section of people in my life, in terms of what they do professionally: Do they have families, do they not have families? Are they straight or gay? It’s just all over the place for me,” she says. “I feel I’m very open and vulnerable to what’s going on politically, environmentally and in other art forms.”

So, perhaps it’s not surprising that she has been attracted to so many “issue” plays. “The Baby Dance” was a microcosm of class struggle, for instance, while the bleakly comic “Ad Wars” imagined a Madison Avenue marketing campaign touting America’s bomb-making might.

Such stories are inherently dramatic, she points out, and what’s more: “It’s really great to dig in and see what all sides of that issue are. You end up learning a lot; your mind doesn’t always get changed, but it’s very interesting.”

Sullivan was born in Santa Monica and raised in Benedict Canyon. A childhood hankering to act led to a career in such films as “The Candidate” (as the campaign manager’s executive assistant), “Getting Straight” (as a college student who hits on Elliott Gould’s graduate assistant character) and “The Other” (opposite John Ritter as the parents whose baby disappears). On TV, she appeared in the short-lived 1980 NBC sitcom “Me and Maxx” as the business partner and former girlfriend, and in the two “V” miniseries as a news reporter and alien spokeswoman.

She began directing plays in Ojai (where she had moved with Messina in 1973) at the Ojai Arts Center, and she staged events with Santa Barbara’s Summer Solstice Celebration and the performing group Mime Caravan. She also made a couple of short films in the early ‘80s as a participant in the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women.

In 1989, she met Susan Dietz, then artistic director of the Pasadena Playhouse, who gave her a directing tryout by having her stage a reading of Vince McKewin’s “Ad Wars” (six years later, Sullivan would direct its much-delayed West Coast premiere). Dietz then added her to the team that conceived “The Baby Dance,” with playwright Jane Anderson and actresses Zimbalist and Linda Purl.

“The Baby Dance”--a gritty slice of life about a poor Louisiana couple and a privileged Los Angeles couple who meet over a brokered baby adoption--quickly grabbed Los Angeles’ attention and grew into a hit in the playhouse’s Balcony Theatre. The play moved on to Williamstown, Mass.; New Haven, Conn.; and, finally, off-Broadway in New York. It is now being filmed for cable TV’s Showtime network, with Anderson directing--clearly a disappointment for Sullivan, though she is reluctant to talk about it.

In recent years, Sullivan has directed premieres of such plays as Barra Grant’s “A Mother, a Daughter and a Gun” and David Simpatico’s “Wish Fulfillment” in small Los Angeles theaters, as well as a revival of Bernard Pomerance’s late-’70s “The Elephant Man” at San Jose Repertory Theatre.

And now, “The Cat’s Meow.”

In the historical research she’s doing for the show, she’s finding that “there are no two stories alike. It’s wild. But it does feel like--in everything that you read--some kind of cover-up happened. It’s just such an amazing mirror to what happens now in the world of celebrity and the press.

“If this event happened today, the media is so on top of every weird thing that goes on, that the truth probably would come out,” she continues, wondering how history might have changed if Chaplin had walked off that yacht to face news photographers’ popping flashbulbs.

She pauses for a moment, then adds: “Maybe we were better off then, not knowing all the gory details of everybody’s life. I don’t want to hear about O.J. anymore. And the whole Diana thing. . . . It’s pros and cons: How much do you want to know?”

Partly by happenstance, partly by choice, Sullivan has staged mostly new plays in the 7 1/2 years since “The Baby Dance.” Working on any play--but especially a new play--is “a continual discovery process,” she says.

For her, that process continues long after opening night. She attends about 90% of the performances, she says, and if insight dawns, she passes it along to the actors. With “The Cat’s Meow,” she expects, “we’re going to be learning about this play until the day it closes--and long after. It’s a big old classroom, and we get to keep going to school.”