When actress Carol Kane- of the thirties mouth, the languid-lidded eyes, the voluptuous curls, the hate-it-or-love-it face- was in her teens, her wardrobe for two years consisted of five identical black dresses, two pairs of black Capezio flats, and five pairs of black tights. The black pahse, not accidentally, happened to coincide with a funereal mood- a classic collegiate depression several years too early, spurred on by the breakup of her parents marriage and Carol's own youthful fascination with misery. By the time she was fifteen, she had already racked up eight years acting experience and had made her professional stage debut in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; she had begun her first year of psychoanalysis; she had become a vegetarian. And, justifiably or not, by seventeen, Kane was into martyrdom and melancholy.
I was committed to misery, involved with being depressed. The world looked totally black to me. I didn't see why people should bother living if they were just going to die in the end- you know, that kind of stuff," she shrugs. It took a combination of loyal friends and Carol's own better judgement- some might call it will- to pull out and move on. "I had two close friends in those days whom I still see, (producer-manager) Doug Chapin and (composer-singer) Lewis Furey," Kane says, "They sat me down one day and told me they didn't want to be around me anymore, that I was so into misery I was boring. They forced me to see I had a clear choice: I was either going to continue in my pursuit of pain and lose my friends- or I was going to snap out of it. It was the first time in my life it dawned on me that I wasn't being fair to others by laying my depression on them. I cried all night, but finally chose to snap out of it."
It's not hard to imagine Carol crying all night; she would wear a long flannel night-gown with her luxuriant, waist-deep hair shrouding her. She might play some plaintive Joni Mitchell, maybe "The Same Situation" from Court and Spark; she'd hug her knees to her chest and stare at the wall- which might be adorned with a Matisse painting- and allow herself one last go-around with the special thrills of misery before taking final control.
"Whitey," drawls Jack Nicholson, who has acted with Carol in Carnal Knowledge (her film debut at sixteen), and in The Last Detail, "is one of the most unique people I've ever known. She is open, honest, a delight to be with, and absolutely extraordinary to work with." Whitey? Why does he call her Whitey? Nicholson's answer is cryptic, abstract, and a bit irritated; he doesn't want to be to literal. "She's just white, that's all; everything she eats is white, she's white."
Carol, curled up in the corner of a couch in her rented West Hollywood apartment, sipping Tab and smoking the first of many Tareyton 100's sandwiched between sticks of sugarless gum, opens her mythical eyes wide in pleasure when I ask her about "Whitey" Abstraction and obliqueness have nothing to do with Carol's nature, so she has no trouble pinning down Nicholson's nickname for her. "I was on a diet because I had to do a nude scene with Jack in Carnal Knowledge [a scene that was eventually cut], and I was living on white food- cottage cheese and things like that. My skin was very pale- I think I was anemic at the time- and my personality was much whiter then; I was much more introverted. At that time in my life, I was so emotionally ill, I felt I had to live up to all those painter's images in which people would describe me- Pre Raphaelite, Botticelli, Van Ecyk, whatever it was. Even Art Garfunkel," she says, giggling, "called me 'Her Whiteness.' Things have changed for me since then, but I like the name. White can mean a lot of things, can't it?"
During that white period when Carol was trying to match people's expectations of her, a compunction that she claims now to be free of, she wore only long velvet dresses- burgundy, purple or black-" because they also seemed to fit the paintings' image. I'm no longer comfortable in them. I'm more vital and energetic now, and you can't lead an active life in long velvet." She shakes her head, amused at the thought.
Today, Kane is wearing faded black andle-tied overalls over a pale blue leotard. Her feet are bare. She offers Tab or coffee or Heineken, apologizing for the lack of wine and the messiness of the apartment, which appears not so much messy as far too big for her. her true home is New York City; she rents her furnished West Hollywood place from an art dealer who has left original Warhol and Oldenburg sketches casually lying around. There are few signs of Carol's winsome personality in the place except for a few funky men's hats, some leather-bound historical books, the two long flannel nightgowns, and the Lanz classics hanging in the bathroom. When one of her two telephones rings, which is frequently, she goes to the bedroom to answer it, then comes out weighted down with a telephone in each hand, the long cords tangled together. Her voice- lazy, loose, slightly nasal, always soft- is as distinctive as her face, and she speaks in a tone that encourages intimacy; though some of the day's calls are strictly business, it always seems that she's talking to a friend. When she's in L.A., she spends a lot of time on the phone talking to her friends in New York; she needs to keep in touch.
In a few hours, Carol will leave for Long Beach, forty-five minutes away for this evening's performance of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, in which she plays Tillie- the outwardly quiet, inwardly intense, frumpy-looking teenager with the mind of a scientist and the soul of a poet- opposite Shelley Winters as the mother, Beatrice. The play is to open soon on Broadway, and the production has many loose ends, which Carol declines to discuss, apart from saying, "We're not ready yet...there are some personality conflicts."
People who have written about Kane love to talk about her "moonstone" eyes, her "dreaminess," her "Pre-Raphaelite" looks, her classic Renaissance features," her 'milk-glass skin," her "fragile bones." Certainly this makes lyrical copy, and she does appear to have all those things, but all of them are a foil for the single-minded will at the core of Carol's nature. "People project that waifish delicacy onto her," says Jack Nicholson, "but I've always known her to be practically-oriented. She takes care of business."
Carol's a disciplined perfectionist who, in her desire to work as well and as often as possible, and in her determination not to be typecast, has taken on an increasingly diverse series of roles: onstage, as a waterfront hooker in Arturo Ui with "good friend" Al Pacino, as Lucy in The Enchanted, as a witch in Macbeth, and now as Tille in Marigolds, on screen as Art Garfunkel's hippie girl friend in Carnal Knowledge, as the gentle Gitl in Hester Street (the role that earned an Academy Award nomination in 1976), as the bank teller turned hostage in Dog Day Afternoon, as the anarchist journalist in Harry and Walter Go to New York, as the hooker in The Last Detail, as Woody Allen's radical-intellectual first wife in Annie Hall, as the loudmouthed starlet in Valentino, as the giddy, fantasizing Annie Valentine in The World's Greatest Lover, and as the violent, sexually and emotionally deranged Cissy in her most recent film Clouds. A remarkable track record for a twenty-six year old woman whose determination manages to outweigh her considerable insecurities.
With a little help from friends Chapin and Furey, who saw in Kane a strength she wasn't using, she reached a personal turning point. Again, it was a friend, actresss Jane Hallaren, who fortified Carol's will when she reached a professional turning point- the role of the hooker in The Last Detail. "I thought I was up for a different part," Kane recalls, "but when Hal Ashby asked me to play the hooker, I panicked. I thought I coudn't handle it. I saw the character as a tough, cold person. I thought it was beyond me to be that kind of person. But Jane gave me a book by Colette that had a chapter on hookers, written from a very affectionate point of view- how they danced together gently, how they made life palatable- and I realized the actions and language had to be tough because the character was vulnerable and needed to protect herself. After that, I loved the role. It was an important lesson, because it taught me that if you take a risk and do something you're not prepared to do and push through it, you feel vibrant, you feel all kinds of possibilities open up." Although Carol sometimes seems surprised at the depth of her ability "to push through," people who have worked with her have no trouble recognizing it. "She's very deceptive," says Joan Micklin Silver, who directed Kane in Hester Street. "She appears fragile, quiet, occasionally shy; but she is actually a very strong woman with extremely focused ambition. It plays against first impressions of her."
Naturally, the impossibility high standards Carol sets for herself provide the ring in which her insecurities are played out. ("Why does Viva want me for a cover?" she askes increduously. "Why not Jane Fonda?") She pays the price of perfectionism: constant, nagging doubt. No matter how much she researches a role, it's never enough; no matter how much energy she pours into a film, it's never enough. A bad review will hurt her, but a good one is hard to accept. "Jane [Hallaren] saw an early screening of Hester street, and she told me afterwards that I'd be nominated for an Oscar," Carol says with some embarrassment. "I thought she was insane. Later I admit I was sort of impressed with what I did."
Gene Wilder has said he chose to cast Carol in her first major comedic role in The World's Greastest Lover because he "saw in her an innocent waif with voluptuous dreams." Those dreams, Kane amplifies, are "to be a genius; to be so full emotionally that you leave your life and become the character you're playing. Which is a contradiction, because it's something you can't hit unless you are truly crazy. To be that brilliant, that selfless, would mean you need a doctor and I don't want that...yet that's what I'm striving for, I'm living my life in pursuit of it. Did you ever see the PBS program The Epic That Never Was, on the making of I, Claudius, with Charles Laughton and Merle Oberon? The clips they showed of Laughton in the role were so incredibly brilliant; he was a genius, totally transparent, everything bubbling on the surface, so precise, so gentle with his characters in everything he did..." She is so impassioned that she forgets to flick her cigarette ash, and her words spill into each other. "Anyway, on the program, which was shown after Laughton's death, the interviewer was asking Merle Oberon to describe him. And she told how Laughton would put his head in her lap every day and cry and say, 'I can't find the man. I can't find the man.' He was so full, so brilliant, yet he didn't think he had it."
When I tell Carol that Nicholson has compared her professionally to "a blend of Bette Davis and Peter Lorre," she wrings her hands in pleasure. "That's wonderful. I'll take it! But I wouldn't mind a little Laughton thrown in. What else did Jack say? Was it good?" She is so seductive in her need to know that I can't resist reading her his quotes. She sits completely still, drinking in his praise, and when I get to his last comment- "Make her sound good, because that's how I feel about her"- her delight is palpable. "When did you talk to him? she asks, wanting every detail. But when I tell her, her delight turns to worry: "That was the same day I was up at his house. Oh, I hope he's not mad at me..." Why mad at you? "Well, maybe he thinks I came over just so he would tell you good things about me." She worries over the thought for a few minutes, drops it, then chews on it again later.
Carol's still young; although her list of professional credits is impressive, she hasn't developed any hard edges. She is more likely to trust you than not; she needs intimacy. After eleven years of analysis, she is not at all analytical about herself or others; her actions and reactions are guided by her emotions, not her intellect, and her humor is gentle. She would make a good friend. Indeed, Carol holds her fiends in high esteem and is loyal almost to a fault; she never fails to give credit to them, and often fails to give herself enough. Jane Hallaren has "a fantastic sense of humor; she saw and encouraged me in my own humor, which had been hidden." Mike Nichols, who directed Carol in
Carnal Knowledge, was the first director to say to me, 'You can't do anything wrong, so do whatever you want; and I believed him; it made me try things I wouldn't have tried without that kind of encouragement. I wasn't aware of a lot of things people would mention about me like my eyes, for instance. I didn't thing they were particularly unusual, or even large. It was Jack [Nicholson] who told me to study Bette Davis on film and watch the way she used her eyes, which are similar to mine. He taught me so much about film."
Carol made her acting debut at age seven as a Munchin in a Children's Theater production of The Wizard of Oz, in her hometown, Cleveland, Ohio. For the next few years, she lived with her family in Paris, while her architect father studied under a Fulbright grant, and later in Haiti. At twelve, she went off to a boarding school in Connecticut. "I remember being fat and unattractive as a kid, and I played with makeup instead of dolls." At thirteen, her childhood world fell apart when her parents divorced and she moved with her mother to New York. "When you're little and your parents aren't getting along," she ways, "you feel it's your fault. Even now, I still fell that if I were really a perfect person, I could make everyone happy."
Today, Carol's relationship with her father is "strong and tumultuous- we're very close, but there's a scar because he still fells bad about missing some of my sister's and my growing up." Carol admits, though "it may sound sexist," that- like many women who had strong and appreciative fathers- she prefers working with men. "I'm more excited, in a way, working with male directors, because ther's that electricity that goes on between a man and a woman that doesn't happen between a woman and a woman. There's a little edge to it; I think it has something to do with pleasing your dad. If a male director is pleased with you, you get the child's feeling of pleasing a parent, which is somehow more all-encompassing that pleasing an equal. There's another thing, too," Kane adds. "If I don't like a male director, I can still have a heathier fight with him because, somehow, I can better separate out our territories. A woman will fight back on the same level as me- an emotional level. I'm somehow more comfortable being knocked down than knocking down, because I feel guilty doing the knocking; I feel that a man can take it, but it will hurt a woman. God, that does sound sexist, but I mean it only from an emotional point of view. Please don't take it out of context. Basically, the main thing is, if they're good they're good- men or women."
As eager to communicate as Carol is there's one subject she won't discuss: her love life, other than to say that she's single. One senses, however, that she has not yet found the right mesh, that she can become disheartened about the lack of a romantic relationship in her life, that she is disturbed about her tendency to seek what's not right for her. But it's equally clear that she's strong enough and open enough to continue to take emotional risks. As for the trappings of stardom, she likes "the fun things like limousines, the things you don't get in everyday life, on the childlike level of it being a toy. But I don't always have alimo, and I don't have much money yet. Lover was the first big money I made, and that was mostly used to pay off debts." she says, laughting. She likes classical music ("but I don't know enough to name anything specifically") and soft-folk-rock--Joni Mitchell, Carol King, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Art Garfunkel. She loves to go to the theater and out ot dinner with friends and her favorite vices are "smoking, drinking and especially food. Chinese and Mexican and baked potatoes- any kind of potatoes. I love food. I'm a compulsive eater and I always will be, but I always go on a diet when I'm in a play or a film. I used to fast, not for dieting, but for causes. I used to think it would matter, which seems ridiculous now. I fasted for ten days when the Reverend Martin Luther King was killed. At the time, it seemed important."
Kane went through a "flower-child phase" in the sixties, like everyone else. "It was mostly a visual thing for me," she says. But one thing she carefully avoided was college. She got as far as the registration table at Bernard Baruch College in New York. "They rattled off a list of stuff I had to take, none of which I cared about, so I just turned around and walked out. When I find the gaps in my knowledge that I need to fill, I'll fill them. I never cared about science, but when I took the role of Tillie in Marigolds, I had to learn about atoms, because they were important to her. I just have never understood the importance of book learning for its own sake; whatever I know has come out of the need to apply it in a real-life situation." Carol still has an "irrational prejudice against college students; they don't have any color, they blend into each other, they all use the same language. I got an anxiety attack just going onto the Boston University campus to do a radio show; everyone on the campus was dressed the same. I felt both inferior, because I don't know as much as they do, and superior, because what I do know, I know with passion."
Given a time machine, Carol would pilot it to "Hollywood in the twenties and thirties, in the silent days when Pickford and Chaplin were forming United Artis," or to Paris in the "Gertrude Stein salon days, and during the time when Picasso was a young man," or to "New York, in the days of the Algonquin round table. All those periods were artistically exciting. They were bands of people striving to create new art forms. And the language was so much more individual." Kane's considerable ability to fantasize and her innate sensitivity- the qualities that make her an artist- carry with them a nightmare edge. Form earliest childhood, she's been obsessed with death," dreaming about her mother dying, avoiding horror movies because "I believe all of them," expecting snipers to shoot her while she's onstage- particularly if it's outdoor theater. "I'm not as obsessed as I used to be," she says, "but I still think of death when I'm feeling particularly vulnerable- when I'm afraid someone doesn't like me, or will leave me, or if I'm not feeling good in a part I'm playing. But it's not at all as bad as it was."
Nothing's quite as bad as it was, a lovely turn of events that Carol attributes with relief to a combination of age, experience, and analysis. Like her friend, Diane Keaton, Kane has been given to shrouding her body in loose, asexual-style clothing. "I'm not happy with my body most of the time," admits the five-foot-two-inch 102-pound Carol, "but if I'm with someone who likes me, it doesn't matter." But she's slowly growing out of the baggy-clothes syndrome. Gene Wilder has been quoted as saying that Carol becomes more womanly in The World's Greatest Lover- in which she wore one fitted harem costume that showed onced and for all, that she has a body, and Carol agrees that a lot of her self-consciousness vanished in that role. "I was given an enormous amount of attention and appreciation on that set," she says, "and that encouraged me to expose myself more."
With her leotards, her romantic hair, her loose way of moving, Carol might have been a ballet dancer in another life. Can she imagine expressing her self in any medium other than acting? She considers the question carefully. "My parents said I painted well when I was a child, but acting is what I enjoyed most and worked at hardest. I used to think I wanted to write, but I don't think I could work in a room by myself. I need the feedback and warmth that come from working with people- it's something really special." Accordingly, Carol is taken with the concept of ensemble acting. For a time in New york, she and six other women formed a roup called The Company, which has since dissolved, "because we all started moving around." I ask her to compose a fantasy ensemble of actors, living or dead. The idea excites her, as always, her mobile face is the barometer of her feelings. She wraps her arms around her knees and begins: "Jane Hallaren, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, John Cazale [who played Fredo in The Godfather], Charles Laughton, Diane Keaton, Gene Wilder, Dom DeLuise, Seymour Cassel [who appeared in Valentino], Marilyn Fried [Kane's acting teacher], Elsa Lanchester, Bobby De Niro, Randy Quaid, Sylvia Miles, [of Warhol fame], Vivien Leigh, Kate Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Kim Stanley, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters, Lauren Frost, Geraldine Page, Lee Grant...and of course Bette Davis, because of her enormous range, because she plays everything full out, takes risks in every way, doesn't care if she has to look ugly.
She is so into composing her list that she forgets it's a fantasy. She catches her breath with doubt, hesitates, then says, "I don't have to be the head of the company, do I?" END

The article is accompanied by a full page color cover photo of Carol Kane's head and neck line- A VISIT WITH CAROL KANE; a two page color photo of Caro with her hair spread from page to page, looking soulfully at the camera; a small color photo of Carol leaning over a pool table ready to take a pool shot, looking wistfully at the camera- 'People project that waifish delicacy onto her,' says Jack Nicholson, 'but I've always known her to be practically oriented. She takes care of business.'