'Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me'

Meanwhile, we’re fortunate to have Shoot Me, a documentary directed by Chiemi Karasawa, made only a year ago, to celebrate this actress/singer’s remarkable life. Shot with a handheld camera, the biopic follows Stritch (almost 87 at the time) from her digs at the Carlyle, through to the streets of New York, on her way to an AA meeting or the Stella Adler Studio, to the Hamptons and back, to Detroit to give a concert in the town where she was born, on the stage at Town Hall.

Interspersed with these scenes are clips from past films and performances. Over her illustrious 70-year career on stage, screen, and TV, Stritch was directed by the best, including Harold Prince and Woody Allen. She worked with an endless array of fine actors, from Rock Hudson to James Gandolfini, Tiny Fey, and Alec Baldwin. She was a definitive interpreter of Noël Coward, Neil Simon, and Edward Albee (she’s played Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Claire in A Delicate Balance). Stephen Sondheim wrote “Ladies Who Lunch” (Company) for her. The documentary film version of her Tony-winning one-woman Broadway show Elaine Stritch at Liberty also won her an Emmy – and, in addition to her other numerous Tony nominations, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

But the most compelling feature of this candid biopic is the documentation of her struggles — with alcoholism, with late-onset diabetes, and, most painfully, with loss of memory. “Everybody’s got a sack of rocks,” Stritch says (quoting her late husband John Bay.) We see her suffering through rehearsals: “It’s hard enough to remember Sondheim’s lyrics, even when you don’t have diabetes,” she quips.

An unforgettable performer

There is one clip where she’s in performance at the Carlyle and forgets the words to a song. “Sing the words, or you’re fired!” Stritch calls out to her loyal accompanist, Rob Bowman, who bails her out, and her performance ends with cheers. “She’s been through it all,” says a musician. “You see her struggle, and then you see her make it to the other side. There’s something truly beautiful in that.”

There are select personal reminiscences of her early years. She tells one anecdote of the second date she had with John F. Kennedy. In her signature candid style, she accounts how she (still a virgin) asked him up for a drink. JFK replied: “If coming up for a nightcap means listening to Glenn Miller and eating scrambled eggs, I’m not interested.” Says Stritch, reminiscing: “I knew he’d go somewhere. He knew how to lay it on the line, and so did I.”

For her courage, fortitude, and perseverance, she gained the admiration of her colleagues, some of whom are interviewed in the documentary. Said Harold Prince: “She’s got the guts of a jailbird. . . . What makes her interesting is that the convent girl is still there. [Stritch was born a Catholic.] You see how vulnerable she is and how deep her insecurities.”

A special brand of glamour

What captures our hearts in this film is Stritch’s inimitable style: her brassy persona, her raspy delivery, her drive, her honesty, her fearless confrontation of her demons, even her endless profanities — in short, her special brand of glamour. Said one woman who met her at an AA meeting and became a close friend: “She’s a Molotov cocktail of madness, sanity, and genius. I don’t think I’d be sober if I’d never met her.”

During a scene in Mount Sinai Hospital (after a diabetes attack), she speaks brokenly of having to face the end of her career. “I’ve never been interested in the picture I’m going to leave — except in the big time, in the Music Box or the Shubert Theatre. Their love for me is what I needed — I couldn’t get it anywhere else.”

And yet, one month later, she’s back. “Dying is easy, comedy is hard,” she says, as she returns to the stage, determined to embrace the challenge again. “There’s something exciting about being afraid,” Stritch says.

Listening to her at 86 singing “I Feel Pretty," or “Everybody Says Don’t," or “Everything’s Coming up Roses,” you feel that she owns those songs. “I don’t like the word “old,” Stritch says. “I like ‘older’. And why not enjoy it. There’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it.”

Elaine Stritch died yesterday, leaving the words of her favorite song, “I’m Still Here,” ringing in our ears. For me, she’s the epitome of show-business glamour. She glowed with the radiance of a performer who loved what she did, and she lived life to the fullest, without apology. She had sass, she had style, and she made a lot of people happy along the way.