Personal Mariel

It began, interestingly enough, when writer-director Robert Towne saw a picture in a magazine of Mariel Hemingway jumping on a trampoline. He was looking for someone to star in his production of Personal Best, and he was convinced that acting talents were not enough to bring off the role. "Films about athletes have never really captured what athletics is truly about--which is movement," he explained. "And I'd been told that Mariel was a cross-country skier and a good athlete."

Few, if any, articles about Mariel have failed to mention her almost tomboy fascination with sports--from skiing to running to horseback riding, hiking, bicycling, camping and tennis--so it was a natural assumption for Towne to make. "He figured I was athletic," recalled Mariel wistfully. "So did I. I thought this running and jumping would be easy to do. I didn't know it was going to be so difficult."

By the time she found out, it was too late. She had already embarked on her third feature film and her first starring role outside of TV. It meant, as getting a job always does, leaving her family in ketchum, Idaho, as well as entering into a rigorous training program that began a full year before the first frame was shot. And it also meant a controversial role as a young Olympic hopeful who, in the process of discovering her sexual identity, falls in love with another woman.

It would be difficult to find a less likely candidate for controversy. As befits someone who has spent almost all of her life in the less-than-thriving (continued on page 184)Personal Mariel(continued from page 109) metropolis of Ketchum (population: 2200) with her family (father, Jack; mother, Puck; sisters, Muffet and Margaux), Mariel seems small-town from her love of the outdoors and the simple life to her high, girlish voice, which makes her sound much younger than her 20 years. Never mind the Hemingway name (grandpa Ernest died before she was born), the Oscar nomination for Manhattan or the pictures of her partying with sister Margaux at Studio 54; Mariel remains as ingenuous as a woman nearly six feet tall can be. As a New York reporter once discovered, she's so sweet that she was even reluctant to speak ill of a fictional character in one of her movies.

Of course, critics have pointed out that it's just that quality that has made Mariel successful as an actress. That, of course, and luck. It was Mariel's older sister Margaux, a jet-set fashion model, who wanted the career in movies. When Margaux finally landed the role that was supposed to make her a star, she used her influence to get Mariel a small, if appropriately cast, part as her younger sister. The film was Lipstick, a schlocky look at rape, and both the picture and Margaux got bad reviews. But most critics found a bright spot in Mariel, then 15. "I couldn't get over how good she was in that movie," recalled Towne. "And I thought it took a great deal of something to be good in that movie."

A TV movie called I Want to Keep My Baby followed, but it was her role as Tracy, the sexually precocious 17-year-old who falls in love with 42-year-old Woody Allen in Manhattan, that created the Mariel mystique. Besides her Oscar nomination, she created a sensation at Cannes (first by getting sick during the screening of her movie, then by being one of the paparazzi's favorite subjects) and found herself sought after by all sorts of trendy types who'd never set foot in Idaho. It was a life she liked, but only in a limited way.

"Most of my friends aren't in the film industry," she explained. "I don't go on dates that much--they make me very nervous. And I don't go to parties or anything like that. I'm not real social."

While she'd bask in the limelight occasionally in New York or Los Angeles, she spent most of her time with her family ("My best friends," she calls them), riding, hiking, camping and waiting--for a good script.

The phone call from Robert Towne ended that. Mariel began her training while she was still at home--first by running, then by pumping iron and learning to master the high jump, long jump and shot-put. Towne lined up a coach in Los Angeles, who made her work four to five hours a day. "I did all the workouts the other athletes he coached did, only at a lower level, not so intense," she said. "I wanted every muscle group to show, so it was a lot of hard work. But I did become bigger and more muscular."

The training continued not only during filming but during some lengthy breaks as well. Personal Best was shut down once by last year's actors' strike and again, later, when a business feud erupted between Towne and the film's executive producer, David Geffen. "I just kept on training," Mariel shrugged. "We all knew at some point it was going to be finished." Once the strike was settled and Geffen and Towne had signed new contracts, Mariel was back on location working, although, she admitted, "it was hard to get my rhythm back."

While Mariel was fine tuning her athletic ability, most of her co-stars were nervously learning how to act. Towne chose to cast real athletes rather than actors in nearly every role--including the pivotal part of Mariel's lover, who was played by Patrice Donnelly, a member of the U. S. Olympic team in 1976. The supporting-cast list reads like a program for a stellar track-and-field event: Jane Frederick, two-time Olympian pentathlete and current U. S. heptathlon champion, and such American record holders as Deby LaPlante (100-meter hurdles), Jodi Anderson (long jump), Pam Spencer (high jump) and Maren Seidler (shot-put).

"It was my belief that rather than try to get athletic actors, I'd use real athletes, because athletes are performers, too," explained Towne. "They perform in front of crowds, they get psyched up to do things and they repeat, repeat, repeat, the way an actor has to repeat. Sixty percent of their performance as actors was already covered, because 60 percent of the performance was athletics. You were placing them in a steam room, a workout room, on the track--things with which they were so familiar that they'd fall right into it and start being themselves despite themselves. They couldn't help giving real behavior."

"I really enjoyed working with the athletes," said Mariel. "It turned out to be a swap, because they helped me get out there and make a fool of myself running and jumping. It was great."

Having a group of nonactors forced Towne to take some rather unusual steps. For the scenes in which Mariel and Patrice spend an evening getting stoned, then arm wrestle and later end up in bed, Towne outfitted both actresses with tiny earphones so that he could talk to them while filming was actually taking place.

"I find that distracting actors under certain deeply embarrassing conditions actually improves concentration," maintained Towne. "It was a way of shutting out the world."

"It tended to bother me a bit." confessed Mariel. "It was great for the arm-wrestling scene because it gives you the feeling of being away, which was good, since we were supposed to be high. But you were listening to something in your ear and saying your lines. Overall, I didn't like it so much."

But that was the only part of filming the lesbian love scenes that seems to have bothered Mariel. "It never seemed like a strange thing to me. It seemed like friendship," she said. "Patrice and I were good enough friends that we didn't feel weird about it or anything. It turned out OK."

As soon as Personal Best wrapped, Mariel was back in Idaho and the great outdoors, immediately dropping her intensive training regimen. "I still ski and run," she said, "but I don't do any of the track-and-field workouts and I don't do as much weight training as I used to. I'm not in an athlete's shape and I'm not as big as I was, but I'm definitely keeping in shape."

This time, her stay with her family will be shorter. In a rather unusual--for her--move, Mariel set her sights on a new part and proceeded to fight for it rather than wait for opportunity to come knocking in Ketchum. Her goal: the lead role in Star 80, director Bob (All That Jazz) Fosse's impressionistic biography of the late Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten, which starts filming in May. It's a part she wants very much.

"When I heard Bob was doing it, I got in contact with him and kept badgering him to read me for the part of Dorothy. He finally did, after quite a while. Then I read again. It wasn't so easy.

"It was unusual for me to really fight to get a part," she smiled, still waiting for the official word. "But it was very exciting. And it was a good thing for me to have to do."

"Never mind the Hemingway name; Mariel remains as ingenuous as a woman nearly six feet tall can be."