Opportunity Comes Tapping, Miller the Survivor Responds

If David Lynch had tried to invent a character like Ann Miller, he most likely would not have made her any different than the genuine item. So it makes sense, in a weird way, that the filmmaker whose fervid imagination produced “Twin Peaks” and “Blue Velvet” would choose the brassy MGM tap queen for his latest cinematic fever dream, “Mulholland Dr.,” which had one of the highest average per-screen grosses in its limited national opening Friday.

There’s an unlikely but canny symmetry between Miller, 78, who’s been around Hollywood since “Gone With the Wind” was in development--enduring by will as much as talent, reinventing herself through seven decades of nightclubs, film, Broadway, commercials and television--and Lynch, who relishes the larger-than-life, artifice and self-invention.

To see Miller once is to never forget her. While her peers have died, retired, sell diapers and acquiesce to geriatric sitcom cliches, Miller determinedly remains the glamour diva: flamenco-style jet-black hair with spit curls, false eyelashes and full war paint, stockings and heels for all appearances. (While I’m in her Beverly Hills drawing room waiting for her to come downstairs, her assistant explains: “She always waits till the last second to put on her clothes, so there won’t be any wrinkles.”)

That’s Miller’s training ground--the MGM boot-camp finishing school of the studio glory days. And while she never reached the heights like fellow MGM alumni Judy Garland, Debbie Reynolds or June Allyson, she has survived a ruthless business through willpower, an aggressively upbeat energy and hard-core, machine-gun tapping that earned her a place in history. (“I did 500 taps a minute, honey,” she boasts.)

And that terrain is what Lynch mines subliminally from Miller for her few brief scenes as Coco, the Hollywood courtyard apartment-complex manager who plays mother hen to a star-struck newcomer, played by Naomi Watts. Behind the lacquered, manicured hair are shadows of Mocambo nights, fleeting flashbulbs--and the school of hard knocks.

Lynch’s genius is the visual shorthand, and Miller’s got history in spades, as people of her era used to say. She was a chorus girl at 12, lying about her age to get the break. “I was hired at the [L.A.] Casanova Club, as a dancer, and was on the covers of [the New York papers] Daily News and the Daily Mirror by the time I was 16. Isn’t that sick?” she confides.

She had contracts all over Hollywood, ranging from the mighty MGM to the dusty Western lot of Republic Pictures. (“Honey, I worked with Gene Autry--and was one of the first girls that kissed him other than his bloody horse!” she asserts.) She said the first of her three husbands knocked her down a flight of stairs when she was nearly nine months pregnant, and the baby died.

But Miller also got breaks. In only her third picture, “Stage Door,” she catapulted into the big leagues, playing opposite Lucille Ball and Katharine Hepburn. Two pictures later, she was in the year’s best picture Oscar winner, Frank Capra’s “You Can’t Take It With You,” a wacky member of Jean Arthur’s family, betrothed to Jimmy Stewart.

She slogged through the ‘40s in B-movies, but finally got her signature role as Fred Astaire’s dance partner in “Easter Parade,” holding her own against Astaire and Garland. That led to Miller’s other famous part, one of the three babes nabbed by sailors Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin in “On the Town.”

And while Miller is pushing 80, the same street-smarts that have kept her in the game also give her the sharpness to have noticed and followed Lynch’s subversive work since “Dune.” “I like that he does mysterious things ... off kilter ... offbeat,” says the actress. “He leaves you perplexed, whereas other directors would not do that.”

Tough Yet Metaphysical

But the steamy lesbian sex scenes in “Mulholland Dr.” apparently challenged her generational boundaries. “Honey, when I saw the footage at the Directors Guild, I almost fell out of my seat,” she says, laughing again.

But mock-shock is more of Miller’s shtick. She’s tough. She doesn’t hesitate to keep a gun by her bed--and would use it. She’s also deeply metaphysical, and, like Lynch, believes in existence on another plane. In a specific past life that resonates for her--illustrated by the volumes of mythology and Egyptian history on her library shelves--Miller asserts she was the only female pharaoh who ever ruled Egypt. “When I finally saw a picture of her, it scared the hell out of me. It looked just like me.”

So when Lynch invited Miller to his Hollywood Hills house last year to talk about Coco (he never auditions his actors), they had instant chemistry. “She’s a no-baloney gal, a fantastic Hollywood gal,” Lynch says, in his countrified style. And Miller, who sees herself as gutsy, liked that he had the gumption to buy back the rights to “Mulholland Dr.” when ABC nixed the proposed TV series, and he raised the money to reconfigure it as a film. “It took courage to do that,” she says.

Lynch’s directing style is also very much like that of her favorite director, the Oscar-winning Frank Capra who, she says, treated his actors with care. “Frank took actors to the side to correct them. He talked quietly. He didn’t embarrass them,” she explains. “David does the same thing.”

But Miller is no shrinking violet. She survived relentless directors like Busby Berkeley, who forced her to dance when her foot was bleeding from hours of rehearsal. “Can we please stop to change my stocking or put a Band-Aid on the blister?”’ she begged. (The answer was no). And she survived 12 years of Louis B. Mayer, who was known to have an appetite for well-built brunettes, but Miller doesn’t elaborate. Miller was also the family breadwinner from an early age and bought her mother the Mediterranean-style house Ann now lives in (in the flats of Beverly Hills) when she was 18.

Much later in life, Miller also hit the boards and dinner-theater circuit when she needed to cover hefty medical bills for her mother’s round-the-clock care. “Honey, I busted my butt dancing, and slipping and sliding through the beef, to pay those nurses,” she quips.

As the biggest-name actor of “Mulholland Dr.,” Miller’s nose was a little out of joint at distributor Universal, which pushed the two young female stars and Lynch to the media. But she had her vindication, she says, at the New York premiere at Lincoln Center. “The house came down when I went out.”

Casting Miller was an inspired Lynchian touch, some critics said. In recounting the plot in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert did a double take: “ ... a landlady (Ann Miller, yes, Ann Miller).” Ebert later explained, “In a dream set in Hollywood, it only makes sense (dream-sense) that your landlady would be a movie star, preferably someone from the Golden Age, and Ann Miller is a perfect fit.” Groused New York Observer critic Rex Reed: “I hope [Lynch] wasn’t using her to make fun of her. I do think that to see a musical icon in tawdry trash is like mixing boric acid and cherries jubilee.””

Reflecting on the momentary intersection of dark surrealist Lynch and sunny musical star, Miller shows an appreciation for the surreal: “Honey, if Louis B. Mayer saw me in this picture, he would turn over in his grave.”