Chapter 1East Meadow

Foreword

My beat, for the better part of my working life, has been the midcentury. The Rank starlets and the Ealing craftsmen, the live-television playwrights, the repertory actresses who held the British and American stage and screen together between the war and the color era — these are my people, and I have spent decades in their company. Their stories share a shape I know by heart: enormous talent meeting an industry with a fixed idea of what that talent was for, and the long, quiet negotiation that followed. So when I told colleagues I was writing a book about Adrienne Shelly — an American independent actress and filmmaker whose whole career fits inside the 1990s and the first years of this century — the polite question underneath their congratulations was obvious. She was not my period. She was, they meant, not my subject.

She was exactly my subject. She had simply arrived forty years late.

Because the story I had been writing all along — the woman whose intelligence exceeds the roles on offer, who is photographed beautifully and heard rarely, who decides at last that the only reliable route to good parts is to write them herself — did not end with the studio system. It moved. It crossed the Atlantic, went downtown, put on a waitress's apron, and turned up in the American independent cinema of the late twentieth century wearing the face of a young woman from Long Island. I first encountered that face the way most of my generation in Britain did: in the Hal Hartley films, on the art-house and late-night circuit, where her stillness did more work than other actors' motion. I filed her away, as critics do, as a performer. It took me years to understand that I had been looking at a filmmaker who had not yet been allowed to make films, and that the misfiling was not mine alone. It was the industry's, and it is half the story of this book.

The other half is what happened in November 2006, and I want to be plain about how I have handled it. This is not a true-crime book. The murder is in these pages because it is in the life, and I have worked from the public record — the press coverage, the court proceedings, the published accounts of the people who knew and loved her, the documentary testimony her family has chosen to make available — rather than pretending to an intimacy I do not have. What I expected, going in, was a career study interrupted by a tragedy. What I found was harder and stranger: a life whose meaning keeps being contested by its ending, an artist whose most-read obituary was written by a stranger with a staged rope, and a body of work that has spent nearly twenty years quietly winning the argument anyway.

The research kept returning me to a single gap. There is the ending Adrienne Shelly wrote — a mother and daughter, hand in hand, walking away free — and there is the ending she received, in a small office in the West Village, at forty. Every document I read, every frame I rewatched, sits somewhere in the space between those two endings. A biography of this woman is an attempt to hold both without letting either cancel the other, and I will not pretend the holding is comfortable. It is not meant to be.

Why is she worth a book? Not because she was murdered; that is the reason the wider world knows her name, and it is exactly the wrong reason. She is worth a book because she solved a problem — how to make a film that is funny about what is painful, personal and universal at once — that most filmmakers spend whole careers failing to solve, and because she solved it after fifteen years of an industry telling her the problem was not worth solving. She is worth a book because the pies, the deadpan, the women smarter than their circumstances, constitute a genuine and durable body of work. And she is worth a book because the midcentury story I thought I knew — the woman negotiating with an industry over the size of her own life — turns out not to be a period piece at all. It is a continuing story. She is one of its authors.

— Donovan Hadley, Manchester

Chapter 1 · East Meadow

The house on Long Island sat on a street like every other street in East Meadow: flat lawns, split-levels, driveways with room for two cars. It was a town designed for people who had left somewhere harder, which is to say it was a Jewish suburb of the classic postwar kind, built for families who had crossed water and survived displacement and wanted, above all, a school district and a yard. Sheldon Levine and Elaine Langbaum had both grown up in New York City. They married young and started a family: their daughter Adrienne was born in Queens on June 24, 1966, before the Levines made the classic postwar move east to Nassau County. It was the middle of the decade that was supposed to transform everything but that in the Long Island suburbs mostly meant the lawns stayed trimmed and the synagogue stayed full.

Adrienne Rebecca Levine grew up in a household that valued education without being intellectual about it. Sheldon worked in business; Elaine kept the home. There were brothers. When Adrienne was twelve, Sheldon died suddenly of a heart attack. She was away at summer camp when it happened. The loss arrived as the first evidence that comfort guaranteed nothing, that a life could stop without warning, and it was a grief she carried quietly for years; it would surface later in the most deliberate act of self-definition she ever made. The family was comfortable in the way that Long Island families of that generation understood comfort: they were not rich, but nothing was missing. The refrigerator was full. The television was on. The neighbors were known. The world beyond Nassau County existed in the way that weather existed. It was out there, it affected things, but it was not something you went looking for.

What set Adrienne apart, and what everyone who knew her as a child later recalled, was the performing. She was a girl who put on shows. She organized the neighborhood children into casts. She wrote scripts on loose-leaf paper and assigned roles and directed rehearsals in backyards and basements. This was not unusual behavior for a theatrical child, and Long Island in the 1970s produced its share of them, but the particularity of Adrienne's instinct was distinctive. She did not simply want to be watched. She wanted to control what was being watched. She wanted to build the thing, not just stand in the middle of it. The difference between a child who performs and a child who directs is the difference between wanting attention and wanting authority, and Adrienne Levine wanted both but preferred the second.

She began performing at age ten at Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Training Center, the legendary summer camp in the Catskills in upstate New York that has served, across its decades of operation, as an incubator for an improbable concentration of American talent. The camp was founded in 1975 in Loch Sheldrake, New York, and its alumni roster reads like a casting breakdown for any major production of the last thirty years: Robert Downey Jr., Natalie Portman, Zach Braff, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jon Cryer. To spend summers at Stagedoor Manor was to understand, for the first time, that the thing you did in your backyard, the performing and directing and the building of worlds from the raw materials of imagination and enthusiasm, was also a thing that adults did professionally, that the gap between the child's play and the career was a gap that could be crossed.

Adrienne crossed it with the urgency of someone who had always known the gap was there and had been impatient to close it. At Stagedoor she found, for the first time, a community of people who understood what she was. They were not the suburban classmates who thought the plays were cute. They were children who wanted, with the same ferocity she possessed, to perform and direct and create. The revelation was not that she was talented (she already suspected that) but that talent was not unusual in the way East Meadow had led her to believe. There were other children like her. The world contained them. The question was how to find the world.

Her professional debut came while she was still a student at Jericho High School in Jericho, New York. She was cast in a summer-stock production of Annie, the musical, playing a role that required her to sing and act and be seen by an audience. The experience of performing in a proper theater, with lights and costumes and an audience that had paid to be there, was different from the backyards and the Stagedoor stages, and the difference was not primarily technical. It was the difference between rehearsing for something and being in it: the shock of reality, the irreversibility of a live performance, the way a stage creates a contract between performer and audience that cannot be undone once the curtain rises.

The public schools of her Long Island childhood were solid and unimaginative, the kind of suburban system that prepared students competently for college without challenging them to think about what else they might do with their minds. Adrienne was a good student, bright and verbal and engaged in class, but the center of her life was always somewhere adjacent to the curriculum. She acted in school plays. She was funny in the way that smart girls in suburban schools are funny: quick, observational, slightly too sharp for the room. Humor was a tool she understood early. It created distance and intimacy simultaneously. It allowed her to say things that would otherwise be too direct, too strange, too honest.

The Long Island of Adrienne's childhood was a particular kind of cultural landscape. It was close enough to Manhattan to receive its signals (the art, the theater, the music drifted east along the Long Island Expressway like weather) but far enough away that those signals arrived diluted, secondhand. A girl who wanted to make things, who wanted to direct and write and perform, could sense that the real world for those ambitions existed forty miles west, across the river, in a city that Long Island both fed and feared. The commuter towns were built on the premise that the city was a place you went to work and came home from. The idea that someone might go there to become something was tolerated but not entirely understood.

Adrienne's relationship with her mother was close and complicated in ways that would echo through her later work. Elaine Levine was a woman of her generation: devoted to her children, defined by her domestic role, intelligent in ways that the structure of her life did not fully use. The dynamic between a bright, ambitious daughter and a capable, constrained mother is one of the oldest stories in American suburban life, and it became one of the central themes of Adrienne's filmmaking. The women in her films are almost always smarter than their circumstances. They are trapped not by stupidity but by the arrangements that have been made around them: marriages, economies, geographies that hold them in place while their minds race ahead.

Whether Adrienne recognized this dynamic in her own family while she was living it is impossible to know. Children rarely see their parents' lives as material. But the pattern was there: a woman of intelligence living within a structure that did not require her intelligence, in a place that rewarded compliance more than creativity. It would take years and distance before Adrienne could see it clearly enough to write about it, but by the time she did, in the pies and the aprons and the small-town diners of Waitress, the emotional architecture was unmistakable.

The question of when Adrienne Levine decided to become an actress, and the related, later question of when she decided to become a filmmaker, does not have a clean answer. There was no single revelation, no lightning-bolt moment that the biographical tradition demands. There was instead a steady accumulation: the backyard plays, the school productions, the Stagedoor summers, the growing awareness that the thing she did naturally, the thing that felt like breathing, was a thing that people did professionally in the city she could almost see from the south shore of Long Island on clear days.

By the time she reached high school, the direction was set. She was going to study theater. She was going to go somewhere that would take the thing she already knew she could do and give it a formal name and a set of techniques. The question was where, and the answer, Boston University's College of Fine Arts, would take her away from Long Island and into the orbit of a theatrical tradition that would, paradoxically, prepare her not for the stage but for something she could not yet name.

What she left behind in East Meadow was not nothing. The suburb had given her a subject even as it failed to give her a vocation. The flatness of it, the tidiness, the way people arranged their lives around comfort and avoided the questions that comfort was designed to suppress: these would become the raw material of her artistic imagination. Her films would return again and again to women in small, enclosed worlds, women whose inner lives were wilder and stranger than the places they inhabited, women who baked pies or worked in diners or lived in apartments that were slightly too small for the size of their personalities. The geography of confinement that she learned in East Meadow, the way a safe place can also be a cage, was the first thing she understood about the world, and the last thing she would stop writing about.

The 1970s and early 1980s on Long Island were years of cultural stagnation that produced, as cultural stagnation often does, a generation of people who wanted to leave. The energy crisis, the fiscal crisis, the general sense that the postwar bargain (work hard, buy a house, raise your children, retire) was fraying at its edges gave the suburbs a quality of exhaustion that was not dramatic enough to be despair but was persistent enough to color everything. East Meadow was not depressed in the economic sense, but it was depressed in the atmospheric sense, a place where the future looked like an extension of the present, and the present was adequate without being interesting.

For a girl of Adrienne's temperament, restless and observant and drawn to the dramatic, this adequacy was its own form of privation. She was not hungry. She was not mistreated. She was not the heroine of a story about overcoming adversity. She was something more common and, in its way, more poignant: a talented person in a place that had no use for her particular talent. East Meadow had Little League teams and PTA meetings and Fourth of July fireworks and none of the institutions that a young artist needs: no theaters, no film societies, no communities of practice where someone who wanted to write and direct and perform could find others who wanted the same things.

The television was the window. The films that played on Long Island's movie screens, the blockbusters and the comedies and the occasional art-house import that found its way to a Nassau County multiplex, were the evidence that the world Adrienne imagined actually existed somewhere. She watched films the way that future writers read books: not as entertainment but as instruction, studying the mechanisms by which stories were told and emotions were produced. She was, without knowing the vocabulary for it, a student of cinema long before she was a student of anything else.

She was eighteen when she left. She had lived her entire life within the borders of Nassau County. She would never live there again.

The Boston that Adrienne Levine encountered in the fall of 1984 was not the city of her ambitions (that was still New York) but it was the first place that treated her ambitions as legitimate. Boston University's College of Fine Arts, which housed its program in theater arts, was a rigorous conservatory-style program that trained actors in the classical tradition: voice, movement, text analysis, scene study. The faculty were working professionals. The standards were high. The expectation was that students would emerge prepared for careers on the stage, in a profession that had no interest in their feelings and considerable interest in their technique.

Adrienne threw herself into the work. She was disciplined and talented and possessed of that particular quality that marks certain young performers: she was interesting to watch even when she was doing nothing. The camera would later confirm what her teachers and fellow students already knew: that her face communicated thought, that her stillness was as expressive as other people's motion, that she had the gift of seeming to think on screen, which is the rarest and most valuable thing an actor can do. At BU she was also surrounded, for the first time, by students who were as serious about theater and film as she was. The social world of the theater program was competitive in the way that any conservatory is competitive (everyone is talented, everyone is watching everyone else, the rankings are informal but absolute) and Adrienne moved through it with a combination of ambition and social ease that suggested she was not threatened by the competition but invigorated by it.

But Boston University also exposed her to something she had not anticipated: the limits of acting as a vocation for someone who wanted to control the whole picture. Acting, as she was learning it, was an art of interpretation. You served the playwright's text, the director's vision, the ensemble's needs. For a young woman who had been writing scripts and assigning roles since childhood, this was both valuable training and a fundamental misalignment. She was learning the craft of executing someone else's ideas with increasing skill, while the part of her that wanted to generate her own ideas grew restless.

The distinction she was working out, without quite having the vocabulary for it yet, was the distinction between an actor and an auteur, between someone who serves a vision and someone who has one. It was not that she was ungrateful for the training or disdainful of acting as a craft. She would be an actress for the rest of her life, and the training she received at BU would inform every performance she gave, including the performances she directed. What the training could not do was satisfy the creative impulse that had been driving her since she organized her first backyard production. Acting gave her half of what she wanted. She wanted all of it.

She did not finish the program. She dropped out after her junior year. The decision was not impulsive. She had been building toward it for months, weighing the practical value of the degree against the cost of staying in a program that was teaching her things she needed to know but that could not, by its nature, be the place where the kind of work she wanted to do would become possible. New York was forty-five minutes away by plane, a few hours by bus. The independent film world that would eventually give her everything she needed was already forming in lower Manhattan. A BU degree was useful but not essential. What mattered was being in New York, auditioning, getting seen, finding the people who were making the kind of work she wanted to be part of.

New York in 1987 was a city that still allowed young artists to survive. Rents in the outer boroughs and parts of lower Manhattan were not yet prohibitive. A young woman with a part-time job and a shared apartment could sustain herself while auditioning, taking classes, working in experimental theater, building the network of relationships that might eventually lead to work. This was the infrastructure of the American independent art world: not grants or institutions but cheap rent and flexible time, and Adrienne arrived just before it began to disappear.

The city she entered was still, in the late 1980s, a place where the physical landscape communicated possibility. Lower Manhattan was scarred and cheap and alive. The East Village was a warren of small theaters, galleries, and performance spaces where young artists could rent a stage for almost nothing and put on a show for an audience of thirty. The downtown scene (the term was used loosely, covering everything from experimental theater to performance art to the nascent independent film world) was accessible in a way that it would not be a decade later, when rising rents would push the artists out and the bankers in. Adrienne arrived at the tail end of an era, though she did not know it was an era until it was over.

She took whatever work she could find: waitressing, temping, the standard survival jobs of the aspiring New York actor. She auditioned constantly. She took acting classes to supplement her BU training. She was learning the city the way all young transplants learn it: through exhaustion and exhilaration and the daily negotiation between what you want and what you can afford.

She changed her name. Adrienne Levine became Adrienne Shelly, taking her late father's given name, Sheldon, and distilling it into Shelly, carrying his memory forward in the professional identity she was building. The change was partly practical (there were other Adrienne Levines in the acting world), partly a deliberate act of self-creation. Shelly. It was softer than Levine, more ambiguous, less obviously ethnic. It could belong to anyone. It was the name of a person who had not yet been defined, which was exactly the point: a name for the woman she was still in the process of becoming, a blank slate she could write herself onto.

The New York she entered was vast and indifferent and full of people who wanted exactly what she wanted. She was one of thousands of young actors in the city, most of whom would never be seen by anyone who mattered. The odds were terrible. The competition was relentless. The rejection was constant. What distinguished Adrienne Shelly from the other twenty-year-olds riding the subway to open calls was not talent alone (talent was common) but a combination of persistence, intelligence, and an instinct for finding the people who were making the kind of work she wanted to be part of.

She gravitated toward the independent film world that was forming downtown. She attended screenings at the Anthology Film Archives on Second Avenue, which had been showing experimental and independent film since 1970 and which functioned as a kind of church for people who believed that cinema was an art form rather than an industry. She found her way to the screenings and readings and parties where the community was constituting itself, where people like Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch and the young filmmakers who would define the next decade of American independent cinema were already present, already working, already building something.

Within about two years of arriving in New York, she would be cast in a film that changed independent cinema, and soon after on screen in one of the defining works of the movement. She did not know this yet. All she knew was that she was in the city, that she was working, and that the life she had imagined in the basements and backyards of East Meadow was finally, improbably, beginning to take shape.

The experience of being a young woman in New York in the late 1980s, particularly a young woman who wanted to make things rather than simply consume them, was the experience of living at the intersection of two contradictory forces. The first was the sense of possibility that the city and the independent art world provided: the feeling that anything could be made, that the resources required were minimal and the imagination required was abundant, that the history of the city's creative life was a continuous argument for the value of making things from scratch with limited means. The second was the grinding reality of survival: the need to pay rent, to eat, to maintain the practical conditions that allowed the work to continue.

Adrienne navigated this intersection with a practicality that was itself a form of discipline. She did the work that was available, the waitressing and the temping and the survival jobs, without pretending that it was the work she wanted to do, and she did the work she wanted to do without pretending that the survival requirements would disappear if she ignored them. This was the ordinary economy of the working artist in any era, but it was an economy that rewarded certain kinds of people: those who could tolerate uncertainty, who found the constraints clarifying rather than paralyzing, who understood that the difficulty was not an obstacle to the work but the condition in which the work was possible.

The name Adrienne Shelly, the professional identity that replaced Adrienne Levine, was a declaration of this understanding. She had not become Adrienne Shelly by accident or by convention. She had chosen the name with the deliberateness that characterized everything she did, carrying her father's name forward in a form that was both personal and practical, both an act of grief and an act of self-creation. The name said: I am someone new. I am building something from the beginning. I am not the girl who grew up in the suburbs of New York, or rather I am that girl, and I am also someone that girl could become if she chose.

The New York of the late 1980s was both the best and the worst place for a young artist with those convictions. It was the best because it offered the community and the culture and the specific geography of possibility that the performing arts required. It was the worst because it was expensive and competitive and organized around hierarchies of talent and connection that were difficult to navigate without knowing the right people. Adrienne navigated it as she would navigate everything else in her life: by paying attention, by working hard, by refusing to be intimidated by the scale of the ambition required, and by trusting that the thing she was reaching for, the work and the career and the life of the mind that the suburbs of Long Island had been too small to accommodate, was real and was achievable and was worth the difficulty of the reaching.

It was real. It was achievable. She proved it. The cost of the proving is the subject of this biography.

The Adrienne Shelly who arrived in New York in the fall of 1987 (young, determined, armed with a partially-completed theater education and a lifetime of watching films and organizing neighborhood productions and imagining a life that was bigger than the one her community had planned for her) was not yet the filmmaker she would become. She was the raw material from which that filmmaker would be made. The making required time and work and love and frustration and the kind of experience that no amount of preparation can substitute for: the experience of living, fully and attentively, the life that would eventually become the material for the art.