I first got to know Sheila Nevins when I interviewed her for
a Hollywood Reporter story honoring
top women in entertainment. I’ve chatted with scores of bigshots in similar
circumstances. But no other woman to whom I’ve spoken in the line of duty has
frankly discussed with me her insecurities, her dislike of exercise, and the
color of her current fingernail polish. After discovering I was once a fellow
English major, Sheila even sent me a gift: a copy of Vanity Fair. (Thackeray’s 19th-century novel, that is.)
Sheila has made her mark as President of HBO Documentary
Films. In three decades, she’s produced over 1000 documentaries, scores of
which have been honored with Emmys, Oscars, and Peabody Awards. She herself has
taken home thirty-two primetime Emmys, so you’d think she’d have a high opinion
of herself.
Not true! The Sheila I know is forthcoming about her
anxieties, her infirmities, and what it’s like being a woman in a man’s world.
And now she’s added to her impossible list of high achievements by publishing a
straight-from-the-hip memoir of sorts, an irresistible collection of stories,
true confessions, and musings. She calls it You Don’t Look Your Age . . . And Other Fairy Tales. It’s blunt and funny about
the phenomenon of getting older, with straight talk about facelifts, sleep
disorders, weight gain (“Gliding Gracefully into Gravity”), and a change in her
eyesight that now encourages her to focus on the big picture. As a career
woman, she also has her say on how to tell “frenemies” from those who genuinely
wish you well. Her most valuable mentor, she insists, has been revenge against
the snobs who tried to keep her in her place.
How does she feel about airing her failings for all the world
to read? Sheila told me, “I always thought it would be embarrassing. I didn’t
care.” In her career, she has many times chronicled stories of people coming
out . . . as gay, as trans. That’s why she decided, “I’m gonna come out as
old.” This woman who used to hide on her birthdays now calmly announces she’s
78. Self-revelation was a weight off her chest, even though in the mornings “I
look my age, without upholstery.” Comparing herself to a couch, she quips, “It
was a good couch, and you can’t buy those couches anymore.”
Though Sheila
sometimes seems brittle, there’s a tender heart beating in her breast. Part of
the impetus for the book was her affection for AIDS activist Larry Kramer, who
encouraged her writing and (from his hospital bed) inspired one of her gentlest
pieces. It was at his bedside that she got the idea of asking their mutual
friend Christine Baranski to participate in an audio recording of the book.
Soon what seems all of showbiz came aboard: Lily Tomlin, Lena Dunham, Glenn
Close, et al. The biggest coup was snagging Meryl Streep, whose deeply
emotional reading of the book’s final section, “The Wrong Kind of Hot,” magically
evoked for Sheila the voice of a mother who’s been dead for 35 years. Sheila’s
relationship with her mother, the victim of two debilitating diseases, helps
explain her sensitivity to those at the bottom of life’s heap.
Sheila admits to other challenges too, feelingly discussing
her son’s Tourette’s diagnosis. (This story is read by Rosie O’Donnell, who
“knows about wounded children.”) But she steers clear of writing in depth about
husband Sidney: “I chose to spare him.” Sidney is, she makes clear, a very
private individual. And she’s deeply grateful that “he took a once-thin,
once-pretty woman and let her be herself.”
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