I’m attempting to determine what characteristic Cindy Williams possessed and why her loss is so painful. Perhaps it has something to do with her being too intelligent for the roles she was obliged to play — the Hollywood career of a petite, attractive girl who could never fully conceal how much smarter she was than you. Perhaps it was because she was an early example of a woman who was not defined by her relationship with a man; she was witty, practical, and completely unconcerned with her flaws. Perhaps it was because Cindy Williams was constantly two steps ahead of you on the road. The rabbit in white Someone to chase but never capture.
I first knew her as Shirley on Laverne & Shirley, her and Penny Marshall’s cameos on Happy Days as “sure thing” dates for Richie and The Fonz, and then their own show that was a weekly staple for me and my friends before a la carte programming destroyed the notion of a shared popular culture: a time even before cable television. The first time I saw her in another role was as Laurie, the girlfriend of popular student Steve (Ron Howard) in American Graffiti, who is absolutely perplexed by her fast acquiescence to his proposal that he might want to see other people now that they are attending college. The way she smiles at him in the drive-through diner with a french fry in her hand, if she’s surprised she’s not surprised for long; and though she’s hurt, she has too much dignity to betray it, though Williams is a good enough actor for us to notice it in the way she pauses for a moment, looks away to compose herself, and picks up another fry to buy her some time. Oh, you moron, Steve.
For all of the fleeting moments captured by George Lucas in American Graffiti — certainly, it is his best film — the film belongs to Laurie as she struggles all night to regain her balance. As Shirley Feeney, I liked Williams, but I fell in love with her as Laurie. Laurie possessed three dimensions: she was vulnerable, yet tough; betrayed, yet cunning; she decided to get into a car with bad boy Bob Falfa (Harrison Ford) to get under Steve’s skin, but was gracious enough to forgive him when Steve realized he was as adrift without her. Six years later, she reprises this role in More American Graffiti. Currently, Laurie is pregnant and married to Steve. Laurie wants to return to work after giving birth, but Steve prevents it. Though the picture spans four different time periods, Laurie remains at the heart, her journey representing the blue collar, women-in-the-workplace situation comedy established by The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Alice, and of course Laverne & Shirley.
This indefinable character of Williams, her knowing smile — sometimes mischievous, sometimes resigned — and the aura of tragedy that accompanies those who are powerless to change the things they know, made her the prototypical anachronistic, unusual object of desire. I like it most when she feigned outrage with an exaggerated and satirical tone of astonishment. This is my favorite form of teasing, and I wonder if she didn’t start it. She sealed her place in my dreams as Ann, the wife of Robert Duvall’s enigmatic “The Director” in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. As part of a college lecture that also included The Parallax View and The Stunt Man, I saw it for the first time as a freshman, and it immediately became my favorite film of all time, the film that allowed me to perceive cinema as poetry. In it, surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is tasked with piecing together a discussion between Ann and her lover (Frederic Forrest) while they wander through Union Square in San Francisco, which is packed and noisy. Her voice is the film’s connective tissue. Walter Murch, the editor, manipulates it as if it were an instrument, warbling it like an electronic bird cry and distorting it with bizarre metallic shrieks. As we observe Harry lying on the ground with a hooker in his desperation, it is her voice that expresses concern for a homeless guy sitting alone on a park bench and asks where all of his loved ones have gone. Her voice sings “Rockin’ Robin” as Harry falls in love with her only by listening to her talk for so long. Who, exactly, wouldn’t? Who, exactly, didn’t?
Murch transformed a portion of a scene in smoke and fog into a nightmare in which Harry tries to tell Ann about a childhood illness he had and how “I’m not afraid of death. I am frightened of murder.” As she often seems to be in her small filmography, she is the moral and emotional heart of one of the greatest American films, The Conversation. She is the specter that plagues Harry’s conscience, the maiden Harry believes he must save, and the incomprehensible monster that reveals too late that everything Harry believed about her were but his hopes.
Teri Garr, an actress who shares Williams’ evident intelligence, world-weariness, and disarming irreverence, is inexorably linked to her in my mind. In The Conversation, Garr portrays Harry Caul’s neglected girlfriend, and Williams is the ghost he can never hope to comprehend. They are as enticing as Tippi Hedren and Suzanne Pleschette were for Rod Taylor in The Birds: a riddle unsolvable by a dumb suitor, possessing useless wisdom and serving as projection surfaces for desires unrelated to the fully-fleshed women they symbolize. They are more interesting than their pursuers, who are too dumb or egocentric to realize it. They are more intelligent, but lack social influence. There is a scene in Broadcast News in which Holly Hunter’s character, a news producer, gets criticized for her perseverance. Her boss sneers, “It must be nice to always be the smartest person in the room.” She states, “No, it’s terrible.” In an alternate universe, Cindy Williams could have had Holly Hunter’s career; they are equally ferocious, equally dangerous to the current quo, and equally compromised by the concessions they’ve had to make.
Cindy Williams could have had Holly Hunter’s career in an alternate universe because they are equally ferocious, equally dangerous to the current quo, and equally compromised by the concessions they’ve had to make.
Cindy Williams became pregnant during the eighth season of Laverne & Shirley, and when the producers refused to work with her, she failed to sign a contract to continue her role. She was eliminated from the show abruptly, and it was ended at the end of that year. At the time, rumors portrayed Williams as “difficult,” the death knell for women in any sector who dare to demand equal treatment. She was accused of requesting excessive compensation, unsuitable accommodations, and clashing with her co-star. It is a common slur that, I believe, made it difficult for her to find important film roles in the future. I adore her as Arlene Stewart in the 1985 film UFOria, a cashier in a dusty backwater who believes that UFOs are coming to transport the selected few to a better world. She meets the Waylon Jennings-costumed wanderer Sheldon (Fred Ward), who is in town to visit his friend Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), who operates a lucrative revival tent scam on the outskirts of town. She is the only lunatic in the picture who is not attempting to take advantage of her fellow man. As she stands at the register and observes Sheldon shoplifting from her business, her first line in the film is “you ain’t him.” She is far too intelligent for Sheldon; she can see right through him. Naturally, Sheldon falls instantaneously in love with her, as if he were struck by a lightning bolt, but, you know, it’s Cindy Williams, and she had that impact on all of us. It is difficult to believe that type of vitality can vanish in a single day. I’ll watch The Conversation tonight, as I have countless times before, and listen to her voice carried on electric gusts, now fuzzy and indistinct, now as pure and beautiful as a recollection of when anything was possible on those dense nights before the rest of your life.
The senior film critic at filmfreakcentral.com is Walter Chaw. His book on the films of Walter Hill is now published, with an introduction by James Ellroy.
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