Director Mike Nichols didn’t take it too well, and made her pay the price with $80,000 in compensation for production time lost. In an interview for Life Isn’t Everything, a new hardcover book in which Nichols’ closest friends tell their memories of the late director, Melanie, 62, details the incident, recalling how she went out for a few drinks with sober co-star Alec Baldwin and continued to binge drink when she returned to the set.
“There were a lot of things that happened on Working Girl that I did that were not right. When we got back to the set, I had vodka in my motor home, so I had a slug of vodka, and it mixed and made me so drunk, which I thought was really funny,” she said. “But it wasn’t, and it was cold, and I had to walk down the stairs with Alec, and I couldn’t do it.”
Obviously, the director wasn’t pleased with her behavior. “Mike got so mad at me, he wouldn’t talk to me. Mike Haley, the first AD, just came up and said, ‘We’re shutting down. Go home,’ and I knew I was in so much trouble.”
Melanie had to bear the consequences the next day. She wrote in the book: “The next morning he took me to breakfast and said, ‘Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to pay for last night out of your pocket. We’re not going to report you to the studio, but you have to pay for what it cost,’ and it was $80,000. They wanted to get my attention and they really did. It was a very humbling, embarrassing experience, but I learned a lot from it.”
This Working Girl clearly learned her lesson. As it says in the movie: “Dress shabbily and they notice the dress. Dress impeccably and they notice the woman.” And if you drink excessively, you notice the missing $80K. ~Marriska Fernandes