Kitty Winn

and The Panic in Needle Park (1971)

By Kia Khalili Pir

FADE IN:

The train squeals on the rails. People are squeezed inside the shaking car, pressing and breathing against each other, as the tram tram of the wheels and the screeching of old metal deafen every other sound. HELEN, a young, waif girl, stands alone desperately clutching the metal pole while waves of strangers crash against her. Finally, some of the people get off and she slowly sits down, holding her stomach in pain.

Here, Kitty Winn is twenty-six and when I sit down in front of my computer to talk to her via Zoom, she is seventy-six. Her voice is kind, at times timid, at others vigorous; but it has maintained that perfect diction typical of theatre actors.

The Panic in Needle Park premiered at the Cannes Film Festival May 21, 1971. It represented Jerry Schatzberg’s second directorial effort and introduced to the world the story of Helen, a young woman who, for love of Bobby (Al Pacino), becomes a junkie whore. It was also Kitty Winn’s and her co-star Al Pacino’s first main role in a film; and it would earn Kitty rave reviews and the Golden Palm Award for best acting at Cannes. Al Pacino went on the year after to do The Godfather (1972) while Kitty Winn received a barrage of offers and scripts before opting for the role of Sharon Spencer in The Exorcist (1973).

Four years later, she retired from acting. 

Part 1:

“To thine own self be true”

Kitty Winn sat in a corner of the room, far from the madding crowd of actors. She was twenty-one and in the eyes of fellow actress Carol Jenkins she looked timid and fragile, not someone who was bound to make much of an impression. When Kitty’s turn came, she stood up and walked in front of William Ball. She took a breath and started her monologue, an easy piece for her.

Katherine Tupper “Kitty” Winn was born February 21, 1944 in Washington D.C.’s Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The daughter of Colonel James J. Winn and Molly, the stepdaughter of George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army General, former US Secretary of State, former US Secretary of Defense under President Truman, and 1953 Nobel Peace Prize winner. She was named after her beloved grandmother, Katherine Marshall, a former actress and alumnus of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, who had performed for a while in Richard Mansfield’s theatre company. Kitty always called her “Nana.”

When Kitty was a child she dreamed of becoming a painter. She had met a teacher at the small prep school she was going to outside of Baltimore. “He was a marvelous portrait painter,” she says. A funny little man, all the girl students would make fun of him, but Kitty knew he had something to teach her. He would come over from Washington D.C. twice a week and Kitty would sneak out of the study hall and go under the window so not to be detected. Then she would creep into the art room and paint all afternoon. 

That funny little teacher had gone to the Rhode Island School of Design and one day took Kitty aside and suggested she carry on with her artistic education. He told her he could help her get into his alma mater if she so desired, and, for a while, Kitty seriously entertained that thought. However, there were a couple of problems: she could only paint the scenery and her grade average was not good enough. She had dyslexia and her reading suffered because of it.

Eventually she turned down the idea. An abrupt end to her life’s first passion.

Then, in her senior year of high school, she was offered a small part in a school play.

Kitty Winn graduated in 1966 with a major in theatre from the Boston University and quickly moved to New York City where she started sending around her resume and headshots while working as a waitress in an Irish pub on Wall Street. After three months, of the fifty people she had contacted only one answered, William Ball, the founder of the American Conservatory Theater, who invited her for an audition. The ACT had been in the process of moving to San Francisco but the last auditions were still being held in the Big Apple. So Kitty, without a second of hesitation, took him up on the offer and went. 

When she finished Frankie’s monologue, Ball’s bald spot on top of his head glistened under the light as he stared at her intently for a few moments. Then he spoke: “Well, can you do some Shakespeare?”

Kitty hesitated, unsure what to answer. So Ball just gave her some money and said: “Buy a Shakespeare book, come back, and read me some Shakespeare.”

Kitty ran out the room and into the street, her head filled with excitement and dull dread, her body warm with pumping adrenaline. She found a bookstore nearby but none of the Bard’s individual plays were on the shelves—just a used copy of The Complete Works. She grabbed it and hurried back. She reached the steps of the venue and stopped, heaving and sweating. The auditions had moved on, other candidates were taking their shots at entering the prestigious conservatory, so she had no other choice but to sit down on the steps and wait. So, she had done the easiest thing in the world—that Frankie monologue there—and had seen how that had gone, so now she was going to do the hardest thing she could do. She picked a piece from the play Antony and Cleopatra, waited for her turn to come again, and walked back into the audition. 

The room went completely quiet, as everyone listened to the waif little girl playing the dying queen. Years later Carol Jenkins would recall that Ball just laughed to himself and said: “That’s what I thought.” But, for Kitty, only one moment remains impressed in her memory. Ball got up from his chair, grabbed another chair, and slowly walked towards her. He made her sit down and knelt right next to her. Then he spoke ever so quietly: “You’ve already left this world.”

And all of a sudden, an image appeared in Kitty’s head: that of Antony dead, her beloved lover. And she knew her time in this world had come. So, instead of rushing through the lines, Kitty spoke slowly, deliberately. And even though she looked no older than a child, she started growing in stature. Cleopatra, not Kitty, spoke to Ball.

Kitty only said a few more lines before Ball interrupted her again: “That’s fine,” he said, “we'll get your number." She joined the ACT on their first year in San Francisco.

Soon after, Kitty found a small apartment in Nob Hill that was owned and run by a Chinese couple, Mr. and Mrs. Lee, who, to her surprise, welcomed her in despite her being the only non-Chinese in the building. They gave her the top floor apartment, which Kitty would mostly use for sleeping, while the majority of her day was spent at the conservatory or on stage. But during her free time, or whenever she had to learn some new lines, she would walk up to the roof, which was open to the sky, and from there she could see all around San Francisco, looking down on Chinatown and over to the Oakland Bay Bridge.

At that time, the ACT had around fifty actors classified into different levels. There were the rookies, or “fellows,” like Kitty, and the main company, which were twenty or so people who had been with Ball since Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—where the ACT had been born in 1965. If you distinguished yourself as a “fellow,” you were given the chance to remain for another year and become part of the main company. Kitty Winn spent four years there.

During that time, Kitty learned everything she could about acting. Because William Ball believed that an actor should always be in training, Kitty would take part every year in a number of productions that were presented in a rotating repertory. And so, if she were not across the street playing at The Geary Theater, or up the street at The Marines Memorial Theatre, she would be in rehearsal. And if she were not in rehearsal, she would be scheduled to take a class. 

CUT TO:

September 29, 1969. The ACT was invited to bring their three best shows of that season to the ANTA Theatre in Broadway, New York. The shows were Albee’s Tiny Alice, Feydeau’s A Flee in Her Ear, and Chekov’s Three Sisters—in which Kitty played Irina. It was her first time on the famed stage, and, although they were there for about eleven strenuous performances, it was a “quite wonderful” experience, she recalls.

On the Playbill issue printed for that occasion, Kitty’s talent and achievements were already on notice, as the section of “Who’s Who in the Cast” has a paragraph about her reading: “KITTY WINN recently received national critical acclaim for her performance as Emily Webb in a major revival of Our Town in New York, which starred Henry Fonda […] Miss Winn also won plaudits for her performances in The Crucible and The Misanthrope.”

After that, film offers started coming in and Kitty decided that her time at the ACT had reached its end. The hectic curriculum of the conservatory made it impossible to pursue any other acting job, so she had to choose. And she chose cinema.

Intermission:

The Method and the Mystery

When people nowadays write about The Panic in Needle Park (1971), they write about Al Pacino, and for good reason. The decade of the 70s, at the height of the New Hollywood, can easily be considered the decade of Al Pacino and, to this day, holds some of the actor’s most successful and better films. He had his first major role in The Panic, followed by The Godfather, Scarecrow (once again directed by Jerry Schatzberg) and Serpico in 1974, The Godfather Part II (1975), Dog Day Afternoon (1976), Bobby Deerfield (1977), finishing the 70s off with …And Justice For All (1980). Of all these great movies, at least four are considered American classics; his performance in five of them earned him Oscar nominations, and his second collaboration with Schatzberg paid off with the Palm d’Or at Cannes.

One constant of these performances is that they remain, for the most part, unchallenged on screen. Save perhaps for Marlon Brando, nobody seems able to match Al Pacino’s intensity and on-screen charisma: he simply fills up the frame leaving little room for the other players. Indeed, he was often paired with such giants as Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, and John Cazale, but his seemingly spontaneous flair paired with ferociously magnetic eyes always granted him immense weight on the scene. 

That was until I watched The Panic in Needle Park. At first, I thought Kitty Winn held her own next to one of cinema’s greats, then she stood toe to toe with him. Her energy perfectly complimented his: she was neither obscured nor swallowed by his intensity. Yet she did not butt heads with him by trying to out-act his outbursts; instead, she accommodated his highs and supported his lows, finally emerging as the backbone of the picture. Her performance was one of the greatest pieces of acting I had seen in a long, long time. In many ways, it reminded me of Kim Hunter’s interpretation of Stella Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

I had to know more about Kitty Winn, her acting method, and her experience in the movie. 

I ran my pen so hard on my next question (“How about the subtext for the character of Helen?”) that I pierced the paper. Forget about that one, all right!

Kitty laughs heartedly.

Dailies are the raw footage filmed during the day that directors, producers, and other members of the production watch to make sure they have everything they need in the way they want it.

So, what is really Kitty Winn’s highly instinctual acting method if we could summarize it in a few general tips?

It starts, as usual, with the script. Looking for that empathy with the character and the story. Read as much as possible about the time and the environment that the story takes place in. Use rehearsals to explore the directions in which you want to take the character and your own ideas—and to learn the action, obviously.

Make small notes on your script to always remind yourself where you have to stand and go. Re-read the script before every performance. And when the time comes to be on set or on stage, focus. Be present, don’t anticipate. Just live in the moment, in the action that you are manifesting, in your relationship with your fellow actors.

And for the subtext? Well, that the actor works out by themselves. It’s the mystery of the craft.

END OF INTERMISSION

Part 2:

The Panic in Needle Park

The year Kitty Winn was cast as Helen she must have played around five different roles on stage. In summer, while the theater season was out, she had her first taste of a movie set. She first played the role of Sara Dunning in the film-for-television The House That Would Not Die (1970), and then had a very negligible part in the British feature They Might Be Giant (1971).

Of the former experience, she mostly remembers her co-star Barbara Stanwyck, a movie veteran and one of Hollywood’s greatest and most accomplished stars. Stanwyck took Kitty under her wing and taught her how to move on a film set, something Kitty was unfamiliar with. In particular, Stanwyck showed her “how to find her light”: where and how to stand in order to be lit in the most flattering way by the key light. “The crew absolutely adored her,” says Kitty, “especially the lighting man.”

Then, on stage, Kitty played the titular role in William Ball’s rendition of Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan and her life changed forever.

It all started with a cursed meal.

Just before the opening night, Kitty had dinner and for dessert she ate a delicious-looking custard. Almost immediately, her lips and eyes started swelling up. Her body was tingling and hot and she labored to breathe. Kitty collapsed on a chair as one of her castmates sounded the alarm. An allergist was swiftly called and he diagnosed her with anaphylactic shock. So Kitty was stuffed with antihistamine to counter the allergic reaction and sent on stage.

As Kitty started talking and marching under the sweltering lights, a nebulous haze clustered her head and her mouth became an extraneous organ. She forced her numbed lips to part and speak, but her voice rolled out in slurs. 

The doctor was in the audience that night and came to see her afterwards. "If you're going to insist on continuing to do this part," he said resolutely, "I'm gonna have to take you off the antihistamine and put you on cortisone." No sooner did she take the steroids than her body started swelling up: she looked like the Michelin Man playing Joan of Arc. Kitty forced herself through the play, finished her performance, and withdrew backstage.

While she was resting in her room, taking her makeup off, a man dressed in a dark suit walked in holding a script in his hand. His name was Dominick Dunne, pleasure to meet you, I’m producing this movie, would you care to read this script and give me a call if you like it?

Kitty Winn took the script: it was titled The Panic in Needle Park, written by Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, Dominick’s brother. Kitty thanked Dominick and went back home where she spent the night reading it.

The screenplay was incredible: the writing was beautiful and evocative, and the main protagonist Helen went through a compelling tragic journey. The setting was bleak but the love story at the center was tender and human. This movie, this role, held the promise to make its actor a star. However, it was not going to be easy for Kitty, because Helen was as far from her type as possible. The challenge terrified her as much as it enthralled her.

The next morning she called Dominick: “I loved it,” she said.

“Good,” he replied, “I’m going to send you a plane ticket for your day off to come to Los Angeles.” There were a few moments before he added: "Count on spending the whole day there and pack a swimsuit.”

Kitty Winn flew to Los Angeles and was greeted at the airport by Dominick, who picked her up with his car and drove her into the heart of The City of Angels. They made their way into Wilshire Boulevard and Kitty sheltered her eyes from the warm rays of the sun, looking at the line of palm trees on the sidewalk that framed their ride.

They drove just behind the I. Magnin store, parked, and went up to Dominick’s apartment. There, Kitty met another actor at the beginning of his career, Peter Strauss, with whom she read the script. Kitty thought her possible co-star was extremely good, he did read beautifully, but something was just not right: “He looks like he went to prep school,” she kept on thinking.

After the reading, Dominick thanked both of them, saw Strauss out, and drove with Kitty to Malibu, where Joan Didion and John Dunne were giving a rather crowded luncheon. It was a hot day and everyone was wearing colorful summer clothes. Kitty made her way through richly dressed, all-smiles-and-laughter people and finally met the writers of the film. She felt awkward and out of place, like a mahogany kitchen shelf in a Japanese house, but she still managed to tell them, very briefly, how much she loved the script.

As the gay chattering continued around the room, Kitty stood in a corner by herself. Someone must have tried to talk to her, but she did not pay him much attention. Joan Didion had made a parsley salad and Kitty kept on thinking: "Oh, interesting idea. Salad, parsley." She met Didion and John’s five-year-old daughter, Quintana; afterwards she excused herself and fled the party.

She changed into her swimsuit and went down to the beach. Dominick came with her to make sure she was safe and stood on the sand keeping careful watch, while Kitty, alone, covered Olympic distances in the cold water. When he drove her back to the airport that afternoon, there was a distinct note in his voice—a way in which he talked to her that made her remember. Kitty thought back to her audition for the ACT and almost jumped through the roof of the car: Dominick sounded exactly the same as William Ball had when he had said: “Ok, we’ll get your number.” Kitty knew she had gotten the part. 

CUT TO: 

It was not long after that she was on the West Coast having lunch with Jerry Schatzberg, the appointed director of the film. Up to that point, Schatzberg’s career had been mostly as a photographer, and, at that, he had been very successful. Equally successful was his first foray behind the film camera, as he had directed a few commercials before making his feature film debut that same year: Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970) with Faye Dunaway. Jerry Schatzberg was confident, talented, and had a fabulous head of black, curly hair that evolved into equally royal sideburns. He had a really dry sense of humor, which Kitty found irresistible, and spoke with a thick New York accent like a real street-savvy New York tough guy. Kitty thought he was the perfect man to handle the gritty material of the film.

Then, at the end of their meal, he turned to her straight-faced and looked at her from behind his large, squared glasses with colored lenses: “So what do you think about the nude scene?”

“What nude scene?” Replied Kitty. There were a few moments of silence then Schatzberg said: “Well, why don’t you go home and think about it?”

Eventually, she decided to put off that thought and just focus on building the character of Helen. But first she would relax: it was summer, after all.

CUT TO:

In the hot summer of 1970, Kitty Winn joined her family at their holiday estate in Nantucket and quit taking steroids. Then, for the next few months she swam in the ocean, trying to go back to her pre-steroid size, and read the script. In fall, she flew to New York for the start of the pre-production, wondering how she would approach the nude scene and who her co-star was going to be.

One night, Jerry Schatzberg invited her out for dinner at Victor’s Cafe, a West-Side Cuban restaurant on Columbus Avenue. When she arrived, the place was alive with people and the sounds of chattering, clinking glasses, and some occasional laughter. She navigated through the crowded tables, squeezing by smoking, grizzled beatniks and a young, well-to-do couple excitedly chatting about the upcoming concert at the Lincoln Centre. The strong smell of burned tobacco mixed with the fragrance of the food invaded Kitty’s nostrils as the rancorous laughter of a trio of Cuban expatriates blared in her ears. She intercepted Schatzberg waving at her from a table close by and moved in to meet him. And then she saw him, standing right next to Schatzberg. A young man, a bit short, and with raven, wavy hair. A strong jawline framed the sardonic smile, as a pair of big, dark eyes looked at her furtively. His name was Al Pacino and he was going to play Bobby.

Kitty and Al hit it off immediately and spent the evening discussing the movie with Schatzberg. By the end of the night two things were certain: only five weeks separated them from the start of the filming and Kitty and Al had no other working commitments in those five weeks. They were going to spend that time entirely focused on rehearsal. This was a welcomed gift for two theatrically trained actors like Kitty and Al, who were adjusted to long periods of preparation before a play. 

The first thing Kitty did in preparation for her role was reading James Mills’ novel, The Panic in Needle Park (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), which had served as source material for the screenplay. In the book, she found a sentence—uttered by Helen—that became the backbone of her performance: “We are all animals in a world that no one knows.” That simple line was the first window into the psyche of Helen and the environment she inhabited. Then there was the New York junkie-culture, which Mills so finely described.

The second thing Kitty did, apart from rehearsing each scene, was roaming around the city with Al and Schatzberg spotting drug addicts and studying them in the milieu they felt most comfortable in. She saw young men standing closely next to each other, fidgeting and convulsively scratching their arms. A young woman sprawled on the sidewalk while passersby ignored her, stepping so close to her head that small chunks of hair would be ripped from her scalp and come away with their soles. Kids who begged for cigarettes and money, cackling with that laughter that a life of addiction had tinted with humiliation. Then, on the Upper West Side, were Sherman Square and the nearby Verdi Square Park, which at the time were referred to as “Needle Park.”

New York in the 70s was on the verge of bankruptcy and one of the most crime-ridden cities in the United States. Large parts of the population were leaving urban areas now deemed too dangerous in favor of the suburbs; prostitution and drug abuse were rampant, corruption within the New York City Police Department was widespread, and Times Square had become the state capital of pornography. The New York subway was old and unreliable, its interiors covered in graffiti, urine, rats, and trash. And if by any chance you found yourself taking the Lexington Avenue Express, beware! You were on board of the “Muggers Express.” As the New Yorkers migrated to the outskirts of the city, landlords would occasionally burn their own buildings down and collect insurance money rather than waiting for new tenants. As a result, large parts of the city’s less-affluent areas were covered in rubble. There were stabbings, shootings, muggings, and rapes.

By 1975 plain-clothed policemen were handing out pamphlets to the tourists at the airport. On the brochure paper cover was drawn a skull wearing a black hood, the title said: “WELCOME TO FEAR CITY.” Just below the ghastly portrait was a subtitle: “A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York.” Inside the pamphlet, tourists found warnings about coming into the city (“Until things change, stay away from New York City if you possibly can.”), about resting in places not deemed fireproof, and about walking around after 6PM.

The underworld of the city had boiled to the surface and lied around the streets—before dilapidated buildings, and in plain sight. It was the best school for the studying actors and “the perfect backdrop for the film,” says Kitty.

Jerry Schatzberg organized for Kitty and Al to meet with recovering addicts going through the methadone therapy program. Kitty had always been only superficially aware of heroin and drug use in general, and here she had a chance to finally speak to the people she had observed around New York for all this time. Eventually, she ended up hiring two kids who were staying at one of the rehabilitation centers to repaint her room.

It was during one of these occasions that she met Maryann. Like Helen, Maryann came from a middle-class family and had gotten addicted to heroin due to her love for a so-so-cool boy. The first time she had used the drug it had been to be closer to her loved one. Then heroin became the only thing that mattered. When Kitty met her in Reality House, the rehabilitation center, Maryann was working and had just gone back to school. Kitty was mostly interested in knowing how Maryann would have acted in certain situations.

Kitty and Maryann met four or five times. The last time Kitty saw her, Maryann gave her a little necklace that she had made in art class. It was a little metal cutout that looked like two fish, Kitty’s Zodiac sign, and had a little hook on it. The hook would be attached to a piece of metal that went around her neck and clasped at the back.

Kitty Winn never saw Maryann again.

The final piece of the puzzle that was to be Helen was given to Kitty by the film costume designer Jo Ynocencio. Make-up artist Herman Buchman gave Helen the dark circles around her eyes, and Kitty stopped combing her hair to achieve that disheveled look, but Ynocencio provided the actress with a wardrobe that reflected Helen’s deterioration, both physical and spiritual, but still maintained the essence of the character. Even while her life spiraled out of control and the clothes got filthier and filthier, Helen never stopped holding on to the threads of her former life. She had to have a certain sense of style. 

Eventually, rehearsing the scenes, exploring ways in which the character of Helen might have evolved, the time spent with Al and Schatzberg around town and the time spent with Maryann, the wardrobe, the makeup, Mills’ book, all the researches Kitty did—they all came together to beget Helen. And the more Kitty built Helen from the inside out, the more she fell in love with her. She understood her; she did not pity her, but empathized with her. Sometimes even to live is an act of courage, and Helen persisted through the misery and pains that her decisions caused her. And Kitty lived with her.

There was only one thing Kitty could not shake off her mind: that naked scene Jerry had mentioned. How was she going to do that?

CUT TO:

On October 16th, 1970, the filming of The Panic in Needle Park officially started. Kitty Winn’s first day on set as the lead of a motion picture proved to be rather peaceful: she had no lines to deliver and remained sofa-ridden. She filmed the initial encounter between Helen and Bobby, just after Helen has had the bad abortion and is staying at her boyfriend’s house (played by Raul Julia in his breakthrough role). 

Despite the spontaneity of the performances and the documentaristic look of the film, not unlike a cinéma vérité movie, Kitty maintains that very little was improvised and that every line, every moment, and every scene were originally in the script. There were however situations that were true both before and behind the camera. The locations, for example, like Bobby and Helen’s apartment or “Needle Park”, where the producers had to hire a couple of policemen for precaution. Then there was the scene on the roof where Bobby injects Helen with heroin. Kitty insisted on using her arm at the sole condition that it would be done in one take and one take only. So an ex-addict shot a small quantity of saline solution in her vein while she pretended to enjoy it. The thirst for naturalism and authenticity did not extend as far as having Al Pacino do the actual injection.

The filming carried on for about three months till December. During that whole period, Kitty stayed at Susan’s house in the Upper West Side. Susan and her husband were both psychologists and Kitty had known her for years. Every night Kitty would come back home exhausted and without much will to talk or party, and they understood that and let her be.

Analogously, Kitty did not interact much with the rest of the crew and castmates, preferring to remain focused on Helen and the task at hand rather than socializing or going out for a drink after the shooting day was over. “Kitty’s a very, very distant person,” Schatzberg once recalled. “She doesn’t allow people to get close to her.”

Still, Kitty’s initial intuition about Jerry Schatzberg turned out to be true, as he proved himself to be an attentive and talented director, showing an understanding of the craft and a relaxed confidence that far surpassed his limited experience. After a take, Schatzberg would sometimes give her small suggestions here and there: “Just a bit less,” “A bit more that bit there this time.” For the rest he would not interfere with the actors’ work. “I was a new director,” he said to her afterwards. “And I just did what I thought would get results.”

One time, Schatzberg walked up to Kitty at the end of the day and gave her a small bag: “Here, take this home,” he said. The bag contained a hypodermic needle, a couple of spoons, aluminum foils, and a medical rubber hose, which addicts would use to tie around their arms to make their veins pop. Then he dropped in her hand a syringe: these were the paraphernalia Kitty had to become adjusted to just like Helen was adjusted to always see them around her.

Schatzberg asked her if she felt ready for “that” scene, the nude one.

“Oh, can we do it tomorrow? Or maybe another day?" She answered. Schatzberg nodded with a smile and left. And every time that scene was mentioned, again Kitty would very politely ask for it to be put off.

When she went back home that night, Kitty had her usual quiet dinner. Then she withdrew into her room and dropped the heroin paraphernalia on the desk, before going to sleep. A few days later, while Kitty was on set, the tools would be found by the handmaiden cleaning Kitty’s room and she would threaten to quit. It would take Susan all of her psychological acumen to convince the maid that those were just props and that Kitty was not a real addict.

CUT TO:

In the script, Bobby is introduced thusly: “He is about twenty, thin, and exceedingly nervous, his reactions jumpy. […] We are dealing here with someone who reacts with excruciating acuity to all stimuli. Bobby is intensely alive, vulnerable to the world. He has a kind of street funniness, a buoyant way of talking rough without really offending or hurting. At heart he is gentle, but in manner he tries not to be […]. He is very funny, extraordinary likable, capable of touching the heart.”

Although Kitty and Al never spent time together off the set, on set she trusted him completely and always admired the way he interpreted Bobby. Al brought a singular intensity to the character that was only his. According to Kitty, he achieved that by investing himself completely into Bobby, and then, within the constraints given by that mask, he pushed as far as he could. The electric liveliness, the impetuousness Al brought to Bobby was the fruit of total emotional and physical commitment—something that would become the actor’s staple going forward in his career.

So Kitty realized that the trick to working with Al was to tap into her own shyness so that Helen's reactions would be timid or bemused, indulgent or modest. She would not try to go higher in intensity, but she would respond to his volatility in a manner that was genuine for the character of Helen.

From time to time, to prepare for a scene, they would discuss it to know where they could go with the characters. Other times, they would remain within themselves, concentrating on being in the moment. And if they had to redo a scene or immediately move into the next one, they would both remain in character.

CUT TO: 

As Helen slips down the steps of addiction, a failed burglary sends Bobby to prison for a few months. Short of money and in desperate need of the next dose, Helen turns to prostitution for the first time—something that Bobby had previously encouraged. Once freed from jail, Bobby quickly realizes what Helen has been up to and a violent argument ensues at their apartment.

The scene takes place in the lovers’ bedroom, with Bobby slapping and throwing Helen around, and then in the bathroom, where Helen locks herself into to escape from Bobby’s wrath. It is one of the most poignant moments of the whole film, a turning point in the story, and a great occasion to witness Kitty and Al’s acting chops on full display.

The scene was shot with only a couple of camera setups: a handheld camera was used to capture the altercation in the bedroom, while Helen’s desperate moments in the bathroom were filmed statically on a tripod. Schatzberg did not shoot cutaways, at least not for that scene. To Kitty’s recollection, it was all done in one take—she can’t imagine Al and her would have been able to do it again.

Before the camera started rolling, Kitty and Al ran through the scene without full intensity to make sure they hit their marks for the camera and the lights. Once everyone on set knew exactly how the scene was going to play out and where the actors would have moved, Kitty and Al withdrew within themselves.

There was the usual frenzy preceding a take: Robert Greenhut, the first assistant director, made sure the cameraman and sound mixer were ready; then “Action!” was called and Helen and Bobby started fighting in the bedroom.

Afterwards, the scene was moved inside the bathroom, with the shot entirely on Helen. Kitty bore her soul out, wailing and despairing while Al gave a full-on performance off camera, screaming that she was a whore and banging on the door. No one stood in for him.

CUT TO:

The last day of shooting, Jerry Schatzberg walked up to Kitty and said: “It’s time.” And Kitty just nodded back. So they cleared the set for her, Al got into the bed, Kitty stripped down to her underwear and joined him, and they did the scene.

When they were done, Schatzberg told her: “You know? I could have filmed it another way, but I really didn't think that would have been true to them.”

And Kitty nodded and said: “I feel the same way.”

To this day Kitty and Schatzberg remain good friends. 

When the production wrapped up, Jo Ynocencio gifted Kitty the nicer of the red leather jackets and the navy turtleneck that Helen wore towards the end of the movie.

Then Kitty went straight back home to Susan, packed up all her things, thanked her friends, and left town. Living with Helen for the duration of the shooting had been the opportunity of a lifetime but had also left her physically and emotionally depleted. She had to get away. So she went to Birmingham, in Alabama, to stay with her aunt, a bond lawyer. “An interesting person,” says Kitty, “with a rapacious mind.” With her aunt, Kitty spoke at length about art, literature, and music, and slowly she started to recuperate. It was only months later, for the screening of the complete film, that Kitty went back to New York.

When Kitty first saw the film, she was shocked. Despite admitting how beautiful it was, looking at herself was a bizarre experience. During the filming, she had been so focused on each individual take, on each individual scene, that she had never had a time to imagine how the whole story would have looked. And since she had never watched the dailies, when the time came to see her work on the silver screen, she almost did not recognize herself. She could not remember how she had reached that emotional place that made Helen so real, and after a while, she thought she was watching someone else.

When the film was over, a roaring applause exploded through the room as people cheered. A narcotic energy seeped through the attendants as the cast and crew realized they had just witnessed something special: a movie they’ll be remembered by. Elated, Schatzberg hugged Kitty and then, little by little, everyone went to the after party.

Kitty did not attend the party and has not re-watched the film in a long time.

Part 3:

Epilogue

The Panic in Needle Park opened to mixed-to-good reviews and was a modest success at the box office.

Kitty Winn was invited to Cannes and she gave away her business-class plane ticket to fly economy with her twenty-two year old sister Ellene. With Ellene, she spent her day by the sea in the company of an old French couple who had long been their family friends. The couple had been friends with artists like Picasso and Mirò, and the wife had taught them how to paint on ceramics. They even showed Kitty and Ellene some of the artworks they had collected through the years, all of which had a sobering effect on Kitty.

Kitty Winn missed the official ceremony and only found out that she had won Best Actress because a journalist told her sister. Still, “it was an absolute surprise,” says Kitty.

In the evening, Kitty went to the award ceremony and when her name was called, she stumbled on stage. They gave her a gold pin the shape of a palm branch, a piece of paper with her name on it, and a huge crystal vase engraved with the Palme d’Or. Under the blinding lights and quiet murmurs of the crowd, Kitty shook so much that Jean Louis Trintignant standing next to her had to hold her. Then, just as it had started, the ceremony finished.

The journalists outside wanted Kitty to strip in a bikini and take a few pictures on the beach, to which she categorically refused. And with that, her Cannes adventure was over.

Back in the States, she appeared in William Friedkin’s horror masterpiece, The Exorcist. Her father, who one day visited her on set, can be seen at the end of the film. He is the old man with a walking stick standing on the stairs before Father Karras’ dying body. To this day, Kitty has not watched the movie. Her brother had gone to see it when it first came out and was found, by a stranger, sprawled on the bathroom of the cinema having just puked and in a state of semi-consciousness.

In 1974 she acted in the low-budget horror film Mirrors, which would not come out till 1978, and in 1976 in Peepers next to Michael Caine. Both were commercial and critical failures. Her last time on a motion picture set was in 1977 with The Exorcist Part II where she reprised the role of Sharon Spencer.

For Kitty, theater would remain her ephemeral home: a place where she could experiment and make mistakes—sometimes even big mistakes. As William Ball had told her time and time again: “If you have to fail, fail big.” And that gave her the courage to lose herself in every role that she did without fear of being brought up before the bar of posterity. Each and every one of her performances would be born and die on stage the night she performed. That was freedom; something that Kitty struggled to find in cinema.

Then there were the auditions, where actors tried to convince casting directors, producers, and directors to give them a job. Kitty hated those. She hated reading to a stranger for a part she did not know and her dyslexia surely did not help. She much more preferred the system in use at the ACT, where the roles were assigned at the beginning of the season. That always gave Kitty a sense of security and the possibility that time gives of exploring a role.

Her experience on The Panic proved to be unique: she never starred again in a project with that kind of writing, team, cast, and preparation. Ultimately she turned down a few offers and took some “that maybe I shouldn't have,” she says. “For reasons that ultimately weren't always good reasons.”

Then, in 1978, her beloved grandmother Katherine died at the age of 96, Kitty married Morton Winston, a Los Angeles businessman, and retired from acting for the first time. 

In 1982, at the request of her friend, Kitty went back on stage for the first time to play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. The performance garnered good reviews and her husband suggested she stick around the acting business a bit longer. So Kitty had a couple of small roles in two TV shows before retiring a second time two years later. And when I ask her what prompted the second retirement, she very matter-of-factly replies:

And I believe her.

When years later Al Pacino found out Kitty had retired he said: “That doesn’t surprise me. I always thought that there was something about Kitty that was too fine for this business.”

In 2011, after her marriage had ended, she walked the stage once more in the San Jose Repertory Theatre production The Last Romance and was nominated for the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle best-actress award. Still, Kitty remains unsure whether she will ever come back to acting.

But on cold days, Kitty Winn still wears Helen’s navy turtleneck.

FADE TO BLACK. 

THE END