Charlotte’s Place: Living with the Ghost of a Vérité Pioneer

Zwerin pieced together “Gimme Shelter” in a cruddy room at the Londonderry Hotel, the film cannisters piled on windowsills. (The Maysleses had a suite with a view of Hyde Park.) She woke up one morning to find that it had snowed on the film. “So that day was spent trying to dry out all the film reels,” she recalled.

Zwerin was given a director’s credit for “Gimme Shelter,” which came out in 1970 and became a rock-and-roll landmark. But its release was shadowed by the misperception that the filmmakers had contrived the Altamont spectacle. Rolling Stone weighed in: “It may surprise many of the people who suffered at Altamont to discover that they were, in effect, unpaid extras in a full production color motion picture.” Despite the fact that the Maysleses’ vérité ethos prized unmediated observation, critics ran with the idea that the filmmakers had blood on their hands. In the Times, under the headline “Making Murder Pay?,” Vincent Canby wrote that the film raised “important moral and esthetic questions relating to ‘direct cinema.’ ” Pauline Kael, in this magazine, asked, “Is it the cinema of fact when the facts are manufactured for the cinema?” (“That’s just so farfetched,” Zwerin said in response.)

By then, Zwerin and David Maysles had broken up. She was dating one of the film’s editors, Kent McKinney, who cut the slow-motion sequence of Jagger performing “Love in Vain.” David had met his future wife, Judy. When I reached Judy, she attributed the split to the fact that “David didn’t want to live and work with the same person.” She added, “I think probably David was the love of her life. The one she couldn’t have.”

Froemke agrees: “All of us felt that Charlotte and David were soul mates.” But Zwerin, nearing forty, was straining against her ties to the Maysleses. “She wanted to go off and make her own films,” Froemke said. “I think she found it very hard.” She wasn’t good at selling herself, and funding was hard to come by, even with the “Gimme Shelter” credit. “She went on an interview somewhere,” Froemke recalled, “and she came back to Maysles Films—I was a front-desk girl then—and she said, ‘They don’t believe I made the film.’ ”

Zwerin skipped the next Maysles feature, “Grey Gardens” (1975), about two eccentric relatives of Jackie Onassis, Big Edie and Little Edie Beale. “She didn’t like the footage,” Froemke, who co-edited the film, said. “And it’s probably true that she wanted to go out on her own.” Two other women, Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, stepped in, editing the film with Froemke. In Old Hollywood, where cutting film had been considered akin to sewing, editing had become one realm in which women could thrive, but it had a glass ceiling. At Maysles Films, talented women excelled in the editing rooms; even when they were named co-directors, however, they never had ownership. “Grey Gardens” has four directors, but, like “Salesman” and “Gimme Shelter,” it’s remembered as a Maysles project.

There was backlash to “Grey Gardens” from critics who believed that it exploited the Beales. To some degree, the critiques were backlash to cinéma vérité, which was falling out of fashion in the disillusioned Watergate era. The idealism that had launched the movement in the sixties, promising a revolutionary authenticity, seemed naïve by the seventies, and the hand-wringing over “Gimme Shelter” had taken a toll. Zwerin, meanwhile, edited “The Shadow Catcher,” a documentary about the photographer and ethnologist Edward S. Curtis, and briefly worked on “An American Family,” Craig Gilbert’s pathbreaking PBS series, which chronicled the lives of the members of an everyday family, the Louds, anticipating reality TV. (Zwerin quit after Gilbert refused to work with three female editors whom she’d brought on.)

By the mid-seventies, Zwerin was haggling with the Maysleses over payments for “Gimme Shelter.” According to a letter from her lawyer, preserved in the Maysles archive at Columbia University, she had “received no moneys from you on account of her profit participation.” Still, when it came to editing, the Maysleses considered her first among equals. In 1977, she was working with them again, on “Running Fence,” a film about the married artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s four-year campaign to mount a temporary twenty-four-mile fence of white nylon across the California hills. The film is a fish-out-of-water caper, as two exotic art weirdos attempt to charm ranchers and perplexed local officials. Zwerin, who was captivated by the artists, made a rare visit to the filming location; the movie ends with a rapturous montage of the finished fence rippling in the breeze at dusk.

Zwerin’s chance to finally direct on her own came from Courtney Sale, a gallerist who in 1982 married Steve Ross, the C.E.O. of Warner Communications. Sale hired Zwerin for “Strokes of Genius,” a five-part television series about Abstract Expressionists, hosted by Dustin Hoffman. Zwerin directed two installments, one on Arshile Gorky and one on Willem de Kooning. Both segments rely on archival footage and interviews, but “De Kooning on de Kooning” ends with a splash of vérité. For an astonishing seven minutes, we observe de Kooning, in his seventies, as he paints a canvas in silence. He steps back, tilts his head, lurches in to add a slash of orange. Then he turns to his wife and says, “That looks pretty good.”

The series aired on public television in 1984. Afterward, Zwerin returned to Maysles Films, where she co-directed another film about Christo and Jeanne-Claude, tracking their effort to wrap two islands in Biscayne Bay in pink fabric. The Maysleses paid their bills by shooting TV ads, and Zwerin paid hers by editing those ads. Lynn Sullivan, who assisted her on a commercial for Signet Bank, recalled, “She made a cut, and then these two advertising guys come in, and they’re telling her some stuff and she’s just sitting there. Then they leave, and she goes, ‘Typical admen. Two guys, one ball.’ ”

In January, 1987, David Maysles died suddenly after a stroke, at the age of fifty-five. “Charlotte was pretty devastated,” Froemke recalled. “She would sit in the front office and just mourn him.” Zwerin organized the music for the memorial service: “Take It to the Limit,” “I’ll Be Seeing You.” David had held the enterprise together, and Froemke stepped up to fill the void. Why not Zwerin? “Oh, she was not a boss,” Sullivan said. “She was very smart, very focussed, just did her thing. And she and Albert never could have worked together. No mutual love there.”

David Maysles didn’t live to see Zwerin’s zenith as a solo director, “Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser.” Back in 1981, the jazz aficionado Bruce Ricker had brought her fourteen hours of footage of Monk from the late sixties, shot by Michael and Christian Blackwood for a TV special that was shown once, in West Germany. Zwerin added biographical context, but the core of “Straight, No Chaser” is the enigmatic, vérité-style Blackwood footage, which captures Monk’s genius and his madness. Several times, as another musician plays, Monk stands center stage and spins in place, in febrile oneness with the music. When he does it again at an airport, you wonder if he’s simply losing his mind.

Clint Eastwood funded the film. The Times critic Stephen Holden, in his review, in 1989, wrote that it contained “some of the most valuable jazz sequences ever shot.” He added, “Other scenes show him explaining his compositions and chord structures, giving instructions in terse, barely intelligible growls.” Bernadine Colish, the assistant editor, told me, “It was a surprising film, because not many people had seen Monk in a situation where he was just himself.” She remembered Zwerin’s decisiveness: “Sometimes directors try everything, because they’re not sure what they’re doing or what they’re saying. But Charlotte always knew.”

By the nineties, the vérité movement had shrunk; PBS’s educational house style—archival footage, instructional talking heads—was dominant. Zwerin made “Sit Down and Fight” in 1993, followed by hour-long pieces on the film composer Tōru Takemitsu and the sculptor Isamu Noguchi. In 1999, she directed her last major work, “Ella Fitzgerald: Something to Live For,” for PBS’s “American Masters,” narrated by Tony Bennett. (She wanted Joe Williams, but he was on his deathbed.) The format was pure PBS—just what vérité had rebelled against three decades earlier—and you get the sense that, for Zwerin, it was work for hire. But she artfully uses Fitzgerald’s songbook to suggest the singer’s churning inner life. “The theme of the picture is Ella’s searching for something in her private life that she was never able to achieve,” Zwerin said, at a Museum of Television & Radio panel. “ ‘Something to Live For’ comes right in the middle of the picture, where you begin to understand that she hasn’t found this, and she probably won’t.”

Had Zwerin found something to live for? She had a career she could call her own. She never remarried or had children, but she adored her nieces and relished her independence. “She said to me, ‘If you’re going to live alone when you’re older, you’d better like your own company,’ ” Lisa told me. She read nonfiction, kept a house in Bridgehampton, and doted on Cookie, her dachshund, until an exterminator accidentally poisoned the animal. She started working on a film about the late jazz great Tommy Flanagan, her old boyfriend. One of her regrets was that she could never quit smoking.

When she was given a diagnosis of lung cancer, the doctors estimated that she had five years left. That’s exactly how much longer she lived. Her breathing deteriorated; she installed the chairlift on the staircase. One of my downstairs neighbors was stunned to see her inhale from an oxygen tank one moment and puff on a cigarette the next. Another tenant recalled, “She told me that she had a bad cold.”