When Melanie Griffith won the part of underestimated Staten Island secretary Tess McGill in Working Girl, two facts were true. In her short lifetime, womanhood had transformed. The year she was born, fewer than one in eight married mothers were employed; in 1988, that percentage was well over half. And Griffith – a twice-married mother herself, who would soon wed Don Johnson (again) – needed the job. Not any job. This one.
Griffith’s own mom, the actor Tippi Hedren, had been one of those working women. Starring in The Birds sounds cushier than fetching coffee, though celebrity didn’t protect Hedren from workplace harassment. Bosses were bosses, as Griffith learned when Alfred Hitchcock presented her with a small coffin with a miniature figurine of her mother inside. Griffith was six.
By 16, Griffith was an actor herself. Not that audiences thought the teenager was, well, acting when she played the wild daughter of an ageing superstar in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves. Griffith had already made headlines for her underage romance with Don Johnson, who was eight years older when he invited her to move in. Life stayed chaotic for the next decade and a half with marriages, divorces, drug and alcohol stumbles and titillating flicks like Body Double and Smile. Griffith’s private life and public image fused. She was the sexpot, the nymphet, the bimbo, the blond. No one was curious about her brain.
Working Girl would change that. Mike Nichols’ hit dramedy, which turns 30 this month, was the makeover Griffith needed, a modern Cinderella story where the heroine is blessed with an iron will, not glass slippers. The producers didn’t want her. But Griffith knew Tess was her story, too. Tess was underestimated and oversexualized, a girl smart enough to spot a brilliant opportunity – and shrewd enough to know that skill alone wouldn’t be enough. She ran into the audition late, hair sweaty and her figure hidden in a beige suit. In the last 24 hours, she’d flown from London to Los Angeles, and then hopped a last-minute red eye to New York when she heard the casting agents had finally agreed to see her.
Her desperation helped the execs to see this Hollywood scion as a hard-luck every-girl. “Just because you don’t have the credentials that people say are necessary doesn’t mean you can’t do the job,” Griffith told a reporter at the time. She was talking about Tess. And herself. And the millions of other career women who made Working Girl a cultural juggernaut with six Oscar nominations and a massive box office haul.
Nichols opened the film with a helicopter shot swirling around the Statue of Liberty, looking so stoic and protective you half-expect her to swoop down, scoop up the Staten Island ferry, and shorten secretary Tess McGill’s Wall Street commute. McGill is one of dozens of women schlepping across a river to pour coffee for powerful men. Their hair alone takes up half the boat, and at first glance, she’s simply one of the crowd: floofy perm, tacky jewelry, and white sneakers that seem too clunky to climb the corporate ladder.
But Tess has bigger dreams than marrying her working-class boyfriend (Alec Baldwin). She looks at Mick with affection – yet it’s Tess’s new boss Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver) who earns her Bambi-eyed awe. Katharine is bold and self-confident, a woman who wields her femininity like a superpower, whether wearing red satin to a drab soiree or feigning a faint to manipulate herself into a seat at the conference table. To the film, Katharine’s ego is at once aspirational and a joke. No one’s sure what to do with a woman who’s so self-assured that she announces her boyfriend must be about to propose as, “I am, after all, me.”
Kevin Wade’s script is aware that workers like Tess have to overcome what Donald Rumsfeld would later call the Unknown Unknowns. For every get-ahead skill Tess can pick up, studying night classes and elocution – the film came out the first year female undergraduates outnumbered men on campuses – there’s a lot she can’t master because she can’t even articulate what it is. Especially the buddy-buddy breeziness Katharine absorbed at Wharton that allows her to, say, peel a man’s paw from her neck while cheerily suggesting they split a bottle of Cristal, if he brings her on to a lucrative deal. (Tess would simply spray champagne in the lech’s face, as she does in an early scene with a coke-snorting Kevin Spacey.) To become Katharine, Tess will literally have to become Katharine: move into her townhouse, imitate her accent and borrow her couture. By the end of the film, she’ll have Katharine’s success, and, in a somewhat cruel capper, her boss’s business associate and boyfriend Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford), too.
Thirty years later, Working Girl is still brilliant in the details and wobbly in its overall arc, a flimsy bridge with sparkling lights. It nails the flubbed customs that expose Tess as working class: the rubber band around her file folder, the stuffed bunny on her desk, her ignorance of an open bar. Even back home in Staten Island, she’s surrounded by communal pressures, like when she commits the unforgivable sin of humiliating Mick in front of his friends by dismissing his proposal. Never mind that she caught him naked with another woman three days ago – he’s desperate to gaslight her into believing that he is the aggrieved party, whining, “Why the fuck do we always talk about the way you get treated?”
As for the film, its biggest flaw is that it pits Tess against Katharine, as though the conference table at Trask Industries can only seat one female. Literally – as soon as one woman demands a chair, the other gets up and leaves. Watching it today, you see the film work overtime to convince audiences that Katharine is the villain, while noting that she, too, has her own career hurdles. Even Tess unthinkingly undermines her authority by calling her Katharine instead of Miss Parker the first time they meet, to which she graciously replies that, yes, Katharine will be fine. When Weaver let her female Wall Street friends read the script, they asked, “This awful secretary steals your man, wears your clothes, takes your office – who’s going to sympathize with her?”
Corporate culture at large was too gargantuan an enemy to be bested, which is why Oren Trask himself, a grandfatherly sexist who accuses Jack of thinking with his dick, escapes the movie unscathed. As for Trainer, he barges into Tess’s life lying about his identity and plies her with shots of tequila hoping to get her in the sack. “Doubles,” he conspiratorially mouths to the bartender. When she wakes up the next morning undressed in his bed – Nichols stuffs the film with so many lace teddies, you’d think he grabbed a rack of costumes from a hair metal video – she glumly accepts their blackout one-night-stand, and the film drags out the misconception for several scenes, before reassuring us that Trainer isn’t a date rapist, just a cad trying to cheat on his girlfriend while she’s in the hospital with a broken leg.
Still, moxie saves the day. Working Girl feels like classic Hollywood transplanted to the last days of Reaganomics, not just because every character is dressed like Edward G Robinson. (When Tess and Jack finally strip naked sober, the camera pans down to note their matching white shirts and gray blazers.) For her performance, Griffith channeled Lina Lamont (played by Jean Hagen), that delirious, sharp-clawed ditz from Singin’ in the Rain.
Both women landed Oscar nominations, along with Joan Cusack as Tess’s guilt-tripping best friend. But Griffith struggled to win over the press, who continued to treat her like a sex toy. One male critic wrote: “With her floozie face, her kewpie doll voice, her made-for-bed bod, and a general demeanor suggesting that she was born already knowing the Kama Sutra by heart, it always comes as a surprise to audiences to find Melanie Griffith actually can act, too.” And that was in a nice review. Another journalist waved away Griffith’s attempt to discuss sexism in the industry by noting that it had been her idea to have Tess clean her boss’s house in her underwear. He couldn’t accept that what he saw as erotic was, for her, a character beat. Perhaps he’d never tried to vacuum in a pencil skirt.
Yet, Working Girl fans in 1988 must have felt that women were poised to reconquer Hollywood. Just listen to the names competing against each other for best actress and best supporting actress: Melanie Griffith, Jodie Foster, Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, Geena Davis, Joan Cusack, Frances McDormand, Michelle Pfeiffer and Sigourney Weaver – twice, for Working Girl and Gorillas in the Mist. Phenomenal characters give rise to phenomenal actors, a feedback loop of longevity that’s still making the industry hum today. Meanwhile, a nomination-less Harrison Ford was stuck grumbling that in Working Girl, he had “the girl part”, ie Trainer winds up sidelined as a cheerleader-to-the-star and a bit of eye candy. Whenever he walks into a room, the female extras leer.
Does Working Girl have a happy ending? For the cast, sure. Griffith got a huge career bump and was seen as deliberately funny enough to host Saturday Night Live. And that night, Don Johnson re-proposed, leading to the birth of today’s best comic starlet, Fifty Shades of Grey’s Dakota Johnson.
As for the characters, Tess gets her office, but then Nichols zooms out to show the whole skyscraper, as if to say that her triumph is merely becoming one of thousands of anonymous drones. For a girl from Staten Island, it’s all perspective. With Katharine vanquished, would Tess have tackled sexual harassment? Maternity discrimination? Would she have leaned in, or would she have helped concoct the corporate hijinks that have made the rich get richer? That’s the problem with a film, and a class structure, that forces a woman to scheme her way to the top. If only tricksters win, there’s still no one in power to trust.
• This story was amended on 17 December 2018 to note that Lina Lamont, the character Griffith channeled, was played by Jean Hagen.
