Actress Melanie Griffith has opened up about the turbulent time she had while filming the 1980s movie Working Girl.
According to People, Griffith opens up about her time on the set in the new oral history Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols as remembered by 150 of his closest friends by Ash Carter and Sam Kashner.
Nichols directed multiple films including The Graduate, Working Girl, The Birdcage and Closer. He died in 2014 aged 83.
Now, his celebrity friends are paying homage to the director in the new book.
In the book, Griffith, who is Tippi Hedren's daughter and Dakota Johnson's mother, discusses her time filming the movie. She says she upset the director when she appeared intoxicated on the set of Working Girl. She was then asked to pay $80,000 in compensation for production time lost because of her behavior.
“There were a lot of things that happened on Working Girl that I did that were not right,” Griffith said in the book. “It was the late ’80s. There was a lot going on party-wise in New York. There was a lot of cocaine. There was a lot of temptation.”
In the book, she also opens up about secretly getting drunk with Alec Baldwin, who was sober at the time. “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. But it wasn’t, and it was cold, and I had to walk down the stairs with Alec, and I couldn’t do it.”
After the incident, Nichols learned that Griffith was getting drugs delivered onto the Working Girl set. He ended up withholding her salary because production was shut down due to her behavior. There was also a nurse on set for the rest of filming.
Producer Douglas Wick also discussed the incident in the book. “From the first reading, we all got a giant crush on Melanie’s talent. She incarnated Tess, and there was no great version of the movie without her. But it was challenging,” he said.
Three weeks after the incident, she checked into rehab. In the past, she’s opened up about her struggle with drug and alcohol abuse. After her time in rehab in 1988, she checked into rehab two more times - once in 2000 and once in 2009.
