On a recent visit, the actress recalls a poignant moment making the Woody Allen film
When Mariel Hemingway visited the city last week to receive an award from the Hope for Depression Research Foundation for her mental-health advocacy work, she recalled living here in the late ’70s while she filmed Woody Allen’s “Manhattan.”
Ms. Hemingway, who grew up in Ketchum, Idaho, and lives in Malibu, Calif., these days, received a best-supporting-actress nomination for the 1979 movie.
“I lived in my grandfather’s apartment on 67th and Madison in a really ugly robin’s-egg blue building,” she recalled. “Do you remember it?”
Actually, I do. It was on 65th Street. And like many white-brick apartment buildings of that era, it received a face-lift, the distinctive if aesthetically suspect blue brick, replaced by red brick, I suppose to help resale values. “But they had the penthouse apartment, which was extraordinary,” Ms. Hemingway added. “And they had Miros and Picassos on the walls.”
Most recall Ms. Hemingway’s grandfather Ernest, author of “The Sun Also Rises” and other works, who committed suicide a few months before her birth in 1961.
“My step-grandmother Mary lived way in the back,” the actor went on. “She never came out, just lived in her part of the apartment. There were two apartments. So we stayed in the other apartment.”
That would be journalist Mary Walsh Hemingway, Ernest’s fourth wife.
“We” referred to Mariel and her mother Byra, who joined her in New York.
“So I would come home and say, ‘I have this kissing scene. What do I do?” Ms. Hemingway remembered. “Because I’d never kissed anybody.”
In “Manhattan” Mr. Allen plays a twice-divorced 42-year-old comedy writer who dates 17-year-old Tracy, played by Ms. Hemingway, a student at the Dalton School.
In some ways, she seems little changed. She still has the great cheekbones, the easy laugh, and that reedy voice that projects both innocence and fortitude.
“I was 16 when I made the movie; it came out when I was 18. And my mother said, ‘We don’t talk about things like that.’ So I proceeded to go into the bathroom and kiss my arm. And look in the mirror to make sure it was looking okay.”
As I mentioned, Ms. Hemingway was in the city for a good cause. She’s become an advocate for raising awareness of depression and reducing the stigma of the disease. She’s also lived in the shadow of mental illness her entire life.
Generations of her family suffered from depression and addiction, and her older sister Margaux, a supermodel who appeared on the cover of Time magazine, committed suicide, the seventh member of her extended family to do so.
Mariel also tells the tragic story of her family, and her efforts to surmount it, in the 2013 documentary “Running From Crazy.”
But I wanted to know how that kissing scene with Mr. Allen turned out.
“It was in the Hansom cab going around the park,” she explained. “I was so nervous.”
She said she asked the black-and-white film’s legendary cinematographer, Gordon Willis, “This isn’t going to take very long, right?”
“When they said, ‘Cut,’ and I ran up to Gordy and I said, ‘We don’t have to do that again, do we?”
They didn’t.
“And it wasn’t because it was horrible,” she added, meaning kissing her co-star. “It was just because I was so nervous, so scared that I’d look like I didn’t know what I was doing. Which was pretty much my childhood. I didn’t know what I was doing. And tried to look like I knew what I was doing.”
In the Lincoln Navigator on the way to the Hope for Depression lunch, Ms. Hemingway admitted that she was looking forward to trading her heels for flip flops later that afternoon and visiting her daughter, Dree Hemingway Crisman, a 27-year-old fashion model and actor who lives in the city.
When she received her award at the event from Audrey Gruss, the founder and chair of the Hope for Depression Research Foundation, which funds neuroscience research into the disease, Ms. Hemingway told the audience of her own quest to find answers to her family’s struggles with mental illness.
“So that I wouldn’t have to pass on to my daughters the fear they were going to be crazy,” she said, becoming emotional. “You don’t want to give that to your children.”
Speaking only for herself, she said eventually had an epiphany: “Deep down inside you have the answers to the problems haunting you. You’re the only one who knows you as well as you.”
—Ralph.Gardner@wsj.com