"I do feel very strongly about filmmakers. If there's a certain filmmaker [I admire], then I will do whatever they ask me to do. Oliver Stone, we created that little role in JFK. It wasn't in the script. I told him, "Hey, I want to work with you so badly. Just tell me what to do."(2) JFK
Oliver Stone's JFK
The Cast: In Their Own Words
Sally Kirkland (Rose Cherami)(1)
"In JFK, when the film opens up and you see this woman being thrown out of a car and she's screaming all kinds of obscenities, that's me. Then you see the documentary with Jackie O and Jack, and then you go to the hospital and there's this woman bandaged up, screaming about 'Kennedy's going to be assassinated,' and this and that, that's me on withdrawal. There's the reporters and doctors with me. Then I give out this blood-curdling scream which pretty much sets the tone of the film. Then they come back to me and are going to have to testify that I'm dead, on the way, on that same road where you see me.
"It was a small cameo role, but the interesting thing is that Oliver [Stone] created it for me. The back story on that is that I told him, 'I've got to be in this film,' and I sent him and Kevin [Costner] flowers. So Oliver called me up and said, 'Come to my office and tell me what you want to do.' He said, 'These six women were assassinated.' I don't remember the names. He said, 'Improvise all of them.' So I improvised and he said, 'The one I liked best was Rose Cherami.' He had his people who work for him do research and send me all the information. She was drug runner and a hooker. She had a child. She was doing whatever she could to support herself and that child. She did not want Kennedy to die. She was the first person to go public and say, 'The President's going to be killed.' She wigged out. Newsweek opened up their review and said, 'One of the most authentic moments in the whole film was Rose Cherami.' If you check out the Newsweek article. They don't mention me by name, but they give it all to my character.(3)
"I thought since she was a stripper I'd go to this club and see what it was like to strip on stage. Of course, Oliver loves women. He's thrilled to have a professional excuse to sit there and have all these girls come over to the table, bodies practically falling over as they brought the drinks. He said, 'Look, you don't have to do this, Sally, but I'm not going to stop you if it's something you think you need to do.' So I tried on the G-string and the whatnot. They have some law in Dallas that you have to have the nipples covered with not just a costume but a plastic something. They didn't have any to give me and they were worried about legal problems. Then they didn't have any music I could dance to. So I didn't do it. But that night I got excited thinking that, even though it was just a cameo, I'd be playing one of the few people who actually tried to stop the assassination.
"The makeup people were doing this beauty thing on me and I said I want to look like someone who's on drug withdrawal, who has been lacerated and thrown from a car. Then suddenly a walkie-talkie is put in front of my ear, and it's Oliver wanting to know if I needed anything? When would I be ready? He was miles away on the location. And I thought, Well, I've done sixty-three films, and this is the first film that the director's talked to me on walkie-talkie from the location to the makeup room. "He [Stone] was very open to my ideas. The stuntwoman took the real hard fall from a distance for the master shot, but I wanted to hit the pavement only half conscious, bloody and teary for my scene. I wanted to stand up and scream, 'You f****** a*******!' That was never in the script. This woman's whole life has been about abandonment, disillusionment. She may be drugged and inebriated, but she knows what's happening and it's like this primal scream. So he said, 'Well, let's shoot it two ways.' And so I had to keep falling from the car and at one point my leg was bloodied a bit. And he said, 'Are you sure you want to do this? We could get a stuntwoman.' But I said no stuntwoman. I felt that we were each challenging the other. How far can we take this small role and give a hundred percent authenticity?
"I was ready to start the [hospital] scene and Oliver asked everybody to please be quiet so I could focus and I felt this extraordinary respect that he has for the process. Then suddenly I was being wheeled down the hall into the room and lifted into the bed in some footage you didn't see in the movie. Then he sent in some actors pretty much the way [Elia] Kazan works, without me really knowing what they were going to do. He told the actors playing the doctor and the officer what to say, but he didn't do it in front of me. It was all like a theater piece. And so suddenly they were asking me questions and I was in tears and all disoriented. I was purposely fogging up my contacts so that I couldn't quite see and putting sensory things on myself so that I would be disoriented. I answered the questions about how they were going to kill Kennedy and then I remember going into this incredible scream. I thought, somewhere in the back of my head, what will the poor people do with this? But it was like from my gut, like back when she was on the road. And in the movie, he had that scream pierce into you so that it sort of set you up for the motorcade that follows."(4)
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You may wish to see:
Who's Who in the Jim Garrison Case
Jim Garrison's New Orleans Photo Gallery
Articles and resources on the JFK assassination
1. Rose Cherami's surname is commonly misspelled as "Cheramie." The spelling error originated in 1967 with Louisiana State Patrolman Francis Frugé.
2. KAOS 2000, Interview With: Sally Kirkland.
3. KAOS 2000, Interview With: Sally Kirkland.
4. James Riordan, Stone (New York: Hyperion, 1995), pp. 377-79.