The Angels of ER

TV's real-to-life heroines reveal their operating procedures 
Article by Johanna Scheller 
Photographs by Mark Seliger 


Every now and then it happens. One of the stars of NBC’s megahit medical drama ER - either Sherry Stringfield (who plays the no-nonsense Dr. Susan Lewis) or Julianna Margulies (enigmatic head nurse Carol Hathaway) or Gloria Reuben (sincere physician’s assistant Jeanie Boulet) - will look up in the middle of rehearsing a trauma scene and realize that everyone in the room is a woman. "Chick trauma!" she’ll cry out, and they’ll all join in, "Chick trauma! Chick trauma!" 

Tubes are stuck into dummies, blood squirts on cue, background nurses (real ones recruited for authenticity) pass scalpels and start IV drips, as the Steadicam operator snakes among them like a Martha Graham dancer. "Cut! Great!" yells the director. High-fives fill the air. 

"Chick traumas are the best traumas," Margulies says. (She’s the one with the 1940’s-movie-star face, all dark eyebrows and slinky curls.) "There’s something different about them: no fooling around, no holdups. We’re more focused. It runs so smooth." The next day they’ll razz their male co-stars, "We did a chick trauma in 45 minutes! You guys couldn’t do that!" 

Even the crew has a different vibe," says Stringfield (she’s the Ivory-soap blonde with the whiskey voice; Reuben, who became a series regular this season, is the one with the toast-and-honey skin and the warm smile). 

It’s lunchtime on the Warner Bros. lot, and the women are sunning outside the studio commissary, a short walk from Stage 11, where they film the most lauded - and lucrative - drama on television. About 37 million viewers check in to ER every week. Thirty-seven million. Last year, its first on the air, the show vacuumed up 23 Emmy nominations and won 8 - tying Hill Street Blues’ record for a freshman series - including Best Supporting Actress for Margulies. This year it snagged everything from Screen Actors Guild trophies to the People’s Choice Award for favorite TV drama. 

The ER guys are on the patio, too, just out of earshot: Anthony Edwards, who plays Dr. Mark Greene (the balding, beating heart of the show), is being interviewed by TV Guide. George Clooney (Dr. Doug Ross, the troubled hunk), Eriq La Salle (Dr. Peter Benton, the cocky, angry surgeon) and Noah Wyle (Dr. John Carter, the soulful naif) stretch out at the next table. 

Stringfield: They’re looking over here again. This makes them so nervous.  If the three of us are ever just sitting on a gurney chatting- 

Margulies: They all come up. "What are you talking about? What, what, what? No really, what?" 

If the guys are talking together do you do the same? 

All: [Quick and certain] Nuh-uh. No way. 

Stringfield: We’re like, "Shut the door!" 

Reuben: Oh, now look. [All the men are staring, frankly curious.] 

Stringfield: They’ll be here in a second. 

Margulies: Look at Anthony, he’s sticking his tongue out at us. [Edwards grabs his pants as if to moon them.] 

All: Come on! Come on! 

"But the truth is," Margulies says later, "They are four of the sweetest, most sensitive, vulnerable guys I’ve ever met. There isn’t a lot of ‘We’re the women, you’re the men.’ They all have a real feminine side to them. And we have a real tough side to us. I think we all give each other a reality check." 

A reality check. Maybe that’s what those 37 million viewers (split evenly between men and women) respond to week after week. ER’s characters - especially the women - are more complicated, cranky and assertive than most people are allowed to be on series TV. "We care about each of the characters in our ensemble equally," says Lydia Woodward, one of ER’s writer/co-executive producers. "Does that mean the women get more attention than on some shows where they’re not thought of equally? Probably." 

The women of ER are heroes to many viewers because they're real. Amid the carnage that is everyday life, they save lives, they ride public transit, they lose lives, their families are screwed up. And at the end of the day, they usually go home alone. 

Back on the set, Margulies’ neck is bright red - a homeless character just throttled nurse Carol Hathaway, and she got slugged in the ensuing melee. "There’s so much testosterone out there, they forgot I’m in the middle of it," she says. She smooths her peach-colored scrubs and sighs. "Ehh, peach. It makes me look green. For a while we had these nice maroon scrubs, but Steven Spielburg [ER’s producer] said the blood didn’t stand out enough." Spielburg concerns himself with those details? Everyone nods solemnly. 

"When I was in college," Margulies continues (she went to Sarah Lawrence), "I would watch All My Children just to laugh. Like, ‘She’s been in bed with him for four or five hours, and her lipstick is perfect.’ You don’t see that on our show. We try to portray these women honestly." Later, when she shoots a bedroom scene - Hathaway and her paramedic boyfriend, Shep (Ron Eldard), waking up in old T-shirts early in the morning - there is no lipstick in sight. 

Margulies arrives for tea the next day at Shutters on the Beach, Santa Monica’s version of a rambling New England inn: genteel patrons but without wrinkles. Clouds scud across the ocean outside. She takes off her black beret and pulls her black cashmere turtleneck over her chin. Throughout tea, she’s enthusiastic, eager to communicate, eager to laugh. "The problem is that they keep hooking her up with men," she says. "I think they have a really hard time allowing Hathaway to be Hathaway without a man." Hathaway was resurrected from a suicide drug overdose in ER’s first episode and rode out the season full of Sturm und Drang: a torched love affair with Dr. Doug Ross, a failed stab at adopting an abandoned AIDS child, being stood up at the altar. "The style of the show," George Clooney says, "is, take the lines and throw them away. Don’t fall prey to ‘acting.’ Julianna is a master at it. She carried me on her shoulders for a year." 

But this year Hathaway’s inner life has evaporated from the show, and it frustrates Margulies. "[Executive Producer] John Wells says Hathaway’s ratings go up when she’s lighter, and I know they think the show is dark enough. But I think they missed the boat." Instead, she wishes Hathaway’s suicide attempt could be explored further: Why is she so hard on herself? How did she get to that dark place? 

Being hard on herself is something Margulies understands. "I set such high standards for myself that I’m always on the edge of panic. I’ve done it ever since childhood," she says. Her mother, an art-and-movement therapist, and her father, an ad executive (he wrote the famous "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz" jingle), divorced when she was young, and her mother moved the family from New York to Paris to London (Margulies, who is 28, has two sisters). "I was always the new kid in town, so I had to exceed to prove myself. And my mother was a hippie, a free spirit. There were no rules, except I wasn’t allowed to watch TV. I think I felt everything was out of control - my parents’ being apart, where we lived. The only thing I could control was my yearning to succeed." She remembers throwing a 50-page, hand-illustrated high school research paper into a mud puddle because it got an A-minus. 

The pressure continued at Sarah Lawrence, which Margulies calls "a horrible experience. The women weren’t kind. But I got lost in plays. That saved me." She skipped to Florence, Italy, for her junior year, to study Dante, and spent her senior year off campus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, researching her art-history degree. 

Margulies still keeps an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; she and her actor boyfriend, whom she won’t name (although he’s reported to be the aforementioned Ron Eldard), commute back and forth, ringing up air miles like cherries on a slot machine. Over Christmas she starred in the film The Traveler, with Bill Paxton, and she recently jetted off to London to audition for the screen adaptation of Henry James’ Wings of a Dove. Her life, she says, isn’t lacking a thing. So why isn’t Margulies satisfied? 

"I just see every step as the next step to the next step. I don’t know how to enjoy where I am yet," she says. I try to be a positive person, to find the good in any situation. I can’t imagine having such a high expectations of myself and being negative. I definitely wouldn’t have lasted." She laughs. "I’m slowly progressing into just accepting who I am." 

At lunch, Part Two:

Margulies: I call Sherry "Norma Rae" [after the union organizer played by Sally Field in the 1979 film]. We’ll be in my trailer, she’ll go off on some injustice. I’m like, "You go, girl!" Then I’ll walk outside and go, "That’s what I have to do. I have to be like Norma Rae!" and I’ll go right to the person we were discussing. Only later do I realize that Sherry is just venting to me. When I tell her I confronted the person, she’s like, "You did what?!" 

Stringfield: But if someone ever says to me, "You crossed the line," I’m like "Hey, George owns homes over the line." [They all laugh.] He lives there. If stuff gets really bad, I’ll say, "George, save us" He goes [big, hearty voice], "All right," and he’s got his stethoscope up his nose in two seconds. And I’m like, "Exactly. Life’s good again." 

Stringfield heads off to the set, where she cuddles a plastic baby for half an hour. When the scene is ready, the real baby arrives - the niece whom Dr. Susan Lewis is desperate to adopt from her flaky sister, Chloe - and does five or six takes like a pro. But gradually the baby starts to cry. Stringfield, unperturbed, keeps nailing her lines, but the assistant director is glued to his walkie-talkie: "Can we get the replacement twin in here? We’re down to one twin!" 

"The hours the writers spent talking about what would happen with Lewis and the baby- we spent more hours than I did selecting a school for my real son," says Carol Flint, another ER writer/co-executive producer. "It was very emotional." (The fate of baby Suzie changed from week to week with the writers’ opinions - but Chloe’s recent reappearance doesn’t bode well for Lewis’ future as a mom.) 

"I was thrilled to play the baby stuff because I don’t know how people do it," Stringfield says later, over Diet Cokes (her addiction) on a hotel patio not far from her West Hollywood apartment, all of Beverly Hills at her feet. She looks like a star - funky fitted white shirt, sandals, wisps of hair blowing in the breeze. Her conversation is like a jazz riff, free-form and deliberately wacky. Clooney calls her a real dame, and he’s right - she’s Judy Holliday in a lower register. 

"It’s fun to play any situation where you’ve gotta act like you know what you’re doing." Stringfield says. "But mostly I love the details. By the fourth episode I noticed I was the only doctor calling patients by their first name. I went, ‘This is cool, it’s so right on.’" 

To prepare for the role, she spent time in an ER with Dr. Lance Gentile, one of the show’s two medical consultants. "After I got over the whole ‘Omigod this is traumatic’ thing, I saw that Lance would help people, but he would also walk away from them rolling his eyes like, ‘Ah, not this again.’ I started to see the real j-o-b in it." 

Still, Stringfield says she’s "not the kind of person who walks into a room and goes, ‘OK, put the chairs this way, and we’ll all sit here.’ A doctor does that. I’m like, ‘I’ll sit on the floor.’ Just to get used to barking at people - I would look up at Eriq or Anthony, both over 6 feet, both handsome, and yeah, right, I’m gonna yell at them." She laughs. "It’s not your first instinct. But Lewis is a woman who can look at anyone and go, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ She doesn’t give a s---." 

And Lewis isn’t very trusting, she says: "If you betray her, you’re out. I understand that. I have compassion, but I’m a big believer of, if you accidentally punch me in the face, I still have a black eye." 

Stringfield, 27, grew up in New Mexico and Texas - "soccer and volleyball and camping with my two younger brothers," she says. "The greatest gift my family has given me, they’re really wise, their philosophy is, ‘Don’t go there.’ Over there, the noise and insanity- don’t go there." (It’s become an ER catch phrase.) 

Her dream was to move to New York to act, and it never let her down. On her first trip - with her high school theater coach and seven other students, to audition for drama colleges - the hotel they’d reserved gave away their rooms to celebrities arriving for a celebration at Radio City Music Hall. "Stars are walking in on the red carpet, and we’re sitting on our luggage," Stringfield says, "I go up to the people behind the desk, ‘Let me tell you my situation: I’m 17, I’m auditioning for Julliard tomorrow, and I don’t know where there’s another hotel.’ Eventually this bellboy comes over, he takes us up to the East Wing Suite, it’s like $4,000 a night, three stories. And we stayed there for five days - at our original rate, $180 a night. I love Manhattan like no one knows." 

She graduated from SUNY Purchase in Westchester, then landed a spot as bad girl Blake on The Guiding Light. "Reading those scripts, I’d just die laughing, like, ‘No, I do not throw water in her face!’ My friends still call me Miss Blake." A short stint as David Caruso’s ex-wife in the first season of NYPD Blue brought her to L.A., but she, too, commutes to New York (she, too, has an unnamed bicoastal boyfriend). 

"Five hours of peace on the flight, and all the Diet Coke I can drink," she sighs, "Noah Wyle said to me, ‘You’re the only person I know who goes to Manhattan to relax.’" On one trip, Stringfield met actor/director Eric Shaeffer (If Lucy Fell). Now she’s starring in his next film, which begins shooting this summer. 

She exhales a plume of smoke and stubs out her last cigarette. "I think people are quick to label me a lightweight. They think because I want to have a good time and laugh, that I don’t notice things. After being upset about it, now I’m like, No, that’s a great way to go through life. Maybe I am a dingbat. You can think whatever. Whatever. If you think I’m stupid, you’re most likely not going to burden me with your crap." 

At Lunch, Part Three:

Stringfield: We call Julianna "Crash Cart [They all laugh.] 

Margulies: [Smart, hurt voice] I just bump into everything. You know when you see all of us running with the gurney? I’m the one who gets stuck in the door. But Sherry has this thing with food. 

Stringfield: I knew you were going to say that. 
Margulies: Whatever she eats ends up on her somehow. One day the cast and crew were eating chicken and corn on the cob, and Sherry made this announcement: "I am not eating corn." So we’re all munching down, and I look up [her voice grows thin in hilarity], and Sherry has corn all over her hair. [All three shake with laughter.] 

Stringfield:  George, now, he’ll look at me when I eat and go - [shakes her head sadly and points to her cheek]. Like it’s not even funny anymore, just pathetic. And Gloria, she’s so serene. She and I flew to New York for a promotion thing with George and Eriq. Eriq threw an M&M and hit me in the eye, I’m like "Oww!" Totally spastic. We were playing Scrabble, and George is seriously competitive, and we’re cursing, and here’s Gloria - [perfectly composed face]. She’s reading a book. 

Margulies: I feel like a truck driver around Gloria. After a day in a trauma, I’ll be going "F--- this" and "F--- that," and Gloria’s like, "Would you please pass the scalpel?" 

Reuben: Wait till next season. 

It doesn’t take that long. Back on the set, Reuben - in character as Jeanie Boulet (who, as a physician’s assistant, can diagnose a patient and prescribe drugs) - stands across a hospital bed from her ex-lover, Dr. Peter Benton (La Salle). He accuses her of misdiagnosing a now dangerously ill patient; her eyes flame but she says nothing. Between takes, La Salle makes loud digs about the scene: "What confrontation? I’m right, she’s wrong." Reuben smiles. 

But during the last take, Boulet’s composure cracks. "Kiss my ass, Benton," she says as she leaves. Reuben smiles radiantly at director Felix Alcala - "What do you think? Should we call the writer in and ask him?" The writer/producer, Paul Manning, is already there chuckling. Angry people, that’s what we like," he says. 

ER has three basic moods: black (the darkness of the medical traumas, evinced by Hathaway’s inner demons), white (the belief that order will conquer chaos, which is Lewis’ approach.) and a soft gray (compassion, Boulet’s beat). "My thing is to try to show that in the madness of it all," Reuben says, "you can still take time with each patient." 

And with each actor. One day Laura Innes, who plays whip-cracking chief resident Kerry Weaver, had a flood of medical jargon to say and couldn’t quite nail it. "I was going, ‘Oh man, I can’t do this,’" Innes says. "Gloria quietly took my hand and said, ‘Yes, you can.’" 

The strength of Reuben’s presence (she doesn’t say much, but she can warm you up or cut you down with her deep brown eyes) kept Jeanie on the show after her original function - to humanize Benton - had run its course. "We shot one scene," Reuben says, "where I say to him, ‘Why don’t you look at me when I walk to you?’ He says, ‘I am so over you.’ And right at that moment - I’m sure it showed on my face - I knew Jeanie would be thinking, Why did I f--- you? That’s rare for a woman to play that ." 

Reuben, 31, is sitting in a health-food restaurant in Brentwood. She shrugs off her suede jacket, rolls her eyes at the people on cell phones at the next table - "La-la land" - and digs into a pile of blue-corn pancakes. 

If Margulies had the most exotic childhood, and Stringfield the most all-American, Reuben’s was probably the toughest. Her father, who died when she was 11, was white; her mother, black - not a common situation in suburban London, Ontario. 

"And the six kids, all different shades," she says. "I was called everything from brownie to nigger walking to school. And when I was 12-" she stops, choked up. "I’ll never forget this. I walked past these two boys, and they spat on me." There are tears in Reuben’s eyes, but they don’t fall. "I’ve never told anybody about that. I didn’t tell my mom. Communication, expression of feelings, just wasn’t happening in my family. But I took it in, unfortunately. I took it in like there was something wrong with me." 

She shakes her shoulders, stabs a pancake. "It’s funny," she says, "because last fall I was on the cover of the Canadian TV Guide, and I thought, I hope all those people that were s---s to me in school see this. I think that’s been an inner drive I wasn’t completely conscious of. I think I turned to acting because my spirit had to find a way to get some of this out, maybe reach somebody else." 

How determined is Reuben? Once, on her way to audition for director John Badham, her car smashed into an old van that suddenly stopped dead in front of her on La Brea Avenue (an insurance scam, she says). The first call she made was not to AAA or a friend but to her manager: " ‘I’ve been in a car accident, call John Badham and tell him I’ll be 10 minutes late.’ My manager’s going, ‘Are you OK?’ I’m like, ‘What? Oh yeah.’" Reuben didn’t get the job - but she’s got one in Badham’s thriller Nick of Time. 

"I loved working with Johnny Depp on that film because he is so authentic," she says. "One of the things I find most attractive in a man is a sense of self. Not false bravado, or macho stuff." Does she have a boyfriend now? "Nooo," she laughs. "It’s hard to find that here. I watched Legends of the Fall the other night - whoa. To experience that kind of love from a man, that ‘I would do anything for you’ I’ve felt that way about men, for sure. But I’d love to see what it’s like the other way around." 

In the meantime, Reuben keeps craziness at bay by "balancing output with input" - yoga, retreats by the ocean, playing classical piano. Her new Santa Monica mountain home is big enough, she says with glee, for "the real thing" - a Steinway. Classical music is the music from God. Like Beethoven, man, he was just so deep." She laughs. "It’s genius, and part of me thinks that when you play the music, you tap into that. To get a little piece of that, by playing it, is enough." 

At Lunch, Part Four:

Stringfield: After a long week, people get scary-funny. Like, last season, I looked up, and there was Anthony coming at us in a golf cart. It had blood bags hanging off it, crutches strapped to the sides for doors. And he’s honking the horn, going, "Sherrrry!" We’re all like [calmly], "He’s lost it." 

Margulies: I always say that on my hiatus I want to do a play in a black box with one person and no props. 

"There’s a Beckett play where all you see are the heads of the three characters, each of whom is in her own garbage can," I offer. 

Margulies: [Dreamily] That sounds good. 

Stringfield: Your own space. [They laugh.] 

Margulies: I just wish we were given more scenes of the women together. Why don’t the chicks ever go out and have a drink, discuss what’s going on, the way men do? 

Stringfield: This is how much we cherish chick trauma: Lydia Woodward actually wrote a scene for me where Lewis looks around and goes, "All riiight, it’s just us ladies today!" And Malik, a male nurse, answers, "And me." Lewis says, "Oh right, sorry, Malik." It’s reverse discrimination! 

No offense guys. It’s just a chick thing.