He’s a woman’s kind of man

The world’s most perfect woman, in Henry Jaglom’s eyes, lives in a photo perched on his bathroom sink. Audrey Hepburn is jumping in the air in a full skirt and a little top and nothing on her feet. In that frozen moment, she is lightness and grace.

Hepburn is the object of Jaglom’s magnificent obsession. She’s someone he wants to have. She’s someone he wants to be.

“It’s amazing the degree to which I go back and forth,” says the notoriously candid director. “I’ve spent some time in therapy talking about it because it’s a problem. Because I’ll brush my teeth and I’ll suddenly feel, ‘Oh, my God, if I don’t look in the mirror I’ll feel like I’m Audrey Hepburn.’ ”

Jaglom’s heart belongs to the gamine sophisticate Audrey of “Sabrina” and “Roman Holiday,” but it’s Holly Golightly Audrey, the kooky sprite from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” whose spirit emboldens the heroine of the filmmaker’s first play, “A Safe Place,” which runs through Oct. 19 at the Skylight Theatre in Los Feliz.

Jaglom, 62, makes movies about and for women because the twice-married father of two identifies with them to an unusual degree, so closely in fact that he used to call himself a male lesbian. Jaglom’s fearless embrace of his feminine side even inspired Orson Welles, his late friend and mentor, to tell the French press, “Henry and I are girlfriends.”

The voluble director has explored male-female relationships from his singular female-centric perspective in most of his 15 films, which have attracted both loyal fans and angry catcalls. (His 16th, “Going Shopping,” is in post-production.)

“He kind of worships women,” said the play’s director, Kim Furst. “You can see it in the way he portrays them and really goes after their innermost thoughts and feelings. It’s unique. To a degree, he really has the ability to and the interest in seeing himself as one of the girls.”

While that tradition continues with the current run of “A Safe Place,” which marks Jaglom’s public debut as a playwright, the play actually predates his film career and had a huge effect on it. The play, which he wrote in the late ‘60s as a student at New York’s Actors Studio, morphed into his controversial first film, “A Safe Place” (1971), which starred Tuesday Weld and Jack Nicholson and set the template for much of his later work.

Indeed, Jaglom may have made his reputation as an almost frighteningly independent filmmaker long before the John Sayleses and the Steven Soderberghs, but playwriting was his career goal until Hollywood called and serendipity stepped in. Serendipity is back again, and this time it’s reuniting Jaglom with the written word. It arrived with 26-year-old Tanna Frederick, an actress whom he met a couple of years ago through mutual friends. The effervescent Frederick somehow reminded him of Noonie, the play’s lead character, who was modeled on his close friend Weld.

“A Safe Place” examines Noonie’s love triangle with a man whose love she can’t return and another she adores because she knows he’ll leave her. Frederick was the first woman he’d met since Weld who’d struck him as right for the part.

“I see in Tanna another one of these special girls who throughout my life I have really become close friends with,” said Jaglom, who lives in Santa Monica with his actress-wife and collaborator, Victoria Foyt, and their children, Sabrina, 11, and Simon, 9. “I identify with their feelings, their emotions, what I think they’re going through. I feel an empathetic connection with her.

“She’s another one of those Noonies,” he added. “It’s a category for me.”

Jaglom’s Noonies live by their own rules. He said Weld was unconcerned with social niceties, which can be a tremendous freedom or terrible flaw, depending upon the eye of the beholder.

Once, after seeing a movie with Weld, Jaglom began talking animatedly. “She crossed the street and walked away. She disappeared for two days. It took me a long time to understand that she was so affected by the movie that what she wanted was not to talk,” he said.

“We’ve all felt that way, but what most of us do is say, ‘Excuse me, I really don’t feel like talking.’ With Noonie, there’s an immediacy of response without the censorship of social conventions.”

Identifiable character

Jaglom has come under fire for focusing on women’s weaknesses and neuroses in films like “Eating” (1990) and “Baby Fever” (1994). But Frederick said that she identified strongly with his Noonie character as soon as she read the play.

“I said, ‘This is completely me,’ There’s a mercurial neurosis to this woman that I wear on my sleeve.”

It’s early afternoon on a recent sun-sparked Friday, and Jaglom is settled into a tufted red booth at Mirabelle in West Hollywood, across Sunset Boulevard from the offices of his production company, Rainbow Films. The company name and logo were inspired by a scene in the film of “A Safe Place,” in which Welles plays a magician who cups a rainbow in his hands.

Jaglom, who is very much a creature of habit, is demolishing a turkey cheeseburger, the same meal he’s had there for the past 15 years or so. On the seat next to him lies a soft briefcase that holds two cell phones -- one in a red leather case, the other in teal -- which ring periodically throughout the meal. “Aren’t these cute little purses for my cells?” he coos.

Speaking rapidly between bites of burger, Jaglom says he began fancying himself a playwright as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, where he won a $50 award for a play he’d written at 19 called “Room 322.” He moved to New York in his early 20s and enrolled in Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, where he wrote “A Safe Place” in two acts. With Jaglom’s girlfriend Karen Black starring as Noonie, one act was staged for Harold Clurman and the playwrights’ unit and the other for Strasberg and the actors’ unit.

They encouraged him to pursue playwriting, but he was soon summoned by Universal for guest spots on “The Flying Nun” and “Gidget.” Shortly after his arrival in Hollywood, he was hired to help edit “Easy Rider” (1969) by Bert Schneider, the film’s executive producer and his former summer camp counselor. With Schneider’s backing after the film’s success, Jaglom turned his 3-year-old play into a movie with Weld as Noonie. But the movie version of “A Safe Place,” which launched his filmmaking career, nearly nipped it in the bud. Jaglom took a freewheeling approach to the play, dropping any pretense of a conventional story line and eliminating boundaries separating reality from dreams, present from past.

When the film was screened in New York, a shouting match erupted. The critic John Simon had hated it enough to bring along a group to boo it. Some people walked out. Others screamed at the people walking out.

“Women were very responsive to it,” Jaglom said. “Men hated it.”

Championed by Anais Nin

The film bombed in the U.S. The one person who saved it from total obscurity was Anais Nin, who raved about it in an essay that ran in alternative newspapers around the country. Nin took the film around to college campuses, where she showed it to women’s groups studying women in film.

“That’s where I got my first audience,” he said. “They were all these very conscious females, people who were very focused on issues related to being a woman in this society. And they felt something about this. And it saved me. From then on, I made films almost entirely for that audience.”

Jaglom hadn’t touched the play for 30 years until he met Frederick. About a year ago, he offered it to her and suggested she get a production together. Frederick enlisted Camelot Artist Productions, and Jaglom dusted off the play and began revising it.

“It’s been a phenomenal experience to come back to where the word is the center,” Jaglom said. “In film, I’ve always been against words being holy.” But onstage, he said, “it’s got to be there for the actors to say. It finally comes down to words or the space between words or silence. And as an author, I’m really exacting. I don’t want anyone saying ‘the’ when I wrote ‘a.’ ”

In an uncharacteristic relinquishment of control, Jaglom suggested that the production be directed by a woman. Furst, who has directed short films and acted onstage in Chicago and with a touring Shakespeare company, was hired to direct her first play.

“I like the new role of being a playwright and seeing someone else interpret my work,” Jaglom says. “It’s much more fun. It gives you another view of your own work and helps you understand it.”

Ultimately, “A Safe Place” speaks to an issue that permeates much of his work -- his lifelong struggle against loneliness and his yearning to feel safe. If love is the answer, the play explores how people botch the question, how a young woman will sabotage her own search for love and inner peace.

“Ultimately, none of us are safe since we die,” he said, “but the illusion is terribly important.”

*

‘A Safe Place’

Where: Skylight Theatre, 1816 N. Vermont Ave., L.A.

When: Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m.

Ends: Oct. 19

Price: $25

Contact: (310) 358-9936