M*A*S*H Dish

The Script called for an actress who could simultaneously convey innocence and sensuality while wearing unflattering 1952 Army fatigues, a moral Midwestern virgin capable of tantalizing an entire company of GIs fighting the Korean War. More than 100 eager ingénues appeared for the auditions: Actors Studio graduates, summer-stock neophytes, hopefuls from Council Bluffs recently arrived in California by Greyhound and a galaxy of fluff-headed starlets normally seen dancing the funky chicken at local discothèques.

Karen Philipp, the willowy blonde ultimately selected to play the Army nurse, Lieutenant Dish, in television's version of the antiwar comedy film M*A*S*H, had never before acted--anywhere. She was best known as the provocative girl on the left whose fingers snapped and torso churned to the sometime bossa-nova rhythms of Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 (later updated to '77). Her harmonizing voice, an integral part of the group's Latin-oriented hits like Look of Love, Mais Que Nada and Fool on the Hill, had been heard in night clubs, concert dates, television specials, recordings and even at a White House gala.

It came as some surprise when the 26-year-old singer announced she was abandoning her security with the popular combo--after logging nearly 100,000 miles on the road across four continents--to pursue the more precarious acting profession. "There's no spontaneity anymore," she explained at the time. "The show I'm performing in is prepackaged. It's formula music, sophisticated Muzak. I hate its predictability. Like, the Brazilians have a saying: 'It doesn't smell good, it doesn't smell bad, it just doesn't smell.' And that's really a drag. To a great degree, being in this group has destroyed my interest in music."

What had begun as a Cinderella story four years before was ending in acrimony and disillusion. Just four months after graduating from the University of Redlands, Karen had responded to an advertisement in Variety, signed a $15,000-a-year contract with Brasil '66, rehearsed for two weeks and suddenly found herself debuting onstage at Manhattan's Lincoln Center. Her hands were so shaky that she was unable to hold the microphone. Many of the words she sang meant little to her, since she had learned Portuguese phonetically by listening to records. Karen soon (continued on page 212) M*A*S*H Dish (continued from page 162) found a more sensible way to master the language; she moved in with one of Brasil '66's musicians, a cozy two-year arrangement that enabled her--among other things--to become totally fluent. The quaint Brazilian custom of maintaining multiple mistresses was not as simple to comprehend. In the wake of discovering the musician in a Georgia motel room with a bossa-nova groupie, she moved into a Los Angeles apartment of her own. Regular sessions with a $35-an-hour psychologist eventually enabled her to understand why her romance had failed but supplied little help in rationalizing the disoriented life of a musical group on the road.

"Everybody has the idea that show business is exciting and glamorous," Karen said, seated poolside at Las Vegas' Caesars Palace during one of her last engagements with Mendes. "But when you're catching a plane at six-thirty in the morning and you've had only three hours of sleep, it all narrows down to irritation, constipation and room-service sandwiches. I don't even bother dressing up anymore. All I carry in my suitcase are a couple of changes of underwear, a toothbrush and however many birth-control pills it's gonna take."

Virtually every male eye stared at her skimpy black bikini as she stepped through the maze of oiled sun worshipers. One of them flashed a peace symbol and waved the key to his room. "At six o'clock in the morning a few days ago, I got a call from a lawyer who wanted me to come up and look at the mirrors on the ceiling in his suite," she said. "Las Vegas encourages that shit by stimulating your senses with an overabundance of luxuries. It follows that if you have incredible room service, you expect to have somebody in your bed to enjoy it with. The pity of it all is that there's no emotion involved."

Now she was passing among coveys of Iowa matrons bellied up to the wheel of fortune and big spenders draped over the casino's crap tables. "When you've been on the road for a long time," she said, "the one thing you miss is feeling healthy." During one Lake Tahoe engagement, at least, she was able to escape the malaise by visiting nearby swimming holes at daybreak, splashing nude beneath waterfalls to cleanse the bad vibes. "If only people would leave the casinos and look at the trees," she said. "The trees in Tahoe are beautiful, man. I've always liked big, huge, monstrous trees. It's probably phallic or something like that. My trunk fetish. No amount of psychiatry can put you together faster than a good environment for just one day."

Her air-conditioned hotel quarters hardly fulfilled those specifications. A vulgar mural depicting Roman ruins dominated one of the walls. Drawn curtains barely shut out the artificial light flickering from the Strip. Her sole contact with the real world was the babble from a television set glowering cobalt-blue images. The film clip of a Nixon press conference recalled Brasil '66's 1971 appearance at the White House, a command performance honoring Prince Juan Carlos of Spain, where Karen had been requested in advance to subdue her normally uninhibited movements. She met the President and members of his family on a receiving line following the minimusicale.

"I was expecting to be a little impressed," she said. "After all, he is the President. I was more impressed seeing Barbra Streisand at Schwab's. When he said, 'Oh, you're from Abilene, Kansas, you graduated from Redlands'--probably something that the CIA had turned up from one of my old biographies--I felt like saying, 'I know it! I was there. For God's sake, you must have better things to be doing than telling me that. You've got Vietnam to consider. We're not in that good shape.' Instead, he was being a politician. The whole evening was just another boring moment in my life, just another gig."

Now she was buckling the sequined hotpants that dominated the Barbarella-influenced space suit she would soon wear onstage, a gaudy outfit Karen regarded as dehumanizing. On her dressing table was a Los Angeles critic's assessment of the newly rechristened Brasil '77's opening a couple of weeks previous. "Mendes' music offered little to the good-sized audience," he had written. "Response to the contrived, uninteresting performance was perfunctory."

Between sips of hot tea calculated to lubricate her desert-dry throat, Miss Philipp concurred. "Compared with what we used to do, these are flat shows," she said. "What bugs me most is that the music is not particularly thought-provoking or stimulating, although I suppose some people find it entertaining, just as the Nixons do."

Within several weeks, Karen had reached the end of the road, submitting her resignation in favor of making the rounds of Hollywood producers and casting directors--a chore made especially difficult by her lack of acting credentials. It took two months to land her job in the pilot version of M*A*S*H, making the most of a soapy shower sequence in which she appeared to be nude--although disappointed stagehands will attest that she actually wore a skintight, flesh-colored leotard. The shower scene required no singing. Karen did her vocalizing last spring when she learned that M*A*S*H had won a place on CBS' fall schedule (Sunday nights, eight o'clock, E. D. T.)--with herself in a recurring role. The song celebrating her exuberant reaction was I Did It My Way, performed a cappella in a phone conversation with the agent who had relayed the good news to her.

"You just have to find out what makes you happy," she noted before shooting her first episode at the 20th Century-Fox studios. "That musician I was living with didn't. Pills didn't. Sergio Mendes didn't. Maybe this break will be the start of something meaningful."

There were additional optimistic signs that buoyed her once-sagging spirits: modeling assignments for Buick and Viceroy, a pair of TV singing commercials and a third commercial in which she was to be seen breaking out of an eggshell, introducing a new deodorant. Furthermore, in the months since the split from Brasil '77, her waning interest in music has been revitalized.

"Ultimately, I want to record my own album," she observed on the eve of negotiations that would likely result in a recording contract. "My goals are a million-selling gold album, an Emmy and--who knows?--maybe an Oscar. You've got to admit that those are knickknacks that might look pretty nice around the house."