Sex Stars of 1973

It was a strange year, notable for a dearth of sex stars that would have been inconceivable in the heyday of the big studios, with their well-oiled apparatus for manufacturing--and maintaining--idols. For a time in 1973, it looked as if the accolade for sexiest male star of the year would have to be awarded to the feline protagonist of Frasier, the Sensuous Lion (the horny old beast from California's Lion Country Safari who had once performed for a Wall Street Journal reporter five times in 40 minutes). Frasier died, however, and so--at the box office--did the film. And as the year progressed, it became increasingly clear that the crown of sexiest female star would have to be placed on the curly head of Linda Lovelace, who went down in history (and on several male partners) as the heroine of America's hottest porno hit, Deep Throat.

Whatever one's reservations about her histrionic abilities, Lovelace has become the screen's first literal sex star for a performance that is still a topic of conversation at cocktail parties--and of heated debate in the courts. As she tells it, the whole thing began when she was doing some modeling in New York, where she was spotted at a party by Gerard Damiano, Throat's director, and offered the lead in his projected film--at $100 a day for approximately two weeks before the camera. It was the kind of work that, as she has frequently announced, she enjoys. The rest, as the saying goes, is history--some of it recorded in her purportedly autobiographical Inside Linda Lovelace, more of it revealed through interviews in such varied publications as Screw, the London Times, Women's Wear Daily and (text continued on page 212) Playboy. In all of them, she speaks pridefully of her esophageal prowess and--as in her remarks during Playboy's panel discussion of New Sexual Life Styles in September--of its importance to mankind. Her contributions to that conversation--in which she was surrounded by psychologists, sociologists and other assorted experts--caused one observer to remark: "She may not have a Ph.D., but she's certainly passed her orals." At present, while awaiting the long-delayed release of Deep Throat II, Linda is sharing a Malibu Beach pad with her good friend and manager, Chuck Traynor, about whom she says with great earnestness, "He taught me everything I know."

Over in the men's camp, 1973 finally produced a number of candidates for sex stardom to replace the fallen Frasier. The busiest of the lot was virile Burt Reynolds, whose coy centerfold in last year's April Cosmopolitan definitely placed him in the running. A trio of films--Shamus, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing and White Lightning--helped him maintain that position in 1973; in all of them, he was praised not only for his thespian talents but for his even more evident machismo. The fact that co-star Sarah Miles had found refuge in his digs when her secretary-manager died mysteriously while on location for Cat Dancing merely enhanced the image--although it's conceivable that Reynolds' constant companion, Dinah Shore, might have had some other ideas on the matter. Whatever the facts in the case, he seems to have wooed and won that special segment of the audience that once pledged eternal fealty to Errol Flynn.

Flint-eyed Clint Eastwood is another who, at the moment, can do no wrong. His High Plains Drifter, in which the rangy star again plays a mysterious, monosyllabic loner, has stood high on the box-office charts for the greater part of the year. Magnum Force, his sequel to Dirty Harry, scheduled to appear just about the time this hits print, can only duplicate the success of the earlier film; it has all the Eastwood ingredients of paranoia, violence and simplistic self-righteousness to make it work. Meanwhile, he has also directed and produced Breezy, a surprisingly lyrical and seductive amelioration of the generation gap starring William Holden as a 50ish cynic who would like to think that maybe a 30-year age differential isn't too bad. Eastwood, with a ten-year advantage on Holden, is even more apt to attract the teeny-bopper crowd--and he doesn't always shoo them away.

But the male sex star of the year has to be the protean Marlon Brando, if only because he followed his role as the aging, faltering Don Corleone in The Godfather with his multifaceted portrait of a failed American in Paris in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris--the most discussed film of 1973. For some critics, his work in Godfather and Last Tango removed completely the tarnish left on his crown by a full decade of flawed movies. Others weren't so sure. "While it is a superbly professional performance," wrote Time's reviewer, "it is also something of a self-portrait." He conceded, however, that "the correspondences between the role and the life are not always precise; in the case of Paul's kinky sexual predilections and darker rages, the viewer can only speculate whether such correspondences exist at all."

Time's man was no doubt being circumspect, for, kinky or not, Brando's sexual predilections and darker rages have been a matter of public record since his stormy advent to stardom more than two decades ago--particularly since both his marriages ended in bitter divorce proceedings, followed by even angrier wrangling over custody of the children. One recalls Rita Moreno's attempt at suicide at Brando's home in 1961, former wife Anna Kashfi's several well-publicized brawls, his long liaison with Tarita, the Tahitian beauty he met while filming Mutiny on the Bounty. Inevitably, there were rumors of further entanglements with his uninhibited Tango costar, bouncy Maria Schneider--rumors that she only partially laid to rest with her cryptic statement, "We were never screwing on the stage." Brando, as usual, said nothing.

Always a loner, Brando has if anything grown even more reclusive of late, spending much of his time in the South Sea Island home he bought in 1966. When he speaks out at all (as, by proxy, in his celebrated "no-show" at this year's Academy Awards presentation, or in person on his 90-minute appearance on The Dick Cavett Show), it's about the plight of the Indians and similar social concerns, never about himself. His insistence on privacy is so strong that when, earlier this year, a magazine writer flew all the way to Brando's island retreat in Tetiaroa, his subject met him with a shotgun. The writer had to content himself with a lengthy piece on how he didn't get an interview. Only with close friends (which generally means old friends) is he affable, or even approachable. There were not many in Hollywood who mourned when Brando's skyrocketing career began to spiral downward during the Sixties with films like The Appaloosa and Morituri. Nor is there any noticeable rejoicing now that the spiral has reversed itself. Hollywood is still a fairly ingrown community, and gratuitous slights--such as sending an unknown Indian actress to reject his Oscar for The Godfather--are neither readily excused nor quickly forgotten. Besides, Last Tango was an Italo-French production, and Hollywood has always reserved its greatest enthusiasm for homegrown products.

On the other hand, if superstardom were simply a matter of Hollywood popularity contests, everybody's pal Ross Martin--whose closest brush with fame has been a co-star slot in the now-defunct teleseries The Wild Wild West--would be a big name today. The big stars at any time are those who kindle the audience's enthusiasm and curiosity--the ones whose faces recur month after month in the national weeklies, night after night on the television talk shows. They are there because the media sense the public's interest and cater to it for their own selfish purposes--greater newsstand sales or a bigger piece of the Nielsen ratings (with advertising rates in both instances pegged to the cost per thousand). While it's true that the public can be manipulated to a degree--that a canny publicity campaign can on occasion create a star--not only are the costs prohibitive but the staying power is nil. The really big star is the one who hires a publicity man to keep his name out of the papers and fights off the talk-show invitations.

By these standards, 1973 was Brando's year. Though he's pushing 50--the hairline receding, the hair itself graying, the jowls sagging just a bit, the once-hard body sagging even more--Brando remains nevertheless a figure of tremendous authority and power. His portrait of the aging Don Corleone in The Godfather re-established him as an actor without peer (even though he had to go through the humiliating ritual of a screen test to obtain the role); and while the critics weren't quite so unanimous in their assessment of his performance as Paul, the American expatriate in Last Tango, there was no denying his undiminished sexuality. Especially when, in the film's penultimate sequence at the tango palace, he steps out onto the floor as slick and svelte and smoldering as if he were still playing Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls. It was just a flash of the mighty Marlon that was; but it was more than enough to make his once-ardent fans believe that the past could live again, that the fires had not been completely banked.

Rising quickly, if not to Brando's former eminence, is blond, wiry James Caan, who, ironically, got his biggest boost as Brando's toughest boy, Sonny, in The Godfather. Columnist Joyce Haber called him "the sexiest man in the world" after polling her readership. Actually, Caan came in third, after Tom Jones and TV soaper (Days of Our Lives) hero and Playgirl centerfold Ryan MacDonald--but their "fan clubs were most perceptible," she explained. Caan, a rugged nonconformist and genuinely good actor, had been climbing steadily, if imperceptibly, since he first hit the big time in Lady in a Cage back in 1964. Although he alternated between TV and features with remarkable (continued on page 214)Sex Stars of 1973(continued from page 212) consistency, his big problem was that no role came along that separated him from a dozen or more other good-looking guys who also played heavies. Critics began noticing him in offbeat films such as Games and The Rain People--but critics were practically the only people who saw them. The turning point came when--reluctantly--Caan went back to television after two years' abstention to play Brian Piccolo in the ABC Movie of the Week Brian's Song. It garnered top notices, big ratings and numerous reruns. For Caan, it also meant a return to the big screen--first as the tough romantic lead opposite Candice Bergen in T. R. Baskin, immediately thereafter in the plum role of Sonny in The Godfather--directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who had also done The Rain People. Since then Caan's made the zany comedy Slither, another comedy, Freebie and the Bean (with Alan Arkin); and before the year is out, Cinderella Liberty, in which he co-stars with Eli Wallach, will be released.

Caan wears his faded blue denims almost as a uniform--a uniform against the uniformity he despises. Both physically and temperamentally, he is in the tradition of Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman and precious few others who have chosen to live their own lives in their own way--and to hell with the studios. Caan, whose great hobby is rodeo, admits that he is constantly broke--and he doesn't really care. "I own my own car, some clothes and two beds--the leg of one is broke, I think--and a lot of footballs and baseballs." Born in Sunny-side, Long Island, 34 years ago, Caan went to Michigan State University on an athletic scholarship, majoring in baseball and prelaw. Later, he switched to basketball and drama at Hofstra, which led to the famed Neighborhood Playhouse and some off-Broadway roles, followed by a Broadway debut in Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole, starring Peter Fonda. He married at 21. ("She's beautiful, and she's remarried, thank God," is his summary of that interlude.) For the past few years, he has been consoling himself with 1969 Playboy Playmate of the Year Connie Kreski and making no bones about it.

Also placing high on the Haber poll was Robert Redford, who has managed his career with greater care--and intelligence--than any other top star, male or female, in the film colony. Notoriously choosy of his roles, Redford can swing easily from comedy to drama to adventure. After his critical acclaim in Jeremiah Johnson, he opted for the role of the WASPish Hollywood writer in Arthur Laurents' controversial The Way We Were, a tale of Hollywood in the dark days of the black list, with Barbra Streisand as his militant costar; then reunited with his Butch Cassidy pal, Paul Newman, for The Sting. From there, he went into Paramount's much-touted version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, with Mia Farrow ultimately acquiring the role originally scheduled for Ali MacGraw, former wife of Paramount executive Robert Evans. Between pictures, Redford simply retires with his wife and children to his triple-A-frame home on a mountaintop in Utah, looking after the year-round sports resort called Sundance that he has developed outside Provo.

Among the other major male sex stars who have lost none of their allure in 1973 is the exuberant Ryan O'Neal--particularly now that he has finally, and officially, untied the knot that bound him to Leigh Taylor-Young. The Thief Who Came to Dinner was hardly helpful; but Paper Moon, in which he co-starred with Tatum, his talented nine-year-old daughter (by a previous marriage), certainly placed his zooming career back in full orbit. At the moment, he is in England for the title role in Stanley Kubrick's next picture, Barry Lyndon, a period piece. Considering how Kubrick works, the moment is apt to be a protracted one, although with Ursula Andress on hand (offstage), it shouldn't be too burdensome. Even more prolific in 1973 was the talented George Segal, an actor of considerable range who seems to have discovered his flair for comedy only recently. Blume in Love caught neatly and perceptively the stresses of a man who still loves his ex-wife, even though she has left him after finding him flagrante delicto with his black receptionist--and no small part of the film's humor derives from the fact that he rather likes the guitar-twanging layabout (Kris Kristofferson) his erstwhile spouse shacks up with. In A Touch of Class, one of the year's wilder comedies, Segal was in top form again as a philandering husband who takes up with the strong-minded Glenda Jackson. By contrast, his own marriage to Marion Sobol has been one of Hollywood's longer and happier case histories. Before 1973 has bowed out, Segal should be visible again in Michael Crichton's Terminal Man, this time opposite Joan Hackett.

Rounding out the front-runners among the male sex stars of 1973 is the dark, saturnine Al Pacino, whose performance as The Godfather's reluctant heir apparent not only rushed him to the top but brought him an Academy nomination and an immediate flood of film offers. After careful picking and choosing, Pacino opted for Jerry Schatzberg's offbeat and inventive Scarecrow, in which he played a simple-minded ex-sailor opposite Gene Hackman's even more simple-minded ex-con. A kind of Midnight Cowboy of the open road, the film reinforced the critics' high opinion of Pacino's talents and gave audiences a character with whom they could more readily sympathize than the nascent capo. He will be seen again toward the end of the year in the New York-based Serpico, taken from the Peter Maas book, by which time he should be well into the production of The Godfather, Part II. Meanwhile, on the romantic side, Pacino has switched partners, having dropped his girlfriend of record, beauteous Jill Clayburgh, soon after the release of The Godfather. Now if he is seen anywhere (which isn't often), it's generally with the talented, mercurial Tuesday Weld.

Perhaps a distinction should be drawn here between the major star, male, and the major sex star, male. There may be as many as a dozen top stars--the names of Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck and George C. Scott spring immediately to mind--who have established themselves as reliable and effective performers, with that added industry plus of being eminently bankable: Money is generally available for pictures to which their names are attached. While at one time or another they all may have been sex stars as well, age and familiarity have long since removed the bloom. Just this year, for example, the versatile and amiable Jack Lemmon, for the past decade the studios' first choice for light-comedy romances, seems to have crossed the point of no return with films like Avanti! and, especially, Save the Tiger. The ability is still there, with Save the Tiger probably his best performance ever; but that added fillip of sexuality that riveted attention on him in a subsidiary role in Mister Roberts, and in such subsequent entertainments as Some Like It Hot, The Apartment and Irma la Douce, has gradually faded. From here on, it would seem, whatever excitement he gives off will have to be generated by the script.

And then there are some major stars whose popularity was never predicated on sex appeal but on the power and the conviction that they brought to their assorted roles. Ernest Borgnine, for example, with his beetle brows and beer-barrel build, can never completely erase the J. Filthy McNasty image--and, indeed, attempted to do so only once, some 20 years ago, in Marty. But rather than wait around for another Marty, Borgnine has wisely concentrated on the kind of villainy he does best, such as his portrayal of the sadistic train conductor known as Shack in this year's Emperor of the North. (Even when Borgnine plays a married man, as he did with Stella Stevens in the highly successful Poseidon Adventure, there is the implication that his sex life is more rigorous than romantic.) Peter Boyle and Warren Oates, two rapidly rising and expert performers, give off the same unwholesome vibes. Gene Hackman, Borgnine's co-star in Poseidon and Al Pacino's partner in Scarecrow, sets off no sensual tremors (continued on page 291)Sex Stars of 1973(continued from page 214) whatsoever; although there were bed scenes in both The French Connection and Scarecrow, the act seemed purely perfunctory, as if he did it because it was there. (Robert Duvall, who finally achieved full stardom this year as the angry cop in Badge 373, gives off much the same aura--indubitably male but essentially sexless.) And though Peter Finch began as a low-voltage romantic lead in films like Elephant Walk and The Nun's Story, he has now matured into the eternal "other man," the one who doesn't get the girl--the Ralph Bellamy of our day.

Contrast these with such stars as Jim Brown, Michael Caine, James Coburn, Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen, Robert Mitchum and Richard Roundtree. Even though they may vary widely in age, race and national origin, their mere presence in a picture is enough to produce an erotic tingle--a promise of things to come. With the possible exception of McQueen, whose performance in The Getaway provided a welcome restorative to a slipping career, all of these men have been in what the airlines would describe as a holding pattern. Nothing they did in 1973 either enhanced or blackened their reputations; their studios provided them with staple fare that neither displeased nor distressed their many fans.

It is almost axiomatic that a real sex star must be sexy offscreen as well as on. His exploits, as duly reported in the gossip columns and fan magazines, become part of the charisma, part of the allure. Certainly, The Getaway didn't suffer when word began to leak from the location for the film that the love scenes between McQueen and Ali MacGraw weren't all taking place in front of the camera; the public went to the local Bijou to see how much of the voltage had been recorded on celluloid. The two stars went through divorces and their eventual marriage to each other, soon after the picture went into release, was almost anticlimactic. Leathery Lee Marvin--who had been sharing his Malibu pad so openly and so long with the same woman that last year she officially (but without sanction of clergy) changed her name to Michelle Marvin--suddenly and impulsively took off last spring and returned home wedded to a girl from his old home town. Michelle is currently suing for alimony as his common-law wife. Similarly, it was no well-kept secret that Michael Caine, whose interviews invariably reiterated his affection for "the birds," had set up light housekeeping with the exotic Shakira Baskh. And when they finally married earlier this year, no one was particularly surprised that their baby arrived "prematurely." Although big Jim Brown, hero of the Slaughter films, has been relatively quiet of late, he has frequently made headlines in the past through his penchant for pushing around women and cops, usually in that order.

But it's all part of the image, all part of the game. And it's a game--or even a life style--that many of the younger, not quite established stars can play, too. Dennis Hopper, whose Last Movie told much about the drug culture in movieland, generally keeps himself well away from the film colony these days, living on a remote ranch in New Mexico. But that doesn't mean he hasn't kept busy, quite apart from his starring role in the critically acclaimed Kid Blue. Divorced from lovely Brooke Hayward (daughter of producer Leland Hayward and the late Margaret Sullavan), he married doe-eyed Michelle Phillips (of the late Mamas and the Papas) early in 1972. It lasted about a week. Now he is married to Daria Halprin (of Zabriskie Point). After splitting from Hopper, Michelle began seeing a good deal of his Easy Rider pal, Jack Nicholson, who then began seeing Faye Dunaway, who is also seeing Elliott Gould, who used to be married to Barbra Streisand. There were rumors, meanwhile--later denied--that Michelle was thinking of reuniting with her former husband, John Phillips (also of the late Mamas and the Papas); the dust has not yet settled. It's fascinating to contemplate the Ronde that Arthur Schnitzler might have produced if he were alive and well and living in Hollywood today.

Pop-singer-turned-actor Kris Kristofferson, whose films in 1973 include major roles in Blume in Love and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (he played Billy), made no secret of his attachment for fellow singer Rita Coolidge. "I was on my way to Memphis to rehearse with my band and he was on his way to Nashville," Miss Coolidge explained. "I met him at the ticket counter. He wound up flying to Memphis, and after that we were flying back and forth across the country to see each other. It got a little ridiculous, so we just put our bands together." Obviously, it was more than the bands that got together. Rita worked with Kris, in a small role, in Pat Garrett and shared the bill with him this past summer in a highly successful series of concert engagements before they tied the marital knot late in August.

And so it goes. David Carradine has been living with Barbara Seagull (nee Hershey) these past several years, and has a baby to prove it--but nothing else. Michael Sarrazin has been playing house with lovely Jacqueline Bisset just about as long, although after her several public appearances this year with the likes of Henry Kissinger and François Truffaut (her director on the French-made Day for Night), the Hollywood rumor mills have it that she and Sarrazin had broken up. Other splits have included the marriages of the Peter Fondas and the Richard Roundtrees, although neither was quite so spectacular as the on-again, off-again, on-again divorce of the Burtons. Elizabeth was supported through her well-publicized ordeal by such Hollywood friends as Laurence Harvey and Peter Lawford; but insiders placed the blame on fast-rising Helmut (Ludwig) Berger, her co-star in Ash Wednesday.

No question about it, the sex stars play sexual games, and to the winner belong the spoils--and often the spoiled. Consider the case of rugged, muscular Charles Bronson. Happily married, Bronson and his wife saw a good deal of television's blond, intellectual David (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) McCallum and his wife, Jill. Before long, Bronson was seeing more of Jill than of David. Today, Bronson is married to Jill. Though his performances as a paid killer-diller in 1972's The Mechanic and The Valachi Papers failed to click--as did this year's The Family--Bronson remains high among the top box-office stars of western Europe and needs only another money role to restore him to the favor he enjoyed a year ago in this country.

If at this season the skies are filled with falling stars, so are the skies over Hollywood. Perhaps the biggest to fall is Richard Burton. Advance reports out of Moscow suggest that his portrayal of Field Marshal Tito in the grand-scaled epic he made in Yugoslavia is a total disaster, a repeat of the hammy, overemphatic performance he proffered last year as Trotsky in a film that also flopped. At the very least, his future without Liz around to bolster his asking price is problematical. Similarly, Donald Sutherland without Jane Fonda seems to be finding the going rough. Her marriage to radical activist Tom Hayden--which produced another "premature" baby--seems to have left Sutherland out on an uncomfortable, and unprofitable, limb. Peter Sellers, who for the past several years has fancied himself a singularly desirable sex image, surged to the fore again for the few weeks that he and Liza Minnelli were cast by the columnists as a hot item. It cooled abruptly when it became clear that Liza's interests were turning elsewhere, and Sellers went back to work on a British comedy, Soft Beds and Hard Battles, which may be here before New Year's. It will have to be awfully good to overcome the pall of apathy cast by his past few films. Sidney Poitier, whose current heart interest is his Warm December co-star Esther Anderson, seems to have lost out completely at the box office to such superstud soul brothers as Jim Brown, Ron O'Neal, Billy Dee Williams, Richard Roundtree and Fred Williamson.

Nor have the Europeans contributed anything like their customary quotient of exciting male leads. Perhaps most eagerly awaited was the American debut of Jean-Louis Trintignant, the protean star of--among dozens of other outstanding French pictures--A Man and a Woman, The Conformist, Z and My Night at Maud's. Trintignant was brought here for The Outside Man, in which he was to co-star with Angie Dickinson and Ann-Margret. It may arrive this year, but too late to affect his status here one way or the other. Less known in this country, although even bigger than Trintignant in their native France, is tall, dark, blue-eyed Alain Delon. At 38, he has appeared in about 40 pictures--Rocco and His Brothers, Is Paris Burning? and his own production of Borsalino among them--owns his own airline and is generally considered one of France's most practiced heartbreakers. Last year, however, he was represented here as the shady assassin in Joseph Losey's ham-handed rendering of The Assassination of Trotsky, and this year fared little better as yet another assassin in Michael Winner's confused (and confusing) Scorpio, in which Delon's unhappy assignment was to hunt down CIA defector Burt Lancaster. The ambitious, bilingual Delon at this moment has both eyes on America as his next country for conquest, but to date the gods who shuffle his movie scripts have not been kind.

Nor have England's several entrants in the sex-star sweepstakes been notably more successful this year. When Sean Connery once again demurred over returning to his golden Bondage, the harassed producers of the series, Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, signed up British TV star Roger (The Saint, The Persuaders, Ivanhoe) Moore to fill his patent-leather shoes--indicating, unkindly, that they had actually been after Moore for the role as far back as On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the one 007 epic starring George Lazenby. There is no doubt that Live and Let Die did well; all the Bond films do. The only question is: How well did it do for Roger Moore? For all the tub thumping, and not a few critical comments that found the suave, polished Moore closer to Ian Fleming's 007 than Connery had ever been, he still lacks the insouciant swagger, the machismo that made Connery the ultimate Bond for many fans. Whenever Connery has backed off to play a "serious" role, the results have been singularly uncommercial. What, then, can happen to Moore, who isn't even as magnetic a Bond? England's other contenders this year were sparkle-eyed Malcolm McDowell, the amoral hero of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, as a present-day Candide in Lindsay Anderson's boldly original O Lucky Man!; young Simon Ward, who made a strong impression last year as Young Winston and scored again this year in Hitler: The Last Ten Days (even though the movie didn't); and Jon Finch, whose original boost to stardom came in the title role of Playboy's Macbeth production, visible this time around as the almost too gentlemanly husband of Lady Caroline Lamb. All three are first-rate actors--not conventionally handsome but with an impressive presence. Their futures will be worth watching.

One last major star--indisputably male--to emerge this year came from, of all places, Hong Kong. During the past three years, the busy Hong Kong studios of Run Run Shaw and Golden Harvest have been cranking out dozens of low-budget action pictures demonstrating the fighting techniques of Kung Fu, a kind of mayhem in which no holds are barred in pursuit of the swift, bloody and utter destruction of the opposition, no matter what its numbers. Gradually, these films made their way into Western markets and, very much like the Italian spaghetti Westerns of a few years back, suddenly developed into a craze. Riding the crest of this craze was the dark, lithe, ever-smiling Bruce Lee, the world's top screen exponent of the ancient art. Actually, although of Chinese descent, Lee was an American, born in San Francisco. Avid television viewers may remember him as Cato in The Green Hornet series. A graduate of the University of Washington, he taught karate in Los Angeles before beginning his acting career. On a visit to Hong Kong just about two years ago, Lee was invited to play the lead in a Kung Fu special, Big Boss, and scored an overnight success. The studios asked for more and such was his drawing power that in less than a year, his price per picture zoomed from $10,000 to $250,000--following which he set up a coproduction deal with Warner Bros. to film Enter the Dragon, the first English-language Kung Fu epic ever made in Hong Kong. On July 20, shortly before he was scheduled to leave for the United States to promote the picture, he was found unconscious in his Hong Kong home. Rushed to a hospital, he died that day, reportedly of an embolism. He was 32.

If Bruce Lee was carried to fame and fortune by his skill in arts of violence, the pseudonymous Georgina Spelvin found her niche by reason of her aptitude at venery. Indeed, so pseudonymous was Miss Spelvin that for the first several months her hit hard-core film, The Devil in Miss Jones, was in distribution, the credits listed her as Georgina Spevlin. Born 37 years ago as Chele Graham, she speaks of growing up in a series of small towns throughout the South and Southwest, terminating with junior high school in Marshall, Texas. She ran off at the age of 12 to join the Pollock Circus--doing acrobatics, trampoline and some dancing--and joined the corps de ballet of the Radio City Music Hall in 1953. "Pranced from 51st to 53rd Street every day," she recalls, not quite accurately. She appeared in sales and promotional pictures and was one of the dancers in Hello, Dolly! when that company was on location in Garrison, New York.

Although she had appeared in skin flicks before Miss Jones (one of them, Parental Guidance, has subsequently been rereleased as The High Priestess of Sexual Witchcraft, now touted as starring Georgina Spelvin), her original function on that film was simply to have been running the commissary. "I read the script," she said recently, "and Gerry Damiano [yes, he of Deep Throat--Ed.] and I talked about it. The lead role was already cast, but he changed his mind and I did it." And a star--of sorts--was born. Miss Spelvin isn't sure whether she got $500 or $600 for her chores on Miss Jones--"I won't know till I get my W-twos," she says--but she does know that in the future she is going to get a percentage or no deal. Unlike Linda Lovelace, who has found a sociological rationale for her work in the pornos, Miss Spelvin couldn't care less. "I got enough trouble saving my own soul without trying to save the world" is the way she looks at it. Her troubles include a couple of marriages that didn't work out and some nonmarriages that didn't, either. As reported in Bruce Williamson's authoritative Porno Chic (Playboy, August), she now "keeps house with actress Claire Lumiere--her partner in private as well as in the lesbian sequence of Miss Jones." About her films, she has a very simple and pragmatic outlook: "If you don't dig it, don't go see it." As this year's Supreme Court obscenity rulings take effect, you may not get a chance to.

Not quite in the Spelvin-Lovelace category at this point, but climbing fast, is Marilyn Chambers, the 21-year-old San Francisco beauty who made her hardcore debut just about a year ago in the Mitchell brothers' erotic fantasy Behind the Green Door. A Cybill Shepherd look-alike, Marilyn is also the girl on the Ivory Snow box--a fact that gave her less pause than it did Procter & Gamble when the New York Daily News headlined, "Mrs. Clean is Porno Cutie." P&G subsequently renewed her contract, after noting, as Marilyn herself put it, that the publicity had sold a lot of soap. Whatever the special talents or charms of these hard-core queens, their futures are not precisely in their own hands. At this point in time, as they say, the courts would seem to hold the ultimate answers.

Back in the mainstream of film making, no one at all seems to hold any final answers. Rarely has there been a year when a new star, a vibrant new personality, hasn't zoomed into focus, raising all hopes. Not so in 1973. At the outset of the year, all signs pointed to Liv Ullmann, described then on Time's cover as "Hollywood's New Nordic Star." A stand-by regular in Ingmar Bergman's talented troupe, she had just completed for him her demanding role in Cries and Whispers, and for his fellow director Jan Troëll the even more demanding role of a reluctant émigrée from Sweden to the United States a century ago in his two-part epic. The Emigrants and The New Land. While in Hollywood to promote The Emigrants' chances for an Academy nomination, she was signed by Ross Hunter for the female lead in his musical production of Lost Horizon. This, in turn, was still before the cameras when producer Mike Frankovich offered her the starring role in the movie version of the Broadway hit comedy 40 Carats. Columnists wrote of the advent of another Garbo, another Ingrid Bergman.

But nothing happened. Lost Horizon was a gigantic turkey--critically, artistically, financially. A flat and unimaginative remake of Frank Capra's 1937 hit--with songs, yet--the film gave Liv little to do beyond looking beautiful; and Burt Bacharach's second-rate score called upon her to sing a Julie Andrews--type number, The World Is a Circle, that suddenly made you appreciate Julie Andrews. And 40 Carats, which Frankovich had had rewritten to emphasize that Miss Ullmann is Scandinavian and to de-emphasize that she is considerably less than 40, enjoyed only a moderate reception. As an older woman who purportedly falls in love with a boy of 20, Miss Ullmann, herself a radiant 34, seemed far too desirable to make the age discrepancy worth noticing, and far too intelligent to let the whole affair happen in the first place. Still to come before the year's end is The New Land, in which she is nothing short of magnificent as the patient, long-suffering wife of an early Minnesota settler. Generally dressed in faded calicoes and bulky sweaters, and pregnant during the film's climactic episodes, she may well garner another New York Film Critics Award; but the role can hardly restore her to the sex-star status she enjoyed when the year began.

Sheer inactivity robbed others of their eminence. Lovely Cybill Shepherd, the WASPish golden girl of Charles Grodin's ambitious dreams in The Heartbreak Kid, was the hottest young star in Hollywood as 1973 began. Instead of choosing a new picture, however, she chose to be director Peter Bogdanovich's latest flame. They're making a film together in Italy, but there's no chance that it will arrive before 1974. Similarly, Liza Minnelli, whose Cabaret swept the Academy last March, has spent the subsequent months in some concertizing, and even more socializing, with the paparazzi constantly in pursuit. Was it going to be Desi Arnaz, Jr., Peter Sellers or who? She got lots of pictures in the papers, none on the screen. Equally wasted, it would seem, was Diana Ross's electrifying personification of Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues. Happily married (to personal manager Robert Ellis), and a millionaire since she was 25, Diana hardly needs the money. But in the bad old days of Hollywood, no studio would have dreamed of failing to capitalize at the earliest possible moment on the surprise success of one of its stars. Certainly, they wouldn't be permitted to go off touring Europe--as Diana did--when there was a buck to be made from a fast follow-up film.

Actually, no matter what else may be held against Hollywood's long-vanished studio system, the fact that it had, as we indicated earlier, all the machinery and the muscle to create stars is something woefully missed today. For the studios, the stars were assets, as tangible as their film inventories, their back lots and their theater chairs. Because the performers were tied to them by long-term contracts, it was to the studios' advantage to turn them into household names as quickly as they could. Not only did they maintain enormous publicity departments for this purpose, constantly feeding photos and reams of interview material to the world press; they also cast their contract people in picture after picture, so that by the end of a single year--after as many as four, five or six appearances--the public was well aware of a Jimmy Stewart or a Lana Turner. The studios quite literally built their stars.

Not so anymore. The would-be star must make it on his (or her) own--which generally means his (or her) own agent, business manager and public-relations firm. Some, like curvaceous Edy Williams, have a flair for self-advertisement, flaunting the body beautiful on every plausible--and sometimes implausible--occasion. The stratagem won Edy plenty of attention, but nothing tangible beyond roles in several films by her then-husband, Russ Meyer, including the trailer for a picture called Foxy that was once appended to Blacksnake, an action movie that Meyer made earlier this year--without Edy. The rumor mills have it that this had a good deal to do with the subsequent Meyer-Williams separation. In any case, the trailer has been lopped off Blacksnake and Foxy is no longer on Meyer's schedule--nor, as of this moment, has anything else turned up on Edy's. On the other hand, when the equally curvaceous Raquel Welch wed Patrick Curtis, she got a husband, agent, business manager and public-relations firm rolled into one, and her career soared. Patrick's problem was that he wanted to be a producer as well, using his wife's name as the bait for a number of dubious packages. The pictures failed, and so did their marriage. Ever since then, the gossip columns and trade press have been filled with harshly antiWelchian comments about her "unprofessional conduct" on The Last of Sheila and her sudden withdrawal, later retracted, from the European-based production of The Three Musketeers. She was said to be distressed with the small size of her role but at last report was back on location, filming in Spain.

As any old studio publicity hand could tell you, no small part of the publicist's job is to keep such items out of the press. But for most young hopefuls, the problem isn't keeping their names out of the papers but getting them in. The Hollywood trades are filled with hot items like, "Spooling spaghetti at Nicky Blair's: Mark Nathanson & Leigh Taylor-Young"; "Fattening on fettuccini at Emilio's Ristorante: Angel Tompkins & Dick McInnes"; "Milking mai tais at The Islander: Tab Hunter & Mary Gavin." The gossip columns dote even more on who is going with whom--"Karen Black seeing much of Skip Burton," "Brenda Sykes is Fred Williamson's current steady," "Hollywood's new two: Sally Kellerman and Clifton Davis (of Two Gentlemen of Verona)." And the aforementioned unfortunate death of Sarah Miles's secretary-manager while on location for The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing provided a good two weeks of copy (with the movie always carefully identified).

This is not to suggest that any of these momentous events had been arranged for the special benefit of the gentlemen and ladies of the press, but it would be ingenuous to suppose that, once having taken place, there wasn't a publicist around (at about $100 a week) to "leak" them to the papers. Ann-Margret's Lake Tahoe accident, and her gallant battle back to full control of her body, won the sympathy of the entire nation. But what was the first announced project for her following her recuperation? Arthur Miller's After the Fall. There will always be a press agent.

But while such gambits may be sufficient to grab off a few lines of type (and remind a casting director that one is still around), they are hardly the stuff of which movie legends are made. A film career requires repeated appearances on the screen, not in the trade papers or the fan magazines. Because the number of feature films has declined drastically over the years, however, such opportunities have become increasingly rare--especially, oddly enough, for women. At the very least, two or three good roles in quick succession are necessary to establish lasting star potential. But how many get a run of such luck? Beautiful Victoria Principal--a cross between Ava Gardner and Esther Williams, with perhaps a smidgen of Jackie Kennedy--lucked into an important role as Paul Newman's Mexican mistress in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, followed immediately by Playboy's production of The Naked Ape. As a result, Victoria has two major pictures, virtually back to back, to her credit, and is considered a comer. But how far she will come depends on how good her next film roles are--and how soon they arrive.

At the moment, Lindsay Wagner--a tall, tawny-haired former model with an impressive list of television appearances behind her--is in very much the same position. Although Robert Wise's Two People was hardly one of the major hits of 1973, the lissome Miss Wagner received all kinds of good notices, both for her looks and for her performance as the haute couture model who falls in love with GI deserter Peter Fonda. The film's release was held up long enough to bring it into fairly close proximity to 20th Century-Fox's The Paper Chase, in which she plays a Harvard professor's willful daughter who shacks up with one of poppa's better pupils, Timothy Bottoms. Critical reactions were uniformly favorable--to her, at least. But what does she do for an encore? At this point, there must be half a dozen or more young actresses, good-looking and talented--Tiffany Bolling, Diane Keaton, Jane Seymour, Valerie Perrine, Angel Tompkins and Susan Tyrrell among them--waiting either for another picture or for that one big one that will make them strong contenders for future fame.

Of all the studios on the West Coast, Universal is the one most closely resembling the old Hollywood, right down to its New Talent Development program. Under the supervision of Monique James, young actors and actresses discovered in off-Broadway or university plays, or even in the films or television programs of rival studios, are brought to Universal under contract, trained in Miss James's classes and gradually permitted to play small roles in that studio's numerous TV shows. If they click, if they accumulate sufficient fan mail, they graduate into features. Lindsay Wagner came out of this program. But so did Susan Clark, Katharine Ross and Carrie Snodgress. Anybody heard from them lately? And Jo Ann Pflug, that promising starlet of two years ago, you will be happy to know, is alive and well and married to singer Chuck Woolery--whoever he may be.

Every year, there is an actress or two who, on the basis of a single performance, registers so strongly that her future seems assured. This year, it seemed to happen for high-fashion model Marisa Berenson--who once graced the pages of Playboy and had a wordless walk-on in Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice--in an indelible role as Liza Minnelli's Jewish friend and confidante in Cabaret. La Berenson--granddaughter of designer Schiaparelli, great-niece of the late art historian Bernard Berenson and longtime companion of banker David Rothschild (of those Rothschilds)--has been signed to appear opposite Ryan O'Neal in Stanley Kubrick's new movie. "I think I play an English countess," she told columnist Joyce Haber. "I've never met Mr. Kubrick. I'm dying to. Ryan says he's fantastic." Miss Berenson may be an amateur, but she indubitably has talent--and connections. Obviously, her future doesn't rest on whether or not she makes it in Hollywood.

Another young actress who scored importantly this year, her first time out, was Michelle Phillips, playing Billie Frechette to Warren Oates's grinning Dillinger in the motion picture of the same name. As we observed earlier, Michelle was formerly with the Mamas and the Papas; now she's seemingly wedded to her new profession. "I want to be a star," she announced on completing her Dillinger assignment. "A big star. Big like stars used to be." No question about it, she has the potential. But will she have the opportunity?. At the present writing, even though Dillinger has been doing socko biz, no new assignments have been posted for this exciting new talent.

On the other hand--and at long last--the film scene has suddenly opened up for talented blacks. Within the past two years, according to Variety, there have been more than 50 black-oriented movies, which has meant unprecedented opportunities for actresses who are not only black but beautiful. Topping the list, of course, are Diana Ross and Cicely Tyson, both of them nominees for last year's Academy Awards. (Possibly they canceled each other out: Liza Minnelli won.) The diminutive Miss Tyson has consistently turned down offers ever since. A black activist and a militant feminist as well, she refuses to appear in any movie that goes against her principles. Instead, this past fall, she did a TV film for considerably less than a movie company would have paid her, simply because she believed in what it was saying. Miss Ross has yet to make another film commitment, even though the offers have been coming thick and fast.

But there are others--the girls who follow the Gunns, the Shafts and the Super Flys through their incredible adventures. Brenda Sykes was eminently appealing as Jim Brown's girlfriend in Black Gunn, and has had many more roles as a consequence. Cool-eyed Pamela Grier is currently one of the most active young women in Hollywood: She has starred in Coffy and offered strong support in such films as Scream, Blacula, Scream; Trouble Man; and Black Mama, White Mama. Almost as active is Playboy's own New York Bunny graduate Gloria Hendry, seen this year in Black Caesar, Slaughter's Big Rip-Off and Live and Let Die. Paula Kelly, the sinuous star of Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope on the stage, registered strongly as Chuck Connors' mistress in Soylent Green. "I suppose some years ago it might have caused raised eyebrows," she says. "It seems so totally natural today, I doubt that anyone in the audience would say, 'Why is she black?'" She has since been starred in American Film Theater's production of Lost in the Stars.

Certainly the most resounding success of the year in black films was registered by the statuesque (6'2") ex-model Tamara Dobson, whose starring role in Cleopatra Jones--her first movie outing--promptly racked up box-office tallies to rival those of Super Fly. Cast as a sophisticated, supersexy undercover agent, Tamara fights Shelley Winters and her drug racketeers with her wits as well as her fists, and comes off better than most of her male counterparts. As athletic as she is beautiful, Miss Dobson is off to a flying start. Other black beauties currently on their way up include the lovely Vonetta McGee (Shaft's companion in Africa), Jonelle Allen, Rosalind Cash, Sheila Frazier and Polly Niles. But most of them would agree with Vonetta, who recently told an interviewer, "I've done too many films in the last year which abused my head, my mind and my body. I used to think it was important to keep working, but when the great part comes along, I fear I will hate acting so much I won't know it when I see it."

She was, of course, referring to the kinds of roles generally assigned to black actresses in the blaxploitation field. Lynn Hamilton, who has a continuing role on the Sanford & Son television series, provided what seems to be a fairly typical illustration. Summoned by a producer to read for a movie in which she was to play what was described to her as a "strong Angela Davis type," she was asked almost immediately if she were willing to do nude scenes. Although she was noncommittal in her reply, she was asked to read for the part anyway. "I started to read," she later reported, "and here is this woman who holds all kinds of academic degrees and has a high position opening the door totally nude to admit her boyfriend, a policeman. The first thing he says is, 'Fix me some breakfast.' She starts to fry bacon. It was completely unrealistic. Any woman knows that bacon splatters grease, and she would certainly not cook it without clothes on. While all this is going on, the boyfriend is patting her butt and feeling her breasts and saying things like, 'Baby, you move me.' I was incensed. It's doubly wrong to have an intelligent woman whom you profess to be an Angela Davis type running around like this. I left, and they never did ask me about my acting background. But just turning down roles like this doesn't stop them from being written," Miss Hamilton continued. "There is always an actress hungrier than the one who turned it down. Actresses, especially minority actresses, are in no position to bargain."

But things may be beginning to change out in Hollywood, for white actresses as well as black. The new militancy that has characterized the women's liberation movement has finally struck at the film industry, hitting simultaneously at its male-chauvinist hiring policies and at what the movement regards as the simplistic, demeaning image of women perpetuated by the screen. Women's committees have been formed within both the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America to study ways and means of ameliorating conditions in their respective areas. More recently, under the leadership of Tichi Wilkerson Miles, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, Women in Film--an organization of established and respected names in the industry, banded together to provide job information that could transform the studios from what they call a "White Male Club"--was formed. Another group, Cine-Women, is planning a Women's Film Festival--similar to that held last year in New York--to be presented in Hollywood next February. A new feminist magazine, Women & Film, has published several issues, and a second magazine, Myth America, is scheduled to appear shortly.

While all of these are primarily concerned with the bread-and-butter business of opening up more jobs behind the camera to women--which involves taking on such staunchly conservative unions as those of the cameramen and the film editors--their ultimate rationale is that only in this way can they alter the image of women that's presented on the screen. Only this way, they feel, can they counter the type of thinking offered by such executives as Paramount's Robert Evans, who recently opined, "Women are turned on by male violence, blood-and-guts films, as long as they are not part of it. They enjoy them just as they sometimes enjoy porno films. Writers write for men, not women, and there are no female stars except Barbra Streisand who could hold up a film." It is this type of thinking that makes ardent feminists such as screenwriter Eleanor Perry dream of one day heading a studio herself. She calls it her favorite fantasy.

But the hard fact remains that most movies today are not only written for men--they are written and produced by men. And since the accent now is very much on violence, there are precious few memorable female roles that an actress can play--unless, like Tamara Dobson, she doubles in karate. Perhaps casting director Joyce Selznick had this in mind when she stated, "Today, the few women who come up as actresses get one or two pictures, and then you never hear of them again." Certainly, the present imbalance between male and female sex stars would seem to bear this out. For two years now, the dominant male has nowhere been more dominant than on the screen. But nature abhors a vacuum; and perhaps next year, nature--aided by the women of women's lib--will find a way of filling this particular void.