"Butterfly" Girl

She's just turned 19, but she's been a family breadwinner for a dozen-odd years. She was brought up as a typical California teenager--high school cheerleader, drive-in-movie fan--but her dates in those teen years were showbiz figures (My Three Sons' Barry Livingston and Maya's Sajid Khan). And she's just completed her first motion picture; but instead of a bit part, she landed the only major female role--opposite no less a personage than Steve McQueen. Her name is Ratna Assan and she comes from a long line of entertainers--musicians, dancers, clowns--in both of her parents' families in their native Indonesia. Ratna herself was born in Torrance, California, December 16, 1954. Her mother, Devi Dja, had been under contract to MGM in the Forties and appeared in several of the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope classics, among them Road to Bali, Road to Morocco and Road to Singapore. She's also a choreographer and dance teacher, and it was she who set Ratna to studying dancing, singing and acting three hours per day from the age of three and a half. By the time she was seven, Ratna was performing professionally, doing intricate Javanese dances and singing native songs in clubs, theaters, even the Hollywood Bowl. That turned out to be (concluded on page 176)"Butterfly" Girl(continued from page 152) a boon to her folks, because her mother had become ill and her father, who wasn't then fluent in English, was having trouble finding a job. So it was partly up to Ratna--dancing, playing kid roles in TV series from Destry to Bonanza, even mowing neighbors' lawns--to help support the family, which more often than not included several foster children.

Things are looking up now for the family and for Ratna, who in Papillon, the screen version of Henri Charrière's autobiographical best seller about his escapes from French penal colonies, plays the part of Zoraima, the chieftain's daughter who nurses Charrière (McQueen) back to health in a remote Colombian Indian village.

"I was really surprised to get the part," Ratna told us. "Up to then, the biggest role I'd ever played was as Yul Brynner's youngest wife in the TV series Anna and the King. I'd first interviewed for Papillon in September of 1972, and although they had asked me to go back several times, I hadn't heard anything definite until about the middle of May 1973, when I got a phone call: 'You're leaving tomorrow for Jamaica.' That's where the village sequences were shot, near Ocho Rios."

Ratna's role called for her to wear nothing much but a loincloth and a string of beads. "That's the way the tribe in Colombia really dresses; very primitively, with the men and women wearing identical clothing and hair styles. You couldn't tell the difference between them if they weren't bare-chested." The first day, working with an all-male crew, she was a little embarrassed. "But," she says, "it was harder on the men, really. They'd been on location for three months doing the prison scenes, and there they worked with nothing but men. All of a sudden, here were a bunch of half-naked women running around the set. It was quite a contrast."

Zoraima and Papillon develop a romantic relationship in the book, but it's only intimated onscreen. "We don't even kiss," Ratna reports. Everything, in fact, is intimated: The entire sequence is played without dialog, to a musical accompaniment designed to create a special mood.

"That's where Steve was a particular help," Ratna says. "He helped me develop different techniques, showed me how to express myself through facial movements, eye contact. He was really great."

Since her return from Jamaica, Ratna has kept busy making promotional appearances. Her hobbies, which include karate and the care and feeding of her own personal menagerie, make her a popular interview subject. "I got out of practice with my karate while I was gone," reports this brown-belt holder, "so right now I'm pretty bruised up. Good thing I'm not wearing that Papillon costume." The animals? "Well, I have three hens, four roosters, seven cats, two dogs, and I've just bought a stud, Amber Surf. He's half Arabian and half quarter horse."

What next? Bookings for her new night-club song-and-dance act, more films, she hopes, and if they ever remake the Road movies, Ratna's ready.