Sex Stars of 1974

How, in these days of increasing cinematic circumspection--when the last X-rated movie handled by any major studio was 1973's Last Tango in Paris--is the film industry supposed to produce sex stars? One might reply that we had sex stars aplenty back in the old twin-bedded, feet-on-the-floor era of the Hays Office; but in those days, films afforded powerful roles for both men and women--whereas today the men get all the best of the thespian opportunities--and there were all those even more powerful studio publicity machines to grind out fodder for the faithful fan. Occasionally, a star will break through on the basis of sheer animal magnetism--Robert Redford is the premier current example--but, in general, the Marilyn Monroes and the Clark Gables of yesteryear are still awaiting their successors.

Like the films of 1973, this year's fare offered remarkably few plum roles for women. As this trend continues, fewer and fewer top female performers can be developed to the point at which they can be counted upon to carry an expensive picture to box-office success. The generally astute Peter Bogdanovich tried it earlier this year in Daisy Miller, lavishing pastel close-ups on the fluttery presence of his offscreen inamorata, Cybill Shepherd, and tossing in an occasional over-the-shoulder glimpse of period Italian landscapes almost as an afterthought. It was a loving and tasteful adaptation of Henry James's classic study of a wealthy, flirtatious American girl on the Continent at the turn of the century, but, despite a number of very respectful reviews, it failed to attract audiences.

If one cannot find high-octane roles, one may always try high-octane (text continued on page 212) publicity. It seems safe to say that Elizabeth Taylor has remained a sex star more because of what she does off screen than on. Her marriage to and divorce from Richard Burton are still providing hot copy for magazine covers, but her cinema roles have featured such spectacles as that of Ash Wednesday, in which she undergoes painful plastic surgery in order to win back the love of husband Henry Fonda. Who needs a sex star who must rely on plastic surgery to look beautiful? When it comes to being a sex star, column inches aren't quite enough.

If they were, beauteous Faye Dunaway would be tops right now. In the past few years, the cool-eyed blonde has been linked romantically with Marcello Mastroianni, Warren Beatty, Harris Yubin, directors Elia Kazan and Jerry Schatzberg and, finally, Peter Wolf, whom she married in a surprise move last summer, despite earlier protestations that she would forever remain single. Faye may have been big with the matchmaking columnists, but she was less so with the ticket buyers. Her Puzzle of a Downfall Child, directed by Schatzberg, was a disaster; The Arrangement, directed by Kazan, fared little better; and in Oklahoma Crude, in which she played the improbable proprietress of a wildcat oil well, her face was so daubed with grease paint and her body so swathed in homespun as to render her almost unrecognizable to any but the most ardent of fans. Roman Polanski's Chinatown, however, restored much of her former glamor and Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers some of her aura of faintly mysterious evil. By the time this appears, she will have been on view again in The Towering Inferno and her NBC special of Arthur Miller's After the Fall will probably have been aired. Since both are major productions, they could re-establish her earlier sex-star potential--although the temperature of sex on network television has never been particularly elevated.

Julie Christie's long-standing romance with Warren Beatty kept her in print, if not in pictures, for several years. The romance has now cooled, though she'll soon be seen opposite Beatty in Shampoo--but her status as a sex star should be enhanced by her torrid bedroom sequence with Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now. Candice Bergen, one of Hollywood's few undisputed beauties, had been more in evidence as a writer and photographer--for Playboy and other publications--before her appearance in 11 Harrowhouse ended a two-year absence from the screen.

The press has also reported, with something of a vengeance, on the doings of porno stars of recent vintage--mainly, we presume, because they provide such colorful copy. Not until she filed for divorce did the columnists learn that Deep Throat's Linda Lovelace was actually married to her promoter and constant companion, Charles Traynor. That was just about the time that Traynor decided to manage the career of Linda's most potent rival, Behind the Green Door's Marilyn Chambers. The WASPish Miss Chambers is now the object of Traynor's affection and promotional efforts--including a so-far-unsuccessful bid to establish her as a night-club singing star. Miss Lovelace is sharing premises with her present manager, David Winters, and talking of plans for a $1,000,000 production of Linda Lovelace for President.

Raquel Welch changed partners, too. After divorcing Patrick Curtis, the young publicist who single handedly made her a household word, Raquel apparently has settled not only her affections but her destiny on bearded Ron Talsky, a fashion designer. Raquel's intentions in this regard first became apparent on the set of The Wild Party, when she not only insisted that Talsky be with her throughout the shooting but, as rumors had it, put more faith in his judgment than in that of either her producer or her director. Since then, designer Talsky has been named as Raquel's associate producer for a forthcoming TV special and will also have a role in the reactivation of her production company. Raquel claims that what she wants to do most of all is comedy in the Carole Lombard manner; that she can, indeed, be funny was manifested in The Three Musketeers, but in that outing, at least, most of her laughs came from the sort of pratfall more reminiscent of the Keystone Cops.

Playing Raquel's sister in The Wild Party is Tiffany Bolling. As Playboy readers who were introduced to her in an April 1972 pictorial recall, Tiffany is very pretty. That she is also talented was evidenced by her indelible portrayal of the strong-willed Regina in the Hollywood Theater production of Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest, seen last year on public television. It was that performance that brought her to the attention of The Wild Party's director, James Ivory.

A month after Tiffany's appearance in the magazine, Playboy showcased another young actress: Valerie Perrine, the former Las Vegas showgirl who showed all in her motion-picture debut as Montana Wildhack in Slaughterhouse-Five. In addition to a fantastic figure, Miss Perrine displayed considerable native dramatic ability. Her opportunity to show off both also came via public television, when she walked through Bruce Jay Friedman's metaphysical comedy Steambath with nothing but a towel draped loosely about her slim shoulders. By the time this sees print, she should be visible again opposite Dustin Hoffman in Lenny, playing the role vacated by Ann-Margret after her fall, that of Lenny Bruce's stripper wife, Honey. Just how visible Valerie will be depends on the rating the producers are willing to settle for.

Equally uninhibited is--or was--Karen Black, who was featured at least partially nude in such films as Drive, He Said and Portnoy's Complaint. A gifted actress of impressive range, Miss Black gave what was by all odds the most multifaceted and intense performance in the whole overblown length of The Great Gatsby. With major roles in Airport 1975 and The Day of the Locust still to come before the end of the year, Karen's future seems anything but Black.

Also coming up fast is blonde, wide-eyed Susan Sarandon, who is concurrently appearing in The Front Page and, opposite Robert Redford, in The Great Waldo Pepper. A fugitive from television's wasteland of afternoon soap operas, Susan made her first screen appearance as the hippie daughter in Joe--the girl who takes a very naked bath in the film's opening sequence and is gunned down by her father at the finale. The movie, one of the first to exploit the drug-culture scene, created something of a sensation in 1970 and made a star of Peter Boyle. For Susan, however, it was back to the soaps and an occasional role in whatever dramatic shows were still based in New York. Persistence finally paid off last year, when she won the plum role of Ailie Calhoun, a thinly disguised Zelda Fitzgerald, in Herbert Brodkin's television production of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Last of the Belles, which skillfully intertwined the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald with the plot of one of his best-known short stories. George Roy Hill, director of The Sting, was impressed by her performance and signed her for Waldo Pepper. Well before the picture's release (Hill spent better than six months editing it to his satisfaction), he announced his conviction that she would emerge from the film a major star. With a relatively small role in Billy Wilder's The Front Page already behind her, Susan is back in New York, where, with her actor husband, Chris, she shares an old house in Pound Ridge and waits for Hill's prediction to come true.

Two other girls who seem likely to succeed at the moment are Woody Allen's bright-faced sweetie in Play It Again, Sam and Sleeper, the winsome, red-haired Diane Keaton--who repeats her small but telling role of Mrs. Michael Corleone in The Godfather with considerable embellishment in the forthcoming Godfather II--and Madeline Kahn, who's been rapidly rising since her picture debut as the jilted fiancée in Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc? She came on even more strongly as the carny tooth dancer in Bogdanovichi's Paper Moon, with Ryan O'Neal once more the target of her unremitting affection, and, to put it mildly, she stole whatever wasn't nailed down in this year's Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks's zany send-up of the old West and the old (continued on page 254) Sex Stars of 1974 (continued from page 212) Westerns. Doing her Dietrich impression and chanting a louche barroom ballad, I'm Tired, the diminutive Miss Kahn radiated a sexy humor that suggested a hybrid mating of Mae West and Judy Holliday. Trained as an opera singer (she sang the role of Musette in La Bohème for the Washington, D.C., Opera Society and appeared in a concert version of Leonard Bernstein's Candide at New York's Philharmonic Hall), she is blessed with an hourglass figure that bulges appealingly at all the right places.

Also showing up with greater frequency at the right places is Britain's Charlotte Rampling, who was introduced to Playboy readers last March in a pictorial previewing her appearance opposite Sean Connery in Zardoz. Since then, the young Lauren Bacall--Ann Bancroft look-alike has scandalized European audiences in The Night Porter (see this month's Playboy After Hours), in which she plays a former inmate of a Nazi concentration camp who shares a sadomasochistic affair with the officer who raped her during her internment. Recently, Newsweek profiled the 28-year-old blonde, proclaiming her "the kinky queen of the Continent" and "the hottest actress in Europe today."

The male star at the top of the heap in 1974 is the Great Gatsby himself, Robert Redford (see this month's Playboy Interview). With the almost simultaneous release of The Way We Were and the Academy Award--winning The Sting, Redford promptly became the hottest property in Hollywood. No Redford appearance, though, received anything close to the ballyhoo surrounding Gatsby. The prerelease photos of the cool-looking superstar, slim and elegant in white or pastel Twenties costumes, inspired fashion designers to trumpet a new Gatsby look. During the shooting, publicity also played up rumors of on-set discord between him and co-star Mia Farrow. Redford denied the reports and Miss Farrow sued the London paper that reported the story, but neither she nor Redford showed for the lavish New York and London premieres of the film.

Gatsby's draw at the box office was less than great. Even so, Redford was besieged with offers. He surprised everyone by purchasing, with $450,000 of his own money, the film rights to the Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward best seller, All the President's Men, in which he will play Woodward. In the interim, he completed a role as a stunt pilot in The Great Waldo Pepper and signed (for a reported $1,500,000) with Paramount for The Six Days of the Condor. There is also talk of a big Western, Mayberly's Kill.

Redford's closest competitor at the moment is Jack Nicholson--"the star with the killer smile," as Time described him in a cover story not too long ago. Like Redford, Nicholson is a serious, committed actor, a star who has been in the ascendant for the past five or six years as first directors, then audiences began to appreciate his special gifts. (Actually, well before his present vogue, he was already idolized by the small but avid audience that ate up the Roger Corman motorcycle movies of the mid-Sixties.) A more tangible form of recognition came when Nicholson won an Oscar nomination for his supporting role as the liberal, alcoholic Southern lawyer who went along for the ride in Easy Rider. Leading roles in Carnal Knowledge, Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens solidified his position as one of the most capable and versatile actors around. In 1974, though, Nicholson appeared in two films in quick succession: The Last Detail, in which his portrayal of a feisty Navy petty officer earned him another Academy nomination, and Chinatown, wherein he played a seedy private detective. All of a sudden, people were going to see movies simply because Jack Nicholson was in them. The "killer smile" is only part of it. There is also a cockiness about him, a relaxed certainty that he can get any woman he pleases--and please any woman he gets.

His own private life would seem to bear that out. Early in his career, he married actress Sandra Knight. The union lasted only a few years as Nicholson found himself devoting more of his time not only to acting but to writing and producing--and to other women, Sally Kellerman among them. Now 37 and a confirmed bachelor, Nicholson presently shares his Beverly Hills pad with Anjelica Huston, the exotic daughter of director John Huston. Constancy, however, has not been Nicholson's trademark. He has been linked at various times with such lovelies as Candice Bergen, Tuesday Weld and singer Michelle Phillips--with uncounted one-night stands in between. Unquestionably, this has added an undertone of ruthless egoism to his genuine abilities as an actor and his often chilling characterizations have attracted the attention of such prestigious directors as Michelangelo Antonioni, for whom Nicholson recently completed The Passenger, and Mike Nichols, who cast him in a comedy titled Fortune. Even at an average wage of $750,000 plus a percentage, Nicholson shows all the signs of continuing his success, because he, along with a mere handful of stars--Redford, Beatty, Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood and Robert Mitchumi--"bankable."

A relative newcomer to this list is Charles Bronson. Long considered bankable in foreign markets, Bronson was not recognized in the U.S. as anything much more than a dependable heavy until this year. But the release of Mr. Majestyk and Death Wish firmly established the craggy-faced actor as a domestic box-office star, though neither picture can be described as anything more than the kind of action-packed programer that the studios used to turn out every week for the lower half of the double bills. Death Wish, in which Bronson plays a pacifistic architect who turns vigilante after some hoods kill his wife and rob his daughter of her sanity, best sums up the specific qualities that Bronson brings to the screen--a total self-sufficiency and a willingness to live at the outer fringes of society combined with a placidity that remains in check so long as no one bothers him. Of course, the point in all Bronson's pictures is that sooner or later, somebody does bother him. Then the glittery eyes grow cold and the violence brooding beneath the surface springs into action. More of the same can be expected in The Dynamite Man and The Ten-Second Jailbreak, both of which should be on view before year's end. The latter is based on a true incident, the rescue of a wealthy American from a Mexican jail chronicled in Playboy's October 1972 issue as Breakout.

Actually, America's male stars had all the best of it in 1974 (as if they hadn't in the past). The macho presences of the likes of Bronson, Eastwood (Magnum Force, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot), Richard Harris (99 and 44/100% Dead), Reynolds (The Longest Yard, White Lightning, WW and the Dixie Dance-kings), George C. Scott (Oklahoma Crude, The Bank Shot, The Savage Is Loose) and even old John Wayne, false hair and all (McQ, Brahnigan), were still highly salable. The tough-cop craze gave employment to Al Pacino in Serpico (before he returned to the far side of the law in Godfather II); to Burt Lancaster, who in The Midnight Man plays an ex-cop who undertakes to solve a series of campus murders; to James Caan and Alan Arkin, paired as plainclothes-men in Freebie and the Bean; and to Joe Don Baker, whose Walking Tall was one of the sleepers of the year. Also scheduled for release before the year is out is The Trial of Billy Jack, a three-hour sequel to the sleeper of 1972, with Tom Laughlin again in the title role.

The current cycle of spy melodramas also extended profitable employment to such well-established performers as Warren Beatty (The Parallax View) and Roger Moore (The Man with the Golden Gun), and to Michael Caine in such films as The Black Windmill, The Wilby Conspiracy and Fat Chance. Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, together for the first time since M*A*S*H, tried not too successfully to mix comedy with CIA capers in S*P*Y*S. And reaping the whirlwind of "disaster" movies that followed the profitable Poseidon Adventure were Charlton Heston (Airport 1975, Earthquake), Paul Newman and Steve McQueen (The Towering Inferno) and George C. Scott (Hindenburg).

The real star of Jaws, the movie adapted from the Peter Benchley best seller, is a killer shark that terrorizes a summer resort. But the film itself represents another major step forward in the fast-rising career of Richard Dreyfuss. First noticed as the reserved, likable high school graduate in American Graffiti, Dreyfuss has slimmed down and firmed up considerably since then. In The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which he made in Canada, he comes on like Albert Finney back in the days of Tom Jones and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Ranking with Dreyfuss is Timothy Bottoms, who, at 23, has appeared in five major films--and has been threatening to retire. This year, he was featured in The White Dawn and appears opposite Barbara Seagull (nee Hershey) in Playboy Productions' The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder. Another young lead, Jeff Bridges, who with Bottoms first came to prominence in The Last Picture Show, is currently working on Rancho Deluxe for director Frank Perry after starring in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, with Clint Eastwood, and The Last American Hero, with Valerie Perrine. Jeff's brother, Beau, seen earlier this year in Your Three Minutes Are Up, is also in demand. To these few younger stars can be added blond, handsome Jan-Michael Vincent, who startled audiences with his full frontal nudity in Buster and Billie, a sensitive study of adolescent puberty rites in a small Southern town of the late Forties. Still to come for Vincent this year is Bite the Bullet, in which he joins forces with such high-stepping companions as Gene Hackman, Candice Bergen and James Coburn. Bottoms, the Bridges brothers, Vincent and Dreyfuss may not yet be bankable, but at least they are proven talents--and available.

Equally talented and available are many of their black counterparts, but--with the notable exception of Sidney Poitier--if you're a black actor, you work in black-exploitation pictures or you don't work at all. Since the blaxplo boom is on the decline (European audiences have rejected such fare, for one thing), the future of the black actor is once again grim. As might be expected, that goes double for black actresses. Diahann Carroll, in Claudine, and Vonetta McGee, in Thomasine & Bushrod, escaped the karate-chop format that seems to be trapping the likes of Pam Grier. But it will be noted that the outstanding performance by a black woman in many a moon--Cicely Tyson's triumph in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman--took place on the tube, not on the screen. There are, of course, some black men who still manage a fairly consistent movie output--Jim Brown, Isaac Hayes, Richard Roundtree and Fred Williamson, to name a few. The outsized Williamson, hardly the most talented of the group, nevertheless squeezed out no fewer than five films in 1974, including The Black Rider, for which he also received screenplay credit. But the strain is beginning to tell, not only on the actors but also on the audiences, both black and white. To paraphrase the ads for a less-than-successful venture into ghetto comedy, Five on the Black Hand Side, we have been "retried, jived, Shafted and Superfly-ed." Not that blaxplo makers didn't try some new variations on their universally violent themes. Strapping Isaac Hayes turned a detective into a modern-day bounty hunter in Truck Turner, ruthlessly tracking down fugitives from justice not for the police but as a pistol-packing minion of a bail bondsman. In That Man Bolt, between episodes in his Black Caesar spin-offs, Williamson portrayed a courier of illegal cash. In Charley-One-Eye, Richard Roundtree played an escaped Union soldier who killed a white officer, only to be trailed by another bounty hunter--white, this time. In Three the Hard Way, Brown and Williamson teamed with Jim Kelly to wipe out some fascist white supremacists bent on poisoning water supplies with a drug lethal only to blacks.

There's no doubt that we are seeing a decline in the explicitness of sexuality in our films; it may yet be too early to tell whether that means we must also see a decline in the ranks of sex stars. Certainly, in 1974, their arena for action was much more circumscribed than it was as recently as two years ago. The new hopefuls, male and female, may no longer bare all onscreen. But then, sexuality has always been more than a matter of bare skin, as the matinee idols and movie goddesses of previous, less permissive generations remind us. Like them, the actors and actresses of today who do manage to overcome the industry's evident submission to prudery must project both talent and erotic appeal strong enough to cut through all barriers and blaze forth into genuine sex stardom.