Sex Stars of 1975

It may be too early to tell, but there's every possibility that 1975 will be fondly remembered as the year that lit a fuse to the careers of many a sex god and goddess of the not-too-distant future. Every movie career requires a good, firm launching pad--a picture that has either the quality or the box-office appeal; better yet, both--to make its participants register strongly with critics and fans. This year saw not only an astonishingly high quotient of first-rate film fare--Jaws, Nashville, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Bite the Bullet, Rollerball and Tommy, just for openers--but also an unusually large contingent of movies that delighted the crowds, if not the critics (Earthquake, The Great Waldo Pepper, Mandingo, The Return of the Pink Panther, Shampoo and The Towering Inferno are good examples).

One of the few films that managed to make it big in both categories was Bob Fosse's extraordinarily frank and searching account of the life and times of the late Lenny Bruce. Lenny--released late in 1974 but seen by most moviegoers this year--departed widely from the norm of screen biographies, which have a tendency to turn their subject, male or female, into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Admittedly, that would be a bit difficult to accomplish in Bruce's case, but, to his credit, Fosse didn't even try. He brought us, through Dustin Hoffman, a kinky, drug-ridden, strung-out night-club comic who just happened to be one (text continued on page 190) of the most honest and outspoken social commentators of our time.

Hoffman gave an extraordinary performance, writhing into the very guts of Lenny Bruce, then spilling them for all to see. But audiences have come to expect nothing less of Hoffman; the huge surprise came from lissome Valerie Perrine, the former Las Vegas showgirl who, playing Lenny's wife, Honey, slowly but irrevocably stole the show. Indeed, if Paramount hadn't used the title years ago, the film might well have been called Honey. For her performance, Perrine won an Academy Award nomination, was voted best supporting actress by the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review and was the sole American contender to walk off with an award at the Cannes Film Festival last May. As the fresh-faced, ingenuous stripper insidiously recruited by her husband into kinky sex, lesbianism and the drug scene, she took us into the very soul of that unhappy lady and made us feel what it was like to live there.

Which is all the more surprising, since Perrine is the first to admit that she has never had an acting lesson in her life. "Wind it up and it acts," she said of herself to the Los Angeles Times's Charles Champlin. Her stint as one of the top topless dancers in the Las Vegas Lido de Paris show just a few years back prepared her well for her torchy strip number in Lenny's opening reel (and, for that matter, for her earlier bare-breastedness in her first two cinematic outings, Slaughter-house-Five and The Last American Hero). But it was the depths she plumbed as Honey that won her not only accolades but also the role of W.C. Fields's long-suffering mistress in the upcoming W.C. Fields and Me.

If Valerie Perrine was the hottest of the female star contenders to take flight in 1975, her male counterpart had to be jack Nicholson. To be sure, the lanky Nicholson. with his "killer smile," had begun to demonstrate to Hollywood his bankability through offbeat characterizations in 1974's The Last Detail and Chinatown. In 1975, he had four such roles--a cameo as the psychiatrist out to seduce Ann-Margret in Ken Russell's Tommy and starring parts in Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, in Mike Nichols' The Fortune and in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, based on the Ken Kesey novel. Nicholson is a romantic star who is also a damned fine actor--and one who, apparently, would much rather test his skills than capitalize on his good looks. In last year's The Last Detail, he grew a mustache to add a touch of naval swagger to his handsome phiz; in The Fortune, as Warren Beatty's dim-witted side-kick in a loony plot to mulct sanitary-napkin heiress Stockard Channing of her millions, Nicholson wore his thinning hair in a frizzle that suggested repeated contact with an electrical outlet. Although he has enjoyed a cult following of sorts ever since he began appearing as a leather-clad baddie in the low-budgeted Roger Corman movies of the late Fifties and the early Sixties, Nicholson achieved his first wide audience recognition (and an Academy nomination) as the alcoholic lawyer who accompanied Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda part of the way in Easy Rider, then broadened this identification with his work in Mike Nichols' still-controversial Carnal Knowledge and in Five Easy Pieces. Perhaps Nicholson excels in playing characters living on the fringes of society because they reflect his own lifestyle--that of a free-swinging bachelor with a pad high in the hills of Beverly, where the beauteous Anjelica Huston (daughter of director John) is his more-or-less constant companion. At this point in his career, Nicholson can literally write his own ticket, be it in the bedroom or on the sound stage. He is a superstar whose time has come.

On the other hand, Warren Beatty, Nicholson's co-star in The Fortune--and the star, producer and co-writer of the year's most specifically sexually oriented hit, Shampoo--has remained a superstar ever since he zoomed to the top in Bonnie and Clyde (which, lest we forget, he also produced) more than eight years ago. Although he has chosen to remain off the screen for one reason or another--sometimes politics, sometimes amour--for considerable periods of time, he is still consistently in demand. One of his longest-running inamoratas was actress Julie Christie; but even though that romance has long since dimmed, Beatty gave her the best role of her career in Shampoo. Once the picture was launched, he set off for the South Seas with the luscious Michelle Phillips, formerly Nicholson's best girl, amid rumors of wedding bells in Bali. A couple of months later. Warren and Michelle were back in Hollywood, making the rounds of all the spots where the Beautiful People regularly show, but the wedding bells were still only rumored.

Much more staid in his private life is handsome Robert Redford. In The Great Waldo Pepper and Three Days of the Condor, he continued to project his clean-cut image as the virile American male at his best--not necessarily too bright but as loyal, honest and dedicated as any boy scout. True, in Waldo Pepper, there were a couple of scenes to suggest that he might have been fooling around with both Margot kidder and Susan Sarandon, but the way Redford played them, he might just as well have been an older brother. Sex hardly seems likely to take up much footage in his next film, which his Wildwood Enterprises will produce, the Watergate exposé All the President's Men--in which he'll play Bob Woodward opposite Dustin Hoffman's Carl Bernstein. In any case, once shooting is over, Redford promptly retires to his mountain retreat at Sundance, Utah, where, surrounded by an electrified fence, he enjoys seclusion with his wife and three children.

Hoffman look-alike Al Pacino's smoldering eyes and sensuous lips reveal all the passionate depths that could turn an idealistic Michael Corleone into a Godfather II. Probably the most sought-after young star in America at the moment, Pacino prefers to devote himself to theater repertory in Boston, from whence he was lured to appear in Sidney Lumet's long-awaited Dog Day Afternoon, which provides this dynamic actor with the strongest, strangest role of his career--a Brooklyn bank robber who pulls a heist to finance a sex change for his homosexual "wife." Pacino makes this complex character so overwhelmingly sympathetic that not only are all the girls in the bank on his side--so is the audience!

Far more prolific, far more available is handsome Burt Reynolds, the former Florida football player (a talent that served him well in last year's popular The Longest Yard), whose insouciant smile and swaggering walk have elevated him to top box-office honors. Reynolds is probably the closest thing we have today to Clark Gable--a man with few pretensions to acting but with a unique ability to project his own persona. Few performers could have survived the sheer ineptitude of Peter Bogdanovich's dubious tribute to Cole Porter, At Long Last Love; indeed, not only did Cybill Shepherd's career fall into a prompt decline because of it but so did her long-standing relationship with Bogdanovich--although there are those who whisper that the virile Reynolds, her co-star, had something to do with that. But, with his customary resiliency, Reynolds bounced back almost immediately with W. W. and the Dixie Dancekings, playing a gum-popping Nashville rake with a penchant for knocking over gas stations. It was Reynolds' movie all the way, the part of the lovable rogue being his special forte. The chances are, based solely on a perusal of the script, that he will bounce even higher with Hustle. In it, Reynolds has a plum role as a tough but compassionate Los Angeles detective shacked up with high-priced call-girl Catherine Deneuve. When called in to investigate a young girl's murder, he finds himself involved not only with the local drug rackets but with Hollywood's porno-movie scene as well. It's a strong script, based on Steve Shagan's well-received novel City of Angels, and could send Reynolds' reputation right up through the roof. So, for that matter, may Stanley Donen's Lucky Lady, in which Reynolds, Gene Hackman and Liza Minnelli play Prohibition-era rumrunners.

Sharing much of Reynolds' macho mystique is shaggy, beetle-browed Charles Bronson, one of the "bankables" whose name on a contract is a gold-plated guarantee to the producer of unlimited (continued on page 272)Six Stars of1975(continued from page 190) financing. An ex-coal miner, he drifted into acting simply because the wages were better than in any of the other jobs he had assayed (including those of construction worker, short-order cook, baker, truck driver and sidewalk pitchman).

It was, of course, last year's Death Wish that, after more than 50 movies, shot Bronson into the realm of American superstardom, even though he had been a number-one attraction abroad for the past six years. Death Wish brought him back to the streets of Manhattan and Breakout placed him as a daredevil aviator on both sides of the Mexican border. This year also found Bronson in Hard Times, as a laconic, bare-knuckles boxer way down yonder in New Orleans during the Depression. Indeed, so tight-mouthed is he that he would rather have his ladyfriend (Jill Ireland) turn prostitute than tell her that he loves her. His latest film, Breakheart Pass, finds him a frontier card-sharp in the period immediately after the Civil War, with Ireland (who's really Mrs. Bronson) again on hand, this time as the wife of a dastardly colonel who plans to steal a trainload of gold.

When Bronson looks at a script, he's not just thinking of a part for himself. His wife, who played opposite him in Rider on the Rain, one of his French films of the late Sixties, has co-starred with him ever since. "There's no doubt in my mind," says Robert Chartoff, the producer of Breakout, "that when Charlie reads a script, his greatest concern is whether there's a good role in it for Jill." The Bronsons also share six children: five from previous marriages, the sixth--Zuleika, now four--their first together. To accommodate this accumulation of offspring, plus assorted nannies, tutors and family retainers, the Bronsons, when they were in New Orleans earlier this year working on Hard Times, took over an entire wing of one floor in the posh Fairmont. On one occasion, Bronson declared to his producer his desire to dine, on short notice, at the exclusive and expensive Antoine's--dinner for 16 in the next half hour, please. Through heavy bribery, the producer was able to arrange a table in one of Antoine's few private rooms. But Bronson quickly made it clear that he wanted to eat with the people. More dollar bills--many more--changed hands and the party was shifted to one of the main dining rooms, where Bronson was quickly targeted by the autograph hounds. Said one of the observers, "He did it all for Jill. It was simply to show her how popular he is."

It's just possible that Charlie Bronson is unique--in Hollywood, at least--in this single-minded passion for his Jill. There have, of course, been longer marriages of record. Robert Mitchum has been wed for something like 35 years to his Dorothy. Paul Newman, apparently, would rather take on dreck like The Drowning Pool than be too long parted from Joanne Woodward. Clint Eastwood relies on his Maggie not only to whip him at tennis but also to accompany him on his far-flung locations. James Coburn, Gene Hackman, George Segal--all have wives dating back to the years before they started making it big, to whom, presumably, they all are true, to the dismay of their feminine followers.

But it isn't the private lives of the stars that concern us here so much as their sexual maneuvers up there on the big screen. And there the top male stars seem more active than ever, with some kind of medal--if only for endurance--going to Warren Beatty for his nonstop screwing in Shampoo. As Beatty, tooling from bedroom to bedroom on his Triumph, explains to Goldie Hawn, he just wants to make everybody happy. That also seems to be Clint Eastwood's attitude in The Eiger Sanction, in which every female in the cast is overtly on the make. The fact that some of these ladies are spies, eager to pry into Eastwood's past as well as his pants, merely spices the action. Hackman, who barely had time for a quickie in The French Connection and had to be dragged into a seduction scene in The Conversation, finds plenty of time for amorous dalliance with Jennifer Warren in this year's Night Moves. Newman is more pursued than pursuing in The Drowning Pool, particularly by teenaged Melanie Griffith, who, in abbreviated halter and shorts, slips into his motel room and literally begs to be taken, much as, in Shampoo, Beatty is seduced by an equally nymphetomaniacal Carrie Fisher. Again, in Antonioni's The Passenger, Maria Schneider virtually forces herself upon a world-weary Nicholson. In the films of 1975, more often than not, the female is the aggressor, with such stars as Beatty, Eastwood, Hackman, Newman and Nicholson their not unwilling victims.

If these are the top male stars of the moment, their instant replacements are not too far behind. Swiftly moving up toward the front rank, for example, is James Caan, who, after garnering considerable praise for his work last year in The Gambler, promptly proved his versatility by playing a somewhat goyish Billy Rose to Barbra Streisand's Fanny Brice in Funny Lady. Because director Norman Jewison had seen and remembered his performance as the doomed football player in television's Brian's Song, Caan was Jewison's first and only choice for the strong-willed, superathletic Jonathan E. in Rollerball, a picture that might well prove the turning point in Caan's accelerating career. Few top male stars today would be up to the rigors of the fiendish sport that Jewison and his cohorts devised as the main event of the 21st Century--a combination of ice hockey, roller derby and sheer mayhem--not without stunt men as stand-ins. But Caan is a natural athlete: At Michigan State, he made both the freshman football team and the swimming team and for a number of years has been an active member of the Rodeo Cowboys' Association. Acclaimed for his work in Rollerball, Caan moved immediately into Sam Peckinpah's The Killer Elite, which, in view of Peckinpah's well-known disinclination to leave an editing room, may or may not make it to the screen before 1975 calls it quits; then he joined Elliott Gould in a vaudeville comedy, Harry and Walter Go to New York. (Connie Kreski, Caan's beauteous exroommate, will soon be on view herself, with George Segal in The Black Bird, a take-off on The Maltese Falcon.)

The roles Caan doesn't get these days often go to Bruce Dern, who keeps fit by running--not jogging, running--a couple of miles a day in front of his Malibu beach pad. Dern, like his friend Nicholson, spent most of his formative years in the business being mean on a motorcycle, then continued to be extremely unpleasant in such films as Wild Angels, Will Penny, Drive, He Said, Thumb Tripping and The Cowboys (in which he had the ungrateful task of shooting down John Wayne). Perhaps because his thin but toothy smile suggests a sneer, Dern was cast last year as the patrician Tom Buchanan in Paramount's ill-fated The Great Gatsby. The picture was not, in fact, ill fated for Dern. Many critics, noticing him for the first time, felt that he snatched the show away from Gatsby himself, Robert Redford--and several observed that the picture might have been better if the casting had been reversed.

In 1975, Dern co-starred with Kirk Douglas in a superior, if low-budgeted, Western called Posse, playing a villain again but this time a villain who by sheer cunning was able to outclass the equally villainous Douglas. Smile found Dern in the unlikely role of a small-town chamber-of-commerce beauty-contest booster and again his performance won him kudos--plus the starring role, opposite Karen Black, in Alfred Hitchcock's forthcoming (next Easter) Family Plot. By 1976, Dern should be in full orbit, with Won Ton Ton, the Dog That Saved Hollywood already announced.

Probably in all of 1975, no flight pad to stardom was sturdier than that provided by Universal's phenomenally successful saga of terror in the briny deep, Jaws. Eight days after it opened, this $8,000,000 production was safely in the black; whatever has come in since then--and it's been plenty--is pure gravy. And riding high on its gravy train are at least two of its male cast members, Roy Scheider and young Richard Dreyfuss. Robert Shaw, the third member of the shark-hunting triumvirate, fully sustained his considerable reputation as one of the ablest character actors around, but this was hardly news. Scheider, on the other hand, very definitely was news. He had been seen earlier to good advantage as Hackman's side-kick in The French Connection and to less advantage in such films as Loving, Star! and Klute; but those few who could be induced to see Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York earlier this year came away convinced that they were watching an American Belmondo. (Like Belmondo, Scheider had had his nose broken in the ring. It was his second--and last--Golden Gloves contest; he had won the other one.) With Jaws and Sheila Levine, Scheider emerges at year's end a strong contender for sex stardom.

And so does his Jaws co-star, Richard Dreyfuss. Last year, in the Canadian-made Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, he came on like the engagingly dynamic Albert Finney in Tom Jones. There was the same unbridled energy, the same sense of self-assurance, the same flashing smile. And while Tom was an endearing rogue, whereas Duddy was chillingly unscrupulous, Dreyfuss contrived to make him warm, human and--yes--even lovable.

For a total change of pace, after completing Jaws, Dreyfuss went to England, where, in three short weeks, he made Inserts, an X-rated movie that promises to be one of the most controversial of 1975. In it he plays, brilliantly, an alcoholic "boy wonder" director from the Hollywood of the late Twenties. Washed up in the studios, he supports himself by grinding out porno pix for a shady producer who pays him off mainly, it would seem, with booze and cocaine. When one of his "stars" (Veronica Cartwright) O.D.'s, he inducts his producer's sexy mistress (Jessica Harper) into the art of moviemaking. By the end of the film, Dreyfuss, his fears of impotence allayed, has become the girlfriend's enthusiastic co-star in a porno. Inserts is as specifically sexual as any film from a major studio (in this instance, United Artists) has ever been. For Dreyfuss, it's the kind of role from which there is no turning back. Fans will never again see him as the chubby-cheeked innocent of American Graffiti.

Also busily image changing are a couple of Englishmen, rock singer Roger Daltrey and actor Michael York. Though Daltrey's debut performance in the title role as the blind, deaf and dumb Tommy won him a theater chain's New Star of the Year honors, Daltrey himself told an interviewer: "Tommy was a poof. That's why I did Lisztomania; I was worried about people thinking I was Tommy. Dear old Franz was a completely different character, a completely flamboyant extrovert, torn between religion and this terrible lust for women." Looking over advance proofs of a Playboy layout of Lisztomania, featuring his lovely co-star Fiona Lewis, Daltrey observed with a sigh: "And to think I was paid for sucking those tits a whole afternoon!" Daltrey, who at 31 has been married twice and is the father of four, admits he has an eye for women. "Fortunately," he told a reporter, "my wife accepts it."

York, once described by columnist Joyce Haber as "a perfect cover subject for Gentleman's Quarterly," hopes that his emergence from understated roles (Cabaret, Murder on the Orient Express,) begun with the swashbuckling D'Artagnan characterization in the two Musketeers films, will be completed with next spring's release of Logan's Run. In that film, the first to utilize holography, he'll play a member of a 23rd Century elite police force. (York, incidentally, is married to photographer Pat McCallum, who shot his portrait for this feature; it all began when Glamour magazine assigned her to photograph him on location for The Guru in 1968. "Michael who?" she asked.)

A couple of years ago, one might have asked "Robert who?" when the name Robert De Niro came up. Not today. De Niro registered strongly as the dying, not too bright baseball player in Bang the Drum Slowly and again as the not too bright Little Italy punk in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. But his stock soared this year when he played the young Vito Corleone, the Marlon Brando role, in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II. It was an uncanny portrait--and inevitably set critics to comparing De Niro himself to the youthful Brando. Meanwhile, De Niro, now 30, has traveled to Italy to work with Bernardo (Last Tango in Paris) Bertolucci in the upcoming 1900, to New York for another Scorsese film, Taxi Driver, and then back to Hollywood for yet another attempt to translate F. Scott Fitzgerald to film, in The Last Tycoon.

All of three years ago, when streaking was in fashion, Perry King streaked twice at a party at Karen Valentine's. Handsome and virile, King first gained attention in moviehouses last year as one of the ducktailed Lords of Flatbush, a tough and knowing study of a Brooklyn street gang, circa 1950. How he stepped out of his T-shirt into the boiled shirt and tuxedo of this year's The Wild Party is one of those mysteries that keep Hollywood such a fascinating place; but as the lover who steals Raquel Welch away from porcine comic James Coco, King brought back echoes of Valentino and his dozens of imitators during the Twenties. That this was more than mere imitation King impressively demonstrated in the deplorable but profitable Mandingo. Whether whupping nigras on the ole plantation, rejecting a defiled Susan George or cuddling up to his favorite slave, Brenda Sykes, he presents an authentic romantic figure.

Forging ahead even faster is young Jan-Michael Vincent, who began to develop admirers last year, after his appearance in Buster and Billie. That appearance included a brief, and tasteful, flash of full-frontal nudity and revealed that he was an actor of no mean ability. Richard Brooks was casting against the grain when he put Vincent into his Bite the Bullet as a bragging, bullying cowpoke who wants to prove that he's really a man; but that streak of meanness, paradoxically, made Vincent more believable in Bullet than he had been as Buster. His talent and good looks also worked to his advantage in White Line Fever--a kind of Walking Tall with trucks--while in the forthcoming Baby Blue Marine, there is also a measure of pathos. In Vigilante Force, co-starring with Kris Kristofferson (who is also on the rise), he plays a tough-guy hero, the kind of role that often makes stars. Vincent has been described as a rebel, a dropout and a nonconformist (all bad words in Hollywood's lexicon); but the fact is that, at 30, he has simply chosen to live his own life. He shares a rustic Topanga Canyon home, some of which he built himself, with his wife, Bonnie, and their two-year-old daughter, Amber, and has only just begun doing the Bel Air party bit--not because he likes it but because he knows it is expected of a coming star.

The possibilities of stardom are just beginning to flicker for the youthful Don Johnson and Keith Carradine. Johnson, with merry eyes and a voluptuous mouth, could be Pan incarnate. He registered strongly with those few who saw him in A Boy and His Dog, an independent production that may sound like a Disney movie but is actually based on one of Harlan Ellison's more chilling visions of the world of tomorrow. He won a considerably wider audience in American International's action-packed Return to Macon County, playing a feckless auto mechanic who unwittingly gets involved with a gun-toting waitress (Robin Mattson) and a psychopathic Georgia cop (Robert Viharo). As is usually the case with "road" movies, there is always the possibility that Johnson and his good buddy (Nick Nolte) may be more than friends, but their open appreciation of the opposite sex minimizes that suspicion.

Keith Carradine, the lanky son of actor John and brother of Kung Fu's David, made his film bow a few years ago with Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash in A Gunfight. He made a strong impression as a neophyte gunslinger in Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller and was starred last year by Altman as a star-crossed loser in Thieves Like Us. This year, Altman used him again, to portray the womanizing minstrel, Tom Frank, in Nashville, and the results are electrifying. Carradine's cynical assurance of his own sexuality--as when, having finished with Lily Tomlin, he telephones for another assignation while she is still in his room--is both repelling and exciting. Sex stars have been born of considerably less.

Actually, Nashville may well have given birth to a whole new generation of sex stars, especially on the distaff side. Ronee Blakley, playing a rising C&W star, had only one prior film appearance--in a commercial promoting the Silverado Country Club. She had come to Altman's attention as a songwriter; Altman bought not only the songs but Ronee as well. Nashville also introduced Gwen Welles to a wider audience. True, she had once played an important role in her onetime great and good friend Roger Vadim's Helle, but that didn't sell many tickets. Last year, Altman used her as one of the hookers in California Split, but she was lost in the crush. No one who has seen Nashville, however, will quickly forget the airport waitress who performs a reluctant striptease--dispirited yet defiant--for a local political club. Welles has been kicking around Hollywood for a long time. Nashville has given her her chance to kick back.

Nashville also gave Karen Black a chance to overcome some odd casting that had befallen her since her memorable performance in the otherwise forgettable The Great Gatsby. In Law and Disorder, she played Ernest Borgnine's floozy aidede-camp. In Airport 1975, she was saddled with the improbable task of bringing a disabled jetliner safely to port. Her Faye Greener in The Day of the Locust was persuasive enough but about ten years overage in grade. But in Nashville, as the C&W star who has made it--and intends to keep it--Black is sensational, overflowing with false sincerity onstage and off, calculating precisely to whom to be bitchy and upon whom to fawn. It's a gorgeous, gutsy performance that seems to well up from her own experiences with showbiz, in which she's never quite made it as number one. But she's still in there pitching. This past Fourth of July, she staged Hollywood's most publicized wedding since Douglas Fairbanks married Mary Pickford back in 1919--a dawn ceremony in a secluded forest to which she had invited, as one of her guests later stated, "600 of her nearest and dearest friends." The bridegroom was writer L. M. "Kit" Carson, who had met her in the course of an interview for Oui.

Although many of today's female stars--Candice Bergen, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Ellen Burstyn, Raquel Welch--are now single and seemingly enjoying it, several others have decided recently to risk matrimony. Among them, besides Black: Liza Minnelli (whose bearded spouse, Jack Haley, Jr., the producer of That's Entertainment! for MGM, landed a new job as president of 20th Century-Fox Television within days of the wedding); Faye Dunaway, who, after the debacle of a long-standing affair with Italian star Marcello Mastroianni, wed musician Peter Wolf, several years her junior; and hazel-eyed Katharine Ross, who, after a five-year liaison with ace cinematographer Conrad Hall, impetuously married production assistant Tom Lisi during the filming of The Stepford Wives.

A younger bride is Deborah Raffin, the 22-year-old who has already been compared to the early Grace Kelly. A product of Bel Air, she had made it as a fashion model and cover girl well before, at the age of 19, she was chosen to play Liv Ullmann's daughter in 40 Carats--and also well before Michael Viner, an independently wealthy writer-producer and exrecord-company executive, began courting her with minks and Mercedes. Viner became first her husband, then her manager.

Also pushing onward, although with no Viner to guide her, is the talented Jill Clayburgh, upcoming as Carole Lombard in Lombard and Gable. As a brunette, she made a tremendous impression as a top hustler in an unusually daring (for television) Movie of the Week, Hustling. Director Sidney Furie saw the show and tested her for the Lombard role--which, after bleaching her hair blonde, she won over studio favorite Sally Kellerman. Once Al Pacino's one and only, Jill was succeeded by, among others, Tuesday Weld after Pacino scored in the original Godfather. As it happens, Tuesday (a natural blonde) wouldn't have been a bad choice, either, for the freethinking, freespoken Lombard.

Carrie Fisher, the 18-year-old daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, scored heavily in Shampoo as Lee Grant's mom-hating daughter who seduces Beatty out of her mother's bed and into her own. Oddly enough, Debbie, the perennially virginal heroine of such films as The Affairs of Dobie Gillis and Tammy and the Bachelor, gave her full assent to Carrie's role. She simply wants her daughter to outdo Liza Minnelli. Described by one Hollywood writer as "17 going on 45," Carrie just might do it.

And then there is Melanie Griffith, Tippi Hedren's exceedingly nubile daughter, dubbed by Arthur Penn, who directed her in Night Moves, "the Lolita of the Seventies." If you happened to see her in that film or in Smile or The Drowning Pool, the reason is obvious. Long-limbed and golden, she has a face that is at once sullen and seductive, with the quirky allure of a little girl who has grown up too soon. Perhaps she has. Visiting her mother on the set of The Harrad Experiment, playing hooky from Hollywood High at the age of 14, she fell in love with actor Don Johnson, then barely into his 20s. The two were inseparable. Before she was 17, they were sharing an apartment in Hollywood--and the bed used by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Cleopatra, acquired by Tippi when 20th Century-Fox was auctioning off its assets. For her 18th birthday this past summer, Don gave Melanie a ring.

Susan Blakely, a bit older than Melanie, is a blonde, blue-eyed ex-model who appeared, briefly, nude in a little-seen film called Savages, then to better advantage as Perry King's WASP girlfriend in The Lords of Flatbush. "It didn't seem to do me much good," she wailed recently to an interviewer. But this year's Report to the Commissioner very definitely did. As an undercover cop who seduces a black narcotics suspect--and gets killed by fellow cop Michael Moriarty for her trouble--she made a lasting impression, lasting at least long enough to win her roles as wife to the spineless Richard Chamberlain in The Towering Inferno and as Big Al's rich, thrill-seeking girl in Capone, opposite Ben Gazzara.

Although 1975 has seen a marked decline in the number of blaxploitation pictures delivered to the market, it proved a great year for the lithe and handsome Pamela Grier--better known as Pam. After more than a dozen movies--all of them bloody and most of them bloody awful--she has emerged as one of the few female sure-fire money-makers, and the only one who is black. New York magazine, in fact, headlined her "Sex Goddess of the Seventies." This year, after her successes in Coffy, Foxy Brown and Sheba, Baby, this former A.I.P. switchboard operator starred in Bucktown. She hopes eventually to move up to producer status, claiming that listening in on deal-making conversations at the studio taught her all she needed to know. Following not too far behind in her footsteps are the beauteous Brenda Sykes (who shared Perry King's bed in Mandingo) and gorgeous Vonetta McGee (as a Government agent who made herself available to Eastwood in The Eiger Sanction). It is worth noting that neither Mandingo nor Eiger could be labeled a blaxploitation film. Black actresses are beginning to break the color barrier, and it is quite possible that their future in films will depend more upon the availability of decent roles in movies with interracial casts than upon films specifically directed toward blacks.

The black audience, though, still flocks to see its stars, which is why movies starring Grier--not to mention such stalwarts as Jim Brown, Richard Roundtree and Fred Williamson--have been resoundingly successful, even when produced on minuscule budgets. For the general public, however, it's become the picture, not the star, that fills theaters. Universal, which cheerfully dumped a fortune into The Great Waldo Pepper because it had Redford, agonized as the budget on Jaws went through the roof (due primarily to unpredictable weather off Martha's Vineyard and mechanical failures of the studio-made shark), because the picture had no "star insurance."

But such insurance is proving less reliable than a life jacket with a leak. We can see this phenomenon in operation most clearly, perhaps, in the field of foreign films. Twenty years ago, the presence of Gina Lollobrigida or Sophia Loren or Anna Magnani in a movie sold tickets, no matter what kind of pasta their producers provided as backing. But today, does anyone go to a movie simply because it stars Charlotte Rampling or Maria Schneider or Romy Schneider, even though their names virtually promise at least one nude scene per picture?

Even in the area of the domestic pornos, where the top performers have come to be known by name, the possibility of seeing Harry Reems making it one more time with Darby Lloyd Rains or Georgina Spelvin is likely to discourage more customers than it attracts. As a matter of fact, many of the biggest porn stars, past and present, have been selling themselves on paper rather than onscreen; viz., Reems's autobiography, Here Comes Harry Reems!; John C. (Johnny Wadd) Holmes's Get Home Free; Tina Russell's Porno Star; Marc Stevens' 10-1/2!, a titular reference to the length of his hard-working appendage; Marilyn Chambers: My Story, by the former leading lady of Behind the Green Door and the Ivory Snow box; and Inside Linda Lovelace, which L.L. renounced in her subsequent The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace. The legendary sword swallower is now trying to make the break into legitimate films but finding it rough going. Perhaps she'll get her chance in a new film being written by Emmanuelle Arsan, author of the novel on which Emmanuelle was based.

After all, when Shakespeare wrote "The play's the thing," he said it all. And it is no coincidence that the hottest battles in Hollywood are now being fought by writers, against studios and directors. The time has come, the writers feel, for them to be properly rewarded for the plots and dialog that keep all those sex stars in orbit. Today, more than ever, they would seem to have a point.