Parkins' Place

She arrives at Kennedy Airport via jet from London and heads start turning as if she'd never been away. Brunette, surprisingly petite, with brown-velvet eyes--and dressed in trim greenish denim travel togs that she calls "my James Dean boiler suit"--Barbara Parkins enjoys the indestructible celebrity of having played Betty Anderson on Peyton Place for five long years (1964--1969). Ryan O'Neal got her pregnant and made Rodney a household word. Mia Farrow dropped out as Allison to marry Frank Sinatra. Barbara collected the wages of sin to the bitter end. Everyone knows that, and anyone who managed to miss her on TV's first prime-time adult soap opera probably remembers her movie debut as the high-fashion heroine of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls.

Barbara has been thrust back into the limelight as co-star with Roger Moore and Lee Marvin in Shout at the Devil, a $9,500,000 African adventure epic directed (text continued on page 90) by Peter Hunt and scheduled for fall release. But the years between Peyton Place, Dolls and Devil have hardly been idle. She recently appeared with Lee Remick as the kid sister of Winston Churchill's mother in Jennie, a highly acclaimed British TV dramatic series. Earlier, she made The Kremlin Letter and The Mephisto Waltz and joined Faye Dunaway in a French thriller ("total disaster") they would both like to forget. "I went to England some five years ago for the wedding of Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate and just decided to stay," says the Canadian-born beauty. "I feel tremendously at home there, always have. Besides, my great-great-grandfather was a mattress maker in England."

More than a pretty face, Barbara has a brain she's made a habit of using, a tart tongue she uses on occasion, plus firmly held opinions about quite a number of things. During a brief sojourn to the outer shores of Long Island for a photo session with Playboy's Richard Fegley, she was ogled, flattered and smiled at in fond remembrance by total strangers who behaved like charter members of a regional chapter of the Parkins international fan club. "Here's to your camera and my body, and let's not forget the rest of me" was her toast to Fegley while lifting a glass of light dry sherry, which marks the outer limits of her alcoholic intake. She doesn't smoke, either, though that's not one of the things she feels it important for the world to know.

Lest we forget, she would rather put into the record that she began her career as a ballerina and still proudly recalls pirouetting to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with a ballet company in Vancouver. The most unexpected bit of Parkins lore, however, is the revelation that Barbara, while still in her teens--before Peyton Place but after she moved to L.A. to start knocking on casting directors' doors--was the nimble dancing partner of Donald O'Connor, moviedom's once and former musical-comedy whiz kid. "A couple of agents saw me and next thing I knew, I was featured with Donald, tapping away on a three-month song-and-dance tour. One of the numbers we did together was a soft-shoe Me and My Shadow. All in all, it was a marvelous experience."

Giving interviews rates low on the list of Barbara's favorite ways to pass the time. And she knows precisely why. "Inevitably, one of the first questions every interviewer asks me is: What about your love affairs? Followed by: What about Omar Sharif? Well, I'd like to put it straight. We met in the commissary at Fox while he was making Che and I was doing Peyton Place. He asked me out. We had a lovely evening; then the studio wanted us to attend a big premiere together. From then on, it was reported as a continuous, flaming love affair between me and the most sexual, sought-after man since Valentino. And it was a complete myth, fabricated in the press. He's a very intelligent, interesting man, but we had no real relationship. Nothing, just total Hollywood gossip. And that takes care of Omar."

When Barbara puts a period on a sentence to close a subject, the subject stays closed. Cross-examination seems pointless, anyway, with a lady ready, willing and eloquent enough to take the stand alone. Being an actress, she responded with verve to the challenge of a soliloquy--impromptu free-associating on a host of topics from A to Z. So here's Barbara herself, to the letter:

"A is for Africa, Arabs, astrology ... oh, my God. Well, I can say a lot about Africa, meaning East Africa ... not South Africa, where Shout at the Devil was made. We were very isolated there and South Africa did not impress me as a place I'd ever go back to. But a couple of years ago, I was sitting at home in L.A.--very bored and splitting up with a man I'd been with for two years--and I decided I just had to get away. So I called up a friend of mine who was producing Born Free on television and said I'd love to do an episode of the show. He said fine, so I got on a plane for Nairobi. While the show itself was horrible--very poorly produced and directed--my first experience there was spectacular. We met a tribe called the Turkana, cousins of the Masai, and I stayed two weeks with them, listening to their music, learning their dances. They're beautiful human beings, with an inner harmony that Westerners seldom understand. In fact, I fell in love with one of them, a black named Rojo. We had a little romance going--which is a perfect way to be drawn into their circle and be fully accepted. Later I sent him a photograph of us dancing together. He'd never seen a photograph....

"B is for beauty, Bertolucci, Britain. It's not for me to talk about being beautiful or being thought beautiful. Anyway, I have one eye smaller than the other and this crooked nose. A man can make me feel beautiful if I'm in love. And I admire beautiful women but not those flawless, chiseled beauties. Someone like Anouk Aimée is beautiful but doesn't have perfect features. Dominique Sanda has an aura of beauty about her; that's what registers.

"C brings me to critics. I think too many get carried away with themselves. I respect Charles Champlin in L.A., who writes fair, intelligent criticism. I don't respect someone like Rex Reed, who is very self-oriented and criticizes personalities instead of appraising an actor's work. So far, in my own career, I don't feel I've done anything important enough--or anything disastrous enough--to provoke heated criticism. I wouldn't mind either of the two extremes, actually. I look forward to that.

"D is for dance ... and working with good directors. I'd love to work with a real actor's director--Bertolucci or Francis Ford Coppola, or Truffaut, whom I think of as a wonderful woman's director. Most of all, I'd love to do a Ginger Rogers--Fred Astaire--type film, a lively song-and-dance show. I'd give anything to do that.

"E? The big E is ecology. I suppose. I wish people could be made aware that we're destroying the earth. We get so tuned away, especially in big cities, I wonder how many of us could go back to living with simple necessities if something terrible happened.... My trips to Africa made me think seriously about this.

"F--ah, yes, the future. I have plans for the future. A house in the English or French countryside. Marriage and children, in due time. Then someday, when I've put my old man under the sod--whoever he may be--I'll open a little village bakery.

"G? Well, I don't believe in God. I don't believe in an afterlife, so I want to have fun and get as much as possible out of this life before I pass on. I wish I could believe more in the goodness of man. I might add that I'm totally against guns and hate gossip--a complete waste of energy.

"H stands for heaven and hell--right here on earth, as I was saying. Hmmm. Hostilities? I'm not aware of any in myself. Horror films? Never watch them. I don't consider myself a highbrow, though. I've tried reading Shakespeare, for example, and don't enjoy it. I find it very ... kind of studied and remote.

"I is the first-person pronoun, or impossible dreams. I don't recognize impossible dreams. Anything is possible.

"J--I love watching Mick Jagger. I like men with a strong female aspect to them. That male-female thing is very appealing, either in a man or in a woman. Though the American ideal is to be strongly one way or the other, that's less true in Europe. Even bisexuality is OK if you're simply a sexual being, without guilt, who happens to appreciate either sex. If you can handle that. I've known quite a few people who do.

"K--Kennedy, Kennedy. I adored John Kennedy. Maybe he wasn't a great politician, but we're learning more and more that we don't always need politicians. We need people we respond to emotionally, people with charisma, whom we'll rush home to watch on television. I also adore Buster Keaton films, as an antidote to all the basically negative, heavy things in the (concluded on page 157) Parkins' Place (continued from page 90) world today--you're left with tears rolling down your cheeks for a better reason.

"L--mmm, I believe in love. Absolutely. Though I don't always have it, I am involved right now, with a man in business in L.A. You can love things other than people, however. I have a passion for languages but wish I spoke more languages and spoke them better. I dream of getting pregnant and using the nine months to indulge myself, studying. I'm not pregnant at the present time, by the way.

"M has a million and one meanings. Men, because I honestly like them. My closest friends are men. M is for my mother, too, a very special lady, the most important person in my life. And money. Oh, yes. I like money, so I can indulge my pleasures and do the things I want to do. Money is very important today, whether we like it or not.

"N--how about nudity? I'm very self-conscious about my nude body. Mostly because I'd prefer to have a wonderful kind of African, catlike body, which is not what I've got. If I had to perform nude on the screen, I wouldn't relish it--though I'd probably agree if the director were someone like Kubrick.

"O--well, I've talked about Omar. So now I'll talk about Ryan O'Neal. Among all the people from Peyton Place, he and I have remained best friends. I think Ryan gets carried away sometimes, because he's basically a fighting Irishman. He likes his house at the beach, likes to work out, play Frisbee, have his woman there. But he's a hard worker, very talented, and he's becoming a big star. That's rough to handle in the beginning, until you mellow it all out. Of course, the ultimate O is Olivier--for me, he's the epitome of screen romance.

"P--I guess my pet peeve is snoring. Hearing someone snore. And I don't like pornography, which has become an obsession among movie people. I don't find it sensual or sexy or a turn-on. Though I saw Emmanuelle and enjoyed it. I guess because it was very feminine and the bodies were beautiful, which is nice to see on the screen.

"Q--first quarrels, then I'll get to the queen old England. On the personal level, I feel quarreling is very, very important for a relationship--so long as you can talk things out, come back together with tenderness and don't lapse into the madness of physically beating each other. As for the queen, all that's not amusing anymore, since it's been revealed she's one of the wealthiest women in the world. She has no real power or position and she's earning huge sums of money for nothing--except to keep the English people supplied with pomp and pageantry, which costs them a lot, much more than they can afford nowadays.

"R--I'll take romance, who wouldn't? Life would be very dull without it. I sometimes wish I had lived in Byron's day. When you received a love letter then, it was poetry. I'd like to play old-fashioned romantic roles, maybe a remake of Wuthering Heights... but they offer me police stories dealing with spies and narcotics. All that Old World romance has gone--to make way for plastics, cubed sugar, salt and pepper sealed in little paper wrappers on TWA.

"S--sex is wonderful, of course. I'm partial to the male sex myself. Sexiness, sensitivity, strength and superiority are all qualities I look for in a man. Not total superiority or domination. But I like to feel a man is stronger than I am, because I don't believe I'm actually a strong person. I may project that image in many ways, but that's basically a front. My protection, no doubt.

"T is for travel, trains. I am just mad about trains. One of the last great romantic voyages must be to take the Trans-Siberian Railroad. I did take a train through Russia once, from Leningrad to Samarkand. From England, I've been to Ireland, Finland, South America, Africa, all of Europe.... I think my wanderlust will take me to the Far East soon. Looking into the distant future, I suspect I'm meant to be a world traveler instead of an actress.

"U--what comes under U? Unisex? Used cars? They remind me of the worst of L.A. Used cars I'd rather not think about, since I'll be going to California.

"V--I hate the violence in movies and on television, which probably reflects the horrendous real violence on all sides--the Irish terrorists in England, and so forth. I was in Harrods once during a bomb scare, when someone phoned to say they'd planted a bomb in the store. Everyone reacted with a strange kind of calm I don't understand. In America, however, I'm afraid people would get hysterical and start a stampede.... I hope I'm wrong.

"W--let me keep away from women's lib, a subject I find tremendously boring. When my agent sends me a script addressed to Ms. Parkins, I tell him I'm Miss Parkins, thank you. Perhaps I'm not that attuned to other women. I don't go to lunch with women; I have very few women friends. I prefer women on the screen, particularly a real woman, someone like Simone Signoret.

"X--I am ignorant about Xs. I'm not X-rated. I'm not an ex-anything, I hope.

"Y is for youth. Youth is fantastic and ought to last much, much longer. I want to keep a youthful mind, a youthful figure.... In London, I studied at the Dance Center in Covent Garden and work hard at keeping my body young. It's exhausting but important.

"Z--well, we're all in a zoo, aren't we? But zoos are sad. I'd love to run off to Zanzibar. As a matter of fact, I'm sure I will."

(Exit Barbara, laughing--and quite obviously going places.)