Sex Stars of 1977
December, 1977
and, lo, the lady with the three names, the lion's mane and the pearly teeth led all the rest
It had never happened before and it might never happen again, but the reigning sex star of the year 1977 wasn't really a movie actress. She was Farrah Fawcett-Majors, one of three costars in a television series, Charlie's Angels. As Farrah Fawcett, she appeared last year--to no significant kudos--in a secondary role in a secondary sci-fi thriller Logan's Run. Then came Angels and the tawny blonde with the tousled hair and gleaming teeth overnight became the hottest thing in T-shirts, posters and bath mats. College girls attempted to imitate the hairdo. College boys pasted up her outsized photos in their dorms. When she appeared to play tennis in the Celebrity Challenge of the Sexes at Mission Viejo in Southern California and began to doff her warm-up jacket, teenagers yelled for her to take off more.
Although television had made Fawcett-Majors a star, there was no guarantee it could keep her there. As the spring season was ending, the actress declared her intention to find more rewarding roles on the big screen--a statement that brought on the inevitable lawsuit and the perhaps equally inevitable $1,000,000 film contract, to star in a "romantic mystery comedy," Somebody Killed Her Husband. But will that make her a movie star? Watch this space.
It's a strange irony that, (text continued on page 220) at least in the past, television stars tended to become so thoroughly identified with the character they played in a series that audiences would accept them only in that role. Susan St. James, for example, was cuter than buttons as the girl researcher-reporter in television's The Name of the Game but got nowhere when she tried to use that as the springboard to a movie career--or, to be more precise, she ended up right back where she started, as Rock Hudson's ever-helpful spouse in the MacMillan & Wife series. Vivacious Valerie Harper, after making her mark on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, was rewarded with TV stardom and a show of her own, the popular Rhoda; on the big screen, however, the best she could get was supporting roles (as in Freebie and the Bean). Actually, Mary Tyler Moore herself is probably the best case in point. Although her TV series remained in the top ten for seven years, her forays into features (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Don't Just Stand There, What's So Bad About Feeling Good? and, especially, Change of Habit) invariably ended in disaster. "Audiences just didn't want to go out and pay for something they could get at home for free," was the explanation proffered by one MTM executive. Perhaps; but it's just as possible that audiences weren't eager to see their wholesome, irrepressible Mary Richards dressed as a nun or playing a Village hippie. The same holds true for male stars, though not quite so rigorously. Some, such as Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen, have been able to shake loose of their television persona; but it has generally taken several years and a complete switch away from their television image to make it happen.
As for TV's current golden girl, whether it's win, lose or draw on the big screen, Farrah Fawcett-Majors has nothing to worry about. Late last July, at one of those Hollywood bashes that not even Hollywood can afford anymore, Fabergé announced that it had just signed her (at an undisclosed seven-digit figure) to be the name, the face and the voice for its newest line of cosmetics. Farrah, resplendent in a white-satin tuxedo, merely smiled that famous smile and waved a lot. (Too bad the company doesn't market a dentifrice.)
As of 1977, however, Fawcett-Majors, T-shirts and all, remained very much a television phenomenon. On the other hand, as predicted in these pages last December, the sloe-eyed Sylvester Stallone, he of the unruly hair and bulging biceps, quickly became the film phenomenon of 1977, when his Rocky rocketed him from total obscurity to instant fame. Made on a $1,100,000 budget (puny by today's inflated standards), the film is expected to gross over $150,000,000 world-wide, according to its producer, Robert Chartoff--"and that doesn't include television sales, records, T-shirts and so on down the line," he hastens to add. With ten percent of the action, Stallone--who, with wife, infant and dog Butkus, was living on borrowed funds throughout the production--stands to close out the year a multimillionaire, his Rocky money handsomely supplemented by the $500,000 he is getting for F.I.S.T., in which he plays a labor leader not unlike the late Jimmy Hoffa. Directed by the prestigious Norman Jewison, the film again boasts a screenplay by its star (this time in collaboration with Joe Eszterhas). It's slated for release early in 1978.
Even while F.I.S.T. was still in production in Dubuque, Iowa, Stallone's success as Rocky had begun to catch up with him. Reports one admittedly prejudiced observer, "It was incredible. Most of the shooting was at night and the kids--both girls and boys--would start gathering about nine o'clock, most of them in Rocky T-shirts, just hoping for a glimpse of Sly. Maybe he'd finally come out at seven a.m. They'd still be there, hoping for an autograph. So he'd sign a few. Next night, they'd be back, hoping for more." That's the kind of adulation that was once accorded to the likes of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and James Dean. It's a way of saying "We love you." It's also a way of saying "You're a star." Not surprisingly, perhaps, Stallone has already gone through the rising star's ritual of firing first his agent, then his business manager.
Less flamboyant than Stallone, but a graduate of the same hang-tough Manhattan school, is Robert De Niro, an actor with impeccable credentials. For those who saw him in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets or Taxi Driver, he was your typical Lower East Side hood--paranoid, unpredictable, ever the potential killer. Yet in Bang the Drum Slowly, playing a simple-minded, goodhearted ballplayer dying of a rare disease, he tore your heart out. Most critics agreed that while Elia Kazan's version of The Last Tycoon was an unconscionable stiff, what little life it possessed came from De Niro's multifaceted portrait of Monroe Stahr, F. Scott Fitzgerald's glamorized version of one-time MGM executive Irving Thalberg. As young Don Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather II (in which he had the unenviable task of creating a credible precedent for the character that Marlon Brando had already given us in The Godfather), De Niro decisively made off with the Best Supporting Actor award of 1974.
But those were character roles, the sort of thing that Paul Muni used to do at Warners' back in the Thirties. New York, New York, also directed by Scorsese, introduced us to a new, warmer, more human De Niro--likable enough but, as T. S. Eliot would have said, "not a verse to live with." His Jimmy Doyle is, above all, a hard-driving, hard-driven jazz musician (and for once, an actor is able to convince us that he really does blow a mean saxophone), caught in the switch from big-band swing to small-combo bop. It's a fascinating character but one that would probably fall to pieces in less capable hands. In fact, the mercurial leaps in Doyle's personality are held together primarily by the intensity of De Niro's performance; the script provides little to prepare us for his vicious diatribe against his wife, played by Liza Minnelli, when the two are together in his car, for example, and none whatsoever for his boorish behavior at the night club where a former friend is appearing. It's possible, of course, that these motivations actually were supplied by the original script and simply disappeared as Scorsese cut the picture from four hours to roughly two and a half.
Unlike Stallone, De Niro doesn't seek out the adulation of the crowds. He is an extraordinarily private man, actually delighting in the fact of nonrecognition. Like Alec Guinness, he researches the people he is to play, be they ballplayers, taxi drivers or hot jazz musicians, until he has down pat the tricks of their trade. His Doyle in New York, New York is a total turn-on, a sexually aggressive male who also happens to be overwhelmingly eager to make it on the jazz scene. Interestingly, a small but memorable performance--and Minnelli's biggest vocal challenge in the picture--comes from sultry Diahnn Abbott, doing a very persuasive Billie Holliday interpretation. Diahnn just happens to be Mrs. Robert De Niro.
New York, New York is also the best thing that has happened to Minnelli to date. For several years, she has been much more the performer than the actress. Even in Cabaret, the critics talked about her cabaret numbers, not her portrayal of Sally Bowles. Lucky Lady was the kind of disaster that nobody wants to discuss. In New York, New York, on the other hand, Liza comes through with all the tremulous vulnerability, the facade of sophistication and the broad streak of frank sentimentality that made her mother so popular. New York, New York unlocks whole new vistas for Minnelli's career, vistas that have apparently been projected onto her new stage musical, The Act, again under Scorsese's direction.
Taken as a whole, 1977 was a year of few surprises. In the course of a cover story, Newsweek named gorgeous Jacqueline Bisset as "the leading candidate for that place of honor in our fantasy life, the Screen's Most Beautiful Woman," but that's not news, since she has been a leading candidate ever since she walked topless out of the sea in her first Hollywood movie, The Sweet Ride, an otherwise unmemorable 1968 release. Although Bisset has had no qualms about doing nude scenes--with that body, why should she?--her most sensational exposure came in this past summer's surprise hit The Deep. As the film opens, she and co-star Nick Nolte are spearfishing in the crystal-blue waters off the coast of Bermuda, repeatedly swimming toward the lens of the underwater camera. It's immediately apparent why the cameraman can't take his eyes off her in her white cotton T-shirt, so wet that the fabric clings to her breasts, revealing them--erectile nipples and all--to far greater advantage than the nudest of skin flicks could possibly manage. That opening sequence makes one understand what is really meant by the "rhapsody of the deep." In fact, when Bisset is forced to strip later in the film by Lou Gossett and his hopped-up pals, or when island natives perform a voodoo ritual with a bloodied chicken claw upon her nude and writhing torso, the effect is notably less erotic. Of course, she performs the strip with her back to the camera and the shot with the chicken claw has been ever so discreetly framed, but nevertheless, in both instances, the nudity is total. It's a paradox that must have nettled the Motion Picture Association: The eroticism of a fully clothed body vs. the relatively low charge provided by total (if tasteful) nudity.
Where The Deep fails--and it does--is in its lack of a co-star of comparable voltage to make the sexual sparks fly on the screen. Nolte, fresh off a television series, gives the kind of laid-back performance that makes you know that if the script hadn't said otherwise, a bright girl like Bisset would never have snorkled with him a second time (though the company made no effort to squelch the rumors that, while on location in Bermuda, she did considerably more than snorkle with her co-star). But such tales seem to be part of the Bisset legend. After The Sweet Ride, she herself made no effort to conceal the fact that she was shacking up with the star of that movie, Michael Sarrazin, while when she was doing Day for Night with the great French director François Truffaut, she not only appeared with him on every possible public occasion but also acted as his interpreter. Her present bon ami, according to the Newsweek piece, is Victor Drai, a French couturier who sold his business in Paris to be with Bisset in Los Angeles--and has been doing very nicely in its booming real estate market ever since. But it's symptomatic of today's star wars that at the age of 33, and endowed with a near-perfect face and figure (both of which she displays to great advantage), Jacqueline Bisset--after more than 20 films--remains a "leading candidate." Perhaps her role opposite Anthony Quinn in The Greek Tycoon (a role precariously similar to that of another Jackie who married a Greek tycoon) will bring her the superstardom that has so far eluded her.
Another strong contender for that choice distinction, however, is fresh-faced, dewy-eyed Diane Keaton. Her film career, which had been progressing at a steady pace since her modest debut in Lovers and Other Strangers (1970), began to zoom earlier this year when she co-starred with Woody Allen in his semiautobiographical Annie Hall, one of the year's more resounding hits. Obviously, it was a role created specifically for her: It included incidents from their long-standing on-again, off-again relationship (such as the sequence with the escaped lobsters or the nocturnal summons to kill a spider in her bathroom--perhaps even the audience's response to her first attempt at becoming a night-club singer). In any case, she projects a warm, endearing presence--that of someone who can, remarkably, laugh at Allen's jokes and one-liners as if she were hearing them for the first time. That takes acting.
Just winding up postproduction as this is being written is Richard Brooks's adaptation of last year's sensational best seller Looking for Mr. Goodbar, with Keaton in the role of the ill-fated schoolteacher who goes searching for love in bars. Brooks counts among his many successes his adaptation, a decade ago, of Truman Capote's no less sensational In Cold Blood. About Diane, Brooks says, "She's close to perfection." Which is no mean praise from a man who is himself a perfectionist.
No such accolades from writer-director Frank Pierson about his A Star Is Born star, Barbra Streisand. In an article for New West and New York that was part venom, part vengeance and part purgative, Pierson (whose credits include Cat Ballou) laced into the lady for continual interference, indecision and self-indulgence. He found himself, he charges, writing, rewriting, then restaging the entire film at Streisand's whim. For several weeks, Pierson's piece was the talk of Hollywood, where one rarely so publicly bites the hand that feeds you. But then the Streisand fans asserted themselves where it counts, at the box office, and Pierson's diatribe was forgotten. After all, the fans were coming to see Barbra, and maybe her co-star, Kris Kristofferson--but certainly not Pierson.
It seemed an affirmation of what is becoming a Hollywood cliché, that the audiences follow the stars. It's a cliché that is having a devastating effect upon today's production scene, when a producer like Joseph E. Levine will offer the likes of Robert Redford, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier and Liv Ullmann as much as they would normally receive for an entire picture in exchange for a few days' work on A Bridge Too Far. Or, following much the same pattern, the reputedly upwards of $2,500,000 that the Salkinds have paid Marlon Brando for about two weeks' work on Superman, plus a percentage of the picture. No star--not even Brando--has ever insured a movie against the vagaries of the box office. (Whatever became of The Missouri Breaks?)
Equally in question is what the film will do to the advancing film career of Kristofferson--not that the popular singer and composer of country ballads really needs to worry about returning to his $50-a-month furnished room in Nashville (even though he continues to pay the rent on it, just in case). But ever since Cisco Pike (1971)--and especially in last year's The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea--he has been polishing his image of the bearded, flashing-eyed loner who dishes out an irresistible brand of sex. Well, in A Star Is Born, despite a bathtub à deux with Streisand, it soon appears that, as far as she's concerned, his sexiness is quite resistible. But word is beginning to roll in from the New Mexican locations for Convoy, directed by the grizzled Sam Peckinpah, with the delectable Ali MacGraw opposite Kris, that all of that could change. And by the time this article appears, Semi-Tough--in which Kristofferson co-stars with Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh--should also be on the screen. At 40, Kris has been an Army helicopter pilot, a Rhodes scholar, a Golden Gloves boxer, a football player, a songwriter, a singer and a movie star, and still is not sure where he wants to focus the rest of his life; but he just may have the potential of becoming one of the hottest male leads in Hollywood.
For the moment, however, that privileged position seems to be occupied by Kristofferson's Semi-Tough co-star, Burt Reynolds, even though Reynolds himself laughs away the notion. He'd rather direct. One of the handful of contemporary stars with the physical equipment and emotional range to inherit the Clark Gable mantle, Reynolds seems almost willfully to have limited himself to such lightweight entertainments as White Lightning, W. W. and the Dixie Dance Kings, Gator and, most recently, Smokey and the Bandit, yet another battered entry into the C.B. car-chase/car-crash sweepstakes. Admittedly, he staged some of the auto wrecks superbly--but what has that got to do with an acting career? Reynolds smiles toothily and brings a notable agility to his truck-driving role, (continued on page 338) Sex Stars of 1977 (continued from page 222) but it's a bit like asking Heifetz to play Three Blind Mice. After all, an actor is merely the sum of his parts. It may be that the time has come for Reynolds to choose less warily but well. Perhaps he has done so in his next star-director vehicle, The End; we'll know next year.
With very few exceptions, most of the older and better-established stars would do well to be choosier. Richard Harris certainly has freedom of choice but chooses to go with masochistic enterprises like Orca, in which he is ultimately flattened against the side of an iceberg by the tail of a whale. George C. Scott's estimable Hemingway portrait in Islands in the Stream was marred by a distinctly un-Hemingwayesque finale that had him melodramatically felled by a stray Nazi bullet. In Cross of Iron, both James Coburn and Maximilian Schell lurch toward certain death to prove their machismo, while Bruce Dern does much the same, with psychotic overtones, in Black Sunday. Not even in their palmiest days, however, could Marlon Brando and Kirk Douglas--two experts in what we might call masochismo--absorb the kind of punishment that Clint Eastwood metes out to himself in his own productions. Whether assaying the Western loner or San Francisco's Dirty Harry Callahan, he contrives to get himself beat up, shot up and mortally wounded just about every 15 minutes. It happened this time last year with The Enforcer, in which Harry hunted down a group of black Vietnam vets who had kidnaped San Francisco's mayor; and there is no reason to believe that in Gauntlet, which is Eastwood's upcoming contribution to our Christmas festivities, he will be the least bit easier on himself.
That's not the style of witty, urbane Roger Moore, playing his third James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me. It's part of the Bond tradition that though he may be pursued, captured and placed in the vilest duress, none of his captors ever draws more than a spot of blood. The way Moore plays Bond, they scarcely wrinkle his jacket. He brings to the role the ultimate cool, a cool that somehow softens the hard edge that Sean Connery brought to the character yet doesn't weaken it. Moore can still operate all those deadly gadgets with an insouciant smile and quip and make you think that he's only kidding--even as the pursuing car goes over the cliff or that persistent helicopter goes up in flames. It's all in a day's work. And all in a night's work is sultry Barbara Bach, the spy who loved him whenever the film's sophisticated script managed to bring them together. (As an extra added attraction in this day of the almighty PG, the film vouchsafes a brief glimpse of Barbara showering from head to toe; it's a very clean movie.) In Los Angeles for the film's premiere, Moore reminisced a bit. "I went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts," he said, "with 16 girls and five fellows, four of whom weren't interested in the girls, so I learned a lot about sex and nil about acting." Which sounds like the perfect formula for anyone playing James Bond.
For most male stars, however, 1977 was a pretty dead-ass year. In Cross of Iron, wounded Nazi noncom James Coburn had the obligatory interlude with army nurse Senta Berger, but if anything happened, the cameras weren't there to record it. George Segal's biggest thrill had to be talking things over with wife Jane Fonda while she was making pee-pee on the potty in Fun with Dick and Jane, which was about as sexy as things got in that movie. There was even less for Segal in Rollercoaster, even though he was dating petite Susan Strasberg, who, now in her late 30s, still looks delicious. Michael York, in The Island of Dr. Moreau, saw considerably less of top fashion model Barbara Carrera than did the readers of Playboy's July issue. And if York fared any better with the curvaceous Ann-Margret, who pursued him relentlessly throughout Marty Feldman's hilarious The Last Remake of Beau Geste, there was little evidence of it onscreen. The French Foreign Legion (again) offered scant opportunity to handsome Terence Hill to pursue war-weary Catherine Deneuve--though he came off a lot better than when playing an Italian garage mechanic in love with Valerie Perrine in Mr. Billion. An enormously popular star in Europe, where he specializes in spaghetti Westerns, Hill is still in need of an American movie to showcase his romantic potential. World War Two opened up even fewer amorous possibilities to Robert Redford or to Ryan O'Neal in A Bridge Too Far. John Beck had the possibilities in The Other Side of Midnight but, shall we say, failed to rise to the occasion. And Warren Beatty, in another of his fallow years, spent most of his time getting his remake version of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, now titled Heaven Can Wait, off the ground.
Which means that of all the old pros, only Paul Newman--the gray lion--really got it on. Slap Shot was, in many ways, a reprehensible movie, punched up with egregious violence and studded with four-letter words that seemed excessive even for a losing ice-hockey team. But there was a sobering sense of reality, and of sadness, in the bedroom sequence where Newman tries to console himself over his team's losses with the attractive wife (Melinda Dillon) of a player on the rival team--and she reveals that her husband's maniacal passion for hockey has turned her into a lesbian; or the sequence in which Lindsay Crouse, as the wife of one of his own teammates, comes to his flat because she can't cope with a rival that is only a game. It's a strange film for Newman, because, while it keeps alive the image of our blue-eyed he-man as just about the sexiest guy around, it also injects a bitter, nasty note. Some deep undercurrent in the script seems to be asking what he has done to merit those women's trust and favors. And the answer comes up zero, which is not the best answer for a fading sex image.
The answers are by no means in yet on Rudolf Nureyev, Ken Russell's exotic choice for the title role in his lurid and bizarre new Valentino. Casting the great Russian ballet dancer of the Seventies as a ballroom dancer (and movie star) of the Twenties may prove to be either pure chic or pure cheek; Russell is capable of both. What he is not capable of is an uninteresting movie; and the idea that in private life the screen's greatest lover was twice married to lesbians is in itself outrageous enough to summon the crowds. For their money's worth, they'll also get nude scenes, a tango performed by Valentino and Nijinsky and a sequence in which Valentino makes love to a girl who turns out to be a male transvestite. One possible problem: Nureyev is pushing 40, while Valentino was dead at 31. Anyone who has seen Nureyev dance knows that he can create the aura of passion, but when the camera is on him in close-up, can he be convincingly passionate as a youth in his 20s? Well, Valentino's entree into the movies was as a dancer; perhaps it will prove the same for Nureyev.
But the most outrageous movie debut of the year had to be that of Canadian-born Craig Russell in a modest Canadian entry titled, appropriately enough, Outrageous! At 26, Russell has already established himself as one of the world's greatest female impersonators (some would insist the greatest). And after watching him do, with devastating accuracy, his tarty impressions of the likes of Carol Channing, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand and the inevitable Mae West, few would argue. At the age of 13, Russell organized an international Mae West fan club, then went to Hollywood to handle her fan mail. Later, he began working the nighteries (including the L.A. Playboy Club) and did some television; but none of that indicated the abilities he brings to a dramatic role. Playing a gay hairdresser, a compulsive transvestite living with a girl fresh out of a mental asylum, he calls to mind that old aphorism "Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse." There's a sadness to Outrageous! but also a positivism that suggests there are affirmative answers for all the crazies of the world. Already the film is being hailed as one of the sleepers of the year and Russell as one of the year's major discoveries--though it's difficult to imagine what he could do for an encore.
If 1977 has been less than outstanding for male actors, it's been even weaker for the females, those impatient lilies of the field. They still complain, with reason, of the paucity of strong women's roles in today's movies, not to mention the fact that there just aren't enough roles of any sort--good, bad or indifferent--to give a young actress the exposure she needs to become known; to become, as they say in the industry, "bankable." Consider, for example, pretty Jessica Lange, for love of whom King Kong took that header from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Both her looks and her performance won her critical kudos but not, apparently, another job. Perhaps she was just another flash in the paw.
Jessica had a pivotal role in one of the year's biggest and most publicized films; what about the girls whose main function is simply to be there whenever the script calls for a little romance? Virtually interchangeable in appearance, they are asked to play colorless, unmotivated characters in films that are invariably dominated by the male leads. What chance have they to make an impression? Who has heard lately of Jane Hitchcock, who stumbled myopically between Ryan O'Neal and buddy boy Burt Reynolds throughout the interminable running time of Nickelodeon? Or of Ingrid Boulting, so beautiful--and so lost--in The Last Tycoon? Red-haired, sexy Joanna Cassidy, she of the lilting laugh, seems consigned to playing philandering wives (as in The Late Show) and ending up dead. And Candy Clark, so promising in last year's The Man Who Fell to Earth, finds herself this year on the short end of a C.B. hookup in Paramount's dud Citizen's Band (which has been retitled Handle with Care).
Even the girls who keep working are generally going nowhere. One would think that after her vital performances in Slaughterhouse-Five and Lenny, Valerie Perrine would never again have to prove herself. After the aforementioned Mr. Billion, in which she plays a girl detective hired to keep Terence Hill from reaching San Francisco, she will. (Maybe she'll make up for it as the sinister Eve in next year's all-star production of Superman.) The outspoken Candice Bergen, after an uncommonly drab role in Stanley Kramer's The Domino Principle, removed herself to Italy to participate in Lina Wertmuller's first movie for an American studio, A Night Full of Rain. Perhaps it will change her luck. Susan Sarandon, who left an indelible impression as a Southern belle in TV's attempt at an F. Scott Fitzgerald biography, keeps getting the wrong roles in the wrong pictures. In The Other Side of Midnight, she was the wife that John Beck jilted for the wealth of Raf Vallone and the charms of Marie-France Pisier. In the upcoming Pretty Baby, she is the mother of a 12-year-old prostitute in a New Orleans brothel; since that film is in the capable hands of Louis Malle, who has managed to handle tastefully such touchy topics as incest, we may hope it's less exploitive than it would seem at first blush.
Dark-eyed Katharine Ross is another attractive and capable actress who has had more than her fair share of career problems. After a brilliant start in The Graduate, she managed to make her presence felt in the first of the "buddy" movies, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but somehow got mired in such efforts as The Singing Nun and They Only Kill Their Masters. This year, she managed to impress again, though in a minuscule role, as a Havana prostitute in the all-star Voyage of the Damned; next year, she gets a bigger chance with the female lead--opposite Laurence Olivier and Robert Duvall--in Harold Robbins' The Betsy.
The point is that even for the girls who have ostensibly made it, the roles aren't always there. Of course, Candy Bergen can always go off and photograph something and Lauren Hutton can do some more ads for Revlon; but for those whose whole life is centered on the movies, frustration sets in early. "When you want to work and all they offer you is garbage," says longtime starlet Tiffany Bolling, "you take the garbage." But there is just so much garbage that any aspiring young actress can take. Tiffany married an airline pilot this year and is now in semiretirement--at least until she can find a role that is not too offal.
Curiously, she echoed the sentiments of Swiss-born Marthe Keller, who has been in enormous Stateside demand in the past year or so, appearing in Marathon Man, Black Sunday, Bobby Deerfield and Billy Wilder's forthcoming Fedora. Marthe, who was also one of the jurors at this year's Cannes Film Festival, told a reporter there: "At the start, when you are offered soup, you take the soup."
The fact is, however, that the foreignborn actresses today aren't taking just the soup--they're getting the cream. It's Marie-France Pisier (the "other woman" in Cousin Cousine) who dominates The Other Side of Midnight. Catherine Deneuve stars in March or Die, Dominique Sanda in Survival Run, Julie Christie in Demon Seed, Isabelle Adjani (of Truffaut's Story of Adele H) in the upcoming The Driver, opposite Ryan O'Neal and Bruce Dern. Without impugning these talents in the least, the sad fact is that our own American producers don't give our own actresses the same opportunities to display--and stretch--their capabilities. In And Now My Love, for example, Marthe Keller had the opportunity (which she used superbly) to portray three generations of women in the same family. Billy Wilder's Fedora script demands an actress who can go from 16 to 60. Which American actress has met that challenge recently? Keller draws a neat distinction. "The French actor wants to be good in a movie," she explains. "The American actor wants to be in a good movie."
Unfortunately, his and, more especially, her chances are limited--except in the pornos. Being good in a good porno is no longer a contradiction in terms; superstars like Linda Lovelace, Marilyn Chambers, Harry Reems and John C. Holmes have emerged in the field (generally, it must be admitted, with the aid of a persistent D.A.). It used to be that most porn performers demanded anonymity or pseudonymity, but today's porn star is beginning to demand top billing. The incredibly endowed Johnny Wadd, for example, is now John C. Holmes, and don't you forget it. The female sex star of the year on the porno circuit, though she swears she's going to retire, is blonde, 40ish Jennifer Welles, whose Inside Jennifer Welles shapes up as this year's Deep Throat. Welles, who is as sexplicit as you can get, has a lot in common with Mae West (herself attempting a comeback in her 80s in a film called Sextette). Mae would probably be the first to deny any resemblance, since her sex was always more verbal than oral. But it's sobering to realize that what Mae West said (in a play called Sex) sent her to jail in 1926, while the things that Jennifer does (which Mae would never approve of) probably won't even get her arrested in 1977. Time does march on--and even though there are always attempts at repression, we never quite go back to where we were.
"With very few exceptions, most of the more firmly established stars would do well to be choosier."
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