Wonder of the World

A few months ago, poster woman Dorit Stevens dropped in to the Postermat in Westwood to see whether or not her posters were selling. She was wearing a jogging suit, sneakers, no make-up, and her hair was all wet. She overhead two kids bickering over one of her posters. They didn't have enough money for it.

One said, "How much do we have? It's $3.50." The other responded, "Gosh, I wanted a pizza." His buddy said, "No, (text continued on page 182) Wonder of the World (continued from page 77) we have to get this one."

Dorit sauntered over and said, "Hey, guys, do you like that poster?" "Yeah, yeah, sure," they chimed in. "Well, that's me," Dorit announced. One kid looked at her and said, "You wish!"

Westwood is along way from the mountain slopes of Europe, and, when you think about it, the odds against someone born in Innsbruck, Austria, going to live in Hollywood, U.S.A., are probably more than 1,000,000 to one. In Dorit's case, though, the move wasn't a gamble; it was an inevitability. Anatomy is one hell of an influence. And the body of Dorit (pronounced Doreet) Stevens obviously belongs in the dream capital of the world. OK, so it took her awhile.

"I was born in Austria," she told us, "but I grew up in Italy, France and Israel with my incredible father. He was much older than my mother and they were separated when I was about a year old. So I had a sort of different kind of life. My father was Russian. He had a lot of women. He was sort of the Hefner type--but not really; he did not live in a mansion. I traveled over the world with him. We ended up in Israel. It was a place that he felt--because he was Jewish--would be the best place for me to grow up. When we were in Italy, he said to me--I was about eight--'Where would you like to go? We can go to America, where there is a lot of snow and people and big buildings, or we can go to Israel, where there is sunshine and oranges and honey.' And I said, 'I want sunshine and oranges!' So off we went."

One consequence of Dorit's varied background is that she speaks five languages, including English, which she delivers in a seductive accent that seems to evoke no particular locale yet has all the allure and mystery of any exotic place that comes to mind. You don't know what it is, but you like it.

"When I was little," Dorit recalled, "I learned to say 'I love you' in 12 languages. My father said that was the best way to get through life, to know how to say it in all languages. He was very passionate, a crazy man. So when I came to the United States, I knew just a few words. I knew how to say 'I love you,' 'I'm sick,' and 'food.'"

For a time after she learned English, Dorit worked in New York as an interpreter for an international corporation. A respectable profession but, as everyone who met her told her, a waste. She headed West.

"I came to Los Angeles and just started going to the studios. I didn't know what to do. I didn't have an agent. What I did was this: I took some shots and I wrote a letter to every agent in town, more than 60 of them. I got about 16 phone calls from people who wanted to see me. Some weren't very legitimate. They wanted something else from me. I was very naïve. I wrote, 'Hi, I'm new in town. I'd like to meet you. I'd like to hear from you. My phone number is....' Not knowing, you understand, that this town has some people who say, 'Oh, new in town! Let's train this one!' But they didn't know that I'm a killer.

"My first part was on Charlie's Angels; I was sort of discovered in the commissary by one of the producers. He said, 'I'm reading girls this afternoon who look like you. Would you come and read for us?' I said, 'Sure.'

"When I arrived, the room was full of girls who looked exactly like me--you know, clones. We all sat there shivering and staring at one another, because we knew there was only one of us who was gonna get it, right? It was my first reading and I didn't exactly know how to approach it, but I had a lot of guts. The part was a secretary who had this rapport with a guy. During my reading, I went to the producer, who was sitting there, and I stroked his head. And the casting director said, 'Dorit, physical stuff is not necessary.' I said, 'But it's written here. I need to play off somebody!' And the producer said, 'Well, I don't mind,' and I said, 'Well, he doesn't mind!' And I finished. They said, 'Thank you,' and a day later, I had the part. That's how it started, but that doesn't mean that Hollywood isn't the toughest place on the planet!"

After that, Dorit showed up on a number of television programs and in a best-selling poster. She has done most of the talk shows and has had guest shots on 240-Robert, CHiPs, Fantasy Island, The Jeffersons, $weepstake$, The Dream Merchants, a Don Rickles special, Matt Houston and the pilot for Magnum, P.I.

"I met Tom Selleck about a year before we made the pilot. It was at Paramount, in the parking lot. I saw this big, tall guy and he stopped me and said, 'You look familiar; aren't you on a cigarette-ad billboard?' I said, 'Yes, I have a billboard on Sunset.' He said, 'God, that's you! Wow, great! You look great.' Then he said, 'Would you like to have dinner?' or something to that effect. I said, 'No, I can't; I'm married.' [The lucky fellow is Dorit's personal manager, Joel Stevens.] We talked a bit more, I said goodbye and I forgot about him. Then, a year later, I got a call to read for Magnum. When I walked in, I saw him sitting on the couch. I said, 'We met!' He said, 'Of course we met. Why do you think you're here?' I said, 'You remembered me? That's so nice!' He said, 'Yes, it is,' so I did the show."

In the pilot, Dorit was a stewardess. Stewardess, secretary, model, bathing beauty--those are the parts Dorit usually gets, and she understands why.

"Listen, when people see a girl like me, they do not want to hear that she is smart. They do not want to know how much she knows. To them, I'm a fantasy, you see, and a fantasy does not talk, does not say anything, just stands there. It doesn't bother me, because I know I'm smart. I know what I'm doing. I know I can't be cheated. I know people too well from living in all those countries and experiencing at a young age so many things.

"The girl in the poster for those kids in Westwood was a fantasy. They didn't want to see the reality standing there with sneakers and a jogging suit and wet hair. They wanted to put the poster on the wall, and God knows what they were going to do with it."

And did those boys buy the poster?

"Oh, they bought the poster, all right. They ran out with it as though they thought I were going to run after them.

"But you know, the fantasy stuff is all right. I understand it. That's who we are. We're all impressions of life. We're all the stuff of memories. It's here today [snaps fingers], gone tomorrow. So you make the best of it. I just want to have some fun with my life. I want to be remembered as someone who didn't hurt anybody, someone with ethics and integrity who just liked to have fun and laughter and smiles and flowers. That's it!"