If It’s Not Tuesday…It Must Be Sandra, Connie, Diane, Carol, Sue, or Yvette Part 2

The times they were a-changin’ in 1966. The Sunset Strip in Hollywood was populated by hippies and motorcycle gangs. The counterculture was in full swing. Teenagers were turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. They fought the establishment in every way—from protesting the U.S. presence in Vietnam to dropping acid to practicing free love. Society was in upheaval as the innocence of the early sixties was being replaced by the cynicism of the late sixties.

Hollywood too was in turmoil as the old studio system was dismantling and independent films were on the rise. New young directors were beginning to cast their films with people who looked real and not Hollywood glamour girls or matinee idols. These changes (coupled with the fact that during the Age of Aquarius, young people outright rejected performers too closely identified with the earlier part of the decade such as Troy Donahue, Shelley Fabares, and Annette Funicello who they felt represented the ideals of the Eisenhower years) adversely affected the big screen careers of these Baby Doll blondes who were now in the early to mid-twenties. They also had more competition as the actresses from The Group (1966) particularly Candice Bergen, Jessica Walter, and Joanna Pettet; Fox discovery Raquel Welch, and a number of European beauties like Ursula Andress and Elke Sommer surpassed them as Hollywood’s newest It Girls.

Sandra Dee sensed her screen demise and voiced her unhappiness with the roles being offered her. She bemoaned, “They can’t keep me in Peter Pan collars for the rest of my life. I’ve got to move on—I’ve got to grow up. I want to do drama, sex—pictures with real substance.” Unfortunately, it was just too late to try to overcome her icky-sweet Tammy image. She and Connie Stevens were so identified with that era and their attempts to play more mature roles to reflect the changing mores of the times did not pan out. This persona lost Dee the female lead opposite Warren Beatty in the mod heist comedy Kaleidoscope (1966) as she was replaced by Susannah York. Even a stab at playing a knocked up singer who has three suitors claiming to be the baby’s father in the supposed “with-it” comedy Doctor, You’ve Got to Be Kidding! (1968) didn’t help. So desperate was she to change her image that Russ Meyer told the Los Angeles Times that Dee’s agent contacted him for a role in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. How surreal would that have been—the King of Cleavage meets flat-chested Tammy.

After going freelance in 1969, Dee gave a good account of herself as a virginal librarian who falls under the spell of a demented stranger in the gothic H.P. Lovecraft thriller The Dunwich Horror (1970). It was just too little, too late as Sandra Dee the movie star went out with a whimper. The seventies found her popping up in the occasional TV-movie (Daughters of Joshua Cabe; Fantasy Island) and guest roles (Love, American Style; Night Gallery (pictured below); Police Woman) looking so frail and gaunt later in the decade probably due to the drinking problem she suffered from. Happily, she got clean and sober and returned to the public eye in the nineties, but sadly she passed away in 2005.

 

Post 1965, Connie Stevens appeared as astronaut Jerry Lewis’ intended bride to get a married couple on the moon in the failed idiotic comedy Way…Way Out (1966). She campaigned heavily to play the role of Honey, the ditzy wife of a young college professor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) but director Mike Nichols deemed her unsuitable for the part. Producers quickly caught on that her acting talent was as thin as her singing voice. Most likely seeing the writing on the wall in terms of her fading movie career, she wisely retreated to the small screen guest starring on practically all the major variety programs singing and dancing. She even had a success on Broadway in the comedy Star Spangled Girl in 1966 in which she received a Theater World Award but when it was turned into a movie in 1971 her role was recast with Sandy Duncan.

Stevens returned to the big screen playing hood Tony Musante’s moll and speakeasy singer in director Robert Aldrich’s violent Depression era kidnap tale The Grissom Gang (1971). Surprisingly, Stevens received good notices and then belatedly went the sexpot route with laughable results in the made-for television movie The Sex Symbol (1973) playing a disguised version of Marilyn Monroe and the low-budget R-rated Scorchy (1976) as a tough detective. Not having the acting skills to continue with dramatic type roles, Stevens returned to light comedy and variety and became the go-to actress for fifties and sixties nostalgia-themed movies (i.e. Grease 2, Back to the Beach, Bring Me the Head of Dobie Gillis, etc.).

The more talented Diane McBain on the other hand was typecast the opposite way as she couldn’t shake the bad girl roles and sunk into B-movies even before the sixties ended. She was a better actress than she was given credit for but her name never came up in casting considerations for some of the top young leading lady roles by the decade’s end. McBain wound up with the second female lead in the Elvis Presley musical Spinout (1966) as a sophisticated author searching for the Perfect Male whom she decides is race car driver and singer Elvis Presley and vies for his attentions with rich girl Shelley Fabares and tomboyish drummer Deborah Walley.

McBain then was paired twice with teen idol Fabian trying to toughen his big screen persona. In Thunder Alley (1967) she was racecar driver Fabian’s vengeful ex-girlfriend who hooks up with his rival to bring him down and in Maryjane (1968) they were high school teachers trying to help their pot-smoking students but the pusher turned out to be Diane! She reached the apex of exploitation films giving an intense over-the-top performance as a murderous tough-talking motorcycle mama (though her looks suited her more for riding on a float in the Rose Bowl Parade)  in the camp classic of biker movies The Mini-Skirt Mob (1968). McBain learned to ride a big motorcycle, but was disappointed that in the movie they were given bikes just a bit bigger than a scooter to ride making this Mini-Skirt Mob never very tough looking. Diane then posed semi-nude for Playboy thinking if Carol Lynley could do it so could she, but had second thoughts and withdrew the photos.

By the end of the decade, McBain found herself in even cheaper films such as The Sidehackers (1969) where this time she is the victim of a vicious biker gang who rapes and then leaves her for dead; and the inanely titled comedy I Sailed to Tahiti with an All-Girl Crew (1969) opposite cigar store Indian Gardner McKay. She then played a supporting role in the spy adventure The Delta Factor (1970) starring Chris George and Yvette Mimieux. Though it hurt Diane’s ego to play second fiddle to Mimeux, a minor consolation was that director Tay Garnett told her that he should have cast her in the lead because she was much more professional then Mimieux who gave him trouble on the set.

It is mind boggling why Diane McBain was not offered the sophisticated glamour roles played by a Dina Merrill or a Barbara Rush. She certainly had the looks and air about her for it. Never able to arise from low-budget exploitation movies, the seventies found Diane talent wasted in Wicked, Wicked (1973), one of the seventies’ first slasher movies filmed in Duo-Vision, as a hotel murder victim, and in Grade-Z foreign productions like the Mexican adventure Savage Season (1971) and the Filipino horror movie The Deathhead Virgin (1974). The rest of the decade found her in the occasional TV-movie and lots of television guest roles. She had early eighties success as the outrageous Foxy Humdinger on Days of Our Lives but she was brutally raped in her carport and the trauma caused her to stop working for awhile. In 2014, she wrote a brutally honest autobiography entitled Famous Enough: A Hollywood Memoir.

Unlike Sandra Dee, Connie Stevens, and Diane McBain who were not considered for major roles, Yvette Mimiuex, Carol Lynley, Sue Lyon and especially Tuesday Weld were all on the cusp of becoming important actresses in 1966. They successfully fought typecasting and their names were bandied around for some super star making roles in critically acclaimed movies but either they just missed being cast or unwisely passed on them.

Post-1965, Natalie Wood and Jane Fonda were at the top of the echelon when casting for some of the latter half of the decade’s top female roles. Both turned down Bonnie and Clyde and then the role was accepted and rejected by Tuesday Weld who just had a child. Carol Lynley was reportedly considered after producer/actor Warren Beatty saw her as Jean Harlow in Harlow and liked her Thirties look but felt she looked too young. (Reportedly, she lost out on Burt Lancaster’s kids’ former babysitter in The Swimmer because she looked too old.) Bonnie was almost offered to Sue Lyon when Arthur Penn observed Faye Dunaway in a play in New York and brought her to Warren Beatty’s attention. She won the role, an Academy Award nomination, and super stardom.

Lynley and Lyon in particular were up for a number of the same roles. Director John Ford wanted Carol to play the innocent missionary in his last movie Seven Women (1966) but MGM pushed contract player Sue Lyon on him. Both actresses were on producer Lawrence Turman’s wish list of actresses, which also included Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, Tuesday Weld, Pamela Tiffin, and Yvette Mimieux, amongst others, to play Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine in The Graduate (1967). Katherine Ross got the part and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, which led to the female lead opposite Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Later in the decade as their careers waned, Lynley and Lyon were sought by producer Tony Tenser to play the female lead of a thrill-seeking coed opposite Frankie Avalon in The Haunted House of Horror (1969) but both wisely turned it down. British actress Jill Haworth, fresh off her successful run as Sally Bowles in Cabaret on Broadway, accepted the part.

The female lead in Rosemary’s Baby was another sought after role. Jane Fonda turned it down. Natalie Wood was considered however director Roman Polanski thought Tuesday Weld would have been ideal (actually his wife Sharon Tate was his first choice) but Paramount didn’t think she “was established enough.” Producer Robert Evans then saw Mia Farrow fresh from leaving TV’s Peyton Place and thought she would be perfect. It is surprising though that Carol Lynley or Yvette Mimieux were not considered for this role. Lynley knew Polanski well (she claimed he not only offered her his movie Repulsion, but named the character Carol in tribute to her) and had given an excellent performance as the beleaguered heroine in Bunny Lake Is Missing a role that Jane Fonda desired while Mimieux had that same fragile elfin look to her similar to Farrow.  Another movie the Baby Doll blondes seemed to have been ignored was Valley of the Dolls. One could easily see Tuesday Weld as wacko Neely and Carol Lynley or Yvette Mimieux as icy model Anne.

A few years prior, both Mimieux and Lynley were contenders for the female lead in The Birds along with Sandra Dee and Pamela Tiffin. Reportedly, Alfred Hitchcock screened footage of them, but decided on the more mature and sophisticated Tippi Hedren who he spotted in a TV commercial. Yvette was also contemplated for the role of the kidnapped sculptress in The Collector (1965) as was Tuesday Weld who campaigned vigorously for it. Samantha Eggar won the part and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. And MGM pushed for Mimieux to play Lara in Doctor Zhivago (1965) but director David Lean chose Julie Christie after, you guessed it, Jane Fonda turned it down.

In the “what was she thinking!?!” category, Tuesday Weld wins the crown as she passed on three major movies in 1969 with none of her contemporaries getting the roles. Instead they were cast with relative newcomers. Kim Darby snagged the tomboy role in True Grit, Laugh-In cast member Goldie Hawn went on to win the Oscar for playing the kooky New York hippie mistress of dentist Walter Matthau in Cactus Flower, and Dyan Cannon went on to receive an Oscar nomination for playing staid housewife Alice in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Roman Polanski came a-callin’ again on Weld to play Lady MacBeth in MacBeth (1971) but she balked about doing a nude scene and lost the role. Explaining why she didn’t want to play these roles, Weld once remarked, “Do you think I want success?  I refused Bonnie and Clyde because I was nursing at the time but also because deep down I knew that it was going to be a huge success. The same was true of Bob and Carol and Fred and Sue or whatever it was called. It reeked of success.”

Carol Lynley on the other hand said, “If Bonnie and Clyde or Rosemary’s Baby were offered to me I would have done them in a minute.” However when one role did come her way in an acclaimed movie, she proved that Tuesday Weld wasn’t the only one to make head scratching bad choices. Lynley was offered the role of Jack Nicholson’s sophisticated sister-in-law in Five Easy Pieces (1970) but she wanted the waitress role already cast with Karen Black. Since the producers were only paying scale, she passed on it then turned around and made Beware! The Blob as a favor to her Malibu neighbor Larry Hagman making his directorial debut. Huh?!?

Though they were still competing for some of the same roles in the late sixties, Yvette Mimieux, Carol Lynley, Sue Lyon and Tuesday Weld each matured professionally and distinguished themselves with various degrees of success as some very promising movies that they did appear in were either critical or box office failures. Suffice it to say, none of them became super stars and eventually all would turn to TV before fading from the movie public’s minds though to this day they all have a cult following especially Tuesday Weld.

Yvette Mimieux settled on playing “the girl” in a series of adventure films such as The Caper of the Golden Bulls (1967) as a blonde airhead unaware that her current beau Stephen Boyd is a retired thief now being blackmailed by a former flame to help rob the Spanish National Bank of Pamplona  during the running of the bulls; the exciting Dark of the Sun (1968) excellent as a frazzled relief worker in Africa who joins with mercenaries Rod Taylor and Jim Brown to save some kidnapped citizens plus retrieve a huge cache of diamonds from rebels during the Congo uprising: and the low-budget spy flick The Delta Factor (1969) as a CIA agent who recruits imprisoned thief Christopher George to masquerade as a drug dealer to help rescue a kidnapped scientist being held captive on a remote island. In between was the unmemorable Disney comedy Monkeys, Go Home! (1967) with Mimieux as a French villager who helps American Dean Jones revitalize an inherited olive farm along with the help of four chimps and the hit exploitation film Three in the Attic (1968) where she played a vengeful coed, who along with two other college girls, ties up lothario Christopher Jones in their dormitory’s attic to drain him of his sexual potency.

The Picasso Summer (1969) was an ambitious failure combining animation and a docu-drama feel to it as Mimieux and Albert Finney play a married couple on a quest to meet the famed artist. Never released theatrically in the U.S., the movie though beautifully photographed with an acclaimed musical score by Michel Legrand was deemed too off-beat for American audiences. With her once promising movie career floundering and the roles being offered containing nude scenes in which she refused to do, Mimiuex turned to television when she was asked to replace Inger Stevens who committed suicide as a sophisticated criminologist in the TV show The Most Deadly Game in 1970. This Aaron Spelling-produced murder mystery series co-starring Ralph Bellamy and George Maharis never caught on with the viewing audience and was cancelled after only twelve episodes. Despite the short run, Mimieux played her part well and received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role – Drama Series.

Back on the big screen, Mimieux played a heroic stewardess and girlfriend of pilot Charlton Heston in the popular Airport rip-off Skyjacked (1972) and then sank to the bottom of the ocean with the rest of the cast in The Neptune Factor (1973). Fed up with the roles that were being offered to her, Mimieux authored the teleplay and played the title role in the TV-movie Hit Lady (1974). She then starred in her most infamous film Jackson County Jail (1976), a huge hit with the drive-in crowd, as a rape victim who turns the tables on her assailants. Who knew this delicate flower could act so tough on the big screen? Her newfound notoriety and good reviews were helpful in her snaring the female lead in the big-budgeted Walt Disney science-fiction film The Black Hole (1979). Though the movie featured Oscar nominated special effects it was not well received by either critics or fans. The film’s spaceship was not the only thing that disappeared into the black hole, Mimieux’s big screen movie career unjustly went with it (though thankfully so did her unflattering curly hairdo that she sported) as the eighties found her relegated to television before she called it quits.

Following her success in Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), Carol Lynley eventually settled into the damsel in distress roles. She at first abandoned Hollywood for London remaining there for two years at an important time in her career when she should have been capitalizing on her successful transition to more mature parts. She made more news for her on-and-off love affair with David Frost (that lasted eighteen years) than for any notable work. All she had to show for her time in Britain was the thriller The Shuttered Room (1967) based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft where she looked stunningly gorgeous and was convincingly scared throughout as a newlywed who inherits an old mill complete with a hideous thing in the attic and a lecherous cousin (Oliver Reed), and the spy adventure Danger Route (1968) as the double-crossing girlfriend of agent Richard Johnson.

Returning to Hollywood, Lynley worked in film and television with an equal amount of felicity. She made numerous TV guest appearances more so than any of the other actresses and she was the first to begin starring in made-for-TV films beginning with 1968’s The Smugglers as tourist Shirley Booth’s beautiful stepdaughter who become dupes of an international smuggling ring. Soon after she cut her hair ala Mia Farrow and was now sporting a very short attractive ‘do. After rolling her eyes as a psychopathic heiress in Once You Kiss a Stranger (1969), a camp remake of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a  Train with a sport/sex switch; Lynley became part of ensemble films such as the Dan Rowan and Dick Martin haunted house spoof The Maltese Bippy (1969) as a college coed who carries a human skull around with her and the road comedy Norwood (1970) giving a standout performance as a foul-mouthed hooker driving cross country with naïve Vietnam vet Glen Campbell. Unfortunately, goody-two-shoes Glen Campbell felt his fans wouldn’t cotton to him making love to a prostitute and convinced the producers to excise those scenes leaving Carol only ten minutes of screen time. Even so she still steals the movie.

1972 however was a banner year for Carol Lynley (now with a hippie look of long hair and minimal makeup) who began it as reporter Darren McGavin’s woeful girlfriend who is the first to suspect a vampire is terrorizing Las Vegas in The Night Stalker the highest rated TV-movie up to that point and ended it as part of an all-star cast in the box office smash The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the granddaddy of disaster movies, giving an effective performance as the terrified hot pants wearing pop singer Nonnie who goes into a state of shock when the ocean liner capsizes.

Despite her success, the remainder of the decade found Lynley unjustly mired in low-budget exploitation films and TV-movies. Though she played some varied roles—gangster Jack Palance’s gun moll in The Four Deuces (1975): a NYC socialite who inherits a rundown Southern mansion complete with moonshine operation run by country hothead Gary Lockwood in Bad Georgia Road (1977); and the governor of the moon in the Star Wars rip-off, The Shape of Things to Come (1979), they were DOA at the box office. The entertaining remake of The Cat and the Canary (1978) should have garnered Lynley kudos for her charming performance as Annabelle West who must survive the gloomy night in a creepy mansion with jealous relatives and a mad man on the loose to collect her inheritance but a legal dispute between the producer and the American distributor kept the movie from being released theatrically in the States until it crept into a handful of theaters in 1982.

Carol, still in the game, was the first choice to play the guest role of Valene on Dallas but had to turn it down due to a prior commitment. As a consolation of sorts, in 1982 she starred opposite Tony Curtis in the cable prime time soap pilot Balboa but it was not picked up as a series. The rest of her career consisted of continuing guest starring on Fantasy Island (she holds the record for most appearances) and low budget direct-to-video movies though William Lustig’s violent Vigilante (1983) where she played an ineffectual DA prosecuting a gang member who killed Robert Forster’s son broke through and was a box office hit. Carol made the occasional low-budget movie and proved she could be a good actress if given decent material. Catch her as Gail O’Grady’s shotgun-wielding mother-from-hell in Blackout (1988) penned by Joseph Stefano who wrote Psycho and as an armed robber paired with Barbara McNair ala Thelma and Louise in the desert road movie Neon Signs (1996) starring William Smith.

Trying to shake her Lolita persona, Sue Lyon traded in her bathing suits for a much more conservative wardrobe as a novice missionary in China held captive by a Mongolian war lord in Seven Women (1966), director John Ford’s last movie, and as a lovely small town gal who charms AWOL soldier boy Michael Sarrazin to give up his con man ways in the comedy The Flim-Flam Man (1967). She next played a drunken heiress in the detective yarn, Tony Rome (1967) starring Frank Sinatra as the gumshoe hired to find out who stole careless Lyon’s diamond pin. Even waking up in a seedy motel from a stupor, Lyon looked gorgeous. It was her last major studio production (talks of her co-starring in then controversial Lesbian drama The Killing of Sister George never came to be and Susannah York got the part) as her career crashed and burned due to her tumultuous personal life.

Lyon relocated to Spain after marrying African American football player and photographer Roland Harrison where they conceived a daughter. While in Europe, Lyon surprisingly turned up in a low-budget spaghetti western entitled Four Rode Out (1971) playing a desperate woman who is willing to have sex with lawman Pernell Roberts of Bonanza fame in exchange for sparing the life of her Mexican lover framed for the murder of her father. Along with Leslie Nielsen as a duplicitous Pinkerton agent, they trek through the barren desert searching for the fugitive. With her marriage to Harrison over by 1971, Lyon returned to Hollywood and gave a sympathetic performance as the supportive wife of George Hamilton’s daredevil motorcycle rider in Evel Knievel (1971) before becoming a pariah to the studios because of the notoriety she received when she married then divorced convicted murderer Cotton Adamson.

Returning to Europe, she starred in the Italian giallo Tarot (1973) as an adulterous gold digger who marries rich blind man Fernando Rey for his big bucks and gets drawn into a plot hatched by his servants to murder him and Spain’s Clockwork Terror a.k.a. Murder in a Blue World (1973) where she has one of her most outrageous roles as a caring nurse working at a hospital who at night seduces lonely men and kills them after having sex. She eventually gets involved with Chris Mitchum as the leader of a gang of red helmet wearing biker thugs.

Back in Hollywood, Lyon still looking fantastic and far more youthful than her thirty years was part of the “all-star” cast playing motorists involved in the Smash-Up on Interstate Five (TV-1976) and could be seen on the big screen in such stinkers as Crash! (1977) as the much younger wife of wheelchair bound Jose Ferrer (crippled in a car accident he holds Lyon responsible for) who with the help of a magical idol try to off one another; End of the World (1977) as the wife of scientist Kirk Scott who uncovers the plot of alien leader Christopher Lee masquerading as a priest to destroy the Earth; and Towing (1978) as a bar maid who tries to break up an illegal towing company’s stolen car operation. Lyon hit rock bottom with The Astral Factor, which was deemed so bad it sat on the shelf until 1984 and was released as Invisible Strangler. Playing a fashion model, Sue meets her end in a bubble bath strangled by the rapist she testified against in court. Watching Lyon thrashing about the tub pretending to be strangled by an invisible man is painful especially knowing a decade before she was working with such giants of cinema as Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, and John Ford. Sue Lyon finally threw in the towel after playing a small part of a news reporter in the tongue-in-cheek horror movie Alligator (1980) from a script by John Sayles. It was her last acting job. Just before Lyon stopped giving interviews and faded away, she made sure everyone knew how show business destroyed her life.

Though she had the pick of more mature roles, Tuesday Weld continued choosing to portray teenagers despite the fact that she was in her mid-twenties. Both director George Axelrod’s comedy Lord Love a Duck (1966) and the thriller Pretty Poison (19968) were box office disappointments but Weld’s acclaimed performances solidified them as cult classics to this day. In Lord Love a Duck, a biting satire on teenage pop culture, Weld was terrific as self-absorbed high school senior Barbara Ann Greene adored by obsessed classmate Roddy McDowall, who tries to make her every whim come true. He gets her into an exclusive sorority where she needs to own a dozen cashmere sweaters by suggesting she take her lascivious father shopping with her; introduces her to a producer who casts her in his newest beach party movie; and when she falls for pretty rich boy Martin West, McDowall insinuates himself with his disapproving mother Ruth Gordon to make her change her mind about the grasping Barbara Ann. A favorite among Weld enthusiasts, the sweater orgy segment and the scene where she fondles her breasts trying to entice Principal Harvey Korman to hire her as his assistant are classic.

In Pretty Poison, Weld’s wholesome teenage Sue Ann Stepanek was much more a menace to society than selfish Barbara Ann. Weld’s cheerleader meets at a local diner just released arsonist Tony Perkins who beguiles her with his fantasies about being a CIA agent. She plays along since she is more disturbed than he is. When he is fired from his Chemical plant job, she joins him in an elaborate plot to sabotage it by releasing pollutants into the nearby river. When caught by the night watchman, Weld not only clubs him on the back of the neck with a wrench but writhes in pleasure as she drowns him. Later when her disapproving mother whom she hates tries to stop the duo from eloping, Weld grabs the gun from Perkins when he refuses to shoot her and does the dirty deed herself. Guilt ridden, Perkins decides to turn himself into the police only to find a sobbing Weld already there accusing him of the murder. Tuesday gave such a chilling performance as the All-American girl turned psycho that she came close to nabbing the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actress placing behind winner Joanne Woodward in Rachel, Rachel but ahead of eventual Academy Award winners Katherine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl.

As she stated emphatically, Weld didn’t want to appear in successful movies at the box office and held true to her word as the public yawned and passed her movies by. 1970 saw Tuesday once again playing the underage nymphet this time a moon shiner’s daughter who seduces married Sheriff Gregory Peck into an elicit affair in I Walk the Line. Next came the experimental drama A Safe Place (1971), directed by Henry Jaglom, where she played a starry-eyed flower child who retreats into childhood fantasies where magician Orson Welles would entertain her in Central Park to escape reality where she is being pursued by two men one being Jack Nicholson. Better received but still a box office dud was Play It As It Lays (1972) from director Frank Perry. Weld received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress – Drama for her mesmerizing performance as a former model and B-movie actress (shades of herself?) who has a nervous breakdown. Flashbacks reveal a combative marriage to controlling director Adam Roarke and her friendship with a motley crew of self-absorbed Hollywood-types. Her only true friend is unhappy homosexual movie producer Tony Perkins who tries to entice her to commit suicide with him.

The remainder of the decade found Weld turning to made-for television movies and ensemble movies including Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) where as teacher Diane Keaton’s unhappily married sister she garnered what none of her former Baby Doll counterparts ever could—an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. This boosted her career, In the eighties Weld copped leads opposite major stars in big movies—Thief (1981) with James Caan; Author! Author! (1982) with Al Pacino; and Once Upon a Time in America (1984) with Robert De Niro but keeping with the Tuesday Weld tradition none of them were box office hits.

By the end of the decade into the nineties, Weld made sporadic movie appearances (Heartbreak Hotel, 1988; Falling Down, 1993, Feeling Minnesota, 1996) keeping her die-hard fans wanting more.

Despite never reaching super stardom that Hollywood insiders predicted for them early in their careers, the Baby Doll blondes had a long run. They all worked past the age of thirty, the death knell for most sixties starlets, and even into their forties and fifties. What is surprising is none of them were able to progress (or wanted to ) into the grandmother-type roles they should be playing now. Probably fed up with Hollywood and having to audition for roles with twenty-something casting directors who never heard of them, all have retired from acting (though Connie Stevens pops up here and there) and hopefully are enjoying their golden years.

To read more about some of these Baby Doll blondes see links to below books and link to my upcoming tribute book to gorgeous sixties cult icon Pamela Tiffin.

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