TONGUE-STABBING SOLO

Continuing on about Robert Vaughn, I give actress Marlyn Mason the last word as she described working with him in “The Deadly Quest Affair” on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in my book Film Fatales:

“We had to do a kissing scene. In those days when people kissed on television and in movies it was all very tame stuff. There was no slurping and nobody was eating anybody’s face like you see nowadays. So we do this scene and Vaughn just jams his tongue down my throat. Of course the actress in me just kept on acting but I was not responsive. I was trying to keep my mouth shut. I was so stunned and I decided that I was just not going to say anything. We did this in one take but I thought, ‘There is no way that they are going to see this in the dailies and pass it. We’re going to have to do this again.’ Sure enough, the next day the director came and told us we had to do the scene over again. I was watching out of the corner of my eye as the director took Robert Vaughn aside and told him, ‘You can’t kiss her like that.’ We did it a second time and he made a half-ass attempt to do it again. But my mouth was tightly shut.”

That Man from U.N.C.L.E.

With the recent release of the entire four seasons of The Man from UNCLE on DVD in one gigantic box set, Robert Vaughn has been making the interview rounds. In the couple of articles I have read, he gushes over his co-stars David McCallum and Leo G. Carroll and some of the big name stars who made guest appaerances. Click here to read one such interview. However, he never mentions any of the nubile starlets he worked with. Funny, because the ones I interviewed had lots of varied things to say about him:

“He was a good actor but wasn’t nice to me. He was very cold and distant.” Chris Noel, Fantasy Femmes

“He was friendly enough but kept to himself…and wasn’t much fun.” Sharyn Hillyer, Film Fatales

“I respected him very much as an actor but he was rather pompous and full of himself.” Kathy Kersh, Film Fatales

“He had…a very tongue-in-cheek polish and too, too suave.” Sue Ane Langdon, Film Fatales

“He is not unpleasant to work with, just aloof.” Barbara Luna, Film Fatales

STARLET SPOTTING

Tonight I was hanging out at The Player’s Club, a writers’ private club in NYC, with my friends Lee Pfieffer, the publisher of Cinema Retro magazine, and fellow writer David Savage. As David and I (and my beau Ern) were leaving whom do we pass on the staircase but Tina Louise! David stopped and said hello to her (while I gawked) and told Tina, looking glam in her cocktail dress, that they had a met once before at a party a few years ago. Tina seemed very sincere when she apologized for not recalling. The poor girl gets a bad rap for being difficult but tonight she was charming!