Angie
Dickinson
article
by Dan Scapperotti
Femme
Fatales magazine April 1998
Gallery of Stars
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Angie Dickinson
Halloween, 1953: TV was eroding boxoffice
business and the film industry was feeling the heat: the ole’ studio system was
on its last legs. But America didn’t care: glued to television sets, the public
was mesmerized by a beauty pageant on NBC’s COLGATE COMEDY HOUR, the Sunday
night variety show alternately hosted by the likes of Abbott & Costello and
Martin & Lewis. Among the six finalists was Angie Dickinson, a starlet who
had earlier entered the competition on her way home from work. Her eyes locked
on the judges. One was gentle comedian Jimmy Durante; the other, leering from
behind a cloud of cigar smoke, was Groucho Marx.
Halloween, 1997: Sitting in her kitchen,
Dickinson drinks a cup of coffee. A little bird house sits on top of the
refrigerator which rests against the Pippin apple green walls. A 12"
statue of pink, green and white kitten blends into her draperies. The coy room
is wired with two telephones, one with a long cord. African violets peek from
their baskets, while other plants are scattered adjacent to that former scourge
of Hollywood, a TV set — 14" screen.
“I love popcorn,” said Dickinson, setting
her cup on the table and pointing to a good supply of the snack food nearby.
She nostalgically recollects her catechism
training: whenever the nuns queried Dickinson about her goals, she’d reply, “I
want to be a movie star.” That aspiration never again crossed her mind until
college. She wanted a career, not domesticity.
One shortcut to a Hollywood venue was a
beauty contest...
( λεζάντα της φωτο:
Dickinson (standing, top left) as one of six finalists
in the 1963 T-Venus beauty pageant)
And she was among the competition’s winners,
who were christened “The T-Venuses” by a public relations stooge.
λεζάντα της φωτο:
The triumph rekindled her “movie star”
stratagem. “I was bitten by the bug once I walked onto a stage,” smiles
Dickinson as she reflects on the ’53 tournament. “The casting director called
and asked if I wanted to be on the show. Of course, I told him I had no acting
experience but he just laughed and asked, ‘Can
you walk?’ Obviously, I wasn’t being called to act anyway. I walked into
that rehearsal hall and that was my first day in show business.”
The guest star was Frank Sinatra, who just
garnered an Oscar nomination for his performance in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. “I
was introduced to the best part of show business,” recounts Dickinson. She’d be
reacquainted with the crooner, next time as an equal, less than seven years
later.
Another beauty contest landed Dickinson on
the Warner Brothers studio lot. She debuted in a Doris Day musical, LUCKY ME.
Her single line: “Happy Birthday, Uncle Otis.”
Subsequent assignments included a Randolph
Scott oater, SHOOT-OUT AT MEDICINE BEND, and CHINA GATE, where Dickinson played
the Eurasian wife of mercenary Gene Barry in a French controlled Vietnam.
“ China Gate ” (1957)
“By then, the
contract system had stopped,” the actress explained. “They didn’t teach you tap
dancing and fencing anymore, nor would they send you off to premieres with Rock
Hudson.”
While maintaining her day job as secretary
for a company that manufactured airplane seats, Dickinson continued to bounce
between small roles.
“ Rio Bravo ” (1959)
Finally, director Howard Hawks screen-tested
the fledgling actress for an intimate but star-studded horse opera, RIO BRAVO.
John Wayne was cast as Sheriff John T. Chance, but Frank Gifford — last year’s
tabloid “bad boy” — stood-in in for Wayne (aka The Duke) during tryouts. “That
film was my big break,” relates Dickinson. “Back then, Frank was retired because of an injury and he
was under contract at Warner Bros. When they test new people, they don’t use
the real star. Somebody stands in for them and Frank stood in for Duke.
“I was blown away. Within four years of
starting my career, I was cast opposite John Wayne, Dean Martin and Ricky
Nelson in that kind of big movie. It was just wonderful.”
Not unlike Marlene Dietrich’s “Frenchy” (1939’s
DESTRY RIDES AGAIN), Dickinson’s role of frontier card player “Feathers” was
among the genre’s rare opportunities to deflect stereotype. “It’s not just the
wife being left back tending to the cows,” laughs Dickinson. “It’s a real back-at-you woman who doesn’t take guff
from the big sheriff. I did a lot of westerns, and they weren’t like that.”
Angie Dickinson and John Wayne in “Rio Bravo”
John Wayne, who passed time in Tucson’s
blistering heat by playing chess with co-star Dean Martin, impressed Dickinson
because “he was himself. You know that the Duke was very out-spoken. There were
no airs about him. No falseness. What you saw was what you got. When he was
having a tough time making a scene work, it was as tough for him as it was for
me. He wasn’t able to hide his insecurities, either. We both struggled through
those scenes, and they were very difficult scenes. He was very kind to someone
who was as green as I was. At one point, he could have said, ‘Goddammit! Why
can’t you get it together and learn how to act?’ He never was unkind like that.
He was very patient with me. I was pretty nervous. And there were heavyweights
all around me.
She recalls that director Hawks “was very
patient with me. He was a slow shooter. He just took his time and he waited for
you to get it right or to get it good.” Hawks, in fact, had signed Dickinson to
a personal contract. When the film wrapped, and Hawks requested a six month
extension of her contract, Dickinson speculated he’d be her professional
anchor. She was in for a rude awakening.
Upon her return from Tucson, the actress was
beckoned by Warner Bros. The studio quickly assigned the young actress to the
usual round of potboilers and television shows, none of which advanced her
career. “The movies are good now mainly because everyone in them is either a
legend... or dead,” says Dickinson between sips of her second cup of coffee.
“ The Sins of Rachel Cade ” (1961)
“For instance, THE SINS OF RACHEL CADE [1961]
was a movie they put me in, but it was with Roger Moore and Peter Finch. Rafer
Johnson has a role too. It was nothing when we made it, but 30 years later —
because Peter Finch went on to be so great and Roger Moore and I got some fame
— it now kind of holds up!”
“ A Fever in the Blood ” (1961)
I did another one movie called A FEVER IN
THE BLOOD with Efrem Zimbalist. I was the wife of a senator who was played by
Don Ameche.
“ Rome Adventure ” (1962)
Other actresses were heirs to Dickinson’s
preferred roles: “I did ROME ADVENTURE [1962], which is kind of a cult classic
with Suzanne Pleshette, Troy Donahue and Rossano Brazzi. I was the villain, the
mature woman who gave Suzanne all the trouble. I was the bitch. I hated doing
that movie.
“ The Killers ” (1964)
By the early 1960s, a truce softened the
high-tech war waged between TV and movies. Studio executives embraced the new
medium as a viable market for their product. Universal’s Lew Wasserman decided
that feature films could be made and sold directly to the networks, bypassing
theatrical distribution.
NBC, quick to jump on the bandwagon,
produced three features aimed at the small screen. But one movie in the
trilogy, “THE KILLERS”, was rejected by the NBC’s standards and practices
committee. It seems the network’s brass gauged the 1964 release — a remake of a
1946 movie, based upon an Ernest Hemingway story — as too violent and risque
for prime time.
John Cassavetes plays a teacher who double
crosses a criminal kingpin (Ronald Reagan). Dickinson, cast as a femme fatale
who’s the catalyst for Cassavetes’ decline, describes director Don Siegel as “a
very quiet. He was a mischievous, adorable person. He always had a little smile
on his face, as if he were just about to tell you a joke. He was very playful.
He was ping pong champion of the world or the United States. I never knew that
until his memorial service, where they showed him playing ping pong. He had a
pixie quality about him. Cassavetes was one of his best friends, so they had a
wonderful time just being together.”
“THE KILLERS was shot as a movie for
television,” but it was theatrically distributed. So, once again, I was in a
groundbreaker which I love. Cassavetes and I were rolling around in the sheets
and it’s very violent. Lee Marvin held me out a window by my ankles and slapped
me around. We were lying together on a couch, or something, and kissing which
you couldn’t do in those days. There was no nudity that I can recall.”
But production was debilitated “because we
were supposed to start shooting the day President Kennedy was killed. It was a
tough time. We were behind a day and we had to shoot that movie under a heavy
vale of sorrow for all of us. It wasn’t a knee slapper.”
Reagan resigned himself to do THE KILLERS
only because had owed the studio a film to finish out his contract. It was the
final credit in his prolific film career. “He was stuck and he didn’t like it,”
says Dickinson. “He was pleasant. He has always been a pleasant man. But we
were on opposite ends of the political spectrum, so I just stayed out of his
way. He was always studying his papers. I had no idea he was going to go on and
become governor. He was studying and always reading the papers, and he was very
political and outspoken. But I would always get out of the way. When he said he
was going into politics, I was too stupid to think he really meant it.
Ronald Reagan and Angie Dickinson in “The Killers”
“The film also has the only scene where Reagan ever had to slap a woman. He says to me, ‘Get on home’ and I say, ‘I’m not going home. I’m staying’ and then he whacks me one and says, ‘I said get on home.’ It’s all an act because I’m there pretending to be in love with Cassavetes, but we’re setting him up. As a production, it looks kind of cheap which it was because it was shot for TV: but if you forget that, it’s quite a good film.”
“ Pretty Maids All in a Row ” (1971)
Our conversation flashes forward to 1971
when the sexual revolution was in full swing. Producer Gene Roddenberry
imported Roger Vadim, the French softcore sovereign (BARBARELLA, BLOOD &
ROSES, NIGHT GAMES), to direct “PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW”. Rock Hudson starred
as a football coach whose pastimes include seducing the student body. After one
comely coed threatens to go public with Hudson’s amorous adventures, he bumps
her off. Pretty soon, other equally curvaceous but cold bodies turn-up on
campus. Dickinson played a voluptuous teacher named Miss Smith, who’s the
Jessica Rabbit of higher education. “Rock and I got to be good friends,
actually,” says the actress. “He was so lovely, and then we were both cops on
television. He would visit the set and drop in once in a while and we’d see
each other socially occasionally over at Dinah Shore’s. He was just wonderful.
“Vadim was called Vadim, not Roger, because
I think that really was his first name. He was Russian-French, so if I say
‘Vadim’ it’s because that’s what Jane [Fonda] called him. He was a very
luscious, very sensuous, very sexy Frenchman — or Russian — but very French in
culture. He was a little bit out of his element directing an American comedy,
that’s why I think it doesn’t quite work. Vadim was more outwardly fun and
didn’t take it as seriously as say Lewis Milestone. Being French, it was hard for
him to explain what he wanted. He would take me by the shoulders and put me in
place and say, You stand there.’ He said, ‘I wish I could direct by calling out
do number 23.’ He wasn’t that great with the English subtleties. He was much
more casual.”
The actress becomes pensive for a moment,
trying to recall the actor who played heartthrob Ponce de Leon Harper. “Who was
the young man I slept with?” she asked. “Oh, John David Carson! I was Miss
Smith, the young sexy teacher, and Rock Hudson wanted me to break John David
Carson into sex because he couldn’t stop having erections in class. Rock played
head of the athletics department and, I think, he wanted John to play football
and stop having hard-ons in class. So he thought if Miss Smith got to him, and
broke him in, he’d be fine.
“ Big Bad
Mama ” (1974)
Hired by B-movie maverick Roger Corman to
play BIG BAD MAMA (1974), the actress afforded audiences plenty of southern —
and northern — exposure. The film made a fortune.
Sipping her coffee, Dickinson notes, “BIG
BAD MAMA had lots of violence, just shooting right and left. And a lot of
nudity: sharing a bed with my daughters, sharing a bed with my lover! The
morals were totally upside down. So I come from being slapped by the future
president, with him saying, ‘I told you to get on home,’ to sharing my lover
with my two young girls.
( φωτο από το IMDb
)
Angie Dickinson in “Big Bad Mama” (1974)
“ Captain Newman, M.D. ” (1963)
I unfold an old clipping that insisted
Dickinson’s legs had been insured for a million dollars. True? ‘They were
indeed, and in those days a million dollars meant something. After I got out of
Warner Bros., I was offered the role in “CAPTAIN NEWMAN M.D.” (1963) with
Gregory Peck and Tony Curtis. Universal said I wouldn’t get the role unless I
signed a seven year contract. It was at a time in my career where I felt I had
to make a change, and I was thinking of moving to Paris because they liked my
work over there. The French loved THE KILLERS and RIO BRAVO. I thought I would
go there and make my mark, but CAPTAIN NEWMAN came along so I had to sign the
contract; however, I didn’t like what Universal did.
The studio had to promote you, so they put
me in CAPTAIN NEWMAN and then THE ART OF LOVE with James Gardner and Dick Van
Dyke. In CAPTAIN NEWMAN, they wanted to promote the film and myself so they
insured my legs and did a lot of photography with them. I was in Life magazine standing over a bag of
money with black stocking on my legs. That’s a great shot, but it was about the
studio not about me. I asked them, ‘Are you sure this is for real?’ because I
always hated those publicity gimmicks that, as a kid, I had read about and been
fooled. They said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s for real. Just don’t ask us for how long.’
And I didn’t. I have a feeling it was for about a week.”
Angie Dickinson
Αποσπάσματα από αφιερωματικό άρθρο στην Angie Dickinson στο περιοδικό Femme Fatales (pp. 92-105), April 1998.
Article by Dan Scapperotti.
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Angie Dickinson
Femme Fatales magazine April 1998
article by Dan Scapperotti
Gallery of Stars
Καλλονές
Θεάματα
Κινηματογραφικά ]
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