Connie Stevens: A Cricket in the House

She reaches behind her to tap on a wall, which sounds as solid as concrete, saying, "There's two feet of space in there. You know that this house is going to stand up. To me, it's all very symbolic. I have a lot of fun digging out there in that garden and I take care of those roses. I keep the bottom half of the land very rural, rough, to remind me." To remind her, she says, of her roots as "a chubby street kid," who was born Concetta Ingolia, of Italian-Irish-Mohican Indian descent, the product of the marriage of a rakish Sicilian bass player ("the handsomest, most romantic man I've ever known") and a band singer. "My whole family's buried in Brooklyn," she says. "I probably will be, too." George Burns, with whom Stevens starred in 1965 on the short-lived TV show, "Wendy and Me," once said that Stevens had one foot over the picket fence. She corrected him: "No, George, a chain-link fence." Stevens says, "My grandfather used to say 'Own a piece of land and don't ever sell it. In your old age, you can grow your own food, feed your family. You won't have to depend on anybody.' Through the bad times, I could have lost this place or made a foolish decision. But that's part of the game. I take it as a challenge. I don't let [things] get me so far down that I don't rise, decide to give bad times a kick in the ass, and say, 'Get out of my way.' This house represents that to me. Every dime I put into it is my own."

Beneath Stevens's penchant for pinks and lavenders, one often detects a bracing slash of Scarlett. Since buying the house she has often ridden career bumps by renting it out and moving into more manageable quarters. Whenever she's in residence, she and this home are renowned for glitzy, all-night blowouts--at "the one that really kicked this house into gear," George Burns, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, and the Ritz Brothers swapped jokes; at another, Beverly Hills doyennes hiked up their designer gowns for a 3 a.m. tennis match. But having once been called by a columnist an "apple blossom with the wham of a bulldozer," Stevens also has a reputation for scrappy levelheadedness. By 15, she had moved to Los Angeles, where she got early lessons in show biz survival at Hollywood Professional School and with a singing group, The Fourmost. "I had a boyfriend who was a junkie who took me to church on Sundays," she recalls. "But I was still a virgin when I was 21. That says it in a nutshell."

A long-term Warner Bros, contract rescued her from doing Grade-Z movies like Eighteen and Anxious and The Party Crashers, the latter a career-ender for both Frances Farmer and Bobby Driscoll. But she describes her stint on "Hawaiian Eye," which made her a household name across America, as "four years of oblivion," and regards her studio's build-up with ambivalence. She felt her looks compared unfavorably to such other movies-and-TV series contractees as Diane McBain and Dorothy Provine ("in makeup, I'd put a big picture of Audrey Hepburn in front of my face so I wouldn't have to look in the mirror"), but takes pride in having been placed on suspension by the studio "more times than I can remember." Once, when she was refused a $50-a-week raise to match her TV co-star Robert Conrad's, she sold Avon cosmetics outside the studio commissary. Stevens got her raise.

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