Connie Stevens: A Cricket in the House

Steeliness creeps into her breathy voice when she ruminates on career opportunities she felt Warners denied her. "Delmer Daves was the best director I ever had," she says, referring to the creator of such campy hoots as Susan Slade and Parrish, adding: "I polished an awful lot of turds." She lobbied for loan-outs to such directors as Billy Wilder, who considered her for One, Two, Three as James Cagney's co-star before he instead cast Pamela Tiffin. After slogging through forty-eight out of fifty-two weeks' shooting on "Hawaiian Eye," Stevens walked, going to Australia to fight Warners in court. "I was only making $300 a week, but they sued me for $3.5 million," she recalls. Still refusing to return to the series grind, Stevens received a personal summons to appear in the lair of mighty studio president Jack Warner. She recalls, "He told me how Bette Davis, Dennis Morgan and others had all tried to beat the system. But by the end of the conversation, I knew I was right."

Stevens kept her convictions while Warners froze her out. "For almost four years," she says, her jaw set, "they wouldn't let me do anything but 'Hawaiian Eye.' No films, no other TV shows, nothing. So I went to bat and finally got a couple of roles." Of sorts, Stevens might have added, considering that she was confined to Two on a Guillotine (playing an heiress who, between bouts of screaming, pauses to warble "What Is This Thing Called Love?") and Never Too Late (as the dull daughter who's dying to get pregnant).

Finally, Stevens staged her last, grandest stand at Warners by bursting into the offices of writer-producer Ernest Lehman, who had refused to consider her for the role of Honey, the hysterical, babbling young professor's wife in Mike Nichols's movie version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?--yes, the same Mike Nichols who just shot his latest movie in Stevens's home. "I've never forgiven [Lehman)," Stevens says, eyes blazing, "for not even letting me read as a courtesy." Despite a petition signed by 1,300 colleagues urging Lehman to test her, Stevens lost the role to Sandy Dennis (who won an Oscar for it). "I was the hottest thing on the lot and it probably would have changed my whole career," she says. To add insult to injury, Stevens then had to pay a whopping $60,000 to buy out her Warners contract so that she could go to Fox to play an astronaut opposite Jerry Lewis in Way. . . Way Out.

Today she says, "I've dropped the bitterness long ago." Besides appearing in such movies as Back to the Beach and Tapeheads, Stevens pops up occasionally on such TV shows as "Murder, She Wrote." More happily, she spends weeks on tour with her concert act. "If I had stayed in this beautiful house and not played places like Flint, Michigan, when it was roaring, then, later, when Flint was boarded up and families were homeless, I wouldn't have the same empathy or generosity of nature. You can't live in a place like this and not get isolated. My daughters and I have dined with kings and queens but we've also seen poverty that would make your head spin."

Indeed, Stevens, whose great-great-grandmother was Mohican, has for years dedicated herself to helping eradicate the head-spinning poverty, teen suicides, disease, and social disintegration of Native Americans. As chief fund-raiser and founder of Project Windfeather, Stevens radiates passion as she describes "the true homeless ones who have no voice, no advocates," and joy over an arrangement to distribute surplus goods from the Home Shopping Network to reservations.

Having struck a $20 million deal for her cosmetics line, Stevens plans to activate several longtime "big dreams" by building at her home a recording and rehearsal studio. "Bill Cosby told me my biggest mistake was giving up making records," says Stevens, who had a hit concert tour in Japan last year. Also on the drawing board is a two-story, modernistic pied-a-terre for visiting friends and relatives. In another irony, although Stevens looks befittingly youthful for a cosmetics entrepreneur, she now hungers for non-glamorous roles. "Aging well can sometimes be an obstacle," she observes. "God allowed to me to show my age a little slower than everybody else. But I think I'll probably start to age pretty good along about now."

Among several properties Stevens has in development is a script she wrote for Anne Bancroft and also a "Hawaiian Eye" reunion project. "I've had times when I was confused or ill that put me down for a while, but I've paid my dues and it's time for me," she says, beaming. "I realized at the recent Warner Bros, anniversary party that even though a lot of us [in TV] built those soundstages, it's movies that withstand time. And I want a crack at that. I'm not afraid anymore to do any role."

While Stevens hopes to tackle "gutsy, meaningful stuff," she admits that, in the tradition of such Warners survivors as Troy Donahue and Joey Heatherton, she would "love to do something for John Waters. As a human being I want to look as good as I can, but I'm an actress. I don't want to play Endless Summer forever." While a match between a former teen idol once directed by the maker of They Saved Hitler's Brain and the bad boy auteur of Hairspray and Cry-Baby is a natural, in the meantime, says Stevens, "My house has been my saving grace, especially when I wanted to follow some dreams, like giving up movies and doing Broadway." These days, a dreamgirl of the '60s is ready to dream big all over again.

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Charles Oakley, the writer-explorer who profiled Ernest Lehman for Movieline in June, is currently organizing the Conn-White Memorial Ascent of Mt. McKinley.

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Comments

  • Connie H says:

    Connie Stevens played in 77 Sunset Strip in the late 1950's NOT Hawaii five-o the latter didn't show up until the late 1960's. Just FYI.

    • John says:

      It was Hawaiian Eye not Hawaii 5 0.although she had one or two spot appearances in 77 Sunset Strip which aired at the same era as Hawaiian Eye as both were detective shows. Hawaiian Eye starred Robert Conrad and Anthony Aisley.