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Date and Issue: Volume 190 / Number 6 / June 1981.
She s divinely famous (named Bo or Margaux or Raquel) and the man who's lifted her into celebrity heaven is also her real-life love. Is she his puppet or his pampered darling, servant or queen? Come shake the stardust from your eyes and see...
John Derek's temper was veering dangerously toward detonation. Minutes before, as he walked onto the set of A Change of Seasons, the film that wife Bo was shooting in Massachusetts last winter, he'd heard alarming news. It seemed his luscious spouse had been spotted eating a handful of chocolates.
To Derek, fanatically interested in keeping his potential chub by baby a svelte " 10," the nibbling of even a single bonbon was: a grave offense. Off he went looking for the sinful sweet eater.' And so did a reporter from the Washington Post, who related the following incident.
Bo, sitting with a stagehand friend, looked startled-and guilty-when she saw her husband approaching. "She didn't cat them, John!" shouted the stagehand, leaping to the star's' defense. But Bo refused to be protected.
"Yes, I did!" she boldly declared. "One of those little foil wrapped ones!"
"You know what will happen if you eat more of those," Derek said menacingly. But Bo remained defiant.
"I ate one!" she yelled back. "I did and I don't care!"
"Bo ..." said Derek, the threat unspoken. "And it was good!" she added naughtily.
Does this scene strike you as ludicrous? A grown man chiding his wife for snacking on candy? To John Derek himself, there was no lack of seriousness in the incident. Eating chocolates was bad for Bo. and, as he's told dozens of reporters, whatever Bo does is his business. That's because Derek's business is Bo. Ever since this gorgeous blonde became a boxoffice bonanza, her silver-haired, thirty-years-older husband has reportedly guided her every move: He picked the film roles, masterminded her pinup image, photographed her magazine layouts (exclusively), answered for her in press interviews. even designed and sometimes sewed the garments in her wardrobe.
Obsessive? Perhaps. But hardly unique. Hollywood has always been rife with Svengalis and Trilbys, with John and Bo 'Derek simply the latest in a long succession of similar pairs. Consider Roger Smith and Ann-Margret, Joe Hamilton and Carol Burnett, Michael Viner and Deborah Raffin, Gabry Ferrer and Debby Boone, Steve Jaffe and Susan Blakely, Alan Hamel and Suzanne Somers. Leon Isaac Kennedy and Jayne Kennedy, and Ron Samuels and Lynda Carter. And these are just the most current crop. Track back through the breakups, and you'll find many other Pygmalion-Galatea couples now gone their separate ways: Grant Tinker and Mary Tyler Moore, Peter Bogdanovich and Cybill Shepherd, Aaron Russo and Bette Midler, Lee Kramer and Olivia Newton-John, and, even further into the past, Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda, and Patrick Curtis and Raquel Welch.
What does the woman derive from this arrangement? "A support system, for one," explains Irene Kassorla, Hollywood psychologist and author of the best-selling Nice Girls Do. "She gains a co-worker, teammate, someone she can trust. After all, being a star can be a twenty-four-hour business. Sometimes it can take at least two people to keep the act on the road."
In some cases, the man is a much-needed father figure, as well. "Ann-Margret doesn't want to make her own decisions," says a New York publicist. "She leans on Roger. She wants him to tell her what she should do." Or the man serves as a handy front, deflecting problems-or hostilities-that might otherwise distract the star.
Gena Rowlands also owes her professional rise to husbanddirector John Cassavetes. When the two married in 1954, both were neophyte actors in the New York theater; then, two years later, their careers took off. Rowlands made a splash on Broadway in the Paddy Chayefsky play Middle of the Night, while Cassavetes enjoyed success after success on live TV and in New York-based movies. When he decided to move to Los Angeles, she came along with him and landed roles in a handful of films before going on to appear under hubby's direction in A Child is Waiting. Since then, she has rarely toiled for other directors, and a few Hollywood critics would argue that Gena's devotion to her husband's work has prevented her from evolving into a full-fledged star-they maintain that Cassavetes's features (especially Minnie and Moskowitz and A Woman Under the Influence) are too eccentric and self-indulgent to appeal to the popular taste and that they don't reflect Gena's extraordinary range. Gena, however, doesn't agree. "John writes the best roles," she told Rex Reed recently, "plus he knows my limits. I take more chances for him than I would for a stranger. If I've emerged as an important actress at all, it is entirely because of him." The most recent Rowlands-Cassavetes collaboration, Gloria, did, in fact, take the public's fancy and win an Oscar nomination for Gena. Next time around, Gena and John will team in front of the camera, starring in Paul Mazursky's The Tempest.
Sometimes a professional "happy ending" isn't reflected in the private life of a husband-manager and his on-screen wife. Take the story of Doris Day and Marty Melcher, a duo for seventeen years until Melcher's death in 1968. In the course of their long association, Melcher reportedly "mismanaged"
$22 million of Doris's money, leaving her with an estate composed entirely of debts, including half a million owed to the IRS. He also, she revealed, refused to let her do what she wanted to do for years-quit. "He kept saying one more year, one more year," Doris told a reporter from Women's Wear Daily. "He kept signing me up for movies and telling me after the deals were made. He took over completely and turned me into a dependent child."
Justin De Villeneuve is another man who served as a controlling influence in his lady's life. And not only that-in the process of turning Twiggy into a star, Justin himself became a celebrity, as much an emblem of swinging-sixties' London as his coltish, supermodel "bird."
When the two met in 1965, Justin, then less grandly named Nigel Davies, was a former pushcart vendor trying to make it as a hairdresser but without much success. His luck picked up dramatically, however, when he met Leslie Hornby, a shy fifteen-year-old whose model's sticklike body would soon be famous throughout the world.
Justin moved fast. A restyled, refurbished Twiggy was soon hailed by the London Daily Express as the New Face of 1966, and just one year-and countless fashion shootings-later, she was gracing the cover of French Elle. Then, in 1967, Justin and Twiggy stormed the United States, where they vied with the Beatles as the most popular British import of the day. Even the prestigious New Yorker sent a reporter to follow the pair around: "If only I can keep total control," Justin was quoted as saying, "then Twiggy will just keep getting bigger and bigger."
After that banner year, this bricklayer's son, raised in a North England orphanage, was financially set for life. "I have my Ferrari and my Mercedes and my £ 20,000 house in the country," he told the New Yorker. As for his relationship with Twiggy, Justin was fatalistic: "When the time comes, we'll go our separate ways," he said.
Justin turned manager the moment he found the right Margaux in celebration of what was then a record-breaking arrangement: Margaux would endorse their new Babe cosmetics line for five years at $1-million annual salary!
Soon afterward, the storybook plot started to sour, Wetson was mauled in the press for being so possessive of Margaux, for handling her proprietorially in public (an Esquire photograph showed Errol smirking at the camera, while his right hand clutched Margaux's derriere), and for trying to control what she said to the press. Meanwhile, the hamburger mavin was storing up a few complaints of his own. "When you work that closely with someone, you find out what they're really like," he told me. "She didn't keep up her end of the bargain. She didn't do her homework, didn't deliver. There is just so much one person can do for another."
Errol has higher hopes, however, for his new live-in love, a twenty-two-year-old student-model named Susan Bishop, whom he met at a Halloween party at the now-defunct Manhattan disco Studio 54. He pulls her picture-a test shot he took himself to show to agencies-out of a desk drawer and, grinning with pride, shows me a blonde whose waist-length hair curls around a wraithlike body and who sports a disarmingly seductive, half-feral smile. "She's quality," Wetson says, "smart, charming, well-educated, stunning. I see her as a spokesperson for a major blue-chip company, a symbol of a fine product line." He seems not at all bothered by a sense of déjá vu.
Not all husbands, by the way, find themselves swimmingly comfortable in the manager's role. John Clark, the former actor-director who took over wife Lynn Redgrave's career six years ago, recently gave up his management role and hired on a professional, Arthur Gregory. Why? "The whole dynamic changed when we moved out to Hollywood," says Clark between sips of a kir in New York's Carnegie Tavern. "Before, when Lynn worked in the theater, I could handle her careerthat's an on-the-level world and I understand it. You either get the role and the billing or you don't. It's that simple.
"Then Lynn decided to do 'House Calls,' a TV series, and we moved to L.A. Well, at that point, l found myself in a totally different arena. Agents lied to me about roles and fees and they talked about Lynn as if she were a piece of meat. How could I deal with my wife that way? Also, they have a habit of screaming all the time, so when I went into meetings, I had to outyell the deal makers if I wanted to be heard. And that definitely is not my style."
Clark's solution was to send somebody else into battle, though he hasn't completely removed himself from his wife's career. "I still check in about once a day," he admits. "Arthur negotiates, but I do like to know what's going on." Would he handle Lynn again? Yes, but only if he felt she were being mismanaged and needed him to set her on the right road.
Curtis's first move was to overhaul Raquel's image. ("She looked like a Mexican waitress before," a Hollywood writer remarked at the time.) Then he talked her up to Twentieth Century-Fox, landing her starring roles in Fantastic Voyage and One Million Years B.C. These cartoonlike sagas might well have gone unnoticed were it not for the brilliant publicity blitz, orchestrated by Patrick, that accompanied her debut. Stills from One Million Years B.C. showing Raquel scantily clad in a prehistoric bikini were sent out to thousands of newspapers across the land, and one particularly sultry shot was made up into a best-selling poster. Within the year, Welch's body was on walls around the world, and a still-ongoing career had been dramatically launched. Ironically, though, Patrick's coup also seems to have been his undoing. When Raquel divorced him in 1972, she told the press, "I need a really strong man now."
A less cynical view holds that these men marry their women for love, jumping into the fray because they are needed, because they can offer the protection and care a stranger could never provide. And just possibly love was Errol Wetson's true motive in guiding Margaux Hemingway onto the glory path.
When Wetson, the hamburger-chain prince, met Margaux, granddaughter of "Papa" Hemingway, it was a classic case of instant infatuation. He followed up cocktails at the Palm Court of New York's Plaza Hotel with a roses-and-champagne-laden rush up to Margaux's suite. Within weeks, the two had moved in together and the outdoor-girl-from-Idaho-turned-gossip-columnist's-darling had decided she wanted to become a star.
What kind of star, however . . . well, that was less than perfectly clear. "She wanted to do everything," Errol remembers, some six years later, when I speak to him in his office. "She wanted to act, sing, model, ski ... but all she knew how to do was ski." A model friend of the couple's named Harden is less gentle. "She was also built like an ox," he says.
Wetson's first step was to induce Margaux to lose weight. Then he hired Warren Robertson, a noted acting coach, to teach her the rudiments of working in front of the camera. "I had lots of friends in the fashion world, too," he says, "so I took her to see them. We went together to makeup people, hair stylists, to designer showrooms-she needed lots of clothes. Finally, I took her to photographers to have test shots made up."
As striking as Margaux was, however, she would never be slim enough to work as a fashion model (one swimsuit shot posed her in a pool to disguise still rather substantial thighs), so Wetson decided to pitch her as a company spokesperson. He called George Barry, the president of Faberge, and talked himself and his lady friend into an invitation for dinner. Over the vichyssoise, Barry saw, in Wetson's words, "an American symbol," and a deal was made. A few weeks later, Faberge feted the press with cases of the exquisite Bordeaux Chateau a real coup, especially as the studio had dropped her $50,000-a-year option just a few months before. Since then, Samuels has become an agenting legend, though he's not known for his gentlemanly style. Says one producer of his methods: "It's like doing business with a rattlesnake."
But however abrasive Samuels may be, talent is his strongest trump card. "He has an incredible sense of the right song, the right part, even the right costume," wife Lynda tells me. "I always listen to his decisions about my career because they've always been right."
Samuels doesn't demur; he's an expert and knows it. "I understand this business completely. I've been a television actor and I've been involved in production, both at Twentieth Century-Fox and on my own. I know how it works from every side. Not only can I negotiate a deal, I can then walk onto the set and tell the actor how to play a scene. And I'll be right."
When they were married in May 1977, Samuels and Carter were determined their partnership would be a strictly nonprofessional affair. He was to steer clear of her career. "I was scared of the pressures," Lynda remembers. "I didn't want our marriage to become just another deal. Nor did I want the demands of business to get in the way of the marriage." But somehow Samuels just couldn't stay away. "I'd listen to what her agents were doing and I'd get crazy over the mistakes they were making. Then Lynda would ask me what I thought of their moves, and I'd say they were messing her up. Eventually, I was advising her about more and more, and I realized that if her interests were to be properly protected, I had to assume control."
When Samuels took the reins, Lynda was locked into a stereotype-she was the Body Beautiful, a former Miss U.S.A. whom millions knew only as Wonder Woman, a cartoonish character in a kiddy series. And she was desperate to break out of this rigid role, to sing, and to try her hand at serious dramatic acting. Samuels's job: to change his wife's image, convincing the powers that be in production Lynda Carter had range.
After the cancellation of "Wonder Woman," Lynda and Ron put together an act for Las Vegas, and though she opened to a half-empty room, she kept on singing and her husband kept on dealing. Finally he arranged a variety special for her on CBS, and when it aired in January 1980, ratings were good enough for the network to agree to last fall's follow-up special, "Lynda Carter: An Encore." Invitations to do dramatic roles in television quickly followed.
"Lynda is an important person in the industry now," says Samuels. "Any project she's in gets off the ground. You can walk into any network with an idea for Lynda, and they know the ratings, so they'll commit." And his wife is luminously happy. "Working together gives us so much more to share," she gushes. "It has really made us a team."
Like the Samuels-Carter partnership, this business alliance evolved in an almost accidental way. "Before we were mar- . ried," says Suzanne, "it was very much a business of 'my career' and 'your career,' but then the real craziness in my professional life just happened to coincide with our marriagethat was in 1977-and I needed Alan to help."
At the time, Hamel was commuting between Los Angeles and Toronto, where he was taping a five-times-a-week talk show, "The Alan Hamel Show," and doing Canadian television commercials. Though he only made suggestions at first, leaving the carrying out to others, Hamel soon gave up his own on-camera work to devote himself entirely to Suzanne's career.
These days, husband and wife are both putting their peak energies into Suzanne's night-club act, which she takes on the road six months a year. Hamel produces, overseeing choreography, costumes, and lights, and also helps Suzanne select her sketches and songs. "Life is like a supermarket," Hamel says. "There are lots of choices. Suzanne has enormous talent and she loves to work. We have to be very careful in deciding what we're going to put on sale that day."
Being off-screen and in the background doesn't bother him at all, he insists. "I take pride in being a co-creator, in seeing what we've done as a team." He even refers to "our career." As for Suzanne, when talking about her husband's contribution, she can't seem to find sufficient superlatives. "He's so, so smart," she says, "he has such a good sense of what's best to do in the long run. I'm only concerned with the immediate things usually-what song I'm going to do, what dress I should wear-but Alan knows how to plan for ten years in the future."
Would she have succeeded without him'? Well, Suzanne certainly has made some aggressive moves on her own-blitzing talent coordinators on "The Tonight Show," for example, until they agreed to let her appear and then creating such a splash on Carson that she won a part in "Three's Company" almost immediately afterward. "I think I would have made a success anyway," she says, "just because I wanted it so much. I would have kept at it until I made it happen."
The Somers-Hamel partnership isn't the only such pairing that seems as smooth as glass. Consider, for example, the symbiotic support between Jayne and Leon Isaac Kennedy. She's the stunning black woman who formerly co-hosted "The NFL Today" and "Speak Up, America," and he's a writer-producer who put his own onstage career on the back burner in order to further the success of his mate.
Leon recognized Jayne's potential right away: "I was doing a talk show in Cleveland called 'Outta Sight,' "he says, talking to me in the couple's Los Angeles home, "and I saw a picture of Jayne in the paper. She was representing Ohio in the Miss U.S.A. Pageant, and boy, was she a knockout! Anyway, I invited her to be a guest on the show, and when she appeared I saw she was as gorgeous inside as she was good to look at. Besides, she was so loaded with talent it just cried out to be shown to the world. A couple of months later we were married, and soon afterward we left Cleveland and moved out to Hollywood."
Leon instantly went into high gear. Tapping in on network gossip, he heard that NBC was searching out a new dancer for "Laugh-In." Jayne sailed through the audition and effortlessly got the job. Next, he made a connection with Bob Hope's office and managed to get his wife an appearance on the comedian's network special. But the real big time didn't beckon until Leon got word that Phyllis George was leaving "The NFL Today." Enterprising as ever, Leon decided to orchestrate a can't-miss audition. One night after a boxing event in Las Vegas, Leon collared a few heavyweights of the sports world-Muhammad Ali, Julius Erving, Hollywood Henderson, Larry Holmesand convinced them to do an impromptu interview with Jayne. "It was 3:00 A.M. and these guys were exhausted, but all I had to do was give them a look at her," he says. "Jayne is so gorgeous they had to say yes." Leon filmed the action and sent the videos off to CBS. "They saw Jayne with all these heavies-what else could they say but yes?"
Next in line for Jayne, says Leon, are feature films-the real big time. He's recently acquired two properties in which she's slated to star-the 1947 classic Body & Soul (he'll co-star and produce the remake) and The Dorothy Dandridge Story. Leon who isn't exactly loaded with modesty, is proud of how far he'! already brought his wife's career and is sure they'll go further still. Says he: "I'm sharp, aggressive, I'm great for Jayne. She needs someone like me."
Meanwhile, his soft-spoken but articulate wife admits that she leans heavily on Leon. "I trust his instincts," says Jayne. "He has a good sense of what I should do. And it makes me feel safer knowing he's in control. I know I'm not going to be cheated."
For all her sweetness, Jayne is no pushover. "Leon will shout, 'Do this, wear this, say this when you meet this person,' " says Jayne. "And though I smile sweetly when he goes into that number, I always do exactly what I want."
What happened to them is what every manager-star team fears most of all. "Everything we did became business," Charlene.told me. "First, Jon began to call the shots in my career. Then all our personal time was business-oriented. If we went to a movie, it was to study an actress; if we went to a party, it was to score a new contact. We never did anything by-or forourselves any more."
Jon, a former actor and TV writer, is a workaholic, Charlene explains, while she herself is not. "After shooting a series, all you want to do is come home and relax. You need time to regroup. But Jon wouldn't permit that. He'd be hooking me into guest shots or personal appearances every weekend, never giving me a moment's time off."
Charlene's discarded Svengali doesn't really deny the charge: "Look, I know this business," he tells me. "You have to grab things while you can. I wanted Charlene to get as much as she could-you know she had a deprived childhood. Her father deserted her when she was just two months old. I thought I could make up for that now."
In the beginning, Charlene appreciated Mercedes's nearobsessive zeal. Although she got the part in "Dallas" on her own (she sat and sat in Lorimar's offices, flatly refusing to leave until they let her read), Mercedes urged her to expand her range and was a first-rate guide through the maze of on-the-set politics when inflated egos on "Dallas" would explode. After he gave up his job as a staff writer for "Happy Days," Charlene luxuriated in having the whole of her mate's attention. "At that time, it felt terrific to have someone tell me what to do-what I should wear, how to act, what to say, where to go." In the end, however, Charlene simply grew up: "After a while, you've got to do things for yourself."
Charlene isn't the first star to pull away from her mentor. Think of Raquel Welch and Patrick Curtis, of Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors, of Cheryl and David Ladd. Bette Midler and Aaron Russo were a particularly classic case, with Bette the silent partner in her own success for years until she finally gained the courage to speak up and strike out on her own.
Let's go back for a moment to the golden couple with which this discussion began-urbane John and gorgeous Bo Derek.
Are they, too, about to follow the classic pattern in which the woman star finally realizes she is a personage in her own right, no longer needful of the props provided by her mentor-manager? Hollywood is just now making book on the future of this pair. As Kassorla says of Bo: "She's twenty-three now, and she was only sixteen when she met John. How young and impressionable, how easily taken in by his supposed strength she must have been!" Pausing, she recalls the special broadcast the couple did with Barbara Walters. Millions, no doubt, were embarrassed-almost ashamed-when John Derek rubbed Bo's leg as if she were a racehorse, wiped the perspiration from her nose, and spoke for her while she sat silent. "If she has any ego at all, she's got to rebel against that," said Kassorla. "As her self-image grows stronger, this kind of treatment won't be tolerable any more,"
Regardless of what the public-or Irene Kassorla-may think, John and Bo laugh at 'the Svengali-Trilby analogy. They've even had a letterhead printed with the words Svengali Productions, with a sketch of Bo as president, wielding puppet strings that reach down to a picture of John.
John's son Russell has often spoken for the pair, and according to him, Bo's image as a pretty doll entirely manipulated by Big Daddy John is way off base. "Sure, she's intimidated when my father's around, but he is a very strong presence. Lots of people would be in awe of him. Actually, Bo is unusually independent and sharp. She knows what she wants and she goes out to get it."
Russell talks about their newest venture, Tarzan, the Ape Man, a film in which she stars and John directs and a project that was her idea entirely. "Bo went into the meetings," Russell says, "and she was the one who handled the big boys at MGM. My father just stayed home and waited."
The credits on Tarzan will read, "Produced by John and Bo Derek." Next time around, one wonders, will it just be produced by Bo Derek alone? Will this stunning young woman emerge so completely from John's grasp that her former lord and master will be lucky if he gets tossed a bone-or a chocolate? And will other so-called Trilbys also rise up against the men who have made them what they are? Maybe ... or maybe not. John and Bo and Alan and Suzanne and Leon and Jayne might just zoom on to ever-more-blissful prosperity.
Even Hollywood psychologists don't know for sure!
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