Connie Stevens.
Remember her? Not Connie Francis. Or Connie Selleca. Or Stella Stevens. Connie Stevens. The one who bounced around as Cricket Blake on the ”Hawaiian Eye” TV series 25 years ago in petticoats and ponytails, saying ”Daddyo” to costars Robert Conrad and Poncie Ponce. The one who flirted with Troy Donahue in ”Palm Springs Weekend.” The prime-time Annette. The poor man`s Sandra Dee.
”I want to be a big star. I want to make movies with Marlon Brando,”
she said in 1965.
”I still want to make movies with Marlon Brando,” she said recently, laughing. ”But first I`ve got to get hot. That`s what I`m trying to do-get hot. I`m still waiting for the big role. I haven`t peaked yet.”
Connie Stevens is saying this in a suburban Chicago hotel suite, her feet tucked under her, munching on potato chips. She`s wearing an oversized sweater and sweat pants. With her marshmallow hair, turned-up nose and itty-bitty voice, it`s hard to believe she`s almost 50, but she is. And in 50 years, 35 of them in show business, 20 of those on the road, you learn a few things. And one of the things you learn is that Hollywood is not rolling out the welcome wagon for actresses who are closer to menopause than to puberty.
”That`s the reality of the business today,” she says, playing with her platinum hair. ”I`m a big star all over the world except in Hollywood. I play (nightclubs in) Japan and Hong Kong every Christmas and New Year`s. I`ve had dinner with the Shah of Iran. Why? I don`t have a hit TV show, I don`t have a hit record, I don`t have a hit movie, but I created something that people still love. I invented Cricket. There was barely a part written for me. Half the time, I said whatever I wanted. I was everybody`s daughter. I was every boy`s fantasy girlfriend. Girls wanted to be like me. That good feeling still exists.
”That`s why I`m a big business, with 17 people working for me. I may not be the richest woman in the world, but I do okay. But Hollywood is a different story. I don`t like to mention names, but there`s something wrong when an actress can come off a `Dynasty` or a `Falcon Crest` and get a production deal (to star in a mini-series or TV movie) and I can`t.”
Stevens wants to change all that. She wants to get into films as an actress, writer and producer. She`s interested in scripts about women in transition, because that`s where she finds herself. After ”Hawaiian Eye,”
she costarred in ”Wendy and Me” with George Burns for one season and was a regular on the ”Kraft Music Hall Presents the Des O`Connor Show” in 1971. There were a few TV movies in the `70s: ”The Sex Symbol,” ”Love`s Savage Fury,” ”Murder Can Hurt You,” a stint in commercials as the Ace Hardware girl. But for years, her career has consisted of guest appearances on
”Hollywood Squares,” frequent trips on ”The Love Boat,” Bob Hope specials, nostalgia bits and her nightclub act.
”I went into nightclubs when Tricia (the younger of her two children with Eddie Fisher) was 5 days old,” she says. The marriage, her second, which lasted from 1967 to 1969, was tumultuous. ”I had to work. I walked out with nothing, just the clothes on my back, not a dime in my pocket and two infants, one on each hip. . . . I`ve been working ever since.”
There was one year when she was home only eight weeks.
”We were road babies,” says her daughter Joely, 20, who occasionally sings backup with Stevens in her nightclub act, which tours several months a year.
Back in the `60s, Stevens said she was sick of what she calls ”Pepsi Cola” roles, playing the bubbly, bouncy airhead who wears pink lipstick, spins records and sighs over James Darren. But today she calls these roles
”my destiny.” She gets work in nostalgia movies such as ”Grease II” and
”Back to the Beach,” TV shows such as ”Bring Me the Head of Dobie Gillis.”
She agrees, they`re not the best parts an actress could want. ”It takes real talent to make them work,” she says. ”I keep playing the same role.”
Better roles have come along, but they`ve gone to other actresses. To Ann-Margret, who outgrew her ”Kitty with a Whip” image. To Sally Field, who moved beyond ”The Flying Nun.” To Jane Fonda, who lived down ”Barbarella.” ”Yeah,” Stevens says, ”but they`ve never sung before 30,000 people. Look, we`re all different. I`ve always been ambitious, but I`m not driven. The actresses who are driven go to New York and read the hot new books before they`re even published. They get the galley proofs and option (the rights to film) them. It`s too much work. Mitzi Gaynor-she tours all the time-she`s driven. She does six hours of exercises every day just so her leg extensions look perfect. That`s not me. We all make decisions based on what we want in life. Ann-Margret never had children. Neither did Mitzi Gaynor. I wanted children. They`re the most important thing in my life. Everyone knows that.” Stevens reared her daughters single-handedly. She estimates the time that Tricia, 19, has spent with her father at ”maybe 12 hours-in her whole life.” Joely, who looks like Fisher, says she and her mother and sister are like
”three girlfriends. We hang out together. We can tell her everything.”
She mothers them, and they mother her right back. They`re worried about her two-and-half-year relationship with Charles Taylor, a 37-year-old actor.
”They`re glad to see me giddy and happy with him, but they think I should be sailing around the world on some rich guy`s yacht,” she explains.
Like every actress, Stevens can tick off the roles that got away. She was up for the Diane Keaton part in ”The Godfather,” but the casting director decided to go with an unknown, she says. She was offered the Valerie Perrine role in ”Lenny” but turned it down because of the nudity and explicit sexuality. Then the specific scenes she objected to were cut from the film, and Perrine was nominated for an Academy Award. ”That`s the way it goes,”
she says. She wanted the Meryl Streep part in ”Kramer vs. Kramer,” the Cher part in ”Mask.” ”I could have done them.”
For the first time in her career, Stevens says she`s taking charge.
”It`s her time,” Joely says.
”I used to just go wherever the wind blew me. Now I say to my people, let`s get an important film, whatever it takes, however we have to do it, however we have to build up to it.”
Part of the buildup is a role in a syndicated situation comedy,
”Starting from Scratch,” that will air this fall on WGN-TV. ”TV is not my favorite medium; the work is hard, you don`t have any life, and I feel like I`ve already been a champion in it, but the economics of the business is you need momentum to get hot. I`m using this to get me into movies.”
She plays a free spirit who has given up custody of her children but pops in to visit them and her ex-husband, played by Bill Daily, who appeared on ”I Dream of Jeannie.”
”It`s a challenge, because it`s so opposite who I am,” Stevens says.
”I never left my girls for more than five days. I can remember coming home from a show at 1 in the morning to do a 2 o`clock feeding, and they`d both be crying. I was so exhausted. I was working so hard, and Joely had asthma, and Tricia was colicky. I was at the pediatrician one day, and he said, `You`re the one we`ve got to watch. Stop trying to be two parents.` And then I stopped. I stopped signing gifts, `From Daddy` and just concentrated on doing what I could.”
The supermom role is important to Stevens because she never had a relationship with her own mother until Stevens was an adult. Her parents were divorced when she was 2. First she lived with her father`s parents and then with her father.
”I remember the loss of my mother. I was dead-determined that my children would never go through that.” She says she has never gotten over that early rejection. ”A lot of things trip me up, especially when I`m tired. Any kind of rejection sets it off.”
Besides the TV show, Stevens is counting on her nightclub act to give her the push she needs. When she first started, she paid thousands of dollars to someone to pick her songs, thousands of dollars to someone else to teach her how to move, thousands of dollars to someone else to put it all together. Now she does it all herself. ”It`s a nice feeling. The show is a part of who I am.”
And the show must go on. That night she walks out on the stage at the Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace. It`s decorated with a few skimpy bouquets. The audience-most of them white-haired men and women-fill only a third of the seats. She does a rock `n` roll medley, sings ”Turn on Your Heartlight.” She brings an old-timer from the audience up on stage and does a soft-shoe with him. It`s not exactly the material that makes an actress hot, and it`s possible that Connie Stevens will always be best known as Cricket.
”It`s not the worst thing,” she says.
