The first thing to strike you when meeting Barbara Bain at her house in the Hollywood Hills is how perfectly home and woman suit each other. The actress is so much a part of her surroundings that it is difficult to describe one without describing the other.
It is a modern house of high ceilings and big windows, sparsely furnished with sleek furniture in gray, white and black. It is flawlessly neat. The only ornaments are simple vases with a single flower or an uncluttered arrangement of grasses. The house is bare, functional and elegant.
To one side is a room of soft sofas, the walls lined with books from floor to ceiling.
“I like the books I’ve read,” she says, “It’s a visceral, personal thing with me. I’m loath to lend a book to someone unless I know that I will get the same one back.”
The 62-year-old Bain may not be known as a book lover, but television fans may remember her as the sexy and attractive Cinnamon Carter in the late ’60s on the “Mission: Impossible” TV series. She also had roles on television in “Richard Diamond, Private Detective” and “Space 1999.” She has aged gracefully and although she has not had any major roles lately, is currently looking for new roles in film or television.
Bain is tall and slender. Her features have the indestructible loveliness of good bone structure, but still she says that growing older is not easy for actresses.
“I’m not crazy about the little marks. I’d like them not to be, but there they are. I’m probably singular in this community in that I’m repelled by the thought of plastic surgery. One of these days, we who’ve never touched anything are going to sit down and watch each other fall apart. My mother died when I was quite young, so I never saw her age. In an odd way it’s a solo journey for me.”
Her voice is resonant and clear, betraying her theater training, despite a huskiness that may owe something to smoking. She sounds rather like Lauren Bacall, and projects the same sense of a strong personality.
Three years ago Bain founded a national organization called Bookpals that links readers from the Screen Actors Guild with children in financially deprived school districts across America. Actress Bonnie Franklin and others have helped in her effort to read books to children.
Bain gained television fame in 1966-69 as Cinnamon Carter in “Mission: Impossible.” The character was beautiful, sexy, intelligent and tough, an equal to her male counterparts in their high-tech espionage adventures.
“That program was a groundbreaker for women in television, no question,” Bain says, “and I don’t know that there’s a difference between being a groundbreaker on TV and in real life, because of the power of TV. People in this country and the rest of the world are bound together by the images that flash in front of them.
“At the time that `Mission: Impossible’ was made, sexiness and intelligence weren’t exactly a common combination in Hollywood. Women were playing the tart, the wife or the girl next door.
“I always knew I was smart. I used to think when I was little that it would be easier to be `dumb,’ so I’d try that for an hour or two. Didn’t work. You struggle with those issues when you’re a kid, trying to find out where you fit in.”
Bains says that when she read romantic period novels, women who were independent were often described as “headstrong,” as if something were wrong with them: These women “upset” society, but if men behaved the same way, they were heroes. The message was that being smart was not such a good idea, she says.
“I began to look at it as a pattern and I didn’t like the idea that you were meant to hide out if you were too smart,” she says.
Nonetheless, Bain has loved books since childhood. “Literature has been the crucible in which everything I imagined, hoped for and thought about was possible.” This is what Bain would like to share with the children in Bookpals.
“I’m totally convinced that human beings are a learning system. That’s what we do all day long. With Bookpals, kids see that somebody other than their teacher thinks that reading is important. Because we’re actors and tend to dramatize things when we read, the children are fascinated.
“They get a sense of the range of books. They like one or don’t like the next, but they learn not to give up if they don’t enjoy one, because the range is so enormous. And of course it opens up their imaginations and makes them think.
“If we’re reading about a monster, I’ll hold the book up and ask, `If you drew this monster, how would he look?’ And they think about it and get the idea that drawing can be `work.’ `You mean somebody does that? I can do that when I grow up?’ It’s spontaneous and they can express opinions. You can’t do that with a video.”
Still, Bain is not quarreling with video or television. “It’s how I made my life. It’s a quick reference point, though not necessarily a fully considered one, and it’s a dynamic in our culture. Television is as powerful as religion has ever been. Both my kids actually asked to have the TVs taken out of their rooms because their friends would come over to play and just plunk down in front of the set.
“There’s something about being in the room and reading to kids that is valuable. They like to make contact, even the boys who pretend they don’t care sort of sidle up to me when we’re reading.”
Bain says her own early influences in that direction were strong.
“I was a product of the Chicago public school system, which has come in for a lot of punishment, but I received a very good education.” She is a graduate of Hyde Park High School.
“A very wise teacher gave me a pass to the library. It was a magical piece of paper and I read everything. Greek mythology, Russian novels-it was a wonderful library with a lonely librarian, ecstatic to find me with my enthusiam for reading. I remember one librarian told me Dr. Dolittle books were for boys, so of course I read every one.
“Without really being aware of it, the actress was born in me then. I was playing all those parts in my imagination. I was Anna Karenina at the railway station, and it was so exciting. Of course it didn’t occur to me that there was a job in which one could do that (acting) for a number of years.”
Instead, Bain went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study sociology and philosophy, then moved to New York to study dance with Martha Graham, who died in 1991. She did not dance professionally and went straight into acting.
“I couldn’t do classical ballet because I was too tall, and it broke my heart, but it brought me to Graham, who was a genius. She had all the qualities I admire and was the first woman I’d met who did things the way she wanted to do them, and never thought it was necessary to be accommodating. She was incredibly exotic and wonderful.”
Bain got involved in acting through two friends who were in theater in college.
“I went to acting classes in my early 20s and found something that was hard for me to do, and I rather liked that. I couldn’t believe I finally had to struggle or that I couldn’t do it, and that’s what kept me there. I like a challenge.
“I had to work very hard for a year because I’m basically a very shy person. I was fascinated by the idea that acting was so ephemeral-it was like trying to grab air, and did not come easily to me. Now, when I see my daughter on stage-she just owns it.”
Her first theatrical assignment in New York was in “Middle of the Night” with Edward G. Robinson.
Bain has two adult daughters from her 36-year marriage to actor Martin Landau, whom she recently divorced. Susan Landau is a writer, director and producer; Juliet Landau is an actress and dancer.
Bain and Landau met at an acting workshop he was running in New York. The workshop included writers, and one of those was Bruce Geller, who was to write the part of Rollin Hand in “Mission: Impossible” for Landau, the “man of a thousand faces” aspect of the character to recognize Landau’s acting talent. Geller later said he didn’t realize he had based the character of Cinnamon on Bain until he started casting for the show.
“We found each other,” Bain says of meeting Landau. By the time “Mission: Impossible” was being made, she and Landau were married and had two daughters.
Bain’s children played a role in Bookpals, which started with books that had been favorites of hers and her daughters, “rummaging around in the attic to find Dr. Seuss, the `Red Ballons,’ all sorts of lovely things. Now children’s libraries steer us to good stuff.
“I happen to read in what are supposedly `disadvantaged areas,’ and the children are incredibly well groomed, well tended and obviously fussed-over by someone at home. They come in looking beautiful, obviously not neglected, The other thing is that as they learn to read, they’re proud of it, very proud.”
