What is Stefanies Powers' problem? The once-upon-a-prime-time Girl From Uncle and Jennifer Hart (as in Hart to Hart) is so frosty. I wish I'd worn thermal underwear to the interview. All too willing to deliver her acerbic views on topics as diverse as GM foods and democracy itself, a mini ice age descends whenever I ask her opinion of her own life. And its a nice summers day in Eastbourne.
Actually, in a word , the problem might be Eastbourne. Six weeks ago she embarked on a tour of a new play called The Adjustment, hoping Micheal T. Folie's comedy, a risky compound of three unlikely themes, religous fundementalism, political lobbing and Parkinsons disease, would reach the West End. Instead it has run into the buffers at the Devonshire Park Theatre where this afternoon I watch a matinee with an audience of OAP's(old age pensioners) and one troubled young woman with a carrier bag who leaves and enters at her own discretion.
Mind you, things were not much happier at the start of the tour. Powers grew difficult during the interview on Woman's Hour. At first thanks to a tactless link she objected to being described as an "Eighties revival". Then she violently misconstrued a question from Martha Kearney comparing the Harts to the villinous millionaires of Dallas and Dynasty.She knew many worthwhile millionaires said Powers.
But Eastbourne loves her.We are not talking full-frontal nudity Kathleen Turner here but Powers frequently removes her top in the first act of the play and the body beneath, albeit buttressed by a bra, is truly impressive. The old chap in front of me gasps the first time it happens and his wife shares his admiration "shes getting on too"(She's 57,yet looks generations younger than today's audience). The play falls apart a little in its second half but Powers is very good as the cynical Jewish lobbyist; funny, ruthless, purblind.
Not that she will care what I think. She says she gave up on critics after a wit explained: "A critic is a person who's tried acting and failed, tried directing and failed, tried writing and failed, even tried homosexuality and failed, so they become embittered". Presumeley this Damascene insight came before the notices appeared for her last West-End venture,the musical Matador which closed after three months in 1991."I guess", she says sadly, "my instinct was wrong again".
But Powers is not blaming her instincts for The Adjustment's fate. She blames the producer, Paul Farrah. He, she tells me has not "got it". The right connections I suggest.Perhaps,(ho-ho) he needs a lobbyist? "He needs", says Powers, "a little more, I guess of the right stuff than he has."
Yet Farrah is flavour of the month next to the plays orginal director who pulled out a week before rehearsals started."He let us down and went to do another job in California directing a pilot of a television.Which I hope fails."
This is such a prickly start, that I resort to praising her figure, the result of daily work-outs, breakfast protein drinks and taking one main meal a day but also of Stefanie having danced since the age of five. "The body has memory," she says. Unhappily her face has forgotton nothing either, in particular the hours it has spent in the sun. In the early 1990s she underwent treatment for a precancerous skin condition. "I just have to be very careful," she says. "I know I have to keep looking for it and make sure I get examinations." Beneath the pancake, she is not so much pale and interesting as "freckled and white." Brought up in Hollywood, Powers won a part in the movie of West Side Story at age 15. She was dropped because of the strict laws on employing minors but she had been noticed and won a role in an independant movie. Before long she was championed by Blake Edwards and being groomed for stardom on a five year contract with Columbia pictures. She made 15 films for the studio.
It was however her role as April Dancer in The Girl From Uncle, a spin-off from the hip tv series, that made her name. The reference books call it unsuccessful but it seemed terfific to me (I was 8). Powers face finally lights up when I ask her if it was fun to make.
"It was so much fun," she says going into a routine of April popping open her secret radio and calling up "Channel D" except the radio was really the cheesiest piece of alumiminum and it kept falling apart in her hands.
In the seventies she became,in her own unironic phrase, the queen of the mini series and stared in possibly the best one ever made, Washington Behind Closed Doors. They don't make many now and that, says their deposed monarch, is because TV appeals to "the lowest common denominator".
"If you don't have the courage of some kind of conviction to say 'I'm keeping that show on and it has the quality and eventually the I will educate the audience to appreciate quality,' you have to go down to the lowest common denominator of the man in the street. Why is everyone interested in the opinion of the man on the street, who is uninformed?"
Because he pays her salary? "No you have a politcal issue and you say, 'What's your opinion man on the street? He hasn't even read the papers." "That's democracy isn't it? But why should I care what he thinks?"
The era of her greatest appeal to this maligned figure stretched from 1979 to 1984, the run of Hart to Hart. This lightly played adventure series starred Robert Wagner as Johnathan Hart, millionaire of Hart Industries and his wife Jennifer, an internally known freelance journalist. They solved crimes together in their oodles of dead line free time. Wagner and Powers were exceptionally well paired convincing you that it might be possible for married people to have fun in bed together. When it was suddenly pulled by "this genious who took over ABC", Powers burst into tears.
By now we have life the stuffy dressing room and are promenading down Eastborne sea front. Shortly we run into a lady with her extraordinary looking dog. Since Stefanie has told me the dangers of genetic engineering, I joke that the bow-wow looks like a GM product itself. "It's a bichon," she says.
The excitement behind us, I attempt to restart the interview. It was as I say during the Hart to Hart run in 1981 that both she and Robert Wagner lost their partners. Stefanie had me William Holden at a celebrity tennis tournament in 1972 and they lived together for nine years. Although she said Holden was sober for five of them,he finally succumbed to his alcoholism tripping over in his home and gashing his head open on a bedside table. Two weeks later Natalie Wood Wagners partner drowned.
"I don't really want to spend too much time talking about that," she says. "Simply yes, it was a terrible tradegy, yes they were two weeks apart and yes we were both extremly supportive as much as we possibly could be to one another which cemented our friendship."
I ask her to describe Holden. "It's been covered, it's over he's gone," is all she will say, except she wishes him to be remembered for his achievements as an actor and converationlist. "The William Holden Wildlife foundation has been formed and is operating successfully based on his principle of backing up specific research with education programmes."
Her own career continues to fund the foundation of which she is president,and his 1200 acre animal sancuary in Kenya. She has a home nearby and two others in Los Angeles and London and there is no doubting her dedication to the cause or the pleasure she derives from it. Every year 10000 students stay at the education centre and an outreach programme educates a further 2000 "for someone who never had children I am putting four kids through college."
She says having children herself would have meant giving up too much freedom. "I was too curious about the world.So it was my choice to some extent." Chronology probably came into it too. She was married to an actor called Gary Lockwood when she was just 22 just as her career was taking off. The marriage ended in 1971. Holden 25 years older than her was already the father of 2 sons when she fell in love. By 1993 when she married Patrick de la Chesnais a polo playing millionaire and agriculural biolgist she was 50.
It ws an unusual marraige from the start. They wed in grand style at the Mount Keyna Safari Club - it was the kind of do where both DJs and Timberlands must be worn - but within 12 months they were not living together. "We don't have a conventional marriage," she told Hello!. "People find out what works for them. There's no rule book about how a marraige should be."
She has I say as we walk back to the pier always prized her independance. "Well why is that everybody used the word 'independant' in the pejorative? I don't but it is, it's synonymous with the kind of pejorative sense. Being independant is some sort of black stain.The reason you are(this or that) is because you are so independant. What does that mean?If independant means that you are not dependant isnt that a good thing? I don't want to be a burden to someone else."
Does this make her a loner? "Perhaps,perhaps. But I don't look objectively at my life. I've always been more interested in things outside of me than inside me Not so interest in me." Anyhow she filed for divorce a year ago. We reach a cafe and I buy her coffee. Is she now single? "No yet we're working on it". Was the marraige a bit too independant at both side in the end, I ask but just as she begins her reply she is rescued by a phone call on her mobile. When the call is over our converation has somehow moved on to her friends. She counts herself blessed to have a dozen really good ones and cursed to have lost another 32 to AIDS.
Maybe I say, she's not the marrying type. Maybe shes the friend type. "I don't know, I have been married twice. Just because they have not been successful ..it could still happen.I certainly hope it will happen. I certainly hope it will happen but I don't know if it will happen. I am not going to have children so marrying for conventional reasons at my age and stage of life is certainly not a prerequisite, although if you are going to spend a lifetime with someone it is just more sensible to be married."
We are just begining to get some where when who should bowl along but the matinees restless bag lady, a French script writer convalescing in Eastbourne. Is Stefanie Jewish she asks and seems disapointed to learn she isn't(she Polish way back and a practising catholic). Powers said she's glad the piece touched her "in one way or the other." Would she have taken on The Adjustment if she'd known where it would end up? "That's a good question," she says. And the answer is "probably not."
When we return an anorak at the stage door is loitering with intent with a Girl From Uncle annual. As Powers signs the photo of the young April Dancer I introduce myself to her co-star Micheal Brandon (Dempsey from Dempsey and Makepeace. This is nothing he says. He has a fan from D&M days who attends everything he does. I take my leave of this little scene of diminished celebrity.
Initally I thought it might be fun interviewing such a crosspatch but in fact talking to unhappy people is never fun. If I'm honest and had her life I wouldn't much like to relive it for a newspaper either. But a line in the play stays with me: "If you really were a the hard assed bitch you pretend to be you wouldn't have to work at it so hard." I'm not sure this quite applies to Stefanie Powers, but I thought as they say at Oscar time, I'd offer it for your consideration.
