Stefanie Powers - a bullfighter? It was time to set the record straight prior to her debut at the elegant Feinstein’s at the Regency (www.feinsteinsattheregency.com ) in New York City, November 16th thru 20th.
“This is ancient history” says Stefanie. I don’t know how it came about. It continues to haunt me. My parents knew people in Mexico who had a ranch where they raised bulls. There are photographs of me circulating around in a matador outfit. . .I knew the bullfighters. I was a teenager. It was part of that culture.”
Stefanie may not be a bullfighter, but she is an avid polo player. “How do you find the time?” I asked. “My polo ponies have had an easy year. They’re in England. I have a couple here and I have seven horses, well, now six. One of my old ones died in Kenya where I also live. But most of my horses are in England. In the summer, there’s a polo game every single day somewhere. It’s a fabulous place to play polo; definitely play every day.”
This eternally beautiful woman of Polish descent was a cheerleader at Hollywood High School, made her first obscure movie The Young Sinner under the alias Taffy Paul released in 1965, and has an impressive list of motion pictures to her credit as well as early television including Route 66 and Bonanza. One would say that Stefanie has led a charmed life but within the human condition tragedies strike, i.e., her beloved mother, Julia Golen’s passing in 2009 and the discovery of her own lung cancer, with surgery scheduled one week after her mother’s death. Stefanie’s latest book from Simon & Schuster (www.simonandschuster.com ) due out November 2nd , One From the Hart, details much more.
Stefanie is an avid conservationist, environmentalist, vegetarian, “maniacal” exerciser and linguist. “Do you still take your own bags to market to help avoid cutting down more trees?” I asked. “Oh yes. And I’m in the process of taking a 1954 house, which I’ve been working on over two years, so that I can reduce consumption and make it function largely on solar energy. We’re very near putting up the panels. There’s rewiring, new roofing, insulation, appliances. . .as much as we can possibly do to a structure that was not purpose built. I’ll have 54 panels and the augmentation of energy we produce will go back to the grid. It’s an imported battery system that will come from Australia that we do not make in the U.S… We have to practice what we preach as much as possible”
Along with her own private conservationist lifestyle, Stefanie told me about the educational center in Kenya functioning since 1982, part of the William Holden Wildlife Foundation which she co-founded and is President, where she continues Holden’s conservation work in Africa and also promotes the humane treatment of animals. It is at this educational center that students are trained in alternative habitat construction, where there is solar and wind power and where water, including wastewater, is recycled. There are demonstrations of how to compost bio-degradable material all of which is intended for the students to take home to their urban and rural lives. The center now serves about 11,000 students a year who are taught to understand what happens when man exploits the soil and to learn about alternatives to its destruction. She is extremely passionate and devoted to this.
She brought a great deal back to her individual life but candidly explains how backwards we are regarding energy alternatives and how the European Union is much further along in the way they recycle their waste. “They’re producing their own bio-gas fuel that is adapted to the household. We are not. Washington is dragging its feet. They talk a good line on both sides of the aisle. All slogans, rhetoric, no substance.”
Moving on to her theatrical career, I asked about her inspirations. “My mother danced, she loved the ballet. There was always classical music on in the house, show tunes, we went to the theatre. When I was a child, I had a chance to see South Pacific and Gypsy with Ethel Merman. I was very fortunate. I remember as a student we always went to an opera, a symphony or show as part of our education. A pity with all of the cutbacks in the schools - that would build an attachment to good music, theatre, supporting that which leads into adult life where we become either audiences or participants. We’re so bereft of support of theatre in this day and age.”
In 1966, “The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.” (a spinoff of “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”), starred Stefanie Powers as April Dancer in the television spy thriller. Many of the episodes included who she was in real life - - a dancer, linguist, even some bullfighting. Unfortunately, it only lasted one season. Stefanie went on to say that Norman Feldon, producer, fell ill and when it came time to go to the network to fight for his show, he wasn’t around to take up the cause. She feels it could have gone on longer but, nevertheless, was a fantastic experience.
“Your great success was the Hart to Hart television series. How did you get to be Mrs. Hart? Did Bob Wagner say, I want this lady.” Well, it turned out to be a much more intricate and illuminating explanation!
Stefanie proceeded to tell me that while she was doing a production of Cyrano de Bergerac with Stacy Keach in L.A. and San Francisco, slated to go to New York, she received a phone call from Tom Mankewicz who was going to direct the pilot. “We had all known each other for years. I had known Manc when I was 17 years old. I had been in dance school with Natalie Wood. Life was a very small community in the Hollywood I grew up in. So on the phone was Tom, Robert Wagner and Aaron Spelling. I knew Aaron when he was married to Carolyn Jones. He had coached our baseball team. I did the very first movie for television that Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg ever produced. We were all connected.” So we all had a meeting at Bob Wagner’s pool house. It was a love fest, we all adored each other.
Because of the newspaper strike in New York, Cyrano was cancelled and instead Stefanie became Jennifer Hart!
Wagner and Powers appeared as the two amateur sleuths from 1979 to 1984 winning her two Emmys and five Golden Globe Award nominations. In the 1990s the pair reunited to make eight Hart to Hart made-for-TV, two-hour movies.
How does Powers react to the unfathomable salaries of the soap stars today?
“Hart to Hart salaries were pretty modest. Desperate Housewives gals are earning $400,000 an episode. I’m flabbergasted Friends were all making one million dollars an episode. We have creative accounting in our industry. If we had honest statements of expenses, costs, losses, middlemen who didn’t get so much for distribution, we could all profit from the success in a reasonable fashion.”
“The public isn’t familiar with Stefanie Powers as a musical performer” I continued.
“Its one of those terrible things. I was a singer, a dancer with Jerome Robbins. When my legs wouldn’t go up that high anymore, I developed other things. I started doing musicals in my off times with Columbia Pictures. When they had the Straw Hat circuit in the Midwest I did “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Pajama Game.” I loved it so much. I didn’t revisit it for a long time until Bob Wagner and I went to England in “Love Letters” in the West End and I got my foot in the door and kept it there.”
Stefanie appeared in “Matador,” met her husband-to-be Patrick Houitte de la Chesnais whom she married in 1993 and divorced in 1999. She went on to appear in “Applause,” which hadn’t been revived in 26 years, which she says really didn’t hold up. “The role of Margot Channing was not a musical theatrical performer. Putting that into musical format, with singing and dancing, was a nightmare. Fortunately we stopped before we got to San Francisco. There were drag queens doing better imitations of Bette Davis doing imitations of Margo Channing with better dialogue than I had.”
Performing in “The King and I,” (she took over the role from Elaine Page in the U.K.) for nearly two years, it became her favorite show. She toured with it for 10 months with 78 people on the road, finding it “sad to finally hang up the hoops. Listening to that overture every night was like a fix of heroin. Rodgers and Hammerstein were great magicians. And so were Rodgers and Hart. That’s what my show is about, Hart, the poet of Broadway.” Stefanie is referring to her debut cabaret show at Feinstein’s November
16 – 20, an evening of lyrics by Lorenz Hart infused with jazzy-bluesy-torch-tinged songs.
Still riding the wave of great reviews received this past summer for her portrayal as the turban clad Norma Desmond in a re-conceptualized version of Sunset Boulevard, the musical, at the Ogunquit Playhouse, she is enthusiastic it may go on tour next year. She describes it as a joy saying she doesn’t particularly like to read reviews because “if you believe the good ones, you have to believe the bad ones.”
As to her liason with William Holden, yes, it was a long time romance until the day he died. Murky ideas about him and his alcoholism are cleared up in her recent book.
Does Powers have a favorite author? She’s enamored with Simon Winchester who wrote “The Man Who Loved China” and “The Professor and the Madman.”
Philosophically, she doesn’t like to look back and hopes she hasn’t repeated mistakes of the past, having learned a little along the way. She prefers a more abstract approach to the usual dogma, considering herself a free thinker. Stefanie had many eastern influences, coming to the conclusion it’s about the process rather than the achievement. It all stems from her natural curiosity as a youngster, attending yoga classes with her mother at the Center of Spiritual Teachings of Paramahansa Yoganada and reading “Siddhartha” and “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” early on.
Yes, Stefanie Powers is a Renaissance Woman who occasionally - - - smokes a cigar!
(www.stefaniepowersonline.com ) Feinsteins at the Regency Reservations: 212 339-4095
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