It hasn't been a good week for glamorous actresses of the movies. I didn't write anything about Raquel Welch because I never met her, didn't see very many of her movies and didn't know any great anecdotes about her. I was going to write a little piece about how I admired how she'd gone from being someone who was hired mainly for her looks to someone who distinguished herself as a good actress on film and especially on stage…but then I saw that everyone else was saying that.
I did however meet Stella Stevens…not for long but on several occasions. We seemed to get invited to a lot of the same parties and we talked enough cumulatively for me to see that she was a genuinely nice person who was proud of her work.
At one event, we were talking about Li'l Abner, the 1959 movie in which she played the lovely-but-sneaky Appassionata Von Climax. Ms. Stevens, unlike most of the cast, had not appeared in the musical when it originally played on Broadway but a fellow who overheard our conversation didn't know that. He politely interrupted to introduce himself and tell her that Abner was the first show he ever saw on Broadway and to gush about how much he'd loved her in it.
An easy mistake. But when I started to correct the guy, she gave me a look that said "Let me handle this" and she thanked the fellow and was so sweet in the way she told him "That was probably Tina Louise or Deedee Wood you saw in that role then" that he wasn't the least embarrassed. I don't think I could have done that.
If you look at her IMDB listing, you may be stunned by how many TV shows and movies Stella Stevens was in. And if you read the New York Times obit, you'll see that she had a lot of struggles, including a certain amount of sexism when she tried to move from in front of the camera to the director's chair. That she overcame as many as she did tells you what kind of lady she was. And she chuckled when I congratulated her on surviving working with Jerry Lewis.