Screenland Plus TV-Land (Jul 1959 - May 1960)

TUESDAY WELD continued She may be only 15, but the world of adolescence is as far removed from Tuesday as kindergarten is from most teenage girls cate with a pleasant dinner at one of Hollywood's famed eating places. Lest anyone do Tuesday a disservice and get the notion that she puts herself in the custody of older men before discovering they are absolutely harmless, it should be pointed out that we had met and conversed on several previous occasions, one of them under the appraising eye of her mother. We made our plans over the phone, and when I suggested dinner at Frank Sinatra's Hollywood stamping grounds, the Villa Capri, Tuesday squealed approval in a captivating regression of teenage exuberance. "Then I'll meet you at seven," she confirmed the arrangements, "and ask for your table!" "Right," I said. "Ohh — how elegant!" she exclaimed. All through the Italian feast — antipasto, steak and peppers, and three desserts — other diners kept staring at our table and muttering about my lovely golden-haired, hazel-eyed TUESDAY'S eating habits are erratic. She may diet for days on end, then do a complete tarn about and devour everything in sight. 44 companion, "What's a pretty young chick like her doing with an old geezer like that?" Tuesday had come to Hollywood after modeling and understudying the two ingenue leads in "Dark At The Top Of The Stairs" on Broadway, a number of attention compelling TV performances, and a nine-day movie shot in the Bronx with Teddy Randazzo under the title of "Rock, Rock, Rock." In less than a year, her impact was beginning to be felt with undeniable effect in the movie colony. She registered a solid hit as Comfort Goodpasture, the sexy teenager in 20th's "Rally Round The Flag, Boys," then played Danny Kaye's polio stricken daughter, in "The Five Pennies" at Paramount, only to be commandeered back to 20th CenturyFox where she was signed to co-star with Dwayne, Hickman in the forthcoming TV series, "The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis." In addition, she played Rick Nelson's girl friend in two upcoming episodes of "The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet." In what free time she has left, she attends the Hollywood Professional School and finds herself on a dizzy whirl of interviews with independent and studio producers clamorously bidding for her services. After dinner and a nice, long chat, I dropped her off at the home she shares with her attractive, youthful brunette mother, Mrs. Aileen Weld, in Hollywood Hills, overlooking Sunset Strip. Tuesday, a very composed young lady, extended a hand encased in a white knit glove, and said, as if she were Greta Garbo, "Thank you for a lovely evening." It may be a contradiction in terms to call Tuesday Weld a teenage sophisticate, but that's what she is — a living contradiction in terms. That well may hold the secret to her thoroughly devastating charms. She has managed to attain an effortless, authentic air of worldliness without giving up or apologizing for a frequently pixie set of teenage mannerisms and enthusiasms. Behind the innocent peaches-and-cream doll face is a remarkably perceptive mind that whizzes along at 100 miles an hour. Her engaging mixture of ingenuousness and sophistry is apparent in almost everything Tuesday does — whether it's her compelling command of the English language, her compulsive food binges and her impulsive diets, her attitude toward stardom, or the way she feels about being interviewed. People — young or old — who use the word "climactic" correctly are not too often encountered, but Tuesday is one of them. She has an extensive vocabulary that enables her to hold her own with the most articulate of adults. Yet this doesn't prevent her from punctuating her remarks, from time to time, with hilarious malapropisms. For example, she refers to actor Mark Damon, who is one of her informal language mentors, as "my vocabular friend." Recently, she ate nothing but vegetables for three days and boasted, "I was on a vegetation diet!" She praised Dennis Hopper, a favorite among her older boy friends, for his active mind with the comment, "I think he's got a dilating brain." She is as captivating in her lapses as she is in her eloquence, because she is not a pretentious conversationalist — although she manages to plumb some mighty deep depths. "I don't feel that my vocabulary is exceptional at all," she ! protests with no evidence of compliment-fishing. "I'm always trying to improve it. I have some friends who are very intellectual and so forth, and I try out all my new words on • them. If I don't pronounce them correctly, they tell me how | to pronounce them. They're good enough friends to tell me." L continued on page 70 i