Life’s a Scream

The rain was so intense that I couldn’t see my hand six inches away from my face. I was staying on a houseboat with nothing for company but creepy crawlies and the fear of headhunters, who I’d been told lived in the nearby mountains. I’d quickly asked for some bodyguards for my houseboat and kicked myself for insisting on special quarters when I could have stayed with the rest of the cast and crew in tents.

We’d spent a couple of weeks in Manila, where I’d been able to ring Steffanie and have long chats. I had trained her well to cope with our separations. She knew I had to provide for us and she was always glad when I landed a job but she made certain I knew that she missed me. I would give her things to accomplish while I was away and, sure enough, the minute I returned, out came the books or drawings, depicting her mother in the funniest shapes and forms, doing what she went away to do.

Film-making is hard work and you don’t want to be preoccupied with small details and worries. On every film I’ve worked on someone has looked after me and made life tolerable. On The Omegans I had a Filipino dresser, Cabrera, who was prepared for everything. During filming I had to lie in the Pagsanhan river for hours, day after day, covered in leeches. Cabrera would put me in the swimming pool at the end of the day and with a lighted cigarette burn them off me. One couldn’t be prissy or he couldn’t do his job.

Once the film was wrapped, all I wanted was a quick flight back to Spain to be with Steffi. I had to stop over in Hong Kong, where I decided to go for a walk to see something of the fabled city. Flush with my film pay I decided to buy myself a piece of jewellery to commemorate the journey and picked out a beautiful jade ring. The jeweller warned me against buying it, saying it was bad luck to buy jade for yourself but I gave him a gentle raspberry and wore it from the shop.

The next morning I began to wonder if the old man hadn’t been right. Just before I left I checked my belongings, only to discover that my travellers’ cheques were missing. I had left them in my room when I’d gone out the previous evening. I notified the management (who informed the police) and the issuing bank and, in a decidedly bad mood, took the hotel limo to the airport. Half-way there I discovered I had left my jade ring at the hotel. I told the driver to check in my luggage and caught a taxi back.

Having retrieved my ring from where I’d left it on the bathroom shelf, I hailed another taxi but the traffic was murder and, to my horror and frustration, my plane left without me – but with my luggage. Politely, the airline supervisor told me that it would be waiting for me at Tokyo airport, my next stop-over. It was hours before the next flight and I kicked my heels around the airport, particularly irritated because Toshiro Mifune, Japan’s superstar in Kurosawa’s hit movies, whom Willy had introduced me to in Manila, had promised to pick me up at Tokyo airport and take me to dinner. I wished I’d just left the bloody jade ring and caught my scheduled flight.

When I landed in Tokyo I enquired about my luggage, only to be told that the flight that had left without me had not yet arrived and was believed to have disappeared over the Mongolian mountains. It was never to be heard of again. If I hadn’t gone back for the jade ring I would have disappeared with it. The engraving on my ring was ‘Be Lucky’. When Steffanie turned eighteen I gave it to her so that she should be as lucky as I was that day in Hong Kong.

On top of everything else, Mifune was not there to meet me. He had been told that the plane was missing and decided I was a goner. I got on the phone to him and told him that reports of my death had been grossly exaggerated and that I wasn’t due out until the morning. He came and picked me up, and we went out on the town. He was incredible. Everywhere we went he was treated like royalty. I was a bit miffed. I got elbowed aside in the fans’ eagerness to get at the great Japanese star. Early next morning he took me back to the airport. We promised to keep in touch.

I was aching to get home, nearly physically sick with longing. When I arrived in Madrid, I was almost glad I had lost my luggage. There was nothing to stop me rushing straight through customs. Steffanie was standing with Maria at the barrier, grinning and waving her favourite teddy bear at me. Like a fool I burst into tears, grabbed her and sobbed down her neck. She let me get over the worst of it and then, practically, suggested we all had a Coca-Cola. She had just discovered Coke and thought it was the answer to any problem. I don’t think she realised why I was weeping and couldn’t stop. I’m a very lucky old bat!

Marc Lawrence, who had stayed in Spain, introduced me to Milo Frank, who worked for Cinerama. They were starting production on Krakatoa – East of Java with Diane Baker, Brian Keith, Rossano Brazzi and Maximilian Schell. I hoped Milo might be able to offer me something on the film but since they already had Barbara Werle, there was no way they could work another blonde white woman into the script at that late stage. In spite of this Milo and I became staunch friends. He kept telling me that I should move to Hollywood but I prevaricated, playing with Steffi, making up for lost times.

I sobbed all the way to the States. Everything I did seemed to take me away from Steffanie, but I couldn’t possibly take her with me until I had sorted out what I was going to do. I took a short-term lease on a flat in 2000 Doheny Drive, just a stone’s throw from Sunset Boulevard and the Spaghetti House where I had so recently been a cook. I’m afraid I exaggerated my fortune outrageously there, but nobody seemed to mind. I just prayed that I could get something set up very soon and not have to face the humiliation of begging for my old job back.

One night I dreamed that Steffanie had fallen down the elevator shaft. The dream was so vivid I couldn’t ignore it. Half out of my mind, I rang the telephone operator and demanded to be put through to Madrid immediately. She chewed her gum and told me there was a six-hour delay. I became so hysterical the operator switched me through to the supervisor to whom I recounted my dream. She was probably into dreams for, having tried to reassure me that it was all going to turn out for the best because dreams always worked in opposites, she agreed to have my call prioritised. It still took nearly half an hour and by that time I was fit to be tied.

When the telephone finally rang I knocked it to the floor in my eagerness to pick it up. For a moment I thought I’d broken it but then I heard Steffanie’s voice. She’d just got back from play school. I dread to think of the state I would have been in if nobody had answered the phone. Hearing Steffi’s voice patched me together instantly. I might be an absent parent but I was determined not to unload my guilt on my baby. I made out I had just phoned in the normal way to see how she was and what she was doing. She asked me when I was coming home and I told her that I’d just found a new job and when I was paid I would send for her and Maria. She took it all in her stride and passed me on to Maria, whom I begged to get a gate installed across the kitchen window that opened into the elevator shaft so that Steffanie couldn’t possibly fall out. I didn’t tell her why but she promised to have it done immediately. When I finally hung up the New York supervisor rang and said, ‘A’right there, sugar?’ What a fantastic woman! I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t been able to hear my baby’s voice right away.

The job I had landed was a TV series called Dundee & the Culhane with John Mills. I played the ‘perk’ for a travelling judge in the Old West with a gun-slinger as bodyguard. Ralph Meeker was the local star. It was great working with two old pros like that. I love Westerns and this one was tremendous fun. Between shots I learned to play poker for sunflower seeds. Or I thought I learned to play poker. I was to find out very soon that playing for sunflower seeds is a whole lot different from putting your hard-earned cash on the line.

I was worried by the level of violence in LA. Every day the papers were full of reports of muggings and shootings. Everyone seemed to carry a gun and when one of the continuity girls on Dundee was attacked with a knife as she parked her car one night at the supermarket, I decided it was time to learn to protect myself. I had a friend who was a stuntman-cum-actor and he was studying karate at the great Nishijama dojo (gym) in Hollywood. I decided to enrol.

Karate was extremely good for me, for my peace of mind especially, and it was an excellent way to while away the boring lonely days when I wasn’t working. As usual I went OTT. Every moment I could spare I was working out and doing katas, which are a series of choreographed stances and movements laid down by Funigushi, founding father of Shotokan karate. I put so much effort into it that I was graded in no time.

Nishijama’s dojo was an ‘in’ club, frequented by the stars. Even the King, Elvis Presley, was a regular visitor. Like everyone else I was in awe of him and worked my butt off to get noticed. Elvis would arrive with a group of mates, most of whom seemed to be highly proficient in karate. He would work out, bid an expansive farewell and leave. I tried to persuade Nishijama to introduce me to him but he wasn’t keen as he recognised that one of the reasons Elvis came to the dojo was to get away from people pestering him and to relax. I was almost at the point of walking up to him and saying ‘Hi, I’m Ingrid. Fly me!’ when Nishijama asked me to do a kata with Elvis. I almost fainted. Elvis was very good; I was awful. Still, he didn’t seem to be too upset and I worked out with him on a few other occasions. He was a black belt at this stage and I a brown. On each kata I wanted desperately to make an impression and pushed hard, until one day I went too far. Elvis wasn’t expecting it and his counter was more forceful than I’d anticipated. He caught me flush on the breast. He could see he had hurt me and stopped immediately. He apologised and I said it was all right – ‘What’s a poke in the boobs between superstars?’ Sensei Nishijama instructed us to carry on. I guessed that discipline was everything and you didn’t stop a kata because some broad with ideas above her station got her tits in the way. I think Elvis was embarrassed. Then I got another job and didn’t go to the dojo for a while. I never met Elvis there again. It was such a shame because he was very good. I enjoyed his stage performances a lot after that because he used the karate movements of the katas in his act. I watched him in action in Las Vegas at one of his great shows. He asked me to stand up and announced that he would sing ‘Love Me Tender’ to Ingrid Pitt – which I thought was out of this world . . .

My next job was in Ironside. I was playing an escaping Soviet Olympic swimmer and the day hadn’t started well. Standing around in a swim-suit waiting to do my water nymph bit for the cameras hadn’t improved either my temper or my health. I wanted my bed, a superheated water bottle and a balloon of brandy. Just as I was about to make my wish come true and have a really early night the telephone rang. It was Ralph Meeker. I hadn’t seen him since finishing Dundee & the Culhane about a month earlier. During the series we had become quite friendly. He now told me about a poker game that was going on at the house of the legendary Hollywood stunt co-ordinator Yakima Canutt. He wanted to take me along. Yakima was particularly famous for the bench-mark super-stunt with John Wayne in John Ford’s Stagecoach, the one that Harrison Ford reprised in Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when he went under the lorry and came up over the back. The last thing I wanted was to go out and be sociable but I was still at the stage when I believed that if you stuck close to the successful some of the gilt would rub off, so I let Ralphie persuade me and was waiting on the stoop when he arrived.

Yak welcomed us casually and led us through to his conservatory. Several men in various stages of bogus Western gear were sprawled on chairs already playing cards. They rose reluctantly to their feet and made patronising sounds in my direction, then switched the big welcome to Ralphie and did cowboy things, which were meant to signify that he was a real, paid-up Yahoo. I wasn’t paying much attention, however. I was still trying to get my mind around the fact that I had just shaken hands with one of my all-time favourite film stars, John Wayne.

The boys settled down in their seats and made room for Ralph, who seemed to have forgotten me. I was feeling awful. Not only did I have the flu, I was being overlooked. I found myself relegated to the sideboard to pour drinks, while the Duke exacerbated my irritation by referring to me as ‘little lady’. I wasn’t anyone’s ‘little lady’ and I was grumpy enough to want to prove it. So, after serving drinks for the umpteenth time, I slumped into a vacant chair next to Yakima and demanded in. They were all a little surprised, but then so was I. The only poker I’d played had been on the set of Dundee while we were waiting to be called and Ralph had been bored enough to teach me the rudiments of the game. As I waited for my cards I could see that the Duke wasn’t particularly happy about the ‘little lady’ not knowing her place and guessed that Ralph might be in for a man-to-man later.

We were playing for table stakes and I didn’t want it to appear as if I were on the breadline so every dollar I had was in front of me. But not for long. I tried desperately to remember what Ralph had told me about not ‘chasing bullets’ or ‘filling holes’ but still I lost. All the pressure wasn’t doing my headache any favours and it had shifted gear to migraine. I felt sick and had difficulty seeing the cards.

While Ralph and the other men ignored me, Yak made sympathetic sounds as I slid towards bankruptcy. After a while he excused himself and went out to water the sage bush. When he returned I was sitting with a pair of fours and another in the hole. Yak stopped behind my chair and gave me an encouraging nod as two other players jacked in their hands, warned off by my pair. Only the Duke was left in and he was using phrases he had picked up from his films, like ‘I guess I’m just gonna have to go with that, little lady’ and ‘Just what have you got hiding in there, little lady?’ Truth was, I didn’t know. What I did know was that I was down to my last couple of dollars and if Big John didn’t see me I was finished. Yak gave me an understanding smile and made a noisy performance of sitting back in his seat. Big John looked at him, surprised that he was being so clumsy. Yak pointedly picked up his chips and dropped them on to the table, then looked at my pathetic little remnant of a week’s wage. The Duke got the message, gave me a lopsided smile and drawled, ‘I guess you got me dead to rights there, ma’am’ and tossed his cards on to the table. I beamed. In one game I’d gone from ‘little lady’ to ‘ma’am’.

As Yakima stood with me in his hall making polite one-sided conversation, he suddenly appeared to have a brainwave. ‘Get in touch with Brain Hutton. He’s doing a film in Austria and there’s a great part for you in it.’ He told me to ring Hutton at MGM and to use his name as a reference. I was grateful. I needed to get into a proper film. The taxi pulled up at the door just as the Duke came into the hall. He feigned surprise to see me leaving but I could see he was relieved. He shook my hand once more, gave one of his well-practised smiles and opened the door for me. ‘Real nice meeting you. I hope Hollywood’s good for you, kid,’ he said, then went back to the boys.