Carol White was tired. She had a terrible cold, tears ran from her alpine-green eyes every time she sneezed, and she’d had a rough day. The people at the Johnny Carson Show had shut her in a smoky room for half an hour and told her she could be on their sacred cameras if she’d go home and think up five cockney jokes and learn five cockney songs, then canceled her appearance in favor of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (“Who’s he?” she asked wearily). Even the press agent had doubts, something press agents are not paid to have. “If only she were not so shy, if only she were a bit more Auntie Mame, she’d be easier to sell.”
But Carol White was a brave soldier. She came to town to plug Poor Cow with her husband and two children, and people liked her anyway. She stood in the receiving line at Le Pavillon and shook hands with people she would never see again. She raced in and out of limousines every ten minutes, tried to be entertaining talking to Virginia Graham and “two women whose names I can’t remember” on “Girl Talk,” smiled wanly when the reporters asked her how it felt to be the new Julie Christie, and even saw her name on a movie marquee on Broadway from a taxicab window.
“I’d much rather be in bed with a good book,” she sighed in her suite at the Sherry-Netherland. The nanny was chasing her sons—Sean and Stephen—around the room in pajamas and commando helmets bought at F.A.O. Schwartz by their father, Michael King, a singer with the British pop group, the King Brothers. “Michael has seen more of New York than I have. He’s been to the zoo.”
She sipped soda water. She pulled off her vinyl boots from Countdown and rubbed her sore feet. She grinned a lot and blushed a bright stop-light red. “I don’t know what people expect me to be like. They all want me to be a sex symbol. I’ve always been shy and terrified of everybody. If all of this crumbled tomorrow, I’d just go home to my kids.”
“It used to be really awful,” added Michael, taking off his dark boutique glasses and tugging itchily at his turtle-neck sweater. “Always she’s had a terrible inferiority complex about acting, her looks, her cockney accent, everything. A year ago you would have met a different person. She never opened her mouth. It was becoming a neurosis for her, her shyness. She was driving me crazy!”
Poor Cow helped. “The director, Ken Loach, had worked with me before, so I trusted him,” says Carol. “Everyone thinks I was discovered by Joe Janni, who discovered Julie Christie in Darling, but Ken is really the one. He made the film in a semi-documentary style with a very loose screenplay and absolutely no camera directions. We just talked out each scene before we shot it, then we improvised. It was a family affair. Nell Dunn, who wrote both the novel and screenplay, was an old friend, I had once had a romance with Terence Stamp—I’ve know him since I was 16—and the little boy who played my child at the age of one and a half was really my nephew Simon. Simon hated Terry and every time Terry had to come near us, Simon would cry. Remember the scene at the waterfall? We had to add music to cover up Simon’s crying. Then when the child grew to the age of three, we used my own son, Stevie.”
“Did Stevie like being an actor?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Ask him.”
“Huh?” said Stevie, age 3.
“The man wants to know if you liked being an actor.”
“Huh?”
“I never act,” volunteered Sean, age 4. They were both sent packing.
“The movie is a true story,” said Carol. “Nell Dunn wrote it about a real girl she met in the slums. Gosh, I hope her husband in prison hasn’t seen it, because she’ll really get it. I guess he has, though. Do they show movies in prisons? We wanted to show what can happen to a girl in the slums. These people really exist. They don’t ask for much in life, but their own lack of knowledge about life and their own ignorance about how to get a job and get out of their environment does them in. Even if you’re pretty, your accent loses you the job, and you fall back on the easy way out—stealing or nude modeling or hitting the streets. I could’ve ended up like that. I was born in a terrible slum and went to an ordinary council school which has since been torn down. But I was lucky. My father was a fairly successful scrap metal merchant who sent me to a stage school when I was 11. The school had an agency that sent me out on acting jobs and the first week I was there I got a job in a children’s circus film that paid for all my school fees. I stayed until I was 16, then got a big break in a Peter Sellers film called Never Let Go. I made 20 pounds a week (under $60) and I thought I was rich. But I always lived at home. I still go home every Sunday for lunch. Now all my childhood friends look on me as the one who made it. They ended up laborers and dustmen. They never got out. But I’ve never been knocked out by show business. I’m just not career-mad. I’m only happy when I have my old friends around me and don’t have to act like an actress.”
She hated studying. Peter Sellers told her the only way to learn was to watch other actors and she did. Then the British film industry entered its war-film phase and there was nothing left for girls to play but “dull, very stupid blondes in skin-tight dresses and bouffant hairdos in awful, second-feature films. I did four of those and all I did was wiggle across the screen, and then it hit me: what was I doing? I wasn’t getting any satisfaction, so I quit.”
Her boyfriend Terence Stamp introduced her to Lionel Bart, Bart introduced her to Michael King at a party, and three months later they were married. They lived in South Kensington near the West London Air Terminal and she gave up every hope for a career. “We moved back to Hammersmith, where I was born, and I did my clothes at the wishy-washy just like all the other mums, and was quite content to settle down. Everybody forgot all about Carol White and I was terribly, terribly happy.”
Then, when the kids entered nursery school, she got bored. “I went to 20 auditions, just to occupy my mind, then I met Ken Loach, who was casting a TV play called Up the Junction, written by Nell Dunn, a rich heiress who gave up her posh town house in Chelsea and moved to a tiny flat in a slum near Battersea. She wrote up her experiences there and they wanted a girl to play it. So Ken gave me the script and said, ‘Just improvise. Pretend you’ve just come out of a public house drunk and you see your husband across the street and he calls you a slut and a whore.’ We ended up having a terrible fight and I screamed some dirty cockney words at him and he said, ‘That’s it, you’ve got the part.’”
The TV show caused a furor and Carol became a star in London. Now with Poor Cow she’s an international star. “We couldn’t get it distributed without someone who was already a name in America, though, so Terry said he’d do it. We all worked incredible hours living in a slum environment for 10 weeks without a single day off for practically no money. Everything was spontaneous, nothing was planned. We’d go around shooting people on the street and in pubs, but because of the unions we had to scrap most of the good stuff and use actors in all the speaking parts. But we sort of made up the scenes as we went along. The interview at the end was completely improvised. And the voyeur scene! I’d been dreading that from the first day. So Ken took me down to this club where I watched this hard French piece pulling off her clothes and I was so embarrassed I walked out. Ken said I could wear a negligee, but when I got into the scene something remarkable happened. I was so involved that I started exposing myself all over and I just didn’t care. I peeled everything off and actually enjoyed it and every time I laughed out of embarrassment Ken would just leave in all the laughs and blushes. He shoots as much film as he’s got in the camera, without ever stopping, and I knew if I just stood there and said, ‘I can’t do it,’ he’d leave that in the film anyway, so I just did it. And I think we ended up with a comment on what it’s like to be a young person with no social background and no chance. I’ve noticed it a lot among the young lower-class kids in England. They only want something to eat, someone to love them and a room to live in. They say ‘What the hell?’ to everything else because the only jobs offered to poor cockney kids anyway are in shops or as laborers. So they rebel. It’s easier for the guys from the lower classes to go out and rob some old lady than walk into the Labor Exchange and get some 9-to-5 job that will drive them around the bend. Some of them are offered help, but they don’t trust anyone. They’ve had their ears boxed so long they just don’t care any more.”
Carol has ears, pretty and soft as camellia petals. Nobody is boxing them. She has a five-film contract with Joe Janni, another contract with Universal, and just completed a role in John Frankenheimer’s new film, The Fixer. As the wife of Alan Bates, a Russian Jew imprisoned for the ritual murder of a child, she has to age from a girl of 17 to a tired, older woman. “I had to cry a lot, so I made myself think of a sad experience. It always works.” Which one? “Well, we took the train from London and the Communists threw us off because Michael had no visa. We were then arrested by the Hungarian border police and all the time I kept saying ‘We have to be in Budapest at 6 a.m. to make a movie. Mooo-vie. MGM. Understand?’ And they kept saying ‘MG-who?’ and Michael would roar like the MGM lion and they thought we were loonies. They sent us all the way back to Vienna and we sat in the railroad station on top of our luggage in the rain and finally someone said, ‘You can go back to the border by taxi and get a visa there.’ So then we set out trying to explain in bad cockney French that we needed a taxi to take us 150 miles to Budapest and finally some journalists told us they’d take us in a Volkswagen, so we piled all our luggage on top of the Volkswagen and then they couldn’t get their visas, so we hitched a ride with an old man who stopped every 20 miles and bought triple gins and then we hit a heavy fog and had to open all the doors to watch the white line down the center of the road just to see which direction we were heading, and finally we arrived at the hotel in Budapest at 3 a.m. and I had to shoot at six, so when you see all the tears just remember they were easy.”
Carol blew her nose. “I don’t see how you people breathe in New York. I think I’ll just go to bed, and watch the telly. I don’t like all this dressing up anyway. In London you can wear dirty blue jeans everywhere. Why, Michael can’t even get into a restaurant here without a tie!”
Carol lives right across the Putney Bridge now, about 10 minutes from all the action on King’s Road. She hangs out at all the in spots, like Alvaro’s and Brown’s Boutique, where nobody bothers her but the creeps. “A man followed me around last week for three hours and when I got back to me car the keys had been stolen. That frightens me.”
“He probably thought you were Julie Christie, luv,” said Michael.
Carol shook her fist. “Look. About Julie Christie. That doesn’t worry me at all. In fact, I hear the only one worried is Julie Christie. I mean, imagine how awful it must be for her to go around hearing about me, hearing all this talk about a ‘new Julie Christie.’ I mean, it must make her feel like the old Julie Christie.” She sneezed, swallowed an aspirin, and blew her pretty pink nose into a pretty pink Kleenex. She looked glorious. Poor Julie Christie. She’s going to be hearing a lot more.