Anne's Lauren Hutton Story

My sister Anne is cultured, elegant, beautiful and brilliant. She's a former ballerina with the Miami Civic Ballet, and an accomplished actress, with a Masters Degree in drama.

In the early 1960s, Anne attended USF. One of her classmates in the Theatre Department was Lauren Hutton. The two became friends. Anne has written this reminiscence of that time, and her friend, which I'm pleased to post here.
-w t

LAUREN HUTTON - EARNESTLY WILDE

"In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing." Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Somewhere deep in the archives of the University of South Florida Theatre Department, circa fall, 1961, are some production photographs of a striking young actress. Her soon-to-be-famous face is framed by a huge hat. Her expression, disdainful and prim, conceals the now familiar gap-toothed grin of countless Revlon promotions. The body that was to launch four decades of magazine covers, is tightly corseted, enveloped in a long gown. But the 18 year-old is still unmistakably alluring, in every way abreast of her time. And at this particular time, she is posing as Gwendolen in a memorable 1960's production of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Wild's haughty 19th century heroine was the only major role she would play at U.S.F. before emerging as a more complex character - herself- on an international stage. Both as Gwendolen, and later as Lauren Hutton, the girl I knew as Mary Laurence Hall was supremely stylish, at once elegant and earthy. Amazingly, she has retained the same qualities that first wowed Tampa audiences nearly forty years ago.

Mary's role (I have never been able to think of her as "Lauren") was an inspired bit of casting - one that seems to have both reflected and affected her life. All the cool sophistication of the character was in her, even as a teenager. She also had an "earnest" sense of drama, both on and offstage, and it was this that drew us together after I entered college in 1962. For four months, until Mary's sudden departure to become a Playboy bunny, we shared acting classes and dorm rooms on the second floor of Alpha Hall. More importantly, we shared feelings, experiences, and confidences, both on and off the stage. In both areas, Mary was a revelation. She had a definite sense of earnestness, through which ran a steak of "wild" unpredictability. Oscar would have loved her.

Like the scandal-plagued Wild, Mary wore clothes wonderfully - even in her college days when she had almost none. Occasionally we double-dated, and it was not good for my self-esteem. Never have I felt uglier than sitting next to Mary, frumpy in my post-fifties crinolines, while she was fabulous in a plain brown pantsuit. This was practically the only clothing she owned, aside from jeans and a few men's shirts. The woman who would later wear Dior, Chanel and Calvin Klein had a threadbare closet and possessed not one stitch of underwear - a deprivation of which she seemed proud.

What she did possess was a unique gangly grace, on daily display in our acting class. Mary really did not need these acting lessons, which were mostly aimed at helping students lose their inhibitions and gain confidence. Mary had no inhibitions whatsoever and seemed born for the spotlight. Her classroom performances bore this out. As students we were given a succession of exercises to prepare, then perform for classmates. With each exercise Mary seemed to reveal more of herself, and to take a sly delight in her ability to casually shock us. Our mid-term exam was to be a pantomimed bath. Mary's "bath" took some forty minutes to perform, and was so fully realized that the rest of us either gawked in fascination or averted our eyes.

And Mary could do more than pantomime; she could improvise dialogue with disarming skill, creating one-liners with a deft sense of comic timing. One unforgettable effort was a "blind date" scene in which her unscripted partner could do little more than stammer uncontrollably. Twenty years later, playing opposite her in American Gigolo, Richard Gere would be similarly inarticulate.

Mary was a great conversationalist offstage as well. And at those times, I had glimpses of a personal life that was not at all comic, but that held poignant realities. One of those realities was that she was poor. She did not explicitly tell me this, but it seemed self-evident from her meager wardrobe and bare dorm room. I knew that her father had died before she had known him, and that she had a mother and younger sisters towards whom she felt extremely protective.

I learned also that she was one-eigth African-American, and consumed by the injustices and pain which would soon ignite the Civil Rights Movement. She loved black artists, notably Billie Holiday, and kept a collection of scratchy old 45's which she played on a small portable record player. To the soulful background of Billie singing "God Bless the Child" we'd sit on the floor of her room and have intense conversations about Art, Life, and Black and White America in the early, segregated sixties.

"Have you heard about the survey of black children?" she asked one day. "They show black kids a white doll and a black doll, and the black kids say that the white doll is 'good' and the black doll is 'bad.' Kids are brainwashed to think that way." Somehow I could not imagine Mary being brainwashed, much less as a child who played with dolls. She seemed such a very old soul at age 18. Later I was to learn some of the reasons why.

In between our intense conversations, there were Portents of Things to Come. With typical individuality, Mary had stopped dating people her chronological age and was going out with a 40-sometihnig disc jockey who took her on fishing trips. After one trip she showed me some pictures taken by "Pat." I was stunned. In person Mary was attractive; in photographs she was glorious.

One image in particular sticks in the mid: Mary in a white shirt holding a frying pan filled with the day's catch. Her arms were outstretched and her expression was like Greta Garbo in Queen Christina. As I looked at it, a small voice inside told me that Mary would some day have much bigger fish to fry.

Meanwhile, we continued preparing exercises for acting class. Mary performed an assigned emotional recall. In semi-darkness with a single shaft of light on her face, Mary sat rigid, alone in a chair onstage, both hands clutching the seat. Her back was hunched, her eyes huge and luminous. She remained immobilized for many minutes looking truly terrified. The night after that performance we had another all-nighter in her room. Mary seemed to need to talk. "Could you tell that I was scared?" she asked. She then told me of the childhood memory she'd used - a traumatic betrayal in a place where she should have felt safest.

In the Age of Oprah, this has been an oft-repeated story with individual variations. In the early, inhibited sixties, however, it was truly shocking. I felt heartbroken for Mary. I wanted to give her something, and offered a gift which in hindsight was oddly prophetic - a gold compact containing Revlon powder. The next morning there was a knock on my door and when I opened it, there stood Mary wearing only the oversized man's shirt she used as a kind of bathrobe. Wordlessly she held out to me her favorite LP - a Judy Garland album entitled "Alone." It remained a treasured possession of mine for many years, until lost in a shipment when I moved overseas.

Several days later, Mary told me that her family was coming to see her. I did not meet them, but caught a glimpse of her mother and one of her sisters from my dorm window. Mary's mother was tall, thin, and fragile-looiking. She seemed to totter unsteadily on platform shoes that were too high, her arms wrapped firmly around Mary and another daughter. The trio formed a vulnerable and conspicuous picture as they made their way across what was then a small, barren campus. I like to think that Mary's subsequent fame gave them all great security.

When the trimester ended shortly afterward, Mary and I headed in opposite directions - permanently. I went north to become a camp counselor for a summer. Mary went to the Bahamas and began to be famous. She returned only once for a brief but memorable visit. One September afternoon I was seated in the theatre lobby at USF, studying my lines as Ophelia in Hamlet. In swept a vision in clouds of aqua chiffon. It was Mary in a dress - the first I'd ever seen her wear. She was animated, smiling, and in a hurry. This was clearly just a side trip on the way to some place more important. In front of our shy scenic designer, she threw up her skirt to reveal that she now wore underwear - the briefest of bikini pants. He looked shell-shocked and yelled, "Mary, put your dress down!" She laughed, complied, and vanished. I never saw her - at least in person - again.

In subsequent months, lurid whispers about Mary floated around the theatre department - mainly that she had made a Faustian bargain somewhat like another Oscar Wild character - Dorian Gray, the beautiful socialite who sold his soul for eternal youth. There were rumors that Mary was involved with strange people, going strange places, writing strange letters, and even drawing strange pictures. I never believed any of this. The Mary I knew was solidly grounded in reality. Somehow, her childhood pain had been a gift of liberation. She also had a shrewd sense of boundaries and just how far to go.

I could imagine her starting some of these stories. And indeed, they were colorful enough to finally make international news - not headlines exactly, but brief, intriguing gossip items. One story became infamous - her reply to a question about how she got a $200,000 contract. "I f---ed around," she said. I didn't believe that either.

I kept up with Mary's publicity while living in what became in 1971, my homeland - New Zealand. I lived there as a housewife and sometime drama coach during the height of Mary's modeling and acting career. Her image, if not her physical presence, had followed me to a remote rural area in the South Pacific, as it would follow me back to Florida many years later.

Usually Mary's image appeared on days when I felt dowdiest. And it was hard not to feel dowdy in 1970's New Zealand, where style was not exactly a priority. I saw lots of Mary's pictures at my family doctor's office. Seated between two small runny-nosed children, I would open a magazine - usually The New Zealand Women's Weekly. A radiant goddess would appear in the centerfold, usually with the words "Revlon" or "Ultima" nearby. Always it was Mary, now fully reincarnated as Lauren Hutton. She looked impossibly, perfectly gorgeous. I heartily hated her guts. Then, with a pang, I would remember the solitary figure onstage of many years past.

Mary not only changed her name and lifestyle, at times she publicly reinvented parts of her past. One evening while sitting up with a sick child in Matamata, New Zealand, I tuned in to Entertainment Tonight and watched an interview with Mary, A.K.A. Lauren. To my astonishment she insisted she had never had an acting class. "I never took a class in my life," she stated earnestly. "I though that stuff was a lot of hooey." "Oh Mary," I thought, "How could you? We had a fine teacher." (Jack Clay, professor at U.S. F. from 1961 - 1966, now a professional actor in Seattle).

Over the next decade, the 80s, Mary's acting career seemed to stall, despite her undeniable talent. I sensed a possible reason. Years before, she and I leaned that acting is, in part, recalling personal experience. She had once shared hers, truthfully but very painfully. Maybe she had found it easer to remain, like Gwendolen, focused mainly on style and appearance. And for Mary, style has truly been "the vital thing", the source of a durability rivaling even the ageless Dorian Gray. Oscar Wild's description of the character also fits Mary today: "Wonderful, with frank, dark eyes and crisp golden hair... one trusts (her) at once." Indeed. For Mary has built yet another career on making endorsements. There really is "something about Mary" which gets us to buy Revlon, Slimfast, and goodies at Burdines. She looks and sounds sublimely, earnestly, All-American.

Over the year, I have come to feel almost as close to Mary's image as I once felt to her. There is a comforting quality in the soothing, husky voice and coaxing smile. Mary has become a soft, commercial background to the different stages of my life.

I look forward, in due time, to seeing Mary become a prototype of geriatric glamour, literally "pushing" the best walkers and wheelchairs at our baby-boom generation. I am sure that she will be stylish and picture-perfect. I know she will be earnest.

-ANNE H.