{"id":10706,"date":"2023-03-04T18:20:45","date_gmt":"2023-03-04T18:20:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10706"},"modified":"2023-03-15T14:08:24","modified_gmt":"2023-03-15T14:08:24","slug":"kay-lenz-on-macho-stars-nudity-and-her-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10706","title":{"rendered":"Kay Lenz on macho stars, nudity and her marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 American actress Kay Lenz, who turns 70 today, was one of my favourite people when I began visiting Hollywood in the late Seventies.\u00a0 <\/span>I first met her at midnight in a bowling alley on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. I was with my pals, showbiz photographer Maureen Donaldson and \u2018Battlestar Galactica\u2019 star Annie Lockhart. Kay was with her then husband, a chap named David Cassidy. The four of them were good friends and I was asked to tag along.<\/p>\n

Kay\u2019s fame was on the rise thanks to the hit TV miniseries based on Irwin Shaw\u2019s novel \u2018Rich Man, Poor Man\u2019 while Cassidy\u2019s stardom had waned since he was an international sex symbol on \u2018The Partridge Family\u2019.\u00a0 <\/span>He appeared relaxed about it and they were good company. She was such fun that I invited her to lunch for an interview and her husband didn\u2019t appear to mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no competition between us,\u2019 she told me. \u2018He was so successful and he\u2019s totally behind me. He really wants me to do well.\u2019<\/p>\n

Over a leisurely lunch in Hernando\u2019s Hideaway in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, she talked my ear off delightfully about working with big stars such as Clint Eastwood, William Holden, Lee Marvin and Oliver Reed and her marriage to a teen idol.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Born in the Valley to parents in the entertainment business, she had started screen work at a young age and was only 19 when Eastwood cast her in his 1973 picture \u2018Breezy\u2019 (photo above), his third outing behind the camera and the first in which he did not star.\u00a0 <\/span>The story of a disillusioned middle-aged man whose jaded life is given new spark by a free-spirited teenaged girl, it was what Hollywood used coyly to call a \u2018May-December\u2019 romance. Audrey Hepburn made a bunch of them.<\/p>\n

From the \u2018me too\u2019 pespective now, the whole enterprise doesn\u2019t bear scrutiny as not only was the leading actor, William Holden, more than thirty years older than Lenz but there was something else.<\/p>\n

\u2018When I told my parents about the nude scenes,\u2019 she said, \u2018I thought my father would fly off the handle but it was my mother.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Looking back five years later, Lenz said, \u2018I was spoiled on my first big film. Clint was kind and sweet and William Holden (left and below) was wonderful. Not everyone in his position, someone who\u2019s been around a long time, is like that. I didn\u2019t know what I was doing and instead of getting upset with me or griping or bitching, he took the time to show me how to hit my mark without looking for it. Any young person I work with, I\u2019ll do the same for them. I\u2019ll never forget it.\u2019<\/p>\n

Eastwood closed the set for the nude scenes and Lenz said everyone was always very considerate of her feelings. \u2018I was really nervous,\u2019 she admitted, but Holden assured her he\u2019d done it a million times. \u2018I thought, if he can take his clothes off then so can I. He never took his eyes off my eyes, not once. When Clint said cut, Holden held onto me until someone came with a robe.\u2019<\/p>\n

Eastwood showed her the scenes and said if she didn\u2019t like them, he wouldn\u2019t use them.\u00a0 <\/span>\u2018The DP had told me how he was lighting them,’ Kay said, ‘and they were so soft and beautiful that I did not object.\u2019<\/p>\n

Also, Eastwood gave Lenz kill rights on the stills. \u2019I didn\u2019t know to ask for that,\u2019 she confessed. \u2018Playboy called and wanted to do a layout. It was flattering but I couldn\u2019t do it. It\u2019s not what I was trying to sell or the movie was trying to sell.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Playboy doubled the money and said she could take the photos and examine them on an expensive two-week vacation but Lenz said no: \u2018I want to work for the rest of my life. Even after \u201cBreezy\u201d, I was never hired for a sexpot role. I\u2019d rather not work for a year.\u2019 Eastwood did her another favour. The first key-art posters for the film had only William Holden\u2019s name above the title but the director decided tthat since Kay Lenz had the title role her name should be above the title too.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then came \u2018The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday\u2019, a riotous western with Lee Marvin, Robert Culp and Oliver Reed shot on location in Durango, Mexico.<\/p>\n

\u2018That was a trip,\u2019 Lenz said. \u2018I heard such stories about Marvin and Reed (below), the director Don Taylor had a legend of his own, Strother Martin even. All these guys were alcoholics and very macho men. I was scared to death. You can\u2019t hang with Lee Marvin and Oliver Reed unless you want to get into a big drinking contest. Robert Culp had his wife there so he kept to himself. They had a house but it was difficult in Durango since Sam Peckinpah filmed \u201cThe Wild Bunch\u201d there. He rented all these beautiful houses and threw parties with donkeys, cows and sheep. The houses were always destroyed so it was hard to rent homes because of Peckinpah\u2019s reputation and here come Oliver Reed and Lee Marvin. Lee stayed in the Peckinpah suite in the hotel and we ate in the restaurant there most of the time.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

She said it was very hard for her the first three weeks as she was the only girl there.\u00a0\u2018They all talked about the boy\u2019s club. I went, aargh! Shit, what am I going to do here for two months, I can\u2019t live like this. Then, thank God, Elizabeth Ashley got there. Elizabeth gets there and it\u2019s like, what\u2019s this boy\u2019s club shit? Screw you, we\u2019ll have a club of our own. She took me under her wing. I\u2019ll never forget her for it, I love her.\u2019<\/p>\n

Of her whirlwind marriage to David Cassidy (pictured below), Lenz said, \u2018I swore I would never marry an actor and he said the same but he hadn\u2019t been working for a while and that was good. I think of him as an actor but he had been so successful and become so famous as a singer, breaking records at stadiums all over the world.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>His idolatrous fans were a problem: \u2018There were always forty girls outside the hotel we stayed at in London. When I met him, he hadn\u2019t been to a supermarket in years. I said, if you want to date me, you\u2019d better go to the market. I don\u2019t want to be a superstar because I always want to go to the market. His transition was hard, the girls are still outside the house. My expectation was not what he had been but what he could be.\u2019<\/p>\n

Their marriage lasted for seven years and Lenz told me in 1992 that the period after their parting had been difficult not least because there was an actors\u2019 strike and she didn\u2019t work for a couple of years.\u2019<\/p>\n

She managed to keep her little house in the hills near the Hollywood sign and her vintage Mercedes convertible but, she said, \u2018Financially it was horrible for me. It was very, very bad. David is a wonderful person and I don\u2019t harbour any ill feelings or resentments but divorce, no matter what, is a difficult thing to go through. The marriage was great; the divorce was not so great.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Lenz went on to have a busy career with more than one hundred acting credits on IMDb including \u2018House\u2019, \u2018Bones\u2019, \u2018NCIS\u2019 and \u2018CSI: Crime Scene Investigation\u2019 in recent years. She won a Daytime Emmy winner for outstanding actress in a daytime drama special for the episode \u2018Heart in Hiding\u2019 in the ABC Afternoon Playbreak in 1974. And she\u2019s had five Primetime Emmy nominations, first for supporting actress in a drama series for \u2018Rich Man, \u2018Poor Man\u2019 (opposite Nick Nolte, left) in 1976; twice from three guest-starring appearances on \u2018Midnight Caller\u2019 with Gary Cole, winning in 1989, and once for playing tough lawyer Maggie Zombro (top photo)\u00a0in NBC\u2019s \u2018Reasonable Doubts\u2019 with Mark Harmon and Marlee Matson.<\/p>\n

Lenz never married again. Cassidy had two more marriages and\u00a0died aged 67 in 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 American actress Kay Lenz, who turns 70 today, was one of my favourite people when I began visiting Hollywood in the late Seventies.\u00a0 I first met her at midnight in a bowling alley on Ventura … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,1263,2257],"tags":[5324,5322,5325,5329,2255,5328,5327,5321,4470,1749,5326,5323,5254],"class_list":["post-10706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-recalling","tag-breezy","tag-rich-man","tag-the-great-scout-and-cathouse-thursday","tag-annie-lockhart","tag-clint-eastwood","tag-david-cassidy","tag-elizabeth-ashley","tag-kay-lenz","tag-lee-marvin","tag-nick-nolte","tag-oliver-reed","tag-poor-man","tag-william-holden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10706"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10755,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10706\/revisions\/10755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}