You Only Live Twice
How does a beautiful actress find work after fifty? If you're onetime Bond Girl Lois Chiles, you say good-bye to Hollywood, move back home to Houston, and start all over again.
(Page 2 of 3)
While she shot The Way We Were, Lois also read for the role of Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby, a project that Paramount Studios was heavily promoting as its big film for 1974. She had impressed director Jack Clayton, who remarked that Lois "has a wonderful throaty voice, a certain . . . masculinity." Gatsby starred Redford and Mia Farrow, and when it was announced in the press that Lois was given the second female lead, her arrival as a star seemed assured. Ready or not, after just two notable pictures, she was a major talent in films.
At the same time, she was also one of the hottest models in New York, making really big bucks for the first time in her career. Today, a star like Jennifer Lopez might cut a pop album, license a new fragrance, and design her own clothing line, all between roles in heavily promoted feature films. But in the early seventies, beautiful people were compartmentalized: An actress couldn't model, not if she wanted to be taken seriously. "After Gatsby, I knew that this was what I wanted to do," Lois said, explaining her decision to quit modeling. "I wanted to act. But I needed to ground myself in my craft, to develop a way of working. So I immersed myself in studying acting."
The decision was probably a mistake. Rather than capitalize on her "heat," Lois disappeared briefly from the spotlight and didn't work again for four years. She reemerged in 1978 with Coma (playing a coma victim), followed a year later by the Bond flick Moonraker. In 1982 she landed the part of oil heiress Holly Harwood for a season on the hit television show Dallas. It was a role she was born to play. Lois' father was a drilling contractor, and her uncle, Eddie Chiles, made a fortune as an offshore driller. The show's season finale ended with Sue Ellen finding Harwood and J.R. in bed, but her character was discontinued the following year. After that, movie and television roles came less frequently and were not as good. "Suddenly," she told me, "it was 'Whoops! I'm in my late thirties and I'm getting only secondary parts.'"
ONE AFTERNOON LOIS DROVE ME around a part of Houston that she remembers well from childhood. She grew up in Alice, but her mother's family was old Houston, and that was where she spent summers and holidays and where her roots have the strongest hold. We drove down narrow streets with giant houses sheltered by magnificent trees, then into a gated historic district—Courtland Place. In front of one of the grander homes, we stopped to read the plaque. It was the home of cotton merchant Sessums Cleveland and his wife, Virginia, Lois' great-grandparents. They had three daughters, all of whom married well. Nora moved to New York and landed a Wall Street guy; Tina married Dudley Sharp, Howard Hughes's boyhood friend (their fathers were partners in the development of a drill bit that made both families filthy rich); and Chiles's grandmother and namesake, Lois, married William Kirkland, a successful Houston banker. "My grandfather Bill was the only liberal in our family," she said. "I'm descended from him. When a nephew had a sex-change operation, my grandfather was the only one who accepted her."
Lois has never been married or had children of her own. In 1965, after her freshman year at the University of Texas, her grandmother sent her on a cruise to Europe, and on the voyage she met a boy from Princeton. During the school year, they had a storybook romance: She traveled to Princeton, he traveled to Alice, and they vacationed at his family's summer compound in Wisconsin. When he proposed a year later, just before Christmas, she said yes but broke it off five months later. It was one of those instinctual, independent-minded decisions that came to define her. "I really loved him," she remembered, "but there was a force inside me, a pent-up restlessness, that could be destructive. He deserved a happy marriage with children, a home, stability, and I didn't feel capable of walking in those shoes."
In the mid-seventies Lois was taking a Pilates class in L.A. when she made eye contact with Eagles drummer Don Henley. He soon sent word with the gym manager that "Don Henley would like to take you out." "I said, 'No thanks,'" Lois recalled. "'The last thing I need is a rock star.'" But Henley persisted, and after a few weeks they began a stormy relationship that would last four years. Some of Lois' friends believe that Henley was the love of her life, but the affair eventually collapsed under the weight of two conflicting careers. "He couldn't be what I needed him to be, and I couldn't be what he needed me to be," she told me. "I was crazy about him,but the rock and roll lifestyle—Lear jets, limos, waking up at four p.m.—I was getting away from my reality."
Lois talks repeatedly of this need to "ground herself." I can't help but wonder if some of that desire stems from the absence of a life partner. But whatever she lacks in terms of stability in her love life, she seems to make up for by throwing her energies into her relationships with friends and family. She is famous for her dogged loyalty. The cottage in Santa Monica Canyon that Lois rented for 22 years was nicknamed Heartbreak Hotel by Hollywood friends because that's where many of them stayed while waiting out divorces. Over the years Lois became a godmother to many of her friends' children, including Broyles's daughter Katie.
She has also always been there for her own family. In 1975 Lois learned that her 25-year-old kid brother, Clay, was suffering from Hodgkin's lymphoma. He would die four years later. There were tears in her eyes when she talked about Clay. "This was my first experience with death," Lois said, biting her lip. "I'd been in Paris, Venice, and Rio for seven months, shooting Moonraker. Then I learned that Clay had taken a turn for the worse, that his body had quit producing blood. After Moonraker I was flying to Texas every ten days to give platelets."
Lois sat at his bedside in his final days, Clay slipping in and out, sometimes talking to people on the other side, at the terminal of death. At last a calm settled over the young man, and he was able to let go. "Up to that point life had been a fairy tale," she said. "Life hadn't really happened to me, nothing really difficult. Nothing deeply felt. But my brother dying and all the heartbreak with Don Henley, those were real life-changing events."
THERE WAS A WONDERFUL LEGEND making the rounds in the mid-seventies that illustrates the narrowness of Hollywood perception. Someone had asked the great movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn what he thought of the idea of Ronald Reagan as president. Goldwyn shook his head and said, "No, Jimmy Stewart as president, Reagan as his best friend." The story helps explain Lois' career after Dallas—forever cast as the best friend, the pretty face in the background. Lois had studied under such notable directors and teachers as Roy London, Sandy Meisner, and José Quintero, but it never occurred to the film industry that she could act. "Lois has a specific kind of beauty," Anjelica Huston told me. "Perhaps that's why she was overlooked for the more character-driven roles, bad girls and such. I feel she has a lot more going on underneath than meets the eye." Lois worked regularly in the late eighties and early nineties, but increasingly, her jobs were for television or minor roles on the big screen. During that period, Sharon Stone, whom she had worked with briefly on a Roy London film, advised Lois how to turn her career around. "You need a scandal," Stone counseled. "Stay out of magazines like Vogue and Bazaar. You need to be in National Enquirer." Stone explained how she had used the formula herself. Tired of playing secondary roles, she decided that what Hollywood needed was a Blond Bad Girl. So she hired a publicist, posed for Playboy, and got on the Carson show. A short time later she hit it big, playing the slutty mystery writer in Basic Instinct. "I thought about finding my own scandal," Lois explained, "but I couldn't find one I could live with."
My Library
