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.
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It's not difficult to see why. At one point, Lois and I had drinks and dinner with her mother, Barbara, who at 81 is still feisty and attractive. Lois lives within thirty minutes of her mother, and it's clear that Barbara's approval is still vital to her. To that end, she is extremely protective of her reputation and how her personal life is perceived by the media. (On more than one occasion, she expressly asked me not to write about certain events from her past.) Lois led me through her mother's house, showing off dozens of family photographs, including a huge collage of pictures of five generations that she had put together. "This is the part of me I want you to understand," she said, touching my arm. "Not the Hollywood stuff."
To this day, Lois remains guarded about a brief relationship with William Paley, a legendary social lion of the twentieth century who built the CBS radio and television networks. The two first locked eyes in 1985, ten days before Lois was to go to Miami for rehearsals for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Lois was in New York to get her hair cut and was attempting to hail a taxi when she spotted an aged but handsome and elegant gentleman in front of the Plaza Hotel. It was Paley, but Lois didn't know it at that moment. "I had a psychic reaction," she recalled. "To my surprise, I could read all this information: charming, an empire builder, not married, a twinkle in his eye. He looked at me approvingly. I walked a few steps and turned around and saw the look again."
Some months after the play closed, she was in the Hamptons, playing the wife of a college president in the film Sweet Liberty, when she heard that Bill Paley was joining the cast for lunch. When the two were introduced, Michael Caine was on his left, Michelle Pfeiffer on his right. Lois mentioned their encounter at the Plaza and told Paley that she had used it as motivation for her relationship with Big Daddy in Hot Tin Roof. Following lunch, he asked her to drive him home, where they had tea with Yul Brynner's first wife, Doris Kleiner, his houseguest. After that Paley telephoned several times a day, asking her out. She says she refused, worried what her parents back in Houston would think of her dating a man in his eighties. "Good Lord," a friend told her, "one of the most interesting men in the world is asking you to dinner and you're worried what your parents will think?" Finally, she agreed to lunch, and they became a regular item.
In Sally Bedell Smith's biography of Paley, In All His Glory, the author paints a slightly different picture. "Within days [of their meeting, Lois] was on his arm at lunch and dinner. Their relationship lasted through the autumn and she spent a great deal of time with him at his apartment, although she stopped short of moving in." But sixteen years after the relationship, and over a decade after Paley's death, Lois still seemed worried about what her mother might think when I related this version. "I never spent a night there," she insisted in an exasperated voice. "Never!" Whatever she and Paley did in private, she would sooner die than tell, and it's pretty clear that Lois was never cut out to jump-start her career with a scandal.
It may not have made a difference anyway. By the time Lois reached her late forties, film offers were rare. She made her last major film, Speed 2, in 1997. During the shooting, not only did Lois agree to work for one third of her normal pay, but she also was forced to cling to a lifeboat hanging from the side of a ship for nine consecutive nights while the crew sprayed her with a fire hose. Ahh, Hollywood. Most of that scene died on the cutting-room floor.
CONSIDERING THE REPEATED HUMILIATIONS THE film industry can unleash on aging actresses, you might think Lois would want to say good-bye to the business for good, but the friends of hers I talked with assured me repeatedly that she's not done yet. She's a survivor, they said. Several pointed out how, in 1998, she signed up for a course in directing under Jim Pasternak in Los Angeles, thinking the new skill might come in handy. Lois told me she thought of directing as a means to pull together her various talents and interests and maybe provide future security. "I could feel myself shrinking," she said. "I wasn't getting good parts. I wasn't growing. My life in L.A. wasn't as much about what I was doing as it was about hair appointments." In October 2000 she spent a month back in her home state. "I thought of it as a location trip," she explained. "The lure of Texas had always been there. Maybe in Houston, I would find a story that I was passionate about."That dream was put on hold later that month when she traveled to Houston's M. D. Anderson for an appointment with Dr. Eva Singletary, one of the world's premier breast-cancer surgeons. Singletary determined that a lump Lois had discovered in her breast was cancerous. She performed a mastectomy, then later took flesh from Lois' abdomen to construct a new breast. Lois survived the cancer, but the cut across her abdomen destabilized a degenerative disc in her back, a condition that was discovered while doctors were running tests for cancer. She's now dealing with the back problem and praying the cancer doesn't return.
If that wasn't enough to persuade her to come back to Houston for good, the decision was sealed in 2001 when the family that owned her Santa Monica home finally decided to sell. Lois wasted no time, purchasing a two-bedroom red-brick house near the Rice University campus and soon thereafter taking the job teaching acting at the University of Houston. Lois already had a contact at U of H. Sidney Berger, the director of the school's theater program, had lured her to his campus about three years ago to be part of a tribute to her former acting teacher José Quintero, the co-creator of the legendary Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York. Berger had previously attracted such talents as Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Edward Albee and Tony award-winning director Sir Peter Hall to teaching positions but had found no one to teach film. "Then Lois walked into my life," said Berger. "As soon as we met, I felt I'd known her forever."
According to Berger, students at the university adore her, and her classes fill as soon as they are announced: "She is very connected to her students. Not someone who lectures or tells anecdotes of her career but someone who enters their lives and becomes part of their growth and development. Teaching can matter a great deal to the next decade of her life."
Still, the work is not full-time. Her next class isn't scheduled until the spring semester of 2003. In the meantime, between her Bond-related appearances in Europe this fall, Lois continued studying to improve as an actress. Last year she sat in on Berger's Shakespeare class.
When I spoke with Berger, I mentioned Lauren Bacall, another Hollywood actress who managed to revive her career after years away from the spotlight. Lois never had the star power Bacall enjoyed, but I suggested that she may be able to similarly reinvent her career in a new era. Berger nodded and added, "Bacall came from a modeling career too and went into acting with no experience. She got better and better, and now she's the best she has ever been."
It would be the classic ending, certainly better than trading on her fame as a former Bond Girl. And although Lois is obviously settling down in Houston, it was quite apparent that a triumphant return to Hollywood was something she'd imagined. Before I left Lois and returned to Austin, she was unpacking books in her new home and debating where to place a dining room table that her mother no longer needed. I then followed her out the kitchen door to the small back yard, where I stood in the shade and watched her hack away old vines, then weave strands of ivy to cover the naked sides of the carport.
The brief bit of homemaking was interrupted when her cell phone rang and she paused to take a call from someone on the West Coast. The cord is not cut yet: Her cell phone area code is 310 (Santa Monica), she still has an agent, and if a good acting role comes along, she'll jump on it. How likely that is remains unclear, but her new boss understands the scenario. Berger told me he has backups standing by.
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