Stefanie Powers - One from the Hart

One from the Hart

Gallery Books A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2010 by Stefanie Powers

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First Gallery Books hardcover edition November 2010

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Designed by Level C, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4391-7210-0
ISBN 978-1-4391-7212-4 (ebook)

To Big Julie

Kenya

It was 1974 and my first trip to East Africa, and I was in good hands. No, I was in perfect hands, the most perfect hands I could have dreamed of, not only for this trip but for my life.

William Holden, tanned and gorgeous at the wheel of his Land Rover, looked more like a movie star at that moment than ever he did on the screen. We were crashing through the bush on and off a dirt track leading far into the northern frontier of Kenya. Bill and his longtime partners Don and Iris Hunt had established a camp for the purpose of capturing Grevys zebras to be translocated to the south of the country, away from the onslaught of poachers who would render them extinct. I was already in love with the man, so it was easy to love what he loved, because I loved it too.

In spite of the difference in our ages, Bill and I enjoyed a seamlessness in our frames of reference, particularly when it came to our professional lives. Bill had been under contract to Columbia Pictures, I had been under contract to Columbia Pictures. Although quite a few years apart, many of the people Bill knew as apprentices were department heads by the time I got to the studio. The world of the movies was a family affair, where sons and daughters followed fathers and mothers into the studio shop. While our times and tenures were different, our inductions into the Hollywood firmament were, if not identical, very much the same.

Bill and I spoke the same language in many other ways as well. We had mutual curiosities, mutual interests, mutual passions, and mutual values. Animals, both domestic and wild, had already played a great part in my life, so I too knew intimately the rewards of the human-animal bond. The only thing we did not share was his addiction, an addiction that we kept at bay for most of the nine years we were together, but which, sadly, won in the end.

I AM ALONE now, driving along yet another dusty and bumpy dirt track leading out onto the plains of Laikipia, a landscape familiar to me now. Never could I have imagined as a young actress how my priorities in life would change after Bill was gone, and how much of his legacy would pass on to me. My twenty-four-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser groans under its own weight as we maneuver into and out of the last in a series of deep trenches, once again victorious over the odds of a breakdown or a punctured tire. As I pull into the tattered grounds of Guara Primary School, the headmistress, Anne Murithi, greets me with a smile and embrace of an old friend, sisters in the fight for education relevant to her students and to the future of her country and my adopted home, Kenya.

This trip to Kenya is different. There will be no more nightly calls to my house in California to speak first with my mothers nurses and then with her, when I was fortunate enough to catch her awake. Hello, baby, she would say in that voice, so sweet and vulnerable that it was almost childlike, even at ninety-six. Our conversations were brief and usually one-sided, yet I knew she was sustained by every word of my trivial report of the days activities.

She would laugh and say, Okay, baby, I love you, and I would say, I love you more. Then she would laugh and we would sign off, my heart temporarily relieved of anxiety.

How could she not be there? The thought is too big to take in all at once. I have to ration my grief or I will crumble under its heaviness, and I must remember my own condition. I have to remain strong, strong enough to function, strong enough to recover from my own lung cancer and the operation to remove it. I must remain positive enough to overcome both events, one after the other within the same month.

I thank God for my family of friends, I thank God for my faith, and I thank God that Tom came into my life.

Surrounded by such love, how could I not carry on?

A Hollywood Childhood

I was not long into this life when I realized that while I had not been born into its upper echelons, I was indeed and most gratefully a product of the lucky sperm club. It was a matter of luck that my forefathers broke from Poland and joined the hopeful masses emigrating to the United States during the early part of the twentieth century. And it was by even greater luck that Julianna Dimitria Golan, third daughter of Zofja and Frederick Golan, broke from the family farm in New York State to venture, as an eighteen-year-old, with her big sister Helena, to the bright lights of New York City to pursue a life in the theater. She eventually found her way to Hollywood, where she married and produced two children, one of whom was me.

My mother was born on July 21, 1912, near Middletown, New York, at home on the family farm with the help of a midwife. Eventually, more of the family came to Middletown from Poland to seek their fortunes, including one person who was a great influence on her. Uncle Leo taught himself English by reading National Geographic magazines, which he passed on to young Julie. Adapting quickly to the New World, Uncle Leo brought with him a sense of adventure and style, resplendent in a photo of him wearing wingtip shoes, posing in front of his newly acquired Model A roadster. Uncle Leo had panache.

The countryside provided an idyllic childhood, but as Julie was growing up, the world around her was changing dramatically. Rural America was being introduced to the telephone, to the moving picture show, and to barnstorming aviators, who toured the country, putting on shows and taking young ladies for rides in their open-cockpit planes. Very exciting for the young Miss Golan. But it was the musical films that caught her attention, and the musical theaters traveling shows that caught her fancy and lured her to the big city.

When the time came for Julie and Helena to spread their wings, they found respectable housing at the home of an Italian lady by the name of Carmella on West 69th Street, one block from Central Park. While studying dance and going to all the auditions she could find, Julie and her sister both worked part-time as hostesses at the exclusive foreign film cinema on 57th Street called The Little Carnegie Theatre. It was an extremely glamorous art house cinema, serving cocktails, tea, and coffee in the foyer lounge, where speakers from the foreign film companies would address their audiences. The Little Carnegie was the only venue in New York City at the time where foreign films were shown, making it avant-garde and an attraction for interesting people, many of whom became lifelong friends, including some of the filmmakers themselves from England, France, and Germany.