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Linda Cristal made 30 feature-length
motion pictures without taking a single acting lesson. Why has she started
now?
"To learn the Method,"
she answers in broken Berlitz. "To get away from doing and redoing
those same old-fashioned scenes. To interpret. To imitate real
life. To make it up as I go along, using whatever and whoever is at hand
to create the illusion. You know, improvisation."
Improvisation. She wrote the
book.
For 29 or so years, Linda Cristal has
been making it up as she goes along. She has approached every situation,
every incident, every conversation as a Second Act Curtain and has responded in
an improvisational way that upstages life itself. Ask David Dortort.
He's the producer of NBC's High Chaparral series. He'll tell you how she
got the job as Victoria (Mrs. John) Cannon, a co-starring role on that
show. She beat out hundreds of hopefuls with an approach not generally
encouraged in better casting circles. One of the last to show up at the
casting conferences, Linda read the testing scene through to herself, closed the
script cover and said, "I'm sorry. These lines aren't me. But
the part is. I'll prove it."
She did a one-girl show.
She
registered Horror, Love, Madness, Sincerity, Happiness, Anger. And she did
it all ad-lib. Off the cuff. Making it up as she went along.
Dortort and his people went along too.
She became the first continuing female
character that Xanadu Productions (D. Dortort, Prop.) has cast on either its
mother lode, Bonanza, or its new range land, High Chaparral.
It is the lore of the Ponderosa that
any female who sets foot in that man's world must be gone by sundown.
Writers of Bonanza can use drowning, strangulation, flogging, a six-gun
or, more mercifully, the Sunday night stagecoach to get the lady out of the
Cartwrights' hair.
By contrast, Dortort encouraged the
inclusion of a female in the continuing cast of The High Chaparral, even
had the part made so basic that most episodes use the girl as a pivotal plot
motivator.
To date, 29 episodes of the show have
been filmed. Throughout all 29, according to Linda, there was always
somebody urging her, quite stridently, to "stick to the script!"
But it was hard because, "All my life I've been getting along by reacting
on the spur of the moment..."
She was born with the wall-to-wall
name of Marta Victoria Moya Peggo Bouges in Buenos Aires on Feb. 24, in some
year hidden in the dim recesses of her press agent's mind. Her father was
a news-magazine publisher of the fearless, hard-hitting school of journalism,
who trod on a political toe once too often. When Linda was 5, the family
was terrorized with threatening notes, smashed windows, broken printing
presses. Linda's father stayed determined. He named names.
Exposed corruption. To shut him up, musclemen were sent out to kidnap and
kill his favorite child, Linda. By mistake, they picked up a school
classmate who had the same first name and by the time the mixed identity was
discovered, Linda and her family had fled to Montevideo, Uruguay, without
stopping to cash out.
Linda's first real-life improvisation
came about as she learned how to relate to 20 other families and their children,
who lived in the one sprawling villa where her family found shelter. Her
father steered shy of publishing ventures, instead started making toys.
They sold. And by the time Linda was 13, the family had a house of its
own, a new car and enough money to send Linda's older brother, Miguel Moya, to
Paris to study painting. What the politicians of Argentina couldn't do to
Linda's father the traffic of Uruguay did. Her parents were killed in an
automobile accident that year. Miguel took on the responsibility for
raising the quiet and already very pretty teenager.
Her 16th birthday gift from brother
Miguel was a vacation trip to see family friends in Mexico City. Shortly
after she arrived, the friends introduced her to film producer, Miguelito Aleman,
son of Mexico's President. He was taken with her bouncy manner and her
snapping good looks, and offered her a part in a picture.
"It was my first motion picture
improvisation," Linda says. "I decided to roll my eyes one way
to show grief, the other way to show ecstasy."
She made 12 Mexican films, using the
Stanislavsky-created, Shirley Temple-perfected techniques of improvisation (Sadness:
Think of your dog being run over. Happiness: The vet says he'll live).
Hollywood companies, shooting in Mexico, discovered her.
Universal-International took her to
Hollywood and she began to co-star in a series of comedies that were tragedies
("No, roll your eyes the other way") and tragedies that were
comedies. Then she was picked to co-star with Jimmy Stewart in "Two
Rode Together" and with John Wayne in "The Alamo." She was,
as they say, getting hot.
For a hefty portion of this time she
had been dating Chicagoan-about-Beverly Hills, Yale Wexler. Wexler had been
raised in the kind of home that had four forks at every meal and he promised her
the same if she would marry him. She did, and he placed her in a $175,000
white brick house.
Linda went through four years of
marriage and the birth of two sons before she began to miss her career.
She discussed her feelings with Yale, and Yale disagreed but suggested that she
discuss with a psychoanalyst why she wanted to go back. the
suggestion cost Wexler $40 an hour, three times a week, and his marriage.
Linda came back big. She was in
the Santa Clause Parade on Hollywood boulevard; Queen of the Latin-American
Festivals. She did guest shots on T.H.E. Cat, Iron Horse,
and Voyage to the
Bottom of the Sea.
She began to be seen in Southern
California's "our group" eating places: Pacific Dining Car, Dominicks,
La Scala, Trancas. Across the table from her: Tom Courtenay or Omar Sharif,
Bobby Darrin or Chris George. Or Adam West or any of a half-dozen other
male-type Beautiful People who wore turtleneck dickies and drove Excaliburs --
$9000 reproductions of a loud, uncomfortable, old German car.
Is she serious about one of them?
"Not this week, " she says,
giving herself seven days' leeway.
On
The High Chaparral, they have her
hair and her face and her attitudes all up-tight. At home it is all
down. The hair falls about a foot below her shoulders. It's fine and
lampblack and kicks out the halos of light that cameramen hate. Linda
looks a soft, fresh 16 years old with a face full of spotlights and
sunshine. She's a rangy girl, 5-feet-7, and has "The Most Beautiful
Legs in the World," according to Willy's of Hollywood, a hosiery designer
who gives an annual trophy to that effect. Others so selected have
included Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe.
As Linda talks about her home, her
sons, her two best friends (her ex-husband and Alejandro Rey of The Flying
Nun), her new Cadillac and her old pre-Colombian collection, her sentences
start on uncharted paths, make sharp turns, disappear at the crossroads.
New thoughts take over. She squirms. She wriggles. Throws open
her arms. Squeals. Coos.
Finally she leaves her visitor an
opening for one more question: Here she is, the veteran of 30 feature
films and now a co-star of a prime-time, hour-long network television
show. She has worked with Cameron Mitchell, Tony Curtis, Leif Erickson,
John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, others. Casting people, producers, directors,
actors think she's a very good actress.
Does she really think, at this stage
in her career, that lessons in improvisational acting techniques can help?
"Just off the cuff, yes,"
she says.
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