Claudia Observed

Any male chauvinist taken in by the cliché that Playmates are beautiful bits of fluff I whose brains have been stuffed with something the consistency of Reddi-Wip should try to arrange a meeting with Claudia Jennings. Several meetings would be even better. Let's start, say, with a midnight rendezvous at Michael's Pub in Manhattan, where she has collected a group of Beautiful People to hear Woody Allen on clarinet. There she sits, a smashing strawberry blonde, wearing the hip-standard Hollywood uniform of blue-denim jacket and jeans, with a green-plastic bow in her hair, and you mentally tick through a check list of her credits, starting with 1970's Playmate of the Year. Since then, she has adorned at least a dozen movies, mostly the kind of drive-in-theater Saturday-night specials that fill a girl's pressbook with stories calling her Queen of the Bs. At the moment, she is in transit, a love goddess between planes, just back from jetting around Europe to be deified in full color by five of the world's flashiest glamor photographers.

A mile-a-minute conversationalist, Claudia doesn't want to waste one of those minutes rehashing the stock biographical data that puts her to sleep faster than Nembutal. It's the great all-American story of a redheaded, freckly teenager from Evanston, Illinois, who never considered herself pretty. She had a nice childhood, yes, and her mother is still a college teacher. But by the time she gets into that, the kid whom schoolmates knew as Mimi Chesterton looks a little glazed, ready to hit the accelerator. "I knew what I (text continued on page 236)Claudia Observed(continued from page 132) wanted. I wanted to be an actress, yet I have always liked things that money can buy."

Claudia already owns most of the luxuries she considers essential to her lifestyle, and she got them while collecting a few rave notices that any starving artist might envy. When she starred in Unholy Rollers, a low-budget rival to Raquel Welch's Kansas City Bomber, Andy Warhol's Interview gave her all the best of it, naming Rollers the best trash movie of 1972. Variety's reviewer also saluted her as delivering the year's hard-boiled performance. And talk about mean, no less a critic than John Simon--the man a hundred seriously wounded actresses refer to as Genghis John or Jack the Ripper--looked with special favor upon Claudia in a 1970 off-Broadway revival of Dark of the Moon. "Simon said my performance lit up the stage like no wattage could...."

Moving right along through her Manhattan stopover, Claudia (reluctantly at first) holds forth on Claudia from the Plaza Hotel's Oyster Bar to the Auto-pub outdoor café ("My god, look, fake grass," she says, recoiling slightly, "and I used to love New York") to a health-food restaurant off Park Avenue. She turns out to be 100-odd pounds of dynamite on a rather short fuse, self-aware and articulate, quick to emphasize what she sees as real achievements but even quicker at airily summarizing some of the schlock movies she intends to put behind her now. Regarding her current Truck Stop Women, quoth Claudia, "I got so sick watching it, I had to check in at UCLA Hospital." She wraps up Gator Bait with, "It's a Swiss Family Robinson in the Texas swamps....I just run around, jumping out of trees and skinning alligators." An elegantly wrinkled nose says all there is to say about Group Marriage, Forty Carats and The Love Machine.

Claudia whips into the Plaza wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Giscard, a souvenir of her trip to France, as well as a gift she recently gave herself--a delicate bracelet spelling out B-I-T-C-H in gold and diamonds. "That's what I always play in movies. Though it's the opposite of what I am really, I'm cast as a spitfire--bad-girl types--I suppose because being submissive is completely alien to me. There aren't many good female roles in films nowadays, so I figure I'll come into my own when I'm about 30. At this point, I can't play kids or hippies, and I sure as hell can't play the wronged wife...because you wouldn't believe a man cheats on me." And from that over-the-shoulder shot of realistic self-appraisal, Claudia segues into some less formal revelations, beginning with the fact that she has been out dancing till dawn. "I danced with all the chicks at Le Jardin. There were no straight couples there, believe me...only mixed-up twosomes. But I didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings."

She prefers to discuss Europe, where she relished having dinner with Bardot, meeting George Harrison, being photographed on the Riviera by David Hamilton, loafing in style between times at the Cannes Film Festival or at the fabulous Hôtel du Cap in Cap d'Antibes, better known as Eden Roc.

Her description of an impromptu skinny-dip in the blue Mediterranean is the kind of story that helps such international watering places preserve their chic: "It was an incredible day. I'd been eating magic mushrooms with some friends from the movie business, then wandered away stoned, took off my clothes and dove off Eden Roc into the sea. When I came out again, I couldn't find my way up to the same spot--but there was a waiter standing onshore, one of those older, oily types that you imagine must be balling all the rich matrons in the hotel. He led me off through the pine trees, stark-naked, and showed me something that was supposed to be the grave of Anatole France. I said look, this is very nice, Anatole France and all, but I've got to find my clothes, for God's sake.

"All I retrieved was the Giscard d'Estaing T-shirt I'm wearing. I guess nobody wanted it. That was election time, and everyone I knew in France was for Mitterrand. Voting for Giscard was like voting for Nixon."

Claudia's opinions of men, like her opinions on everything else, are rarely equivocal. "I've been surrounded by men, it seems, for the better part of my life--and there are only about five or six that I really know and respect. It would be hard to be male now. Being a man must be difficult...."

The Jennings name has been linked by Hollywood gossips with Bernie Cornfeld, Johnny Carson and a host of other celebrities, including a few she has never met. "You name them, or ask Rona Barrett...she's had a few good shots at me. The truth is much duller. Physically, I have always gone for the same type--slim men, with tight little bodies."

The tight little body in Claudia's life these past five years belongs to Bobby Hart, a successful record producer and songwriter. They share an acre or so of Los Angeles, living in single blessedness with a 13-year-old son from Hart's first marriage. "It's the beautiful, traditional East Hampton type of house I like best," says Claudia.

Though Claudia insists that she and Bobby prefer a quiet family life, enjoying separate friends as well as mutual friends in movie and music circles, they are still a striking unconventional pair by middle-American standards. Not, for sure, like your average back-yard-barbecue types out in Gerald Ford country. "Once I was doing a personal appearance someplace in Ohio, and the Welcome Wagon reported that if Bobby and I were to move into their neighborhood, they would certainly not welcome me or want to live next door to me....When I heard that one, I started to laugh. It's funny, because Bobby is a very spiritual, serious man...he's into Eastern religions. I'm more carefree than he is, but maybe I'm settling down. I don't go out on dates. Never."

Their fidelity pact, according to Claudia, was her own idea. "Bobby had a big" reputation as a swinger when he called my roommate once, looking for somebody nice to go out with. I was in Chicago at the time, shooting for Playmate of the Year, and as soon as he heard that, the phone never stopped ringing.

"Our first date was instantaneous impact. He came over and we sat looking at each other until he asked where I wanted to go. Then, how about over to his house for a cup of tea? Tea? I thought. Ok, I can handle that. So we finally put the teakettle on, and I guess the water just boiled away all night."

The glint of humor in Claudia's green eyes looked about to ignite into an Olympic flame of liberation. "After that, I didn't hear from Bobby for ten days. Then he called to say he needed time to think. I told him I just don't do things that way, but I didn't want him sleeping with anyone else. He thought that was a bit much. But I moved in a little later and we've been together ever since. I hadn't ever lived with a guy before. But I tell you, when I make up my mind what's good for me, it usually is."

That I-know-where-I'm-going tone is pure Claudia and conveys more than a hint that anyone who doesn't like the direction she's headed can get off at the next stop. Taken in toto, however, she presents an alluring argument for hanging in there. Even a brief shopping expedition with Claudia can leave a guy breathless. Prior to her departure for Kennedy Airport, she pauses at Yves St. Laurent's men's boutique on Madison Avenue to buy things for Bobby--and spends just under $1000 on two velvet jackets and four silk shirts (pink, burnt orange, rust and blue) in a total elapsed time of 23 minutes. "Holly's Harp clothes are all I wear," she says, "along with jeans, T-shirts and blazers."

Claudia continues to muse while carelessly gathering up T-shirts and baubles in her suite at the Sherry-Netherland, repeating for the record that the Queen of the Bs is abdicating. "Every film I ever did has made money. I have a following, thanks partly to Playboy and to the people who know me from drive-in movies. When I went to Hollywood, the day of the casting couch was over, but I had to deal with a lot of squirrely types--and I'm done with it. I like straightforward people. Of course, I have quieted down a lot, but I was born with an opinion on practically every subject, and I used to think everyone needed to know my opinion. I suppose that's why I have a reputation in Hollywood for being--tough...."

Tough? Maybe. But even while weighing the charge, she shows a child's innocent delight in demonstrating the windup bathtub toys she bought a day earlier at F. A. O. Schwarz--two red, spewing whales (one momma whale, one baby) and a blue-plastic frog with a hell of a kick. That's another Claudia. A girl who is whatever she chooses to be, as the photographs show. Just the same, there are two or three more things you ought to know about her:

• She is writing a novel, and will probably finish it. Says Claudia: "I've always been mind over matter, a bit too cerebral for my own good--though in L.A. it's difficult to be an intellectual, since there's no one to be intellectual with."

• She is trying to learn patience, and probably won't. "When things become boring to me, I create situations. I get the crazies sometimes...."

• She exudes a kind of aristocratic self-assurance proved to be the sine qua non of movie stardom for every aspiring cover girl from Lauren Bacall to Raquel Welch. Claudia states her own case succinctly, looking ripe and ready: "I'm not like Cicely Tyson, who claims she's never done a thing professionally she can't be proud of. Well, I have. I've done everything the hard way, made a lot of money. Obviously, I'm bright. I'm also educated, I'm wealthy, I'm photogenic and a damn good actress." How's that for self-assurance?