Television: Mother Lupino

Big Augie sits in the meat cooler. Augie is so suety that on a warm day the cooler is the only place he can keep his body heat down. In comes one of his hoods to report a botched heist. Augie pulls a wicked knife, slams the hood against a meathook, and threatens to make him look like a slab of Grade A Prime. A woman in pink slacks, straw hat and cowboy boots interrupts. “Peter, darling,” she husks, “hold the knife this way. And make sure we see that sweet meathook.”

This well-chilled slab of sadism occurs in a forthcoming scene in The Untouchables. The Lucrezia Borgia in boots is familiar to middle-aging movie fans as the tough-kitten, been-around blonde (sometimes brunette) of several dozen B films and several A’s. To the cast of The Untouchables, she is an A-plus director. Her name? Ida Lupino.

Now 46, Actress Lupino became Director Lupino in motion pictures more than a dozen years ago (among her credits are RKO’s Hard, Fast and Beautiful and The Hitch-Hiker). She got into television in 1956 when Producer Joseph Gotten asked her to direct The Trial of Mary Surratt for NBC’s On Trial series. Since then she has directed more than 50 television shows—everything from Have Gun, Will Travel to Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where she developed such a cool hand with terror that she is now known in the trade as “the female Hitch.” She is one of the three regular directors on NBC’s Sam Benedict series, and will do at least four Untouchables episodes this season.

The Untouchables’ Bob Stack (Eliot Ness) attributes her success to the fact that as an actress “she knows when some thing would feel uncomfortable on a performer.” She is also famed for her “glue,” her ability to link scenes smoothly, as when the distorted image of a gangster in a funhouse mirror gives way in an eyeblink to a beautiful girl looking in a mirror at a new fur wrap. She rules more by sex appeal than by fiat. “Can we try it this way, darling,” she will murmur, “or would you hate me for that, sweetheart?” Or, as she adjusts the plastic welder’s mask designed to protect her from flying chips and plaster: “Darling, could you hold the gun this way and shoot down the alley? Try it, sweetheart, and see if it works.” The actors affectionately call her “Mother.”

Born in cockney London, the daughter of an acting family whose traceable history on the stage goes back to medieval Italy, Ida Lupino is referred to by her husband, Actor Howard Duff, as “the ex-Limey broad.” They have been married eleven years, and she adores him so much that there have been four reconciliations. Six years ago, when they began acting as a husband-wife team in their own productions of Mr. Adams and Eve for CBS. some Madison Avenue oracle told them that it would be unsuccessful because they “would not be identified with the next-door neighbors.” The Duffs looked the adman over and told him, in effect, that it was all right, since they would not particularly care to be identified with their next-door neighbors.

“We call ourselves the Guttersnipes.” says Ida in her dulcet croak, “as opposed to the Rat Pack. We don’t wear Italian shoes and we don’t drive foreign cars. We rarely talk about show business. I’m sure there’s something much more interesting in this world.”