Despite her name, Tuesday Weld was born on a Friday. Then why is she called Tuesday? There is no telling for sure, though in the past she has said that the name was 1) a childhood corruption (“Tu-Tu”) of Susan, her given name, 2) derived from the day when all the worst things happened to her mother, and 3) a mispronunciation of two-days, the length of time her mother was in labor with her. Whatever the truth, the world is beginning to realize that, at 28, Tuesday Weld is a first-rate actress.
Weld film festivals have been held in Manhattan, and there is already something of a Tuesday Weld cult, which was partially inspired, paradoxically, by the fact that she has been so good in so many bad films. “She was undervalued year after year,” says Roddy McDowall, who starred with her in Lord Love a Duck, one of her less awful movies. As a drum majorette in Pretty Poison, a fine but little-publicized 1968 film, she mixed innocence with evil to chilling effect, etching her character with acid and honey.
Now at long last she may have found a script that fits her talents. In Play It As It Lays, a movie currently being adapted from Joan Didion’s novel, Tuesday portrays Maria, an actress in search of a breakdown in the vast emptiness of Southern California. “She knows the role so well she could phone it in,” says Director Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife). “I tested hundreds of girls for the part, but I always knew it had to be Tuesday.”
Like Maria, Tuesday has always had the reputation of being a difficult performer to work with. Like Maria, she has had a troubled private life that has made her something of an untouchable flower in lotus land. “Miss Weld is not a very good representative for the motion-picture industry,” complained Gossip Columnist Louella Parsons, Hollywood’s dragon lady, when Tuesday was 16 and the star of a seemingly endless series of sex-at-the-beach type minipics. Actually, Tuesday’s sins—odd clothing, bare feet and open love affairs —would have seemed quite normal a decade later. Her chief offense was to be hip too soon.
Tuesday has been too soon in almost everything she has done. Born in New York’s Greenwich Village, she was supporting her family—her mother and an older brother and sister—as a child model when she was four. Her father had died when she was three. When she was twelve, she appeared in her first movie, Rock, Rock, Rock, a cheapie made in Brooklyn to cash in on the rock-‘n’-roll craze of the ’50s. Whatever its demerits, the film projected Tuesday as the archetypal nymphet, Shirley Temple with a leer. “The girl I generally played was a little whorish teen-ager who would sleep with anybody, and yet has a childlike quality,” says Tuesday.
Even in her teens she had a reputation for wildness. “I used to say I was going to school,” she remembers, “and head for the Village and get drunk instead. But then I wasn’t a little girl at all at that age—I never had been.” At 16, she was bounced from TV’s Dobie Gillis because a sponsor thought she was out of place on a family show. Men took on an early importance (she claims she had her “first real affair” when she was eleven), and her succession of boy friends ranged from Albert Finney and John Barrymore Jr. to Terence Stamp and the ubiquitous George Hamilton.
She often brawled publicly with Barrymore, and she once tried to run down Actor Gary Lockwood with her car. When he jumped on the hood, she sped down Sunset Boulevard trying to shake him off while he pleaded with her through the windshield. “Tuesday did some wild, wild things and screwed up many, many guys,” says Ryan O’Neal, a longtime friend. “She’s highly sexual. It’s what makes her interesting on the screen.”
War Hero. At 22, Tuesday married Claude Harz, a young screenwriter who was working as Roddy McDowall’s secretary. Though it lasted for five years and produced a daughter, Natasha, the marriage was one of her bigger mistakes, according to Tuesday. “It seems the brighter you are, the deeper the hole you get into,” she says. “How can people endure pain for so long and let it ride by?” She declares about men: “It’s never satisfactory. Either the man is able to keep you happy sexually, and he has no intellectual quality; or he’s very intellectual and not good at carrying on a satisfactory sexual relationship.”
Woe and perturbation! But don’t worry too much about Tuesday. She still goes on an occasional bender, and talks openly about drugs. “I enjoy getting high on anything,” she says. “No, not anything. Not drugs like acid. The pot I smoke has to be very good quality, and I love it. It gives you a terrific feeling.”
Today she is thinking—or says she is thinking—of things other than films. She writes verse in a loose, prosy style —”You be a Nubian, you be a sheep chained to death’s tow rope,” begins one of her poems—and she plans to write a screenplay. She even talks about writing a novel, which if it follows her own life would read like a collaboration between Louisa May Alcott and Harold Robbins.
But above all, Tuesday Weld has survived. She has lived down her name, her image and her reputation. Says O’Neal: “She’s held in very high esteem because of her survival and because she’s good. She’s like a war hero, and she deserves the Congressional Medal.” The only thing that bothers her is—what else?—success. “If I find myself a commercial success, I’ll probably go into a state of shock,” she says. “If I get out of this underground thing and become commercial, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
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