Hollywood: Smoking Toad

Dilettantes were big 400 years ago, but today’s dilettantes lack acceptance. Leaderless, mocked and misunderstood, they are pariahs sniffing at the edges of a multicellular society.

But, led by Jill St. John, they could overcome. Actress, sex grenade, marine zoologist, model railroader, sailor and pipe smoker, she could be to dilettantism what Jean Harlow was to sex. She has kept elephants as pets. She plays with porpoises. She is, moreover, the sort of symbol around which dilettantes would choose to rally. She is rich and beautiful, with auburn hair and sparkling brown eyes. Her chest is gothic. She has dabbled in marriage with Lance Reventlow and dallied on the arm of Frank Sinatra.

Trains & Pipes. She is only 22, says she has an IQ of 162, but knows that intelligence means little in Hollywood. In three new movies—Come Blow Your Horn, Who’s Minding the Store? and Who’s Been Sleeping In My Bed?—she plays three dumb broads.

She is still married to Reventlow. “I adore him,” she says. They live separately, date others, and sometimes join up for happy weekends sailing their catamaran. As Mrs. Reventlow, she is heir-in-law to the F. W. Woolworth millions, and has no shortage of charge accounts to fuel her fabled whims. Getting interested in tropical fish, she once filled her house with vast aquariums. She has dived to a depth of 100 feet in an Aqualung. At Santa Monica’s Ocean Park, she jumps in with the porpoises and lets them nibble little fish from her fingers.

“My clothes are like the portrait of Dorian Gray,” she says somewhat inexactly. “They never get dirty or old.” They have no chance. She has over $2,000 worth of Jax slacks. Friends have given her all sorts of furs. Her 80 pairs of shoes are arranged in closets according to the color spectrum. “My friends say I have a ‘perfect’ complex,” she says. “You should see my drawers. My maid goes crazy. It’s weird that I’m so organized, yet I can be such a flake I’ll forget an appointment.”

She has appointments with people who give her instruction in everything from helicopter flying to horsemanship. Or she just goes shopping. She will buy staggeringly expensive furniture only to ship it off to storage. She buys $50 Dunhill pipes and smokes them while she plays with her electric trains. The trains come in kits from Germany. She assembles them herself and has them running all over a bedroom. “I never had any toys as a child,” she says, “and now I can afford them. I’m going to have the darnedest train layout you ever saw. I’ve ordered a waterfall from England and a ski lift, and hoboes to ride in the boxcars, and cows and cities. I’m going to have my own crashes right out of Charles Addams.”

Early Woman. “I absolutely had no childhood,” she explains. “I was a woman at six.” What she means is that her mother, the wife of a Los Angeles businessman, wanted Jill to be an actress, and by the time Jill was six, she was a pro. She performed regularly in radio soap operas, modeled children’s fashions, went to the Hollywood Professional School, and at 14 entered U.C.L.A. She quit two years later when Universal signed her to a contract.

She was 18 when she married Reventlow. She took over his canyon-top Beverly Hills pad, added closets (which had never crossed his bachelor’s mind), and brought in a muralist to paint savage animals on a bathroom wall. “It’s a safari john,” she says.

Most significantly, Jill is a Toad. The Toads are a group of Los Angeles girls who talk on the telephone. None of the others are in show business, but they all wear jeweled-frog pins on their blouses. They just talk and talk, like teenagers. They may be a year or so older, but they really are teenagers.