New Faces: Packaged Tomato

There is a tomato famine in the land. So much time has passed since Hollywood last turned up a really luscious girl that even casting directors are reading Playboy. For the last several years, Hollywood has had to import its glamour, and its latest is a westbound CARE package from Germany named Elke Sommer.

Happily, Elke is no peaches and cream puff to take home to mom; sex is prominent in her essential demeanor. She is 5 ft. 7 in. tall, weighs 127 Ibs. Her bust is one yard around. Her figure is terrific and her eyes flash green beneath a fluff of platinum hair. Hollywood’s image sculptors took one look at her, sucked in their breath, and began to perfect her perfections. They told her to lose ten pounds, which she did.

They fed her to the M-G-M dentist, who inspected her even and shining teeth and found two infinitesimal spaces, which he capped. Seven different ways they set her hair, decided on one of them, and lightened it beyond all taint of nature.

Kitten & Linguist. But Hollywood could never make her into one of its once numerous mannikins, because she has too much of a head start. She is a bright, fast-moving girl with a mind of her own. Being a star does not impress her. “I want to be a good actress,” she says. “The word star is flexible.” Beyond German, she speaks Spanish, Italian, French and English, and is an established star in the French, German and Italian cinema. In the parts that have built her fame, she has almost invariably been a sex kitten ever ready to sleep with a passing cat. Hollywood hired her to star opposite Paul Newman in a picture at M-G-M called The Prize. Newman has won the Nobel Prize in literature, and she plays a Swedish girl who guides him around Stockholm.

In real life, Elke (pronounced ellkey) is the daughter of a Lutheran minister who died when she was 14, and her real surname is Schletz. Her schoolgirl nickname was Schluffi, which means “Sniffing Around.” Raised near the university town of Erlangen, she had a classical education but changed her field to modern languages when she decided to become an interpreter rather than a teacher. To learn English, she went to London for seven months and worked as a domestic for $7 a week.

Traveling in Italy four years ago with her mother, she went to a dance in Viareggio. Someone gave her a numbered ticket at the door. A bit later the number was called out and, implausibly, she was named “Miss Viareggio of 1959.” Unsurprisingly, a movie producer who was there offered her a job; incredibly, he really was a movie producer, and within a year she was being directed by Vittorio De Sica.

Bed & Breakfast. She is 22 now and her contract at M-G-M runs until 1966. She has a $150,000 house in Erlangen, a modest villa in the south of Spain, a tax-haven flat in Switzerland, and a $900-a-month rented house in Beverly Hills. “Until my mommy came, for one whole month I lived alone in this house and I had a mouse here,” she says. “I fed it every night. At least I had something moving around.”

She moves around pretty fast herself. Within 24 hours of her arrival in Los Angeles, she had a driver’s license. At home she likes to gun her Lancia up the Autobahn at 125 m.p.h. In her first month as an American driver, she was arrested twice. “What business have policemen being out there at 5:30 in the morning?” she asks. “They should be home in bed.”

She paints, reads much, composes, has recorded her own songs, and knows that her bread is buttered with controlled eccentricity. For breakfast, for instance, she puts raisins, Rice Krispies, maple syrup, malt, and chocolate topping into a saucepan, heats it and eats it. “The press created me,” she says. “I wouldn’t dare to be normal.”