The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 479

JOYCE HABER Outspoken Anne Baxter Tells It Like It Really Is I Anne Baxfer, who is tired of stepping in for people, will appear next in "Applause" "I'm tired of stepping in for people," declared Anne Baxter, who'll soon step into Broadway's "Applause" for Lauren Bacall. "Hell, I went through it for 14 bloody years at Fox. Anytime anybody didn't want to do anything, I had to step in." Anne and I had been discussing Rita Hayworth's recent bow out as Bacall's projected replacement. Rita declared that she wouldn't have had enough time to rehearse, and insisted she still hadn't met the director-choreographer, Ron Field, after weeks in New York. "I don't believe that," said Anne, who had an appointment with Field, who was flying out to the Coast to see her.

"He's too nice a guy. He worked with me all the way up to my audition. "Listen, I don't know anything about the Hayworth thing. But it's put a helluva lot of pressure on me, their hiring her and then supplanting her." Miss Baxter was a pleasant surprise. I suppose, as one who recalls her early movies, in which she played either the cloying, sweet ingenue Dinner for a or the cloying psychotic in the I expected a kind of dimpled Kewpie doll.

But Anne rather suggests the contempora-reity and precociousness of a Barbie. At 48, a brunette-turned-blond, Anne is more glamorous than she's been at any time in her life (take heart, American She's lost the plumpness to which she refers when she speaks of her early self. Her face is taut, and her skin has a comforting iridescence. She has a cadaverous wholesomeness, in short, as though she's just been through a wringer or come from a health farm. And has done all the sit-ups and eaten all the right things.

Her eyes flash green like a "Go" signal while she is talking, which is much of the time. She delivers each sentence as actors are taught to deliver first lines on stage: with energy, in an "up" mood. In her smart beige dress, dripping jewelry, and sitting down (she is shorter) she could be mistaken for Lauren Bacall. No one could have made that mistake in 1950, when Anne appeared as Eve, the scheming young actress, to Bette Davis' Margo Channing in "All About Eve." Bacall is playing, and Baxter will play, the older, victimized actress, Mar-go Channing in the current musical version, "Applause," on Broadway. From the day Darryl Zanuck tested her and signed her to a contract at Fox, Anne Baxter was differently typed.

"Darryl Zanuck," she says, "thought all women were either broads or librarians. He thought I was a librarian. He thought I was smart." Zanuck smartly refused to consider Anne Baxter for the part of the unhappy young dipsomaniac in "The Razor's Edge." It won her a best supporting actress Oscar in 1946. "They tested 13 girls," she recalls, "and here I was under contract, 23 years old, a little plump. I saw Gricia (Gregory) Ratoff, with whom I'd done my second picture, and told him I'd like the part.

He liked me. "Gricia was on the payroll to Zanuck, in charge of paying back Zanuck's gambling debts. Gricia asked him one weekend: 'Darryl, what about Anne Baxter? Darryl said 'She has no sex. She's a cold So Gricia said, 'It's not true I can tell you she's "So Monday I get a call from Eddie Goulding. I had dinner with him at his apartment on Wilshire Blvd.

I'll never forget it. We had oxtail soup. He thought I was an All-American girl and wouldn't understand Sophie. I was. But when he told me the terrible things that Sophie had done, I added a few.

I shocked him." She tends to shock today but all the right people, by her outspokenness. For example, she made the publicity man- very edgy during our interview. He works for her latest producer-director, Dick Ross. Anne just finished shooting Ross' "The Late Liz," in which she plays a millionaire's daughter who turns alcoholic and gives away all her money before she finds herself: "I tried to figure out What they do in soap opera and do the opposite," she said frankly. "That's all you can do.

"Dick Ross, he's not my kind of director." The press agent blanched and tried to contradict her. But no one softens Anne Baxter's opinions. "Dick Ross is a doctor. He comes in in the morning and looks at the patient the actor and gives it tranquilizing drugs and puts it before cameras. You know what he does?" The press agent audibly choked on his Bloody Mary.

Miss Baxter ignored him. "You know those plastic cups they use on a set for coffee? He eats them. He'll break off a piece and chew it and spit it back in the cup. I call him The Cup Eater." Similarly Joe Mankiewicz, who won Oscars for writing and directing her movie "All About Eve," is not in all cases Anne's kind of writer-director. Her last appearance on Broadway was in Carson McCullers' "The Square Root of Wonderful," which Mankiewicz produced.

"They absolutely destroyed it out of town," she says. "Saint Subber rewrote, and Mankiewicz. Now can you imagine Mankiewicz rewriting Carson McCullers? The director, Jose Quintero we opened in Princeton, and Jose quit after three performances. He ran away. We played eight weeks on Broadway because we had a $200,000 advance.

Those were the worst weeks of my life. I would come offstage wringing wet. The audience hated it. All Heavy Sets "And the critics even Jo Mielziner (the dean of stage designers) got a bad review. The sets were all heavy.

They should have been scrim." Anne also discomfited the PR man with repeated allusions to Bette Davis, her costar in "All About Eve." The man kept interrupting, but honest Anne returned to the subject. "Bette Davis," she said. "She used to snarl at me on the set every morning." As legend has it, the rivalry between the two women was so keen that Anne insisted on running for Best Actress, in competition with Bette, rather than ceding to a "Best Supporting" nomination. The result: Judy Holliday won that year, for "Born Yesterday." Davis and Baxter probably canceled each other out in the voting.) Claudette Colbert, not Davis, was originally cast as Margo Channing. Davis stepped in when Claudette had an accident during rehearsals.

"Claudette was in traction in the hospital. She couldn't do it," remembers Anne. "I know, her brother was my agent. Bette wasn't doing anything at the time The PR man breaks in: "But NO ONE could have done it as well as Davis, Anne." "Oh, she was excellent," Anne "concedes, and continues, undeterred: "I ADORE Bette, of course. She's wonderful.

Bette fell in love during the making of it with Gary Merrill, you know. It was two martinis all the way through." The press agent shudders. In a sense, Darryl Zanuck was right. Anne is bright. The daughter of Kenneth Baxter a VP of Taylor wine, now retired still consulting at she was born in Michigan City, but raised in New York.

She attended private schools first Lenox, then Brearley, which she left to come to Hollywood. At 12, she made her Broadway debut in a mystery called "Seen But Not Heard." Eventually, David O. Selz-nick gave her a screen test for the lead role in "Rebecca," Selznick settled on Joan Fontaine, but Zanuck took over Anne Baxter for all those "librarian" roles. She fell in love herself with John Hodiak during the making of a movie. They were married in 1946 and had a daughter, Katrina, who's now 19, before their divorce.

In 1960, Anne took her second husband, Randolph Gait, from whom she was divorced last year. She has two daughters by Gait, Melissa, 9, and Maginel, 8. Anne's household in Beverly Hills includes a collie pup, a cat and a guinea pig named Daisy Rose on my birthday presented me with two She's felt the pressure of "wearing two hats," as she puts it. "At 4, Karina said to me, 'Why don't you pick me up at school like all the other She said, 'Your job is to stay home and take care of Try that one on for size. It hurts.

"Being a wife-mother and doing a job, it's the toughest damn thing in the world. But we want it. I tried it the other way. I went to Australia, for heaven's sake, and lived on a ranch. "Acting is not what I do.

It's what I AM. It's my permanent built-in catharsis. I've had seven careers already. I'm going to have nine." Anne's grandfather was the famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright: "I remember him reading Ayn Rand's 'The which was said to be based on him, and suddenly, halfway through, he threw it down and said 'That's Wright once told her, "You are my daughter without tears." He also observed, on one occasion: "Well, Anne, I think you improve with age, like wine." Says Anne: "I thought, 'why shouldn't This damn youth-oriented country do you know that 13-year-old boys are worrying about using underarm deodorant? And if they haven't a date, they think it's disaster." She describes her grandfather as "a handsome man, and he loved women. Like they knew it.

There's no question he ditched his family. But his wife was strong, like me. "He was a honey pot, he was. I've only known a few men in my life who LIKE women like, really like. With whom if you start as a woman, you start ahead, not behind.

Women were the first oppressed minority. But I'm not a Woman's Libber. I think we're human beings first, and secondly, male and female. There's something deeply hormonal in us that makes us like to be under a man, the whole Yin and Yang, the active and passive." Female Names Only With all her activity, Anne is feminine and funny. As we left the Beverly Hills Hotel, she remarked, "Now to find Babar." She noticed my puzzlement.

"Babar," she said, "is my Doesn't everyone name his car? Everyone's car is the family pet. It must have a name. I had a car called 'Crumbly He just conked out all over the place. "But never call a car a female name. Like my 'Gorgeous': that damn Lincoln Continental.

I was at Century City during the Christmas rush the fifth time it had to be towed. I was furious. I called Holmes Tuttle, the dealer in Beverly Hills. I said 'Give me Mr. Holmes or Mr.

The receptionist said 'It's one man, Holmes I said 'Then damn it, get him on the "You know," she reflects, the lady who has three features and two TV movies upcoming, plus a Broadway musical debut, "there are times in your life when you can't do anything right, and times when you can't do anything wrong. If I fall on my face, I'll be home soon. But you have to go to New York when it's the nuts on the whipped cream or the cherry on a sundae, not when you need a steak." And the effervescent Anne Baxter hops into Babar, the Cadillac, and whizzes away. Zvsrsni fttit sr aiehdar; stwtoAY; juhe 20 1 971 IF1FTKN.