"Elizabeth Ashley has a real southern quality," Williams explains. "People have a misconception of what a lady is. A lady can use all the filthy words; Elizabeth does and gets away with it. She has terrific vitality."
Williams' revised and franker version of his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a sexually troubled Mississippi family opened first in Stratford, Conn. Critics rhapsodized about the star. "Not even her heady loveliness distracts us from her acting," wrote one reviewer, adding, "Miss this performance at your soul's peril." For Elizabeth Ashley, 35, raised in Baton Rouge, La., the eight-week New York run, which began last week, is the triumph of a spotty career. "My only worry with Cat," she says, "is that they won't let me play Maggie long enough. I haven't found out everything there is to know about her yet."
Elizabeth Ashley has spent much of her own life finding out exactly who she is. A child of divorced parents, she left Louisiana at 18 for New York. ("You don't go from Baton Rouge to Cleveland!") To pay the rent, Bessie, as her friends call her, was a Greenwich Village waitress and a garment-district model before landing her first role. Then, at 22, she won a Tony for her supporting role in Take Her, She's Mine. One year later she had her first lead in a Broadway smash, Barefoot in the Park, opposite Robert Redford, and Hollywood reached for her.
But a movie career that started well (The Carpetbaggers, Ship of Fools) sputtered and stalled. In nine years she went through two husbands (actors James Farentino and George Peppard) and prolonged analysis. Of the bad times, she says, "I was one of those people who became a 'star' very young, and I turned into a monstrous human being—Bessie von Bitch, they called me. I was in analysis forever."
She now sees herself as made for the stage—"a leading woman who can handle anything they've got, but God knows I'm not a movie star." As for her mores, they are strictly contemporary. Drugs? "I believe in gettin' high anyway you can without hurting yourself or someone else. Man, I require it." Boyfriends? Says Ashley of her current one, western novelist (Ninety-Two in the Shade) Tom McGuane: "His energy is so massive and so fierce that it infects you. He is one of those men (and I've known a couple) who, if he passes through your life, it's a privilege. You just got lucky."
But her special passion is for her 6-year-old son, Christian Peppard. "Oh, the lust of my life," she exclaims. "He's gorgeous. If I were 6 and I saw Christian, I would sure shoot my best shot."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
