In Her New Book Shelley Winters Tells Plenty About Her Lovers. (2024)

The Washington Star, August 5,1980 NEW YORK: ”I usta be a young blonde bombshell. Now I’m ah middle-aged blonde bombshell.” Shelley Winters, still explosive and still blonde, sits back and trains her baby blues on an interviewer, awaiting confirmation. She is confronted by open-mouthed silence. No matter, it’s OK to be speechless around Shelley Winters. If you’re able to break into her stream-of-consciousness monologues, she skids to a stop, blinks, looks blank, listens briefly, then cooperatively lunges off in new directions.

Not by a long shot are all her tales included in her new autobiography, “Shelley” (subtitled, “Otherwise Known as Shirley”), which finishes in 1954 with the end of her marriage to Vittorio Gassman who was, she relates, agonizingly unfaithful with a young girl. Published last month by Morrow, “Shelley” has soared to №1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and Shelley Winters has soared into Sardi’s on a wave of new fame.

“The only thing I’m ashamed of in the book is William Holden,” she starts in, her raucous laughter cutting through the noise of a matinee luncheon crowd. “He’s the only Republican I ever slept with.” Winters carried on a “Same Time, Next Year” relationship with Holden for seven years, meeting every Christmas Eve for a champagne and satin nightie tryst in his dressing room trailer; she claims the affair inspired the play. Between Christmases, meeting on the set, it was Mr. Holden and Miss Winters. “Holden is a stuffy guy,” she explains.Since the book has been published, Winters made still another picture with Holden, this one titled “S.O.P.” “The first morning I saw him on the set, he said, ‘Shelley, after your book, yuh better call me Bill.”

“Where’s my picture?” Winters suddenly demands of a passing waiter, rising from her chair. “It’s in the book, a story about Sardi’s, and my picture’s supposed to be up near the front. *Up front.” Her voice has taken on a good-natured whine as she looks around myopically at the caricatures of stars that cover the walls of Broadway’s favorite restaurant. The sketch, of Shelley Winters as a young blonde bombshell, is duly located, up front and over a lamp.

“Oh, yeh,” says Winters, smiling and settling her dwindling bulk into a chair. Looking at the menu makes her think of her diet. Since she gained 35 pounds at the age of 35 for her Oscar-winning role as the mother in the “The Diary of Anne Frank,” she’s had a weight problem. I bet I lost a 1,000 pounds in my life,” she sighs.

Winters is a befuddling mixture of vanity and vulnerability. Arriving for lunch laden with her tote handbag and a sack of her books to autograph for a press agent’s relatives, wearing a black ethnic dress with a piece inserted in the back to make it larger, and sporting a turquoise scarf that streams from her neck like a banner, she manoeuvres into her chair like a barge settling into its slip.

“I weighed 200 pounds for ‘Poseidon Adventure,” she says, going into a description of her newest — and, she insists, best-diet. She is losing slowly this time; 16 pounds in four months.

“Yeh,” her nasal voice taking on its occasional whine. “I played this fat old woman, yuh know. They put streaks of gray in my hair. I thought I looked like the white whale. I’ve hated that whale — What’s his name? Oh, yeah, Moby Dick — ever since!”

Winters dives deep into her handbag and produces a handkerchief. “Is the air-conditioning on over here?” she demands of a passing busboy. And to her press agent, “Yuh know how well my book is selling in California and I haven’t even been out there yet (on her press tour)?” She waves her hand, and laughs, “Miami, I don’t have to go to.”

To the photographer: “Don’t get my double chins. Ha! Youth is the commodity we sell, yuh know!”

Winters, who has since become a playwright and director as well as continuing as an actress, has been married three times and has never made a count of her lovers — although she and her friend Marilyn Monroe once made up lists of all the famous men with whom they planned to sleep. It was a grand game of traditionally-male one-upmanship, and, Winters says, a form of self-preservation.

How well they succeeded may never be completely known, but nobody every tried to get Winters in bed with the promise of a movie role. Although, says Winters wistfully, “I wish George Stevens woulda asked me. I was crazy about him!” (Stevens directed Winters, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in the classic “A Place in the Sun,” adapted from Theodore Dreiser’s “American Tragedy,” for which Winters won an Oscar nomination as best actress.)

As long as Winters took her frivolous love affairs lightly, she was all right; but when Winters fell, she fell hard, and she’s always gotten hurt. Two years of what she calls “Back Street” bliss with Burt Lancaster, who was married and had two toddlers, ended when she read in The Hollywood Reporter that his wife was pregnant again. Confronting him with a butcher knife in her hand, she berated him for sleeping with his own wife. Marlon Brando, her pal from Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio, came over, crawled into her bed and helped her get through the night.

Winters’ old husbands and lovers continuously reappear in her life. Burt Lancaster recently refused to be her co-star in “Looping,” a movie she’s making in Berlin this fall with German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. “See, I’m the star, and he wanted the movie rewritten so he could be the star,” she says, not without a certain amount of satisfaction.

Suspecting her last husband, Tony Franciosa, of carrying on with Anna Magnani, Winters tucked a butcher knife (again!) into her purse and raced up to Magnani’s penthouse apartment in a Hollywood hotel “So I go up there, and I don’t know if they’re rehearsing or what, but they’re in each other’s arms. So I pulled out this butcher knife and we began to yell and run around the table and Magnani runs down the stairs and in the middle of running down the stairs after her, I start to laugh. Hysterical. She says, ‘Don’t laugh, he’ll kill both of us. So come on, be jealous. So scream!’”

Winters spots an old friend leaving Sardi’s. “Just a minute,” she says, dashing after her. She’s back. Her eyes bright. The friend’s son — “a handsome, smart thing, already graduated from Yale and a lawyer” — has just broken up with his girlfriend, and Winters immediately turns matchmaker. She has a 27-year-old daughter, Tory (by ex-husband Victorio Gassman), a Harvard graduate now entering Columbia University to study medicine, who has also, she says, just broken off a long relationship. “Say,” she informed the friend, “that just happened to my daughter!.” Winters hasn’t been called a yenta for nothing.

When it is mentioned that her book is somewhat franker than, say, Lauren Bacall’s, Winters pounces. “Ha! I know Lauren and it ain’t true,” she sing-songs in delight. “She did not only sleep with Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra in her life. I’m here to tell yuh. I know. She called up one night from a restaurant and said, ‘I’m looking for Tony (Franciosa).’ I said, ‘Whaddaya talking about?’”

Laughter begins to choke off the story, but Winters continues. “She sez, we’re supposed to have dinner. I sez, ‘Oh yeh?’ Tony tells me they were supposed to talk about some play or something. I said, ‘O-h-h, r-e-a-l-l-y?’ and I took his plate and I threw it out in the hall and then I pushed him out and I took the phone and I sez to Lauren, ‘He’ll be right over.’”

It is Winters’ contention that the Hollywood sexpot buildup in the ’40s and ’50s was a setup for promiscuity. “Everybody’s job depended on your looking great. People treated you as if you’re God’s gift to the sexual appetites of American men, and you got Burt Lancaster in a dressing room on one side of you and Jeff Chandler on the other and, well,” she laughs, “somethin’s gotta give!”

Original Head: Shelley Winters Tells All