Actresses: Housewife in Houriland

It should be a cold day somewhere when the reigning American sex queen is a middle-aged housewife, but that is the situation now. Hollywood's highest flying skirts and tightest slacks now belong to Carroll Baker. Through simooms of expensive publicity, she occupies the place of Marilyn Monroe and all the Lana Turners, Jean Harlows, and Theda Baras before her.

She is the varsity sexpot in The Carpetbaggers, swinging seminude on a tinkling chandelier (TIME, July 3). She is completing a picture called Sylvia, in which she plays a call girl who was raped by her father when she was 13. And most notably, she will begin work next month on Joe Levine's production of Harlow, inspired by Irving Shulman's keyholing biography.

Carroll Baker is also something new in sex bombs in that she can act quite respectably; but her background at least has the familiar, tempestuous sound of some of the biographies of her predecessors. Her father is a farmer manque who now runs an appliance store in Pittsburgh. "Our household had much strife," Carroll says. "If I ever write an autobiography, I will start at 18. I don't like to concentrate on things that are morbid. My parents gave me nothing spiritual or ethical or moral—no set of standards by which to live." When she went to Pittsburgh for the local premiere of The Carpetbaggers, her father refused to see her. He hasn't spoken to her for ten years.

Her father and mother were divorced when she was eleven. Her mother remarried and moved to Florida, where Carroll met a magician called The Great Volta. Volta trained her to do her own magic act. She could pluck priceless treasures out of thin air, or shake up a boxful of loose stones, reach in, and remove a tiara. All this was done by wires and other devices, since Karol Carroll (as she was billed) was insufficiently nimble for true prestidigitation.

On the Mound. Later, she became a nightclub chorine in Manhattan and was briefly married to an aging ex-furrier. She tried TV commercials and was the sweet young pause that refreshes for Coca-Cola. Those were the days of live commercials and live dramas, all on the same set. "I looked at the actors," says Carroll, "and thought, 'Well, gee, I don't know what the big deal is. Learning how to do magic must be harder than learning to act.' "

She proved, incredibly, that this was so. She joined the Actors Studio and was soon winning good notices on Broadway for her part in Robert Anderson's All Summer Long. She played the daughter of Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson in 1956's Giant, whose director, George Stevens, was so impressed with her that he declared her as promising a rookie as young Whitey Ford of the New York Yankees.

But the film that established her and has almost forced the shape of her career was Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll, in which she lay in a crib sucking her thumb, a physically developed, mentally retarded 19-year-old symbol of unprotected sex. Its seduction scene—in a garden swing—is still discussed by old men on winter evenings. "It's amazing that Baby Doll is the one movie I've done that no one has forgotten." she says now. "I tried to get away into different parts, but I find that audiences want me as an image only in the sexy way."