HOLLYWOOD: Epic-Maker

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C.B. had been an actor himself, and he always knew exactly what he wanted done. Once, when Britain's Henry Wilcoxon was playing Antony to Claudette Colbert's Cleopatra, DeMille became disgusted with the limp acting of extras in a battle scene. He grabbed a spear and charged Wilcoxon to show the extras how to do it. In the melee, Wilcoxon was wounded and went to the hospital for seven weeks.

Peacocks in Dogpatch. To support his well-publicized passion for authentic detail in his movies, DeMille liked to dabble at historical research, would sit for hours in the basement of his Laughlin Park home (where he lived with his wife Constance for more than 40 years), poring over reference books, surrounded by a small museum of medieval armor and -three glass-enclosed shrunken heads whose hair was regularly washed and coiffed.

DeMille had an Olympian hideaway in the Tujunga foothills, east of Los Angeles, a rough, scraggly domain akin to Li'l Abner's Dogpatch. The parties he used to give at Paradise Ranch are still part of Hollywood legend. Guests got Russian Cossack blouses to wear, and DeMille's own entrance was always in the tradition of high drama. Gifts for guests were borne in on silver trays, while an organ blared Wagnerian music and tame peacocks and deer blinked in at the windows.

The Hollywood of those days disappeared, but in his on-screen showmanship, DeMille refused to change. He was shooting The Ten Commandments in Egypt three years ago, when he insisted on climbing to the top of an 111-ft. gate to direct the action himself. He barely got down. The cause of his sudden fatigue was a coronary thrombosis. But he was back on location next day, defying his doctors.

By last week the erect, white-fringed bald eagle of Hollywood had finished another epic (The Buccaneer) and was starting to work on a filmed history of the Boy Scouts and its founder, Lord Baden-Powell, when his overworked heart finally failed. The DeMillennium was over; Hollywood would never be quite its old colossal self again.