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Eventually she landed the part that finally made her a movie star—Alice in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. With stardom, there quickly came a reputation for star temperament and all the late arrivals, weeping fits and temper tantrums that go with it. "Like any strong woman," shrugs Producer Frankovich, "she's got fangs." The director who seems to have felt them most keenly is Preminger, himself no Teddy bear. On the set of Such Good Friends, they clashed over her lateness, his penchant for exacting retakes (58 on one scene), and her refusal to pose completely in the nude. Bare breasts were as far as she would go, a problem that Preminger eventually solved by superimposing her head on another actress's body. At one point she stamped off the set, leaving Preminger, who tends to forget names under stress, chasing after her calling, "Come back, Miss . . . Miss . . ."
Live-Sex Show. Dyan says today:
"I would never make another film rather than work with Preminger again. I don't think he could direct his little nephew to the bathroom." To which Preminger replies with a ferocious gleam: "Imagine how good her performance will be in her next film if her performance in this one was so brilliant with a bad director." He adds: "I didn't hire her to praise me; I hired her to give a good performance. And she did." Her next film, to be released in the U.S. in February: The Burglars, in which, to top her list of easy-women roles, she plays a performer in a live-sex show. The picture, which has already done well in Europe, was shot on location in Greece, amid cake-throwing cast celebrations and plate-smashing parties in tavernas. Says she of fellow Performer Omar Sharif: "What a man! He's my ideal of a real movie star. He does the whole bit—horses, cars, girls."
Meanwhile she lives in her new house in Malibu with her daughter, a young driver-helper, a maid, a fox terrier, a large mongrel and a deaf cat. She eats health foods ("Our whole society is built around the dining table," she complains over alfalfa sprouts and carrot juice) and spends a lot of time watching the tide—and her psyche. Starting with her breakthrough in B. & C. & T. & A., she recalls, "people kept saying, 'Wow! You're a star. You must really be happy,' and I kept asking myself, 'If it's so great, why doesn't it feel any better?'" She sought the answer at Esalen, the California group-therapy center shown in B. & C. & T. & A., where, after some hesitation, she joined a nude session in a tub. After that she tried primal therapy, a far-out treatment that induces the patient to reenact his infancy, including kicking and screaming. She still attends weekly group-therapy sessions.
As her attitudes on nudity show, Dyan retains a sense of the Puritan ethic. In these days of four-letter words, for example, her efforts to avoid using foul language seem almost selfconscious. She rarely talks about sex, and when she does, she shoots a wicked glance, as if to say, "There, I've said it," like a Girl Scout who has strayed from the campfire.