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Even in her teens she had a reputation for wildness. "I used to say I was going to school," she remembers, "and head for the Village and get drunk instead. But then I wasn't a little girl at all at that age—I never had been." At 16, she was bounced from TV's Dobie Gillis because a sponsor thought she was out of place on a family show. Men took on an early importance (she claims she had her "first real affair" when she was eleven), and her succession of boy friends ranged from Albert Finney and John Barrymore Jr. to Terence Stamp and the ubiquitous George Hamilton.
She often brawled publicly with Barrymore, and she once tried to run down Actor Gary Lockwood with her car. When he jumped on the hood, she sped down Sunset Boulevard trying to shake him off while he pleaded with her through the windshield. "Tuesday did some wild, wild things and screwed up many, many guys," says Ryan O'Neal, a longtime friend. "She's highly sexual. It's what makes her interesting on the screen."
War Hero. At 22, Tuesday married Claude Harz, a young screenwriter who was working as Roddy McDowall's secretary. Though it lasted for five years and produced a daughter, Natasha, the marriage was one of her bigger mistakes, according to Tuesday. "It seems the brighter you are, the deeper the hole you get into," she says. "How can people endure pain for so long and let it ride by?" She declares about men: "It's never satisfactory. Either the man is able to keep you happy sexually, and he has no intellectual quality; or he's very intellectual and not good at carrying on a satisfactory sexual relationship."
Woe and perturbation! But don't worry too much about Tuesday. She still goes on an occasional bender, and talks openly about drugs. "I enjoy getting high on anything," she says. "No, not anything. Not drugs like acid. The pot I smoke has to be very good quality, and I love it. It gives you a terrific feeling."
Today she is thinking—or says she is thinking—of things other than films. She writes verse in a loose, prosy style —"You be a Nubian, you be a sheep chained to death's tow rope," begins one of her poems—and she plans to write a screenplay. She even talks about writing a novel, which if it follows her own life would read like a collaboration between Louisa May Alcott and Harold Robbins.
But above all, Tuesday Weld has survived. She has lived down her name, her image and her reputation. Says O'Neal: "She's held in very high esteem because of her survival and because she's good. She's like a war hero, and she deserves the Congressional Medal." The only thing that bothers her is—what else?—success. "If I find myself a commercial success, I'll probably go into a state of shock," she says. "If I get out of this underground thing and become commercial, I don't know what I'll do."