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Diane Lane. She was just back from ten dusty weeks in Durango, Mexico, where she had filmed Cattle Annie and Little Britches with Burt Lancaster and Amanda Plummer. "Every day was the same," complained Lane. Also, she said, there was no Bubble Yum. "I always wanted to do a western," she sighs. "Zip, there goes another childhood dream." In Los Angeles not long ago for photo sessions at Walt Disney Productions, for which she is about to do A Watcher in the Woods, she sported black cord jeans, yellow tank top and hair tucked up under a San Luis Obispo Rugby Club cap (a gift from her acquaintance Steve Ford). She talks funnily about A Little Romance, confessing mock disappointment over the casting of Thelo Bernard ("I had John Travolta more in mind") and noting that Thelo did not want to kiss her ("We had to shoot it seven times"). She says she learned poise at six, in Medea, for which she memorized her Greek lines phonetically. "I was one of Medea's children and was supposed to be dead in this man's arms," she recalls. "I was trying to be limp and all of a sudden, I gotta go and I can't hold it in. So I pee all over him in front of the audience. Oh, I hid my face! Go to the bathroom first is what I learned."
Diane played her child-prostitute role in the Public Theater production of Elizabeth Swados' Runaways, and turned down a chance to follow the show to Broadway in order to film A Little Romance. She has visited Paris nine times, but she can talk with animation about her favorite skateboard run, under the 59th Street Bridge in Manhattan. Or she can coolly run down her reasons for rejecting a part in a forthcoming movie because it entailed undressing. "It's too soon for that. I decided not to take it because there were too many ifs about how it would be edited, how it would be publicized."
As she makes this convincing speech, her father/manager, Burt Lane, enters the conversation and steps all over her fine performance. He was the one, he insists, who urged her not to take the role. Burt, a former real estate salesman, is now a cab driver, and he took the job because the flexibility of its hours lets him shepherd Diane through her career. Diane's parents were divorced when she was two weeks old, and she grew up living with her father in a series of Manhattan residential hotels. Diane's mother, whom she has "a good relationship these days," she says, is an interior decorator in Georgia.
She earned $13,000 for A Little Romance; for Watcher her fee is $75,000. "Essentially, it's my social life with boys that is being sacrificed," says Diane. She attends a school for professional children when she is in New York, and "I'm nervous walking into a school dance." She is afraid that boys will think she doesn't want to be bothered by such unprofessional matters as dating. The trouble with that, she says a little plaintively is that "I want to be bothered."