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"She isn't really an actress yet be cause she doesn't have the disciplines," says Barbara Claman, who has become a protective aunt to Linda. "But she's learning very fast." Linda works on dropping her accent. "I took a lesson in Southern, and all you have to do is draw out those words," she says. "I could do a middle-class kid, but I'll never be one. Maybe when I'm 95 and married." She will be 18 this month, but it is not just her 4-ft. 10-in. height that makes her seem younger; her emotions have only just begun to unfold. She has not seen any big money yet. She gives a child's answers to an interviewer's questions. What role would she like best? "A mother, where I could be in control, be in charge." She admires take-charge actors—John Wayne, Jane Fonda.
Linda runs the danger of being typecast forever as a tough runt, which is exactly what she plays in her latest film, The Wanderers, a campy teen-age gang movie in which her boyfriend is a shaven-headed, 6-ft. 6-in., 425-lb. tough named Terror. One scene required her to climb a high fence, and she notes, with satisfaction, that she rejected the director's offer of a double. She has a daredevil's face, marked by a scar that runs from the bridge of her once broken nose, across her right eyelid and down nearly to her cheekbone —the result of too many falls in playgrounds. Not long ago, she finished filming Orphan Train, a CBS-TV movie, in which she plays a little girl who runs away from her job as a thief in a whorehouse.
Manz is only beginning to shed the boys-are-creeps stage, and there are times when her most reliable friends seem to be her three cats ("But the cats can't play cards or nothin' ").
Her parents split up when she was a baby, and she has fantasies of meeting her father and punching him out. When she returns to her old neighborhood the street kids say, "Hey, there's Little Star," in tones that make her feel not quite comfortable. But working in the movies can be fun, she says. "It can straighten you out. I feel much better now. I used to feel that I was halfway dead."
Claman says that "Linda has always lived on the edge of danger. If she has money, she'll spend it on satin disco pants or gifts for her friends. If she doesn't have money, that's O.K. too. I suspect that Linda wouldn't feel bad if no more acting jobs came up. She'd figure she could get a job working at the corner service station."
Devil's paintbrush, daisies, lupin, blowing in the hay grass, quickly sprouted and gone, lovely but not to be sentimentalized, the dependable product of sun, rain and horse manure. It is hard not to think of Liz Taylor, especially if the thinker happens to have been twelve when she was twelve, all brave and radiant in National Velvet. (Teddy Kennedy was twelve then, and so was John Updike, but they had not wandered into the witch's house, were not on public view.) Some of the present class of very young actresses will become fat, will be many times divorced, will forever erase the lying promise of incredible early beauty. Some of these pretty children will do better, some worse, but that is for later, for the unimaginably distant future, for October. Just now the meadow is new. —John Skow