"Rattlesnake"? The knot of teenagers dissolves from Stefanie Powers as she opens the plastic bag, urging them to feel the serpent's bulge, a peristaltic memory of its final repast.
"Lady Hart, watch out. He bite you dead," a voice warns from a safe distance.
Mrs. Bernadette Graham's Junior Achievement Group from the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles stands silent, watching Power's elegant arm ease deep into the bag. On a field trip to Will Rogers State Park (near Malibu), they happened to encounter Powers and her Hart to Hart costar Robert Wagner, whom they know only on Tuesday nights as Jennifer and Jonathan Hart, and who happen to be filming a scene for their ABC series on location here. Powers and Wagner are gracious as all 10 students encircle them, thrusting forward for autographs and wanting to know what its like to be worth a hundred million and deliciously married.
But now Powers is going to put her hand into that rattlesnake bag and bye-bye hit show!- ruin everything.
"Poor dear," Powers smiles mischievously "What a beautiful creature. He can't hurt anyone. Look...." She opens the bag wide, revealing a headless ratter, offering it gently for inspection. On the ground the snake writhes reflexively, and the youths draw near, laughing again, relieved that the Harts are OK and all is right in the TV manor world.
Later, Powers walks briskly across a polo field, where the show's been filming, to a eucalyptus grove where STARBABY , her mobile dressing home is parked.
"Snakes don't scare me," she says over a "lunch" of energy bars and sparkling water." Bill [Holden] had a pet rosy boa- Bertie- and she was always loose somewhere in the house. They're remarkable animals. I learned an enormous amount from Bill- about wildlife and human life. For all his foibles- and he certainly had some- he was the most influential person in my life." She chooses her words carefully, picking across areas that are still tender.
From 1973 until November 1981, when Holden led to death in an alcohol-related accident, the two had been friends, lovers, and travelling companions. The details of his death- and of Natalie Wood's (late wife of costar Robert Wagner) several weeks later- made Powers sensational media copy, attention which invades her privacy to this day.
"The William Holden Wildlife Foundation" she goes on "was founded last October as a condition of Bill's will." Holden was a world traveler; when he visited Kenya in 1959, he found a peace and wholeness he had never before experienced. He and several partner later acquired the Mawingo (Cloudland) Hotel and 1216 acres on the western slopes of Mt. Kenya- once Mau Mau country- and created the Mt. Kenya Game Ranch, a wildlife preserve.
"We've excised 15 acres for the Foundation," Powers enthuses. "We have 29 species of breeding herds. The business of the ranch is urgent- wildlife is vanishing from Africa. We're capturing certain dwindling species- like Grevy's zebra, black rhino (our symbol)- for re-implantation in new habitats."
Directing the Foundation would be a full time job for many, but Powers runs the day-to-day activities from a Columbia Studio's office (donated by producer Leonard Goldberg), her two homes (Beverly Hills and Malibu) and whatever other phones are free to patch her through to management in Kenya.
At 40, she is impatient with wasted time, and idle chatter. Hart to Hart takes 12 or so hours a day, weekends are devoted to Holden Foundation business, making commercials for three fashion and beauty products she represents (the money goes to the Foundation), working on five projects she wrote for her new Karoger (Swahili for "stirring it up) production company and caring for five Arabian horses she owns with Hart to Hart executive creative consultant Tom Mankiewicz. Last month, she began work on the NBC movie Mother's Day in which she plays an advertising executive.
Earlier, after completing two Hart episodes in London, Powers flew to Kenya, where she helped birth two babies on the ranch ("a bongo and a hartebeest," she says, "and we picked up a baby elephant whose mother had been shot."). from there to Ethiopia, then down to Johannesburg for a plane to Hong Kong (she has an apartment there) to make a promotional film.
And don't forget Switzerland last winter when the tabloids had her on a romantic skiing interlude with Robert Wagner. "Yes," she says tersely, "I was there and so was Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews at their chateau, along with a house full of their friends. I have new romances weekly, everywhere but Antarctica.'
She flew back to the U.S. on Saturday, saw her mother on Sunday and arose at 4am on Monday for A.M. America, to plug an American Sportsman episode featuring her and Holden's African ventures. She arrived for taping at the Hart set in time for breakfast. The fact that Powers speaks six languages simplifies her travel greatly, but it doesn't help in trying to reach her. Most interviews of this type are arranged in a day or two; this one took six weeks and fifteen attempted contacts on four continents.
A knock at the mobile-home door signals an end to our first session; Powers is due back to shoot an elaborate polo scene. Polishing off her drink, she smoothes her dress and concludes: "The foundation is not my harmless hobby..." She waves a sheath of letters from scientists proposing wildlife projects. "And it's not a liberal do-good cause. Mainly, its an educational project for Africans, they don't have the means to fund. The animals are finally in their hands, not ours... There are 50,000 Kenyan students in wildlife clubs, and we're already working with them. Phase I of building is underway- a permanent tented compound with camping, cooking and storage facilities. all of which they use. The cost of the project will be about two million dollars, certainly not a huge amount for the importance of it. And that..." she stands donning strawberry-framed sunglasses matching her lipstick, "is why I have to get to work. I've got to solve a murder and catch a jewel thief."
Tom Mankiewicz, who rewrote the original; Sidney Sheldon script Double twist, from which Hart to Hart derived, and who directed 12 of the original episodes, explains the appeal of the show, which is about to begin its fifth season. "Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest- they all depicted the wealthy as nasty, conniving, trying to mess each other over. Hart is a warm fantasy of wealth, and deep down, Americans want to believe you can be rich, and decent. The Harts address that wish."
"As Jennifer, " he adds, "Stefanie is elegant, intelligent, sexy, just as she is in person. But we don't give enough credit to her, as a sophisticated light comedienne. Were she living back in the 1930s or '40s, she'd be getting the parts Carole Lombard and Madeline Carroll played."
As a close friend of Powers and Wagner (he was a pallbearer at Natalie Wood's rites), Mankiewicz lived through their losses with them. "We'd just finished shooting at Malibu when word came over the radio that Bill Holden had been found dead (on Nov 16, 1981). Stef'd just left for home, and we were concerned that she would hear the news on the car radio, which she did. We all went over to her house that afternoon. She was remarkably string through her own loss, and when Natalie died (on Nov. 29)- it seemed like just a few days later- she was suddenly in the role of helping R.J. (Wagner). We shut down for a week, and during that time, she was magnificent. Remarkably string.
"After the deaths," Mankiewicz recalls, "we picked up slowly. We were over-whelmed by the press and TV-news media- especially the scandal artists. The show took on a bunker mentality. Us against Them. One always hears that to be an actor is to live n the public life, but the invasions Stef and R.J. suffered were brutal. I remember one afternoon at Columbia Studios when an absolute toad from a tabloid asked her a vile question linking death and romance. Stefanie bit her lip and turned to him. Her eyes were piercing. "You know' she said, very calmly, 'I'm a human being, too.' Everyone fell silent and the man walked away."
Wrap day dawns at Will Rogers State park, and Stefanie Powers, clad in a white jump suit, walks from her chocolate Mercedes 250 SL to STARBABY. "Wait...." she warns, inside, spreading her face with cold cream. "You can't come in now- I'm getting ready to work."
Shooting drags throughout the afternoon, and then Powers talks once again of her May- December relationship with William Holden." Bill and I were like soul mates. He came along t the lowest emotional point of my life. I was working-surviving-but at the end of a very unsuccessful marriage [to actor Gary Lockwood]. He helped make me back in to a human being.
"We didn't need to get married. We'd both done that before. There was no question of having children- Bill couldn't have any more. We simply did not feel the need to marry. We were both unconventional people and it was simply free choice.
"I knew there'd be a telephone call at the end of the day, or before I went to sleep, I'd call him to share thoughts. That's the hardest part, getting over the physical loss of a loved one." She pauses, choosing her words carefully.
"He was and is still very much a part of me. We very definitely talked about what would happen when the series was over and we had time - we even laid out pieces of property on the ranch and sketched things in. I'll probably go ahead and build a smaller house on that land.
"I'll never forget that first trip to Africa, the primordial landscape around Lake Turkana. Inhospitable as hell, a barren place, but I have never felt ,more serene in my life. I always know Bill through the African soil. I wanted to take his ashes back and scatter them on Mt. Kenya but that was impossible."
She stops again. "Right after his death I went back to Kenya. I had to. I spent two very good months there -I wouldn't dream of telling you what I did, but at the end, I realized that when someone has been a profound influence on your life, even though they die, they never leave you. Bill stays alive concretely in the William Holden Foundation."
She seems girlish, a little dreamy, but snaps back into focus when asked about "Golden Boy", a new biography of Holden by veteran Hollywood writer Bob Thomas.
Thomas suggests that Powers had a strong early effect on Holden, but that their relationship deteriorated as the actor's alcoholism worsened. He cites a 1979 Christmas party- at which Holden arrived three hours late and stupefied- as a tawdry end to their relationship as lovers.
Powers refused to speak with Thomas. "It is an unauthorized biography that hides behind some respectable people as source material" she says, biting off the words, "its filled with the greatest rubbish- so many lies its like a tabloid, I won't dignify it by further discussing it. You know, we seem to believe celebrities are born with rhino hides- shouldn't be troubled with sleazy little tales. Am I a freak or something? I'm a low-profile person, I'm just not that important. Am I a freak because I want a private life?"
Talk wanders to gentler subjects: her pets at home, reproductive technology at the ranch (her per project.), the progress of her own "flower generation" as they shape the world. "We turned the trends in the Sixties" she brightens. And now we're getting into positions of power. People keep popping back into view. Somebody described it as a snake that has swallowed an egg, and we're the egg. You can watch the egg move through the snake's body, gauge the bulge's progress down the line. Right now, I seem to be the bulge a lot of people are following. I hope I am worthy of the attention."