Stella Stevens: From the Yazoo hills to Beverly Hills
During the 1960s Stella Stevens was one of the most-photographed women in the world, along with Raquel Welch, Brigitte Bardot, Ann-Margret, and of course, Marilyn Monroe. 
 
by Teresa Nicholas
Regardless of what you may have heard, actress Stella Stevens wasn’t from Hot Coffee, Mississippi. She was born in Yazoo City, but when she was starting out in Hollywood a press agent advised her that “Yazoo” didn’t sound like a good place for a starlet to be from (and this was confirmed when he found out that despite the Indian name’s comic ring, it means “waters of the dead”). So Stella Stevens had to come up with another hometown. “I remembered that whenever Daddy would drive us to the coast we’d stop on the highway at this little sign for hot coffee,” she explains. “My agent said, ‘That’s great, you’re the cream in the coffee.’ ”

But not only was Stella Stevens from Yazoo City, she was from one of its oldest families. Her great-grandfather was Henry Clay Tyler, an early settler from Boston and a jeweler who gave the courthouse cupola its clock. He played organ in the Presbyterian Church and he married Cornelia Cusack, one of the first white children born in newly incorporated Manchester, as Yazoo City was named then. So often the history of Southerners isn’t just the history of our forebears, but also their houses: Cornelia Cusack had grown up in a log cabin near the slough at the end of Manchester’s Main Street, but sometime in the 1840s Henry Clay Tyler bought one of the town’s finest homes, with eight-inch-thick brick walls and elegant six-over-six-pane windows, where he and Cornelia raised six girls (a son died in infancy). Granny Tyler, family legend goes, would rock on the front porch and listen to the Civil War skirmishes down near the Yazoo River.

The Tyler family was blessed with longevity. Gertrude Tyler Eggleston, one of Henry Clay’s and Cornelia’s daughters, lived in the Wilson-Tyler house (as it became known, after its owner and the builder, James Wilson) until 1964, when she died at the age of eighty-eight.

After her divorce from Trent Eggleston, Gertrude had had to take in boarders in the antebellum home. “She would cook for them,” says Stella Stevens’s first cousin and lifelong Yazoo City resident Marsha Dunn Williams, about the grandmother they shared. “She was a marvelous cook. That was how they survived.”
           
Estelle Eggleston was born October 1, 1938, the only child of Gertrude’s son Thomas Eggleston and Estelle Caro. Tom worked for the Yazoo Coca-Cola Bottling Company; Estelle was a public health nurse. He was fun-loving and Presbyterian; she had a nurse’s caring heart and was Roman Catholic. They also lived in the oldest part of Yazoo City, a few blocks from the Wilson-Tyler house. Young Estelle experienced her first name change when she was still a toddler. “I was Bootsie—that’s with an -ie not a -y—because I wore boots from the time I was three years old,” she recalls. “Bootsie was my official name for a long, long time.”
           
At the age of four Estelle moved with her parents to Memphis, where her father got a job with International Harvester. At Christmas they would return to Yazoo City and the family home, where they’d spend the holiday with the Dunns and grandmother Gertrude, who was beloved by the children for her bottom dresser drawer, where she kept old spools of thread for them to play with.
           
As a teenager in Memphis, Estelle “watched movies and movies and movies and movies. I loved movies,” she says. She was brought up Catholic. By the time she was “discovered,” in 1957, she’d already lived a life in brief: married Herman Stephens, an electrician, had a son, Andrew, and gotten divorced.
           
Her breakthrough — the kind of fairy tale that young actresses dream about—occurred while she was performing the part of the ingénue Chérie in a stage production of “Bus Stop,” at Memphis State (now the University of Memphis). “I’d dyed my hair golden from dirty brown. Someone saw me and said he’d introduce me to the people from 20th Century-Fox if I could raise the money to get to New York.” She borrowed money and went to the Big Apple, then when it became necessary borrowed more and went to Los Angeles.
           
Then real life began not just mirroring fiction, but trumping it: In Fox’s 1956 movie version of “Bus Stop,” Chérie (played by Marilyn Monroe) desperately wants Hollywood to discover her, but instead opts to accompany the hapless beau back to Montana. But Estelle Eggleston didn’t follow any beau back to anywhere. Soon she was under contract to 20th Century-Fox and known as Stella Stevens, a variant of her first and her ex-husband’s last names. And after “Bus Stop,” she kept the hair. “That’s why I’m blond today. Blond forever,” she says in her effusive voice.
           
In a series of wide-ranging and frank telephone interviews from her home in Beverly Hills, Ms. Stevens talked about, among other things, her association with Fox. Her first film was “Say One for Me,” with comedic director Frank Tashlin and crooner Bing Crosby. “In six months I did three movies for Fox. And then one day the head man called me to his office and said, ‘I just saw you today in what you’re doing. Are you under contract?’ ”
           
Soon after that, the studio dropped her, and she made the controversial decision to pose for Playboy, for five thousand dollars. With a young son, she needed all the money she could get. “I’ve never liked Playboy. They paid me half. If I wanted the other half, I had to be a greeter at his house,” she says, referring to the magazine’s publisher, Hugh Hefner. “I wouldn’t do that. People don’t realize how horrible men can be toward a beautiful woman with no clothes on.”
           
In fact when she got the role of Appassionata von Climax in Paramount’s 1959 film “L’il Abner” and signed a new contract with that studio, she tried to get out of the Hefner deal, before her photo could appear as the January 1960 Playmate of the Month. 
           
“At Paramount I did a lot of good things, and they knew that I was theirs,” she says. She won a Golden Globe in March 1960 for “Most Promising Female Newcomer,” sharing the award with Tuesday Weld, Angie Dickinson and Janet Munro. Her career took off.
           
She stayed with Paramount until 1963, developing a kittenish persona in her film roles, unlike the bombshell who had influenced her. “Marilyn was one of my idols, but I wasn’t trying to be her,” Ms. Stevens says. “I was trying to be myself.” She was also recognized in her films for her first-rate comic timing. “I want to be remembered for whatever made people laugh the most,” she says. “I did like to make people laugh.” After Paramount, she was under contract until 1968 with Columbia Pictures.
           
The seventy-one-year-old actress counts a filmography long as an arm, having appeared in more than sixty movies and eighty TV shows. Some of her films are cult classics, among them “Girls! Girls! Girls!” with fellow Mississippian and Memphian Elvis Presley; “The Nutty Professor” with Jerry Lewis; “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” opposite Glen Ford; “The Silencers;” “The Ballad of Cable Hogue;” and “The Poseidon Adventure.”
           
“If you stick with things, they work out. I’m very lucky,” she says, although some movie insiders believe that she had the misfortune to arrive in Hollywood when serious parts for gorgeous blonds were scarce. And gorgeous Stella Stevens was—just look at her close-ups in “The Nutty Professor.” But in “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” at least, she got the attention she merited. In their 1970 review The New York Times wrote, “There is nobody in the cast not to praise…. But it is Stella Stevens, at last in a role good enough for her, who most wonderfully sustains and enlightens the action.”
 
During our interviews, I asked Ms. Stevens how she felt about her career. “I may never be satisfied. Everybody wishes they could do more,” she says. “But I liked them all, all the movies I did.” We also talked about some of the directors and leading men she’s known:

Jerry Lewis: “I liked him very, very much, loved what he was trying to do in ‘The Nutty Professor.’ ”
Elvis Presley: “I met him and the Colonel at the start of filming ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ and I went to my room. And there Elvis stands with two of those tall drinks with a cherry in it. I don’t even like alcohol. I told him he couldn’t barge into me. From that time on he didn’t talk to me very much.”
Cary Grant: “He liked to eat in bed with a tray on his lap. I went to see him one evening, and his housekeeper brought two little trays and we ate in bed. He couldn’t go out or he’d get mobbed. So we ate in bed.”
Glen Ford: “We did three movies together. I loved working with him. He could be extremely funny, and then he could make himself cry and people’s jaws would drop. Later on, he’d smile and people wouldn’t know if it was real or not. Up until the time he died, I used to go and visit him.”
Bobby Darin: “Just a lovely gentleman and a lovely actor. A brilliant young man, kind to everyone. He was so wonderful to work with.”
Dean Martin: “I adored him. He was funny, kind and gentle. He had a huge heart. He did everything the first time perfectly.”
Ernest Borgnine: “I love him dearly. I wish there was more we could do together. I think he’s 90-something now.”
Sam Peckinpah: “Because of him, ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’ was unlike anything I ever did. I am more proud of that movie than any of them. He was crazy about making movies and wanted to make them wonderful. He knew what people would love.”
The director of “The Poseidon Adventure,” Ronald Neame: “The movie worked. People were surprised I died at the end. All the people in it were wonderful. The director is still alive, in his 90s. He lives not far from here.”
          
During the 1960s Stella Stevens was one of the most-photographed women in the world, along with Raquel Welch, Brigitte Bardot, Ann-Margret, and of course, Marilyn. She was also voted one of the sexiest stars of the 20th century (number 27, behind Sharon Stone) by her nemesis Playboy. Ask any man of a certain age if he remembers Stella Stevens and the answer is always, “Yes.” Often followed by, “How is she? Is she happy?”
           
Stella Stevens never remarried, and today lives in the same Beverly Hills house (“I have a pool, but no tennis court”) that she bought when she first moved to California. “I have loved this place and still do,” she says. “It has kept me really well.” Occasionally over the years she had to borrow money on the house, but she says, “Two years ago I got a thing in the mail and found out I’d finished paying for it.”
           
These days, how does she spend her time? “I’m still working. People still ask me,” she replies. “I enjoy working better than eating.” Just recently she was approached about a recurring role in a proposed TV series. “I look forward to showing my fans a different kind of ‘Kitty,’” she says, and adds that’s all she can say for now. In addition to acting, she’s also directed two films, “The American Heroine” and “The Ranch,” and written a novel, Razzle Dazzle.
           
But one gets the sense that life has slowed down for her, at least a bit. “When I’m here and not working I try to garden. Very calming. I love it when plants are the best they can be. That’s what I like with people, too.”
           
These days one also gets the sense that her thoughts turn more and more toward her roots. “I have fond memories of Yazoo City,” she says. “I love the people there. I love that you have to go way away to catch a plane.”
           
Her son, Andrew, an actor, director, and producer, lives in Texas with his wife and their three children. Stella Stevens has little extended family, but in Yazoo, she recalls, during her last visit to see her cousin Marsha Dunn Williams, “I found a whole group of people I could love and they could love me. My heart was happy. I didn’t know there were that many people kin to me.”
           
Her thoughts also turn at times to the cemetery in her hometown, where her ancestors, including Henry Clay Tyler, rest near the entrance, beneath a stately obelisk. “I went to the cemetery and met the people working there—it’s very nicely taken care of. They were very nice. When I die, if they’ve got room for me, I’d like to go there, too.” DM