More than five years ago, Piper Laurie walked out on a $2,000 weekly movie contract because she couldn't stand being what she called a "sex-and-sand princess" any longer. Studio heads moaned in disbelief. True, her films for seven years were little more than updated versions of The Son of the Sheik, with Piper playing the shy princess in love with dashing Tony Curtis or John Derek or somebody. But was that bad?
Piper thought it was. She rejected sex-and-sand roles for five years, till at last she was cast in her first meaty role in The Hustler. Her characterization of the lame alcoholic won her Oscar mention.
"I didn't like those glamor-queen pictures I made," a 30 year old Piper recalls today. "I didn't like the color of my hair, I didn't even like my name. I detested the sound of Piper Laurie and everything she stood for. I could hear people laughing when my name was mentioned. 'Piper act...? they would guffaw. I made up my mind people would eat those remarks. One night I tried to remember at least one person who'd mentioned that they'd liked my acting. No one ever had. I started begging the studio to give me something more than a harem dance or bathing beauty parade."
The Stigma of being Piper
Piper wanted to act as long as she can remember- through grammar school in her native Detroit, later at high school in Los Angeles. But after disillusion set in- when she realized her films weren't really actors' material- she bowed out of her contract and went to New York.
There, she took daily acting instruction from Sanford Meizner, one of the best and most expensive dramatic teachers. She also appeared in an off-Broadway play, a play which lasted only two weeks and was her sole stage engagement. One night, producer-director Robert Rossen, who'd seen her performance, walked back-stage and handed her the script of The Hustler.
"I read a few pages and knew I had to do it," she recalls. "This was the part which would free me of the Piper Laurie stigma." The stigma had been brought home to her one day in New York when she attempted to read for a play. "I was told by the author, with great diplomacy, that I was 'too fragile' for the role. I didn't believe it, and persisted for a fuller explanation. I got it, both barrels: this play, I was told, had every chance of being a winner, winning a Pulitzer Prize. In view of this, the author declared, they simply couldn't afford to put the name 'Piper Laurie' in the cast."
In New York, she wanted to change her name back to her own name of Rosetta Jacobs, but friends had argued that Piper Laurie still represented name value. So she continued to use "Piper Laurie" in her increasingly frequent New York TV parts. She was twice nominated for an Emmy as TV's best dramatic actress of the year.
Roses & orchids for dinner
Also, in New York, seeking a new career, she met Joe Morgenstein, assistant drama editor of the New York Herald-Tribune. Morgenstern came up to her apartment one day to interview her about her new career. He liked what he heard- they were married four months ago (Feb., 1962).
Piper started off in movies well enough, after an agent had seen her in a small theater production in Los Angeles, and arranged for a contract at Universal-International. This daughter of a Polish furniture salesman was stage-struck. And to the studio, her pretty, cuddly looks were a dream-come-true. The publicity department had her five-foot-four, 112-pound figure posing for every type of picture. Before she was cast in her first film, she was known in all the fan magazines. Publicity men even devised the rumour that her blossom-fresh beauty was due to her diet- that her favorite meal was rose petals and camelia blossoms, with a side order of orchids.
She even dreamed up her own name. "I dreamed it up in a fit of silly fancy when I was 16," she tells you apologetically. "I always felt there was something pleasantly sentimental about the song, "Annie Laurie. And I remembered a girl in school who attracted boys. Her name was Piper. Presto- Piper Laurie."
In her third picture, she was paired with Tony Curtis, himself still practically unknown, in The Prince Who Was a Thief. It started her on her sex-and-sand sagas.
"The trouble is, though," Piper relates, "I didn't make a series of those pictures. It only seemed so. I was in only three or four but because Tony was with me in all of them, everybody thinks that's all I did. Tony was lucky enough to get away from being typed. I wasn't."
Things have changed since. By going east, young woman, Piper Laurie's found a new career and a husband. All of which isn't a bad trade-in for a soiled harem girl outfit.