The Ordeal of Ann-Margret

It was like watching Minnie Mouse play Ophelia--brilliantly. Nobody could believe that Ann-Margret, the Swedish meatball, the female Troy Donahue, the 30-year-old high school cheerleader from Wilmette, Ill., was actually acting. But in Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge (TIME, July 5), playing the billowy milkbed the hero frolics on, she opposed Jack Nicholson's grim portrait of a swordless swordsman with a rich and touching study of what happens to a woman when her man won't let her be one. Her work deserved and got the sort of reviews that could win a girl an Oscar, and her body got a degree and quality of exposure that made her overnight what for eleven years she has clumsily tried to be: a sex symbol. In the past six months, thanks to a sudden ripening of her stage personality, Ann-Margret has made herself a smash hit at the International in Las Vegas and has outdrawn Frank Sinatra at Miami Beach's Fontainebleau.

Cat-Sized Rats. With every reason to feel just great, why did she look so puffy and strung out? "I'm flabbergasted by the reviews," she told TIME'S Brad Darrach. "After eleven years, I can't believe it. But you know, doing that part --it changed my life." Her voice broke. "It made me realize. So much. That poor girl I played in the picture had been so used. Always attracted to the same kind of man, and each man destroyed her. She was like a little puppy dog. No matter how much you beat her she kept coming back, trusting the owner. Since I did the part, I've been feeling so much tension, such pressure." She drew a deep breath. "It's a definite signal. I'll work through the year because I've got commitments. Then I'll quit show business. At least for a year, maybe forever."

Forever in show business usually lasts till the next good offer, but success and disillusion do seem to have struck Ann-Margret simultaneously. Her story, which she told like a woman who had just discovered pain and was fascinated by it, is a version of the old standard about the small-town girl who paid too high a price to reach the big time. When Ann-Margret Olsson was a year old, her electrician father left his family in a tiny Swedish village and sailed for the U.S. For the next seven years, until his wife reluctantly agreed to follow him, Ann-Margret was her mother's main source of happiness. It was a heavy responsibility. "As early as I can remember," she says now, "the thing I thought about most of all was giving people happiness."

In Wilmette, the family fell on hard times and took cheap lodgings in a funeral parlor. Ann-Margret slept on a foldout bed in the room where the bodies were laid out. When there was a funeral, she could not go to bed until the last mourner had left; she was often wakened, she says, by rats as big as full-grown cats that (for reasons perhaps best left unexamined) lived in the mortuary cellar. At 16, Ann-Margret sang on Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour but lost out to "a Mexican leaf player," and at 19 she turned up in Las Vegas. She had a firecracker energy and a hot, staccato style that could take your eye off a charging tiger.

George Burns gave her a spot in his show. United Artists found a part in Frank Capra's A Pocketful of Miracles, and in State Fair her dark brown hair showed up as a cornea-shattering shade of red. A star, she drove up to her old high school in a yellow Cadillac convertible and strolled through the halls in a mink coat. But four years later, the bottom fell out. Her managers, in her version of it, were merely exploiting her sex appeal--and ineptly. With puppylike trust, Ann-Margret did as she was told. At 25, after a descending spiral of bike operas and drive-in fillers, she was a has-been and a joke to the industry. But in 1967, she married Roger Smith, a TV actor who had played in 77 Sunset Strip, and Smith and an agent named Allan Carr took over Ann-Margret's career.

Instant Improvement. In two Ann-Margret TV specials and a role in Stanley Kramer's R.P.M., her screen personality seemed quieter, sweeter, more womanly. She had lost the twippet look. Her breasts with suspicious suddenness had taken on melony dimensions. Had she seen the silicone man? Ann-Margret said no. "When I put on weight, I put it on there." Lucky for her. Melony dimensions were required for the role of Bobbie in Carnal Knowledge.

Mike Nichols had spent six months looking for the right girl to play the part. He had considered and rejected Raquel Welch, Jane Fonda, Dyan Cannon, Natalie Wood. One night Critic Kenneth Tynan's wife suggested Ann-Margret. Nichols smiled, but a screen test convinced him.

Nerves and Viruses. It did not convince Ann-Margret. "It was hell," she said. "Every minute I worked on that movie was hell." Terrified of failure, imagining the final collapse of her career, she gave herself desperately to the role. "I knew I had the emotion. That's all I am, emotion. But I couldn't do Bobbie by myself. Mike had to mold me. And he did. I lived Bobbie day and night. I turned into the slob Bobbie is. Between takes I just sat in my dressing room and stared at the wall. When I got back to the hotel at night, I put on my bathrobe and walked back and forth in the bathroom. I felt depressed, all the time depressed. So vulnerable, so betrayed. Mike and Jack kept me going. One day I couldn't cry when I should have and Jack said horrible things about Bobbie until I burst into tears."

When the shooting stopped, Ann-Margret's anguish did not. Stone pro that she is, she went ahead with a four-week run in Las Vegas. Pain lent a darker resonance to her voice and presence, even in moments of razzmatazz. Pain came through wild and pure in her song about Marilyn Monroe: Does Anybody Out There Love Me? At the end of the run, nerves shot and viruses acting up, she was rushed to a hospital.

"I was scared bad," she recalled. "I still am. I've always had this endless energy. Lying there, I thought about having a baby. I think that kind of giving would calm me down. Peace is what I lack. I got into all this too fast, too young. If I could just be Ann-Margret Olsson again, maybe I'd get over this feeling that my nerves are on top of my skin."

Ta-Daaaaa! The thought seemed to cheer her up. Her husband ordered a steak sent up to her room, and after she put it away she bounced up and taught a visitor how to do the shuffle and the shim-sham. Soon she was stomping to the music of an imaginary combo and shaking it up like the great little putter-outer she has always been. "Ta-daaaaa!" she yelled as she reached the Durante closer, her arms opened wide and her green eyes glittering happily through her long soft strawberry locks. Quit show business? Come off it! Just watch her face light up when somebody discusses her recent appearance at the Teamsters' convention or asks if she's been offered the Marilyn Monroe role in Arthur Miller's After the Fall. "I know I'm vulnerable," she said, still exploring that new-found capacity for pain, "but I'd rather not have a shield, even though it hurts more that way. As long as I can, I want to go out there and make millions of people happy!"

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