The Skin Touch

At first glance, nearly everything seems wrong. The lips are too thick and the nose is too flat, a porcine little button. For a woman who stands only 5 ft. 5 in., the bust is perhaps too heroic, while the stomach is--well --flabby. Yet somehow all the defective parts work together to make Dyan Cannon Hollywood's newest sex star. "She has the skin touch," explains Producer Mike Frankovich. "It's a vibrant sex that goes over so strongly it sets off most men."

Accessibility is the essence of her appeal. The usual Dyan Cannon role is that of the good-hearted slattern, the readily available Miss--or Mrs. --next door. In Doctors' Wives, she was a bored spouse on the prowl for fresh medical talent; in The Love Machine, the nympho consort of the head of a giant TV network; in The Anderson Tapes, a high-class prostitute. Now Otto Preminger's Such Good Friends (TIME, Jan. 10) has her bedding down with her dying husband's best friends--how else is a girl going to cope with the discovery of her mate's past infidelities?

Until recently, Dyan's best-known part was that of Gary Grant's fourth ex-wife and the mother of his only child, five-year-old Jennifer. Born in the mid-'30s--she refuses to give her exact age --Samille Diane Friesen grew up in Seattle, the daughter of a Baptist father and a Jewish mother. After 18 months of drama courses at the University of Washington, she left for Hollywood. Eventually she tested for Producer Jerry Wald who gave her her stage name.

"I see something explosive," said Wald. "Terrific! Bang! Cannon!"

At this point in her career, Dyan went into TV soap operas, which, she says, "taught me how to relax in front of a camera and how to work fast. I acted everything from committing murder to selling Girl Scout cookies, and I even had to read speeches while sets fell on me." Her performance in a TV film entitled--what else?--The Diane Adventure caught Grant's eye and prompted him to audition her for one of his movies. She lost the part (the picture was never produced), but gained a husband --eventually. She and Grant lived together for about four years before her "uptight" feelings about not being married led to a wedding, over his reservations, in 1965.

Less than three years later they split up in one of Hollywood's messier divorces, with Dyan charging that Grant was a weekly LSD tripper who beat her in front of the servants and tried to "remake" her. "He changed the way I wore my hair, my makeup, my speech and my clothes," she says. "If I hadn't divorced him, I'd be dead by now."

Eventually she landed the part that finally made her a movie star--Alice in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. With stardom, there quickly came a reputation for star temperament and all the late arrivals, weeping fits and temper tantrums that go with it. "Like any strong woman," shrugs Producer Frankovich, "she's got fangs." The director who seems to have felt them most keenly is Preminger, himself no Teddy bear. On the set of Such Good Friends, they clashed over her lateness, his penchant for exacting retakes (58 on one scene), and her refusal to pose completely in the nude. Bare breasts were as far as she would go, a problem that Preminger eventually solved by superimposing her head on another actress's body. At one point she stamped off the set, leaving Preminger, who tends to forget names under stress, chasing after her calling, "Come back, Miss . . . Miss . . ."

Live-Sex Show. Dyan says today:

"I would never make another film rather than work with Preminger again. I don't think he could direct his little nephew to the bathroom." To which Preminger replies with a ferocious gleam: "Imagine how good her performance will be in her next film if her performance in this one was so brilliant with a bad director." He adds: "I didn't hire her to praise me; I hired her to give a good performance. And she did." Her next film, to be released in the U.S. in February: The Burglars, in which, to top her list of easy-women roles, she plays a performer in a live-sex show. The picture, which has already done well in Europe, was shot on location in Greece, amid cake-throwing cast celebrations and plate-smashing parties in tavernas. Says she of fellow Performer Omar Sharif: "What a man! He's my ideal of a real movie star. He does the whole bit--horses, cars, girls."

Meanwhile she lives in her new house in Malibu with her daughter, a young driver-helper, a maid, a fox terrier, a large mongrel and a deaf cat. She eats health foods ("Our whole society is built around the dining table," she complains over alfalfa sprouts and carrot juice) and spends a lot of time watching the tide--and her psyche. Starting with her breakthrough in B. & C. & T. & A., she recalls, "people kept saying, 'Wow! You're a star. You must really be happy,' and I kept asking myself, 'If it's so great, why doesn't it feel any better?'" She sought the answer at Esalen, the California group-therapy center shown in B. & C. & T. & A., where, after some hesitation, she joined a nude session in a tub. After that she tried primal therapy, a far-out treatment that induces the patient to reenact his infancy, including kicking and screaming. She still attends weekly group-therapy sessions.

As her attitudes on nudity show, Dyan retains a sense of the Puritan ethic. In these days of four-letter words, for example, her efforts to avoid using foul language seem almost selfconscious. She rarely talks about sex, and when she does, she shoots a wicked glance, as if to say, "There, I've said it," like a Girl Scout who has strayed from the campfire.

Still, she does think about sex and blames "too much education" as the malaise behind "so many frigid women in America." That does not seem to be her problem. Like the on-screen Dyan, her main worry is men: "All I need is a guy. I've never had a relationship with a man I could be completely at ease with. But I still believe in the grand passion."

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