Before Drew Barrymore, there was Tuesday Weld. By the time the blond grandspawn of the Barrymore acting dynasty was twenty, she had already been addicted to drugs and alcohol, attempted suicide, written a book about her recovery and transformed herself into America's kick-ass sweetheart with a heart of gold. Tuesday Weld began her career on a similar trajectory, but the ravishing blond with coal-black eyes chose a more challenging path, rebuking the mainstream at every turn in favor of a more personal, interior vision. She famously turned down leads in such blockbusters as Lolita, Bonnie and Clyde, Rosemary's Baby, True Grit and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (when asked why she turned down Lolita, she responded, "I didn't have to play Lolita; I was Lolita"), and her very persona is a rebuke to the idea of the commodified Hollywood blonde.
By her own admission, Weld, who started supporting her mother and two siblings by working as a model at age three after her father died in 1946, had a nervous breakdown at nine and became an alcoholic at ten, regularly blowing off correspondence school to get drunk in Manhattan's West Village. In full Judy Garland mode at twelve, she fell in love with a gay man and attempted suicide by washing down sleeping pills with gin, causing her to temporarily lose her hearing and sight. By the time she made her Hollywood film debut at thirteen, she had lived life harder than most actresses four times her age, inspiring Danny Kaye, her co-star in 1959's Five Pennies, to quip, "Tuesday is fifteen going on twenty-seven." Perversely, in spite of her premature maturity she would end up playing sweet-sixteen characters until she was twenty-seven. Yet as the idealism of the '50s turned into something more bleak and complex in the late sixties, Weld's persona gained a more self-consciously sinister and foreboding edge.
She parlayed her infamous turn as Thalia Menninger, hip teenage aristocrat and nubile material girl in the 1959 season of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, into ingenue roles in questionable movies such as Sex Kittens Go to College, Wild in the Country (her obligatory Elvis flick) and Bachelor Flat. Although she had already managed to squeeze in one controversial movie — as a girl who is raped by her stepfather and has an abortion in 1961's Return to Peyton Place — it was in TV roles that she started to articulate the disturbed, feral persona that would soon become her trademark. In a 1962 episode of Route 66, she played a woman who got off a bus in a small Texas town wearing a Japanese mask and mysteriously burned a doll at the stake. In a 1964 installment of The Fugitive, she essayed a seemingly sweet, innocent sculptress suffering from hysterical blindness who was revealed to be a manipulative murderess. From that point on, the evening gloves (and cashmere sweaters) were off.
Often cast as the innocent-if-eventually-corrupted country girl (Wild in the Country, The Cincinnati Kid), Weld lampooned her vixenish image in two of her best films, Lord Love a Duck (1966) and Pretty Poison (1968). The two movies are remarkably similar variations on the same theme: a high-school girl from a fractured, single-mother family comes under the spell of an older "boyfriend" who harbors elaborate delusions (and who is also heavily coded as gay), then proceeds to wreak havoc on the town. In both movies, the mothers are promiscuous and tarty — frustrated women in their early forties stifling the freedom and ambitions of their daughter — and in both cases the highly unsocialized boyfriends are enlisted in some crazy homicidal scheme to extract the girl from her repressed position. ("The old hag even took my car keys," complains Tuesday in Pretty Poison.) Although the girl is undeniably complicit in the murders (in Pretty Poison, she actually commits matricide), it's the boyfriend in both movies who ends up in jail for the crime, so entranced by the young, anarchic beauty that he gladly takes the rap.
These two enormously clever black comedies get to the black heart of Tuesday Weld. Pretty Poison was way ahead of its time in its depiction of homegrown terror: it's not the unhinged, sociopathic outsider (Perkins) who becomes the multiple murderer, but the freckle-faced majorette next door who giggles and innocently sips a Pepsi after killing her own mother. The scene in which a short-skirted Weld sits on the face of the dying security guard she's bludgeoned — as Perkins watches, in horrified fascination — seems oddly contemporary, a precursor to the homicidal duos of Badlands, Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers. Teenagers had been depicted as violently disaffected before Pretty Poison, but Weld's sangfroid and frank sexuality took things to a chilling new level. Lord Love a Duck, an existential bikini-beach movie, goes even further in its capricious anarchy. "What's your major?" asks Roddy McDowell as Alan, the couch-surfing drifter who becomes a Svengali to Weld's luscious Barbara Ann. "Adolescent ethics and commercial relationships," she replies, blithely nailing the essence of her own screen persona. Of course Barbara Ann wants to be a movie star, and Alan will do anything, including murdering the young husband she begins to tire of, to help her achieve her goal. Barbara Ann ends up in Hollywood starring in a movie called Bikini Widow (her director's previous movies include Bikini Vampire and Cold War Bikini), blowing kisses in her white mink stole to the crowd that menacingly engulfs her at the premiere. It's a pure indictment of the Hollywood system, and it foreshadows Tuesday's own disenchantment and withdrawal from the scene.
After turning down films that undoubtedly would have made her a major star, Tuesday Weld became known in the '70s for being very good in thankless roles. One exception is the amazing Play It As It Lays (1972), based on Joan Didion's takedown of Hollywood. Weld plays a former model and actress in full nervous-breakdown mode who has a traumatic abortion. Her first child is schizophrenic; her husband is a philandering cult director whose gay producer Anthony Perkins, is her only friend. Perkins ends up committing suicide in her pretty, poisonous arms.
It's a pity Weld chose not to star in Rosemary's Baby, because it would have so neatly reinforced all the cruel ambiguities of her persona. Children don't fare well in Tuesday Weld movies — she is usually either forced to abandon them or to abandon their fathers with them (1978's Who'll Stop the Rain, 1981's Thief), or they're mad or she aborts them (Play It As It Lays; 1977's Looking For Mr. Goodbar).
