Tuesday Weld with Richard Janssen of “The Fugitive.”
If you are a child of the 60s, you will remember Tuesday Weld.
The blonde bombshell combined an innocent, virginal blonde beauty with a sexuality that made her Stanley Kubrick’s first choice to play “Lolita.” (She turned the part down, saying, “I don’t have to play it. I was Lolita.”)
You have to admire a woman who changed her name, legally, to Tuesday when she was only 16 years old and, when asked what drove her from Hollywood, responded, “I think it was a Buick.”
Tuesday had some outstanding roles, although it was always her appearance that preceded her, in the same way that Michelle Pfieffer’s blonde good looks have made her into a line in a Bruno Mars song.
Her childhood was not a happy one. Born in 1943, she became her family’s sole breadwinner when her father died at age 49 in 1947 just before Tuesday’s fourth birthday. Her mother, Yosene Balfour Ker, daughter of the artist and Life illustrator William Balfour Ker, was Lathrop Weld’s fourth and last wife.
Mother Yosene put Tuesday into modeling and she soon began her career as an actress. Tuesday began drinking heavily at ages 9 and 10 and had a breakdown at age nine. Mommy didn’t think that Tuesday needed therapy and life went on pretty much as before, with Tuesday’s first suicide attempt at age twelve. Later, Tuesday expressed a great deal of hostility towards her mother and said she only felt free when her mother had passed. In fact, she began telling people that her mother was dead literally decades before she had actually died.
Most of her life, Tuesday was preyed upon by older men. One of the most famous of her laiasons with the actor John Ireland, who was then in his forties, while she was underage. Over the years, she had romances with Al Pacino,[29] David Steinberg,[30] Mikhail Baryshnikov[31] (whose previous girlfriend, Jessica Lange, had been Weld’s best friend),[32] Omar Sharif,[33] Richard Gere[34] and Ryan O’Neal.
Tuesday Weld in 1960.
Career
Weld attracted attention as the favored, out-of-control Katherine in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) – packing into her short screen time an orgy, a divorce, a lot of alcohol, and two abortions – and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress;[20] later she appeared in Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978) opposite Nick Nolte; and the ensemble satire Serial (1980).
She said she preferred television. “What I dig about TV is the pace”, she said. “Two weeks for even a heavy part – great. Too much thinking about a role is a disaster for me. I mean, let’s do it, let’s get it done.”[25]
She played the lead in the TV films A Question of Guilt (1978), in which she plays a woman accused of murdering her children, Mother and Daughter: The Loving War (1980), a remake of Madame X (1981), and a new version of The Rainmaker (1982).
In feature films, Weld had a good supporting role in Michael Mann‘s acclaimed 1981 film Thief, opposite James Caan. She played Al Pacino‘s wife in Author! Author! (1982) and co-starred with Donald Sutherland in the TV film The Winter of Our Discontent (1983). This performance earned her an Emmy nomination.
In 1984, she appeared in Sergio Leone‘s gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America, playing a jeweler’s secretary, who is in on a plan to steal a shipment of diamonds. During the robbery, her character goads Robert De Niro‘s character, David “Noodles” Aaronson, into “raping” her with her complicity. She later meets up with the gang from the robbery, and becomes the moll of James Woods‘ character Max Bercovicz. Disturbed by what she sees as Max’s delusional, even suicidal, ambitions, she convinces Noodles to betray Max to the police. The performance earned Weld a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress of 1984.
On TV, Weld was in Scorned and Swindled (1984), Circle of Violence (1986) and Something in Common (1986). She had a supporting role in Heartbreak Hotel (1988).
Later career
Weld was reunited with Anthony Perkins in an episode of Mistress of Suspense (1990).
In 1993, she played a police officer’s neurotic wife in Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall. She had small supporting roles in Feeling Minnesota (1996), Investigating Sex (2001), and Chelsea Walls (2001).
Personal life
Weld was married three times. She was married to screenwriter Claude Harz from October 23, 1965, until their divorce on February 18, 1971. They had a daughter, Natasha, born on August 26, 1966. Weld was awarded custody of Natasha in the divorce and $100 a month in child support payments.[26]
She married British actor, musician and comedian Dudley Moore on September 20, 1975. On February 26, 1976, they had a son, Patrick. The couple divorced in 1980, with Weld receiving a $200,000 settlement plus $3,000 monthly alimony for the next 4 years and an additional $2,500 a month in child support.[27]
On October 18, 1985, she married Israeli concert violinist and conductor Pinchas Zukerman, becoming stepmother to his daughters Arianna and Natalia. The couple divorced in 1998. In court papers, Zukerman quoted Weld as saying, “Why do I need to go to another concert when I’ve heard the piece before?” and “I can’t stand the backstage scene. I don’t want to hear another note.”[28]
Weld sold her beach house in Montauk, New York, in the late 2000s and moved to Carbondale, Colorado. In 2018, she left Colorado and bought a $1.8 million home in the Hollywood Hills.[36]
Montauk house
Weld and then-husband Zukerman purchased 74 Surfside Ave in 1990 from the estate of Norman Kean, who produced the long-running Broadway show Oh! Calcutta! and who killed himself and his actress wife Gwyda Donhowe in their Manhattan apartment in 1988.[37] Although the Montauk residence was not a crime scene, Weld later struggled to find a buyer for the property due to its murder-suicide connection. Listed in 2006, it sat on the market for three years before selling at a reduced price of $6.75 million in 2009 and is now rented.[38][39] Weld bought a “tiny condo” there in 2021 for $335,000.[40]
Filmography
Television
| Year | Film | Role | Notes |
| 1959 | The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet | Connie/Cathy | 3 episodes |
| The Red Skelton Hour | Starlet | Episode: “Appleby: The Big Producer” | |
| 77 Sunset Strip | Barrie Connell | Episode: “Secret Island” | |
| 1959-62 | The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis | Thalia Menninger | Series regular (season 1) Guest star (seasons 3-4) |
| 1960 | 77 Sunset Strip | Kitten Lang | Episode: “Condor’s Lair” |
| The Millionaire | Beth Boland | Episode: “Millionaire Katherine Boland” | |
| The Tab Hunter Show | Ginny | Episode: “The Doll in the Bathtub” | |
| Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre | Beth Lawson | Episode: “The Mormons” | |
| 1961 | Follow the Sun | Barbara Beaumont | Episode: “The Highest Wall” |
| Bus Stop | Cherie | Episode: “Cherie” | |
| 1962 | Adventures in Paradise | Gloria Dannora | Episode: “The Velvet Trap” |
| Naked City | Ora Mae Youngham | Episode: “A Case Study of Two Savages” | |
| Route 66 | Miriam Moore | Episode: “Love Is a Skinny Kid” | |
| Ben Casey | Melanie Gardner | Episode: “When You See an Evil Man” | |
| 1964 | Mr. Broadway | Emily | Episode: “An Eye on Emily” |
| The Fugitive | Mattie Braydon | Episode: “Dark Corner” | |
| 1967 | The Crucible | Abigail Williams | Television film |
| 1968 | Cimarron Strip | Heller | Episode: “Heller” |
| 1975 | F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood | Zelda Fitzgerald | Television film |
| 1978 | A Question of Guilt | Doris Winters | Television film |
| 1980 | Mother and Daughter: The Loving War | Lillie Lloyd McCann | Television film |
| 1981 | Madame X | Holly Richardson | Television film |
| 1982 | The Rainmaker | Lizzie | Television film CableACE Award for Actress in a Theatrical or Non-Musical Program |
| 1983 | The Winter of our Discontent | Margie Young-Hunt | Television film Nominated — Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Miniseries or a Movie |
| 1984 | Scorned and Swindled | Sharon Clark | Television film |
| 1986 | Circle of Violence | Georgia Benfield | Television film |
| Something in Common | Shelly Grant | Television film | |
| 1990 | Chillers | Jessica | Episode: “Something You Have to Live With” |
“What the Democrats are trying to do on this issue is wrong, to allow abortion all the way up to the moment of birth.”
So, I’ve been watching the Republican debate. (Just shoot me now.)
According to a recent publication by two Constitutional scholars, Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be President of the United States, because of the Constitutional prohibition under Section 3 of the 14th amendment, which bars anyone from elected office who has “engaged in” or “given aid or comfort” to an “insurrection or rebellion.”
Independence, Iowa, was named as the seat of Buchanan County in June of 1847. A second town, New Haven, and its mill, were located on the west bank of the river. In 1854, the State Legislature merged the two towns. Ten years later, in 1864, Independence was incorporated. Quasqueton, then called Quasquetuk, which I wrote about as the location of a Frank Lloyd Wright home, is quite near Independence (located on what is often referred to as the Independence/Quaskie diagonal). Quasqueton was originally the county seat, but that distinction was moved to Independence in 1847 at a time when there were only 15 residents in Independence.
It was decided to raise the bridge to make it less vulnerable. In doing so, the level of the street on the East side would also need to be raised, thereby changing the grade of the entire street. A massive project began. Retaining walls were constructed. Dirt was hauled from further up the hill to the East to raise the street from the river to beyond 3rd Avenue N.E. As it progressed, the entrances to stores fell below street level. A walkway was maintained so that merchants and customers could still do business. I’ve been told that the revelation of this “buried” level of the city was not fully realized until about 2011. I grew up there and knew nothing of it, but the Episcopalian minister of St. James Episcopalian Church, Sue Ann Raymond, whose father owned Raymond Printing Company for years, said she was aware of this subterranean nature of the city, because part of it was located beneath her father’s store.
In May of 1874 a second larger fire began in the middle of the West side of 2nd Avenue, consuming the buildings on the north side of 1st St. E to the river. High winds allowed the fire to jump to the south side of the street. Within 10 days of the second fire, merchants and land owners began rebuilding on the existing limestone foundations, leaving underground storefronts as they were. The devastation led to an opportunity to recreate the downtown with beauty and continuity. The buildings were crafted in the Italianate architectural style of the day.
Today’s random rant will be about the polar vortex and how it ravaged my kitchen in my absence (Texas).
It appears that a new sub floor is going to need to be put in. The people who removed some of the cabinetry want us to buy all new cabinets, even though the cabinets that currently are in place do not appear to have been harmed much or at all and the bottom parts would never match the top parts (and the Wood Mode cabinets were exorbitantly expensive when put in in 1993). One laborer, who had said he would intercede with the insurance company on our behalf, seemed quite put out that we don’t want to invest huge sums of money in all new cabinetry when the current cabinets appear to be largely okay. One went so far as to say, “They could collapse,” which seems highly improbable. There is talk of signing some sort of waiver that would protect from something like the recent collapse of the Davenport on Main building in Davenport, Iowa.
on a plastic door to enter the kitchen. (We chose to go outside the house and enter through the deck door). The fans were noisy (difficult to hear TV over them) and a heater was employed for a while, which drove the temperature in the room up to 87 degrees. The fans were loud. My spouse told the workmen that I would not have had to run my “wind machine” at night, because the fans were that loud. That would be funny, but not if you’re living in the middle of it 24/7.
I’m almost caught up from the recently concluded SXSW film festival.