The Nicest Yet

She's the nicest girl Sinatra's ever gone with--Nicer than Ava, Lauren, Kim, Kyle, Candy, Kitty, Sally, Shirley, Terri, Patti, Marta, Milly, Lana, Lulu, and Lady Beatty.

The tribute is echoed in various forms by many long-memoried observers all over Hollywood. Frankie's latest "latest" deserves anyone's admiration: she is a tall, intelligent, guileless South African dancer named Juliet Prowse, who calls Hollywood a "demoralizing hick town" and wears Sinatra like an ankle charm.

Featured in Fox's Can-Can and starred with Elvis Presley in a film now in production, she has about her a pouting, full-lipped flavor that suggests an exercised, trim-figured Bardot. But Juliet Prowse is no BB. She's a high-caliber bullet. Last week, on camera for Hal Wallis' G.I. Blues, Juliet writhed and swiveled through a German nightclub jazz dance in a flesh-colored skirt sliced in panels from hem to hips. At a ringside table, a fat cat with slowly inflating eyes made an impassioned grab and caught the center panel, pulling her toward his lap. For his pangs, he was shot in the face with his own stein of beer. "Cut," called Director Norman Taurog, and a wardrobe woman rushed forth to sponge the foam from Juliet's snowy thighs.

Watching raptly off-camera, Elvis Presley also swiveled ("He would make a damn good dancer," says Juliet. "He's got fabulous rhythm"), made his own grab for the center panel a scene or two later, when he gave Juliet her first on-screen kiss. "Cut," said Taurog finally. "Cut. I said, 'Cut.' Do you hear me? Cut!" But Taurog merely got a wave from the hound-dog man.

The Tree of Life. Off the lot, Presley couldn't so much as polish Juliet's Thunderbird, for many good reasons, not the least of which is that Frankie got there first. They met on the set of Can-Can. She was "terrified of him," but soon she fell for the bony build, that dimpled chin, those big blue wisecracks. He, in turn, was more entranced than Khrushchev by her cancan, and--in another scene of the film--must have got ideas when she slid sensually down from the branches of the Tree of Life, dressed in blue-green moltable snakeskin, a big red apple in her hand.

A discreet girl with wisdom apparently beyond her 23 years, Juliet keeps her private life to herself, yet openly and offhandedly refers to her evening drives out to Sinatra's Coldwater Canyon home. "We date. But I would not put it as a big romance. We get on very well together. Gossip doesn't worry me. I'm an open person. I've mixed around in this business long enough not to be embarrassed by anything pertaining to sex."

The Boy She Left Behind. Juliet Prowse's early, experimental mixing began in Johannesburg, where at eleven she won her first merit certificate--for a Greek dance, "in which I was supposed to be a moth burned by a flame." As "the baby" of Johannesburg's Festival Ballet Company, she appeared at 14 in the corps of Swan Lake, Coppelia and Les Sylphides. Two years later she was the Queen of the Wilis in Giselle, had done well enough to continue her studies in London.

Anton Dolin's Festival Ballet in London turned her down because she was too tall (5 ft. 6 1/2 in.). Switching to the musical theater, Juliet played Princess Samaris in the London production of Kismet. Later, she moved on to an engagement at Paris' La Nouvelle Eve, a nightclub distinguished for its bare dancers, but a motor-scooter accident interfered with her appearance in that particular Eden.

In Italy, working in a sort of roving revue, Juliet met a quiet, handsome dancer named Sergio Fadini. They fell in love, teamed up and toured the European nightclub circuit. Ambitious for her, Fadini helped polish Juliet's acting, her fine singing voice, her sinuous dancing. They were in Spain last year when Fadini heard that Choreographer Hermes Pan was also there, looking for dancers to take back to Hollywood for Can-Can. Fadini himself arranged the interview.

They still write each other.

"It's ironical," Fadini recalled philosophically in Rome last week. "I once kidded her about falling for Sinatra and she scoffed at the suggestion, saying he wasn't her kind of man. I am happy she is making a career for herself. It's my only consolation. Juliet is a sweet, shy, reserved girl. Actually, I don't see what she sees in a man like Sinatra."

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