Unlikely Myth

Yvette Mimieux is her real name; yet it sounds more like an anagram or a code phrase devised by aliens, vaguely but discernibly inventive. Her hair is naturally blonde, yet it is so impossibly pale, so much closer to moonlight than to anything found on any ordinary human head, that it seems the product of a prop department. Her complexion, clear as ice and the untroubled color of early dawn, hints of a makeup artist. Her eyes, too, momentarily blue, then grey, then aquamarine, then green, look to be explicable only if they are not eyes at all but varying sets of colored contact lenses. Everything about her suggests that she is not a real girl, but simply a contrivance, like a myth, put together by the gods (or publicity people), who dreamed her perfect.

But perfection, after all, is the stuff that Hollywood starlets, as well as myths, are made of; and to Actress Yvette Mimieux, currently picking up a cool $60,000 a year as Hollywood's newest bit of fancy, the stuff seems genuine enough. So is her new-found stardom. At 21, with only eight films to her credit, Miss Mimieux (pronounced Mee-mee-yer) captured the plum part of the rich, put-upon child-bride in the screen version of Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic, for which she receives top billing, right along with Geraldine Page and Dean Martin. Considering the fact that just three years ago she was playing Weena, the forward-thinking girl in a science-fiction fantasy, The Time Machine--and that only her role as the lovely but mentally defective girl in Light in the Piazza has won her any sort of critical recognition--her sudden spiral to the top seems astonishing indeed.

No Poodles in Shorts. But no more so than her life offscreen. Born of a French father ("He's distantly related to Bach," says her pressagent) and Mexican mother ("a descendant of a conquistador'') in Hollywood, Yvette attended Catholic schools, studied for a year in Mexico City before settling down at Hollywood High School. She didn't get very far. For once upon a summer day, while horseback riding through the Hollywood Hills, she was startled to see a helicopter swoop down from the sky. Out stepped Pressagent Jim Byron ("that's spelled BYRON, as in Lord"), best known for having pasted together a puffy collage known as Jayne Mansfield.

Yvette was only 15, and was easily persuaded to try acting; though she let Byron direct the general shape of her career, she insisted on avoiding "anything that is not myself. Like sticking poodles under both arms while dressed in shorts.

I've never opened a supermarket, and I never will. When M-G-M wanted me to let my picture be put on the bottom of 90 million boxes of Kleenex, I refused. 'What could be worse,' I asked them, 'than being in 90 million bathrooms?' "

Bubbles for Shoes. Though she turned down the cheesecake, Yvette grew gluttonously fond of her new life. By the time she was 20, she had traveled through seven countries and crossed the U.S. half a dozen times. It was all too incredibly exciting. She sang and danced the night through with genuine gypsies in genuine caves in Granada, sipped chicory coffee at dawn with stevedores on the New Orleans docks, rolled hashish in a Tangier tavern. "I taste of everything the world has to offer," she says. Her tastes run from opera and religious music to modern art, though she takes time out from Baudelaire (which she reads in French) to catch up on Peanuts (which she reads in English).

She studies singing, piano and music theory, attends modern-jazz dancing classes five mornings a week ("It makes me feel as if I had soap bubbles for shoes"), and "dabbles in watercolors and short stories." Says she solemnly: "The lives of actors are centered round such transient things. What career can replace the total growth within the self?" She lives in an old clapboard house in Beverly Hills, spends most of her between-class hours walking alone through the woods, her evenings listening to her 1,000-record collection or playing chess with a friend. "Yvette has this kind of relationship with so many marvelous men," says Byron. "Like Glenn Ford. And Charles Boyer and Lee Cobb, who decided she was the best chess player they'd ever seen."

All of which leaves little time for the friendliest friend of them all, Evan Harland Engber, who has been married to Yvette for more than three years. Who he is, where he is, and what exact part he plays in Miss Mimieux's unlikely life is indeterminable; Yvette refuses to talk. "I don't want to sound mystical, but you have to reserve a part of yourself," she says. "Otherwise, you give too much of yourself away, and what's left is just your surface. One door leads to another, and you have to decide where you're going to close the doors. Open too many and there's nothing left behind where you can hide, where you can live."

On the other mystical hand, leave enough doors locked for a long enough time and people are apt to suspect that there is nothing there worth hiding--except maybe an industrious pressagent.

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