The Electronic Tomato

She is, more or less, the empire sex building. She is 6 ft. tall. She is over a yard in circumference at the chest. Her thews are soft, her sinews are taut; her thighs, her eyes -- her total form is a monument to the aspirations of man.

She could not have been made any where but in a laboratory.

That, actually, is the story line. This creature's name is Air Force Project 709. Her nickname is "Rhoda." She is made of transistors, computers, poly ethylene and a generator. Within her breasts are solar batteries. She is the central figure and continuous joke in CBS's new situation comedy, My Living Doll. Created for experimental purposes by aerospace scientists, she is for the moment on loan to a psychiatrist (Bob Cummings), who keeps her in his apartment. She will do anything he tells her to do, and when she doesn't under stand him, she says, "That does not compute." Curiously enough, this remarkably human robot is being played by Julie Newmar, and typecasting has rarely had a brighter hour. A strong-minded, singleminded, career-minded girl with a unique sense of humor, Julie speaks in terse, direct and sometimes disarming sentences that seem to have been programmed on punch cards that say PLEASE DO NOT FOLD OR BEND. No method actress has ever found a more empathetical wave length with the character she is playing. "Rhoda is the ultimate consciousness," says Julie, "the ultimate reality, the ultimate freedom.

She is the quintessence of humanness.

As I play her, the robot is coming closer to the ideal in humanity, and the humans around it are becoming more and more like robots." Fresh Ears. Unmarried and 29, Julie used to sleep in her dressing room until Desilu studios told her they were not insured; now she has a flat across the street from the studio gate. She is on the set at 6:30 every morning, a half-hour before her call. On weekends, she goes home to her parents. Her father was once a professional football player and is now a teacher at Los Angeles City College. Her mother was a Ziegfeld girl.

As a pretty little computer in frocks and saddle shoes, Julie was shy and withdrawn. "That is the reason," she analyzes, "why most girls become actresses. The thing that turns them into a star is the need to be loved and accepted. Approbation to me means more than anything." By the time she was 16, she was getting approbation all over the place, even on a trip to Spain, where a matador spotted her in the stands and gave her both ears of his most recently vanquished bull. Outside the plaza de toros, her mother threw the ears in the gutter.

When she was 20, she was a featured dancer in Broadway's Silk Stockings.

In Li'I Abner--on Broadway and in the film--she was a monadnock of sex as "Stupefyin' Jones." In The Marriage-Go-Round, she won a Tony award for standing on the stage dressed only in a towel and begging Charles Boyer, as a brilliant professor, to unite his mighty mens sana with her massive corpore sano. She brings the same sort of ingenuous sexuality to her role as a TV robot, managing the difficult trick of being comical and at the same time alluring enough to start the Colossus of Rhodes off his blocks.

Perfect Intuition. With all this, she gained confidence. "Most beautiful women are not beautiful enough to suit themselves," she says. "I have never believed I was beautiful. Once in a while, I will sidle up to a mirror and plant a kiss on it and squeal something about how beautiful I am, but I am just kidding. I would rather you^ tell me I am beautiful than intelligent, because I am sure of my intelligence. I have not accepted the physical part of me yet." Even though it has a star of the quality of Bob Cummings, Living Doll, which is somewhere in the middle of the ratings curve, would be nothing without her--since the physical part of her is feverishly acceptable. Julie says she used to date only bankers and lawyers.

Now that she is more secure in show business, she thinks she would like to have a director or writer as a husband.

It is possible, however, that she would stand a better chance of getting the one she wants if she were to ask the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to construct one for her. "I don't need security," she says. "I don't need a house, social acceptance, or a chance to get away from my family. So marriage will have to be a direct hit. All I need is happiness. I have everything else."

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