Boom in Black

One worries about her. Her eyes, for example. Close-set, irredeemably myopic, they tend to look out of alignment when the camera shoots her headon. If lighting, costume and camera angle are not exactly right, her 5-ft. 7-in. frame looks bottom heavy. Her voice skips from squeaky to strident without even a glancing brush at the tones in between.

Such defiantly unglamorous physical attributes might hamper the career of an aspiring stewardess on any regularly scheduled airline, but they have helped make Karen Black, 32, the busiest actress in Hollywood. She has just finished her sixth movie in the past two years, and last week she began work on her seventh, Alfred Hitchcock's Deceit. She has not sought out safe, sympathetic parts. She has played the teasing Faye Greener in The Day of the Locust, the honky-tonk waitress Rayette Dipesto in Five Easy Pieces, the low-down and libidinous Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby, and the victimized Monkey in Portnoy's Complaint. Right now she is within hailing distance of being what she calls "a first-rank star."

Gamy Sexuality. Black claims that there is "a lot of Marilyn Monroe in me," but she disdains the traditional glamorizing process of Hollywood--all the makeup and surgery that can camouflage every flaw. She has capitalized on her defects as well as her virtues. Her image is to look scruffy and a little disassembled. Black brings to all her roles a freewheeling combination of raunch and winsomeness. Sometimes she is kittenish. At other times she has an overripe quality that makes her look like the kind of woman who gets her name tattooed on sailors.

Bruce Dern, who in Deceit will co-star with her for the third time, says: "Karen is always alive on that screen." Jack Nicholson, her co-star in Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces and her director in Drive, He Said, maintains that "she's the most lucid actress I've ever worked with. You tell her where it's at and she grabs it." For Black, acting is like grabbing at air. She says that she plans nothing about a character and gives a role "no prior thought."

Instead, she likes to discuss "Myrtle's life force" or "Monkey's elan." In much the same way, she will talk about "the essences" of friends or colleagues. She feels that she has learned much from Scientology, Ex-Science Fiction Writer L. Ron Hubbard's free-floating religion. Black keeps an E-Meter, which indicates emotionally charged words, close at hand. It measures "biofeedback emotional response," she says. "Scientology is a group of knowledge to handle and get rid of inexplicable behavior. It has cleared my mind."

Scientology has also helped patch "a terrible relationship" with her mother. When she was an aspiring actress, things got tense at home in Park Ridge, Ill. Mother would ask daughter if she would like help setting her hair, and Black wondered, "Why is she doing this? Is she trying to smother me? Destroy me?" Scientology has since allayed such fears, soothed her about her recent divorce from Actor Skip Burton, and given her some new, if hardly original, insight: "He wasn't the right man for me."

Black professes not to understand why people identify her with the character she plays on screen. "I'm acting," she protests, "not playing myself," and friends loyally insist that her occasionally batty behavior is a hype. No one would deny, however, that she hurls herself into her roles with uncommon zeal. Drive, He Said originally got an X rating partly because of the ardor that Black and Co-Star William Tepper showed during one scene in the front seat of a car. After filming a nude scene, Karen can forget to put her robe back on. On one movie set she volunteered to the wife of a costar: "How can you live with such a schlump? Divorce him before he destroys you."

Stoutly maintaining that she is "really very middleclass, very loyal to the man in my life," Black sticks close to her home above Los Angeles' Mulholland Drive. Along with the cultivated eccentricities of the public personality, she has the usual movie star's catalogue of modest pleasures ready for the press and her public. She fixes Chinese dinners in a wok, maintains a menagerie of six cats, and composes country-and-western tunes. (She sings three of her songs in Robert Altman's upcoming C & W pageant Nashville.)

Bed Sheets. Currently, the man in her life is Freelance Writer L.M. Carson, 33, called "Kit," who came around to do a magazine article about her last winter. "After five hours," he says, "I fell in love."

Carson thinks he can do some organizing in Black's life. He has a script he hopes Black will star in. Meanwhile, they are planning a dawn wedding in a forest on the Fourth of July. The ceremony will boast balloons and banners, a contrast to the Black-Burton nuptials, which featured the bride and groom larking in bed sheets. Black vows: "I'm ready for a good marriage and children." But the new bride will be back on the Deceit set the next day.

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