North’s Touches With Stardom

Take a stroll down memory lane with Sheree North and you run into an icon on every corner.

The veteran film, television and stage actress, who debuted on Broadway in 1953 and had her first major screen role in 1954, never became a huge star. But she can pluck insider stories from a rare collection of close personal encounters with pop culture giants. North wore Marilyn Monroe’s outfits, turned down Marlon Brando for dates, tried to advise a troubled Elvis Presley and held the hands of an ailing John Wayne.

Starting Tuesday night at the Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theater, North will play Amanda Wingfield, the wounded and wounding mother in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.” It’s the latest role in a stage career that goes back 55 years, to when she was 11 years old and dancing in light opera at the Greek Theatre.

North was 20 when she landed on Broadway, turning heads with short platinum hair and a hot solo dance number in the musical “Hazel Flagg.”

As she tells it, Brando’s head apparently was among those turned. She was living the bohemian life of a young actress, hanging out at Birdland and at jazz-culture soirees and taking calls from Brando, who wanted a date.

“I was going out with somebody [else],” she said. “I would sit with Lenny Bruce and Charlie Parker, and they had discussions about how hot it would be if I was on the back of Marlon Brando’s motorcycle.” North said she was charmed by Brando’s wooing technique, which included a “great” Cary Grant impersonation. But she was already a young mother, having first married in her teens, and didn’t think a fling with Brando would suit a woman “trying to run a household.”

In 1954, North reprised her Broadway role in “Living It Up,” the film version of “Hazel Flagg” starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Twentieth Century Fox signed her and began building her up as the successor to Marilyn Monroe, who was having a spat with the studio.

“They signed me as a threat to her,” North said. “Life magazine followed me around for weeks and did this story on me replacing Marilyn [it was the magazine’s cover story of March 21, 1955]. What would I know about replacing Marilyn Monroe? I was a teeny bopper rock ‘n’ roll girl. She was a siren and a sex symbol.”

North took what was supposed to be Monroe’s part in “How to Be Very Very Popular,” wearing outfits designed for Monroe. When Monroe returned to Fox, North says, she was gracious toward her purported replacement. For North, watching the studio’s handling of Monroe was an eye-opener that dissolved any illusions about the nature of Hollywood stardom.

“She had her own ideas,” North said. “She was going against the formula that the studio people had. There would be all this terrible talk about her, which frightened me. I thought, ‘If I have any individual ideas, they’ll treat me like that too.’ ”

After 1958, North dropped out of film work for 10 years in favor of theater and television. In 1962, she may have been one of the last people on Earth to exercise power over Barbra Streisand: They shared a dressing room as players in “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” Streisand’s Broadway debut. The veteran laid down a rule for the newcomer: no singing in the dressing room.

In 1969, North played opposite Elvis Presley in “The Trouble With Girls.”

“Elvis was so afraid about acting that before every scene he would start telling everybody how bad he was. He was comfortable with me” because of her rock ‘n’ roll dance background. “He’d say, ‘You’re so good at acting, man--how?’ I told him, ‘I took acting classes, and you can’t believe what it can do for you.’ I had him talked into seeing a therapist and taking acting classes--the combination worked for me. But he had to go back to Graceland with the goons,” North’s term for Presley’s insider group of friends and hangers-on.

John Wayne was a surprise to North when she played his girlfriend in his last film, “The Shootist,” the elegiac 1976 film in which he portrayed a dying gunfighter.

North said she previously had been asked to play Wayne’s wife in “The Green Berets,” his 1968 Vietnam War film, but turned the part down because she was against the war. While filming “The Shootist,” she was shocked at how vulnerable he seemed.

“He was so open and connected. It wasn’t the Wayne that I knew and didn’t like. It was another guy.” Off camera, she said, “we talked about women and his lack of understanding about them.”

Marilyn Fox, who is directing North in “The Glass Menagerie,” thinks that people can watch North and get an idea how Marilyn Monroe might have turned out had she lived until this day.

“She has that truly feminine thing. It’s not phony. She truly is a sweetheart.”