The Tuesday Weld Shebang

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"When I'm working I never need an entourage or anyone 

with me. Time has no meaning; I don't notice how many 

weeks or days go by. I'm so totally absorbed that I really 

like to be alone. Actually, it's not only when I'm working; 

I like to be alone in general. I have a hunger for it. I eat up 

silence." -- Tuesday Weld

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Emmanuel Levy: "Tuesday Weld began her showbiz career as a child model. 'Mama tried to turn my brother and sisters into models too,' Weld says. 'but they preferred swimming. But me, I was the backward child, and I took to modeling immediately. Anything to escape.' At the age of three, she became the sole supporter of her widowed mother and two siblings. She began drinking heavily at ten."


TW as child model

Tuesday Weld: "When I was 9, I had a breakdown, which disappointed Mama a great deal. But I made a comeback when I was 10. I was in and out of several schools, but I never really went. There were no rules then in New York protecting working children. I was doing television shows as well as modeling, and instead of going to school, I used to do what they called correspondence, which meant that if I was working, I'd just write in and say I had jobs. Even when I didn't have jobs, I'd get up in the morning and say, 'Goodbye, Mama, I'm going to school,' and then I'd head for the Village and get drunk. I started drinking heavily when I was about 10 years old. I made my first suicide attempt when I was 12. I had fallen in love with a homosexual and when it didn't work out, I felt hurt.  A bottle of aspirin, a bottle of sleeping pills, and a bottle of gin. I was sure that would do the trick, but Mama came in and found me. I was in a coma for a long time and I lost my hearing, my vision and several other things. When I recovered, I decided that I should try to get some help, but Mama didn't think I needed analysis."

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The Wrong Man, 1956

Wikipedia: "Weld made her acting debut on television at age twelve and her feature film debut the same year in a bit role in the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock crime drama, The Wrong Man."

TW: "Once I wanted to study acting, so I had an interview with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. I was 14. That was against the rules. Mama told them I was 18, but they knew. It was horrendous. He asked me these stock questions. I hate stock questions. He said, 'Who's your favorite actor?' I said, 'Constance Ford.' He said, 'Who?' Very sarcastically. I don't have favorites, I don't think about actors, she just seemed to me good. Obviously, that was not the right answer. I guess the Actors Studio is OK for people who want to act all the time, so when they're not working they can put on their own plays, keep acting -- well, I don't want that. I want to act some part I like, and then stop."

Guy Flatley: "Weld's mother was so distressed by her rejection from the Actors Studio that she bundled up Tuesday and the rest of the Welds and went West. There Tuesday proved sufficiently ripe to play rambunctious teeny-boppers in Sex Kittens Go to College, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve and Rally Round the Flag, Boys, as well as Danny Kaye’s sweet, invalid daughter in Five Pennies. She was also ripe enough to participate in amorous off-camera activities with men double –- and triple -– her age."


TW as teen nymphet actress

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The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis opening credits, 1959 (0:54)

Wikipedia: "In 1959, still only sixteen years old, Tuesday was given a role in the CBS television show, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Although Weld was a cast member for only a single season, the show gave her considerable national publicity, and she was named a co-winner of a "Most Promising Newcomer" award at the Golden Globe Awards."

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Sex Kittens Go to College trailer, 1960 (2:53)

Ray Davis: "Career tragedy struck Tuesday Weld in 1960's beautifully titled but incompetent Sex Kittens Go To College, in which Mamie Van Doren -- "What does she do? Sag?", Lou Reed -- usurped Weld's natural role. Weld retired, reflected, and returned, cardiac tissue toughened, determined to build a meaningful career of such demeaning roles."

Jack C. Stalnaker, TW fanatic: "It only took me (almost) four decades, but I FINALLY got the semi-legendary Tuesday Weld single "Are You the Boy?" There is nothing else in life to look forward to now, unless, maybe, if Tuesday could be convinced to tour with a musical review. Amazingly, the A side, "Are You the Boy?" is really not bad at all. It's got a nice Lesley Gore feel to it. Tuesday sings off key, but it really sounds like her persona of 40 years ago. Even more amazing is that the B-side ("All Through Spring and Summer" is actually rather good. She even sings well on it. It's a Connie Francis-type ballad, and very nice. Both sides are very well produced; nothing cheap for our girl. Both sides are definitely in the Paul Petersen/Shelley Fabares mode -- very bubble gum. But I'm still very impressed with the record."

mp3: 'Are You the Boy?"

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Wild in the Country excerpt, 1961 (1:17)
Elvis Presley sings to Tuesday Weld

TW: "Elvis walked into a room and everything stopped. Elvis was just so physically beautiful that even if he didn't have any talent... just his face, just his presence. And he was funny, charming, and complicated, but he didn't wear it on his sleeve. You didn't see that he was complicated. You saw great needs."

Theresa Duncan: "In 1961, after starring opposite Elvis Presley in Wild in the Country, he and Tuesday Weld began an off-screen romance. In Hollywood, her reputation for a reckless lifestyle was fodder for the gossip columnists and Louella Parsons reportedly said, as politely as possible, that "Miss Weld is not a very good representative for the motion picture industry." The romance with Elvis did not last long after Colonel Tom Parker cautioned Presley against the relationship, fearful it would harm his image."

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Bachelor Flat excerpt, 1962 (4:32)
Terry Thomas dreams Tuesday Weld

Roddy McDowell: "No actress was ever so good in so many bad films."

Emmanuel Levy: "In the 1960s, Tuesday went through a period of depression and seclusion, during which she married, had a child, divorced and saw her house burn down. But with her film career all but finished, suddenly fans began to notice that she had been a first-rate actress all along, a major talent that had the misfortune of appearing in one horrible film after another. Indeed, in the late 1960s, Tuesday became the center of a growing cult of aficionados. Special Tuesday Weld film festivals began to spring up in New York and in other cities."

Dudley Moore, at the time TW's husband: "We've very few friends. We live in sort of isolation. She's almost paranoid about public life. She just prefers to stay home."

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Lord Love a Duck opening credits (top), excerpt (bottom), 

1966 (2:19; 2:27)

Ray Davis: "1966's Lord Love A Duck was the first of might be termed the Dobie-deconstructions. Here Roddy McDowell plays a young upstart whose intellect (clearly signalled by a mid-Atlantic accent) is only surpassed by the passion inspired by Weld, who easily reduces the owlish McDowell to hawk-like screeching and mowing down of suburbanites, ironically paralleling both the bloody technocrats who conducted the Vietnam war and the impending revolutionary fervor which would reap Richard Nixon as its reward."

Douglas Hawes: 'Over the years I have met a number of people who were aware of the remarkable behind the scene aspects of Tuesday Weld's life and influence. A friend of mine in Santa Cruz talked at length with Kenneth Anger at the Silver Screen years ago about Tuesday Weld's hidden influence in the realm of underground occult activities. Another figure I know, a New Age teacher (now deceased) with widespread Sufi/Masonic/Rosicrucian contacts told me that Tuesday was involved in the promotion of a certain grand master to the leadership of the AMORC Rosicrucian order in San Jose back in the eighties... A Vietnam veteran I knew said he had attended a ritual in the Santa Cruz mountains in which Weld officiated (it didn't involve anything scandalous). He once got up in a political meeting I attended in Santa Cruz and said that Weld was doing all she could to help the cause....

'I could tell other stories as well... The hidden life of Tuesday Weld has largely been undisclosed in the media, and remains one of the great undisclosed stories of the sixties and seventies. The only major reference to her that discloses her occult connections, but only in a discreet way, is a long forgotten book, "Popular Witchcraft," which was published by Bowling Green University Press in 1972. In it Anton LaVey in an interview says that his book "The Satanic Bible" was partially dedicated to Tuesday because "she was the embodiment of the goddess," and was "part of the ritual." LaVey's remarks reflect a close personal acquaintanceship with Weld, and hints heavily on her involvement in his ritual activities. So why the coverup?'

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Pretty Poison excerpt, 1968 (1:48)

TW: "Don't talk to me about Pretty Poison. I couldn't bear Noel Black (the director) even speaking to me. When he said 'good morning,' it destroyed my day. I learned more from the old Dobie Gillis TV shows than from Pretty Poison."

Emmanuel Levy: "By l968, Tuesday was becoming a little tired of playing the eternal nymphet. At 25, she was still playing the precocious adolescent but, this time, with a difference. Under the baby-doll exterior lurked a heart of pure evil. Pretty Poison, with a script by Lorenzo Semple Jr., was based on the novel "She Let Him Continue", and co-starred Anthony Perkins in his usual Psycho-like psychopathic role. At its release, Pretty Poison was not commercially successful; it was not until some critics praised Tuesday's performance that the film acquired a cult status. Over the years the movie has become an underground classic. "

TW: "I should do movies worthier of my talent? You’re crazy! Do you think I want success? I refused to do Bonnie & Clyde because I was nursing at the time, but also because down deep I knew that it was going to be a huge success. The same was true of ‘Bob & Carol & Fred & Sue,’ or whatever it was called. It reeked of success. I turned down Rosemary's Baby because they asked me to test for it, and will not test.... To test is the ultimate humiliation. No, not quite: my daughter was very young then. Do you know what it is like, stuck in a house all day with an infant? Monstrous! Did you ever have to talk to a five-year-old, day in, day out? I did! I was suddenly playing this wife role, cooking, cleaning, mothering, it was worse than testing! I may be self-destructive, but I like taking chances with movies. I like challenges, and I also like the particular position I’ve been in all these years, with people wanting to save me from the awful films I’ve been in. I’m happy being a legend. I think the Tuesday Weld cult is a very nice thing."


TW as 70s cult actress

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I Walk the Line excerpt, 1970 (3:29)
Gregory Peck and Tuesday Weld

TW: "Gregory Peck and I had to do a love scene in bed and it showed my bare back. I wasn't nude or anything, maybe a half-slip, I don't remember exactly, but I was as nude as possible. And he got into the bed with his pants and his shoes on. Now they weren't moccasins. They were big clunky businessman's shoes, laced up, you know. With socks, and... what more can I say."

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A Safe Place excerpt, 1971 (9:47)
Tuesday Weld and Jack Nicholson

TW: "It’s been quite a year. Everything has really fallen apart for me. A Safe Place is a dud. I got a divorce, my car disintegrated, and my house burned down. There was absolutely nothing left of my house. Nothing. Not even a picture of my daughter Natasha. All the paintings I’d done are lost, as well as five years of journals I had been keeping. I enjoy writing so much. In fact, I’ve begun on my novel again. It’s going to be a good book, but I may have to wait until my ex-husband and my mother die before I publish it. From here, I go to Paris, but I feel so misplaced everywhere. Sometimes I just walk the streets at night, for hours and hours. I’m incredibly restless; I guess maybe it’s time for my renaissance."

PlatinumCelebs.com: "A few years after turning down the role in Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski wanted her to star in his film version of Macbeth (1971). She lost the part when she refused to do a nude sleepwalking scene."

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Play It as it Lays, 1972

Emmanuel Levy: "Weld was always Frank Perry's first choice to play Maria Wyeth in Play It as it Lays. She was widely quoted at the time as saying 'I could phone it in.' However, this was not her feeling about the role. Although she knew the ground covered in the picture, she insisted the part 'has nothing to do with my life and my past. And I'm not that personality at all. I'm not typecast for it.' Asked if she liked her role, she said, 'Who could like it? It's not a part I relished playing. It went against my personal feelings of life. And I had to think about the state I would be in. It was unsettling.' Although Tuesday won the Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival, Play It As It Lays was not well-received by American critics."

TW: "All these lost people I do, Maria Wyeth, saying 'Nothing applies.' That's bullshit! No, forget the bull, one syllable's better. Everything applies! I am not Maria Wyeth, or any of these schleps!"

Melissa Anderson, Film Society of Lincoln Center: "If you were to imagine a celluloid ancestor to Mulholland Drive’s Diane Selwyn, she’d probably look a lot like Maria Wyeth, the heroine of Frank Perry’s acerbic Play It As It Lays, a 1972 film based on Joan Didion’s merciless second novel, published two years earlier. Brilliantly played by Tuesday Weld, Maria is rapidly unraveling, as is her marriage to her director husband, Carter Lang (Adam Roarke). Carter has previously directed her in both a vérité short, barking bullying off-camera questions (“Did you ever want to ball your father?”), and an acid-rock biker movie called Angel Beach. As Carter prepares to shoot his next movie in the desert, Maria — which rhymes with “pariah” — drifts through a succession of ghoulish Hollywood parties and hotel-room assignations with producers from the East Coast, always returning to the driver’s seat of her banana-yellow Corvette." Rating: ***

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Looking for Mr. Goodbar, 1977
Diane Keaton and Richard Gere

Psuedopodium.org: "Now in her thirties, Weld gave a memorable performance in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actress. Playing Diane Keaton's sexually promiscuous air hostess sister whose influence turns Keaton's character from a frigid romantic into a slut, a rape and murder victim waiting to happen, it was a beautifully played but utterly thankless role, as thinly conceived as an imbecilic scrawl on a toilet stall, each cliché transmuted by Weld into glimpses of gold behind the foregrounded rubble of inferior stars-du-jour."

TW: "I think that from here on, I should be paid to do interviews. And do them myself. I should be sent the questions, and write the answers. I mean, an interview isn't going to get me a job, or make me act well, it's of no use. I mean, can you make me a star?"

Arthur Bell, talk show host, after interviewing TW: "Tuesday Weld depressed me so much, I went from her hotel to Bloomingdale's and shoplifted, and I've never done that before or since."

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Once Upon a Time in America excerpt, 1984 (9:59)

Wikipedia: "In 1984, Weld appeared in Sergio Leone's gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America as a masochistic prostitute featuring a brutal rape scene with her and Robert De Niro that may be among the most shocking ever filmed. The scene was the source of some controversy as Weld's character is depicted as eventually enjoying the rape."

Melanie Clark: "The film would have been much much better without Tuesday Weld. I fast forwarded through all scenes with her in it. She was atrocious."

Emmanuel Levy: "About this time, the long-standing tension between Tuesday and her mother erupted in the press. Tuesday began telling people that her mother had died."

TW: "I hated Mama. She took my childhood away from me. I was expected to make up for everything that had gone wrong with in Mama's life. She became obsessed with me, pouring out all her pent-up love -- alleged love -- on me. It's been heavy on my shoulders ever since. I didn't feel really free until she died. Otherwise her death didn't really affect me much.... "

Tuesday Weld's mother: "I wasn't really mad at Tuesday until she started telling everyone I was dead. I didn't like being called dead. Why, if it hadn't been for Patty Duke, I might have starved to death -- that's how much help Tuesday has been."

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Falling Down, 1993

Rob'sReviews.net: "Like most movies designed to be debated on the op-ed page, Falling Down doesn't live up to its negative hype. It's been called dangerous and borderline racist, a charge it narrowly deflects by showing one good Hispanic cop for every Hispanic punk, and so on. It has also been called a powerful black comedy, but considering the true classics of black comedy we've produced (Dr. Strangelove being the pinnacle), it's an embarrassing assessment -- an indication of how far movies have sunk. Tuesday Weld plays a cop's shrewish, neurotic wife who spends the movie shrieking at him over the phone. The script provides a plausible reason for her sad craziness (their daughter died at age two), but director Joel Schumacher treats her cruelly."

Filmreference.com: "Forty years into her career, Tuesday Weld still percolates through American pop culture. A 1995 biography is devoted to her, and a worldwide web site; she will soon appear in the off-mainstream Feeling Minnesota, her first movie since 1993's Falling Down (reportedly the first commercially successful film of her entire career). Weld's uncredited picture adorns the cover of rock musician Matthew Sweet's 1991 Girlfriend album, epitomizing her continued if obscure relevance — but also suggesting that her signature star qualities of self-determining sexuality, insolence, and nearly self-destructive wastefulness (philosophically grounded in antimaterialism as it may be) fit the rock 'n' roll era's patterns more than classical Hollywood's."

TW: "I like everything open. Everything. I don't like shut doors. I like to see. In the kitchen, I like to see all the spices, all the food. I wasn't really aware of it until people complained. It was completely unconscious. I would hear, 'Could you please shut that door! We're gonna lose all the ice.'"

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TW in Feeling Minnesota (1996)

TW: "I got bored after a while with analysis, with me-me-me. Could that be one of the purposes of it, you get so bored with self-absorption? Enough, already, getting yourself together is preferable. It is so uncomfortable, all those personal things you're supposed to say, except I never did, I never opened up totally."

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: "Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz fuck on the bathroom floor right at the beginning of Feeling Minnesota, and it's still not any good. Poor Keanu. First he flops with a big-budget action flick (Chain Reaction), and now he scrapes bottom with this indie stinker. ... His mom, Nora, played by Tuesday Weld. Yes, the Tuesday Weld, of Pretty Poison and Lord Love a Duck, grown plump but still flirty fun and undeserving of such a nothing role."

Sam Shephard: "Tuesday Weld is the female Marlon Brando."

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Chelsea Walls, 2001

The New Yorker: "Ethan Hawke, as director, presents a group of friends and fellow-actors in a series of mushy dramatic moments inside the venerable Chelsea Hotel, the onetime haunt of William Burroughs, Sid Vicious, and other artists. Hawke captures the woozy, dissolute atmosphere of the place (the rough, grungy surroundings are well suited to the shadowy digital filmmaking used here), and there's a single superbly rich scene featuring the great Tuesday Weld and Kris Kristofferson, and some beautiful use of Jeff Tweedy's music, but the movie sinks with its script. The writer Nicole Burdette based it on her stage play, and all the woe-is-me bohemian angst grates on the viewer eventually."

MGSinNYC: "The most noteworthy scene is with the luminous TUESDAY WELD! I had almost fogotten what a terrifically talented and gorgeous actress she is. Acting students take note and watch her in action for she is the real thing. Why doesn't she work more? I didn't even realize she was in the movie and when I saw her scene, I was riveted. A true pro in every sense of the word. Only complaint was her role was too small. MORE TUESDAY!!"

MovieCrazed.com: "Now 64 years old, Tuesday Weld keeps a lower profile than ever. The most recent of her marriages to Israeli concert violinist and conductor Pinchas Zukerman ended in 1998. He divorced her for the official reason of 'lack of interest in his career.'  He quotes her as saying: 'Why do I need to go to another concert when I've heard the piece before?' Tuesday Weld's last film performance was a small role in 2001's Chelsea Walls. Since then, as far as the public is concerned, that silence she has been quoted and saying she 'hungers for' and 'eats up' seems to have eaten her instead."

TW: "I love the cult thing. Love it! Why? It's fun. And it has endurance. When you're a "cult goddess", you don't have to do anything to keep being it! You don't have to work, it's better you don't, great, know what I mean?"


TW at the Tribeca Film Festival, 2003
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