Behind the camera

For 50 years Connie Stevens tried to forget the summer of 1951.

For five decades the blithe blonde - "Cricket" Blake on the '60s television show Hawaiian Eye - tried not to think about the murder she witnessed as a young girl in Brooklyn, N.Y. For her mental health, her family sent Stevens, age 12, to Boonville, Mo., where she lived with family friends.

That summer, the Missouri River flooded its banks, and Stevens survived yet another devastation when the family she was staying with was torn apart both by rising waters and mental illness.

She dammed those memories away, too.

"But after 9/11, it all came pouring out," recalls Stevens, 69, by phone from Los Angeles. Because planes were grounded after the towers fell, Stevens, stranded in Manhattan, drove back to L.A. with actress friend Diane Ladd. Driving west on U.S. 40, she saw the signs for Boonville. "And I started telling Diane and her husband, Robert Hunter, everything that happened."

Stevens fully captures those swelling banks and swelling emotions in Saving Grace B. Jones. Her second directorial effort and first feature has its world premiere Saturday at the Philadelphia Film Festival / Cinefest '09, which opens tonight with (500) Days of Summer.

Saving Grace is a semiautobiographical memory piece largely seen through the eyes of Carrie, an 11-year-old who witnesses a fatal knifing in Brooklyn and is sent to spend the summer with family friends in Boonville. It features a poignant, almost wordless, performance by Tatum O'Neal as the title figure, a mentally unbalanced adult reconnecting with her family after 17 years in an institution.

"Writing the screenplay was so cathartic," confesses Stevens, who still speaks in an alto chirp, which has mellowed only fractionally.

Who knew that inside this bubbly blonde, prototype of the ditzy characters later played by Goldie Hawn and Reese Witherspoon, was a screenwriter/director struggling to get out?

Tonally, Saving Grace is a feverish, 1950s-style melodrama in the style of William Inge and Tennessee Williams, the tale of a Norman Rockwell American family caught in the flood plain of love and madness.

Concetta Rosalie Ann Ingolia was born in Brooklyn, 70 years ago come August.

The rowhouses, the stoops, the tight-knit neighborhoods. "Brooklynites are honorary Philadelphians - and vice versa," insists the actress, singer, entrepreneur, director, grandmother, and inveterate do-gooder, as her dog, Mac, barks his assent. ("He's a Maltie-Poo," she says of the pocket-size hybrid. "He looks like a cross between me and Phyllis Diller.")

She's Philadelphian by marriage. Eddie Fisher, her second (and last) husband, father of daughters Joely and Tricia Leigh, hails from South Philly. "I spoke only Italian until I was 5," says the woman who lapses into Italian and into Yiddish. She nurses fond memories of entertaining at Palumbo's during the 1970s.

The surname came from her father, a jazzman known as Teddy Stevens; the musical DNA came from both Teddy and her mother, Eleanor McGinley, a singer. Stevens' parents divorced, leaving her to the care of paternal grandparents and the nuns at boarding school. As with Carrie in Saving Grace, movie theaters were her home away from home.

At 14, she moved to Los Angeles with her father, sang with a girl trio called the Debs, found work as a movie extra in B movies like Young and Dangerous and Dragstrip Riot. At 19, she caught the eye of Jerry Lewis, who cast her in the 1958 comedy Rock-a-Bye-Baby.

"Ironically," she says, "I replaced Debbie Reynolds," her second husband's first wife, who was pregnant. Warner Bros. put her under contract.

By 1959 the tiny sparkler with the explosive firecracker voice hit the charts with the novelty song "Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb," a duet with Edd "Kookie" Byrnes, her costar on television's 77 Sunset Strip.

Later that year, Stevens appeared as Cricket, the free-spirited singer/photographer/ditz of Hawaiian Eye. "I didn't realize it at the time," she reflects, "but someone recently wrote that Cricket was the first time America saw a young girl living on her own." This was not lost on Elvis Presley, whom she dated. In 1960, she recorded "16 Reasons (Why I Love You)," her biggest pop hit.

Given a shot at big-screen stardom in the 1961 melodrama Susan Slade, Stevens hit the bull's-eye as the unwed mother in love with two men. The unusually effective sudser should have made her the fair-haired Natalie Wood.

But "Warners didn't want to interfere with the success of a money-making TV show," says Stevens. She fought mogul Jack Warner to cast her as Honey (the Sandy Dennis role) in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She even lobbied for the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. But Warner was immovable. There was a stigma against small-screen actors going to the big screen, with the exception of the occasional Warners quickie like the utterly dispensable spring-break flick, Palm Springs Weekend (1963).

Rather than grieve the career that might have been, Stevens celebrates where her professional and personal paths took her. She married James Stacy (1963-67), then Fisher (1967-69), bore two daughters, played Broadway in Neil Simon's The Star-Spangled Girl, and founded her own cosmetics line, Forever Spring. She regularly traveled with Bob Hope's USO team to entertain the troops. "I wasn't for Vietnam," she says. "I was for the soldiers."

Vietnam nurses were the subject of her 1997 directorial debut, A Healing: Women in Vietnam. Those same nurses accompanied her to Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina struck, and Stevens loaded her RV with $20,000 worth of first-aid supplies and the nurses to volunteer in flood-struck areas. "I admired these women before," she says. "But I admired them even more after Mississippi."

On top of her many professional and philanthropic activities, Stevens is also an involved unionist, secretary-treasurer of the Screen Actors Guild.

"We're fighting for residuals" - compensation for past work when televised - "and against forcibly endorsing products, as in a scene where a character walks in and says, 'I just love Coca-Cola.' "

Last year, she actively campaigned for Sen. John McCain. "I said he should run for president. I campaigned with him in New Hampshire. And he won," she says, describing herself as "the hot young thing when men of his generation went to Vietnam."

On her Holmby Hills estate, once owned by Olympic skater and movie star Sonja Henie, Stevens tends 200 rosebushes, eight grandchildren (a ninth is on the way), and her multiple projects.

"L.A. hasn't changed in 50 years. The weather is still beautiful but people still don't know their neighbors," she says with a sigh. "My roots are in Brooklyn, I'm an Italian street kid. I know that."

Saving Grace

B. Jones

7:15 p.m. Saturday at Ritz East, 125 S. Second St. 12:15 p.m. Sunday at Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St. Information: 267-765-9800 Ext. 4, www.phillycinefest.com

See STEVENS on C4