Liz Renay Shows Her Face

It was the perfect set-up--an afternoon alone with Liz Renay in her Hollywood apartment.

I myself won't be there, her publicist repeated in arranging the tete-a-tete. So just ask Liz anything you want. I think you'll find she can be extremely honest.

Clearly, it was to be an afternoon for euphemism. Not that language--particularly as handled by the sensation-seeking press--has ever been entirely upfront in dealing with the tawdrily notorious Miss Renay.

For the newspapers never really did know what to call the lady in question--or else, if they did, they weren't letting it get any further than the inevitable city room locker jokes. In the news columns of the fifties, Liz Renay was variously described as "glamorous," "beauteous," "redhead," or "blonde," as an "acquaintance," "playgirl," "entertainer," or "stripper," as an "acquaintance," "girlfriend," or "date" of gambler Mickey Cohen and gangster Anthony Coppola.

But by 1961 when Miss Renay was hurried off to California's Terminal Island on a three-year perjury charge, the adjectives were no longer necessary. Her name said it all. Liz Renay--one-time winner of a Marilyn Monroe look-alike contest, four times divorced and occasional artist--had herself become a grade-B, low-budget Hollywood legend even though the studios had long since black balled her for fear of her shadowy connections.

Why then bother to rehash such a past, one that even the most skilled of touch-up artists couldn't airbrush into the semblance of virtue?

Well, for starters, there's money in it. Lyle Stuart has just published Liz Renay's memoirs, "My Face for the World to See," and Stuart has already promised his star fall property, authoress Renay, that with him behind her she's destined to outsell even his previous record-breaking bookends, "The Sensuous Man" and "The Sensuous Woman."

"Imagine!" Liz laughs, a laugh that comes too easy and is turned against herself once too often for your own comfort if not also hers.

So, momentarily, the two of you simply stand there. You trying to figure out whether you're acting more like Tom Ewell in "The Seven-Year Itch" or is it Tony Curtis in "Some Like It Hot," Liz in the infamous white hotpants she wore to last spring's Boston Book Fair, making like June in the Rodgers & Hammerstein lyric.

Finally she seats you on a long bench-like couch, surrounded by potted plastic palms and the kind of pastel spotlights that most Hollywood apartments have only on the outside, underneath what you take must be a self-portrait of herself in the nude.

"I believe people should live life to the fullest," she explains in answer to your question as to why she decided to bring out the book. "That's my philosophy, it's what I've learned through my life and I just wanted the world for an audience, every human being, to learn this philosophy of mine."

Liz admits that the Terminal Island chapters did leave their strain, particularly since they reminded her of days of forced separation from her two, now-grown children. "But other than that I've had a very happy life," she says. "I adjusted so much to life. I think even prison is only a state of mind. It's like the army--the only difference is you don't have weekend passes." She laughs at her own remark. "How's that poem go --

Two men look out through the same prison bars.

One sees only mud, the other the stars.

"Another thing I wanted to bring out," she continues. "Age is no barrier to enjoying life. I don't feel any different now than I used to. And I don't think I look any different..."

You interrupt to grant her point and inquire as to the secret behind the achievement.

"Oh, it's a continual maintenance program," Liz again laughs. "It's a case of never letting things slide in the first place."

But what of the book's occasional gratuitous mention of Hollywood personalities whom Liz claims to have known and loved? And what of its nasty little attacks on Robert Kennedy, whom, as attorney general, Liz blames for many of her legal pratfalls? Anything to sidetrack the conversation onto safer, more substantive ground.

Miss Renay matches your move by switching from the inspirational sweet to the dangerously catty.

"I only judged them as 'lovers,' I never called them bedpartners," she demurs. And as for Kennedy, "He was the talk of all Hollywood. One day two FBI men came to my door asking questions about Kennedy. I really learned a lot from them!"

And anyway, Lyle, who insisted she add the material to her original draft of the book, has checked it all out for possible libel suits in the meantime.

Entr'acte: A mailman suddenly rings the doorbell and, without faltering at Liz's appearance, requests 42 cents in postage due.

"People are always sending me mail I don't want," she grimaces as she digs into a purse for the change.

"Say, Renay--that name sounds familiar. Aren't you an actress?" the mailman asks back.

"Oh, no, I'm just a jack-of-all-trades," Liz protests.

Which isn't far from the truth. For among the future projects Liz begins to describe once she's again ensconced on the couch are a handful of possible movies, two new books, a record...

20th-Century Fox has expressed interest in "My Face" and so Liz speculates on who might play on film her younger self: "I had thought of Diana Dors, but friends tell me she's put on weight. Now she's Double Dors!"

And Carlos Tobalina has just had Liz narrate his latest sex film, "The Refinements of Love": "He asked me to talk about love. Now I understand that while I say love, sex is happening on the screen."

And her fifth husband, Tom Freeman, is helping her on her new novel, "Loves of a John," by reading the high points of his sex life into a tape recorder.

And her real dream is to co-produce her own film in which she plays the Virgin Mary in a black wig sans make-up.

And as she sidles up beside you to let you share her scrapbook, you can't help but understand. Liz Renay will always be, at heart, the fifteen-year old bargirl from Mesa, Arizona, astounded by her success so far, but nonetheless always wanting more. Not that she shouldn't be amazed. She has every right to be proud for she's proven tough enough to survive the men who've picked her up and used her along the way--from New York to Los Angeles--even though she's hardly about to resist those who'll pick her up and use her in the future.

So it's far from the final fade-out as she says goodby to Cohen and Coppola, hello to Stuart and Tobalina. It's much, much too early for Liz Renay to write her epitaph. But when she's ready, it'll be there. In fact, she's already composed a little verse on the subject of female liberation that could itself do perfectly well:

Make things better?

I don't see how.

I don't want to be an equal.

I'm privileged now!