Baker In The Boudoir

Flamboyant film impresario Joe Levine is said to have known at their initial meeting that blonde, headline-grabbing Carroll Baker was perfect for the part of the Harlowesque Rina in his movie version of Harold Robbins' passionate potboiler The Carpetbaggers. Its staggering box-office receipts are a tribute to Levine's acumen and the somewhat more elusive qualities that have made Miss Baker first in the running for the title of U.S. sexpot queen. Neither the most amply endowed physically nor the most gifted dramatically of the current crop of distaff film stars, Carroll is nevertheless being touted by moviedom's drumbeaters as the American girl most likely to succeed Marilyn Monroe as flicksville's sex symbol supreme. It is a role in which she has been inextricably entwined since she played the pre-Lolita nymphet in Elia Kazan's lensing of Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll. It won her an Oscar nomination and a sudden, unexpected reputation as a living synonym for sensuality. At first, Carroll tried to fight her projected image; she bought back her Warner Brothers contract when the studio kept coming up with facsimile Baby Doll roles. It wasn't till four years after playing the thumb-sucking seductress that she accepted the facts of filmic life, did an abrupt about-face and became a studio publicityman's dream. Her dress, or lack of it--on and off screen--has turned the onetime Actors Studio hopeful into a "hot property." In her recently released Station Six--Sahara, Carroll is once more the sensuous child of nature bringing out the animal in her male co-stars. Upcoming is Sylvia, in which she plays a well-to-do authoress who has made her way in the world as a prostitute. When showman Levine staged a gala wingding at the Beverly Hills Hotel to reveal his plans with Paramount for the filming of Irving Shulman's Confidential-styled biography, Harlow, he coupled it with an announcement that Carroll Baker had been cast in the title role. Miss Baker, true to her current fashion, was chauffeured on stage at the luncheon in a block-long 1932 Isotta Fraschini limousine and emerged from its luxurious depths clad in a skintight, plunged-to-the-navel satin gown modeled after one of Harlow's, her eyebrows penciled à la Harlow's, and wearing under her gown exactly what had been under Harlow's--a sunny disposition.