Burly Dames: Dee Wallace

If Steven Spielberg taught me the wonder of manliness and Pulp almost simultaneously (RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK), then he also managed to kick-start my romantic notions. Karen Allen was a cutie pie, in RAIDERS, there's no doubt. But it was the mother of the boy-we-all-once-were Elliot in E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL, played by a fairly unknown actress named Dee Wallace, which set the 12 year old me on my ear.

Like a lot of great loves, I'll just say that Dee Wallace, soon most known as Dee Wallace Stone (married to late actor and beefy werewolf, Christopher Stone), entranced me. I don't think I hardly noticed her the first couple of times I saw E.T., and then about the third time when she opens that door on a California sunset with an astronaut standing on her stoop, I realized how beautiful she was.

Soonafter, while watching old "Twilight Zone" reruns on Channel 20 out D.C. at eleven at night during my early teens, I started seeing ads for a movie version of Stephen King's CUJO. And there she was, in the previews, getting out of a car, sweaty and terrified, and beautiful.

At the same time, THE HOWLING was making its rounds on the cable televison. This was the werewolf flick Dee Wallace had made prior to her Spielberg role. Her husband in the movie and real life turns into make-up master Rob Bottin's onscreen werewolf; THE HOWLING and AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON had transformation effects which had never been seen before. Blew our minds, folks, let me tell you.

Dee Wallace's career, I've read, started with a small bit on "CHiPs" and evolved to exploitation in Wes Craven's original THE HILLS HAVE EYES. I think she was a hooker in both roles, but nevertheless, enthusiastic and hard-working.

CUJO was the role, Stephen King stated once, that Dee Wallace should have been nominated for an Academy Award. Not to be a love-struck fool, so removed from my young years as I am, but I would agree. The role of a victimized housewife trapped with her young son in a broken down Pinto while a rabid Saint Bernard stalks her, is not the sort of thing the Academy would deem worthy. Yet there's nothing in CUJO (a great movie by the way) which, where it concerns Dee Wallace, is not savagely authentic. As authentic as anything Meryl Streep ever did. In fact, I doubt Streep could have pulled it off with such believability.

Dee trooped on after that, starring in another fun little b-movie project that I still fondly recall, CRITTERS. After that, the lady pretty much looks to have steadily plugged away in television for the next 20 plus years. She's still working, still as attractive and sincere as ever, last time I caught her while flipping channels.

My secret is that I was so in love with this woman, when I was 14, that I intended on walking to California to where I'd read she lived, Woodland Hills. This coincided with my reading of King's THE STAND, so I was in full-on road odyssey mode at this point. I wanted an adventure (I'd have ended up dead on the road somewhere between Virginia and California, but far be it for reality to sink in), and I had a romantic notion I'd meet the lady herself and, you guessed it, become her pool boy.

It wasn't a literal interpretation of pool boy-istics. But I figured, in my addled teen brain, that Dee Wallace couldn't turn away a kid who'd walked three thousand miles just to rake her lawn. And there isn't even innuendo there.

If I'd actually done what I set out to do, I'd really have a story to tell. But like most things, I couldn't escape my own world. The dream of a quest to reach Dee Wallace faded, replaced as it was in my imagination within my early writing work, where the love interest invariably had "wide cheekbones, short blond hair" and spoke in the soft Kansas drawl of Ms. Wallace. I had a tough little robot miner in love with her, in one "science fiction novel", and he protected her night and day from the evils of a maniacal, cruel universe. Love, it seemed, gave the robot life and purpose beyond his basic function as a rock-smashing piece of steel. Within the robot lurked a heart that yearned to be alive, and human, just long enough to show this blond 35 year old woman how much he loved her, in the most delicate and romantic way possible: to gently cup with real hands her ankle, to kiss her instep with lips of flesh and blood, and to then peer up into the recognition in her blue eyes of that adoration.