Akron Beacon Journal, June 14, 1964
HOLLYWOOD — One of the first persons I met out here was a studio publicity man who told me I really should make it a special point to interview Lola Albright while I was in town.

“She’s from Akron, you know,” he said, beaming like he was telling me something I didn’t know. “Think of the hometown angle you can get.” He winked as he nudged my ribs with his elbow.

“Fella,” I answered, matching him wink for wink and nudge for nudge, “I’d want to interview Lola Albright even if she were from Mingo Junction.”

AND SO IT came to pass a few days later that Ms. Albright and I met in a restaurant owned by her husband pianist Bill Chadney.
The first thing I noticed was the contrast she presented from top to bottom She was wearing her sandy blond hair in a long pony tail that bounced around the back of a frilly white blouse that would have made Jayne Mansfield look like a little girl.

But Ms. Albright also as wearing a skin-tight pair of black stretch slacks — and whoosh! The little girl was suddenly grown up.
Next I caught myself trying to imitate her smoky soft voice. My effort sounded like a poor imitation of Peter Lorre.

Finally, I noticed Lola fidgeting with something. She had a ball-point pen in her right hand and a matchbook cover in her left.

“My husband ordered 65,000 books of matches when he opened the restaurant six weeks ago,” she explained. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they? Expensive, too, thanks to this raised gold lettering.

“There’s just one problem. They’ve all got the wrong telephone number.”

SO THERE we sat — me asking questions, and Ms. Albright giving me answers while she crossed out and corrected the telephone number.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get all 65,000 done,” she said, “What made it worse — the day the matches arrived, we had a fire in the kitchen and a flood in the bar.”

Despite the rough start, the couple claim they’re extremely happy with the new business venture.

“Bill has always wanted to be his own boss,” she said. “Of course, I won’t be able to work as much as I have been. Not if I want to see Bill, anyway. I just finished a TV show and hardly saw Bill all the time I was working. I got up for work about the time Bill was coming home from the restaurant, and when I got home each evening, Bill was just leaving.”

THAT TV assignment was a starring role in a “Suspense Theater” drama to be presented this fall by NBC.

Ms. Albright also has a movie due for release in the fall — “Love Cage,” which follows the current trend toward bizarre mysteries. She plays a murderess who keeps her husband’s body locked in an upstairs room until this secret is discovered by a visiting niece.

She made the film in Paris with Jane Fonda and Alain Delon, and if she never goes back to France to work, it will be understandable.

“Most of the cast and crew were French; only a few of them spoke English. Jane didn’t have as much trouble as I because she speaks the language fairly well. Oh, I picked it up after awhile. Those two years of French I had at West High finally came in handy.

“A BIG PART of the problem was the script. It was written in French and translated for an American audience by a woman from London. Unfortunately, the woman wasn’t familiar with American slang. Much of her translation had a double meaning.

“Jane and I had a constant battle with the director trying to convince him the dialog would sound dirty to an American audience, and they would snicker when they were supposed to shudder. It was a tough battle. European directors — in my experience, at least — are reluctant to listen to actors.

“American directors may not agree with an actor’s suggestions, but, at least, they’ll listen to them. And they’ll argue until the point is settled, many times in the actor’s favor.

“But not in Europe. Our director threw tantrums each time we made a suggestion. You wouldn’t believe how he carried on! He kept screaming at us, ‘That’s the trouble with you American actors — you think too much!’ ”

BUT AS THEY SAY in TV commercials, that was just part of the story . . .

“There also was an actor in the film who spoke very little English. We had a scene in which he was supposed to slap me three times. When we rehearsed the scene, I discovered he didn’t know how to stage a slap. When he hit, he hit!”

Ms. Albright then showed me how it is possible to whack someone without actually making contact.

“I tried to teach him how to do it, but he couldn’t get the hang of it . . . or I couldn’t get through to him, I don’t know which. Anyway, I was hoping to postpone the scene until someone taught him how to slap. but he was appearing every night in a play in Paris and couldn’t work as late as the rest of us. So the director decided to get the scene out of the way early one day and wouldn’t wait until the actor learned how to slap.

“Well, his first slap knocked me clear across the room. I tried to finish the scene, but I couldn’t remember my lines. I could hardly get up I was so stunned. The left side of my face got so swollen, I couldn’t work for the next three days. Luckily, I didn’t have to get slapped again. We picked up the scene from where I landed in the corner.”

IT WAS on those five words — “I landed in the corner” — that the interview moved away from this particular assignment into a discussion of her career as a whole. Without doubt, that career has been unusual.

Her first job out of high school was as a receptionist at WAKR radio. Soon she declared her independence, left home and moved to Cleveland and got a similar job at WTAM. Her face and figure attracted the attention of an agent who arranged an interview with scouts from MGM.

“I’ve never figured out how I got the contract,” she said. “I was terrible; absolutely terrible, but it din’t bother me that I was terrible. The important thing was the contract. I wanted to be a good actress who worked a little, but I wasn’t really interested in learning how to act. As a result, I was a bad actress who worked a little.”

SHE MADE a few soon-forgotten films, but got a break when Stanley Kramer put her in “Champion,” the movie that elevated Kirk Douglas and Ruth Roman to stardom. Lola Albright? She landed in a corner.

“I was more concerned with my marriage to Jack Carson than I was with my career,” she said. “I never really wanted to work again until that marriage broke up. After our divorce, I took stock of myself and decided acting was the only field open to me.”

She also started taking singing lessons, and not a moment too soon. Blake Edwards called her just before starting work on his television series, “Peter Gunn.” “Lola,” he said, “Ive got a part in my show that would be great for you if you could only sing . . .”

“Wait just a minute,” she told him. “I just happen to have a record I cut last week. Why don’t you listen to it?”

He did, and she got the job.

THE “GUNN” series turned Lola Albright into one of television’s sexiest performers. The show led to a recording contract and also helped her get the lead in a low budget movie called “Cold Wind in August” in which she played a 28-year-old stripped involved with a 17-year-old boy. The controversial film was a hit in the art house circuit and her performance drew rave reviews.

One agent told me her biggest mistake was letting that performance speak for itself. “If she had hired a good publicity man, she might have won an Academy Award.”

Her career tapered off after that, but by choice. The big factor was Chadney, who had a small recurring role on “Peter Gunn” as a pianist and had been Ms. Albright’s voice coach at the time.

Although married twice before, she claimed her marriage to Chadney was special. “The others were mistakes. Bill is the man I was looking for. I’m happier now than I’ve ever been.”