BAKER, Carroll

(b. 28 May 1931 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania), actress whose promising film career in the 1960s was derailed when she was unable to shake her sex goddess image.

Baker, one of two daughters of William W. Baker and Virginia Duffy, attended Greensburg High School in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1949, and Saint Petersburg Junior College in Florida. After settling in New York City, she married furrier Louis Ritter in 1952 and divorced him the same year. In 1953 she began attending Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. She appeared in two stage productions in New York, making her Broadway debut in 1954 in the hit show All Summer Long. In 1955 she married Jack Garfein; they had two children.

Established as a credible young actress, Baker began to receive major offers from Hollywood. Finally she accepted the role of Luz Benedict, the daughter of Elizabeth Taylor's and Rock Hudson's characters in George Stevens's Giant (1956). Only three weeks after completing Giant, she started shooting Elia Kazan's controversial Baby Doll (1956). Kazan cast Baker in the leading role, which was created by the playwright Tennessee Williams. Starring as a young Mississippi wife in a film written by one of the most important playwrights of the period was intended to give Baker success; however, it marked her as just another sexy blonde for the rest of her career.

Tellingly, despite Baker's largely unsuccessful attempts to play down the sexual frankness of her screen image in the next few films she made, the name "Baby Doll" remained with her. Even her 1983 autobiography is titled Baby Doll. In her autobiography, Baker complains that the attention she received from the public and the press because of the film, and the controversy it caused with the Catholic Legion of Decency, was "a confusing, disillusioning, distasteful, and even abhorrent experience." Yet the title of the book points to her willingness, almost three decades after the film, to build her success on the very image that the film and the press created. The cover photos on the paperback edition of the book also indicate this continuity between Baker and her famous screen role. One portrays Baker at the time the book was written, while the other depicts her in the famous Baby Doll posture of sucking her thumb in a crib.

During the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Baker tried to find roles that would be a complete departure from her role in Baby Doll. She joined the all-star cast of William Wyler's The Big Country (1958), accepting the role of a wealthy ranch owner's daughter who is in love with Gregory Peck. This ambitious Western epic, however, failed to revive Baker's star image. As the film ran over schedule and over budget, Baker was released when her contract expired; her character quickly dropped out of sight in the movie without much explanation.

Baker next pursued her detachment from the Baby Doll image with Irving Rapper's The Miracle (1959), which was based on a Spanish legend about a nun who runs away from the convent after asking the Virgin Mary to step in for her. Baker admitted that the film was not her cup of tea; after seeing a sneak preview in New York City, she "got into a huff" and asked her agents to buy back her contract from Warner Brothers. This was the first of several wrong choices that eventually led Baker away from Hollywood. That same year she starred in Paramount's But Not for Me, an undistinguished comedy that did little to create a new screen image for her. She commented, "I'd taken a gigantic step backwards, committed a type of professional suicide, and suddenly I was stricken by the horror of what it means to be no longer in demand. No offers came my way: three months, four months, six months."

When offers did start to come again, they were for films that all seemed promising to Baker, who was facing severe depression and financial problems, but they failed to be particularly exciting or rewarding. Her next four films included the unsuccessful Method experiment Something Wild (1961), in which Baker played a rape victim; Bridge to the Sun (1961); How the West Was Won (1962); and Station Six-Sahara (1963). Henry Hathaway and John Ford's How the West Was Won was the sole success, but because it had such a large cast, it did little to rekindle Baker's fame.

Baker's career had taken a downward turn and become artistically unremarkable. Only eight years after her overnight stardom with Baby Doll, Baker was seeking a "come-back" vehicle and accepted a role in The Carpetbaggers (1964). Although the film briefly restored Baker's star status, it did not help her escape from her sex symbol image. The success of The Carpetbaggers limited Baker once and for all to the stereotype of the blonde goddess and did nothing to alter either the critics' or the public's perception of her.

After starring in Ford's Cheyenne Autumn (1964), and Stevens's The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Baker stopped trying to change her screen image, but her choices had ruinous effects on her career. She agreed to be photographed for Playboy magazine and then played the title roles in Sylvia (1965) and Harlow (1965), films that banked on her sexual appeal. Ironically, when Baker finally accepted roles modeled on the part that had made her famous, she was unable to turn them into box-office hits. In particular, the highly publicized Harlow failed badly with audiences and critics alike. The financial losses were so catastrophic that the Paramount producer Joseph E. Levine canceled Baker's seven-year contract. Suddenly, she again found herself unemployed. To avoid another nervous breakdown, she joined the comedian Bob Hope in 1966 for a tour to entertain U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.

In 1969 Baker divorced Garfein and moved to Italy. She remained there throughout the 1970s, starring in several B movies, mainly erotic thrillers and melodramas. In 1982 she married the actor and art director Donald Burton. Although Baker did not appear again in leading roles, from the late 1970s to the early 2000s she acted in supporting roles in U.S. productions on stage, in film, and on television. Her screen image finally became diversified, albeit at the price of reduced visibility. Baker appeared in art-house releases such as Andy Warhol's Bad (1977) and Bob Fosse's Star 80 (1983), in social problem films such as Native Son (1986) and Hector Babenco's Ironweed (1987), and in blockbusters such as Kindergarten Cop (1990) and The Game (1997).

Baker's career and star image embodied the difficulty experienced by many actresses in the 1960s in finding a way of sustaining their initial success in Hollywood. Film historians are still debating the extent to which this difficulty was due to the changing modes of production in the movie industry, the shifting taste of audiences, or the development of countercultural values among certain social strata in the final years of the era. Baker's screen personae from Baby Doll to Harlow, and the exploitation films she made in Italy through the late 1960s and the 1970s, also appear in constant negotiation with the related stereotypes of the "Hollywood Lolita" and the blonde sex goddess. Baker was initially able to exploit the "nymphet syndrome" in the movies, and the title role in Baby Doll launched her as a major star. Yet, in the end, such stereotypes proved limiting for Baker, and movies such as Sylvia and Harlow, in which she completely surrendered to the role of the sex object, were disastrously received by critics and audiences alike.

Baker published her autobiography Baby Doll (1983), the sentimental memoir To Africa with Love (1985), and the novel A Roman Tale (1986). Some parts of the study by Marianne Sinclair, Hollywood Lolitas: The Nymphet Syndrome in the Movies (1988), are devoted to an analysis of Baker's screen personae.

Luca Prono