once thought too European, too sophisticated for “Charlie’s angels ” this native newyorker went primitive to co-starr with ringo. hail “caveman's” lady—
pictorial essay By BRUCE WILLIAMSON
When Caveman comes to the large screen sometime this spring, art will not be imitating life. In the movie, “a knockout prehistoric comedy," if we're to believe what publicists write, gorgeous Barbara Bath fails to get her man. He’s a small, smart caveman named Atouk, played by former Beatle Ringo Starr. He understands things. Barbara explains: “Like the wheel, food, even relationships . . . love, and walking upright. Atouk only has eyes for Lana, the part I play. But I’m the bitch. At the end, the girl from the cave next door wins out. I get thrown into the dinosaur dung."
It's a total spoof. Atouk nya zug-zug Lana, in the Caveman vocabulary (from a glossary of just 15 words), means that Atouk ultimately doesn't get it on with Lana. Offscreen, as the entire civilized world must know by now. Barbara and Ringo wrote their own happy ending, which should be culminating in a marriage about the time you read this.
I’d never have believed it when I went to interview Barbara last spring at the Caveman location in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Ringo was temporarily' down and out with food poisoning, being nursed back to health by his then-current girlfriend, a likable photographer named Nanev. Barbara was working her shapely tail off on camera every day, under a blazing sun, and was expecting a visit from cinematographer Roberto Quezada, whom she had met when he worked on one of her earlier pictures, a thriller titled The Unseen.
To see Barbara through a close up lens must invite substantial risk of love at first sight. To see her in person, esc II at arm's Jength, guarantees, at a minimum, instant infatuation, Hazel-eyed and lawns, she's a wonder to behold, easygoing, with sheer beauty as the only indication site's a movie star. Every man, woman and child connected with Caveman was part of an unofficial Bach fan club long before I arrived on the scene.
“She's a real pro; she's been very helpful to me” was the testimony of big John Matuszak of the Oakland Raiders, who moonlights as Barbara’s Neanderthal steads in the film.
“We just call her Senorita Casabas," cracked comedian Avery Schreiber, paying mock tribute to the scanty cavewoman costume in which Barbara's breasts were squeezed together like twin melons.
The first day of shooting in Puerto Vallarta was a fishing sequence, to be filmed on a shallow river filled with spectacular rock formations, downstream from a hilltop restaurant called Chico's Paradise. Barbara, wearing a floppy straw hat and a faded Army shirt to keep the sun off, sat on a stark of film boxes under a makeshift umbrella while director Carl Gottlieb rehearsed the action. All the male cave people were using their womenfolk as fish poles, gripping their ankles and forcing them in underwater, headfirst until the ladies came up gasping lot breath, with or without realistic rubber fish. They were saving Barbara for the actual takes. "God," she said dryly, half to herself, while her stand-in went down for the fifth tune, “men were always terrible.”
Despite that touch of cynicism, Barbara was up for the game. When her turn came, with the cameras rolling, she was plunged into the river by Matuszak for take after take. Later, for a sequence in which Lana flounders helplessly until Atouk jumps in to save her, she watched a stunt woman slide off a rock and slip into a steep, rushing rapids. Afterward, Barbara, a dogged perfectionist, repeated the action so sportingly that her double might as veil have taken the afternoon off.
Gottlieb—who rewrote Jaws and co-authored The Jerk prior to his Caveman assignment—explained the Ringo- Barbara screen relationship to me in words that subsequently sounded prophetic: “Lana is meant to be the first sex object, Atouk is the first man to evolve with any sense and Matuszak as Tonda is primal man—you can't get much more primal than John. As a cast, our principals look wonderful. The first time we saw them all together, our hearts leaped. When you need a suave, small, funny, awkward, unprepossessing leading man, there aren't a whole lot of those to choose from—Dustin Hoffman, Dudley Moore, Robin Williams. And who else is there who’s also a star? There’s Ringo."
Barbara nodded. “He's so interesting, a very nice guy. I think Richard’s going to be marvelous in this picture.”
Later that night, during dinner with Quezada, Barbara rambled from subject to subject with nary a mention of Richard Starkey, a.k.a. Ringo Starr. As an actress, she was determined to play more comedy and had already shot Mad Magazine Presents Up the Academy. “A horrible film, after all the hard work we put into it. I’m just standing there; I could have been a stuffed doll.” Before that, except for The Spy Who Loved Me and Force 10 from Navarone, her career had been mostly a series of grade-B potboilers made in Italy and sundry faraway places, epics with such titles as The Island of the Fish Men and The Humanoid.
One of Barbara’s major professional disappointments, of course, occurred during the torrential spring of 1979, when she almost won the Charlie's Angels role they eventually gave to Shelley Hack, then to Tanya Roberts.
“The producers thought I was too European, too sophisticated," says Barbara, born and bred in New York. “I’m afraid I didn’t take them seriously enough when they asked questions like, ‘What sports do you play?’ and 'What brought you to Hollywood?’ Now, that was a good question. I'd often wondered myself. Somehow, in the end, I sensed that the problem was not whether I could act but whet...
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