The Barge Is Sailing Along

Between classes at Hollywood High, the outsized and unsightly girl known as "Barge" would sneak off to the girls' room and stare at herself in the mirror. She pressed her nose against the glass so she could look into her eyes without seeing the rest of her face. And she would murmur over and over again: "Some day you'll be beautiful. Some day you'll be beautiful."

It must have been a magic mirror. After 15 years, Sally Kellerman is one of the screen's loveliest and most delightful comediennes, a fortuitous cross between Kay Kendall and Carole Lombard. Last week her work as Major "Hot Lips" Houlihan in the heretical M*A*S*H won her a nomination for an Academy Award.

Fat and Ugly. Sally's hard-earned transformation began after a small part in a high school production of Meet Me in St. Louis. Hooked on the stage, she enrolled in acting classes with Jeff Corey, a respected character actor (Seconds, Little Big Man) and an exceptional teacher. "He really brought me out of myself for the first time in my life," she says. Corey's classes got her stage roles in Moon for the Misbegotten, and An Enemy of the People. Equally important, her cousin David Bennett, a fellow Corey student, appointed himself her unofficial protector and promoter. He turned up at her apartment early in the morning to roust her out for auditions. "David, David," she would say, "I don't wanna go, David, I'm fat and ugly, David, and I don't even want to be an actress." David refused to listen, and Sally's auditions eventually led to a couple of featured roles on television and a tiny part in Reform School Girl, "one of those American-International kind of movies where I played the weight lifter or something," she remembers. Next came a part in The Boston Strangler. "I put on a bunch of bruises and decided I wasn't going to worry any more. Once I did that, I said, 'All right, I'll take anything they'll give me.' "

They gave her The Third Day ("I played a sex pervert") and The April Fools. "That was the knock on the head. When they finally sent me the script it was The Boston Strangler Revisited. I played another cold woman. But I went around for a lot of interviews before the film was released, and I could say that I had played Jack Lemmon's wife. I made it sound like it was Sally and Jack all the way, instead of four lines."

One of those interviews was with Director Robert Altman and Producer Ingo Preminger, who were looking for someone to play Hot Lips. "I thought, you know, terrific and all that. Then I looked at it. It was about three pages long. I was hysterical. I threw the script at Bob Altman and started yelling and crying at the same time. 'You son of a bitch, how can you ask me to play a part like that, you dirty bastard, whoever you are--it's practically not even there!' 'Stop, stop!' Bob Altman says from behind the desk, where he's hiding. 'You're Hot Lips. You've got to be Hot Lips. We'll swing with it. We'll try things. They'll work.' " She did, and they did.

"I'd do anything for Bob Altman now and for the rest of my life, en-nee-thing," she says. By asking her to take the part of a mystic birdwoman-spirit in Brewster McCloud (TIME, Jan. 4), Altman might have been abusing her loyalty, but she responded by supplying moments of melancholy, dizzy hilarity and aching sexuality to an otherwise benighted project.

Her personal life has changed for the better as well. There were some bad times: she dropped out of college, worked at odd jobs and went through a painful break with her parents. But last December she married Director Rick Edelstein in New York. "We didn't fight for almost five days afterward," she reports proudly. Her constantly diminishing free time--she is now at work on Autumn Child, a psychological thriller--is spent cultivating her garden, working on a record album, playing volleyball, relishing her three stepchildren and her status as a newlywed. She talks incessantly--in short, clipped phrases--stopping now and then just long enough to scribble the names Sally and Rick Edelstein on a piece of paper. Pleased and a little wondering, she says: "Look at that. Isn't that beautiful?"

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