feMail Request: Margot Kidder
A devoted “fan since Issue 1″ who wishes to remain anonymous {wouldn’t you?} writes, “Dear Mr. Sleuth: Engaged in some good natured banter this weekend regarding the hottest Lois Lanes. I offered that I remembered stills of Margot Kidder braless in a see-through blouse, as Lois Lane at her desk in a variety of sultry color poses in the 70s. I have only found obscured evidence of these shots online usually in B collages. Would you have these shots in your collection? Also recall a color photo of her in nothing but a Superman towel that was also a favorite. Maybe you can settle this argument on a future blog!”
Great Caesar’s Ghost! Do you think I’ve got superhuman powers?! Well, maybe in certain areas. And I believe it’s transparently clear where you probably saw them in the 70s! {the original vintage cover}. Feel free to towel off with the other Margobilia you mentioned {originally published when I was working here}. At the time Kidder was one of the most recognizable People in the world, but continued to wear “see thru blouses” in her private life as well! And you didn’t need X-ray vision to see through to What Lies Beneath! Ain’t she Super?
As to the original aspect of your question, Margot must be considered the “hottest Lois Lane” by virtue of being the one who introduced S-E-X to the uptight girl reporter always trying to get her “Ten Cents in” since her debut in Action Comics #1 in 1938 {her very first frame of the strip}. “Margot Kidder was and remains the quintessential Lois Lane,” opined a sci-fi fan just last year. And Playboy concurred back in the days of Superman II: “Christopher Reeve continues to impress, but it’s Margot Kidder who dominates the movie s pert Lois Lane…in a skillfully pointed performance. Kidder becomes the kind of girl that any man, Super or not, would want to take off with” {a favorite still from my private stash}. Added Time magazine: “Margot Kidder gives Lois Lane the sex appeal that schoolboys always knew she had.”
Especially if they’d seen the model she was literally drawn from: Joanne Carter, a self-described “skinny little kid” who placed an ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in late 1937 looking for work. It caught the attention of two struggling young pals {Canadians like Kidder}, artist Joe Shuster and writer Jerry Siegel…and, chaperoned by her mother, Joanne agreed to pose for Shuster in his apartment, wearing her sister’s “two big” bathing suit. “He said, ‘Never mind, I’ll put a bit more here and a bit more there,’” she recalls…and the voluptuous result led to Lois!
Sleuthian insights: Basing the character’s personality on Torchy Blane–a feisty female reporter in a series of 1930s films–Siegel took her moniker from the star of the latest Torchy film, luscious Lola Lane. And her heartthrob from the German Übermensch —”the goal for humanity to set for itself”—in the classic 1883 treatise Thus Spoke Zaruthustra by mad-genius Friedrich Nietzsche. It literally means “Over man,” but the first translation into English in 1909 rendered the term as “Superman.” This concept—designed to create a “master race’—was often blamed for spawning the Nazi desire for “Aryan supremacy”…and indeed the first short story Siegel wrote with the name was of “a powerful villain bent on dominating the entire world.” Shuster later realized that the only way this Superman would be a successful comic book character was as the “wholesome, morally upright figure of modern times” we know today…so they added his “mild mannered” alter ego Clark Kent—borrowed from the first names of lookalike leading men of the time, Clark Gable and Kent Taylor. Yet unlike the “one-man woman” she inspired, original model Joanne Carter dated artist Shuster before marrying his partner Siegel! Now that’s just plain evil…
Enough background, now let’s move to the front! “Generally, I find that if my body is in good shape I love working nude,” mused Margot Kidder. “Love it. I just feel sexy and wonderful. There’s something very sexy about being photographed without your clothes and knowing you’re beautiful.” Except the nude scene she “hated” in 1975’s The Reincarnation of Peter Proud–even though the actress thought her body “looked fine.” Playing a 52-year-old woman {exactly twice her age} having an emotional breakdown {foreshadowing?} while bathing, Margot claims the director “assured me the bathtub scene would be shot from the shoulders up. Then when I saw it,” she hisses, “he had shot it from all sorts of angles {an original frame from Sleuth’s private collection}. My hand was floating around in the water while I was crying, which made it look as if I were masturbating. That made me furious {and masturbate furiously}, because I’d been lied to and tricked.”
Often by men: “Actors only get uptight about their own bodies,” Kidder critiques. “They have this thing about their cocks. They go crazy when they’re asked to work nude. They’re afraid of getting erections, or that someone will think that they’re too small, or something. If women felt about their breasts the way men feel about their cocks, we’d spend our whole lives running around in muumuus.” As did her ravishing roommate: “My best friend, Jennifer Salt {daughter of screenwriter Waldo Salt}, for one, is uptight about nudity,” Margot mulled. “But you don’t have to do it, you know. You can say no and still get work.” Or you can say yes, as Jennifer finally did for dad’s Midnight Cowboy, and get even more work!
After three marriages that lasted less than a year—to novelist Thomas McGuane {in hot tub as his son watches}, actor John Heard {for a month!} and famed French filmmaker Philippe de Broca {they met making a miniseries in 1983 and divorced before it aired!}—Kidder sighs: “I was never good at male/female relationships, though God knows I try.” So did she ever try a same-sex session? “Honey,” she smiles, “I think most people are bisexual. If a woman wants to sleep with a woman, she should go ahead and do it.” So have you done it? “Yes, I’ve slept with a woman, and I don’t think I’m an outlaw or a bad person for doing it. It was something that didn’t particularly appeal to me and didn’t work, but I did try it.” Reportedly with Rosie Shuster, head writer on the original Saturday Night Live: “We got Rosie dressed up in a tuxedo and bowler hat” to attend the 1981 Oscars as Kidder’s date, she recalls, “and my agent got 10 phone calls asking, ‘Is Margot Kidder a lesbian?’” Actually, she muses: “Life might have been easier for me if I had been a lesbian, but I’m not {damn!–”Olivia Hussey was a bit of an odd one,” she says of filming Black Christmas in 1974}. It’s just very natural for me to have a man.”
Even a Superman! “The thing everyone wants to know,” Kidder kidded before Superman II, “is whether there’s a love scene in the sequel. I can say right now, you’ll have to wait till 1980 for that,” she teased. “Will it be nude, I’m asked. Wait and see, I say.” Unlikely in the PG franchise, but she did bed the hero: “We make love, and after that he gives up his super powers, so I guess Lois is a good lay {Reeve seems lost in reverie}.” So did Chris get to experience bliss in real life? “No. We know each other too well. We can kiss onscreen, but in general I think it would be easier to close my eyes and have someone have sex with me than to be kissing him. We have too much in common.”
One tragic thing they had in common: Everyone recalls Christopher Reeve’s 1995 horse-jumping incident {shown just moments before it}, which rendered Superman flightless, wheelchair bound and led to his death in 2004, but his “Lois” was similarly paralyzed five years before him in a car accident on the set of the USA cable series Nancy Drew on 10/15/90. She was fired a few days later…and unable to work for two years—filing for bankruptcy {with debts of over $800K} in August 1992. Ironically it was the only time that the words “Margot Kidder” and “flat” have ever appeared in the same sentence {no, that’s not a wheelchair she’s sitting in}! “I’m shattered,” the actress sobbed. “I can’t walk, and have no use of my left hand {that sucks}. I can’t even fly on a plane” {couldn’t Chris rescue her?}. Yet after Reeve’s fall, Margot bravely flew from the Czech Republic to be at his bedside.
“Lois Lane!” Kidder commented after the first film. “God, it’s almost like playing the Virgin Mary.” Yet though the self-described “whore” insists she was never intimate with her Superman {looking cozy before his marriage}, she proved Lois “was a good lay” with nearly everyone else! “I was never hard to get if I wanted to be gotten,” Margot maintained. “If I didn’t want to be gotten, there was no way I could be. Though at one point in my life,” she admitted, “making love was no more than shaking hands. I used to feel guilty if I didn’t sleep with somebody…”. And once she “went black”—four flings with Richard Pryor {”I fell in love with him in two seconds flat. Richard was irresistible“}—she never went back: having public love affairs with California political boss Willie Brown in 1983, as well as original Late Night with David Letterman {and now John Mayer’s} drummer Steve Jordan in 1987.
Yet the curvy Canadian was just warming up: Two nights before the California Primary in 1988, “Margot KIdder was filmed leaving candidate Jesse Jackson’s hotel suite at 10:30 p.m., declaring that the reverend’s bedroom was a mess.” A newswoman with the ABC crew noted that “Kidder appeared drunk and also proclaimed, ‘I’m Margot Kidder, and I’m whacked.’” The lady reporter {”High and Lois?”} revealed that the actress “later insisted the word was white, not whacked.” Jackson campaign workers also confided that Kidder “does travel on the plane with him from rally to rally“—where she marched by his side while wife Jackie stayed away. “Any work that I have done is now destroyed,” snapped a miffed Margot. “It becomes the bimbo actress fucking the cute politician. And sure she’s committed, ha, ha, ha.” It was no laughing matter, however, when Kidder next encountered the ABC reporter who had revealed the tryst: “I grabbed her,” the actress admits, “threw her up against the bus and went, ‘Look, you stupid cunt.’ I said, ‘This is the most sleazy thing I’ve ever heard of.”
Until April 20, 1996, that is…when Margot went missing for three days, threw away her purse because “I thought there was a bomb in it,” then took off running, slept in yards and on porches in a state of fear,” until she was found by police behind a stranger’s house in Glendale, California–cowering in this rotted woodpile. “You shouldn’t be back here,” homeowner Elaine Lamb told the intruder. “There are black widow spiders.” To which the “dazed and disheveled” drifter replied: “What’s chasing me is a whole lot worse than black widow spiders. You may not believe me,” she whispered, “but I’m Margot Kidder.” Said one of the cops who took her away, “It was a classic case of paranoia {say it ain’t so, Lo’}. The woman we saw {crazed and missing two teeth} was in obvious mental distress.”
What triggered it was a computer virus that wiped out 3 years’ of work on her memoirs, aptly titled Calamities. “That’s when I went from really distressed to absolute delusion,” the actress recalls, becoming convinced that first husband Thomas McGuane {her hot tub honey above} “was trying to kill me.” {What the buck?!}. Living off the streets—a far cry for help from the days she hosted Saturday Night Live—Margot was nearly “raped by a homeless man” but reasoned with him: “You’re a good person. You don’t want to do this.” Thankfully, “he backed off.”
“We were sure that she would turn up dead,” sighed an eyewitness who saw the actress wandering in L.A. airport at 3 a.m., and was later “surprised to learn she is safe” {since crazed Kidder had slipped him a note that read: “I am DEAD”}. But others had faith: “Margot is incredibly strong,” her brother John said at the time. “She’s a survivor.” Indeed, she’s proved to be a real Superwoman, facing her demons and examining her past: “I’d been insane for many years,” Kidder confesses {her shaky signature might have provided a clue}, “probably from age twelve when I first contemplated suicide. If I felt myself starting to go manic, I’d get drunk. Better drunk than crazy.” In the swinging Seventies, the high-spirited hippie recalls: “I love men and sex {in her Wilder days}. I was a binge drinker. In another era, I probably would have been called a party girl.”
Now realizing that the answer to her “totally empty life” couldn’t be found in the bottom of a shot glass, the “addled actress” has cleaned up her act: “I’d had episodes before, but I swept them under the carpet. This time, I couldn’t do that because everyone knew. Coming out of the closet as bi-polar was not my idea,” Kidder laughs. “I mean it was all over the news. What happened to me—the biggest nervous breakdown in history—is not so uncommon. It’s just that mine was public. If you’re gonna fall apart, do it in your own bedroom.” Speaking of which, Margot once ironically mused: “Nudity in the flesh doesn’t bother me. But having my mind uncovered–that scares the hell out of me.”
To recover, she returned to her roots: “I owe it all to my family,” Kidder crowed just 3 months after her famous “freak-out.” She stayed at younger sister Annie’s home in Canada—”where they spent weeks discussing Margot’s problems and sorting out her priorities.” Activist Annie–who now looks remarkably like big Sis—was recently honored for founding “People for Education”…but Sleuth recalls her playing the victim in 1987’s Deadly Deception. Margot also got help from actress niece Janet Kidder who got Auntie a comeback role playing an older version of herself in the 1999 Canadian series La Femme Nikita. We, however, prefer this version of niece Janet the next year in the film XChange. Admits Margot: “I was really fucked up at the time.” Ditto for naughty niece Janet …
“I’ve always played either bad girls or whores or psychos,” Margot mused {ass-uming Janet’s pole position}, “and I’ve always enjoyed doing it. But I guess I got tired of kissing ass to get parts I thought were stupid.” She hit bottom a year later in 1985’s Little Treasure … and also hit her legendary co-star! “There is a report out of Cuernavaca, Mexico that veteran actor Burt Lancaster and actress Margot Kidder got into a slapping, punching brawl on the set in March 1984″—a fight Esquire dubbed “The Shocka in Cuernavaca!” According to Sleuth’s hometown Washington Post: “Kidder, showing the 70-year-old star how she wanted the scene played, shoved him. He smacked her twice across the face {how’s this for a Sleuthian “find”?}. They then were in a free-for-all battle, tumbling onto the floor. Kidder was bleeding from the back of her head and Lancaster had a cut lip by the time the fight was broken up.” Even today, Margot gets her shots in: “Yeah, he beat me up! I virtually whacked him back and said, “You washed-up old fag!” or something horrible. Well, then I got a reputation for being sort of nuts and difficult, because I was at that point, so I wasn’t much in demand.”
Happily, she is again—reuniting with Superman’s Lana Lang, Annette O’Toole, on two episodes of Smallville and landing a recurring role as Sally Field’s bosom buddy in the ABC drama Brothers & Sisters.”There aren’t a lot of parts,” Kidder concedes, “when you get to be my age {60} if you refuse to have face-lifts” {chin up old girl!}. Though there was a time when Margot mused: “I’m thinking of getting my tits lifted“—recalling her teens when “I spent hours trying to figure out how I could get my breasts to shoot skyward like Miss January when I lay on my back instead of having them fall down on either side of my armpits.”
Instead, she lifted her spirits…and now proudly proclaims, “My career virtually ended after the breakdown, but I plowed through, which I consider a triumph. I went to work and did a lot of homework about what was wrong with me. Now it’s just part of my story {she’s working on an autobiography entitled I Slept With Everyone on Television}. It’s been almost 14 years now since that happened. No, 13 years, without an episode of bi-polar or depression or mania, so I can safely say I’m cured.” And thus finally free to hit the convention circuit, along with other familiar faces from her past!
Speaking of which, they’ve named the road that Margaret Ruth Kidder was born on in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada Lois Lane. There’s even a new street sign that bears her name … and a makeshift sculpture that recalls her bare frame. “I’ll have ‘Lois Lane’ inscribed on my damn grave,” Margot sighed just last month. A quarter century earlier, when reduced to a walk-on in Superman III for calling its producers “beneath contempt as human beings,” Kidder concluded: “I love Lois Lane. I could play her till I die, but I’m not going to die if I don’t play her.” Because of some super powers she’s survived…and today has the last word: “You know, I’ve had a colorful life, and I have to live with that. But right now things are pretty darn good.” And looking pretty darn good too!