Stefanie Powers: Television, film and stage actor also serves as global wildlife and climate change advocate
Stefanie Powers became most widely known as a television star for her role as Jennifer Hart in the American mystery series Hart to Hart, with Robert Wagner as Jonathan Hart, in which they portrayed a married couple who continually get mixed up in mysterious and/or criminal occurrences that they then solve usually without the assistance of the police. As the show opening noted, their hobby was murder. Hart to Hart aired for five seasons from 1979 to 1984. Powers and Wagner later reunited for eight Hart to Hart television movies in the 1990s. Powers received nominations for two Primetime Emmy Awards and five Golden Globe Awards.
Her close relationship with actor William Holden led to their joint involvement with wildlife conservation. Holden died in 1981, and by the following year Powers was founding president of the William Holden Wildlife Foundation and a director of the Mount Kenya Game Ranch and Wildlife Conservancy in Nanyuki, Kenya.
Catching up with Ms. Powers in Los Angeles before she jetted off to Kenya, we discussed her television and film career as well as the importance of her wildlife conservation work and love of animals.
By Sheldon Baker
Alternative Medicine (AM): You and Robert Wagner played Jonathan and Jennifer Hart in Hart to Hart that aired from 1979 to 1984. That series ended 45 years ago as of last year. It is hard to believe it’s been so long ago. Alternatively, time has certainly flown by.
Ms. Powers: From your mouth to God’s ears. Yes, it’s hard to believe. The passage of time is a mystery. When I was young, I heard people say that time was flying by, but I didn’t relate to it. Now, I hear young people say, “Where did the time go?” It’s going exponentially faster and faster, and I don’t know if we’re accomplishing any more than we did before. Nevertheless, time passes really fast.
AM: You were in 111 episodes and eight Hart to Hart movies. Today’s television series don’t seem to last that long.
Ms. Powers: That generation of television shows and all the television that were in my golden years was at a time when there were not as many choices as there are now for entertainment. But with streaming services and pay TV the show is not that old. It was through the years that I was under contract to Columbia Pictures and in the twilight of the motion picture studios star system. After about 15 movies, Columbia sold my contract to MGM Studios to do a television series called The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. In those days they were divesting themselves of all the people they had under contract because the studios were becoming independent production houses. Things were changing even back then. But television itself was relegated to three television networks. ABC, NBC and CBS. If you were regularly on television in a television series, you came into people’s homes worldwide. In a very intimate way, families would be sitting around the television on a Sunday night watching The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and Hart to Hart, in numerous countries like France, Germany and England. Depending on time zones in other countries, they may have been watching us during their lunch. I think that created a very different kind of loyalty and relationship with the audience and the performers in a television series. Today, because Hart to Hart seems to have come full cycle after all these years, we have a younger audience, but they keep re-releasing Hart to Hart in Europe. I get fan mail from young people who say wonderful things about the relationship I had with Robert Wagner, and especially from young women and men who say, I’m looking for my Jennifer or Jonathan.”
AM: That’s quite an honor.
Ms. Powers: Yes. Interestingly enough, and apropos today, I recently read in the Hollywood Reporter, an interview with the director of the blockbuster movie Wicked, John Chu. He said when he was growing up, being from a family of immigrants, they wanted so much to emulate everything that was American, and what they watched on television influenced them to such a degree that their favorite show was Hart to Hart. Because of that his parents named their children Jonathan and Jennifer. And now Jonathan, or John Chu, is an established and wonderful Hollywood director.
AM: When you were offered the role and saw the script for Hart to Hart, what were your initial thoughts about the characters?
Ms. Powers: First, I have to set the stage that it was Hollywood in my youth. Hollywood was a very small town. Everybody knew each other and grew up together. Society mingled to such a degree that we all had something in common with one another. When I was under contract to Columbia Pictures, I was still a teenager. There were softball teams within the industry for boys and girls. I was on the girls’ softball team with a lot of wonderful young actors and our coach was Aaron Spelling who became one of the great television writers. He and his partner, Leonard Goldberg created Spelling-Goldberg Productions, which was one of the most successful independent television production houses on record. They used to call ABC Aaron’s Broadcasting Company because as independent producers, they had more hours of primetime television on ABC-TV than any studio or any larger entity than Spelling-Goldberg.
I was in a ballet class as a child with actor Natalie Wood and met her husband RJ (that’s what they called Robert Wagner) on the set of rehearsals of West Side Story.
I then worked with RJ on the television series, It Takes a Thief. The Hart to Hart pilot writer and director was Tom Mankiewicz. We knew each other from working together at Columbia when I was under contract. We were both only 17 years old. Now, here are the ingredients of what led up to the pilot of Hart to Hart.
I was in the midst of doing a production of Cyrano de Bergerac with actor Stacey Keach. We were opening in San Francisco, going to do the play as an out-of-town opening there before going to Broadway. I got this wonderful phone call from Robert Wagner, Tom Mankiewicz and Aaron Spelling telling me they were going to do the Hart to Hart pilot. I loved all of them and said I would really like to do it, but I was in the midst of doing Cyrano. Aaron said there’s a rumor that there’s going to be a New York City newspaper strike and traditionally, whenever there was a newspaper strike, nobody would bring a new play to Broadway because you couldn’t publicize or review it. So, the newspaper strike did happen, and I am so grateful for that strike. It’s the greatest strike in the world, as far as I’m concerned, because it allowed me to do the Hart to Hart television pilot.
AM: From what I’ve read it was my understanding that author and playwright Sidney Sheldon was the show’s main creator.
Ms. Powers: Sheldon had written a script called Double Switch that was sitting on the shelves of Spelling-Goldberg and somebody dusted it off. When they gave it to (Tom) Mankiewicz, who was a very stylish writer and witty, and who had a wonderful understanding of film, comedy, and style, he turned it into what became Hart to Hart. He in essence rewrote and directed it, and created more characters fashioned after the Thin Man movies. The dog and the butler also came on the scene which was not in the original piece that Sheldon wrote.
AM: Your butler and driver Max was actor Lionel Stander who passed away about 20 years ago. He appeared in many of the episodes.
Ms. Powers: He was in every episode. He was our partner in crime and definitely part of Hart to Hart on a consistent basis.
AM: Another of the show’s characters, if I can call it a character, was the dog you called Freeway.
Ms. Powers: Yes. Freeway came from a kill shelter. That’s how most of the movie dogs are found. They’re found with certain characteristics at kill shelters and thank God for that because we all need to adopt as many dogs as we possibly can as the shelter kill rate has gone up 30%. It’s just astonishing and heartbreaking that these animals are being euthanized. I adopted one from a kill shelter who was two days away from being euthanized. It just broke my heart when I saw her. She was a puppy and now just about a year old. I always recommend everybody go to a kill shelter and rescue a dog. My five dogs came from kill shelters and I wouldn’t trade a single one of them.
AM: How many animals do you have?
Ms. Powers: In Los Angeles I have five dogs, a parrot who’s been with me for 51 years and three horses. In England, I have nine horses and a cat. In Africa I have five horses, three dogs, and I live on a game ranch with 37 species of East African wildlife.
AM: When you filmed episode 111, the final episode of Hart to Hart, can you recall any memories about it?
Ms. Powers: No, because there was no actual final episode. I was in Paris doing a miniseries called Miss Ralph’s Daughter, with Stacey Keach and Lee Remick. It was a wonderful long-form miniseries. I received a call on a Sunday night from Robert Wagner, Tom Mankiewicz, and Leonard Goldberg saying they’d been planning to shoot two Hart to Hart episodes in Paris for the new season. They had wonderful ideas where Freeway was going to run away with a French poodle, and there were other lovely ideas for those episodes. They called to tell me that we were not on the fall schedule as ABC had decided to cancel the show. I was in tears all night. Imagine showing up for work the next day with a red face. It was heartbreaking as we always wanted to put a period at the end of the sentence, so to speak, for the series. But a few years later we were able to revisit the series with two-hour television movies. I think that was a lovely way to put a period there.
AM: I understand you’re still good friends with Robert Wagner.
Ms. Powers: Yes, thank God, and I’m going to celebrate his 95th birthday with him in February.
AM: You also starred in the feature film McLintock! with John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, and several other well-known actors. Did you do your own stunts in that wild west film?
Ms. Powers: I did. Playing the daughter of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, there was one scene where we were filming in a beautiful location on a farm in southern Arizona and the house for the ranch was on a slightly raised hillside with a field below it. I was supposed to get on my Palomino horse that was borrowed from a local rancher who didn’t allow me to ride the horse before we did the final ride. They originally had a stunt girl do the ride in front of the cameras, but as she rode fast down the hillside and past the camera, they saw her startled face, so a few days later they asked me to do it. I didn’t have the opportunity to speak with the stunt woman otherwise I would have learned that the horse was almost impossible to stop. I learned the hard way. I heard camera, and action, got on the horse and rode down the hill as fast as I could past the cameras. I tried to rein in the horse, but he wasn’t stopping. He just put his head down and I put the bit between its teeth and went for the leather. There was a barbed wire fence in front of me because it was a cattle ranch. The horse would not have seen the barbed wire. I was getting my feet out of the stirrups to try and bail out when one of the stuntmen on a horse rode right in front to stop us. I went flying and landed on the ground like a sack of potatoes. I blacked out because all I remember is opening my eyes and seeing John Wayne rushing over to me with tears in his eyes. All I could say was, did you get it on film? Unfortunately, it all happened beyond the camera, so it wasn’t captured on film.
AM: So, you learned a good lesson?
Ms. Powers: I have learned not to do a lot of my own stunts, because that’s what stunt people are for. They’re wonderful. They’re your best friends. They do it better than any actor can, except maybe Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise defies all logic. He’s amazing.
AM: Regarding The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., you weren’t in the initial pilot.
Ms. Powers: Right, but I had nothing to do with that. Mary Ann Mobley appeared in the show’s pilot. My Columbia Pictures contract was traded to MGM who decided to put me in the role of April Dancer which was really just a spin-off episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Later on, Mary Ann became my neighbor, and we became very good friends. We walked our dogs together. She had two dogs, and while Mary Ann was suffering from cancer she was still the most gorgeous, charming, and lovely Southern belle, and became a very good friend. When she died her dogs had to go, so it was without question that they would come to my house. They knew my dogs and they were part of our dog neighborhood. Bailey and Mr. Brewster came to live with me. I’ve never seen a dog mourn so much as her dog Mr. Brewster did, who cried all day and night after she passed. I still have one in my care.
AM: Of all your acting roles, is there one that’s your favorite, or stands out?
Ms. Powers: That’s hard to say. I have more favorites than others, or ones that I was very proud of. I was one of the producers of a miniseries about the aviatrix, Beryl Markham, who was the first person to fly the Atlantic solo non-stop going West. Charles Lindbergh had gone East with a tailwind. A few years later she went West with a load of fuel in her plane. Lindbergh said it couldn’t be done, and it would be like a flying bomb. But she was going to dislodge that notion. The miniseries was called West and based on her life, not her book, which was called West With the Night. The miniseries was based on an interview she had done, plus research that I conducted in Kenya with a lot of people I knew that had a great deal to do with Beryl. I met her once in passing, but I couldn’t say that I was at all friendly with her, because she was not a woman’s woman. She loved the boys. She liked to talk about aviation, and she saw all women who could fly as competitors. She wasn’t too pleased with me. She was an extraordinary individual, and that whole project was very close to my heart, being one of the producers.
AM: Thank you for sharing that story. Are you still doing stage?
Ms. Powers: Not presently, but I’m still employable.
AM: In the early 80s you were founder and president of the William Holden Wildlife Foundation and that has been a major part of your life.
Ms. Powers: It’s a long story but I’ll encapsulate it. I had the great good fortune of spending the last, almost 10 years of life with William Holden (one of the biggest box office draws of the 1950s). I loved all the same things he loved. He was enamored of Africa. I had traveled to the northern part of Africa, but I had never been to East Africa until Bill took me there. He had gone to Africa in the 1950s as a hunter with three friends on safari. He eventually bought a hotel and turned it into the Mount Kenya Safari Club which became the jewel in the crown of visitors to East Africa. Mind you, mass travel and people visiting and traveling as they do today absolutely didn’t exist until the late 1970s as most people in the US didn’t have a passport. Bill was living in Europe at the time, and going to Kenya was just an overnight flight so he had great access. He really enjoyed the people, the wildlife, and the natural world. There was a 1,200-plus acre farm that surrounded the hotel. He negotiated with the farmer who owned it and bought it, because Bill had a vision. In the late 1950s he created the first game farm for the preservation of species in the whole of Africa, and maybe one of the few in the world. His vision of what might happen, and how the natural world was in peril placed him as a visionary of the things to come. As a result of having created that wonderful facility and collecting what became 37 species of East African wildlife, five of which sadly are no longer visible in the wild, he felt that was probably the greatest work of his life over and above anything he did on film.
AM: It was quite an undertaking for you to move forward with what Bill envisioned doing.
Ms. Powers: Bill passed in 1981 and one of the things he wanted to do, but failed to make it come to fruition, was to build an Education Center as a component for the ongoing species conservation that was happening on the game ranch for local people so that they could understand biodiversity, the reason for the preservation of the natural world, how it affected them, and how to appreciate and understand the human animal conflict as well as realize how much it affected their quality of life. In his memory I created the William Holden Wildlife Foundation, which is a 501c3. It’s a public charity registered in the US, and we have our IRS status. Everything that anybody donates is tax deductible.
AM: It has been quite an ambitious project.
Ms. Powers: In 1982, I began the building of our Education Center, which today, and has been for years, serves about 11,000 students annually. We also have an outreach program into extremely impoverished rural areas, seven rural areas to be exact, where we work with close to 6,000 people including children and students. That’s an ongoing part of our education projects.
AM: You work closely with Kenyan farmers focusing on regenerative agriculture.
Ms. Powers: The mission statement of the Foundation is wildlife conservation through education and alternatives to habitat destruction. In that second part of the mission statement, we recently opened a laboratory on the site of the Education Center so we can now teach a method of regenerative agriculture, starting with the soils so they no longer have to depend on over chemicalization and therefore pollution of watershed air and land through overuse of chemicals. Through our methods we can turn around a small plot of land to our target audience which are subsistence farmers whose small holdings are between an acre and 10 acres. Using our methodology, we can turn over their land starting with regenerative soil techniques in one growing season which meets the demands and requirements of subsistence farmers because we’re not competing with factory farms.
AM: You must be a godsend to the Kenyan farmers.
Ms. Powers: We are hopefully rescuing some of the land which has already been exploited so they don’t go on to another piece of land and exploit that and ever increasing burnt out property that’s been over exploited. Now, all it does is sit there as dirt, and allows carbon to escape into the atmosphere. It’s all part of what we all need to know about how agriculture contributes to climate change, which really is one of the biggest factors in the world. Addressing it in a global way, we can say that factory farming, and over-exploitation of land for farming purposes has probably been the number one ingredient in climate change.
AM: You are really ardent about climate change issues?
Ms. Powers: You can talk about all the cars in the world, but electric vehicles are not the solution, because they are also part of the cycle of pollution and exploitation. What powers the power plants you are going to plug your car into? How can you recycle the unrecyclable battery? How much more energy does it cost to create one of those batteries to create one of those cars as opposed to buying vehicles that are already sitting on the lots? You have to look at the entire holistic picture and the monetization of all the alternatives that industry is allegedly presenting as the solution for climate change.
I think that’s a very ephemeral way of looking at it when really, we have to look at how the demands of the over demanding populace of the world forces greater exploitation of land that is unrecoverable, such as what has happened in Brazil and the jungle areas which are currently in desperate peril and have been the lungs of the planet. What happens when you don’t have those lungs anymore?
AM: Today you spend time between Kenya and California.
Ms. Powers: Yes. I’m a dual resident. I spend about six months of the year in Kenya, and all of our projects that are ongoing are compelling and very exciting. We have bids and dialogue out with a number of notable education institutions such as Stanford, University of Southern California, University of Michigan, and Cambridge University hoping we will attract both the Ph.D. and master’s degree candidates to do their dissertation studies on our soil regeneration protocols.
AM: You were recently acknowledged by the United Nations for your work.
Ms. Powers: I was part of a group of 25 people who’ve been acknowledged, and the presentation was made at the UN a few months ago. We’ve been acknowledged in an e-book called Vision of the Future that is available for everybody free on the internet as agents of change who are putting their money where their mouth is and also doing work in a variety of areas. I believe I’m the only one who’s doing environmental, flora and fauna work in the scope that we are doing it. It’s a great honor to be highlighted along with the company of these 24 other devoted people who are doing great work in other avenues of passion and human need. I feel very grateful for that honor. That was the motivation for doing it and for highlighting this kind of work, and dedication to hopefully inspire others to either join in or to do the same thing in areas where they might feel it is their calling.
AM: What are your recommendations for any of our readers who might want to get involved with the Foundation?
Ms. Powers: Please contact us at the William Holden Wildlife Foundation website, which is WHWF.org. There’s a lot to entertain you on the website. There’s a wonderful video that has to do with Bill (William Holden) on how the foundation was formed. I hope people will visit the site. We’re open to questions and anybody who wishes to join us. We would love to have input from Alternative Medicine readers to see how they might get involved. Just even becoming a member of the Foundation so we can increase the knowledge of what we’re doing and people will understand that there are things they can get involved with.
AM: Is it true that you’re fluent in six different languages?
Ms. Powers: I’m fluent in the languages I’m speaking on a regular basis. There’s nothing like hearing a language and speaking it regularly. I lead with English and also speak mostly Spanish and Swahili on a regular basis, but I was married to a Frenchman, and I lived in France, so I do speak French. I speak Polish as it was my first language but speak it haltingly now. Nevertheless, I can get along with Polish, French, Spanish and Italian.
AM: You have to tell me, at 82 how do you stay looking so young and fit?
Ms. Powers: I don’t think about the numbers, that’s for sure.
AM: Did you do anything special on your birthday last November?
Ms. Powers: It wasn’t a big one. I was just motoring on. The zeros and fives are what I celebrate.
AM: How about your diet or exercise routine?
Ms. Powers: Is there a formula? First of all, it has to do with the gene pool, which I think I’m very lucky to have. My mother was fantastic. She was riding elephants in India with me when she was 82. So, I have a lot to live up to. And then, of course, diet and a lot of exercise, and being involved in things that are more important than you are, as with what we’re doing in Kenya. That certainly makes me get up in the morning and keeps me on my toes.
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