Interview with Ann-Margret | Interviews

"I knew when I read the script that that was going to be a rough scene to film, if we could do it at all," Ann-Margret said. She reclined on a sofa in her Continental Plaza suite, looking somehow innocent and sexy at the same time, while her mother, Mrs. Olsson, knitted nearby. "We shot 'Tommy' during a period of three months, and the TV scene was the second to the last one we shot. Russell needed all that time to prepare it.

"People ask me how we did it. It was done exactly the way it seems to have been done. Those were real soapsuds, and real baked beans, and that was real chocolate. After we got the chocolate smeared all over, we had to take a day off from shooting - we didn't work on Sundays - and you wouldn't believe what that set was like by Monday, with the chocolate under the hot lights . . ."

The problem, she said, was that Russell knew he'd only have one chance to get his footage. The scene begins in a bedroom that's dazzlingly white and spotless. It ends with chocolate and beans everywhere. If Russell didn't get his footage the first time, the set would have had to be redone. So he used three cameras, Ann-Margret recalled, and they were all shooting at once when the soapsuds exploded out of the TV screen.

"They only knew in theory how it would work; they'd never tried it. What happened was that the room filled with suds - literally filled up. And I was rolling on the floor under the soap and I caught a piece of glass in my hand. Under liquid like that, you don't really feel the cut very much. I thought I'd nicked something, and then I saw the suds turning pink. And the next thing I knew, I'd had 23 stitches taken. That was bad enough, but as for the beans . . . To this day, I can't look a bean in the face."

The interview took place during Ann-Margret Day in Chicago, so proclaimed by Hizzoner, and A-M recalled that it was her first visit back to her hometown in four years and her mother's first visit in nine. The years in between have been good ones for Ann-Margret (aside, of course, from her near-fatal fall at Lake Tahoe).

When she was here in 1970, she was promoting a motorcycle movie named "C. C. and Company," in which she co-starred with Joe Namath. She still uses footage from "C. C." in the film clips shown during the costume changes in her nightclub act - more perhaps for the entertainment value of seeing Ann-Margret and Joe Namath on motorcycles than for any intrinsic artistic merit.