CHARM KILLS The George Hamilton Story

He's always been more Porfirio Rubirosa than Cary Grant, and he's charmed his way into some very unlikely places—from J.F.K.'s Palm Beach Camelot to Malacaiiang Palace. And now, after allegedly being used as a clearinghouse for Marcos millions, he's playing Don Corleone's moneyman in Godfather III. Who is George Hamilton? BOB COLACELLO reports from Beverly Hills

Bungalow 5 of the Beverly Hills Hotel is the perfect setting for an interview with George Hamilton, Hollywood movie star, international extra man par excellence, and, according to his official press bio, "the world's most ardent worshipper of the golden orb." For one thing, it's got a new, $100,000 private swimming pool, put in by the hotel's owner, the Sultan of Brunei, at the personal request of Walter and Lee Annenberg, who always take the $2,675-a-night, five-room pink stucco villa when they are in Los Angeles. For another, George Hamilton loves the Beverly Hills Hotel. He takes breakfast at the counter of the coffee shop. He uses the tennis courts almost every afternoon. And he often lunches at the outdoor cafe facing the main pool, surrounded by the tented cabanas of major show-biz moguls. Hamilton, however, is not actually staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel; Bungalow 5 has been borrowed for a few hours for our interview.

The man who has squired everyone from Lynda Bird Johnson to Imelda Marcos is currently living in an apartment a couple of miles below the hotel in "Baja Beverly Hills." As we spoke, the Summit Drive mansion in "Haute Beverly Hills" which he occupied for a large part of the eighties was about to become the property of the Philippine government. And a front-page Los Angeles Times story explaining how $ 12 million in Marcos money had passed through Hamilton's accounts—perhaps knowingly, perhaps not—was the talk of Hollywood.

At fifty-one, George Hamilton looks almost exactly the same as he did in his first movie, Crime and Punishment U.S.A., made in 1958.

He's never had a face-lift, but his lifelong Christian Scientist devotion to natural health, including vitamins, minerals, exercise, and frequent visits to spas from Mexico to Munich, where he has tried everything from blood washing to injections of fetalsheep cells, has obviously paid off.

Only his hair has changed. Gone is the sleek black mane that gave him the aura of a South American playboy and always made him seem older. Now it's half gray and cut short for The Godfather, Part III, his first feature film since Zorro, the Gay Blade in 1981. Francis Coppola has cast him as a smooth, high-Wasp lawyer who sets up a deal for the Corleone family with the Vatican bank. Hollywood is talking about that too.

They're saying that Hamilton is great in the movie, which opens Christmas Day, and that he's going to make a major comeback. But on the eve of what may be the biggest success of his career, he is also facing the biggest scandal of his social life. After "charming," the adjective I heard most about George Hamilton was "complicated." As one Hollywood wag put it, "Charm kills."

George Hamilton met Imelda Marcos in Manila in 1979. He was on a promotional tour for the only movie he's ever made that was an all-out hit, Love at First Bite, which he co-produced, because, as he says, "I couldn't get a job." Originally titled Dracula Sucks Again, the movie worked because it used Hamilton's brilliant talent for self-deprecating wit. He plays Count Dracula, in white tie, and has lines like "How vould you like to go around dressed like a headvaiter for the last seven hundred years?"

The Marcoses were not thought of as common criminals. They were major allies. I met Mrs. Reagan there. I was flattered to be their friend."

Mrs. Marcos invited Hamilton to lunch at Malacanang Palace. Also present were two friends of Imelda's: Gliceria Tantoco, wife of a Filipino supermarket magnate, and the bluest of the Blue Ladies, as the inner circle surrounding the First Lady were called; and Antonio Floirendo, the Filipino sugar and banana king. They would prove to be both a boon and a bane to George Hamilton over the next decade.

On one hand, they provided him with more than $12 million in investment funds and loans, which contributed to his lavish life-style in the eighties. And lavish it was. In 1982, Hamilton bought Charlie Chaplin's old house, called Breakaway, on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills, for $1.2 million and immediately put his brother Bill to work remodeling and expanding it. The master bedroom was the piece de resistance: "You pushed a button," one guest at the housewarming party, hosted by Joan Collins, said, "and the wall opened onto this huge closet. You pushed another button and the clothes turned around on this giant metal rack, just like at the dry cleaner's. There were hundreds of suits, jackets, shirts, and sweaters, and everything had a number on it. George said if he was on a trip he could call up and ask them to send jacket No. 366 with shirt No. 47." In the course of the eighties, Hamilton also maintained a Tara-like mansion called the Cedars, in Natchez, Mississippi; an apartment on Park Avenue in New York; a house in Aspen; a house in Belgrave Mews in London; and an exquisitely restored sixty-eight-foot yacht, also called Breakaway. He gave several splashy parties at Summit Drive, including one for his Dynasty costar Catherine Oxenberg and another for the Speaker of the California State Assembly, Willie Brown Jr., just days before he sold the house for $6.5 million to Adnan Khashoggi's daughter, Nabila.

On the other hand, those same investments and loans from Tantoco and Floirendo caused George Hamilton to be named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal fraud and racketeering case against Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and Adnan Khashoggi. President Marcos died before the trial in New York last spring, at which Hamilton testified as a subpoenaed witness with immunity, and Imelda and Khashoggi were acquitted. But two civil suits brought by the Philippine government against Mrs. Marcos are still pending in the United States, and Hamilton has given a two-and-a-half-day deposition in California.

To make a long story short, in March 1983, a year after Hamilton attended a film festival in Manila, Gliceria Tantoco gave him $5.5 million, partly as an advance for a film about General Mac Arthur. The film was never made, and in November 1983, Hamilton returned the money to Tantoco. Shortly before that transaction, he was lent $6 million by Antonio Floirendo, $4 million of it against the Summit Drive house. That loan was paid back when the house was sold to Nabila Khashoggi.

The Philippine government claims, and the Los Angeles Times article in October supports the claim, that all of these funds came out of secret Marcos accounts in the Philippines and ended up in secret Marcos accounts outside the Philippines. Tantoco, according to the Times, "today lives in Morocco as a fugitive from federal fraud charges in New York and bail-jumping charges in Rome." Floirendo has testified that Mrs. Marcos directed him to lend money to Hamilton. Khashoggi has reportedly admitted that he acted at the behest of the Marcoses, which is why the Summit Drive house was awarded to the Philippine government. George Hamilton, in his 457-page deposition, given in the summer of 1987, quipped with the lawyer for the Philippine government, even as he answered question after question with "I don't recall" and insisted that he had never discussed business of any sort with either of the Marcoses.

"It's possible he doesn't know anything," says Bill Rempel, who co-wrote the L.A. Times article,

"but if that's the case, he's one of the densest people that ever existed."

Joseph Bernstein, who acted as attorney for Imelda Marcos on her secret New York properties, including the Crown Building, 40 Wall Street, and Herald Center, and has since initiated a civil suit against her, says, "George Hamilton was clearly advising her on real estate. He was bringing her deals. And often when I brought her a deal, she involved him. He took part in the discussions and even in some of the meetings we had on the New York properties. He asked questions. In fact, the night we went to see 40 Wall, he was with her. Tantoco wasn't George's friend—the Marcoses were."

"In fairness," says Michael Lewan, who was chief aide to Representative Stephen Solarz's investigation into hidden Marcos assets in this country, "I have to say there was nothing there, other than the social connections. Hundreds of leads came to our attention, mostly from the Filipino community. And we would have liked to have been able to call George Hamilton—you don't have to be a public-relations genius to realize the benefits of that for our investigation—but nothing came to our attention that warranted calling him as a witness."

Hamilton arrived at the Beverly Hills Hotel in a buffed black Bentley, very much in the style of the star he has always admired most, Cary Grant. He was wearing an olive-green sport jacket over a pine-green T-shirt, sharply creased tan trousers, and highly polished cordovan tassel loafers. His gold watch had a dark-green leather strap, and his gold-buckled belt was dark green, too. The burgundy-olive-and-pine paisley pocket handkerchief matched the burgundy-olive-and-pine socks. And everything brought out the green in his hazel eyes, which went from olive to pine as the golden orb set over Bungalow 5's private patio.

His tan is perfect, not too shiny or too dull, not too orange or too brown, but the same cinnamon wash he's had since he was sixteen. "I was a gangling Jerry Lewis kind of kid, the class clown," he said. "And then my mother moved to Palm Beach, and I went down for spring break and got a tan, and all of a sudden girls were looking at me and I was being invited to dinner parties. Well, in Palm Beach, all you had to have was a dinner jacket and a suntan and you were invited to everything, and you could always have eggs at two o'clock in the morning. It was a wonderful style of life—the last of an era."

His face is remarkably unlined for someone who's had the same suntan for thirty-five years. He credits early use of aloe vera, from his mother's Palm Beach backyard, and his own line of products, the George Hamilton Sun Care System. "How many guys can parlay a tan into a money-maker?" he has said. A few months ago, he launched his own cologne, Chivalry.

In two long interview sessions, he often made tongue-in-cheek cracks at his own expense and amply demonstrated his legendary skill, prized by hostesses from Beverly Hills to Monte Carlo, at turning almost any subject into a dazzling dinner-party anecdote. When I asked him about his role in Godfather III, I got a riotous tale of how the Italian hairdressers clipped, shaved, stripped, and bleached his hair until "it looked like shredded wheat," when all they had to do was wash out the Loving Care that he said he'd been using since Zorro. The story included hilarious imitations of the barbers, in fluently chirpy Italian, and a special guest appearance by Helmut Berger, who is also in the movie, done in a totally accurate German accent. (Hamilton also speaks French and Spanish.)

"George was the most popular guy on the set," says Lauren Hutton, who visited the Sicilian location near the end of the shooting last winter (and who co-starred in Zorro). "Everybody had been through a lot, but they all still loved George." Bridget Fonda adds, ''He kept us in stitches. He's a very kind person. He helped me out a lot. I was trying to figure out how to make something out of my part, and he listened, and made suggestions. He also prescribed a homeopathic flu medicine for me. He's the original frustrated doctor." The Godfather himself, A1 Pacino, states, ''George Hamilton is devoted to his work and was always there to contribute a good deal of his knowledge in many different areas." Pacino and Hamilton, an unlikely pair, became fast friends and poker buddies, playing in Pacino's trailer with Andy Garcia and Eli Wallach, ''for a lotta lira," as Wallach puts it.

"A1 had moments of real pain and problems during the movie," Hamilton told me, ''but we fused together. For Francis, I became the character in the movie—I was invited into the family, but separate. A1 was not that way. A1 embraced me as a total friend. We shared secrets. I think Francis was really great to ask for me, and I guess to get me for the movie he had to fight certain powers."

The powers at Paramount reportedly felt that George Hamilton was too ''lightweight" and ''comic" for the role of Pacino's suave financial adviser. But what Francis wants, Francis gets, and Hamilton was offered a two-week cameo part, which his agent blithely turned down. ''You did what?" Hamilton said he told his agent. ''We're talking about The Godfather here." After a complicated series of conversations among various agents, producers, and executives, which Hamilton recounted for me in various voices and accents, he finally called Coppola in Italy and asked the director if he really wanted him. Coppola assured him that he did, but said he couldn't send him anything to read, because the role hadn't been written yet. "I said, 'Francis, you're telling me that you will work with me to make it good. That's all I need.' And I jumped on a plane and went to Rome."

He stayed for four months (with time off to renew his tan in nearby Tunisia). "Coppola just loved having George there," says Eli Wallach.

"He enriched the set. Coppola put him in scenes he wasn't supposed to be in, just to have him there. George is the kind of guy you like being around. George is very underestimated. He's serious about his craft, but he does it instinctively.

And he's wise beyond his years. You know, people in this industry love to destroy others. They say, 'George is always suntanned.' So what? I was in three pictures with George. Act One, the story of Moss Hart, was not a success, but George was excellent in it. The second was The Victors, with George Peppard, Albert Finney, Melina Mercouri, and Jeanne Moreau. George plays a strong role in it. It was a war picture and George had his uniforms made to measure. His knapsack was not filled with regulation army material like everybody else's. It was stuffed with paper. It looked bulky, but it wasn't. He knows how to get around things. George supplied his own clothes on Godfather III too."

Did Wallach see much of George Hamilton in the character he plays in Godfather IIP

'What I've really always wanted was Walden Pond with a kitchen added on."

"A lot. A lot of this film deals with high finance. George knows about the stock market—buyouts, takeovers, leverage. He sounds like Michael Milken sometimes. People think he's flighty, but he knows what he's talking about. George is a survivor. I like George. He's like Eliza on the ice in Uncle Tom's Cabin, escaping the dogs. She steps on one piece of ice and you think she's going to slip, but she doesn't. She jumps to the next piece of ice. And then she jumps to solid land. That's George."

George Hamilton was bom on August 12, 1939, in Memphis, Tennessee. He grew up in Arkansas, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Acapulco, and Palm Beach, attending various private and public schools along the way, as well as a military boarding school in Gulfport, Mississippi, when he was eleven. His mother, Anne Stevens Potter Hamilton Hunt Spalding, was married four times. Husband number one, Bill Potter, was an old-line Manhattan stockbroker who went down in the Crash. That marriage produced a son, also called Bill, who was nine years older than George. Husband number two, George's father, George William Hamilton, was a society bandleader who toured the country as Spike Hamilton and His Barbary Coast Orchestra. Besides George, that marriage produced another son, David, one year younger than George. Husband number three, Carlton Hunt, was an alcoholic Beacon Hill Brahmin. Husband number four, Jesse Spalding, was the tennis-ball king. According to Hamilton, his mother left them all, and never took alimony.

Anne Hamilton, as she is now known, is eighty years old and lives in an oceanfront condominium in Palm Beach, where, according to Jerry Zipkin, "she floats around town like Gloria Swanson." In fact, she was a great friend of Gloria Swanson's and dated Clark Gable when she and her sons lived in Hollywood in the late forties. Everyone I spoke to told me that Hamilton's mother has always been the overriding influence in his life. He told me her reaction to his recent bad publicity: "We're living in a different era, George. It's not enough to be famous anymore. You've got to be infamous."

"Anne Hamilton," says an old family friend, "is a marvelous woman, made out of 100 percent U.S. steel with a voice of melting honey. You see, George went to charm school, and his mother was the professor. They were poor rich, a good family hurt by the Depression, and George was their great hope. But they have that tragic southern tradition of keeping up appearances, so that people who don't know better think that they're fakes. They're not fakes. They're the real thing."

"Money fluctuated for us," Hamilton told me. "Always. It was up and down." Typically, he makes his mother's marital and financial travails—and his childhood—sound like an amusement-park roller-coaster ride, building up the comedy and playing down the trauma. In his telling, it sounds like Auntie Mame, especially the crisscrossing of America in search of his mother's fourth husband in the fifties. George was in his early teens, and his mother had left husband number three in Boston. "So we arrived in New York," Hamilton said, "and my mother said, 'You must never grow out of something, you must grow into something. Always buy something bigger.' That was her theory. So rather than try to cut down, we moved into One Beekman Place, which was the most difficult board to get past, and we didn't have any money. I don't know how she did it—all I know is the next day I was swimming in the pool in One Beekman Place. And then I went to Browning on scholarship..."

He laughed and jumped ahead a year or two. "My mother called the three of us in—Bill, David, and me—and she said, 'Look, we have no money and we're going to have to sell all the furniture and we're having an auction here at One Beekman Place.' And she said to me, 'I want you to get a car, but I don't want to spend more than thirteen, fourteen hundred dollars, and we're going to do something.' So I went to J. S. Inskip, which in those days was very carriage trade, and I found a 1947 Lincoln Continental convertible, pea green— and we had it painted blue. And my mother had the auction in the afternoon, the sheriff arrived to evict us, and we left. I said, 'Where are we going, Mom?' She said, 'We're going to go across the United States and I'm going back and visit every man that I've ever been in love with, and one of them is going to be the next husband. Because that's the only way I can keep my three boys together.' "

Hamilton laughed again. "That woman has great strength, great dignity, humor, style, she cares about other people— and I love that about her. She's not a hard person. She did what she had to do to exist."

In 1957, George Hamilton left his mother in Palm Beach, where she'd finally found husband number four, Jesse Spalding, who was a close friend of the Kennedys'. He took a summer job at the Westhampton Bath and Tennis Club. That's where Betty Spiegel, the widow of movie producer Sam Spiegel, first met him. "He was eighteen going on eighty," she says. "Sophisticated and chic and terribly bright. And he danced like a dream." She told him he should be in pictures, as did another member of the club, the columnist Sheilah Graham. Earlier that summer, he had won a Florida state acting contest in Gainesville. "So I thought," he said, "Why not? I've got nothing to do."

"George's great ambition was to be rich, not to be a star," says longtime friend Reinaldo Herrera. "But if being an actor was the way to get there, then George would be an actor."

"Acting is not what I really wanted to do," Hamilton said. "I always wanted to be a doctor, like both my grandfathers. But I felt responsible, strangely enough, to my family. My mother had this dream. My brother Bill had this dream. Both of them always felt that they could be movie stars." Was he a vehicle for their dreams? "Yes, very much so. And it was also my way to stand out."

Perhaps this ambiguity helps explain why Hamilton's career never really took off in the sixties, despite his having been cast in more than fifteen films in ten years, including By Love Possessed, with Lana Turner, Light in the Piazza, with Olivia de Havilland, and Viva Maria!, with Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau. And why it came to a screeching halt by the mid-seventies, after The Happy (Continued on page 118) (Continued from page 104) Hooker Goes to Washington, with Joey Heatherton. "George got caught in a decade warp," says producer Stan Dragoti. "It wasn't chic to look like George Hamilton. It was chic to look like Dustin Hoffman." A major studio executive says, "George Hamilton can't act. It's as simple as that." A major agent chimes in, "He can't deliver a line and make it believable. ' ' But contemporaries who started out with him, like Tony Perkins and George Segal, disagree. "He's a wonderful actor," says Segal. "He illuminates his characters with personality." The general consensus is expressed by Brooke Hayward, who was at one time married to Dennis Hopper: "George had a real quality which was overlooked. He was a comedian, and he was never brought along properly."

Hamilton agreed. "I was the last of the contract players [at MGM]. They put me in Home from the Hill and I was this beleaguered, brooding kid, and they thought, Well, maybe we'll move him toward James Dean. And Where the Boys Are came along and it was a watereddown Rock Hudson Pillow Talk replica, and there I was, and they said, 'Ah, perfect playboy.' And the next thing they put me in was Two Weeks in Another Town. Vincente Minnelli was doing it in Rome. And they finished the movie and I came back and they said, 'We saved your career.' I said, 'What did you do?' They said, 'We're cutting you out of the movie, it's such a bad movie.' I said, 'Thank you.' " (Actually, he wasn't completely cut out of the film.)

Hamilton admitted that he hadn't helped his image much when Hollywood publicist Warren Cowan asked him who he saw himself as and he answered Porfirio Rubirosa, the famous fifties playboy-diplomat who married Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton and the daughter of the Dominican dictator Trujillo. "It must have seemed kind of insipid and flip," he said, "but I had seen South America. I had seen the Herreras' Hacienda La Vega—they had a life-style in Caracas that you can't imagine. And I enjoyed that, I enjoyed that feeling. And then the parties in Palm Beach, where Earl E. T. Smith [U.S. ambassador to Cuba] sat around with [Secretary of State] John Foster Dulles talking politics with [then senator] Jack Kennedy. I mean, this was something, this was an interesting thing. I didn't belong to that. I was an outsider to that. Palm Beach was a totally different world then. There was an amazing activity and energy, not just a bunch of social butterflies. You had the exiles from Havana pouring in and setting up their life-style, and they had an amazing life-style. And I said to myself, Well, would you rather be doing this [movies]? Or would you rather live like Rubirosa? I'd see Rubirosa there in a nightclub with an orchestra playing next to him and I'd say to myself, God, when I grow up, that's what I want to be—Rubirosa. You know? And one night, Rubi said to me, 'Take the band if you like,' and I took the band around town and serenaded every girl I could think of. ' '

Among the women George Hamilton "serenaded" back then were Charlotte Ford, Wendy Vanderbilt, Candice Bergen, Vanessa Redgrave, Marina Cicogna, Jeanne Moreau, and Maria Cooper. And that was just the first half of the sixties. He specialized in young heiresses, movie stars, and the daughters of movie stars, and "he's always remained friends with everyone he's gone out with," according to Marina Cicogna.

He was also an instant hit with the grand Hollywood hostesses, starting with his mother's old friend Cobina Wright, who introduced him to Mrs. Bruno Pagliai, better known as Merle Oberon, who kept the gossips guessing by insisting that he always be seated next to her, even though he was usually the youngest man at the table. Louis B. Mayer's daughter Edie Goetz had him to her A-plus-list at-home screenings, and the second Mrs. Vincente Minnelli (now Denise Hale) will never forget the time he got Mrs. Ray Stark to do the twist on top of the bar at Romanoff's. Betty Spiegel is still laughing about "the time in Miami when he drank brandy Alexanders all evening and got up and won a paso doble contest. But he's never been drunk in his life. He never falls down or walks unsteadily or slurs. He's got tremendous control. ' '

And then there was the daughter of the president of the United States, Lynda Bird Johnson. They were introduced in 1965 by Charlotte Ford, who says, "I think they were crazy about each other. And he did wonders for her. He changed her hairstyle and got her to wear makeup." Betty Spiegel adds, "He adores doing that sort of thing. He gets all his friends to lose weight. But it was a real romance. He sincerely liked her. He had fun with her."

The fun started on their first date, a White House dinner for Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, and reached a peak with the dinner Hamilton gave for Lynda Bird at Gray hall, the Beverly Hills mansion—once the residence of Douglas Fairbanks Sr.—he bought in 1963. By that time, his mother had divorced Jesse Spalding and moved in with George, along with his older brother, Bill. An interior decorator, who has been described to me as both "the most handsome man I've ever laid eyes on" and "a real screamer," Bill Hamilton did up Grayhall's sixtyfoot-long baronial drawing room in red velvet and gold moire. "It looked like a stage set," says Denise Hale. Hamilton sold Grayhall a few years later to Bemie Comfeld, the controversial international financier, and was reportedly later questioned about his dealings with Comfeld by the authorities.

His friendship with the president's daughter brought him the same kind of negative publicity that his friendship with a president's wife is bringing him now. After Hamilton and Lynda Bird spent a highly publicized three days together in Acapulco—highlighted by a lavish party given for them by Merle Oberon and Bruno Pagliai, with guests like John Wayne and Henry Ford II (who jumped in the pool, fully tuxed)—the press started asking a very pointed question, over and over. Did the fact that this seemingly fit twenty-six-year-old was dating the First Daughter have anything to do with his draft exemption, which he said was based on his being the sole support of his mother and brother? "It was suggested to me," Hamilton said, "that if I'd go into the army I'd be handing out volleyballs at Fort Ord. And I said to the president, 'Sir, I don't think it's good enough for me to go in. I think I've got to be on the front line of an atrocity.' And I think he wanted me to do that. He didn't like criticism of any kind, and it came at a particularly difficult time for him."

Hamilton said it taught him a lesson. "Any time you get around politicians, their opposition tries to splash as much mud on you as they want to splash on them. They attack them through you, and it's a very difficult thing. Because I was too old for the draft: they weren't drafting my age—they were drafting nineteen, twenty, twenty-one." Hamilton didn't sign up. His romance with Lynda Bird gradually wound down, though he sent her 365 red roses on Valentine's Day 1967. When she married her Marine guard, Chuck Robb, now a senator from Virginia, Hamilton went to the wedding.

In 1968 he started dating a stunning twenty-two-year-old blonde Ford model named Alana Collins, who came from a "dirt-poor" Texas family and whose mother had also been married four times. After four years of living together on and off, they married on October 29, 1972, in Las Vegas. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision; they both wore jeans, and Colonel Parker, Elvis Presley's manager, was their sole witness. They lived in Palm Springs for a year, and then moved to a Beverly Hills house done up by brother Bill in forty-eight hours, just in time for Town & Country to photograph the housewarming party. Everything was white, with Mylar trim, including the carpet. When Alana fretted about someone spilling red wine, Hamilton said, he "took a glass of red wine and poured it on the carpet and she went berserk. And I said, 'You just take a little soda water and wipe it up.' " Loma Luft remembers her halfsister, Liza Minnelli, dropping some guacamole and standing on the spot for the rest of the night so that nobody would notice it. And everyone remembers David Janssen's parting shot: "It's a wrap. Strike it!"

"We were the Bickersons," Hamilton said. "There was all this badinage going on that was humorous. It was a question of lose your breath, you lose your turn with Alana. She liked that. And I liked it. She was just like a parakeet on Benzedrine. You couldn't stop her."

An old buddy interpreted George Hamilton's "philosophy of women" for me: "Give them a tremendous amount of chivalrous treatment, which they love. Light their cigarettes. Open the door. Be gentle with them. But never make a commitment."

Why was Alana the one woman he married? "Well, when I went to Nacogdoches, Texas—where she's from—and realized that she came from a little town and her family were not wealthy, I saw there was a reality about Alana. I came from a little town, Blytheville, Arkansas. That's where I grew up for the first seven years of my life, and I've never forgotten that. My uncle owned the hardware store, and my grandfather was the doctor. I saw what it was to be able to walk around and say, 'Howdy, Bob. Howdy, Joe. How are you?' See, I'm not impressed by that terribly chic, sophisticated, all-the-languages stuff. I'm more impressed by that creamgravy-and-fried-chicken reality. What I've really always wanted was Walden Pond with a kitchen added on."

Why did they divorce after five years, in 1977? "I wanted to get married and settle down, didn't want any of that showbiz stuff at all. Alana wanted all the razzmatazz. I remember coming home from the studio and seeing Richard Harris reciting Dylan Thomas on the bar, Liza singing 'New York, New York,' David Janssen with his tongue stuck in a vodka bottle, Dani Janssen talking about shopping—I saw this amazing evening going on, and it had been going on for two days. And I said, 'Alana, what are we going to do?' And she said, 'Allan Carr is coming by with a bus to pick us up and take us to dinner.' "

When I asked Alana Stewart for an interview, she told me that she hadn't spoken to George in a year, because they had had "a difference of opinion" over how to raise their son, Ashley, who is now sixteen and living with his father. (Alana also has two children by her ex-husband Rod Stewart.) But when I arrived at her house in Brentwood, she told me she had called George in the interim and they had made up. Then she launched into an impassioned defense of the father of her eldest child.

''I just think the whole Marcos thing is appalling," she said. "George never had any business dealings with them. It's bullshit. It's baloney. It was a social relationship and they were heads of state at the time and suddenly they fall from grace and they're the scum of the earth and so is everyone involved with them. What's hurt George is this propaganda coming from the Philippines. Clearly, by involving a well-known American movie star, they get more publicity. George borrowed money from these Filipino businesspeople because they gave him a lower interest rate than the bank. He borrowed it and paid it back. George has a long history of buying and selling property, even when we were married, and fixing it up and selling it for a big profit. If you met a businessman at the White House and later did a deal with him, what would that have to do with George Bush?"

Hamilton has long been recognized as a clever real-estate investor. The all-white house he and Alana lived in, for example, was sold to French rock stars Johnny Hallyday and Sylvie Vartan, reportedly at a large profit. "I've always heard that George was very good at investing in the stock market," said Marisa Berenson, whose former husband James Randall was one of the circle of tycoons, including Saul Steinberg, Hamilton hung out with in the late seventies and early eighties. He's also very friendly with British financiers James Hanson and Sir Gordon White. An acknowledged high-stakes gambler, he told me that baccarat is his favorite game, and he recounted a recent, twenty-eight-night winning streak in the company of Australian tycoon Kerry Packer. "You have to assist a thirty-year involvement in the film business," Hamilton said.

Love at First Bite grossed between $52 million and $80 million, depending on whom you talk to, and Hamilton made between $500,000 and $3 million, again depending on whom you talk to. Most sources agree that Zorro, which he also produced, was not a big money-maker. During the remainder of the eighties, Hamilton didn't work that much. In 1985 he did an eight-week stint on Dynasty. A 1987 CBS series, Spies, was short-lived, and a CBS TV movie, Poker Alice, was soon forgotten, though his dates with co-star Elizabeth Taylor were not.

I asked Alana Stewart if she thought there was ever a romance between George and Imelda Marcos. "Give me a break! No. Do you think she's his type? He's a stand-up, honorable man. He's not the kind of man who would have an affair with the wife of a man who befriended him."

"All these stories about George Hamilton and Mrs. Marcos are silly," says the former First Lady's close friend Italian movie producer Franco Rossellini. "Because she is a nun. A nun! She told me recently that in the Philippines they wrote that she was marrying him. It's absurd. It would be like saying she was marrying me."

At a recent New York dinner, Imelda Marcos brought up the marriage rumor and giggled about it. Then she said to a rich lady friend, "It's not easy for women like us to find a man. If they are too old, we have to take care of them. If they are too young, we have to chase after them."

"What really bonded the relationship between me and the Marcoses," George Hamilton told me, "was their enormous sensitivity to my brother Bill's death. My brother had cirrhosis of the liver. He drank. And then he had kidney failure and he was on dialysis. And what really came from them was an amazing interest and constant communication over my brother. The president had his own kidney problems, so there was an understanding." After his brother died, in 1983, he said, his mother "gave up on life," and Mrs. Marcos took her to the Philippines and cared for her at Malacanang Palace for several months, for which he is forever grateful.

"You know," Hamilton said, "the Marcoses were not thought of as common criminals. They were major allies—I heard Johnson say this many times. They were hailed by Bush. He said he was proud of their democracy. I met Mrs. Reagan there. I was actually flattered to be their friend, and they showed nothing but friendship. Now, of course, it's very easy for people to turn their backs and say, 'Oh, I never had anything to do with them.' Well, I didn't do that, and I don't feel any reason to do that. It's not my style.

"And I think it's an easy shot to look at George Hamilton and say, 'Oh, he must be having an affair.' That's absolute madness to think that I would have an affair with the First Lady of a country. First of all, may I ask you, where could you do that? When could you do that? And who has the guts to do that?"

Has he seen Imelda Marcos recently? "I saw her one afternoon in New York. I went by, paid my respects, brought her some books, and she had a Mass said for me."

I asked him about Spies, in which he played "a dashing C.I.A. agent" named Ian Stone. Maybe that was really George Hamilton? I suggested.

"Who said that?" He laughed. "I wonder who could've said that. That's the character they wanted me to play."

Then he outlined two projects he'd like to do next. One would be a light comedy based on that cross-country husband hunt he and his brothers made with their mother. "I'm having an old Lincoln Continental convertible restored right now," he said. The other project is a true story from the 1920s based on an independent oilman who was set up in a stock swindle by Standard Oil and run out of town by the L.A. Times.

The last time I saw George Hamilton was at Mezzaluna, on San Vicente Boulevard, where celebrity trainer Mark Stevens, of Body Construction, the gym where Hamilton works out, was giving a dinner party. Hamilton arrived with his girlfriend Denice Lewis, a stunning, thirty-year-old blonde Texan who is a model in London, and his six-foot-four son, Ashley, who was named after Leslie Howard's character in Gone with the Wind.

It reminded me of a story I'd heard about Hamilton and his son getting ready to go out for dinner in Palm Beach a couple of years ago. Ashley appeared in a brown jacket, blue shirt, and gray pants, and his father told him he had to change, because nothing matched. Ashley refused. "All right, have it your way," George Hamilton told his son, "but you will suffer the social consequences."