Campaigner

Mercedes McCambridge, offstage, is a candid person, kind, attractive, unsophisticated, and without visible defenses. But onstage or on-camera, she can somehow suggest the sort of skirted arachnid that bites through everything in its path. Two weeks ago, Mercy McCambridge took over from Uta Hagen, playing opposite Donald Davis, as the harridan in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? With this new, brown-eyed, waspish savage, the producers have probably added a year to the run.

As the newswoman Sadie Burke, she nipped at the heels of Broderick Crawford in Hollywood's All the King's Men, winning an Oscar as the best supporting actress of 1949. She had been a radio soap-opera star (Big Sister, This Is Nora Drake). But Hollywood instantly claimed her as its new resident shrike, and she has lived out there over the past dozen years, making pictures like Johnny Guitar, Giant, A Farewell to Arms and Suddenly Last Summer. "Every day," she says, remembering Summer, "the makeup department would spend an hour making Elizabeth Taylor look more dazzling, and then another hour and a half making me look worse."

What saved her from being bored to death was that she was an Adlai Stevenson Democrat. She traveled endlessly in Stevenson's behalf during the campaigns of 1952 and 1956, and led the crowd that stormed the Los Angeles convention to draft him in 1960. "I don't know if I'm interested in politics or just Stevensonism," she says. "There are two kinds of people in this world as far as I'm concerned--everybody else, and Adlai Stevenson."

Charlotte Mercedes Agnes McCambridge, now 46, was raised on a farm within 80 miles of Adlai's home in Libertyville, Ill. She went to Mundelein College in Chicago and was married soon after graduation to a boy "whose father was a minister, and I thought that sounded nice and permanent. We went to Mexico to live like Tolstoy." The marriage did not last, nor did her second one, to Fletcher Markle, once the young wizard of Canadian broadcasting. Her personal life, in fact, has been a long bout with a troubled psyche. A little over a year ago, her 20-year-old son was nearly killed by four attacking thugs, and soon after recovering he was back in the hospital, near death, as a result of an auto accident. The strain was too much, and the mother opened her medicine cabinet and ate every pill in it.

More than 7,000 wires and letters of encouragement reached her in the hospital, one of the first from Adlai Stevenson. Things seem different now. Her son will graduate in June with honors from U.C.L.A., then hopes to go on to Harvard Law School. She has found the caliber of work that once won her an Oscar, placing her own considerable stamp on what is currently one of Broadway's best and most difficult roles.

And when Adlai isn't busy squiring official visitors like Lady Bird Johnson, he often goes out with Mercy McCambridge, and their names flash up the next day in columns.

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