Dyan for Some Laughs

Cannon roars back again

Tricked out once more as the amiably inept Chief Inspector Clouseau, Peter Sellers is bungling his way into Le Club Foot, a Paris disco frequented by dope dealers. Just then a blonde plunges out, struggling to escape a nasty-looking killer. She trips over Clouseau, which is lucky for him. She turns out to be Simone Le Gree, the former mistress-secretary of France's drug kingpin, who is out to get Clouseau. Since she is also out to get her boss, who has dropped her, she becomes the inspector's sexy sidekick in Revenge of the Pink Panther, the fifth entry in this continuing Sellers market of laughs.

Clouseau's helpmate is a comic actress who once seemed to have quit movies altogether: Dyan Cannon. But after a four-year absence, she is reveling in the kind of role she plays best: a particularly tart (and tartish) genus of smart dumb blonde. Besides appearing in Panther, she nearly steals Warren Beatty's box-office smash Heaven Can Wait, playing the spacy wife who drips diamonds and drops crudities as she plots Beatty's murder.

Now in her early 40s (she refuses to divulge her age), Cannon's screen trademark is an odd but appealing mix of sensuality and wacky spontaneity. Says Paul Mazursky, who directed her in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice: "She has this strange sexuality, which has the slightest edge of being funky, and this humor." She is the exact opposite of a gently provocative Diane Keaton, much more like a latter-day Judy Holliday (but brassier). Cannon downright dares to be vulgar. Says Buck Henry, co-director (with Beatty) of Heaven Can Wait: "She's successful because she's not afraid to make a fool of herself."

Although Cannon has made several sexpotboilers, she has also given some impressive performances. She received an Oscar nomination for her portrayal in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice in 1969 of the well-stacked wife who turns uptight when her husband (Elliott Gould) and friends start to dabble in swinging sex. In The Last of Sheila (1973), she did a fine, funny job as a bitchy Hollywood talent.

The Last of Sheila was almost the last of Cannon--for a while, anyway. Her private life was on the skids. After a grim 1969 divorce from Cary Grant and experiments with acid and mescaline, she tried all sorts of trendy emotional cures, including Esalen and primal-scream therapy. Cannon even installed a padded howling room in her Spanish-style home in Malibu. Eventually she decided to drop out of movies for a spell. "It used to be devastating for me to finish anything--the last five pages of a book, an affair or a film," she recalls. "I'd come home and feel like I wanted to die."

The recovery began when she rebelled against all the far-out treatment she was taking, which seemed based on the notion that "you have to suffer to feel good." One morning she decided, "Enough! No more time to feel bad. It's time now just to enjoy." In one new venture, she directed a short film called Number One, which wound up as an Oscar nominee last year. She jogs and rides (bikes and horses) with Jennifer, 12, her daughter with Grant. She drinks nothing stronger than Perrier water. An old Bible sits by her bed--a vestige of her childhood days near Seattle, where she was raised by a Jewish mother and a Baptist father.

Not that she is staid. The focal point of her home is her bedroom, decorated in neoashram. The floor is covered with rugs and silk pillows; when guests are around, Dyan is apt to hold forth from a hammock hung from the ceiling, and ramble on in an idiom that is alternately hip ("You're lookin' good, Mama") and psycho-pop ("If it isn't is, it isn't").

Cannon's next venture is an NBC movie about Sally Stanford, the San Francisco madam turned mayor of Sausalito, to be aired next season. She also has a dea] to produce and direct a film for Twentieth Century-Fox. As she says, it's time to enjoy.

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