Arms full of empty: On borrowed time with Inger Stevens

“When I lie down at the end of the road, I’ll want to have left something behind, even if it is just having helped one other person.” It was a piece of cake for prolific actress Inger Stevens to convincingly convey undercurrents of desolation and fragility. Stretched over 16 tragically fleeting years, Stevens’ résumé boasts roles in 39 television series, 13 theatrical films, and 3 made-for-TV movies.

Whether the near-to-the-breaking-point heroine being hounded by “The Hitchhiker” in The Twilight Zone, a chronically ill pioneer falling for big lug Hoss Cartwright in Bonanza, a post-nuclear destruction survivor stumbling upon Harry Belafonte in The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Manhattan detective Richard Widmark’s social-climbing spouse in Madigan, an empathetic landlady for running on empty outlaw gang leader Henry Fonda in Firecreek, or an unsuspecting wife incapable of seducing dipstick husband Walter Matthau in the comical A Guide for the Married Man, Stevens was magnetic. Furthermore, the breathtaking blonde was easily one of Clint Eastwood’s best ever celluloid love interests in Hang ’Em High as a revenge-seeking widow nursing his untold bullet wounds. Stevens was predisposed to engage in brief, ultimately unfulfilling flings with her leading gents, including the Man with No Name.

Above is a color rotogravure of the beaming Swede in profile circa October 27, 1961. In the dramatic anthology series The Dick Powell Show, Stevens earned her debut Emmy recognition as an expectant mother hitching a ride from a pre-Columbo Peter Falk in the 1962 episode “The Price of Tomatoes.” Starting in 1963 Stevens would headline three seasons of the obscure 30-minute ABC sitcom The Farmer’s Daughter. She nabbed a Golden Globe and received her second and final Emmy nomination as Katy Holstrum, a beguiling governess to widowed U.S. Congressman William Windom’s two sons, in 1964.

Unjustly forgotten since her presumed suicide six years later at age 35, sole biographer and private investigator William T. Patterson presented compelling counter evidence in The Farmer’s Daughter Remembered: The Biography of Actress Inger Stevens that in spite of a suicide attempt a decade before, secret husband, failed African American film producer, bit actor, and all around hustler Ike Jones forcibly compelled his estranged partner to ingest 25–50 Seconal sleeping pills so he could gain access to her kaleidoscope of offshore assets.

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