This Woman Absolutely Is a Wonder

You would have no trouble recognizing the hostess of this week’s tennis tournament at Mission Hills in Rancho Mirage if she were (1) stopping bullets with her bracelets; (2) putting out a forest fire with a flick of the wrist; (3) heaving assorted 250-pound villains into the sea, or (4) clearing the Empire State Building at a bound.

It’s not a bird, a plane--it’s not even a man. It’s--all together, now!--Wonder Woman, herself!

You all know the 7-foot character in the red, white and blue star-spangled costume who wears the mysterious out-of-this-world protective fabric that makes her impervious to falling buildings or stabs in the back, who crusades for peace and justice in this imperfect world.

She never kills anybody, she just reforms them by breaking every bone in their bodies and making them see the error of the ways with a left to the jaw if necessary.

You may want to think of Martina Navratilova as Wonder Woman. Others may look to Valerie Brisco-Hooks or Mary Lou Retton. Or even Nancy Lopez Knight or Margaret Thatcher.

But in the make-believe world of a couple of generations of comic book readers, Wonder Woman is this cartoon cutout, larger than life, faster than sound, a gorgeous combination of Joan of Arc, an Amazon and Venus de Milo.

The only difference between her and Superman is, she changes in the powder room. Like him, she can clear tall buildings at a single bound. Like him, she can bend steel, repel armies, right wrongs, enforce rights. Like him, she comes from a place in time and space that makes her ageless, gorgeous and fearless. She is every man’s fantasy, every girl’s model.

There have been half a dozen Supermans, a score of Tarzans, but there has been only one Wonder Woman of any consequence.

Lynda Carter looks as if she had walked right off the drawing board or right out of the pages of the strip. You imagine the model for Miss Liberty might have looked like this: Nearly 6 feet tall, long, exquisite legs, big blue eyes and a perfect nose.

The casting director must have swooned. She wasn’t born, she was drawn. Not since Gable played Rhett Butler or Garbo played Camille has there been a more perfect wedding of cast and character.

Wonder Woman herself did not just pop out of the ink pot, Lynda reveals. She was a product of the calculated imagination of a woman psychologist who thought women should have the same fantasy role model as men had in Superman and dreamed up her fairy tale heroine in the golden age of comic books in the late ‘30s.

“She wanted someone who was strong and beautiful but could still be feminine,” Carter says.

The specifications fit Lynda Carter to a C but she did not envision herself as carving a career in a steel bra and red, white and blue tights when she was a girl growing up in Arizona. She saw herself more as the Doris Day type, the romantic interest with a song in her heart.

But as a schoolgirl, she was somewhat of a wonder herself, starring in track in such different and demanding events as the 100-yard dash and the mile run, a highly improbable double for most athletes of any gender. “I had these long legs and I could run at almost any distance without tiring,” she explains.

She also had this red-brown hair and porcelain features that soon attracted the sponsors of the Miss World beauty pageant, in which she not only won Miss Arizona but also Miss USA. She was a runner-up in the finals in London. Some spectators thought that Lynda should not only be Miss World but Miss Out-of-This-World.

That’s what she became in films when a hope for a career as a singer in dramatic roles brought her to Hollywood. Desperation forced her into a cattle-call audition for the Wonder Woman part one day. Legend has it the casting director took one look at her and told his assistant “If she can talk, she has the part.”

Lynda Carter’s feeling was that her early training and background as an athlete made her a natural for the part.

“My father, Corby Carter, was a swimmer and football player back in Illinois,” she says. “My mother spent hours in front of Jack LaLanne’s TV shows, my brothers were wrestlers and swimmers.”

For those who think a true wonder woman comes with a tennis racket or uneven parallel bars attached, or is someone who can break 68 in an open golf tournament, Hollywood’s Wonder Woman begs to disagree.

“Acting is a decathlon of its own beginning at 5 o’clock every morning,” she says. Making films for TV is a weekly marathon.

“It hardly left time for tennis,” acknowledges Lynda. Not even after Wonder Woman exhausted her do-good opportunities and left Lynda Carter to pursue her career in straight dramatic roles could she get the time she wanted to on the courts.

But, it was her extravagant admiration for the female stars of the tennis world that persuaded her to urge the Maybelline cosmetic company, for which she was fashion and new products consultant, to sponsor a women’s tennis tournament.

The $250,000 Lynda Carter-Maybelline Tennis Challenge was the result, and the eighth annual will be held at Mission Hills in Rancho Mirage this weekend, starring Martina Navratilova and Chrissie Evert Lloyd.

To this Wonder Woman, Navratilova is the real wonder woman who has really taken the movement off the cartoon pages and put it in prime time and reality.

“Wonder Woman could stop trains and clear skyscrapers--but her backhand was terrible.”