Kidder Aided Along Journey by Samaritans

Actress Margot Kidder wandered for three days across Los Angeles, often apparently on foot and aided by good Samaritans who took the co-star of the “Superman” films for a homeless woman, according to a reconstruction of Kidder’s erratic odyssey put together Thursday by Glendale police.

Piecing together at least a dozen accounts from those who met her on the way--airport security guards, taxi drivers, Samaritans and others--police retraced Kidder’s journey from Los Angeles International Airport to a refuge in the bushes behind a private home in Glendale.

She was discovered there in the bushes Tuesday--dazed and dirty, her hair hacked off, dressed in a transient’s borrowed clothes--by police who took her to the psychiatric ward of the county’s Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar. She was transferred Wednesday to an undisclosed private psychiatric clinic, police said.

The journey began when Kidder, best known as Lois Lane in the “Superman” movies, showed up at LAX Saturday night--a day early--for a scheduled flight to Phoenix to teach a college acting class.

By retracing her path, police believe that she walked miles from the airport, beginning early Sunday morning. She took taxis some of the way and walked miles more.

She was driven the last leg of her journey--from Atwater to Glendale--by three people who befriended her when she approached them on the street late Monday and asked for a cigarette, police said.

Thinking the tired-looking movie actress was a homeless woman, the three put her up at a Glendale motel for the night after trying unsuccessfully to get her admitted to a shelter for the homeless, one of them said in an interview, recounting what he told police.

“She said her name was Elizabeth and she was really paranoid about not having anyone know where she was,” said Robert Giannini, 28, a Tujunga car salesman who said he paid $33 for Kidder’s room at the Bell Motor Motel.

“She said she had been walking for three days from L.A.,” he said. Kidder told him that someone “had some thugs after her and they beat her up, and that she had been sleeping in bushes,” he said.

Giannini said that even though he doubted the woman’s account--she showed no visible signs of being beaten, he said--she could barely stand and was clearly in need of assistance.

Dressed in a red sweatshirt and dirty blue pants, she was missing some teeth--police said later that she misplaced her dental plate--and her haphazardly cut hair was tied with a strip from a plastic grocery bag, he said.

“She said she was trying to disguise herself,” Giannini said.

Glendale Police Sgt. Rick Young said Thursday that detectives had suspended their investigation of Kidder’s claim that someone assaulted her near LAX because “everything we have now does not show she was attacked.”

The Canadian-born actress twice refused to meet with the investigators looking into her story, he said.

Young said the police “have a fairly good trace of her whereabouts” during the three days she was missing, but out of respect for her privacy do not want to disclose all the details.

According to the partial account the police gave, Kidder was scheduled to fly to Phoenix on Sunday for an assignment teaching acting at Eastern Arizona College, but for some reason arrived at LAX late Saturday night. Airport security guards have told the police that she remained there until 3:30 or 4 a.m. Sunday.

For much of Sunday and Monday, she simply wandered and hid from her unknown persecutors, until she ran into Giannini and his friends outside a church in Atwater about 9:30 Monday night and asked for a cigarette.

“I asked her if she had anyplace to stay and she said no. So I asked her if she would like one and she said, ‘Yes, you are a saint,’ ” Giannini said.

He and two friends brought Kidder to a nearby restaurant and started calling homeless shelters. The only one with space available was in Los Angeles, however, and “She said, ‘No, thank you very much. I can’t go back to L.A.,’ ” he recalled.

“She asked if she could sleep on my living room floor, but I didn’t think that was a very good idea.”

Giannini said that after the fruitless search, he decided to rent the woman a cheap motel room in nearby Glendale because “we were already 45 minutes into this thing and I couldn’t just leave her.” At the Bell Motor Motel, Kidder signed in under the name E.S. Brown.

Before leaving her, Giannini said he and his two friends bought Kidder beef jerky and orange juice from a nearby liquor store and gave her some spare change so she could call homeless shelters the next day. When they walked her to her room, she began compulsively checking the windows to make sure they were locked, he said.

He said that during the entire encounter, Kidder was articulate and did not seem intoxicated.

Kidder also went unrecognized by the motel’s manager, James Rauch. After checking her in Monday night, he next saw her Tuesday morning when she approached the front desk wrapped only in a comforter from the bed and requested $1 in change for the clothes dryer. She told Rauch that her clothes had fallen into the shower and gotten wet.

She borrowed a pair of scissors, Rauch said. When she returned to check out about 10 a.m., her hair was cut considerably shorter “like a guy’s haircut,” he said.

Young said Kidder spent most of Tuesday walking through Glendale. The backyard of a spacious home on Ross Street where she was found cowering in the bushes was several miles away from the motel, he said.