Post by ApplCinamnBy the way, does anyone know if James Stacy has ever worn any prostheses,
either for a role or in real life? I've never seen him with any.
Ellie
I think some have the history mixed up on Stacy, or perhaps they don't
kow/care what type of person he really is, if your interested read the
article : (Article pasted below) I am friends with some of his fans,
what they have told me, and I personally don't believe is that James
claimed the mother gave him permission to touch her daughter, their
claim is the mother was also a drunk. IMO the fact he tried to kill
himself after his conviction tells me more than anything one of his
fans says or what they try to ignore about him.
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=8t11u2%247ji%241%40news.panix.com&rnum=16
His fans tend to ignore those little details about him.
TROUBLE: HITTING BOTTOM AFTER FIGHTING BACK FROM A GRISLY ACCIDENT
ACTOR JAMES STACY, HIS LIFE IN TATTERS, GOES TO PRISON
People Magazine
By CURTIS RIST and JEANNE GORDON
May 13, 1996
For a time, James Stacy seemed a rakish figure who knew how to
live on the edge. "He was fabulous," says Susan Reeves, an old
friend who in 1962 met up with the handsome actor and his future
wife, singer Connie Stevens, now 57, on a trip to Rome. The
first night, after Stevens fell asleep, Stacy took off with
Reeves. Stealing a motor scooter from a local butcher, they
briefly zoomed through the hallways of her pension, then sped
off to tour the city. "It was beautiful in the early morning
hours," says Reeves, laughing at the memory.
Not all of Stacy's nights were so romantic. On Sept. 28, 1973,
the actor--who was 35 and best-known for a gig on the CBS
western Lancer--was racing his motorcycle through the Hollywood
Hills just after midnight. Stacy, who was working as a kind of
B-level Rock Hudson in movies opposite actresses such as Raquel
Welch, had just picked up a 26-year-old waitress named Pia
Isataki and was taking her for a spin. But, as they rounded a
turn, a drunk driver swerved into them, knocking them onto the
road. Isataki bled to death from a severed leg. Stacy survived
but lost his left arm and leg.
As they would later with a stricken Christopher Reeve,
Hollywood's elite rallied around the injured actor--who was
suddenly more famous than ever. The next spring, his by then
ex-wife Stevens helped stage a gala that raised $118,000 toward
his expenses. "Because of you, I'll smile again," Stacy told the
crowd, including Frank Sinatra and Barbara Streisand, as he stood
at the podium on one crutch. "I'm gonna do good things with the
money!"
It hasn't turned out that way. Even though he had a comeback as
an actor--and earned two Emmy nominations--Stacy's life today is
a shambles. Now 59, he sits in a cell in the Chino Men's Prison
in California, where he is serving a six-year term for molesting
an 11-year-old girl at his house in Meiners Oaks, 70 miles north
of Los Angeles. At his trial in November, the judge also found
Stacy guilty of "prowling"--terrorizing two teenage sisters by
entering their nearby home. When he was led out of court in a
wheelchair after the sentencing on March 5, Stacy--strands of
gray hair hanging down the neck of his prison jumpsuit--smiled
wanly and waved at the few family members who had come. "Oh,
Daddy, no!" sobbed Heather Elias, 28, his daughter with his
second wife, actress Kim Darby (True Grit), now 47. Later, in
his cell, Stacy, at the very least a confused and
self-contradictory man these days, wavered about taking
responsibility for his actions. "It makes me look like a goddamn
pedophile," he told PEOPLE. Then he added morosely, "I can't
believe that I'm stuck in this damn mess."
Stacy's life once seemed promising. Born Maurice Elias in East
L.A., he was one of six children of Lois, a waitress, and Louie,
a bookmaker. While his father took bets and dodged police,
Maurice began working as an usher at a movie house, where, he
says, "I first started loving films."
He dreamed of playing professional football. At 19, after a year
at Glendale College, California, he was drafted by Canada's
British Columbia Lions. Cut after two months, he took a bus to
Manhattan to try acting. After being in a Pepsi commercial, he
returned to L.A. for a spot as David Nelson's frat pal Fred on
TV's The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet. ("I had lines like,
'Hey, Rick, want a hamburger?' " he recalls.) In 1962, while
shooting Summer Magic in Palm Springs, he met Stevens, who was
filming Palm Springs Weekend. The two married the next year but
divorced amicably in 1966. "Connie was always working, and I was
always home," he says.
A year later, Stacy met Darby while filming a Gunsmoke episode.
They married in March 1968 but divorced the next June after
Darby told a judge Stacy "did not love me anymore." By then he
had moved on to Lancer. After it went off the air in 1971, Stacy
says, "things were coming my way." But while he was waiting, the
accident occurred. To some, it seemed inevitable. "He was a wild
character," says a Hollywood publicist who recalls Stacy as a
drinker and a brawler. But he was also charismatic and inspired
those attending his Hollywood gala. Their donations were
augmented by $1.9 million he won in a 1976 lawsuit against the
L.A. bar that had sold drinks to the driver who had struck him.
After the accident, Stacy had probably the best roles of his
career. He earned an Emmy nomination for playing a disabled
Vietnam veteran in the 1977 TV movie Just a Little
Inconvenience, and another in 1986 for his portrayal of a
mugging victim on Cagney & Lacey. But all the while, he was
drinking more heavily. "He had a dependency on alcohol and
anger," says friend Eleanor Dudley, who had met Stacy when they
were teenagers. After his accident, she says, his sweetly
rebellious side turned into frustration and bitterness. Looking
for a change, Stacy assumed custody of Heather in 1979 and moved
the 9-year-old to his modest home in Meiners Oaks. "My dad has a
big heart," says Heather, now a full-time mother who lives in
the house with her 10-month-old son, Luke, and her boyfriend
Lester Maxwell, a house painter. "It's just with the alcohol, it
gets so distorted."
In the late 1980s, Stacy was usually too drunk to work. He moved
about in an electric wheelchair and squandered his money on
drinking holidays--basically he was known as a moody drunk. By
last year he had few friends other than Patrice Loher, a nurse
who lived nearby. On March 26, 1995, Loher's daughter, 11,
visited Stacy while her mother was at work. He bought the girl a
pizza in exchange for a massage. and he admits he touched her
genitals. But Stacy insists, rather pathetically, that it wasn't
molestation. "She wanted to learn acupressure," he says. "I
touched her for five seconds."
He might have gotten off with probation, prosecutors say, but
for what came next. On June 18, as a family with two girls, ages
12 and 16, moved into town, Stacy lingered outside the
house--even after the parents asked him to leave. When they left
to pick up more boxes, Stacy wheeled inside. "Come talk to me, I
know you're in there!" he yelled in a drunken haze, and was
later arrested. A week after, Stacy appeared in the backyard of
Joan Archer, a schoolteacher, whose daughters 10 and 11, were
playing on a trampoline with a friend. She heard cries and ran
outside to find Stacy racing toward them in his wheelchair.
Again he was arrested, but prosecutors dropped the charge at his
trial.
After pleading no contest last November, Stacy checked into a
Ventura County rehab facility but was thrown out for trying to
take control of the classes. In despair, he flew to Hawaii,
where he drank a pint of whiskey and took a cab to the top of a
1,200-foot cliff for a suicide dive. He jumped but was rescued
from a ledge 45 feet below. He remembers that he lay there,
thinking, "I even screwed this up."
Arrested at the hospital and later flown back to Ventura County,
he was sentenced to a long term for a first offender, in part
because the judge agreed with the prosecution's assertion that
he had a "propensity for pedophilia." Stacy insists his basic
problem is drinking. "I mean, Jesus, God, rehab would have done
it," he says. At other times, he vows that he's "ready to take a
look at myself for the first time" and make some changes.
Susan Reeves believes change is possible. "God didn't want him
to die," she says, "and so he's going to get a second chance."
But the victim, now 12, still suffers. "She is angry. She feels
embarrassed," says Loher, who says the trial upset her so much
she couldn't go to school all the next week.
Stacy has been down before, but this time there are no galas
planned and no celebrities coming to visit. He can attend daily
AA meetings in jail, but for the most part he is left alone with
his thoughts--perhaps the most agonizing punishment of all.
"Every once in a while I hit reality," says Stacy, "and I just
scream, 'God, no!'"
--
Kat-1
The most destructive force in the universe is gossip.
