Goldie Hawn Her Long Road to HAPPINESS

SHE EARNED FAME AND ACCLAIM IN HER 20s, BUT IT TOOK YEARS OF SEARCHING FOR GOLDIE TO FIND HER SMILE AGAIN

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You've got to meet this girl," a friend told Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In producer George Schlatter in 1967. "I said, 'We're not using dancers,'" George recalls to Closer.

Wisely, he took the tip and invited Goldie Hawn, then 22, to come in for a meeting. "She sat in this big, red leather chair and said, 'What do you want me to do?'" he remembers. "I just fell in love with her, but I didn't know what to do with her because she wasn't a comic."

George decided that Goldie would do introductions on the countercultural variety series. The first time she flubbed a line and giggled nervously in response, lightning struck. After that, Goldie wasn't allowed to rehearse so the cameras would record her genuine reaction when she messed up. "Ruth Buzzi would always do something to screw up Goldie's cards," George recalls. "When Goldie gets confused, she laughs and her laugh is just golden."

That laugh has taken her a long way. Two years after her debut on Laugh-In, Goldie won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Walter Matthau's suicidal girlfriend in Cactus Flower. "Winning the Oscar was a total whirlwind for Goldie," says a friend. "She was already popular from the TV show, but now she was officially the It Girl of the time."

But everything happened so fast that Goldie barely had time to adjust. "It was a very strange ride, a quick rise to stardom," says Goldie, 79. "I was unsettled. I didn't know where I was going. I went to the psychologist when I was 21 and I continued for about eight years."

Goldie, whose mom was a dance teacher, began taking tap and ballet at age 3.

LOVE HURTS