Sommars Escaped With Her Youth Intact : Acting: Being too young for the role that brought Jean Seberg overnight stardom turns out to be a blessing.

There are plenty of cautionary tales in the Hollywood chronicles: careers that rose and fell like rockets, careers that never quite got going, careers cut short by mischance.

Few stories have seemed to me more bitterly sad than Jean Seberg’s. The robust and beautiful young woman from Marshalltown, Iowa, had won an audition to be Otto Preminger’s Joan of Arc in “Saint Joan,” and you would have said, as the press releases did, that it was an updated Cinderella story.

It turned out to be a nightmare of scathing, humiliating reviews that in effect drove Seberg to exile. And while the career resumed, after a fashion, and there were periods of happiness, the ending--suicide in a car parked on a Paris street--seemed as inevitable as anything in classic tragedy.

I’ve often talked about the other side of the coin--the disappointments that can later be seen as blessings in disguise--with another actress from Iowa, Julie Sommars of Onawa, who shared a fateful afternoon with Seberg.

Sommars, who currently plays the assistant district attorney and love interest opposite Andy Griffith on the “Matlock” series, knew Seberg because they were fellow competitors in Iowa state oratorical contests. “She was a senior and I was in ninth or tenth grade. She was doing ‘Joan of Lorraine,’ I was doing ‘Sorry, Wrong Number,’ ” Sommars said over lunch recently.

The two young women--and some 300 others--went to Chicago to audition for Preminger for “Saint Joan” and, the seating being alphabetical, Seberg and Sommars found themselves sitting side by side. They sweated out the long parade of girls reciting, or starting to recite, the two speeches Preminger had had them memorize.

“She dumped her street shoes in my lap and told me to watch them when she went in to see him,” Sommars says. “She was in there what seemed like forever. When she came out she grabbed the shoes and said, ‘He listened to both my speeches,’ and marched away.”

Preminger listened to both of Sommars’ recitations too, and then chatted with her. Would she like to go to New York? he asked her. “Not if it’s anything like Chicago,” she said, innocently, and Preminger roared with laughter. He asked how old she was. When she said 15, he said, “Thank you very much” and dismissed her.

Sommars went back to Iowa, finished high school, came to California and studied at San Bernardino Valley College. She moved into the now-legendary Studio Club in Hollywood where many an aspiring actress lived. (Marilyn Monroe, another cautionary tale, was one of them.)

Sommars got a job as a receptionist and began making the rounds, landing a job understudying the lead in a small theater production of “Our Town.” In the useful show business tradition, the lead became ill, and Sommars went on and got good reviews.

“It wasn’t acting,” she says. “Believe me, I was right out of Grover’s Corners, and it was me.”

An agent saw her and two weeks later Sommars was playing Loretta Young’s daughter in one of the playlets on “The Loretta Young Show.” She was 19. She found more work in episodic television but felt she needed better training.

On money she’d saved she flew to London and enrolled at the Actors Workshop, working briefly as a telephone operator but defeated by accents she found incomprehensible. She subsisted, she once told me, on tomato salad, cheese and warm Pepsis.

After a year she quit London for New York, where she did off-Broadway plays and summer stock and toured with Edward Everett Horton, who told her she was the second-best ingenue he’d ever worked with. The best, he said consolingly, was Colleen Dewhurst.

The Horton play, “Miss Pell Is Missing,” brought her back to Hollywood, where she won an audition, this one with Ross Hunter for the lead opposite Brian Bedford in “The Pad, and How to Use It,” a pleasant, modest entertainment based on Peter Shaffer’s one-act play “The Private Ear.”

Since then she has made other films, including “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo” at Disney and a now-you-see-her-now-you- don’t appearance opposite Gene Hackman in “Bat 21.” But essentially Sommars has made a comfortable, successful career in television movies (“The Harness”) and series, including a run as the J. J. in “The Governor and J. J.,” playing Dan Dailey’s daughter.

What began as a guest appearance on “Matlock,” as a bright, flame-haired assistant D.A. who keeps losing to Griffith, turned into a continuing role.

Meanwhile, Sommars is happily married to a lawyer and has a daughter who will shortly be 17. Hers can be thought of as one of those non-cautionary Hollywood tales in which an actress’s public and private lives are both eminently satisfactory.

What seems clear is that she escaped--and it’s the only way to say it--the blinding light of overnight stardom that fell upon Jean Seberg and that proved in the end to be cruel, cold and fatal.

There are worse things than being too young for a part.