Joanne Herring has been compared to Scarlett O'Hara, Marilyn Monroe and Dolly Parton. She is all of them and more as she waits for a photographer in her condominium in Houston's affluent River Oaks community. The place is great - an elevator delivers guests right into the French-style living room - but it's a step down from the mansions she's shared in the past.

In midafternoon, Herring, 78, wears a foamy white evening gown, form-fitting and strapless, with her faithful poodle, Chulo, by her side. She has an hourglass figure, taut skin - she cheerfully admits she's had some surgical help - and blond hair. When she entered middle age, she says, she dyed her hair a color she actually likes.

Herring is funny and charming and smart. And she hopes actress Julia Roberts portrays her just that way in the movie "Charlie Wilson's War," which opens Friday.

The movie is about three people who helped fuel a semisecret war in Afghanistan in the '80s. The unlikely trio - Herring, former Rep. Charlie Wilson and CIA agent Gust Avrakotos - may have changed the course of history by helping bring down the Soviet Union and end the Cold War.

Herring is flattered that Roberts is playing her character, and she's happy to be back in the spotlight. At least she was happy until she read the script.

In the old days, Herring used the Southern belle stereotype to her advantage. These days, she finds it less amusing.

"In one scene I'd seem really intelligent," she says, "and in the next I was a hypocritical, bipolar tart."

Herring, a conservative born-again Christian, found the "tart" parts so insulting that she hired attorney Dick DeGuerin. Perhaps, she thought, DeGuerin could persuade veteran Hollywood director Mike Nichols to clean up her character in the script.

Nichols doesn't scare, but he did cut the bad language from Roberts' lines because Herring really doesn't curse - at least not often and not much. Meanwhile, Houston-Hollywood relations have thawed a bit.

Herring was invited to the movie set, where she met Nichols, Roberts and Tom Hanks, who plays Wilson.

Hanks, Herring says, "is the nicest man. He came up to me and said, 'I've been in love with you for six months. Let me kiss you.' "

That day it was nice to be a Southern belle.

"It was very muddy," Herring remembers, "and he said, 'Oh, the queen can't get her feet wet,' and he scooped me up and carried me to the car."

Herring wants to know: Is the reporter who is drinking her hot cocoa and petting her dog a liberal?

She hates labels and likes liberals, she says. It's just that sometimes they see her more as a caricature than a real flesh-and-blood person. With brains. And feelings.

Herring's maiden name was Johnson. She was born July 3, 1929 ("my mother and I couldn't wait" for the Fourth of July), into a family that valued beauty, charm, good works and good manners.

They also valued intelligence but worried about Joanne. Clearly she was bright, but she couldn't do math.

"I have dyslexia," Herring says. "But back then, they thought I was not only unattractive but dumb. How can you add numbers that seem to be jumping around on the page?"

Herring, an only child, grew up in elite, clubby River Oaks. If she ever was an ugly duckling, she morphed into a swan in junior high.

That's what childhood acquaintance James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, remembers, as does his cousin Annie Baker Horton.

"Dances were always held in the school gymnasiums," Horton says. "There'd be girls on one side and boys on the other. All the girls would watch their dates line up to dance with Joanne. She was so much prettier than we were, we couldn't possibly be jealous."

Horton can tick off numerous favors that Herring has done for her over the years - from bringing her vegetable soup when she was feeling poorly to lending her French designer fashions.

"I have so many nice things to say about her," Horton says. "She's just so darn good-looking, people have the wrong impression."

Herring says her parents were very comfortable, but not like some of their neighbors, who were very rich. And while the Johnsons spoiled their only child, there was a dab of tough love mixed in.

When she was 11 or 12, for example, she looked down, saw a snake wrapped around her leg and screamed for her father, who told her to shake it off and kill it with a hoe.

"I thought my daddy would come to my rescue," she says. "But I had to rescue myself."

Herring attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she had friends and boyfriends at her beck and call. When a boyfriend offered to take an economics class for her, she accepted. He mastered the course work, and she pursued other interests. Unfortunately, when it came time to take the final, that boyfriend had a scheduling conflict.

Herring took the test and earned an A.

"He tutored me for two days straight," she says. "It taught me I have a little of a photographic memory and a very analytical mind."

Also, she says, she learned not to cheat.

Herring dropped out of college at 20 to marry Houston developer Robert King, whom she'd met at a debutante ball. In that era, many bright women didn't set goals for themselves; they set goals for their husbands.

"I was really engaged to somebody else," she says, "but Bob King decided he was going to marry me, and he followed me around and courted my mother and grandmother. I thought anybody who loved me that much would make a wonderful partner."

And he did, Herring says.

"But we were just too young when we got married, and we grew apart," she said. "He liked to live a very quiet life."

Herring craved excitement.

Ironically, it was the quiet King who wanted to give his wife a 30th birthday party - and stories from that night of excess in 1959 live on even now. Suffice it to say the theme was "Roman orgy" - the guests came in costumes, there was a slave auction, a Christian was burned at the stake and underage boys poured drinks. Herring was the first of many to be thrown into the pool fully clothed, and some guests walked home from the King mansion after sunrise the next day.

The party might have been forgotten if it hadn't been for Life magazine photographers and the local press recording every detail.

Herring's mother was not happy. Herring is still embarrassed. She also wonders if it's not time to forget about parties that took place almost 50 years ago.

She's a different, more serious person now.

Herring was in her early 30s when she appeared on a noontime TV talk show on Houston's KHOU to raise money for her great-aunt's favorite charity. The next thing she knew, she was the host of the show.

It was Herring's first serious job, and she took it, she says, thinking that a challenging professional life might save her marriage. It didn't work out that way, but her TV career lasted 15 years. By the time she quit because she was overcommitted, most Houstonians felt they knew her. Many loved her.

She called her guests "darlin'."

"I wanted them to look good and be successful, and they knew that and just relaxed," she said. "They'd tell me anything."

Guests included high-profile people - kings, queens, movie stars. At the time, a less well-known interview subject was interior designer Bill Stubbs.

"She was such an encourager," says Stubbs, who was in his 20s then. "She had that dewy-faced innocence, and she would bat her pretty eyes and make me feel like I was the only man in the world."

Ron Stone, Herring's friend and mentor at the television station, remembers "The Joanne King Show" well. He says a lot of sweet things, then sums up: "Joanne learned on the air and turned out to be quite good at what she did - even if she was over the top most of the time."

After Herring's divorce from King, she was a single working mother and broke, by River Oaks standards, for the first time in her life. She struggled to take care of her boys, Beau and Robin, do her job and pay her bills.

But she wasn't single for very long. After five dates with millionaire oilman Robert Herring, she felt she'd found a true partner, someone who valued her intelligence and business acumen as well as her beauty and social skills.

After their marriage, the Herrings made dozens of trips to the Middle East to make oil and gas deals. During the plane rides, Robert would fill her with facts, figures, persuasive arguments. Inevitably, there would be social events, and the men would swarm Joanne. While they were swooning, she was selling.

But the foreigners weren't fools. They recognized her analytical mind, sought her advice and took her calls. At a time when doing deals with other women was out of the question, they worked with her. And in the twin worlds of diplomacy and oil and gas, those relationships and connections were priceless.

By the late '70s, Herring had three volunteer positions in the Middle East: She was honorary consul to Pakistan and honorary consul to Morocco, and she also helped poor Pakistani villagers redesign their handmade crafts - everything from rugs and fabric to copper and silver goods - to appeal to Western consumers. Along the way, she enlisted influential friends in the fashion industry to design dresses using Pakistani materials.

Herring says the projects were financial successes. But she intended a fair share of the money to go to the villagers. When bureaucrats and middlemen started skimming off the profits, she quit.

Robert Herring was the anchor, the mentor, the cheerleader whom Joanne had always wanted, but they were together only nine years. In early 1980, he found out he had terminal lung cancer. She stayed by his side until his death in '81, though she did break away for one dangerous trip.

Herring was deeply concerned that Americans were dismissing a conflict in Afghanistan as intramural, tribal warfare. The president of Pakistan told her Afghan soldiers were actually fighting well-armed, well-trained Soviet soldiers and that the Soviet plan was to use Afghanistan as a steppingstone to domination in the Middle East, then the world.

Convinced that American security was at risk, Herring decided to form a small crew, sneak into Afghanistan and film the Soviets in action.

Which she did.

Herring, the former talk-show host, interviewed the tribal warriors, and Robin King, her son and then a professional combat photographer, filmed Soviet helicopter attacks. Charles Fawcett, an experienced filmmaker, put it all together. They showed the movie to every influential politician who would sit still, including Charlie Wilson.

Back then Wilson was a congressman from Lufkin, Texas, and regularly in trouble for lifestyle habits (lots of women, lots of alcohol) he seemed unable to control. But he, like Herring, believed that the Soviets' long-term goal was to destroy the United States, and he fell in love with the beautiful crusader and staunch anti-communist.

Over the next few years, Wilson helped channel billions of dollars in American aid to the war effort. He was motivated by Herring, whom he hoped to marry, and his own patriotic zeal.

Today, Wilson lives with his wife, Barbara, in Lufkin. When he reflects, he says, he is proud of his congressional career, proud of his contributions in Afghanistan and unconcerned about past foibles.

He and Herring call each other once in a while to talk.

"Joanne," he observes, "is a very difficult woman to say no to."

From his back porch, Wilson looks out on birds flitting about in the woods and enjoys explaining how Herring manipulated some of the most powerful members of Congress.

It goes without saying - at times Herring also manipulated him.

Their affair died a natural death in the mid-'80s, and Herring married Lloyd Davis. The millionaire Houstonian owned Fisk Electric, one the biggest electrical contracting companies in the country.

"He's a fine man, and we had a lot of fun," Herring says. "But I had the same problems with Lloyd as I did with Bob King. He wanted to live a very secluded life."

And she did not.

They divorced in 2005.

"We still have a very cordial relationship," Herring says. "But I figured 20 years of marriage was enough."

Author and journalist George Crile took 15 years to research, write and publish his book "Charlie Wilson's War." It was the inspiration for the movie that has Herring so excited - and worried.

Most of the time, of course, Herring is busy with other projects. She lists just a few of them to make it clear how she spends her time.

These days she funds a group of 100 single mothers in five counties who need help with everything from personal hygiene to money management. She's involved in starting a camp for foster children. She helps support a group that keeps at-risk children in school. She works on the problem of high school dropouts, too.

Her list of projects involving children and families goes on and on. She still supports the local arts. In all, she gives away about 20 percent of her income, which comes from investments and real estate. She's not rich, she says, but she's pleased to share what she has.

She also spends time with her sons, who are now her business partners.

"Her essence is her energy," Robin King says of his mother. "She doesn't procrastinate."

Which is to say she's a woman in a hurry.

Earlier this year, she needed minor surgery and was supposed to stay in the hospital for four days. She stayed less than half that time, then put on her street clothes and walked out. What really upset her was that she couldn't drive.

Sometimes, like everybody, Herring loses perspective. Sometimes she worries as much about a newspaper story as about a Hollywood movie.

She leaves a reporter with an anecdote.

Three salesmen were in such a hurry to catch a plane home that they knocked over a young woman's apple stand. They didn't stop to help her. They just rushed on board and started buckling their seat belts. Then one of the salesmen came to his senses. He told his buddies goodbye, got off the plane and went to help the young woman restore order at the apple stand.

That's when he realized she was blind, her boss had doubts that she could do the job and she was working to pay for her education. He also realized that some of the fruit was bruised after the fall, and he paid her $40 for the damage.

That's what drives Herring, perhaps.

She says softly: "I've spilled some apples."

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (R) opens Friday at Bay Area theaters.