She Likes to Watch

This is the second of two parts remembering Jeanne Carmen, who starred in the 1959 film “Monster of Piedras Blancas,” which was filmed in Cayucos. Carmen died Dec. 20, 2007, of lymphoma at her Orange County home. She was 77.

Jeanne Carmen made a name for herself in the 1950s as a pinup model and B-movie actress, but her claim to fame in the final decade of her life was in the stories she told of life in the Hollywood of the late 1950s and early ’60s. Rat Pack Hollywood.

These were the waning days of the studio system and changing movie mores and public tastes. This was the era of Marilyn Monroe and, in the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Bobby Kennedy.

Author Paul Parla knew Jeanne’s stories and of her old friends. He convinced her to begin selling autographed pictures at memorabilia shows, which led to Jeanne’s celebrity comeback in the 1990s. That in turn spawned the 1998’s “E! True Hollywood Story Jeanne Carmen: Queen of the B-Movies.”

“She’s an icon in her own way as exemplifying the beauty of the 1950s starlet,” Parla said in a TV interview. “She’s really basically the same 18-year-old girl who bagged Frank Sinatra for a good time.

“She’s got these great stories to tell, and whether you believe them or not, she’s part of the Hollywood mythology. She’s in there with the Kennedys and Marilyn (Monroe) … just part of the mix.”

Name-dropping
Here’s what she told me about three of the biggest celebrities of that era:

• Frank Sinatra: “Frank was a sweet guy, but he was boring to me because I was a young girl still in my early 20s, and he was in his late 30s,” she said. “It’s OK when you’re 38 and they’re 48, but not when you’re 21 or 22. That’s not OK because you’re just living, and they’ve already lived. So I found him to be very boring. I’d go down to spend a weekend with him in Palm Springs, and I could never stay the whole weekend. I’d sneak out in the middle of the night and drive home, or I’d say I was going to the hairdresser and never come back. I was very independent. I was a young girl with a great body, an interesting face, and money. You got to be a little bit of a monster on that one, haven’t you? But I was a nice monster.”

• Elvis Presley: “I met Elvis when he was 21 (or Presley’s breakout year in 1956) at a party. We started dating until he went into the Army (in 1958). Elvis was sweet, but he was, at that point, inside of himself, very shy and quiet. I was sophisticated and grown up when I met him. He was still like a little boy. He was still in awe of everything. I had already been with Sinatra. How can you go from Sinatra to Elvis is what it came right down to.”

• Marilyn Monroe: “Marilyn was one of the sweetest people I think I’ve ever met. She would give you the shirt off her back. You wouldn’t dare say, ‘I like those earrings.’ She’d hand them to you. She really got her lumps in Hollywood. She was not all those things they called her. She was just a really nice girl, wanting very much to be a movie actress, not a movie star particularly. She wanted to be a great actress so bad.”

Success despite headstrong attitude
Jeanne continued to act in the late 1950s, landing roles on TV and in B-movies, including Allied Artists’ “Portland Expose,” Warner Bros.’ “Untamed Youth,” with rocker Eddie Cochran, and as a lead in Republic Pictures’ “The Three Outlaws,” a story about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Alan Hale Jr. (who gained fame as the Skipper on “Gilligan’s Island”) before landing a role in “Piedras Blancas.”
Her last role was as Mrs. Lipschitz in 2005’s “The Naked Monster,” a film co-directed by Newsom and Wayne Berwick. As a kid, Berwick also had a role in “Monster of Piedras Blancas,” which was directed by his dad, Irvin Berwick.

“I succeeded in spite of myself,” Jeanne told me. “I just kept going up the ladder. I was always saying no to everything that came along, but I always had people, other actors, husbands, whatever, who pushed me into it.”

After Monroe’s death in 1962 — Jeanne believes the actress was a victim of foul play — she left Los Angeles, gave up the fast life and became a housewife and mom in Scottsdale, Ariz.

“I would have done really big things had I not left (Hollywood),” she said. “I was starting to really get offers, but I left town … and didn’t come back for 18 years.”

After her three kids were raised, Jeanne ventured back into the industry, using memorabilia shows and her roles in B-movies and Three Stooges shorts to reconnect with old fans.

“I’ve had the most interesting life, probably, than anyone that you’ll ever meet, or know or hear about,” she said with a hearty laugh. “I can’t imagine anyone from where I came from doing what I did.”

• • •

Jeanne’s son, Brandon, has written a biography of his mom: “Jeanne Carmen: My Wild, Wild Life as a New York Pin-up Queen, Trick Shot Golfer and Hollywood Actress.”
For more about Jeanne Carmen visit her Web site.

— Jay Thompson

This is the first of two parts remembering Jeanne Carmen, who starred in the 1959 film “Monster of Piedras Blancas,” which was filmed in Cayucos.

Jeanne Carmen left her mark on the Central Coast but was hardly a household name here.

Jeanne was a maverick, a sort of hick-from-the-sticks with a fifth-grade education who reinvented herself using her beauty and street smarts to become a pin-up, a Hollywood actress, a trick-shot golfer and, in her 70s, a celebrity famous for the celebrities she knew.

She died several weeks ago of lymphoma at her Orange County home. She was 77.
Frank Sinatra, one of her former lovers, would have agreed that she did things her way.

Jeanne returns to the Central Coast
I met Jeanne in October 2002. At that time it had been almost 45 years since she had starred in “The Monster of Piedras Blancas,” a B-movie and “Creature from the Black Lagoon” knockoff that made local headlines as the first motion picture filmed in Cayucos.
She returned to that beach town as guest of honor at a fundraiser the Friends of the Cayucos Library called “Hollywood Comes to Cayucos 1958.”

Jeanne was part of a panel discussion, a group that included Cayucos locals who watched or were extras during the week of filming in March 1958. There was also a representative of the Piedras Blancas Lighthouse, although scenes set in the lighthouse were actually filmed at Point Conception in Lompoc.

It was standing room only in the Veterans Memorial Building during the first of two screenings of the movie. I remember watching the fire marshal, who was standing near the building capacity sign, as he nervously kept count of the crowd that ultimately filled the room.

When the lights dimmed and the movie began there were actually more screams from laughter than of fright, although in one scene the monster carries a severed head — pretty heady stuff (pardon the pun) for the Ike-era drive-in movie set the movie was originally intended for. (I specifically remembered that scene from when I first watched the movie as a 10-year-old in Milwaukee in the mid-1960s.)

Watching the movie with 200-plus others was a kick. How could you not laugh with corny dialog like this:

“Murder, murder, murder. Mom, someone’s been murdered! Someone’s been murdered!”
“Who was it Jimmy?”
“Mr. Kolchek. He’s dead. He looks awful.”
“Where son, where, where?”
“I went to his store to buy some candy, and he was in his office dead. And mom, he didn’t have any head.”

Cayucans who crowded the Vets Hall were equally proud of seeing their small town on the big screen that Oct. 27, 2002, evening — a place that looked eerily similar to the 1958 community featured on screen.

During the movie, Jeanne sat with her son, Brandon James, in a side room off the main hall. As the end credits rolled she left through the back door and waited until master of ceremonies Bob Whiteford introduced her.

And when the 72-year-old strutted — and I mean strutted — in through the hall’s main entrance, she walked as if in a spotlight and left a stunned audience in her wake — likely, I thought, as she had as a young starlet half a century earlier.

“It’s funny, but she’s probably as well known now as she ever was and this is for somebody who dropped out of sight for 20 years,” Ted Newsom, a film historian and documentary filmmaker, told me in a phone interview before the event. “Basically the only thing that anyone has ever seen her in is (‘The Monster of Piedras Blancas’). It’s on that basis that she’s famous today.”

Humble roots
Jeanne told me about growing up poor in the 1930s in the cotton fields of Paragould, Ark., where she told anyone who would listen that, ‘I’m going to be a movie star.’ ” She didn’t like her stepdad and ran away from home with a girlfriend at age 13. Eventually she ended up in New York and became a model.

Portraying Lucy, the daughter of the Piedras Blancas Lighthouse keeper, was one of her biggest movie roles. In an interview, I asked how she got it and her answer unfolded like a mini-drama, showcasing her headstrong zest for life.

“I can remember that I gave up a walk-on in a major movie,” she told me. “In this movie I was supposed to in a bikini walk down the stairs at the Beverly Hills pool, walk over, say hi and kiss the star, and do a couple of other things.

“They sent me off to the studio to get fitted. When I got there everyone ignored me. Finally I got to somebody who said, ‘There are the bathing suits, go down and look at them.’

“The whole thing just pissed me off. I walked out. I had already been offered this part in ‘Monster of Piedras Blancas,’ so I said to hell with them (and said) ‘I’m doing the “Monster of Piedras Blancas.” ’ ”

The peroxide blonde needed to darken her hair for the role as a young woman who returned to the lighthouse after being sent off to boarding school.

“So they take me to the hairdresser and they show me a book of hair colors. They said we can do this, which was a mousy blonde, or we can do this, which is red. Red is not a good color in black and white — it’s a horrible color for black and white — but I got the red anyway. I looked at it and I decided, ‘Oh my god, I don’t like this.’ So I went to the hairdresser. I had this long hair. (I told him) ‘You have to put this back to blonde, I can’t stand (the red), I don’t want it.’ He said OK. When he was washing the bleach off the hair he said, ‘Carmen, look in the sink.’ I looked and there’s all my hair laying in the sink.”

Her hair was simply overbleached and broke off. She stared at the hair and shrugged.
“That’s why I’ve got that horrible-looking hair in the movie. Have you ever seen worse hair in your life?”

And she was right. Her hair looked terrible.

Nude scene
Though she had an impressive portfolio of swimsuit photos, Jeanne drew the line at complete nudity. But that’s what the script called for — a nude swimming scene filmed on a Cayucos beach, where in March the chilly water was in the low 50s.

“I said, ‘What? There’s no nude scene in this thing.’ (They said) ‘Oh yeah, didn’t you read on page … ?’ ‘No. I haven’t read anything about a nude scene.’ Probably all I did was learn my lines and didn’t read the rest of it. I said. ‘I don’t do nude scenes.’ They said, ‘You’ve got to.’ I said ‘No, I’m not doing a nude scene.’

“So … they hired somebody else to do the nude scene. After I saw the movie, and I saw what (my stand-in) looked like, I said, ‘Holy s—, if I’d a known you were going to get somebody that looked like that I would have done the nude scene.’ ”

There was a real down-to-earth charm about this lady who in her later years enjoyed her return to the limelight.

Here’s a link to Jeanne Carmen’s official Web site.

— Jay Thompson