Mamie Van Doren has outlived them all. One of the three heavy-hitter blonde bombshells of Hollywood’s golden age — the others, of course, being Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield — Van Doren is 94 years young and living a helluva life. On Labor Day weekend, she will be honored with the Legacy Award at the annual Cinecon Film Festival and present a screening of her underrated film noir, 1959’s “Guns, Girls and Gangsters.”
In the very definition of a wide-ranging interview, Van Doren spoke with IndieWire about her unique legacy, that string of movies in the ’50s and ’60s, but mostly her rollicking (and insanely interesting) personal life — a life that quite literally has included encounters with virtually every big name of the past 75 years. I mean, everyone. One of her first Universal Studios-arranged dates was with Rock Hudson. You know, the Rock Hudson that was an incredibly popular leading matinee idol, the epitome of a manly man, only to be outed years later after his tragic AIDS-related death in 1985.
“With Rock Hudson, they said he was gay at the studio… ‘You don’t have anything to worry about.’ But that’s not true. That was not true at all,” Van Doren recounted. “He came on to me, and in my book I told about having (on) a Crimmins skirt and him getting very passionate and rolling on the kitchen floor.”
I guess for those dirty details, we’ll have to read “Play the Field,” her aptly-titled autobiography (she also wrote a second memoir about her pet cockatoo titled “China and Me”). Keep in my mind, we’re talking about a woman who was discovered by Howard Hughes. Yes, the one Leonardo DiCaprio played in “The Aviator.” And, no, she does not think that movie accurately captured Mr. Hughes.
“Is it accurate? Uh… no,” she said. “I met him, and he had a little bungalow at the Garden of Allah (Hotel in Hollywood) when he was seeing me. He also had one up at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but the real young ones he kept up at the Garden of Allah. And the swimming pool was beautiful… I was taking my shower after I got out of the pool, it was at night, and he insisted upon me getting my hair wet in the pool, because he had a role for me in the picture that he said that I had to have wet hair. So, I get out of the pool… I had a bikini… and I ran into the bungalow, showered, came out, and I got towel around me. He’s laying in bed.”
At that moment she considered, “What do I do, Mamie?” She thought about her idol, classic Hollywood star Jean Harlow, and whether or not she would get into the bed. “I know she did it,” Van Doren decided. So she got into the bed with Howard Hughes.
“I jumped in bed. I said, ‘Howard… I have to have a rubber. You have a rubber?’ I peeked under the sheet and there was already a rubber on him. Well, shall I say… I thought that penises were the size of the man, — if he’s six foot four or five — the penis is going to be more in keeping with the size of the man. Well, that’s not the way it works,” she recalled.
Van Doren was born in South Dakota but became a Los Angeles home girl after her family moved to the city in 1942, when Mamie was just nine years old. Of course, in those days, she was Joan Olander, named in honor of Joan Crawford. She entered beauty pageants, earning the titles Miss Palm Springs and Miss Eight Ball, and that led to her contract with Hughes and RKO Radio Pictures — of which he was the then-head. When she later moved to Universal, she took on Mamie Van Doren — named after the then-First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. At the time, Van Doren was a Republican.
That didn’t last.
“I was a, I would say, Eisenhower conservative. I idolized Eisenhower. I watched the war years — because I was born in ’31 and I went through the war years, a very strong time in my life — and I was out here, so I watched,” she recounted. “I knew everything that was going on in the war. I watched it very closely. It was a very strong time in my life. It’s an imprint in my mind of World War II. And then Korea came along, and most people, kids my age, went to Korea and got killed, and then came along Vietnam. And then I said, ‘Well, hell, nobody’s paying any attention to these grunts out there… and I got very involved with Vietnam.”
Vietnam changed her perspective, even transforming her into a much more liberal activist.
“I went over there in ’68 and I did a lot of clubs, and I got paid for the clubs and everything, but between clubs, I would go to the hospitals and entertain. And it was a terrible, bloody year. 1968 was the worst bloody year they had. We really lost a lot of young men. And when I came back home, I just felt really awful, and I watched the war very closely, and when I saw our pilots being marched in cages in Hanoi… I decided to go over there,” Van Doren said.
It was a high-risk area to be. Mamie’s helicopter was even shelled. “I had to be really, really careful,” and she instructed the soldiers who transported her that if taken prisoner, “Kill me. Don’t let them take me.”
As for her film stardom, she appeared with virtually everybody, including a series of films starring rock ‘n’ roll idols making their breaks into cinema — Jerry Lee Lewis, Conway Twitty, Paul Anka, and Eddie Cochran among them. Her best-remembered role is likely as the second lead in the romantic comedy “Teacher’s Pet,” starring Clark Gable and Doris Day. Her part, however, ended up a little more slight than it was supposed to be.
“(Gable) saw me at Warner Brothers in the commissary, and he wanted me for the part that I got, and it was a larger role when I read it. And then when I went to see it, they cut the scene out that I had in the dressing room, which was a very cute scene. It was a kissing scene, and they said that I look like (Gable’s) grandchild or something stupid. And why would he go out with Doris Day when he had me? Luckily, someone saved it, and I have this clipping of him kissing me,” she remembered. “If I had had the scene that I had… I think I could have gotten probably an award or something of an acknowledgement, because it was really done well.”
One of her co-stars in that movie was Gig Young — over whom she literally dodged a bullet.
“I had a problem with that one. I was very on the outs with my husband at that time, but we were still together, and I didn’t have any kind of relationship with him then, but I realized that he liked me,” Van Doren said. “And then Merv Griffin had a show coming out of Las Vegas. (Young) was on the show, and I was on the show. Well, he was there, and he wanted to take me out. And I didn’t want to go out with him. There was something about him that I didn’t particularly care for. I have a sense that’s really good. I have a really good nose for horse flesh, that’s for sure. And I refused to go out with him. He got very upset and very mad at me, and then I heard later that he married somebody, and he shot her.” Young, it should be noted, also shot himself after he shot his fifth wife Kim Schmidt in 1978.
Van Doren didn’t ever play by the studio’s rules. Married five times, Mamie had a son with band leader Ray Anthony, in 1956. That didn’t sit well with Universal.
“It was hard because there weren’t any women at the studio… the men ran the studio and ran everything. So I kept pushing and pushing, and sometimes I did things I shouldn’t have done, and then… I found myself pregnant, and I got married afterwards, and then that was unheard of. At least it got me out of my contract at Universal,” she said, explaining that Universal didn’t want her to have the baby.
With the ’60s bringing a new feminine ideal, Van Doren’s blonde bombshell fell out of favor. Monroe, a personal friend of Van Doren’s, died in 1962.
“Marilyn and I were very good friends, and we liked each other. We went to the same drama coach,” Van Doren said. That coach was Natasha Latz. “I got to know Marilyn… I was 12 years old when I first met her, she was at the Blue Book Modeling Agency at the Ambassador Hotel, and I lived out back at the Ambassador Hotel. And when I was a kid, and I would go into the swimming pool all the time, and I used to see her modeling all the time. So I met her when she was 17 then and I was 12. We used to see each other all the time at parties, and I knew what she was doing all the time… She really had a hard time of it.
Thinking back on Monroe’s tragic death, Van Doren observed, “Marilyn always thought she had to have a man with her. She’s always looking for a father, but she was crazy about (John F.) Kennedy. I think they only went to bed one time, and then he passed her on to his brother. And she got hung up on Bobby (Kennedy), and she just couldn’t stand rejection anymore.”
Even if she largely exited filmmaking long ago, Van Doren has never left her talent behind — a talent that blossomed under the rigorous studio system of the 1950s.
“My talent was just incredible. It came very natural. As an actress, I didn’t have any problem. As a singer, I didn’t have any problem. All I did was vocalize and I could sing. As a dancer, I wasn’t as good as a dancer because I have large breasts, and that’s a lot of work… I really was lucky. I got to learn how to dance really well. I did a lot of ballet at Universal. They paid for all that. That was part of my studio contract,” she said.
Van Doren remains an enduring cultural icon, one that is part of a lineage of bombshells that has led to modern-day stars like Pamela Anderson. In 2006, Van Doren even appeared alongside Anderson in a titillating photo spread for “Vanity Fair.”
“I was very proud of myself,” she said. “I thought, I look just as fucking good. I had my real tits. There’s a lot of things I never had to do anything to improve upon… and I felt very secure. I never get insecure with women. If there is someone that is better than me, I take my hat off. I love beautiful women. I really adore women that are talented, strong. I don’t have a jealous bone in my body when it comes to another woman.”
Van Doren has also remained outspoken about causes dear to her, serving as an early high-profile grand marshal for the LA Pride Parade in 1987 — at the height of the AIDS Crisis.
“Elizabeth Taylor came along trying to say that she was the first one that ever did anything for the community. And it was a very bad shock… I wasn’t invited to anything after that,” Van Doren explained. “So, the gay community got together and… put me in the parade and made me the queen.”
Van Doren said that, after Taylor took on the task of being a leader in the campaign to fight AIDS, she and other advocates were “iced out.” “A lot people — we were all the first ones — we’re all getting ready to go to this charity thing that (Taylor) had, and they called us and told us that we weren’t wanted. That was the end of it. I want to make it very clear in history, she was not the first one. She only did it after Rock Hudson died.”
For Van Doren, it is about the guiding principle of just being a good person… paying it forward.
“I’ve got a couple of wonderful angels on my shoulder. I really believe that, and I have a connection with God. And everything I do, there’s a reason why I do it. It’s to help and be kind to people. I’ve tried to be kind to people even when they weren’t kind to me. And if I’m around someone that’s very bad, I try to just get away from it. I don’t like to be around bad things,” she said.
And soon, Van Doren will tell even more in a forthcoming third memoir, as well as the documentary “Mamie Confidential,” currently in production. To say it’ll be must-see would appear to be an understatement. Van Doren actually promises it will be a “lulu.” As for who should play Van Doren in a potential biopic, Mamie has a definite opinion: Sydney Sweeney.
“I’ve watched her movies. She’s a good actress. She hasn’t had that one plum that she needs. And that one plum is my movie called ‘Mamie Van Doren.’ I’d love to have her play me,” she said.
If you’d like to see what else Mamie Van Doren has to say, live and in person, check out the 61st Cinecon Film Festival, which will take over the Writers Guild of America Theatre August 29-September 1. Among the other honorees will be Ann-Margret and Juliet Mills… stay tuned for the IndieWire exclusive interviews with those icons, coming soon.
