They had to do everything for him, and all he had to do was go to work in the morning. “A woman had to cook and be a prostitute for. “I really wasn’t interested in getting married,” she says of her outlook after that. She fought for her life, escaped that man, and recommitted herself to creating a career. One evening, her husband attempted to throw her off their second-story balcony in a drunken rage. Her ambitions almost ended before they began, however, when she eloped at 17 and found herself in a violent marriage. The whole family was wiped out from scarlet fever.” “Every day, I saw a hearse taking someone away. “Only the strong survived,” Van Doren recalls. Her family had no electricity or running water and scarlet fever, polio, and tuberculosis were rampant in her community. Taking her cue from her favorite femme fatale Carole Lombard, she paled her blonde to platinum and set out to see her name in lights.orn Joan Lucille Olander, she grew up on a farm in South Dakota during the Great Depression. when she was 11, her interest in Hollywood grew. The whole family was wiped out from scarlet fever.”Īs a child, she was weaned on golden-era greats like Mae West and Jean Harlow, who helped her develop a taste for the sultry more than the sweet. “How you treat your age depends on your attitude, so try to fucking forget about how old you are,” she muses before adding, “life doesn’t even start until 40.”īorn Joan Lucille Olander, she grew up on a farm in South Dakota during the Great Depression. “Imagine all the crap I’ve been through!” In fact, when I catch up with her she’s just celebrated her 90th birthday and is busy working on the follow-up to her 1987 memoir, Playing the Field. “Can you imagine? I’ve been here almost a hundred years?!” she exclaims, laughing. But it also keeps her from the same degree of deserved recognition. Her survival has spared her legacy the tacky adorations sold at tourist traps next to Van Doren’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Their youths, further glorifying and commodifying them, Van Doren would not, outliving the combined ages of both Monroe and Mansfield decades ago. But while her peers would go on to die tragically in Hollywood’s “It” girls, they were considered the cream of the honey-haired crop. The press crowned Mamie Van Doren, Marilyn Monroe, and Jayne Mansfield the “Three M’s” in the 1950s. A decade before the sexual revolution, she had the nerve to prioritize her own pleasure, saying and doing what she wanted, and she’s still that way today. Often captured bewitching audiences beneath a shock of icy blond hair, the points on her bullet bra sharp as daggers, there was nothing safe about Van Doren, and the censors knew it. Her performances made her the subject of juvenile delinquent fantasies for decades to come and gave her a reputation as the ultimate bad girl. I had such a crush on him.”Ī complex and provocative woman, Van Doren is the star of numerous midcentury films centering around counterculture and rebellion, including Untamed Youth (1957), High School Confidential (1958), and The Beat Generation (1959). ![]() ![]() “Clark Gable had that mustache, you probably would’ve liked it,” she says, giggling, then goes on to describe how his signature facial hair tickled her in the kissing scenes for their 1958 film Teacher’s Pet. Within minutes, she’s uncovered my peculiar fetish for pencil mustaches and begins to dish. After decades of rebelling against ageism and gender norms, today she still poses as a nude model, and her desire to destigmatize female sexuality is ever-present. She says exactly what she means and isn’t waiting for a permission slip. “Do you like one-night stands?” Van Doren asks sweetly over the telephone from her home in Newport Beach, CA.
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