Last of the ‘Blonde Bombshells’ : The Survival Saga of Ex-Sex Kitten Mamie Van Doren

Mamie Van Doren is contemplating the plans for a party in her honor. Her publicist wants her to be deposited at the door of New York’s chi-chi Tunnel Club in a vintage pink Cadillac. But she wants none of that.

“A pink Cadillac?” she says, cringing. “That’s not me. That was Jayne (Mansfield). That was the ‘50s. I want to arrive in a white Rolls-Royce Corniche, wearing my black-and-white Chanel. That’s the ‘80s. That’s me.”

Names, Places and Body Parts

At 54, Van Doren is making a comeback of sorts. In two weeks she hits the book-tour trail promoting her dishy autobiography, “Playing the Field,” which chronicles in 275 pages her life as a screen sex kitten, her frustrations with a career that spanned more than 30 years and included such films as “Teacher’s Pet,” “High School Confidential,” “Born Reckless” and “Sex Kittens Go to College;” plus the steamy details of her five marriages and her romances with Steve McQueen, Nicky Hilton and baseball player Bo Belinsky, among many others. She names names, places and body parts.

But this veteran of thousands of interviews is now nervous, nervous at having a reporter in her Newport Beach home, nervous about facing the TV interviewers, worried whether she will be asked cruel questions. “But,” she says, sucking in her breath and tilting up her chin, “I’m prepared.”

Van Doren admits she stewed over what to wear for this interview, opting for glamour in a pink-and-black Chanel boucle suit with a thigh-high miniskirt that shows off her shapely legs. Her long, white-ish hair is pulled back with a black bow and big pink camellia. Around her neck is a string of pearls and a huge gold medallion given to her by late designer Coco Chanel.

Middle age shows in her tanned face, crisscrossed with wrinkles and laugh lines, but her figure is still tight and trim and her infamous bust, once padded and trussed up in torpedo bras, is discreetly tucked under a pink blouse.

Going Out for Lunch

After a brief tour of her fairly modest but sunny and spacious two-story house, including descriptions of various antiques and introductions to her three huge parrots, she suggests lunch at the Ritz in Fashion Island. She drives, in a green Alfa convertible (the top stays up), and points out the Balboa Bay Club, where she used to live.

At the restaurant, she strolls through with the confidence of someone used to doing this. And the heads swivel. Once seated, she’s eager to talk about the book. “The thing about it,” she says, “is that there’s no one else around to write about what it feels like to have your name linked to sex from the very beginning of your career.

“I was groomed as a so-called sex symbol, a rival to Marilyn Monroe, and from then on, whenever my picture appeared in paper it was sex kitten, sex symbol, sex goddess, sex pot. I’ve accepted it, and I’m flattered, but in some ways it’s been a hindrance to me because I haven’t been able to be taken seriously as an actress. It’s such a shame that you were put in a category of a dumb blonde, but that’s what they did in the ‘50s. You fought the system but you didn’t win.”

Van Doren, who last made a movie in 1985 and gives interviews infrequently, says her book, co-authored by Art Avielhe, tells everything.

“And everything I’ve said about myself is all true, it’s all there. I didn’t want it to be boring, or to sanitize my life. It’s like I wanted people to look through a keyhole and say, ‘Gosh, he’s putting his pants on one leg at a time--or taking them off.’ I really wanted to make people as human as possible. If it’s hurting somebody, well, I just don’t believe it is. The people I went out with all had senses of humor.”

Men in Her Life

As detailed in the book, her transformation from Joan Olander to Mamie Van Doren took her into the arms of some of the best-known. She and Rock Hudson became lovers after a night at the Photoplay Awards; her affair with Nicky Hilton was fun but unsatisfying; Warren Beatty pursued her, boasting of his sexual prowess, but she never gave in. She and Clark Gable exchanged a few passionate kisses--their separate marriages kept them from consummating their relationship; and Steve McQueen introduced her to sex on acid. She compares Burt Reynolds to a fast-food joint (“high on jive but low on substance”), but has kinder words for a young Joe Namath who she calls “singularly unselfish in bed.”

“My attitude about sex is just the way I was made,” she says. “I never had anybody say this was not the way to do it. I was living in the ‘50s, but I was in the year 2000. I thought, ‘This feels good. Why not do it?’ ”

Above all, she will tell you, she is a survivor. She has outlived many of her Hollywood peers and most of her husbands and stands as one of the few pretenders to the Marilyn Monroe throne.

But in death Monroe has become an icon. In life Van Doren has drifted into near-obscurity.

It’s a role Van Doren plays in part by choice and in part because she thinks Hollywood never gave her a fair shake. “It was life and I just accepted it. The one mistake I will always kick myself for is not doing ‘Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?’ It was written for me. Had I taken that role it would have gotten me out of this situation that I’ve always been in. My star would have been higher.”

Yet she harbors no bitterness about her career. “I’m experiencing something that none of the other blondes experienced,” she says carefully, her eyes gazing off across the restaurant, “and that’s getting old.

“I see old pictures of me with ones of me now, and I see lines and wrinkles in my face. I’ve earned them, I guess, but at the same time I’m glad I’m here to experience what the ‘80s are like. I’ll see a picture of Marilyn looking at me, and it’s a weird feeling. I say, ‘. . . If you had lived and seen the ‘80s and ‘70s and seen what it’s like. You missed so much, lady.’ ”

Pride and Joy

Her son, Perry, 31, has been her source of determination. “When I gave birth to that boy, I said, ‘I’m going to hang on as long as I can to help take care of him.’ He went through a lot, too--my romances, marriages and divorces. He didn’t get all the motherly things he was supposed to have. It wasn’t easy but he hung in there for me.”

Perry Anthony, the product of her marriage to bandleader Ray Anthony, who was husband No. 2, lives downstairs from his mother and husband No. 5, Thomas Dixon, a writer and editor. A computer salesman, Perry is recovering from a concussion suffered in a recent motorcycle accident.

Van Doren’s 8-year marriage to 41-year-old Dixon is her longest so far, and when she talks about him she blushes like a new bride.

“Growing older doesn’t bother me because I have a really great husband. He really loves me very much. He always tells me how beautiful I am. And I’m going to tell you something, it’s a job to be glamorous. I mean, if you think it comes easy, it doesn’t. Marilyn went through it, all the sex symbols go through it.”

She says she flirted with the idea of plastic surgery, and at one point sought a qualified surgeon who would nip and tuck away some of the wrinkles. “But I think it would change my look,” she says between bites of sauerbraten and potato pancakes. “I think a little bit of a relaxed look in my face is kind of nice. It makes it soft. If I pull it up, I’ll look like an older lady who’s trying to look young.”

Van Doren excuses herself and leaves the table for a moment. A young waitress comes by. “Is everything going OK?” she asks, eyeing the tape recorder on the table. “She’s the one doing those TV commercials now, right?” she asks, alluding to Van Doren’s appearances on commercials plugging excerpts of her book in the Star magazine. “Is she an actress? I asked the oldest bartender here what she does, and he knew. She seems pretty level-headed.”

A Shopping Trip

After lunch Van Doren drives a couple of blocks to Amen Wardy, the ultra-expensive clothing store. She has bought some outfits for her book tour here, and drops by again to look through a new shipment of Galanos gowns.

Brigitte Dovletian, her favorite saleswoman, is properly solicitous when Van Doren walks in, and points her to the five-figure Galanos dresses. Following her, Dovletian notices Van Doren’s skirt is hiked up a bit in back and reaches down to give it a few solid tugs.

“Oh no, it’s supposed to be that way,” Van Doren says, playfully scolding her.

She tries a couple of evening minidresses on, and in front of a three-way mirror poses for pictures, effortlessly falling back into her sex kitten role, vamping it up in a black suit cut down to there. She tucks her camellia into the jacket to cover up some of the cleavage. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to run these pictures,” she says.

Back at her home, Van Doren confesses she felt somewhat uncomfortable in the store, and says playing the vamp was her way to compensate. “It’s acting,” she says. “It was a job.”

There have been a few acting offers in recent years; plays, nightclub shows, teen-age movies where Van Doren would play the mom. “I did ‘Free Ride’ in 1985 (a forgettable preschool comedy), but it’s a little harder to get up at 5 a.m. I wouldn’t do anything unless the money was really good. I love working, but it’s got to be the right thing.”

In 1985, Van Doren also revived her singing career, appearing live at Studio One in West Hollywood, and in 1986 cut an album called “The Girl Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll,” of which People magazine wrote, “You’ve got to root for her as she gamely twangs through a time capsule of sorts.”

There was a well-attended Van Doren film festival at the Nuart theater in 1984, and she says she’s aware of a new cult of teen-age film fans who can’t get enough of her old movies.

Van Doren ran an antique business in the store below her home, but gave it up within a few months. “They just came in to look at me,” she says with a laugh. “I was the antique, I guess.” The space is currently rented to a hair dresser.

Visits to Hollywood

Now days are spent shopping with a friend, keeping up her tan at the beach and occasionally making her way back to Hollywood. “It’s great to go visit,” she says. “I like to see some of the new actresses--compare, say, what has she got that I haven’t. I like to check the scene over.

“But sometimes it depresses me. Rodeo Drive is not the way it used to be. Then when I hit the ocean I say, ‘Yeah, wow, I’m home again.’ I live down here because I’m away from all of the things that are bad. My husband and I think the same way. We keep everything good.”

Besides her autobiography, how does Mamie Van Doren want to be remembered?

“Gee, that’s a question I haven’t thought of,” she says after a long pause to reflect. “I’d like to be admired for being a survivor, being strong enough to cope with some of the things I’ve had to endure in my life. I would like to be remembered for my kindness toward animals. I’d like to be remembered for all the good things, some of my rock ‘n’ roll movies.”

Here she pauses and her eyes fill with tears, which she blinks back. “I know that when I see something on the television, when someone dies, you know, one of my peers, I just choke up. I will have a tear for them. I will always have a tear for one of them, I don’t care who it is. It touches me . . . I see myself. It’s weird, but I see myself as if I was dying. Like it’s the last of the blonde bombshells and they’ll flash my picture on the screen. Like it’s the end of an era. It’s so scary.

“I’m human. I’m not going to say nothing bothers me. I’m very sensitive. And I try to surround myself with really nice, beautiful things. And I keep the evil away from me. That’s why I’ve made it as far as I have.

“This experience of going out into the world and shedding my skin may be difficult, but I’m prepared. People are going to say things that are unkind because I’ve told the truth. I’ve got to be able to laugh it off. And that’s what I’m planning on doing.”