Blond Ambition

Actress Loni Anderson, who has made a blond career for herself, knows something about playing movie blondes. She did a Jayne Mansfield biofilm for CBS in 1980, and for Thelma Todd she studied some of her movies and talked with people who remembered her.

“I wanted to know how talented she was--and she was quite talented,” Anderson said. “Jayne Mansfield was not a very good actress but incredibly good at instigating publicity.

“But Thelma Todd was very pretty and had great timing and never went ‘over the top.’ In ‘Cockeyed Cavaliers,’ everybody was crazy and she was very ‘economical.’ ”

Anderson said that the off-camera Todd was “very well-liked, a darling, wisecracking, lot of fun . . . extremely wild but very vulnerable . . . And her taste in men was atrocious,” she added, referring to her husband and to gangster Lucky Luciano--both of whom slapped her around.

She didn’t attempt the Thelma Todd vocal quality but she struggled to match the ‘30s fashion: “I lost five pounds; I worked out like crazy. I mean, the style was a structured boyish, shapeless look, with bound chest.” Not the usual Loni Anderson assignment.

Anderson said she wore a curly platinum-blond wig and period makeup--skinny eyebrows and screaming red lips.

For that pale white look: “I stayed out of the sun for four months,” she said. “But it drove Burt (husband Burt Reynolds) wild. He loves tan California blondes.”