Life’s Chances Provide Music for Her Song

Totty Ames traded in the dust of Oklahoma for the glitter of Hollywood when she was 19. She had stars in her eyes and a $10 bill in her pocket when she arrived in Los Angeles.

Now 71, she’s still beautiful and she has yet to brush the glamour out of her system. She’s the stuff Hollywood used to make movies about: Beautiful farm girl working as a cashier is discovered by top producer, becomes movie star, marries famous leading man and lives happily ever after in Beverly Hills mansion and decides to become singer in her 60s.

Well, not quite. The beginning and the end are true. Everything in between has no resemblance to her life.

Totty Ames was a cashier at the Egyptian Theatre, and she was “discovered”--but by a brassiere manufacturer, not a producer.

“I knew two things when I was 19,” she said. “I wanted to be an actress and I didn’t want to be in Oklahoma. I was this showoff kid. I was the only child of an unconventional single mother in the 1920s. She taught me life is what you make it. You can either play the cards you’re dealt or turn them back in and start again. That’s why I always have a bag packed.”

“When I was asked to travel around the country to model brassieres, I jumped at the chance. To me, that was glamorous,” she said in her West Hollywood living room.

So was being Miss Nightfighter, an honor bestowed upon her in 1951 to help launch a Navy jet. She was the television stand-in for Barbara Stanwyck, and did bit parts when television was still young. Ames appeared in several films as well. She married four times.

“Each marriage lasted one year except the last one. That lasted nine years because I helped raise his children and I felt needed. I kept trying to get it right. I was my own obstacle--too independent, strong-minded. Plus, I got bored really fast. Most women in my age group married for life; I guess I married for lust. I never really had any money, but I’ve never been an unhappy person because I’m open to change. My passport is always in order.”

One of the children she helped raise with her producer-husband, Saul David, died of cystic fibrosis at age 10. After that, Ames became president of the Los Angeles Chapter for Cystic Fibrosis and a trustee at large for the national organization.

She still is an active volunteer. She is a frequent guest speaker at a class offered at Santa Monica College called Women in Transition, a subject she feels well qualified to discuss. “I’m always in transition, so I talk about change and not trying to resist change because it’s the same as resisting life, and you eventually find yourself in a rut if you do that,” she said.

Totty Ames was in a rut after her 60th birthday. Film jobs were scarce. The modeling business was getting better but she wasn’t the grandmother or the high-fashion type.

She did a print ad for a motor scooter for older people but she was bored and unfulfilled.

“I always wanted to sing, but I wanted to do it well enough to perform professionally,” she said. “Then I thought, so what if you fall down? The world is full of people with skinned knees. You don’t learn anything being right all the time.”

Ames took voice lessons and began singing her favorite music. “I don’t sing anything written past 1950. They don’t write songs today, they write attitudes. I do like some Country and Western tunes.”

She then began to sing “Life’s Highway,” the song she opens her show with at The Gardenia Club in Hollywood. The lyrics are classic Totty Ames:

There’s hope at every turn

There’s a bridge to build

There’s a bridge to burn

Here’s hoping you never go astray on life’s highway.