Bombshells: Glamour Girls of a Lifetime

by Sullivan, Steve

  Joi, Kim Novak, and other sexy starlets graced Howard Hughes’s 1955 sand-and-bosoms epic Son of Sinbad, whose female lead was stripping legend Lili St. Cyr. At last, in 1956, Joi landed her first featured movie role, in the acclaimed children’s story The Brave One. The tale of a Mexican peasant boy and his love for a bull destined to die in a bullfight earned the Oscar for Best Original Story. Another costarring role came the same year in an action film, Hot Cars.

  One could hardly turn the station without seeing Joi. Her TV appearances in 1956 alone included Make Room for Daddy, Fireside Theatre, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and the anthology series Conflict. A memorable episode of I Love Lucy in which the Ricardos and Mertzes are stranded on a desert island, which turns out to be a movie location, and encounter threatening natives features lovely Joi in a swimsuit.

  Many adolescent males got their first gander at the blonde stunner in an episode of The Adventures of Superman in which she “wed” the Man of Steel, actually a scam used to catch a criminal. While continuing to appear on the Cummings show, her TV guest appearances kept coming. During 1957-59, these included two more Ozzie and Harriets, a Lucy and Desi comedy special, The Frank Sinatra Show, and Studio 57, among others. She also found time to appear in several “Joe McDoakes” comedy shorts released by Warner Brothers from 1954 to 1956.

  One of her most unforgettable TV appearances occurred in 1958 with Jack Benny and Danny Thomas. After seeing Joi in a daringly low-cut gown doing a sketch with the two comedians, leaning over between them provocatively at one point, some bluenoses sent complaints to the network. Joi’s admirers, of course, cheered for more. Some years later on The Joey Bishop Show, she performed a song in a gown whose top appeared to be almost entirely transparent. As Joi finished, Bishop ran up and draped a jacket over her shoulders.

  A small part in Orson Welles’s 1958 film classic Touch of Evil looked good on her resume, but the only scene in which she is recognizable comes when Welles enters a strip joint, and one of the dancers pictured on the poster outside is Joi. Welles also gave her the lead role in a thirty-minute 1958 TV drama, “Fountain of Youth,” regarded by some as her finest performance.

  A supporting role in Frank Sinatra’s sentimental 1959 comedy A Hole in the Head occurred when Sinatra was romantically involved with the Marilynesque beauty. Several years later, Joi would appear in another Sinatra film, Marriage on the Rocks. And in the early 1970s, according to Kitty Kelley’s biography of Ol’ Blue Eyes, he quietly paid Joi’s medical bills during her final illness.

  1960-1972: A Trouper to the End

  The 1960s opened promisingly with Joi’s memorable supporting role in the hit comedy Who Was That Lady?, a spicy farce starring Tony Curtis as a college professor caught kissing a pretty student, with Janet Leigh as Tony’s jealous wife. Joi (as Florence Coogle) and Barbara Nichols, as her comparably curvy blonde sister, almost steal the show in a hilarious restaurant scene with Curtis and pal Dean Martin. Another good role that year came in the sci-fi film The Atomic Submarine.

  Klondike, an adventure series set during Alaska’s 1898 gold rush, was Joi’s second network series as a regular, playing gambler James Coburn’s girlfriend Goldie. However, after several episodes in the fall of 1960, the series was overhauled with Joi dropped from the cast; it was canceled the following February. In a happier event in August 1960, Joi married producer Stan Todd, who also became her business manager.

  Seeking a different direction, Joi focused more on live theater performances and singing. Her nightclub debut occurred at New York’s popular Living Room Club. In addition to releasing a single on the small REO label, “Love Me” backed with “What’s It Gonna Be?,” she also reportedly recorded an album, Joi to the World.

  Joi was also a contributor to a short-lived fad that proved ahead of its time, video jukeboxes, and recorded at least three music videos. “Web of Love” provided the basis for a colorful production depicting Joi caught in a large “web,” and then changing into a swimsuit to seduce a lucky fellow at an indoor pool.

  In her nightclub appearances, “Joi saunters up to the mike in the most daring gown in all of show business,” wrote Milt Gentry. “The bottom half of her dress clings to her slender gams like wet tissue paper, and the top half — well, there almost is no top half. It roughly approximates two wide shoulder straps joined somewhere in the neighborhood of her navel, and it is filled to overflowing with a figure that makes Jayne Mansfield look like Fred Astaire.” Also during the early 1960s, she signed on to replace Xavier Cugat’s gorgeous ex-wife, Abbe Lane, as vocalist with his band at a few U.S. engagements and in a TV special recorded in Portugal.

  Ushering in a new career phase in early 1964, Joi was cast by The Beverly Hillbillies in the role of bluegrass musician Lester Flatt’s wife, Gladys, an ambitious but hopelessly untalented singer and actress. Joi made once-a-year appearances in this role through 1968.

  Joi’s always splendidly curvy form had taken on even more spectacular dimensions by this time. One publication remarked that “her physical training has added three-and-a-half inches to her bustline and thousands of dollars to her bank account.” It has been speculated that Joi obtained breast implants, bringing the top measurement of her famed 39-23-35 dimensions to an imposing 41 by 1962.

  In a potential career breakthrough, it was reported in 1965 that Joi was up for the female lead opposite Dean Martin in the Matt Helm spy romp The Silencers. But the role wound up going to Stella Stevens, who turned in a bravura comic performance. The missed opportunity was reminiscent of a decade and a half earlier, when Joi lost a juicy supporting role in The Asphalt Jungle to another blonde named Marilyn Monroe.

  By the late 1960s, the privately modest beauty who had turned down thousands of dollars to pose for Playboy said she was ready to consider going nude in the right film role. “I hope they have a big enough lens,” she said teasingly. Sadly for her pinup admirers, it never happened.

  The longtime starlet could sense that her motion picture career was winding down with the 1967 hooter Hillbillys in a Haunted House. But nightclubs and dinner theater provided a venue for her continuing beauty and talent. Joi starred in a 1968 production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for eight weeks in Memphis; put her old-fashioned sex appeal to work by starring in a summer of 1969 nostalgic revue, Follies Burlesque ’69 in Latham, New York; and followed in 1970 with Come Blow Your Horn at the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas. In a 1970 interview, Joi noted that doing a nightclub act would “give me time to sit things out and see which way the wind will blow — what the new trends will be. Frankly, I’m confused.”

  In 1970, Joi learned that she had a cancerous tumor, and underwent surgery early that summer. Following a brief recuperation, she resumed her career later that year by shooting a grade-Z horror film, Big Foot, directed by Robert Slatzer — who later garnered publicity for his claim that he had briefly been married to a prestardom Marilyn Monroe.

  Another blonde-bombshell actress, June Wilkinson, knew and liked Joi. Around 1971, June had to turn down an offer for a dinner-theater production of her famous vehicle Pajama Tops, and suggested that Joi stand in her place. “She gave it a try, but she was in the final stages of cancer then, and wasn’t able to do it. The theater finally held the show until I was available.”

  In 1972, Joi was signed to star in a new production of Follies Burlesque at the Meadowbrook Theatre in New Jersey, scheduled to open that July 26. However, she was again taken ill, with severe anemia. She died on August 7 in Santa Monica.

  Joi had emphasized to George Lee: “I am not how I look, inside. Outside, I’m blonde and fluffy — but inside I do have a heart and soul and deep feelings. Yet no one gives me credit personally, because of the exterior.”

  A few years earlier, Joi took a philosophical look at her career. She noted that she had proudly publicized her exceptional dimensions, but while they were responsible for landing her numerous roles, there were drawbacks. “My being blonde and curvy, you might say, was a kind of mixed bl
essing,” she reflected. “I was always known as a glamour girl and categorized only as that. It was very limiting. I was held back by my image.”

  Jennie Lee

  She was known as the Bazoom Girl, but to her friends and fans, Jennie Lee’s vivid character and generous spirit were even more unforgettable than her outrageous physical attributes and wild stage performances.

  Born in October 1928, in Kansas City, Virginia Lee Hicks began her burlesque career as a teenager just out of high school. Upon seeing her first burlesque show with a group of friends, the already well-constructed youngster decided that she had just as much to offer as the gals onstage. Fired from her first job as a showgirl at a K.C. burlesque theater, she decided to try stripping, and put together an act that proved a smash in a tryout at a Joplin, Missouri, theater. Before long she was performing as a headliner before enthusiastic off-duty GIs.

  By 1950, the buxom (42-28-38) blonde was working in theaters throughout the burlesque circuit, billing her mighty torso as “the biggest bust in burlesque.” During the bosom-crazy fifties, this was enough to bring Jennie before a national audience, and she made the most of the opportunity. Later, she regularly proclaimed herself “Miss 44 and Plenty More!”

  In addition to her natural assets, Jennie was renowned for her prowess in twirling tassels in opposing directions, and for sometimes performing cartwheels onstage. In her uninhibited enthusiasm she was also known on occasion to test the outer limits of the law regarding the presence of pasties and G-strings.

  Stripping and frequent modeling for men’s magazines were hardly the limits of her professional activities. Jennie also starred in legitimate stage comedies in Los Angeles such as Diamond Lil, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and She Dood It in Dixie. In addition, she made recurring appearances on TV’s classic private-eye show Peter Gunn as — what else? — a stripper. She also headlined nudie movies, including Abandon (1958), The French Follies (1959), and Ding Dong … A Night at the Follies (a full-length 1959 burlesque movie). One of her early strip film shorts brought her into court in February 1952 on the charge of performing an indecent dance in the photographer’s studio, but after Jennie insisted on a jury trial she was quickly acquitted.

  “Miss

  44 and

  Plenty

  More”

  As her fame spread, Jennie took her act abroad, including a six-month tour of Asia in 1956, leaving Japanese and Filipino audiences stunned by her overwhelming physical presence. By this time, her organized fan club numbered over five thousand, calling themselves “the Bazoomers.” But for the most part, she worked the clubs and theaters of the West Coast.

  Jennie ascended to a new level in pop culture in 1958 when she became the inspiration for one of the year’s biggest hit records. A group of Los Angeles high school pals including budding musicians Jan Berry and Arnie Ginsburg ventured downtown one night to see the Bazoom Girl in action, and the show left them dazzled. One of the group’s members later recalled: “As she bounced, or I should say as they bounced, the old men [in the audience] would accentuate the bounces by chanting, ‘bomp bomp bomp bomp,’ etc … . While driving home in the car, we started the ‘bomp bomp’ chant, added some lyrics reflecting Arnie’s love for his new-found girl, and ‘Jennie Lee’ was born.” The rock ‘n’ roll novelty by Jan & Arnie (which later evolved into the hit-making duo of Jan & Dean) reached the Top Ten on the Billboard chart in early summer.

  In late 1959, Jennie and fellow strip great Candy Barr offered their expertise to teach the female costars of the film Robin and the Seven Thieves the art of the exotic dance. While Candy coached Joan Collins, Jennie counseled Joanna Barnes for the actresses’ roles in the picture. “Toward the end of this torrid tutorial, when Jennie shook her tassels and howled with sensual glee, Joanna could do likewise — and like a pro,” related one magazine account.

  For all her success onstage, nothing in Jennie’s career was more important than her 1954 founding of the Exotic Dancers League of North America (which she served as its first president). Her friend Dixie Evans recalls that in those days, strippers had only two choices to represent their collective interests: the Burlesque Artists of America, which was widely ignored, and the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA), which represented actors and others in the entertainment industry. Jennie was not only an active member of AGVA, but later became president of the organization — just like another entertainer named Ronald Reagan.

  When Jennie and her fellow peelers discovered that the minimum wage for dancers in Los Angeles (eighty-five dollars a week) was below the rates in other cities, they complained to AGVA but received no satisfaction. So they formed the Exotic Dancers League to fight for better wages, less crowded dressing rooms, and an end to practices like requiring dancers to hustle drinks from customers between their turns onstage. Jennie took the responsibilities of the new union very seriously. The group was “founded on the proposition that the exotic dance has a rightful place in modern entertainment,” she declared, and was formed “to combat the many discriminations that hazard the profession.”

  Like all good strippers, Jennie never missed an opportunity for some juicy publicity. But in her case, much of the publicity was designed to promote her profession as well as herself. She would lead pickets of nightclubs that underpaid strippers; on one occasion, she organized a public burning of old G-strings “as a symbol of our fight for freedom and expression.” Another widely publicized PR stunt in 1964 featured Jennie and friends picketing a Hollywood revue of topless swimwear, asserting (tongue firmly in cheek) that the suits were “unfair to strippers” by lessening the appeal of nudism onstage. At one point, she removed her bikini top for dramatic emphasis.

  Dixie Evans laughs as she recalls that Jennie sometimes acted as her own press agent. “She was so smart, so industrious … Jennie would do anything for publicity. We’d all think up crazy stunts, and she was especially good at that.” Among her promotional efforts were self-designed lingerie that she marketed commercially, and an exercise tape accompanied by a “Jennie Lee Better Built Slant Board.” In 1959, the league started an annual Ten Best Undressed list as a counterpart to AGVA’s annual awards. Jennie also garnered press coverage for her Barecats stripper softball team. Another vehicle for publicizing the profession was a regular column Jennie wrote during 1962-64 for the Montrealbased newspaper Continental Flash, “Who’s Who in Burley-Q?”

  During the 1960s, Jennie expanded her acting endeavors into mainstream cinema. She had bit parts in the 1961 film Cold Wind in August, the 1962 sci-fi film Moon Pilot (with Jennie as a voluptuous siren), and the 1964 Mamie Van Doren sex comedy Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt (in which Jennie played Miss Griswald). Her numerous nudie pictures during this decade included Hollywood Bustout (1961, described by Jennie as “sort of like a travelogue — with sex”), and Mondo Hollywood (with scenes of Jennie stripping onstage, billed as “the Bazoom Girl” in the credits). Perhaps the most noteworthy of her unclad epics was 1969’s I, Marquis de Sade, which chronicled the father of sadism, with Jennie and bosomy Russ Meyer bombshell Babette Bardot in featured roles.

  In early 1968, Jennie met an aspiring singer, Charles Arroyo,

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  who was also bartending at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. When the bandleader invited him to a party, “there was Jennie — the life of the party,” he recalls today with a smile. Soon thereafter, “we started going together, and we stayed together.” Jennie had been married once before to radio announcer Danny Wanick, but her partnership with Arroyo would prove enduring.

  The following year, the couple bought the Sassie Lassie nightclub in San Pedro. She stripped there regularly while he helped run the business. About six years later, after the closing of nearby military bases hurt business, they closed the club and bought another bar, the Blue Viking in San Diego, again with Jennie as the headliner. During the early 1970s, she also starred in an art-house film called We’re a Family.

  B
y this time, the always zaftig Jennie had added considerable weight to tip the scales at more than two hundred pounds. Arroyo recounts that she went to several different hospitals to get her weight under control through various pills. “Finally, she gave up. She told me, ‘I got so tired of all the different diets, that’s all I did. Now I’m just going to enjoy the years I have left,’ and stopped trying to fight it.” But the excess poundage didn’t inhibit her a bit as she continued stripping; indeed, she even posed for extensive new nude magazine layouts during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and gained a new group of fans who preferred their women full-bodied.

  Dixie Evans

  Joy Harmon

  Cynthia Myers left and opposite page

  Sabrina

  Joi Lansing

  Maria Stinger

  Maria Stinger

  Maria Stinger

  Yvette Vickers

  Leaving a Legacy

  The Sassie Lassie in San Pedro was to serve a crucial function in Jennie’s life: it became the original site of her longtime dream, the Exotic Dancers’ Hall of Fame and Museum, later known as Exotic World.

  It started on a small scale in the early 1970s, as Arroyo began putting up on the wall some of the many photos and bits of memorabilia that Jennie had accumulated over the years. Once they decided to expand the concept to an actual museum, the real work began. “I have a strong, strong faith,” says Arroyo. “The idea came out of a depression, and it developed into a kind of miracle.”

  A few years after its humble beginnings, the museum moved to the San Bernardino County desert town of Helendale. Due to its remote location in the midst of the Mojave Desert, the land was available for a good price. Jennie and Charlie busily accumulated more photos and burlesque artifacts; to generate more publicity, she began a tradition of hosting annual strippers’ reunions.