Bombshells: Glamour Girls of a Lifetime

by Sullivan, Steve

  Now known as Shirley Mae Bessire, she danced at the Florentine Gardens for nearly two years, most notably in the Victor Young musical production Pardon My French. The other girls took turns caring for young Dawn backstage, and the baby sometimes slept there in a carefully redesigned hatbox. A photographer snapped a picture of this scene, and it was published all over the country. The Gerber baby food company saw it, and hired Sheree for a print advertising campaign as an anonymous young mother. In late 1949, she filed for a divorce, which Bessire contested; after receiving his consent, she gave him all their community property.

  A divorced mother at sixteen, she worked steadily to provide for her daughter. She had to dodge police trying to enforce a California law against minors performing in nightclubs. Sheree did vaudeville at L.A.’s Paramount Theater; started a dance act with Lee Scott; danced a solo routine with an Earl Carroll musical production; performed for eight months at Larry Potter’s famous supper club in the San Fernando Valley; and did choreography and costume design for other dancers.

  She danced wherever she could find a job, including one engagement in a Mexican club called the Papagallo for $42.50 a week where she was also required to “be chatty” with the customers. “We wore a lot of feathers on our heads and a lot of them behind,” she told one interviewer in 1970. “There weren’t very many up front.”

  Film Loop Queen, Vegas Dancer, and Broadway Bombshell

  In addition, she posed for calendars —under the name “Muriel” — which would become collectors’ items just a few years later. The best-known pictures were taken by Bruno Bernard (“Bernard of Hollywood”). The poses are innocent by today’s standards: a pretty pigtailed brunette splashing apparently nude in the ocean. “The bra came off, but my arm was covering everything,” she emphasizes. Because Bernard learned that she was underage, the photos couldn’t be published at the time, but were widely seen after Sheree became famous.

  It was at this point in 1950 that the lovely brunette — whose name had by now evolved to Sheree — performed in four brief 8 mm “home movies,” averaging four minutes each, which were marketed as stag films. She was to earn fifty dollars for each, but she later remarked that “one was so good they gave me one hundred dollars.” “The Wastebucket Blues,” “Sheree in Her Original Can-Can Dance,” “How to Be an Exotic Dancer,” and “Slave Dance” were considered hot stuff for their time. Sheree never appeared in anything less than leotards or bikinis, but her sensuous dancing heated up many a bachelor party, and would at least briefly get her into trouble.

  “The reason they were considered so scandalous wasn’t because of anything I did — I was just dancing away,” she notes today. “It was because Joe Bonica [the producer] was shooting lingering closeups of my body: moving up from my legs to my hips and my chest. I had no idea at the time.”

  The United States Post Office decided in 1954 that the hotselling films were “lewd, lascivious and licentious,” and tried to ban them from the mails. Postal inspectors claimed that the black leotard she wore in one number was “too scanty.” They also banned seven other Bonica films at the same time, including striptease routines by Tempest Storm. Sheree protested, “I never did a bump or grind in my life. There’s nothing wrong with the movies. It’s just modern dancing.”

  In the midst of the controversy, Bonica remarked that Sheree’s dances were in good taste. “They just have a little sparkle. Sheree has a lot of zip. Let’s not kid the public, she’s sexy. She just winds up and —zowie! — that’s it. But it isn’t lewd. It’s terpsichorean art.” U.S. Judge Ernest A. Tolin agreed: “I don’t believe anything I saw could corrupt the morals of the public,” he said in his ruling against the Post Office that March. Ads for the films continued to appear regularly in men’s magazines for the next decade. Magazine layouts on Sheree also began to turn up frequently starting in late 1950.

  Sheree’s teenaged years were filled with adventure, and one of the most memorable occurred around early 1951 when she went to Las Vegas to appear in Nils T. Granlund’s show at the Flamingo Hotel. At the Flamingo, she was working for Mo Sedgeway, an associate of the hotel’s infamous founder, Bugsy Siegel. “I met all these guys, and when one of them made an untoward move I would say something like, ‘Keep your clammy mitts to yourself’ — all this stuff that I’d heard in Jimmy Cagney movies.” She laughs at the memory. “It’s a wonder that they didn’t shoot me, but they must have been very amused. They also thought I was very good in the shows.”

  She fondly recalls the easy small-town atmosphere of Las Vegas at the time. “We did two or three shows a night, and rehearsed during the day. We’d go out in the parking lot on our break, and the first car that had the keys in, I’d get in it and drive over to the stable, get on a horse, and ride across the desert for awhile. When our break was up, I’d just drive the car back. Nobody ever reported a car missing or stolen — of course, they were probably inside gambling. It was very loose and casual then.”

  Sheree “learned a lot” during her Vegas period. “Sometimes I had to front the show and make up my own numbers.” Recalling the trademark line of the famous 1920s entertainer Texas Guinan, “I would enter from the back of the house and say, ‘Hiya, suckers,’ and walk up through the audience. I’d dance on the tables, and they just loved it. I was free and loose.” Of course, she was well aware that the owners “were all men of terrible violence. But you’re young, and you don’t know anything.”

  After leaving the Flamingo, she returned to Hollywood and became a specialty dancer at the Macayo Club in Santa Monica. Six months later, she answered a call for chorus girls and was signed by Paramount for the film Here Come the Girls. It was not her first movie experience; in 1950, Michael Curtiz had hired Sheree as an extra for Force of Arms, and later engaged her for an unbilled bit part in 1953’s Jazz Singer.

  Around this time, Sheree went blonde, and the difference was immediate. “I goofed in show business while I was a hazel-eyed beauty with dark hair,” she later commented. “I started to click the moment I became blonde.” It was also about this time that she changed her last name to North. Still, she was near the point of giving up show business. The life of a showgirl was not a lucrative one for a single mother. She began taking a business course to prepare for work as a secretary. Then, just as in every good Hollywood story, came the Big Break.

  Choreographer Bob Alton had spotted Sheree dancing at the Macayo, and persuaded her to try out for a Broadway musical then being cast, Hazel Flagg. Songwriter Jule Styne, who was producing the show, hired her, and began five weeks of grueling rehearsals during which she wasn’t paid a dime and was barely making ends meet. Also, her dance number was a small one, and she had reason to fear it would be cut.

  Then the show opened on Broadway on February 11, 1953, after a tryout in Philadelphia, and Sheree was an immediate sensation. Her “Salome” dance of the seven veils lasted only one and a half minutes, and it stopped the show. Sex goddess Rita Hayworth performed her own movie version of the dance that same year, and by all accounts Sheree’s rendition made Rita’s pale by comparison. She was immediately proclaimed “Broadway’s Answer to Marilyn Monroe.”

  Because the national publicity about Sheree had become the driving force behind the show’s success, Styne wanted to expand Sheree’s brief appearance and to give her some dialogue. However, to his surprise, she refused. “All during this period, I just danced. I didn’t ever talk or express myself. So I told them, ‘I don’t want to say any words. If you give me words to say, I’ll leave the show!’” When they realized she was serious, they relented.

  One of the many impressed witnesses to Sheree’s Broadway explosion was Bing Crosby, who snapped her up to appear on his first television show. The result, once again, was white heat. Sheree performed a whirling-dervish dance, and also appeared on the show as Jack Benny’s young girlfriend. Sheree had just broken her second metatarsal bone (near her ankle), and had to “sneak out of the hospital” to do the program. Soon thereafter, in February 19
54, 20th Century—Fox signed her to a seven-year movie contract.

  Events were moving so quickly now that it all seemed a blur. After her abbreviated earlier movie appearances, Living It Up in 1954 — the movie version of Hazel Flagg, this time starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis — really established her in Hollywood. In perhaps the best of all the Martin-Lewis romps, Jerry receives a mistaken diagnosis from Dean, his doctor, that he’s got just a few months to live, and they take an all-expenses-paid trip arranged by reporter Janet Leigh; Sheree dazzles in an expanded version of her role as a jitterbug dancer. Because of her ankle, she recalls it as a demanding experience: “They would take me to the set in an ambulance, I’d go in on crutches, put them down and dance like a crazy person, get back in the wheelchair and drive back to the hospital in the ambulance.”

  Fox’s Replacement for Marilyn Monroe

  It was at this point that Sheree found herself in the middle of the cold war between 20th Century—Fox and Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn was scheduled to do a Jule Styne musical for Fox, Pink Tights, but she walked out after she married Joe DiMaggio and the couple honeymooned in Japan and Korea. The film was delayed for months, and then the studio decided to proceed with Sheree taking Marilyn’s place.

  “I didn’t realize that the studio was using me to try and get Marilyn in shape,” Sheree says today. “I was much younger, highly publicized, and a platinum blonde. So they were using me to threaten poor Marilyn, which was a terrible thing to do. I was totally innocent about the whole thing … . I certainly didn’t feel in competition with Marilyn. I didn’t think about anything except having a good time and dancing.”

  Sheree did her Fox screen test in Monroe’s wardrobe. “They told me that those were the only costumes they had around that would fit, and I believed it.” Fox then made sure that every publicist in Hollywood knew about the “new Marilyn” angle. “My God, the photographers — every newspaper in the world was photographing it all. And since I was in her costumes, what was poor Marilyn to think but that they were using me to threaten her? When I went to the studio, I asked if they were trying to get me to replace her, and told them, ‘I can’t do anything that Marilyn does.’ And they said ‘No, no, that’s not what we’re doing.’ Of course, I believed it.” Soon thereafter, when Marilyn was studying acting in New York, she began signing autographs with Sheree’s name.

  Pink Tights was never made due to script problems. Fox then went back and forth with Marilyn over the next film it had planned for her, There’s No Business Like Show Business, again using Sheree as the threatened replacement. However, the clash between the studio and Marilyn was coming to a head. How to Be Very, Very Popular was planned as Marilyn’s sequel to the 1953 film How to Marry a Millionaire, but she had no interest in the project. This time, Sheree was in fact hired to take Monroe’s role in the film.

  The picture went into production in February 1955, and the hype was everywhere: Sheree North, the perky young blonde who had taken the place of the defiant superstar. Helping the process along was Sheree’s sharp, saucy wit, which made her eminently quotable. Asked to compare herself to Marilyn, Sheree assessed her five-foot-four, 117-pound, 35½-23½-35½ frame and told Life magazine, “Let’s just say she takes a bigger lead offa first base than I do — you print that and let the reader figure it out.” As for “replacing” Marilyn, she was all too aware that there was no way: “Let’s not kid … Marilyn’s an institution like Coca-Cola and who’s gonna replace that?”

  “The pressure was enormous because I didn’t know how to act and I didn’t think I would have to act,” Sheree remembers. “And suddenly there I was on the set, with all these cameras and people everywhere, waiting for me to speak. I felt totally ill-equipped. I was miserable because I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  In Very, Very Popular, Sheree and Betty Grable (in her last movie) are striptease dancers who witness a murder and flee to a college town. Sheree’s wild “Shake, Rattle and Roll” number stole the picture from nominal star Betty; she also does a mean Bunny Hop. Sheree was spared from doing much speaking because her character was hypnotized through most of the film. She seemed on a rocket ride straight to the top. But then Very, Very Popular was released, and it proved to be anything but. Although this was hardly Sheree’s fault, she decided to quit after it was over. Then Fox presented her with yet another film that had been planned for Marilyn, The Lieutenant Wore Skirts. She made it, and decided to quit again.

  Despite her misgivings, her two 1956 pictures were quite enjoyable. The Best Things in Life Are Free was an outstanding musical biography of 1920s songwriters DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson, with Sheree as the female lead; a highlight is her hot dance performance to “The Birth of the Blues.” The Lieutenant Wore Skirts was a pleasant farce directed by Frank Tashlin and starring Tom Ewell (his first film after serving opposite Marilyn in The Seven-Year Itch) as a TV writer married to Sheree, who is accepted for military service. Tom is stuck on base while his wife is on patrols.

  The ordeal eased when she began studying acting with Jeff Corey, well known for teaching the recently deceased James Dean. However, since Corey had been blacklisted due to the McCarthyist paranoia that infected Hollywood at the time, the studio threatened to suspend Sheree if she continued to study with him. “I said, ‘Go ahead and suspend me if you like, but it won’t look very good since this is Jimmy Dean’s teacher,’” she recalls. “There was a lot of sympathy for Jimmy, so they gave in.” With new confidence in her acting abilities, making movies became “less terrible.” That confidence also showed up in TV roles such as the 1957 Playhouse 90 production Topaz.

  In 1955, she embarked upon her second marriage, to music publisher and writer John “Bud” Freeman; this ended in divorce two years later. In December 1958, she wed Dr. Gerhardt Sommer, a professor of psychology at UCLA.

  While Sheree’s films had not been giant hits, most were solidly entertaining A-caliber productions that were considerably enhanced by her performances. But by 1958 the original blonde-bombshell role for which she had been recruited by Fox was being amply filled by Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren. She was released by the studio.

  “I was focusing on my new marriage and was pregnant with my second child, Erica. I wasn’t thinking of my career at all. I did the film Mardi Gras while pregnant, then left the studio. And I never went back.”

  The Theater Years

  During 1959-61, Sheree retreated from show business to focus on her family. “But when the marriage wasn’t working out,” she came to New York to do the Broadway musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale. The show was built around a family working in New York’s garment district, with Sheree as a glamorous model who gets ahead by having affairs with powerful men. Its leading man was a young actor named Elliott Gould, and its musical standout an exceptionally gifted up-and-comer named Barbra Streisand.

  Sheree recalls that the show was plagued by preproduction problems that led to numerous firings, and “one day my turn came.” But she took the risk of exercising the right provided under her contract to open with the show, and it paid off. When the musical opened in January 1962, it was a hit and Sheree’s reviews were terrific — “and everybody was so nice to me suddenly!”

  Since Streisand was not given a dressing room, she accepted Sheree’s offer to share one. As the show got underway, Sheree became concerned that Gould was not exhibiting the kind of leading-man charm needed for his part, “and I thought if he fell in love it would soften him up. I looked over the entire company, and decided that Barbra would be the best thing for him. So I sort of became the house mother for their romance.” Not long after, Streisand and Gould were married.

  After seven months with the show, Sheree’s personal life presented a professional crisis. Her divorce was pending back in California, and Sommer was putting up a custody fight for their three-year-old daughter, Erica. State law did not allow the child to leave California without the father’s consent until the divorce was final. “So I stayed in L.A. and never went
back to the show.

  “This was cause for a lot of problems. David Merrick [the show’s producer] was very unhappy with me. I told him, ‘David, I can’t come back or I’ll lose my baby.’ He said, ‘Do you want to be in show business or do you want to be a mother?’” But years later, Sheree was eating with Erica at Sardi’s in New York when Merrick came by, and he told her, “She was worth it all.”

  It was at the end of Sheree’s run with Wholesale that the woman with whose career she had been so identified, Marilyn Monroe, died. The personal impact of this shattering event would be felt still more deeply eighteen years later with Sheree’s involvement in the 1980 film Marilyn: The Untold Story.

  The 1960s were Sheree’s theater years, a period of intense work and professional growth in stage productions throughout the country. In 1964, she toured with her former movie costar Tom Ewell in Thursday Is a Good Night. Featured roles in productions of the musicals Irma la Douce and Can-Can kept her dancing skills sharp. And in 1965 came one of the most traumatic episodes of her career.

  Black playwright Leroi Jones’s drama Dutchman was perhaps the toughest, rawest exploration of race relations ever seen to that time in American theater — right around the time of the Watts riots. And Sheree was at the center of it, portraying a psychotic racist spewing a succession of epithets. “It was an incredible experience. It riled people up. The L.A. Times barred any mention of the show. Police took dossiers on all of us and stood in the doorways. My car was set on fire three times. Every night, a car would circle the block and a man would come up to my door and tap very lightly — it was very scary. We were considered a big threat.” The show ran for about nine months in L.A. and was then to move on to San Francisco, “but I’d had enough.”

  The role could hardly have been more ironic, for Sheree had already put herself on the line for racial equality at some risk to her career. A musical she had performed in Reno was scheduled to go to a Dallas nightclub that she learned did not permit blacks, so she refused to perform there. This act got her blacklisted from many clubs around the country, and prevented her from appearing in a Las Vegas production of Sweet Charity. She believes it may have also contributed to her long absence from feature films. In addition to her civil rights activism, Sheree was one of the founders of the L.A. chapter of the antinuclear organization SANE, and also picketed against the death penalty.