Bombshells: Glamour Girls of a Lifetime

by Sullivan, Steve

  Sabrina headed south in 1960 and found a most receptive audience in Cuba. By press accounts, she apparently took the country by storm — including its new revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, who found time to show her some of Havana’s famed sights. The trip proved so successful that American promoters who had previously snubbed her were suddenly forwarding new offers. “Who says I’ve gone bust?” she proclaimed to reporters.

  After having been away for four years, Sabrina — her measurements now improbably reported as 42-18-35 — made a widely heralded return to London in 1963. She made TV appearances (including a reunion with Askey) and performed in nightclubs, once again playing the breathy-voiced dumb blonde joking about her assets. She and Askey also performed a skit at the Royal Variety Show. In December 1964, a worldwide search for a bosomy successor to June Wilkinson (who was leaving to make a movie) in the bedroom-comedy stage hit Pajama Tops ended in the selection of Sabrina. But it soon became apparent that when it came to theatrical comedy talent, Sabrina did not quite measure up to her old friend and rival, and the show quickly closed.

  Sabrina hit the road again, with a tour of Europe and Australia. She became a particular favorite Down Under, appearing regularly on television as the Caltex Oil girl. By the end of 1965, she had settled down to stay in the United States.

  In August 1966, Sabrina starred in Rattle of a Simple Man at the Ivar Theater in Los Angeles. This play had been preceded by an eastern-U.S. tour with The Loving Couch. In an interview at the time, she showed her sense of perspective about a most unusual career. “I’ve never taken myself seriously. I’ve always been content to be the dumb blonde of the BBC. It’s a bit of a giggle for me to take on this part because I’m not an actress at all.”

  The curtain did not close on one of the most curious of all show business careers until later that year, when Sabrina was top billed in a cheap exploitation movie called The Ice House. The film depicted a psycho killer who strangles a succession of beauties who gave him the cold shoulder, encasing them in a meat freezer. The picture was placed in cold storage for three years until a limited release in 1969.

  In December 1967, Sabrina announced that she had married Dr. Harry Meilsheimer, a wealthy Hollywood plastic surgeon. “He’s tall, dark and handsome … . We’re very much in love,” she said happily. Sabrina and her new husband settled down in Encino, California. Looking back on her career in the 1970s, she remarked: “I always enjoyed singing and dancing, but really I never took myself seriously as a performer. Neither did the public, not to mention producers and casting directors. They usually reviewed my figure and not the performance. I was frustrated and eventually got fed up with the whole thing.”

  In one last hurrah as an entertainer, Sabrina made a special return appearance to England in 1974 for Arthur Askey’s This Is Your Life. Unfortunately, married life back in California proved less enduring than her career, and the Meilsheimers divorced around 1980.

  In the final analysis, it can fairly be said that Sabrina was “all sizzle and no steak.” But for a time, that sizzle alone was oh so tantalizing. “I can’t dance. I can’t sing. And I can’t act,” she once candidly admitted, shrugging her beautiful shoulders. Whatever Sabrina may have lacked in ability, she more than compensated for as a delightfully goofy symbol of a bosomaddled age.

  Maria Stinger

  Like no glamour girl before or since, Marilyn Monroe inspired a generation of aspiring imitators who sought fame by trading on her golden tresses, little-girl wink and smile, and big-girl sensuality. Among the most popular of these “Marilyn wanna-be’s” was Maria Stinger, who seemed to have the makings of one of the era’s true glamour queens. It never happened because Maria would share at least one more trait with Marilyn: death long before her time had come.

  “It’s amazing how very much her life paralleled Marilyn’s,” remarks Maria’s husband of sixteen years, Harry Stinger. “She was an illegitimate child like Marilyn. And, like Marilyn, she committed suicide at age thirty-six.”

  Maria was born in Philadelphia in 1931. Her father, who was not married to her mother, was an Irish-American policeman. Maria’s mother later married another man, who drank heavily and apparently had a violent temper; the couple ultimately divorced after having two children.

  In October 1948, Maria moved out and settled in Miami. “When I first met her, she was very shy, and would walk down the street with her head down,” Harry recalls. “I was twenty-five, and had just gotten out of the military … . She was just seventeen. I was married at the time, but divorced soon after.” They were married in 1949. During the next few years, they had three daughters — poetically named Spring, Autumn, and Summer.

  At first, Maria was a housewife while Harry began his career as a painting contractor. After having Spring and Autumn, she began modeling around 1951. Her saucy brown-haired beauty and curvaceous five-foot-four, 37-25-36 form made her ideal for swimwear. “Big swimsuit companies like Jansen and Cole would send their salesmen down to Miami, set up in a hotel where buyers would come to see the latest suits, and Maria would model them. She probably got about twenty-five dollars a session.”

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  The first well-known glamour photographer to shoot Maria was Bill Hamilton, also known for his work with Bettie Page under the pseudonym Jan Caldwell. By this time, Maria was taking advantage of her resemblance to Marilyn Monroe by bleaching her hair blonde. Hamilton did some splendid early layouts on Maria (starting with the December 1953 issue of Photo), but the photographer who would become most closely associated with her was Bunny Yeager.

  Bunny recalls that Hamilton “came to me because he had this wonderful girl and he needed some bikini suits.” Hamilton then sent Harry Stinger to see Bunny. “When he pulled out his wallet with pictures of Maria, I couldn’t believe it. I mean, here was Marilyn Monroe, here was a movie star. I thought, how could anyone be married to this gorgeous creature? I was really enthralled with her beauty. So I made some bikinis for her to wear, but what I really wanted was to photograph her for myself. And eventually, I did.”

  Nearly all magazine write-ups on Maria cite her victory in a Marilyn look-alike contest as the event that launched her to modeling stardom. But interestingly, this victory did not occur until late 1954 or early 1955, nearly a year after her Monroe-like photos began appearing in national magazines.

  “It’s fun when people do double takes over me,” Maria confessed at the time. “I know they think they’re seeing you-know-who.” By the end of 1954, Maria was a hot pinup property. Among her hundreds of magazine appearances, the most noteworthy included four Night & Day covers (July 1954, April and July 1956, and October 1958) and a nude layout in Fling Festival issue 5 in 1960.

  “I loved Maria as a model,” says Bunny. “She was like Bettie Page — you just couldn’t help but like photographing her and to be around her.” In addition, Maria “probably became my best friend during that era. I had my first child right after she had her last child, and we’d share baby clothes. We’d go out together with our husbands. She was about the closest friend I had.”

  While her most famous layouts were photographed by Bunny, starting in late 1954 she did a number of bondage-type layouts for Irving Klaw that also created a stir. “Klaw got her name from Bunny, and every three months or so he’d come down to Miami with whips, six-inch spiked heels, and the like, and shoot Maria in S-M stuff,” says Harry Stinger. “He paid about one hundred dollars a session. There was no nudity, just bra, underwear, and garter belt. I’m in some of those layouts, too! I’d put a grimace on my face, and Maria would threaten me with a whip. It was all just playacting.”

  Maria in the Spotlight

  The flush of success Maria experienced through modeling gave her a sense of confidence that she’d never known. “It was a great crutch for her,” says Harry Stinger. “It gave her an outlet, some notoriety and recognition. She gloried in it.”

  Nothing gave Maria greater pleasure than the admiring m
ale attention that would feed her fragile self-confidence. Bunny recalls: “Maria would come off as very shy at parties, and here she’s dressed with these big boobs and everything hanging out. In the back of her mind, she knew she was turning everybody on. You could talk her into taking her clothes off at the drop of a hat, in a sweet, little-girl way. People would convince her to take off her top at a party or by a swimming pool. Because that was what she really wanted to do, but she had to be kind of talked into it, so everybody played that game with her.” Harry Stinger recalls that she enjoyed receiving male attention in everyday life. “We’d go to a bowling alley with Maria wearing stretch pants, and every guy in all forty lanes would be watching her. She reveled in the attention.”

  “Maria could be so temperamental,” Bunny recalls. “She was strange in that she would cut her hair, dye it different colors, and once she even shaved her head bald. It was hard for me to convince her to keep the Marilyn Monroe look … . With that look, she could have done anything. I tried so hard to get more pictures of her when she looked good. But when she went back to her natural color, Maria would say, ‘I like it this way and I don’t care if I never model again.’ … I couldn’t sell her as a brunette. She was never as pretty as she was when she looked like Marilyn.”

  Harry Stinger well remembers when he “came home one day and she had shaved her head bald. She didn’t give any reason — she just felt like doing it. She said her hair would grow back fuller afterward, and it did.” For the next few months, she wore wigs for modeling jobs.

  In retrospect, he realizes that it was not the first sign of the demons in Maria’s mind. “When we bought our first G.I. Bill house around 1953. I had a Prudential man come by to talk about life insurance. Out of the blue at one point. Maria suddenly asked him if they paid in case of suicide. Why in the world would she ask that?”

  Perhaps due to her lack of self-confidence, Maria never actively pursued a show business career. Once, a studio flew her out to California to serve as a nude body double for an actress in a single scene. The only other “acting” she ever did (except for a 1963 nudist movie) was six weeks of Lanolin commercials during local studio cut-ins of Wednesday-night fights.

  “She never mentioned wanting an acting career, and certainly never pursued it.” Harry Stinger says. “And I don’t think she would have been a good actress — she couldn’t have handled the pressure.” But Bunny believes Maria could have made it if she’d tried. “There was just something holding her back. She kept trying to destroy herself with all these crazy looks. She should have been a big star.”

  All things considered, says Bunny, “I would rate Maria Stinger and Bettie Page side-by-side [as exciting models]. They just exuded sex all over the place … . When you finally got Maria out there, she really enjoyed posing — it was just like Bettie. You hated it when you ran out of film, because she was still going! Maria was provocative without knowing it. But she kept saying, ‘I just want to be a housewife.’ I could never quite understand it.”

  Even while avoiding show business itself, Maria stayed on its fringes, including the long friendship she and Harry had with Sammy Davis Jr., which began at a Miami club. “Sammy sat with us at the table after the show, and when Bunny introduced us, he said to Maria, ‘Your face is in all the magazines! Can I do a shoot with you?’” recalls Harry Stinger. “So he shot Maria, and it turned up on the cover of People Today.”

  Maria’s modeling income was crucial for the growing family. When Harry began working as a restaurant general manager, “that had me working nights, so I didn’t have time to give Maria the counseling she needed. It was a time in her life when she really needed someone. She couldn’t be left alone. She needed someone next to her, just for companionship.”

  By the start of the 1960s, Maria was drinking during the day, smoking more heavily than before, and going to bars at night. She shed the Monroe image by modeling in her natural brunette state — and occasionally under pseudonyms. Her face took on a somewhat harder, puffier appearance, and her body seemed more voluptuous than before. Some even suspected a bust job, but Bunny says, “It was just that she was putting on weight, and she looked bigger all over.”

  Maria’s drinking did not go unnoticed. “She’d call me on the phone and we’d have these strange conversations where she didn’t seem like she was with it.” Bunny recalls. The fun-loving Maria she had known now seemed sullen and distracted. Still, they kept in touch. In 1963, Bunny provided the photos for Maria’s book, Guide for the Amateur Photographers’ Model. It offered practical advice to aspiring models, with vintage and recent pinup poses.

  Around late 1963, Maria starred in the nudie film Girls Come, Too (also known as Nature’s Sweethearts and How I Became a Nudist). Using her own name, Maria opens the film describing her real-life career, showing a portfolio of her magazine covers and even mentioning her recent book. In typical nudie-film fashion, she goes on to relate her introduction to a nudist camp to escape the pressures of workaday life and to “get out of those confining city clothes.”

  “Being a photographer’s model, you get used to being in the nude,” she remarks. Once at the camp, we see plenty of Maria in all her latter-day glory: harder-looking than in the past — and in a preposterous platinum blonde wig — but impressively voluptuous. In addition to the usual nudist volleyball and shuffleboard scenes, there’s also an enjoyable nude modeling sequence with Maria and several other girls on a yacht.

  At the film’s conclusion, Maria marries the fellow who initiated her into the nudist experience. “I had come to Miami Beach on an ordinary modeling assignment, and it turned out to be the beginning of a richer, happier life for me,” she proclaims. Sadly, in real life this was not to be the case.

  The End

  In 1965, Maria and Harry Stinger were divorced. This came as a complete surprise to Bunny “because they’d been through a lot together.” There had been financial difficulties, including a bankruptcy declaration when Harry’s restaurant business folded. But the chief cause was Maria’s steadily deteriorating mental and spiritual health.

  Her modeling days now over, she was deprived of her sole source of self-esteem. “She needed her career, it was essential for her ego,” declares Harry Stinger. “She had a husband who loved her, three children, and a nice home. But she couldn’t seem to take solace in that. She felt her career was over, and she needed that adulation.” Despite her family, Maria seemed to feel alone. “She was reaching out. She’d run up big phone bills calling Sammy Davis, just to talk.”

  “The handwriting was on the wall” when Maria went out for a pizza one night and didn’t return. “The next morning, I broke down the door at a bar, and there she was,” says Harry. Also, she was buying large amounts of patent drugs for various real and imagined ailments. About a year before the divorce, she had taken an overdose of pills and had to have her stomach pumped.

  Following the divorce, Maria moved to Columbia, South Carolina, and began another romantic relationship, which didn’t work out. “I talked with her about two weeks before her death,” says Harry, who had remarried by then. “She said she would try to come down for Christmas. She had been working for the previous couple of months at a fabric shop, as a salesperson. She even mentioned getting together again, but I knew that wasn’t possible.”

  Bunny was in California working on a photo assignment for the National Enquirer in November 1967 when she received the shocking news from Harry Stinger that Maria had taken her own life by swallowing about fifty pills. After being discovered she was taken to intensive care, but died there. It was the day before Thanksgiving.

  Despite all the episodes of odd behavior, there seemed to be no warning for Bunny that it would lead to this. “She was such a nice person, really a lot of fun. It’s a shame.”

  The great glamour photographer Peter Gowland told me, in discussing another model with a tragic life, of his belief that “it’s a curse to be beautiful.” Could it be that the demands placed upon Maria to live up to the
public’s glamour-girl expectations became too much for her? Bunny Yeager rejects this theory. “Being beautiful isn’t a curse, it’s a blessing,” she declares. “I just think Maria turned into a different person.”

  Harry Stinger agrees. In her own troubled mind, Maria seemed to believe that being beautiful and admired by men was all she had. “I tried to make her understand that with her family, there was life after modeling.” But that message was never taken to heart.

  Reflecting on Maria today, he says that one quote about Marilyn Monroe from her former husband continues to resonate with meaning for the woman who built her career on the screen goddess’s image. “Arthur Miller said that emotionally, Marilyn was like an empty vessel — no matter how hard you tried, you could never fill it up.” Like Marilyn, every time Maria received approval through her career, the feeling would fade quickly and the emptiness would return. Finally, there was nothing left to fill the void.

  Maria left a suicide note, addressed to her daughters. Nearly thirty years later, that letter has never been opened.

  Yvette Vickers

  A sultry blonde uncovered as Playboy’s Playmate of the Month, Yvette Vickers has become one of the definitive symbols to connoisseurs of the tarty “bad girls” who made the B movies of the 1950s beloved to a generation.

  Yvette was born in Kansas City on August 26, 1935, the daughter of Chuck and Iola Vedder. The name of tenor saxophonist Chuck Vedder is well known to record collectors; after playing in the bands of Paul Whiteman (at age sixteen), Tommy Dorsey, and Harry James, he cranked out some hot small-combo instrumental singles in the 1950s. As a child, Yvette went on the road with her parents. Her mother was an adept pianist in her own right (originally a classical concert pianist), and when Chuck struck out on his own, Iola performed with his combo nightly at Danny’s Hideaway, a club outside of Lancaster, California.