In Los Angeles WHO’S WHO OF MAMIE’S LOVES Last of the blonde bombshells
After losing her friends Marilyn and Jayne, Mamie Van Doren feared for her future, but now she says: I’m a survivor… smarter than them and still sexy at 90
SHE IS the last of Hollywood’s famed Three Ms: the blonde bombshells Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren, whose pneumatic curves set the standard for 1950s feminine beauty. For a long time Mamie has been the era’s only screen goddess still standing, and while she may have celebrated her 90th birthday recently, she won’t be embracing the elasticated waistband and comfy shoes look any time soon. She’s determined to stay as flirty and seductive as she ever was.
“I’m as sexy as ever,” says Mamie. “I want to tell anyone who thinks you lose your sex drive when you get older – I never did. It got even stronger.”
The 1950s screen siren is writing her fourth memoir, Secrets of a Sex Goddess, and looks forward to her centenary and beyond.
She says: “I won’t say that I want to be 100, no way. I want to go longer than that, as long as I’m healthy.”
As a 16-year-old beauty queen Mamie was discovered by movie mogul Howard Hughes, and soon found herself hailed as the “Answer to Marilyn Monroe”.
After becoming a singer and actress, Mamie went on to star in hits such as Teacher’s Pet, High School Confidential, and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, opposite stars including Clark Gable and Tony Curtis.
“I was friendly with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield,” she says. “I’d known Marilyn since I was 12 and we shared the same acting coach.
“She was vulnerable and sad, thinking that her fame and looks would last forever, which wasn’t going to happen. She had very bad luck with her personal life.
“I filmed Las Vegas Hillbillies with Jayne and liked her very much but I didn’t like that she was into devil-worshipping, and she had so many men who mistreated her.
“I always thought they were dumb blondes to be doing the stupid things they did. I was much smarter, a survivor.”
MONROE died of a drug overdose in 1962, aged 36, and Mansfield was killed in a car crash in 1967, aged 34. Their deaths made Mamie feel that she was on borrowed time. “I was worried when they both died young because everything comes in threes and I feared I might be next,” she says.
“After they died there was less work for me in Hollywood. I felt like an embarrassing reminder that beauty is perishable.”
But with Mamie’s blatant sensuality, that was never going to happen, and the leading men with whom she had relationships or flings reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood A-listers.
“Elvis Presley, Steve
McQueen,
Burt
Reynolds, Clark Gable, Howard Hughes – they were so gorgeous,” she says, ticking them off one by one. “What woman would turn them down?”
Her conquests even included the secretly bisexual Rock Hudson.
“I was told I’d be safe with him,” she laughs. “After a date we came home and in the kitchen Rock grabbed me, and one thing led to another. He was very masculine and it hadn’t occured to me that he might be gay. We made love on the kitchen floor, which wasn’t very comfortable, and he ruined my skirt.”
Then there was her ‘It’s now or never’ encounter with the King, after he came to see Mamie perform in Las Vegas.
“I had a one-nighter with Elvis Presley, who saw my show and visited me backstage,” she says. “He drove his Cadillac to the back of the Riviera hotel and we made love in the front seat.”
But beneath the bejewelled jumpsuit, Presley proved to be a bit of a disappointment. “Honestly, it was nothing special,” Mamie shrugs.
Movie star Burt Reynolds was a much more memorable partner…for all the wrong reasons. In the throes of passion, she recalls, he was given to shouting out his beloved’s name – the only problem being that the name was Judy, his ex-wife.
But his greatest love, Mamie says, was for himself.
“Burt was so in love with himself, he wanted to die in his own arms,” Mamie says. “Not my type.”
Much more her type was Jack Dempsey, the former world heavyweight boxing champion. They were engaged when she was 18 and he was 53, but she soon realised she couldn’t live in his shadow.
“I couldn’t marry him,” she sighs. “I wanted to be a star in my own right, not riding his coat-tails.”
Then there were the big names she turned down, including heartthrob Cary Grant.
The problem, she says, was that at the time he was in the grip of his well documented experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs. “It became so boring I wouldn’t answer his calls,” Mamie says.
She got on much better with Old Blue Eyes, and believes he could have been hers, if she’d said the word.
“Frank Sinatra took me on dates, and one night cooked me lasagna. Suddenly his arms were around me and we kissed for a really, really long time, when Barbara Marx walked in – his girlfriend, and later his wife.
“I backed away, but if I’d pursued him she’d have been gone.”
Steve McQueen was another of her flings after they danced together at a Hollywood nightclub and went on to a party.
The one that got away was tragic young
idol James Dean. Mamie says: “He was gorgeous and after a motorcycle ride we kissed and fooled around, nothing more. He took my number but never called. I don’t think I was Jimmy’s type.”
It wasn’t just the handsome young stars she was attracted to.
“I loved Clark Gable, he was a great kisser,” she beams. “I don’t give a damn how old he was. He spotted me in the studio commissary [canteen] and had me star with him and Doris Day in Teacher’s Pet.
“But he’d have a double martini at 11 o’clock and chain-smoke and drink all day. His heart couldn’t take it. If he hadn’t been married, it might have been different.”
Incredibly, she also dated President
Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, confessing: “I love a smart man but when Henry kissed me he had denture breath, and dirty socks, which really turned me off.”
MARRIED five times, Mamie had son Perry by her second husband, bandleader Ray Anthony. But after Jayne Mansfield’s death she decided to quit Hollywood and moved with her son to an ocean-view home in Newport Beach, California.
She says: “There were too many drugs. A lot of my contemporaries were gone. It was time to leave Hollywood. Looking back, I’m
not sorry for anything I did. People have done a lot of rotten things to me but I brush it off because better things come along the next day.”
Mamie might have entered her 10th decade but she doesn’t want anyone to think she retires to bed early with cocoa and a good book.
“Turning 90 bowled me over,” she says. “I used to think 30 was old. I see lines and wrinkles in my face but I’ve earned them.
I change my hair and clothes to stay young. I’m not stuck in the 1950s.
“I’ve never had face lifts or plastic surgery – never had to. I exercise daily, eat healthily, and I’m in decent shape.”
She has been married for 46 years to her writer husband, Thomas Dixon, 15 years her junior, and they are still wildly attracted to each other.
“I wake up sexy,” she says. “I go to bed sexy. Good sex really does help.”