Glamorous red-haired beauty of Hollywood dies at the age of 96
Arlene Dahl, a flamehaired Hollywood actress, beauty products entrepreneur and syndicated columnist whose dramatic offscreen life included tempestuous marriages to actors Lex Barker and Fernando Lamas and a climb back from bankruptcy, died Nov. 29 at her home in New York City. She was 96.
Her son, actor Lorenzo Lamas, announced the death on Facebook but did not specify the cause.
With alabaster skin and a signature beauty mark near her upper lip, Dahl was a made-for-Technicolor actress who enjoyed a steady career in musical comedies, period pieces and romantic dramas in the late 1940s and ’50s.
None of her films, bearing such titles as “Desert Legion” (1953), “Sangaree” (1953) and “Slightly Scarlet” (1956), remotely registered as classics, and Dahl had little illusion about her screen legacy. By her own estimation, many of her films were “an embarrassment.”
“Talk about past sins,” she later told an interviewer.
She was a decorative presence in a vast majority ofher credits, exuding an effortless-glamour, as if she had floated off the glossy pages of Harper’s Bazaar. She appeared only sporadically in films after 1960, having transitioned to a second career marketing her own line of lingerie and other boudoir merchandise and writing a syndicated column called “Let’s Be Beautiful.”
“A woman’s greatest beauty secret?” she once mused. “Love: to love and be loved.”
She had vast experience in the subject.
As a starlet, she was courted by a rich but disheveled young congressman, John F. Kennedy. “He was charming, articulate and attractive,” she told People magazine, “but every time I saw him he looked like an unmade bed. He had no fashion sense until he married Jackie.”
Her first marriage - to Barker, who played Tarzan in the movies - lasted less than a year, although she rated him “the best undressed man I’ve ever known.” His raging temper, she said, doomed the marriage.
Her subsequent union with Lamas, the Argentineborn screen heartthrob, was undermined by his machismo, including a demand that she give up her career. She said she cared for him during a bout of depression after a car accident, only to have him leave her for aquatic-musical star Esther Williams.
“He was in her picture ‘Dangerous When Wet,’ ” Dahl told People. “Believe me, she is very dangerous when wet.”
She later married and divorced oilman Christian Holmes III, Russian-born wine authority Alexis Lichine (“a terrific temper, even worse than Fernando’s”) and TV producer-cum-yacht broker Rounsevelle “Skip” Schaum.
Her sixth and final marriage, in 1984, was to Marc Rosen, a perfume executive 18 years her junior. “Arlene was very concerned about the age difference, but not me, ever,” Rosen told People. “She needs someone younger to keep up with her.”
She was a whirlwind of energy, feeding off her ardent devotion to Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking.” She teamed up in 1970 with the Sears department store to produce skin-care and health products that she said brought her nearly $750,000 annually.
Dahl left Sears in 1975 to create her own fragrance, Dahlia, but said a confluence of events forced her to declare bankruptcy five years later.