A former Catwoman will prowl into this week’s Memphis Film Festival.
Long-running film event pays tribute to stars of yesteryear
Actress Julie Adams worked opposite two of the most recognizable leading men in Hollywood: the Creature from the Black Lagoon and Elvis.
One was half-man, half-fish (a so-called “gill man”), while the other was described by an unimpressed Time magazine critic as having “the soft, beautiful eyes and long, curly lashes” of “a Walt Disney goldfish.” But both are icons of the 1950s who have lost none of their fan appeal, even if Elvis appeared in a great many more feature films (33) than did the Creature (3).
As for Julie Adams (originally billed as “Betty Adams” and then “Julia Adams” before settling on “Julie” in the mid1950s), her filmography puts those of her co-stars to shame: She appeared in 146 film and television productions from 1949 to 2011. “I’m a person that likes to work,” said Adams in a recent phone interview from her Los Angeles home.
She’s not kidding. Adams is 88, but she continues to travel regularly to film events and fan conventions around the country, and she recently published her autobiography, “The Lucky Southern Star: Reflections from the Black Lagoon” (available at julieadams.biz). Thursday through Saturday, she’ll be back in the Mid-South — she spent much of her youth in Blytheville, Arkansas — as one of the close to 20 celebrity guests set to take part in the Memphis Film Festival, a nostalgic celebration of classic cinema and vintage television that has been a local tradition for four decades, making it the area’s longest-running film event. Other guests at this year’s event include sexy pop singer, actress and former teen idol Connie Stevens; “Little House on the Prairie” stars Alison Arngrim (bratty “Nellie Oleson”) and Charlotte Stewart (“Miss Beadle”); he-man Robert Fuller of “Laramie” and “Wagon Train”; and “The Time Tunnel” triumvirate of James Darren, Robert Colbert and Lee Meriwether, to name only a few.
Founded in 1972 by a group of B-Western buffs, the Memphis Film Festival began life as the Western Film Festival.
For much of its early history, it focused on singing cowboys and other ranger riders, bringing such guests to Memphis as Lash LaRue, Sunset Carson and Tex Ritter. Eventually, the festival expanded its reach to “golden age” cinema in general, attracting the likes of Buster Crabbe, Spanky McFarland, Elisha Cook Jr. and “Bowery Boy” Huntz Hall, as well as Oscar winners Ben Johnson and Kim Hunter.
When attendance began to flag, longtime festival chairman Ray Nielsen — in collaboration with Albuquerque-based Boyd Magers, publisher of the Western Clippings newsletter (westernclippings.com) — galvanized the event by returning it to its Western roots, boosting attendance with stars from “The Virginian,” “Cheyenne,” “Lancer,” “The Rifleman” and other popular network horse operas. This year’s event is the seventh in a row to be subtitled “A Gathering of Guns — A TV Western Reunion,” in recognition of the loyal cowboy fan base.
The popularity of the convention’s Western theme runs counter to the trends in popular entertainment. Westerns are now rare, on both the large and small screen, while science-fiction and comic-book-inspired stories are ubiquitous. As Nielsen said: “The Western is a genre that’s been written off by the bean counters in Hollywood.”
Like most performers of her era, Adams appeared in many, many oaters, from director Anthony Mann’s masterpiece “Bend of the River” (1952), with James Stewart and Rock Hudson, to episodes of “Bonanza” and “The Big Valley.” Even so, she’s better known for such non-Westerns as “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” (1954), in which her unwitting character performs a sexually charged “underwater ballet” with the Creature that has become one of the most famous sequences of 1950s cinema, and “Tickle Me” (1965), in which she manages an upper-scale “dude ranch” for glamour girls that is tossed into a tizzy by the presence of ranch hand Elvis. Presley, Adams remembers, was “a charming fellow,” but the Creature made a bigger first impression: “When I saw him, I think my jaw dropped.”
Jaws dropped, too, when Memphis Film Festival guest Lee Meriwether was in her heyday, whether she was prowling the catwalk at Atlantic City in 1955, when the Los Angeles native was crowned Miss America, or slinking across the screen with feline ears and bared claws as Catwoman in the campy 1966 movie “Batman,” a spinoff of the trendy TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward as the Dynamic Duo.
A self-described “gawky, lean, skinny kid that boys make fun of” as a young teen, 80-year-old Meriwether — whose Western credits include “The Undefeated,” with John Wayne — remembers the Catwoman audition as being somewhat intense. “I walked into this room and saw a bevy of beauties, all very voluptuous, and I said, ‘Good Lord, there’s no getting this job.’ I said, ‘If I could just do something to make them remember me. ...’ I started doing cat things; I curled up into a big overstuffed chair and began licking my hand. I had grown up with cats, so it was very easy for me to do those things. Also, I had studied with Strasberg (legendary “method” acting coach Lee Strasberg), and we had done animal exercises, and my best animal was a cat.”
Meriwether — who uses the money she makes selling memorabilia at conventions to support Ability First, a California camp for children and adults with special needs — was Buddy Ebsen’s assistant for eight seasons on the detective series “Barnaby Jones,” but she said fans at conventions these days are perhaps more interested in Catwoman and in her guest role in an episode of “Star Trek.” They ask her to sign photographs of herself in the slinky Catwoman costume, but “I never even thought of it as being sexy; I couldn’t wait to get out of it,” Meriwether said.
“It was the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever worn. I was covered from head to toe, and when we worked outdoors, I got burned because there were metal fibers in it, in the material, to make the suit glisten, and they would heat up and burn your skin.”
Adams, meanwhile, had a happier time with her most famous formfitting outfit: the iconic white swimsuit that functioned as a come-hither beacon to the lovesick Creature from the Black Lagoon. “It’s the only time I had a custommade bathing suit,” she said happily.