IMMORTAL ANGELYNE

Oh, talking about people growing older (which we weren’t, but are now), how many of you have heard of  Angelyne, the blond lady with the come hither look, one hand idly resting on the pink wheel of her pink Corvette as she blows you a kiss?  You know, the famous Angelyne who in the 1970’s tooled up and down Sunset Boulevard, glowing in her tight pink blouse and tight pink short shorts?  If you have no idea who I’m talking about, it might be worth a google.  Back then, her billboards were everywhere around Hollywood, craftily placed near the studios and towering over The Strip.  Angelyne, looking down on the hubbub and madness of show biz, her pouty red lips seeming to beg for just one more something, her marvelous breasts spilling out over her rosy décolletage. 

 Rumor back then was that she had a sugar daddy who paid for the billboards, hoping to fulfill her dream that she might land a role and end up on the silver screen.  To my knowledge, she never did.  She was the original Kardashian girl, never got a lead role in a movie but had those billboards plastered all over the Strip and on a good night you might see her in person at a stop light at the corner of Hollywood and Vine and she just might blow you a pouty kiss or at least wave in your direction, and so she was famous, in her own way, without ever having an actual film career.

 Well, flash forward - I saw her two weeks ago, working a parking lot at an Osh hardware store in Woodland Hills!  No, no, no - honest!  Hang with me here for a minute:  This was at the west end of the San Fernando Valley near my hillside home studio, a long way from Old Hollywood, relatively speaking, but of course Angelyne had the latest model of  her hot pink steed to convey her about.   She was still the stellar attraction, still had matrons and their daughters and old men like me huffing across the parking lot to see her.  And she was still curvaceously plump, still brimming out of her impossibly tight pink outfit.  Unbelievable, I know, but true.   

 What on earth was she doing, I asked myself, and in a flash headed over there to see for myself:  Yes, there she was, gathering quite a crowd as they swarmed over to buy Angelyne t-shirts.  Yep, she was selling t-shirts out of the back of that shiny hot pink Corvette.  “You’ll like the Andy Warhol one,” she told me.  “I always was Andy’s favorite subject.”  She paused, thinking back, maybe about that other blond Warhol icon.  “Well, one of his favorite...”

 Now maybe you think this is one of those sad nostalgia stories about one of those crippled old bag ladies wandering around Tinseltown with broken dreams, and although it easily might be, somehow I don’t feel it is.  Here is Angeline, forty years later, as Ripley always said, Believe it or not!  My God, her makeup was so thick I was afraid her face would crack, but it didn't and she was still flirty and flouncy and somehow she made everything work and the show went on.  She was sexy Angelyne the legendary Hollywood Billboard Queen, bigger than life and looking like she belonged in a Marvel comic book for super-heroines. 

 I had to have one of those t-shirts, for old time’s sake, you know.  Cost me $20.  Don’t tell the wife.