Tom Lisanti

A popular shapely Playboy Playmate, blonde German beauty Susan Denberg, with the far away look in her eyes, was handed a lead role in a Hammer horror movie after playing one of Mudd’s Women on TV’s Star Trek. She grew up in Klagenfurt, Austria.  At age eighteen, she traveled to London where, after working as an au pair, she became a Bluebell dancer in 1963.  About a year later she accompanied the famous dance troupe to perform in Las Vegas at the Stardust Hotel where she met and married singer Tony Scotti future star of Valley of the Dolls.  The marriage lasted only six months but the beautiful showgirl was bitten by the acting bug and relocated to Hollywood.

After studying at the Desilu Studio Workshop, Denberg made her film debut in the lurid over-the-top melodrama An American Dream (1966) starring Stuart Whitman as a TV talk show host who may or may not have killed his wife and is being pursued by the police and the mob. Small TV roles followed playing a German Girl on an episode of Twelve O’clock High and a gorgeous alien humanoid in “Mudd’s Women” on Star Trek.  Denberg looked stunning in her blue off-the-shoulder tasseled mini-dress as one of the three loveliest women in the universe who mesmerize the male crew members of the Enterprise.  The gals are cargo being transported by Roger C. Carmel who acts an intergalactic pimp providing brides to lonely men. Standing 5-foot-7 and measuring 34-25-34, Denberg had the same effect on Hugh Hefner who chose her to be Playboy’s Miss August 1966.  She lists “Harold Robbins” as her favorite author and her turnoffs are “impoliteness, bad dressers, and self-admiration.”  Susan’s pictorial was quite popular and she was one of the finalists for Playmate of the Year in 1967.

Denberg’s notoriety was noticed by Hammer Films in London who selected her to play the female lead in Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) opposite Peter Cushing.  Wearing a long auburn wig, she played an innkeeper’s timid disfigured and crippled daughter infatuated with Robert Morris as the assistant to Cushing’s Baron Frankenstein.  When Morris is set up for the murder of her father and beheaded before her eyes, the despondent lass jumps off a bridge and drowns.  Frankenstein retrieves both bodies and melds Morris’ soul with the remodeled Denberg now a ravishing pigtailed blonde beauty.  However, things go terribly wrong when Frankenstein’s creation tarts herself up and goes on a murder spree avenging those who framed Hans.  After getting her revenge, she meets a tragic end.  The movie was a hit for Hammer in part due to the misleading title and promo photos that led audiences to believe that Frankenstein creates the scantily-clad Denberg, but her suggestive poses in a makeshift bra and panties were not part of the actual movie.  Though Denberg’s voice was purportedly dubbed by British actress Jane Hands because her German accent was too thick, the beautiful blonde still had the beauty and on-screen poise to become a Hammer Girl like Veronica Carlson and Ingrid Pitt. But Susan got caught up in the excesses of the Swinging Sixties.  She turned down many film offers and was content to live off her savings while blowing all her dough on clothes and jewelry by day, and partying by night. Hence, her acting career was blown as well. She is reportedly still alive, despite rumors to the contrary, and residing in Austria.

Read more about Susan Denberg in my book Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood.

A reader recently posted a 5 star rave review on Amazon for my book Pamela Tiffin: Hollywood to Rome, 1961-1974. Click to read.

The late Lyn Edgington was a pretty sandy blonde with All-American girl-next-door appeal who specialized in playing fun-loving coeds on the big screen. Lyn made her film debut playing a proud college coed who leads Sandra Dee and other students in a sit-in (“Bottoms always on the floor!”) protesting book censorship in the comedy Take Her, She’s Mine (1963) starring James Stewart. She then transferred universities when cast as one of Carol Lynley’s envious college classmates who revel in the coed’s plan to live platonically with her boyfriend Dean Jones to see if they are marriage compatible in the comedy Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963) also starring Jack Lemmon as an amorous playboy landlord determined to deflower Lynley.  She played another perky coed who challenges poet James Stewart’s diatribe against science in the comedy, Dear Brigitte (1965).

But her most memorable appearance was in Girl Happy (1965). Coeds Lyn and Chris Noel convince roommate Shelley Fabares to defy her father Harold J. Stone and join them on a jaunt to Fort Lauderdale for Spring Break.  However, the coeds aren’t as clever as they think as Stone hires Elvis Presley and his combo to secretly chaperone the trio while performing at a local nightclub.  As the girls drive south they sing the snappy tune “Spring Fever” along with Elvis and the guys in a scene that cuts back and forth between them.  As the naïve friend who thinks boys prefer the brainy types, Lyn has a few amusing moments at the hotel when the manager threatens to evict the three girls for having a boy in the room even though they were only playing cards.  Later on the beach Edgington feels uncomfortable and suggests to her friends that she feels like they are being stared at unaware that Gary Crosby is spying on them from a nearby sand dune.  The gals later get drunk and wind up in the slammer when a melee breaks out at a club where Fabares decides to do a sloppy impromptu strip tease.

The Loved One (1965) was Lyn’s last film of the decade and was relegated to the small screen for the remainder of the decade with roles on Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and three appearances on The FBI. In 1971, Lyn co-starred in the very popular Dirty Harry (1971) where she reunited with Clint Eastwood playing a hard-boiled San Francisco detective who throws away the rule book in tracking a perverted psycho nicknamed the Scorpio Killer who has kidnapped and murdered a number of women chosen at random.  As the wife of Eastwood’s injured partner Reni Santoni, Lyn has a poignant scene where she confesses to Eastwood her insecurities of being married to a cop.  She continued acting in minor parts on television until the late seventies and then retired to raise her family. She passed away in 2005.

https://youtu.be/R3TOt06w0jI

Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Hollywood‘s cover girl Celeste Yarnall, a former model and Miss Rheingold, risked her life savings to travel to the Cannes Film Festival in 1967 in hopes of being “discovered” even though she had begun acting in 1963 on television and in films such as The Nutty Professor and Around the World Under the Sea. Discouraged that her career hadn’t taken off, she headed to that international city hoping to wow some producers.  And wow them she did! Producer Harry Alan Towers, who was looking for a girl to play a female Tarzan in Eve, spotted her strolling down the street. According to Yarnall, “He yelled and pointed, ‘Stop that girl!  That’s my Eve!’” Celeste made a breathtaking jungle goddess in Eve opposite Christopher Lee and Robert Walker, now on BluRay. She went on to act in such drive-in fare as Live a Little, Love a Little where Elvis Presley’s photographer sings the memorable “A Little Less Conversation” to her sophisticated model at a party; the Philippines-lensed horror movie Beast of Blood with John Ashley, and her most notorious film The Velvet Vampire as a female bloodsucker lusting for hippie couple Michael Blodgett and Sherry Miles.

Birthday wishes are also extended to the British blonde beauty Suzanna Leigh most remembered as Elvis’ leading lady in Paradise, Hawaiian Style; The Deadly Bees; and the spy movies Deadlier Than the Male and Subterfuge.

https://youtu.be/SMknIFeRpw0

Read my interviews with Celeste Yarnall in Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema and Film Fatales: Women in Espionage Films and Television, 1962-1973.

Read more about Suzanna Leigh in Film Fatales: Women in Espionage Films and Television, 1962-1973 and my upcoming BearManor Media book Talking Sixties Drive-In Movies where co-star Irene Tsu dishes about making Paradise, Hawaiian Style.