Sixties Posts

MAKING HER CONVENTION DEBUT…

is the lovely Quinn O’Hara. You lucky Southlanders can meet Quinn at the upcoming Hollywood Collectors Show on July 18 and 19. After years of prodding, Quinn will be there signing autographs along with other 60s celebrities including Tommy Kirk, Francine York, Martine Beswicke, Edd Byrnes, Luciana Paluzzi, and Lana Wood. Quinn has a wonderful collection of publicity photos and movie stills of her so stop by and say hello. She is one of the nicest people you will ever meet.

From my book, Hollywood Surf and Beach Movies:

A “red-headed gasser,” Quinn O’Hara certainly lived up to that description and became very popular with teenage audiences during the sixties. A former Miss Scotland, this titan-haired beauty began on television before appearing in minor film roles with major stars such as Jerry Lewis and Jack Lemmon. Younger audiences remembered her best for her two back-to-back starring roles in two beach-party movies. O’Hara exuded a natural sex appeal that had every boy’s heart racing either playing the good girl as in A Swingin’ Summer (1965) or the vixen as in The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966). She should have become a major star however, disenchanted with the roles being offered her, Quinn fled to England in the late sixties where she worked on stage, TV and an occasional film.

Quinn O’Hara was dramatically born in a hospital’s elevator going up in Edinburgh, Scotland on Jan. 3, 1941 to a Welsh father and a Scottish-Irish mother who named the impatient newborn Alice Jones. Most of her childhood was spent in a convent boarding school in Wales. When she turned fourteen, she and her mother moved to Quebec, Canada where the blossoming teenager learned to speak French. After three years, they upped and moved to Long Beach, California where the red haired beauty stood out from the myriad of California blondes. Her European origins prevented her from competing in the Miss California contest but she was dubbed Miss Scotland by the Royal Order of her home country.

With all the newfound attention she was receiving and with the acting offers coming in, Alice Jones morphed into the more appropriate name for a titan-hair Scottish lass, Quinn O’Hara. Her big screen debut was in a bit part in The Errand Boy (1961) starring Jerry Lewis. O’Hara would go on to work with Lewis again in The Patsy (1964) playing the minor role of a cigarette girl and in Who’s Minding the Store? (1963), though her scenes were cut.

O’Hara’s first taste of fame came when she was selected to appear with Vic Damone in his 1962 Emmy-nominated summer series The Lively Ones. The popular show brought O’Hara notoriety and she became very much in demand on TV but she wasn’t having much luck with films. Only her hand was on display in The Caretakers (1963) where she played a nurse. Good Neighbor, Sam (1964) featured all of Quinn in the small role of a curvy secretary to recently promoted ad man Jack Lemmon. O’Hara kept persevering. She began getting press in all the movie rags of the time and she was chosen by Photoplay to be photographed on a pre-arranged “date” with teen idol Fabian. But surprisingly, the duo hit it off and it developed into a relationship that lasted a year.

In 1965 Quinn O’Hara co-starred in one of the better Beach Party knockoffs A Swingin’ Summer with William Wellman, Jr. James Stacy, and Mary Mitchel. Though it was not her first color movie it was her first lead role. She looked terrific in her mod swimsuits and more than held her own with rising superstar, Raquel Welch.

Quinn next auditioned at AIP for the role of the sexy though bumbling Sinistra in what was then titled Bikini Party in a Haunted House. It was not her first encounter with the studio. The producers and director Don Weis originally wanted her for a role in Pajama Party (1964) but she declined because “I didn’t want to be just one of the beach girls so I turned it down.” AIP decided they needed to pump new life into their beach-party genre so they came up with an idea of combining it with a horror angle, which had worked so well for them with the series of Edgar Allan Poe films. Bikini Party in a Haunted House featured Tommy Kirk, Deborah Walley and Patsy Kelly as heirs to a fortune who gather at the creepy mansion of dead millionaire, Hiram Stokely, to hear the reading of his will. O’Hara played the bumbling daughter of crooked attorney Basil Rathbone who instructs the vixen to off Kelly’s interfering nephew Aron Kincaid. But her nearsightedness keeps getting in her way. That’s her reallysinging in the clip below.

The head honchos at AIP decreed that Bikini Party in a Haunted House was not releasable. To salvage the film, scenes with Boris Karloff as the recently departed Hiram Stokely and Susan Hart as his long-dead wife, Cecily, were added and the film was re-titled The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini. Though the film was not a big moneymaker, AIP was so impressed with O’Hara that they offered her another film. However, it was the laughable low-budget sci-fi flick In the Year 2889 (1967), co-starring Paul Petersen of The Donna Reed Show and directed by self-described “schlockmeister” Larry Buchanan. Much better was the Academy Award-nominated short film, Prelude (1968) starring O’Hara as the bitchy wife of meek John Astin who meets his fantasy girl Karen Jensen in a supermarket.

It was shortly thereafter that Quinn O’Hara departed Hollywood for London to do theatre. One of the films Quinn O’Hara did while in Europe was a small role as a “witch wench” in the AIP horror film Cry of the Banshee (1970) starring Vincent Price and she made a guest appearance on TV’s The Saint with Roger Moore. O’Hara’s last movie was Rubia’s Jungle (1971), which was shot in the Netherlands.

During her time in England, O’Hara made periodical trips back to Hollywood to maintain her working status. She could be seen on TV in To Rome with Love, The Smith Family and Ironside, and on the big screen in the cult sex comedy The Teacher (1974). Then Quinn disappeared from show business. On a trip to Africa to visit her father who was working there she met an Italian guy there. She accompanied him back to Italy where they were suppose to marry but didn’t. When she returned to Hollywood in the late seventies she found it surprisingly difficult to get work. Her friend, director Don Weis, gave her a part in an episode of CHiPs and she landed two small roles on One Day at a Time. Unfortunately, that was all she could muster.

Like a number of her contemporaries, O’Hara took up real estate to make ends meet. After a short-lived marriage Quinn met Bill Kirk who is twenty years her junior in 1981. They married, divorced, and have since reconciled. Today, Quinn O’Hara works as a nurse and has reactivated her acting career. She still has her va-va-voom looks and wants another chance at the big time. “I wanted then and still might get an Academy Award,” says Quinn defiantly. “I haven’t given up and will put my face out there and let people know that I am alive. I have set up a web site and have started attending acting workshops and Tai Chi.”

Looking back at her beach party days, Quinn says, “Beach movies reflected the times. I think that is important that people look back on these films and remember them for what they were. It was good clean fun not like the smut you see today on the Internet. I am proud to have been a part of it.”

THE WAIT IS OVER!

Sixties starlet Gail Gerber’s memoir, co-written by moi, Trippin’ with Terry Southern; What I Think I Remember is now available. Click here to purchase your copy through Amazon.com.

If I do say so myself, the book is very entertaining. The chapter that stands out for me is Gail’s remembrance of what went on behind-the-scenes in creating Easy Rider. For years and years, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper have given Terry Southern short shrift in regards to the film’s success and never shared any of the millions of dollars they earned with him. Today is even worse as “the Lads,” as Terry called them, now say he didn’t even write the screenplay but only gave them the title. Balderdash says Gail and she is backed up by Terry’s original script now housed at The New York Public Library.

SURF’S UP!

On Turner Classic Movies that is. Set the DVRs for Thursday July 9 beginning at 12:45PM as it is a 4 picture marathon of beach and ski parties. Click here for the schedule.

First up is For Those Who Think Young (1964) where rich college boy James Darren pursues studious coed Pamela Tiffin in and out of the surf. Wonderful supporting cast including Bob Denver and Tina Louise before they were stranded together on Gilligan’s Island, Nancy Sinatra, and Paul Lynde and Woody Woodbury as two bickering old queens oops I mean swinging playboys.

Get Yourself a College Girl (1964) sends coeds Mary Ann Mobley, Nancy Sinatra, Chris Noel, and their swinging teacher Joan O’Brien to the ski slopes where pompous Chad Everett wants to make more than beautiful music with budding songwriter Mobley while Latin lover Fabrizio Mioni only has eyes for the naive Noel.

It’s a Bikini World (1967) when Deborah Walley and Suzie Kaye decorate the shores of Southern California where chauvinist beach boy Tommy Kirk tries to woo feminist Walley by pretending to be his nerdy twin brother who coaches her in a series of sport challenges.

And finally Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello have a Beach Party (1963) in the movie that started the Hollywood surf movie craze. All your beach movie faves are here including Dick Dale & His Del-Tones, John Ashley, Jody McCrea, Candy Johnson, Valora Noland, Mike Nader, Ed Garner, Johnny Fain, and Delores Wells.

THE JOAN WHO GOT AWAY

Joan Freeman is one of my favorite starlets from the 60s. I was forever trying to track her down to interview. Out of the blue I got an email from her a few years ago where she told me a friend said I was looking for her. When I replied about interviewing her for my Drive-in Dream Girls book I never heard from her again! LOL

Below is my profile on Joan from the book and it includes at the end a clip of her deleted scenes from Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.

Winsome Joan Freeman was one of four Joan’s—the others being Joan O’Brien, Joan Blackman, and Joan Staley—who graced movie drive-in screens during the ‘60s. Producers deemed these gals interchangeable as all four Joan’s worked with Elvis Presley, two of them with Jerry Lewis, and two with Don Knotts. How to tell Joan Freeman apart from her counterparts? She is the blue-eyed, honey blonde who was usually cast as the sweet girl-next-door rather than the bikini-clad swinger in such films as Panic in Year Zero! (1962), Roustabout (1964) with Elvis, The Reluctant Astronaut (1967) with Knotts, and The Fastest Guitar Alive (1967) with Roy Orbison.

Joan Leslie Freeman, a purported descendant of Daniel Freeman the state of Nebraska’s first homesteader, was born on January 8, 1942 in Council Bluffs, Iowa though she spent most of her childhood in California when her family moved to Burbank when she was two years old. Her father was a railway postal clerk and her mother a housewife. When Joan was three she began taking dancing lessons and by nine she was a regular on a local Saturday morning children’s program called Fantastic Studios Ink in 1951 along with youngsters Jill St. John and Richard Beymer. That same year Freeman made her film debut playing Joan Leslie as a young girl in Pistol Harvest.

During the remainder of the fifties, Freeman continued appearing on live TV along with the occasional film appearance while attending public school and graduating from John Burrough High School in 1959. She then enrolled at San Fernando Valley College to study accounting but her parents encouraged her not to give up on an acting career. Freeman commented in TV Guide, “I loved to dance and Mother had no objection to my being in these [TV] shows. But she certainly didn’t push me. I wasn’t really what you’d call a dedicated actress. I’m still not for that matter. There were long, long periods of time between each show I did. It was more just for fun than anything else. I would have hated working all the time and going to those studio schools.”

Things began picking up for Freeman in 1959. She played one of Clifton Webb’s many children in The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (1959) and one of the college students along with Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin who crash at an Italian villa owned by Rock Hudson in Come September (1961). Joan confessed in Show Business International to having a crush on Hudson. “Once I saw him in a white dinner jacket and black pants and I just stood there with my mouth hanging down to my shoe tops. He probably felt very self-conscious.”

After transferring to UCLA, Freeman became a member of its famous Javanese Gamelin Orchestra where she sang and played the xylophone-like stenten. She still continued pursuing acting parts and after losing out to Carole Wells for a continuing role on the TV series National Velvet, Joan was cast as waitress Elma Gahringer in the anthology series Bus Stop loosely based on the 1956 movie. The TV show debuted in September of 1961 and focused on big name guest stars playing characters that stop by the Sherwood Bus Depot and Diner while passing through sleepy Sunrise, Colorado. Bus Stop only lasted a season but is remembered for a violent episode starring Fabian as a wild-eyed youth on a murder spree, which caused one of the earliest public outcries against violence on television.

After Bus Stop was cancelled, Joan guest starred on all the top dramatic series particularly westerns and also began landing leading roles in movies. She was out of her depth though playing Lady Margaret to Vincent Price’s ruthless Richard of Glouchester in the Roger Corman directed film Tower of London (1962). As the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, the deranged Richard holds Margaret hostage in the tower as he begins a rampage killing everybody standing between him and the throne. Panic in Year Zero! (1962) directed by and starring Ray Milland is “a skillfully made exploitation picture” featuring Joan Freeman as Marilyn Hayes, one of the survivors of a nuclear blast that has destroyed Los Angeles. She is discovered hiding in a farmhouse on the outskirts of the city where a trio of toughs has murdered her parents. Harry Baldwin and his son Rick played, respectively, by Milland and Frankie Avalon rescue her from the hoodlums and take her back to the cave where they’ve been hiding with the rest of the Baldwin family. Several days later the lone surviving gang member (Richard Bakalyan) returns to extract his revenge. Rick disarms the youth but a furious Marilyn picks up the rifle and shoots him dead. The film concludes “with the feeling that, as the Baldwins and other good people have survived the atomic attack, civilization will be renewed again soon, perhaps for the better this time.” After making this film, Freeman bemoaned in Life magazine, “For sexy parts it’s blondes. If you’re a blonde you don’t get the stable part.”

In 1962 Freeman received a Photoplay Gold Medal Award nomination for Most Promising New Star (Female) and in 1963 she was voted a Hollywood Deb Star. The pretty blonde landed her first “stable part” in The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze (1963). She played Amelia Carter an American tourist who is rescued from a pair of thugs in Calcutta by Phileas Fogg III (Jay Sheffield) and his servants (The Three Stooges). Fogg has made the same bet his grandfather did with the Reform Club members when one of them makes an accusation that the elder Fogg cheated in his global journey. The following year Freeman followed in the footsteps of Joan Blackman and Joan O’Brien by being romanced by Elvis Presley on drive-in screens across the country. In Roustabout (1964) Joan was the good girl vying for the King’s affections with vixen Sue Ane Langdon as Madame Mijanou amidst a traveling carnival setting. Freeman fretts throughout the movie, as she is either catching Presley’s Danny in a clinch with Mijanou or arguing with her bitter father (Leif Erickson), a drunken carnie. The reviewer in Variety remarked, “Miss Freeman hasn’t much to do except wring her hands…but does it prettily.” Freeman was nominated that year for the Photoplay Gold Medal Award for Best Female Star [Ann-Margret won].

In her next film The Rounders (1965) starring James Stewart, Glenn Ford, and Sue Ane Langdon, Freeman was reduced to a supporting role as a farm girl who pursues a reluctant Ford throughout the movie. Could the fall from lead to support be because early in her career Joan had let it be known that she was not going to play by the rules? “The last thing in the world I want to be is a glamour girl. I just had a fit when they wanted to take pictures in a bathing suit. That’s so Hollywood. I hate to think of myself as a starlet,” remarked the “starlet” in Show Business Illustrated.

Freeman did progress back to leading roles in two more films that were hits on the drive-in movie circuit. Who better to pack the cars in than Don Knotts in the comedy The Reluctant Astronaut (1966) where he played a timid fellow with a fear of heights who gets accepted into the space program? Freeman was cast as his childhood sweetheart. According to the film’s press book, Joan tested for the female lead in Knotts’ previous movie The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966) and lost out on the role to Joan Staley. Director Edward Montagne remembered her from it and offered her this role without even an audition. In the western The Fastest Guitar Alive (1967) Freeman was finally able to let loose on the big screen playing Sue Chestnut, a dancing barmaid with a fondness towards “scanty undies and silk tights” who travels across the US with her sister Flo (Maggie Pierce) and their beaus as part of a medicine wagon. What Sue doesn’t know is that her guitar-playing boyfriend (Roy Orbison) is really a Confederate spy planning to rob the government mint. The Variety critic panned the movie but praised Freeman and wrote that of all the cast members she was “most at ease and competent, showing ability far beyond this script.” Roy Orbison was smitten with his lovely co-star too and remarked in the film’s press book, “I ought to be paying the studio for the chance to do love scenes with Joan.”

The Fastest Guitar Alive was Freeman’s last ‘60s movie. As with most of Elvis Presley’s early sixties co-stars such as Juliet Prowse, Anne Helm, and Laurel Goodwin, Joan Freeman too fell out of favor with teenage drive-in movie fans during the late sixties. But Joan had the talent and perseverance to continued working well after other drive-in movie starlets had long retired from the big screen. She finally began to out grow the sweet ingenue roles as exemplified playing the wife of drug addict on Insight and a grasping cold-hearted spouse who browbeats her husband to commit a crime on Land of the Giants.

In the eighties Joan Freeman must have surprised her old fans when she turned up playing the mother of terrified teens Kimberly Beck and Corey Feldman in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984). Freeman continued working playing matrons and snooty rich ladies roles well into the nineties. Joan Freeman is alive and well in 2002 and reportedly she is sailing the East Coast with her husband, former director Bruce Kessler.