Sixties Posts

Millions of music lovers remember prolific singer and songwriter Jackie DeShannon for her beloved Top 10 singles “What the World Needs Now Is Love” and “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” during the ‘60s.  But what they might not know is that the pretty slender blonde embarked on an acting career for a short period of time during that swinging decade.  Her film debut was in the beach romp Surf Party (1964) starring Bobby Vinton and Pat Morrow. DeShannon played the doe-eyed, tomboy Junior who accompanies her friends Morrow and Lory Patrick to Malibu from Arizona to visit Morrow’s brother who is the leader of an elite surfing group called The Lodge.  Morrow is romanced by Vinton the operator of a local surf shop while Jackie pairs up with Kenny Miller as a surfer who breaks his arm trying to gain entrance into an elite surfer gang.

After appearing in the low-budget drama Intimacy (1966), Jackie teamed with Bobby Vee for the youth-oriented musical C’mon, Let’s Live a Little (1967). It was one of those too-square-to-be-hip movies the major studios released in the late sixties trying to attract the college crowd. DeShannon soon let the acting drift and concentrated on her music career exclusively culminated with a Grammy Award for co-writing the hit song “Bette Davis Eyes” in the eighties.

Read my interview with her in my book Drive-in Dream Girls.

With her short cropped flaxen hair, blue eyes, and shapely figure, sexy Karen Jensen was perfectly cast in the late-in-the-cycle beach movie Out of Sight (1966).  She actually looked like she grew up on the shores of Malibu unlike Beach Party star Annette Funicello. Though Karen left an indelible impression on fans of the genre, she quickly progressed to more mainstream films (The Ballad of Josie, Sullivan’s Empire, etc.) and TV shows (The Wild Wild West, Run for Your Life, Bob Hope Chrysler Theatre, etc.).  In 1970 she was cast as one of a trio of starlets looking for fame in the series Bracken’s World.  As the ambitious one, Jensen had the breakout role and for a time captured the public’s attention.  “This was an actress’s dream role,” commented Karen.  She received numerous invitations to appear on all the popular talk and game shows and graced the covers of such magazines as TV Guide and Show who called her “television’s first real sex symbol.”  After Bracken’s World folded in 1971, Karen’s most notable film credit was the espionage thriller The Saltzburg Connection (1972) co-starring Barry Newman.  She retired from acting a few years later and is currently wed to actor Brendon Boone.

Read my interview with Karen Jensen in my book Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema.

A curvaceous statuesque baby-face redhead with a button nose and little girl voice, Pamela Rodgers always seemed on the verge of stardom but never made it to the big time. She made her film debut in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) where she pranced around in a gold lame bikini then played a Slaygirl in The Silencers. More small roles followed in Three on a Couch, The Oscar, and Out of Sight as one of Karen Jensen’s bikini-clad friends. She was a regular for a year each on the sitcom Hey, Landlord! and the variety series The Jonathan Winters Show, which led to co-starring role in The Big Cube with George Chakiris and Lana Turner; and a funny bit in The Maltese Bippy with Rowan & Martin who brought her on to Laugh-In. She was able to parlay the new found fame Laugh-In brought her into appearances on many talk and game shows of the early seventies moat notably Match Game and The Hollywood Squares as well as acting in a few episodes of Love, American Style usually cast as the sexy ding-a-ling.  However, she never returned to the big screen and was only able to scrounge up supporting roles in TV-movies such as Suddenly Single (1971) and Jigsaw (1972).  She disappeared from show business around 1976 after marrying a third time.

The late Jill Haworth was a saucy, petite blonde with a wonderfully throaty voice and just a trace of an English accent. She was discovered in 1959 by producer/director Otto Preminger and made her film debut in Exodus (1960) as the ill-fated Jewish girl opposite Sal Mineo (with whom she had a romance and long friendship with). She received a Golden Globe nomination and then co-starred in Preminger’s lavish epic The Cardinal as a selfless young woman caring for the terminally ill and his all-star WWII adventure In Harm’s Way as an ill-fated nurse. “When you make three films with Otto Preminger, you’ve made three films with Otto Preminger and no one dicks around with you after that,” said Jill with a laugh.

After appearing in the horror film It!, Jill temporarily abandoned films for Broadway when Hal Prince cast her over countless actresses in the coveted role of Sally Bowles in the hit Tony Award winning musical Cabaret. Jill enjoyed great success as Sally and remained with the show for over two years. When asked years later if she had a shot for the movie, she quipped, “No, they always wanted Liza Minnelli for the movie. She’s still doing the movie!” Returning to films, she played a swinging Londoner opposite Frankie Avalon in the horror opus The Haunted House of Horror.  Haworth continued in the horror genre begrudgingly through the mid-seventies before returning to the stage. The eighties and nineties found her only doing voice-overs, but she was coaxed out of retirement in 1999 to play an ex-hippie mother in the independent film Mergers and Acquisitions. Sadly, we lost Jill in 2011.

Read my complete interview with Jill in my book Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema.

The Eve Arden of the motorcycle set, the late wisecracking hazel-eyed blonde Glamazon Alberta Nelson never got her man as the ruff-and tumble biker chick loyal to inept Harvey Lembeck’s Eric Von Zipper in the Frankie and Annette beach movie extravaganzas.

Alberta Nelson began the decade with a Broadway flop. Playing a servant in the 1961 Broadway play Once There Was a Russian co-starring Walter Matthau, Roger C. Carmel, and Julie Newmar, the drama closed opening night. With nothing to lose, Nelson journeyed to Hollywood where she was cast in minor decorative dramatic roles in episodes of Thriller, The New Breed, and Dr. Kildare before Harvey Lembeck chose her to be his comic foil in Beach Party (1963). Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, and their friends share a beach shack during spring break where their main concerns are surfin’, dancin’, and romancin’. Their idyll life is interrupted by Harvey Lembeck as the inept Eric Von Zipper and his motorcycle gang The Ratz and Mice who “hate those beach bums.”  Nelson and redheaded Linda Rogers were the Mice—the only two girls in the gang.  Even early on in the beach party cycle it looks as if Nelson’s character is resigned to the fact that Lembeck will never have eyes for her.  Here he lusts after Annette but when she rebuffs him he turns to platinum blonde sexpot Eva Six. Even though she is always passed over, Nelson is a good sport and joins the gang for the end of the movie pie-throwing melee against the surfers.  Her character began as the dependable yes-girl but as the bikers began to have more prominence in the films due to their popularity, Nelson delivered more wisecracks in her trademark screechy Brooklyn-style manner.

Nelson reprised her role in all the remaining beach movies from Bikini Beach (1964) through The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966). In between, she and Amedee Chabot play fitness nuts who hang around the bodybuilders in Muscle Beach Party (1964).  The service comedy Sergeant Deadhead (1965) featured Nelson as a WAC and in the spy spoof Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) starring Vincent Price in the title role, Alberta is a robot reject.

With the beach party movies dead at the box office, Nelson returned to television in 1966 with appearances on The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Andy Griffith Show. Impressing the producers of the Griffith series, they brought Alberta back later in the year to play Flora Malherbe, a somewhat naïve, warm-hearted waitress sweet on George Lindsay’s Goober.  She played the role in three episodes and in “Emmett’s Retirement” on Mayberry, R.F.D. in 1969. In 1971, Alberta remarried and retired from show business moving with her new husband to Millcreek, Pennsylvania.
They had three children and Nelson spent her free time gardening and doing needle work until her death from cancer on April 29, 2006.  She was sixty-eight years old.