LITTLE SHOPPE! LITTLE SHOPPE OF MODELS! II

In my haste to write my previous post, I totally forgot that former Playboy Playmate Anne Randall (whom I interviewed for my book Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood) was also in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop playing a model that aired last night. Below are her comments about the movie:

“This was wonderful and one of my favorite memories! Jacques Demy was a very nice man and easy to work with. I worked with Gary Lockwood and found him to be very professional. By that, I mean, he didn’t ‘hit on’ me. I didn’t get to know him and I really can’t remember any kind of exchange with him.

I remember hanging out on the set with an unknown actress who was visiting Jacques Demy and his wife. I thought she was absolutely stunning and a sweet person. She had a beautiful face and a great body—very tan with smooth skin. She was wearing a flimsy mini sundress and sandals with bare legs and no bra. I thought, ‘She’s going to be a huge sex symbol!’ Her name was Sharon Tate. Sharon was there all day and we got to know each other. She was so nice and so beautiful.”

LITTLE SHOPPE! LITTLE SHOPPE OF MODELS!

Turner Classic Movies has come through again with another hard-to-find 60s movie. This Thursday Dec. 18th at 11:45pm EST they are airing Model Shop (1969). In Jacques Demy’s beautifully filmed tribute to Los Angeles and its youth culture, Gary Lockwood (post-2001: A Space Odyssey) plays an alienated twenty-six year old architect waiting to be drafted and facing an overdue car payment. During the course of a twenty-four hour period, he has encounters with three women: his grasping starlet girlfriend (Glamour Girls’ Alexandra Hay pictured with Lockwood) who wants to get married; a beautiful French woman (Anouk Aimée) who works as a model, posing semi-nude for amateur photographers; and a hippie chick (Drive-in Dream Girl’s Hilarie Thompson) who he picks up hitchhiking.

Per my book interview with Hilarie, she remarked about Model Shop and playing hippies in general:

“All that I remember about Gary Lockwood is that he took me out on a date and tried to seduce me—unsuccessfully I might add.”

“I hardly remember the picture itself but as I was playing this role I felt more like myself. I usually felt like a cartoon caricature of a hippie in most of the hippie roles that I played. It’s hard to talk seriously about “hippies” these days because it is conceived as a silly, youthful fad. But I was a hippie. Having survived a harrowing, bohemian childhood, to finally be able to be the neurotic, war protesting, free loving and thinking person I was “raised” to be was quite liberating. The late 60’s liberated me from that 50’s and early 60’s bourgeois life style of the normal and functioning which my family was not. One could be open about one’s life experiences and the crazier or more horrendous your life had been or was, the more interesting you were. Show business made “hippies” and “the revolution” a caricature, but to me on a personal level it was not a silly, youthful fad but a time that changed the world as we knew it and saved my life. It opened up the world to many, many things that before that time were unmentionable. People opened up and began to talk and I think it was a great time.”

THAT MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.

I was in the bookstore this weekend and browsed through a number of new memoirs including those of Robert Wagner, Roger Moore, Diahann Carroll, and the one that most interested me, Robert Vaughn. He writes a lot about his hit TV spy show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and mentions a few big name guest stars but he totally ignores all the nubile starlets that worked with him. Not surprising based on what a number of them said to me about him in my book Film Fatales (not all bad though):

“Vaughn was professional but he wasn’t much fun. He wouldn’t hang out where as David McCallum would.” – Sharyn Hillyer

“I respected him very much as an actor but he was rather pompous and a bit full of himself” – Kathy Kersh

“As for acting with him, he is not unpleasant to work with, just aloof.” – BarBara Luna

“So we do this scene and Vaughn just jams his tongue down my throat. Of course the actress in me just kept on acting but I was not responsive. I was trying to keep my mouth shut. I was so stunned and I decided that I was just not going to say anything.” – Marlyn Mason

“He has the same atmosphere about himself as Napoleon Solo in the show—a very tongue-in-cheek polish and too, too suave!” – Sue Ane Langdon

“Robert Vaughn was wonderful to work with. He is a very elegant and intelligent man.” – Celeste Yarnall