CHAPTER 17

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC?

Once I was back in LA, my friend Allen Perlstein, who by this time had broken up with his partner, Joe Danova, was kind enough to let me stay with him until I could find work and get back on my feet. Allen helped me land a job working with him during the Christmas rush at Propinquity, a popular gift shop in Boystown, and I eventually saved up enough money to rent a nondescript single apartment in my old stomping ground, Beachwood Canyon.

To make ends meet, I signed up with Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Modeling Agency and began going on interviews. Despite the name and the fact that many of the girls were ex-centerfolds, the jobs we went out on had little to do with Playboy magazine. They usually entailed wearing short, sexy outfits and working as convention hostesses or modeling for movie posters or romance-novel covers, but mainly posing alongside car parts, washing machines, or you name it. My most memorable jobs were being Ann-Margret’s body double on the movie poster for the film The Twist and wearing a silver lamé bikini while standing in a “Vanna White pose” next to the Voyager II spacecraft at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. I also worked as a hostess at the American Film Market for Sid and Marty Krofft, creators of H. R. Pufnstuf, and legendary producer Samuel Z. Arkoff, whose company, American International Pictures, had produced so many of my best-loved horror films, like The Pit and the Pendulum, Premature Burial, and The Tomb of Ligeia.

Once in a while I’d land a job for Oui magazine, another Playboy publication, which required posing topless. Perhaps the biggest mistake I made in my twenties was posing nude for a husband-and-wife photography team, who bullshitted me into doing what they said was a “test shoot” for Penthouse magazine. They guaranteed it would never be seen anywhere publicly. Seemed safe to me! God knows, I had no problem posing topless, but I drew the line at showing pubic hair (this was back when girls still had pubic hair). Promising the photos would be tasteful and not show anything I didn’t want to reveal, they managed to talk me into getting completely naked, “so your underwear won’t accidentally get in the shot.” Like the trusting moron I was, I did the shoot, signed the contract, and collected a small fortune—what an easy $500! I never saw or heard from them again, and as far as I knew, that was the end of that—until 1981 when I became famous. Those photos, pubic hair and all, appeared in every sleazy men’s magazine on the stand and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. The advent of the Internet compounded matters, and I realized I’d made a very stupid mistake with long-lasting negative consequences. Although tame by today’s standards, they were embarrassing and ultimately cost me a lot of work.

During my time with Playboy models, I also got to work as a hostess for Lorimar Motion Pictures’ annual showcase for international distributors that took place at the La Costa Resort and Spa near San Diego. During the weeklong event, the venue hosted more than 300 distributors from around the world who attended to view Lorimar films and make deals. My bosses were Merv Adelson and Lee Rich, who ran Lorimar at the time. Stars like Jon Voight and Al Pacino were there promoting their upcoming films, and after a little eye contact passed between Jon and me, he asked for my number. Back in LA, Jon, who had just finished filming Coming Home and was still so handsome, called and we ended up spending a romantic night at his house making love on a bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire—so theatrical!

I was later hired by a director I’d met at the Film Market to work as a production assistant and photographer on a commercial starring Raquel Welch. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen; however, she wasn’t the kindest, at least to me. The whole day she treated me like her personal slave, making crazy demands that kept me running. First, she wanted fruit. We were shooting at a home high up in the hills of Bel Air, so getting to a store was quite a trek. When I returned with an array of every fruit available, she got angry because there weren’t any kiwis. I sped back down to town, running from one store to another, only to discover that, during winter in the ’70s, kiwis were impossible to find. When I returned kiwi-less hours later, she was furious. She demanded I go out and buy her some magazines. “Which ones would you like?” I asked. “I don’t know! Get them all!” she snapped. Frustrated, I drove to a magazine stand and came back with a trunkful of everything from Ladies’ Home Journal to Popular Mechanic. Turns out she had good reason to want me out of the way. Her slimy French husband, who spent the day hanging around the set, was making passes at me and every other woman within spitting distance whenever Raquel turned her back. The moral? Beauty doesn’t always equal happiness.

The same director hired me again to shoot photos at the press junket for the box office flop Meteor. Even though the movie sucked, I had a fantastic time spending the day in a helicopter shuttling up and down into the Barringer meteor crater in Arizona and taking photos of the movie’s stars, Natalie Wood, Martin Landau, and Sean Connery (who I’d met back in my Vegas days when I shot a brief scene in the Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, which featured some of the showgirls from Vive Les Girls). We spent a fun day together and I got some great shots.

It was time to reevaluate. I had no money, no real career, and no boyfriend. What was I doing wrong? Why was I here again? It suddenly felt like my whole life had been a huge waste of time. I became depressed and had moments when I seriously considered doing myself in. A friend suggested a couple of books to me that became game changers: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Dr. Joseph Murphy and The Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes. Coincidentally, I later learned that a dog-eared, highlighted copy of that book sits on Elvis’s desk at Graceland. The basic philosophy is this: “The law of action and reaction is universal. Whatever you impress upon your subconscious mind is expressed in your life experiences. Therefore, you must carefully watch all ideas and thoughts entertained in your conscious mind.” Many years later, The Secret would echo a similar philosophy and become wildly successful.

I’m not a religious person. Between my Jehovah’s Witness grandma scaring the literal bejesus out of me with her fire-and-brimstone talk, and my parents, who never attended church but still forced me to go to Sunday school every week, I was turned off to religion big time. When I was a kid, sitting through endless repetitions of Bible passages at Sunday school was living hell for me. The only image that stuck with me was watching the smiling teacher slap some cutout felt figures of Jesus, a few sheep, and a couple dogs that looked like Lassie on a cloth board while we recited the Lord’s Prayer in unison: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” I decided the two collies were named Goodness and Mercy and that they would follow me for the rest of my life, which I have to say gave me a sense of security. After a short time of being coerced into attending Sunday-school classes, I got smart. When my parents dropped me off at the little white clapboard Presbyterian church not far from our house, I walked in the front door and straight out the back, where I’d climb down to the creek and catch and release tadpoles for the next hour. I’m all for everyone practicing whatever religion they want as long as they (a) don’t try to foist it off on me; and (b) don’t berate, deride, beat, maim, or kill anyone who doesn’t believe exactly the same way they do.

Despite all this, I consider myself a spiritual person and believe in a power greater than myself. Dr. Murphy’s and Ernest Holmes’s philosophy resonated deeply. Based on both the spiritual and scientific, their philosophy had already worked for me so many times in my life that I couldn’t ignore it. Just a couple examples: believing I could be a showgirl in Vegas and my encounter with Elvis—hellooo!? I’d always known that what I dreamed of, what I desired and believed in, came into my experience. Here was a book that put my feelings into words and spelled it out: if you desire something and truly believe and feel it’s your reality, it will come to pass. That works both ways, by the way—good and bad—so it’s critical to watch your thoughts and words.

A quote of Ernest Holmes that really resonated was, “You are like the Captain navigating a ship. He must give the right orders, and likewise, you must give the right orders (thoughts and images) to your subconscious mind, which controls and governs all your experiences.” It went on to say that a person without a specific goal in mind is like a ship without a compass. How will you ever reach your goal if you’re floating around in circles without a map or a specific destination in mind?

Reading that passage, over and over again, I decided I had to be a lot more specific about what I wanted. I made a vow not to leave LA again for another traveling show, no matter how bleak my finances became. From then on, I would focus on acting, and even more specifically, on comedy acting. I promised myself that I would no longer go on any interviews or accept any jobs that weren’t for comedy roles.

The first thing I did was write down the specific things I wanted in painstaking detail, beginning with a good long-term acting job and a lasting romantic relationship. I read my list every night before bed, then tucked it under my pillow. The next thing I did was go to the Groundlings Theatre and sign up for classes.