I nearly died when I was a baby. According to a palm reader I met when I was seventeen, I did. The lifeline on my right hand is severed by a short, deep crease that cuts across it at an angle, just after it begins. Then the line starts up again, ending in a star on each palm.
The fortune-teller held my right hand, bringing my palm closer to his face in the dim light. Silence. He lifted my left hand, which was resting on the table, to within inches of his eyes and squinted. “You, my dear,” he murmured in a deep, almost hypnotic voice, “are destined for stardom.”
If only he’d foreseen what a long, strange trip it would be.
It was the summer of 1981. A B-list movie actor had just become the new president of the United States; Raiders of the Lost Ark debuted in theaters across the country; and my favorite record, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy, won the Grammy for album of the year.
I lay in bed on the 5th of July, gazing out the window at the piercing, azure-blue Aspen sky, when an even more piercing sound jolted me from my reverie: the shrill ringing of the phone on my bedside table. Mark, my husband of just twenty-four hours, managed to pry himself off me just long enough for me to answer it.
“Mrs. Pierson?” the hotel receptionist asked. For a split second I thought she was looking for my new mother-in-law, then I realized she meant me. “You’ve just received a call from a Dawna Kaufmann asking you to call her back right away. She said it’s urgent.” With great fear and trepidation, not because I was afraid of what my friend Dawna had to say, but because I worried we couldn’t afford the long distance call, I had the front desk transfer me to Dawna’s apartment in Los Angeles.
“This better be good, Dawna-ski.” I sighed.
“Cassandra-ski, you’ve got to get back to LA right now!” she babbled into the phone. “A friend of mine is holding auditions for a TV horror host and you’d be perfect for it!” I’m not sure why we referred to each other with our version of Russian names, but we’d done it ever since our days working together as assistants on the ’70s musical variety TV show Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. I imagine the names had something to do with the term “brewskis.”
There’s an old unspoken showbiz superstition that whenever you leave LA, you’re sure to get the call for that audition of a lifetime. I’d dragged my sorry ass back to Los Angeles one too many times, cutting short a multitude of pleasure trips, and had I ever aced the part? What do you think? If I had, Mark and I would be honeymooning at the Four Seasons in Bali instead of near my hometown in the Colorado Rockies.
“Are you out of your mind?” I sputtered into the receiver. My husband rolled off me, groaning like Frankenstein’s monster.
“First of all, what’s a horror host?” I asked. “You know damn well I just got married yesterday. There’s no way I’m coming home for another stupid audition that I won’t—”
“Listen! Just listen a minute,” Dawna interrupted.
I sighed and leaned back in bed, prepared for a huge long-distance bill.
“This guy I know, Larry Thomas, is a director at a local TV station in LA and he’s reviving their late-night horror movie show,” she rambled. “They’ve got tons of scary films they want to air but need someone to host them. The last guy they had was Sinister Seymour, but he died. Larry really likes the idea of replacing him with a sexy Morticia Addams type.”
KHJ Channel 9 had a long-standing tradition of showing late-night horror movies book-ended by a ghoulishly gruesome “horror host.” It began in the local Los Angeles market in 1954 with The Vampira Show, the very first horror host on TV. Her show lasted only a few months on KABC in LA but was later picked up by Channel 9. Again, it was short-lived, but marked the beginning of the horror-movie host, a tradition that would endure for decades. Vampira was followed in 1972 by Fright Night, hosted by Moona Lisa in her tight, black catsuit. The most recent KHJ horror host had been Sinister Seymour, played by Larry Vincent, who entertained the LA market until his demise in 1974. Since then, KHJ had remained horror host–less.
Now they were looking to fill two hours of late-night programming by bringing back their library of B-movie horror films.
“Dawna-ski, I really can’t,” I protested.
Dawna ignored me and barreled ahead. “I told him all about you and it turns out he’s seen you perform at the Groundlings. Small world, huh? He loved that valley-girl thing you do!” Dawna paused to catch her breath. “Anyway, he really wants an actress who can play both sexy and funny and he hasn’t been able to find one. You’d be perfect!”
Dawna was right about one thing: finding a woman who was both sexy and funny was a tall order in those days. Women were allowed to be sexy or funny, but not both. If you were the least bit attractive it was impossible to have a sense of humor. If you were funny, you needed to look like Phyllis Diller, Totie Fields, or Joan Rivers (with their original faces). I loved old horror movies and I’d been working in LA’s top comedy improvisational group, the Groundlings, for a little more than four years, so had the timing been better, horror host actually seemed like a bill I could have filled. Damn.
Dawna began to whine. “Cassandra-ski, please, please, please! You’ve gotta come back and try out!”
But at that time, I was very serious about performing my wifely duties. “I appreciate you thinking of me, Dawna-ski. I really, really do. Thanks soooo much,” I said. “But, seriously, no thanks.”
A week later, the happy couple returned home to our little one-bedroom love nest in the Hollywood hills. The first ten messages on my answering machine were from Dawna.
“Larry’s been posting audition ads in the papers and running commercials on TV and they still haven’t found anyone. Call him now!”
Beginning my new married life with both of us unemployed was a little daunting, so we were excited and hopeful about the possibility of me landing the gig.
“Hi Larry. I’m Dawna’s friend, Cassandra Peterson,” I said, trying to sound cool and vaguely uninterested.
“Oh hey, thanks for calling me! I don’t know if Dawna told you, but we’ve seen literally hundreds of girls for this part and still haven’t found anyone,” he explained. “We’re holding the final auditions here at KHJ tomorrow. I’d love it if you’d come in and read.”
When I hung up the phone, I threw my arms around Mark’s neck and squealed, “I can’t believe they still haven’t found anyone!”
“It’s a sign,” he beamed. “This part is meant for you.”
The next afternoon when I arrived at KHJ-TV, a brusque receptionist signed me in, shoved a page of copy into my hands, and escorted me to the morning-news team’s makeup area. The tiny room contained only a long countertop and a large chair in the center that looked like something you’d see in a dentist’s office. Fluorescent lights glared overhead and a large makeup mirror reflected a few metal folding chairs lined up against the wall. Until that moment, I thought I looked pretty hot in my summery turquoise minidress and white high-heeled sandals. But when I got a look at the girls crammed into that claustrophobic cubbyhole, my confidence took a nosedive. All six of the finalists were dressed in their full-on fiendish finery: pasty white makeup, skin-tight black leotards, and Bride of Frankenstein silver-streaked hair. A gaunt-looking girl wearing a Cher wig glared back at me like I was the freak. With my strawberry-blonde 1979 Farrah Fawcett do, I felt like one.
“Are you auditioning?” she asked, squinting her black-rimmed eyes and looking me up and down.
“Uh, I think so,” I mumbled.
“You were supposed to come in costume.” Oops. The room suddenly smelled like a funeral home. A combination of face powder and cheap perfume made me want to sneeze. “No shit,” I thought, but instead chirped a perky, “Oh right, thanks!”
A black leather–clad woman gazed up at me and attempted a sympathetic smile, but because she was wearing permanently affixed fangs on her incisor teeth, it came off more like a vicious snarl.
I wanted to melt into the woodwork, and because of the heat coming from the dozens of lightbulbs surrounding the makeup mirror, I almost did. Flop-sweat trickling from my armpits down the sides of my rib cage, I squeezed into a seat next to a busty vixen and buried my face in the copy.
Oh, did I mention the script they gave me sucked? It was full of tired, old, hackneyed horror-host-of-days-gone-by lines like, “Come in, darling, drink a glass of bloooood.” Considering myself a comedian—granted, an out-of-work comedian, but still—I couldn’t imagine delivering those lines and trying to sell them to an audience. One by one, the other girls left the room and took their turns reading for the station bigwigs. I thanked God that I was last to be seen, because it gave me time to fool around with the script, adding a few improvised lines in an attempt to make it my own, or at least, to get a laugh.
“I’m your hostess with the mostest, the toast of Tinseltown! Y’know why they call me the toast of Tinseltown? ’Cause I’m always workin’ for crumbs!”
“What’s this movie about, you ask? It’s about an hour and a half too long. This flick’s so bad, I’d walk out on it even if it was playing on a plane!”
“I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but hey, some of us got brains, and some of us just got a couple of nice consolation prizes.”
My ad-libs must have worked because I’d barely made it off the stage floor and out to the lobby before Larry Thomas ran up behind me and clapped a hand on my shoulder. I turned around to see him grinning from ear to ear. “Congratulations, you’ve got the job!”
Okay. Let me just get this out of the way. I’m seventy years old. There’s no hiding it from Wikipedia. My age is always announced in the first sentence of any interview I do. I’m going to do my absolute best to remember as much of my life as humanly possible even though nowadays I can barely remember what I did last night. I’ll try to recall every gory detail and be as factual as possible because I sure as hell don’t want to end up like that James Frey dude who got reamed by Oprah after she found out his autobiography was bogus. The bottom line is, this story is the truth. My truth.
My life has taken a lot of unusual twists and turns, to say the least. If I had a dime for every time someone told me I should write my life story, I’d be able to support my ex-husband in the style to which he’s become accustomed.
I’ve never come anywhere close to being what you’d call an A-lister. I’m more of a B- or even C-lister, not an actress as much as an underground-pop-culture thingy. Mine is a story of the tortoise and the hare. I eluded the short, hot burst of fame and fortune that many stars enjoy, in exchange for a long, slow, productive career that’s stretched for forty years and counting. And in the business of “show,” that’s a damn long time. I once read that the average successful Screen Actors Guild performer’s career is five years, so I’m pleased that I’ve made a pretty good living for myself and my family, doing what I love, for four decades. And I’ve got to admit, it still gives me goose pimples to hear Elvira referred to as an icon or a legend. Love her or hate her, if you’ve heard of Halloween, you’ve probably heard of Elvira.
As an actor, landing any job in Hollywood other than a temporary secretary gig sounded really good to me, so that day I walked out of KHJ happy as the proverbial clam. Sure, they were paying me only $350 a week, before taxes, but at that point in my career it felt like a fortune. It meant I would finally be able to cut down on the number of brain-numbing, data-entering temp jobs I’d been forced to suffer through between acting gigs, which was the majority of my time. Also, just by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin (Ew. Remind me to pluck that!) I’d managed to avoid the dreaded, self-imposed, arbitrarily set date of my thirtieth birthday, when—dun-dun-DUNNNN—I’d give up my showbiz aspirations for good. Yes, in a few short weeks I would hit the big three-O, stop this crazy showbiz shit, and get a “real” job for the first time in my life.
It was harder to come to this conclusion than you might imagine. I was throwing away a lifetime of working toward my goal—endless interviews, dance classes, voice lessons, and acting workshops—and felt like I’d be flushing all that time and money down the toilet. The thought of starting over at the age of thirty terrified me. I had no experience in anything except some form of show business. Now I’d go back to square one with no one to blame but myself.
I’d made a meager living going from one brief TV or movie appearance to the next while living in a run-down apartment and driving a cruddy, orange ’69 Volkswagen Beetle. In between auditions, I worked part-time as a secretary, a hatcheck girl, a restaurant hostess, and a model for Hugh Hefner’s agency, Playboy Models. I also sold a little weed on the side and used my ex-boyfriend’s old Nikon to take topless photos of my girlfriends, which I sold to Japanese men’s magazines. All this was going on while I performed two to four nights a week with the Groundlings. I was nothing if not enterprising.
But as you may have already guessed—because after all, you’re reading this book—it turned out I was one of the lucky ones. I happened to be in the right place at the right time and ready when the chance presented itself. As Elvira always says, “Opportunity only gives you knockers once!”
The decision to call it a day, as far as continuing to bang my head against the showbiz wall was concerned, had come just a few months earlier, when I lost my dream job (cue dreamy, trance-inducing flashback music).…
Yes, I’d miraculously landed the role of Ginger in the remake of one of my all-time favorite childhood TV shows, Gilligan’s Island. Every day after school, I’d rush my prepubescent self home to wade through another episode, just to see my favorite character, the sultry, sexy Ginger Grant. Then I’d spend hours in front of the mirror practicing everything she did and said—from her poor-man’s Marilyn Monroe breathy whisper to her slinky walk. I wanted to be the redheaded bombshell so bad that—okay, I know you won’t believe this, but I swear to God—I somehow grew the very same beauty mark that she had in exactly the same spot, next to the same eye!
Incredibly, I was one of two finalists for the new Ginger—my childhood dream was coming true! The one-hour special that would serve as the season opener for the revamped sitcom was called The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island. Catchy, right? In addition to playing one of my favorite characters, I was thrilled out of my mind at the possibility of being in a made-for-TV movie and then, if the show was a success, on an actual, honest-to-God weekly network TV series! After three separate, anxiety-inducing auditions—one for acting, one for singing, and one for dancing—the number of Ginger wannabes dwindled down to me and one other actress: coincidentally, my next-door neighbor, Judy Baldwin. Judy had played Ginger in a previous incarnation of the role, in a TV movie called The Castaways on Gilligan’s Island, but I’d privately been assured that the producers were looking for someone “fresh.” I was going to be the new Ginger Grant! The days that followed were a flurry of activity. I went to CBS Studios for wardrobe fittings, received my script to study, and made plans to pack up my apartment because—icing on the cake—we were shooting in Hawaii! As far as I was concerned, my days of pounding the pavement, poring through Variety, and attending humiliating cattle calls were over. I was going to star on a network television show—almost too good to be true!
Guess what? It was too good to be true. Days before I was to leave for Hawaii, I got a call from the producer and creator himself, Sherwood Schwartz, telling me that despite his wishes, the network had indeed decided to go with a fresh face. Judy was out—but for some unexplained reason, so was I. The part of Ginger was going to be played by newcomer Constance Forslund. I was beyond devastated. I couldn’t believe my dream job had slipped through my fingers. Many years later, I ran into Sherwood at a party. When I asked him why I didn’t get the part, he confided that one of the network heads had seen me in the comedy improv troupe, the Groundlings, doing a sketch in which I played a patient in a gynecologist’s office. It wasn’t that unusual because, during an improv, audience members are often asked to supply the character that each of the actors play. Other than hooker or stripper, gynecology patient was my number-one request. The network veep reported back to the producers that they didn’t need “that kind of element” in their programming. I, on the other hand, believe the job went south because, years before, I’d lost my shit when I walked in on the same network exec in bed with my boyfriend, Matt. Guess we’ll never know for sure.
Not only had I lost my dream job, but I’d just dropped my agent because he had a problem with his hands. He couldn’t keep ’em off me! I’d spent the previous month going from agent to agent without so much as a return call. The last agent I was unlucky enough to interview with was the appropriately named Edgar Small.
This one-man operation was comprised of a weathered, silver-haired Jewish agent who’d been around for an eternity but came highly recommended as someone who could open Hollywood doors. The walls of his musty office in a posh, older building on the “good” end of Sunset were lined with photos of his clients: the used-to-be-famous and hopefully-soon-to-be-famous. Sitting across from him, his cluttered, gray metal desk between us, I did my best to exude confidence while rattling off my credits. He grunted intermittently, which I took as a sign that he was impressed or at least interested. When I’d said all I could say about how fabulous I was, he sat for a silent moment, seeming to take it all in.
“How old did you say you were?” he asked in his raspy smoker’s voice.
“I didn’t. But I’m, uhhhh… twenty-nine,” I replied, slurring my words so he might miss the “nine” part.
But his hearing was still sharp. “Twenty-nine !?” he spat, before launching into a coughing fit. When he finally stopped hacking, I gave a tentative nod of my head. I’d been in town long enough to know that, by Hollywood standards, I might as well be dead.
“Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you, kiddo, but your days as an actress are over.” He wheezed. “No one, and I mean no one in this town is looking for a thirty-year-old actress. You might as well pack your bags and head back to wherever it is you came from because, and you’ll excuse me for being blunt here, you’re all washed up.” I managed to keep the tears that had welled along my lower lids from spilling over and ruining my mascara before standing up and leaving with what little dignity I still had intact. I think the door actually did hit me in the ass on the way out.
A gratifying postscript, for me anyway: The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island bombed and the series never materialized. In the forty years since, I’ve never hired an agent for acting roles again. I’ll always take solace in the fact that an agent would forever miss out on a sweet chunk of change from the luckiest over-the-hill actress in Hollywood.