Bombshells: Glamour Girls of a Lifetime Read online

  The gag worked because the teenager had already filled out to the startling dimensions of 41½-22-36 atop a five-foot-five frame. Joy understood that a curvaceous form was a powerful asset for a budding actress in the 1950s. “The whole thing back then with girls like Jayne Mansfield was the competition about who was the biggest up here [pointing to her chest]. And it was always the measurements — ‘Here’s Joy Harmon with a forty-one-inch bust!’ It was very much the thing to have a big bust measurement.”

  Make a Million kept Joy on Broadway for a year, and she made the most of the opportunity. Once, she walked through Times Square at lunch hour in a skintight red dress while photographers captured the open-mouthed stares of admiration from male onlookers. In another commercially sponsored stunt, a leotard-clad Joy walked down Wall Street at midday accompanied by a guernsey bull, snarling traffic for nine blocks.

  Joy began to turn up in numerous men’s magazines starting in the fall of 1957. “It was all just for fun. Because I’m naturally sort of naive, it was easy for me to fall into the sexy dumb-blonde parts. All those magazines wanted me to pose topless, and I was always fighting it. They’d be shooting a sexy layout, and the photographer would say, ‘Let’s just drop the top down,’ and I’d say no … . Playboy asked me to do a centerfold. I just didn’t want to do nudity. I wanted to act.”

  After being signed to a contract with Screen Gems—Columbia Pictures, her first featured film role was in Columbia’s Let’s Rock (1958), starring Julius LaRosa as a ballad singer who is persuaded to switch to rock; Joy appears as a “pickup girl.”

  The rising starlet headlined an Off-Broadway production of Susan Slept Here, a comedy based on a Debbie Reynolds film. “It was a good role for me, because I was onstage every minute of the show. They made me a little sexier than Debbie Reynolds had been in the movie.” After its initial New York run, she took it around the United States and Canada for seven months. Joy also did a production of the famous sex farce Pajama Tops in the role of tempting French maid Claudine. “It was a fun, burlesque-ie kind of show,” Joy recalls. “I did the part wearing little shorts with an apron, mesh stockings, and a French accent. I’d come bubbling in and sort of shook all over.” June Wilkinson made the part her own in 1961 and later carried it to Broadway and beyond.

  Joy in 1958 film “Let’s Rock”

  Joy returned to Broadway for the hit comedy Come Blow Your Horn —the first play written by Neil Simon. Starring Hal March and Warren Berlinger as young men working for their domineering Jewish father and embroiled in a comic family feud, the play provided a good role for Joy “in my usual dumb-blonde style.” When Berlinger moves in with older brother March and begins to emulate his more worldly style, Joy jilts ex-sweetie March and falls for the younger man. After a six-month Broadway run in 1961, Joy left to join a road company performing the show in major cities.

  Her next big break came through showbiz legend Groucho Marx. “Groucho saw me in Make a Million and invited me to come to California to be a guest on You Bet Your Life. After I went back to New York, he called me and asked me to do some more shows. He liked me to play the dim-witted blonde.” Groucho later decided to drop longtime announcer and hapless straight man George Fenneman and revamp the show, and utilized Joy (billed as “Patty Harmon”) as his eye-catching “straight woman” in his new series, Tell It to Groucho, which ran from January to May 1962. When Marx hosted The Tonight Show for a week, Joy served as his comic foil.

  Her friendship with Groucho went beyond their on-screen partnership. “When I came back to California for the show, my mom was ill, and my dad had to take care of her. So my younger sister Gay and I moved into an apartment and we spent a lot of time with Groucho. He was kind of like my dad. He changed when we were shooting or when his friends would come over. Then he’d suddenly act flirty like I was his hot girlfriend. And I was really like his daughter. He never laid a hand on me or anything — it was all part of his act.”

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  Screen Gem’s No. 1 Blonde

  After the demanding grind of three long stage tours, Joy says, “I was tired of traveling. So I was glad when Screen Gems brought me back to California under contract, and I was working all the time for them.” Joy’s third and final film for Columbia was the hit 1963 comedy Under the Yum Yum Tree starring Jack Lemmon, with Joy as Carol Lynley’s girlfriend. From 1963 to 1969, she appeared on virtually every TV series associated with Screen Gems, plus some others.

  One of her best-remembered TV roles was as Mickey Dolenz’s girlfriend on four or five episodes of The Monkees in 1966-67. She also turned up twice in 1963-64 on The Beverly Hillbillies playing Max Baer Jr.’s girlfriend; twice on My Three Sons as Don Grady’s girlfriend; several episodes each of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Gidget; and various other series including Batman (in a February 1967 episode featuring Frank Gorshin as the Joker), That Girl, and Bewitched. In her most prolonged TV role, Joy was a regular on the ABC daytime serial Never Too Young in 1965-66. The series focused on teenagers and their parents, and Joy played the girlfriend of Tony Dow (formerly of Leave It to Beaver).

  Joy appeared in four films released in 1965. Topbilled in One Way Wahine, a comedy shot in Hawaii, Joy and pal Adele Claire go for a vacation on the islands only to get caught up in a scheme in which they serve as lovely distractions while two male partners grab a cache of money stolen by gangsters from a Chicago bank. Joy performed the torrid dance “The Wahine Rock,” and posters featured her bikini-clad form with the tag line: “Blonde! Blue-Eyed! And Built for Bikinis!”

  Her most famous role to that date came with Village of the Giants, a delightfully goofy Bert I. Gordon production. A fantasy loosely based on an H. G. Wells story, Village is about eight teenagers who are stranded in a small suburban town, steal some “magic goo” created by boy genius Ronny Howard, and become thirty-foot giants who decide to terrorize the town. In this camp classic, Joy played the girlfriend of Beau Bridges. When they eat the “goo” and begin sprouting, the camera slowly pans up Joy’s body as her shirt buttons explode. When the formerly brash blonde blushingly holds her arms akimbo, one of the guys remarks, “What’s the matter, hot shot? Don’t cha like your new size?” She responds, “I was big enough before!”

  In a film highlight, the giants encounter the town’s teenagers in the village square, and begin dancing energetically to the music, with closeups of Joy’s torso in a revealing orange bikini. Just for fun, she bends over to pick up one of the local teens, Johnny Crawford, and laughingly continues to dance as Johnny clings for dear life to her bikini bra strap. This scene was depicted in posters for the film. In the end, the giants are cut down to size by little Ronny’s ingenuity, and slink back out of town.

  Her frenetic dancing in Wahine and Village showed off the prowess Joy had developed through one of her offscreen activities. “When I wasn’t acting, I danced in clubs in Hollywood with my sister Gay, who was a go-go dancer. I filled in for her once at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, and sometimes clubs in L.A. would hire me to dance. I loved it.”

  Cool Hand Luke

  Little did Joy realize in 1967 that she was about to embark upon the most renowned role of her career. Set in 1948, Cool Hand Luke is the story of rebellious former war hero Paul Newman, who is convicted for knocking off parking meters and sent to a brutal southern chain-gang camp, where he is gradually accepted by George Kennedy (the Oscar winner as Best Supporting Actor) and the other prisoners, who come to respect his fierce spirit and independence.

  “My agent got me an audition at Warner Brothers. Paul Newman and [director] Stuart Rosenberg were there. I was told to wear a bikini, just to see if the girls who were auditioning had a good figure. I wore a big sweatshirt over the bikini and then pulled the sweatshirt off.” Rosenberg interviewed fifty to one hundred actresses, but Joy’s qualifications were unmatched.

  “They sent me to Stockton [in northern California], and I was there for two and a half days. I just sat in a hotel roo
m, because Stuart Rosenberg didn’t want any of the guys to see me. Joanne Woodward wasn’t there, and no wives were on the set. He wanted a totally fresh reaction, and for the guys to have the feeling of being without women for a long time. There was no makeup, he wanted me to look natural.”

  Joy Harmon a-go-go!

  The scene unfolds soon after Newman has joined the chain gang, and the men are slaving away on a lonely road. They see Joy walk out of her dilapidated farmhouse in a skimpy, low-cut blue dress with several rips in the fabric. Their eyes boggle as she fiddles with a garden hose before beginning to wash her car.

  As she begins to wash the vehicle, it becomes apparent that this extraordinarily constructed girl is quite aware of her audience — she glances in the car’s rearview mirror and takes a sultry look at the prisoners’ reflection in the hubcap. She leans over, displaying ample cleavage, and we see just how fragile her attire is. Newman just grins in silent admiration.

  “Hey, Lord,” begs Kennedy, “whatever I done, don’t strike me blind for another couple minutes. Oh, my Lucille!” “Your ‘Lucille’ — where’d you get that?” asks Newman. In an immortal line, Kennedy replies, “Anything so innocent, and built like that, just gotta be named Lucille!”

  Next she stands and methodically squeezes the big sponge as the soapsuds cascade down the front of her already wet dress. Kennedy chortles and visibly trembles in astonished excitement. She squeezes some more, and slowly wipes the soap off her dress. As she carefully brushes her bosom, she shoots a provocative glance toward her helplessly panting audience. “She doesn’t know what she’s doin’!” exclaims one prisoner. “Oh, boy, she knows exactly what she’s doin’,” responds Newman with amused cynicism. “She’s drivin” us crazy and lovin’ every minute of it!”

  Finally, Joy bends down to take a drink from the hose, walks up to the car and presses her bosom against the window as she washes. As she sways back and forth in that soaking, low-cut blouse and rubs ever harder against the window, her cleavage assumes startling proportions, and the men are literally gasping for breath, until the scene cuts to the camp shower.

  It’s amazing to realize that Joy’s entire scene in Cool Hand Luke lasts for less than five minutes. Perhaps no other single motion picture scene of the 1960s stimulated more fantasies than Joy’s Big Tease.

  “I knew that the guys would be turned on, and I knew I had a tight dress on and that my figure would be showing,” says Joy. “But I had no idea they were showing my bosom rubbing against the windows. Even when it played in the theaters, it just looked to me like a sexy girl washing her car. Now, looking back, I can see the double meaning of the girl deliberately driving the prisoners crazy. I was just acting, not trying deliberately to be sexy; that was secondary. Maybe that’s what made the scene work so well. I’ve always been kind of naive and innocent, and that’s the way I played it.”

  Cool Hand Luke appeared to be the biggest breakthrough of Joy’s career — the role that would catapult her to major stardom. However, all-out stardom did not follow. “I never really had the desire to become a big star. I know people said that after Cool Hand Luke I should have really gone after it. I was constantly working, with calls from Screen Gems to do one TV show or another. I probably wasn’t very smart; maybe if I’d planned things more carefully, I could’ve gone further in my career.”

  In 1969-70, Joy appeared in Love, American Style as Michael Callan’s girlfriend, and twice on The Odd Couple as a ditzy waitress. She also kept busy with TV commercials. “I did a Milky Way commercial in about 1967 that ran for two years, playing a kooky young receptionist eating Milky Way bars while I was talking. I also did an airline commercial as a passenger wearing a very short, revealing red dress, and a Ford Mustang commercial as kind of a blonde ding-a-ling.” In 1969, she did sexy print ads clad in a bikini as “Miss Body Beautiful” for a line of auto-body products.

  Her first movie after Cool Hand Luke was Angel in My Pocket (1969), a comedy starring Andy Griffith as a parson who helps settle a small-town political rivalry. In a colorful reprise of a familiar role, Joy portrayed a beauty contest winner, Miss Holland. “I had to go onstage and dance in this crazy costume — I had little windmills, run by batteries, stuck on my bikini top. I was giving a performance at Andy Griffith’s church. I was chewing gum and saying, ‘There’s something wrong with my batteries!’, and he was trying to fix it so that I could go on. Finally the batteries started working and the windmills’ arms started going around, and I said, ‘See! It works!’” The picture turned out to be her last.

  The reason for the end of Joy’s showbiz career was her marriage to TV and movie producer Jeff Gourson. “I met my husband horseback riding. Jeff was working for Alfred Hitchcock at the time as an assistant editor. We got married three months later.” Jeff Gourson later became an editor at Universal, working on films such as Somewhere in Time and Tron; he also produced the hit TV series Quantum Leap.

  In 1969, American International Pictures “wanted to put me under contract. But my husband didn’t want me to do it, and I turned it down. He never liked that sexy image I had.” After Joy left showbiz behind, the couple’s son Jason was born in 1974, followed by daughters Julie and Jamie. The breathy, little-girl vocal quality that served Joy so well in her acting days is unchanged today. “All of my roles had that ingenue quality. Even today, I still sound young and I think young.”

  During recent years, Joy has put her distinctive vocal qualities to work in TV and movie voice-overs. “I did all the voice-overs for Quantum Leap. Sometimes I put in an actress’s voice, but mostly it was in crowd scenes, looping in the extras’ voices … . And I do kids’ voices, naturally!” Joy’s looping has also included work on Columbo and several horror films.

  While considering a part-time return to acting, Joy has embarked on her own business, Aunt Joy’s Cakes. “It started a couple of years ago. I always used to bake cookies for Groucho and for people on all my acting jobs. I started supplying cakes to local coffeehouses, and then Disney and the other studios started asking me to bake cakes for parties and other special occasions. It’s very fulfilling. I like to know that what I do makes people happy.”

  Joy’s recent reemergence at collector shows was an eyeopening event for a lady who’s always seen herself in exceedingly modest terms. “I just can’t believe that people remembered me! They were so glad to see me and to know that I was all right. I never made it to be a star, but I did have a following, which I was totally unaware of. That really made me feel warm.

  “I’ve always been a very fortunate person, and I’m grateful for everything that’s happened to me. It’s given me a lot of happiness. I worked for a long time, I married late, and I have a wonderful family and now a new career. I really feel blessed.”

  Joi Lansing

  Among the leading Hollywood sex bombs of the 1950s, Joi Lansing was unique. A non-smoking, non-drinking, practicing Mormon is hardly a typical character profile for a glamour queen. But still more striking, a 1996-97 All-Time Glamour Girls Survey conducted among international pinup fans placed Joi in the Top Fifty, surpassing many of her contemporaries who were bigger “stars” by traditional standards. The sheer power of her beauty, astonishing figure, and golden-girl aura has enabled her to exert an enduring hold on the memories and imaginations of her fans.

  The future blonde bombshell was born Joyce Wasmansdorff (not “Joy Loveland,” as stated in her studio biographies) in Salt Lake City to a devout Mormon family. Attributed dates for her year of birth have ranged from 1928 to 1936; a birthdate of April 6, 1929, seems most credible. When she was six, her family moved to Los Angeles. As a well-developed sixteen-year-old, Joi started working as a photographer’s model.

  From an early age, Joi (whose first name was generally spelled “Joy” until the mid-1950s) had her eye on Hollywood. In 1957, she recalled, “Strangers used to stop me and Mother and tell her I should be in pictures. It got so I believed it.” After she was seen in a high school play, MGM’s Arthur Freed sig
ned her as a contract player, and altered her last name to “Lansing.” Her first major nationwide exposure came with a cover story in the March 28, 1949, Life magazine, which described her as Hollywood’s newest “dumb blonde.” One director dubbed her a latter-day Jean Harlow.

  Joi’s studio biography remarked that some of her early movie appearances “landed on the cutting room floor because they were considered too sizzling” for a young girl. Her debut occurred, uncredited, in 1947’s aptly named When a Girl’s Beautiful, as a “Temptation Girl.” She appeared (barely) in at least six other films during 1948-49; in the 1949 Esther Williams flick Neptune’s Daughter, Joi finally played a character with a name. The following year, her MGM contract was not renewed.

  While modeling swimsuits on the side, Joi won the 1950 Miss Hollywood beauty contest. That same year, American soldiers had the opportunity to ogle Joi as part of a Hollywood contingent touring armed forces bases from Japan to North Africa and Europe.

  From 1951 to 1953, she was married to actor Lance Fuller, whose movie credits would later include This Island Earth and God’s Little Acre. The union ended unhappily. Meanwhile, Joi continued to accumulate small parts in a wide range of movies, including Singin’ in the Rain (as an audience member) and as a showgirl in the Jane Russell vehicle The French Line. She also began turning up frequently on television, including the 1954 pilot episode of December Bride and guest shots on The Jack Benny Program and Ford Theater. Additionally, she served as a regular “TV Girl Friday” on Los Angeles’s NTG show, hosted by showman Nils T. Granlund.

  1955-1959: The Starlet Emerges

  Joi’s career to this date had to be considered a disappoint ment for a would-be Harlow. The small screen would provide her vehicle to stardom. In early 1955, The Bob Cummings Show (later known as Love That Bob) debuted on NBC, starring the ever boyishly charming Bob Cummings as a girl-crazy pinup photographer. Joi was a delightfully welcome regular in 125 of the sitcom’s episodes as Shirley Swanson, a bosomy model who chased after Bob. That September, the show switched to CBS for two years, until returning to NBC for two final seasons concluding in September 1959.