BONUS NUMBER 115: MAMIE VAN DOREN, THE BLOWTORCH BLONDE, NEVER WON AN OSCAR -- AND SHE NEVER NEEDED ONE
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
She is now ninety-four and, by all accounts, doing well. She even has a Substack post, although so far it’s a meager one that’s mainly to promote her latest book, Secrets of the Goddess. She was at work on a previous memoir, Playing the Field, when associate editor Freeman Gunter interviewed her for Mandate in 1984. (That book was published three years later.)
She has always been a friend to gays, and was one of the first Hollywood celebrities to lend her name to AIDS fundraising. She may well be the nicest star ever to survive the studio system.
In this interview, she talks about Marilyn Monroe, Rock Hudson, Jayne Mansfield, Doris Day, Clark Gable, Louella Parsons, and others.
“I really like guys who really look good,” she said in the interview. Imagine if she were at tonight’s ceremony, where most of them look more like shipwreck survivors — and the rodents who jumped ship — than movie stars.
