Is That You, Patsy Ann??

The COVID19 shelter-in-place has brought with it a lot of television and movie viewing. Some of it has been wonderful, some of it less so. Most of it has been diverting at least. One of the true oddball flicks that made its way to my home screen is a very obscure biker flick called J.C., released in 1972. It was filmed, however, in 1970, which is rather key to an assertion I'm going to be making about it today...

The movie is dreadful, yet occasionally cannot help but be entertaining due to the sheer squalid ambiance and lack of skill in so many areas. The vanity project, if it can even be called that considering how he comes out appearing, was written, produced, directed and starred in by one William F. McGaha. To throw us off the scent a little from his hyphenated megalomania, he used the name Bill McGaha for his acting credit.

As the perennially pot-smoking, rarely-employed leader of a biker gang, McGaha treats the viewer to a series of eye-searing, jaw-dropping moments of personal exposure. Whether trundling around his house in some ragged tightie-whities or sitting on the toilet in even less (!), we see altogether too much of our "hero," a hog-rider with a Jesus complex. (Get it? "J.C.?")

You can thank me later for refusing to bring to you any photographic evidence from when he rolls over to reveal the torn and heavily-stained rear of these undies...

Somehow, this guy has managed to land a hot, blonde girlfriend who is devoted to him. (And also, somehow, McGaha managed to entice Pat Delany to play her!) Delany had amassed several TV guest role credits to this point, along with a low-budget flick or two, but would later portray the mother on a childhood favorite series of mine, Irwin Allen's Swiss Family Robinson!

But it didn't stop there. He also wrangled Joanna Moore to portray his sister. Moore had been a highly-active starlet of the late-'50s and 1960s, but by this time had begun to experience trauma in both her personal and professional life. A rocky marriage to Ryan O'Neal (which resulted in Tatum and Griffin) and an even more horrible divorce had led to depression and the abuse of drugs and alcohol. By the mid-'70s, she was in no position to maintain an acting career, though she did appear briefly a couple more times before receding from view completely. Still very pretty at this time, she was rigged with a very obvious, not to mention thick, wig!

For a movie shot for $11.78, McGaha somehow was able to enlist even a couple more name actors for this movie. One was Burr DeBenning, a very busy and useful actor of the late-'60s and 1970s who was on many, many TV shows and occasional movies. He just never landed that one iconic role to make him famous. (Strangely enough, he also worked for Irwin Allen on the failed pilot City Beneath the Sea as an amphibious man, a part that might have garnered attention had the show gone.) 

But, wait, there's more. As the town sheriff, he also got none other than extraord- inarily busy cowboy actor Slim Pickens. Now Pickens wasn't Kirk Douglas or Burt Lancaster, but he was present in many a prestigious or popular movie. So he must have said yes to practically anything! And, in truth, playing this bigoted, mean-spirited character was probably a nice change of pace for him. Pickens also later worked for Irwin Allen in the career-killers The Swarm (1978) and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979.)

None of these fine folks, however, are the reason for this post. I was just setting the stage for what I intend to share with you in a moment. In the story line, such as it is, McGaha takes his band of bikers back to his hometown in order to visit his sister. Their mere presence causes something of an uproar and it all goes downhill from there. While he is visiting, he is spotted by his onetime girlfriend, who dated him back when he was a clean cut player on the school football team. Her distress is evident right away. And my eyes bugged out of my head upon first glimpse of her...

From the nanosecond she appeared on screen, exiting a building and observing a dispute in the street, I became certain that I was looking at Morgan Fairchild. Yes, that Morgan Fairchild! In the intervening hours and days since seeing the movie, I have waffled from doubt to absolutely positivity and everything in between. One reason for doubt is that there is no record anywhere of this appearance. The name on the movie is "Judie Frazier" (a persona with no other known credits...) Another reason is, um, look at Morgan Fairchild here - the epitome of 1980s excess, hair to the gates of heaven and makeup for days... 

We're fully used to seeing Fairchild slathered to the hilt, with elaborately coiffed hair, dripping with jewelry and with an almost sedimentary rock level of makeup. This was one of the more clean-scrubbed pictures of her from her 1984 hey-day and even in this (which she described as a "non-glamorous" role in TimeBomb), its hard to see through the smoke and mirrors of lighting, makeup and styling. 

Note here, however, how her looks had already been changed since the early days of her TV career. One could almost get away with tagging this shot as early Shelley Long!

It would be easy to forget it and move on, but when I get a gut-feeling, I'm like a dog with a chew toy who will not give up! Could this compar- atively clean-scrubbed young lady possibly be an early incarnation of a 1980s soap sensation? Barring no expense, I boarded a plane to Norcross, Georgia, headed to the filming locations and began taking swabs of all the walls and furnishings that the gal may have touched back in 1970. This way I could collect enough DNA evidence to prove my case and correct imdb.com... Okay, maybe I didn't. But I'm still not done.

I thought the resemblance here was very strong. Not to the Morgan Fairchild we all know and love, but to the young Texan Patsy Ann McClenny, who decided at a young age to completely reinvent herself from a heavily near-sighted, mousey-brown child into a blonde bombshell. She also shed herself of her native accent and lowered the voice to boot.

Take a look at some early pictures of Fairchild, from the bleach-blonde sixteen year-old to the burgeoning actress, renaming herself and experimenting with hair and makeup to undergo a significant transformation. I mean, could God really have put that nose with that chin and that mouth and those cheeks on more than one young lady during this time period? Add in the height, the build, the favored side for the hair to swoop and that vague catch-eyed look of someone who can barely see in front of them (eventually corrected by contact lenses.)

Fairchild got her first taste of show business when she doubled for Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) in scenes which required driving a vintage car with standard transmission. (This at left is about as much as we ever see of her!) 

A couple of years later, fully making her way onto the screen.

In 1969, she kept things in a similar vein when she had a wordless role in A Bullet for Pretty Boy (released in 1970.) She played a very blonde girl who drove a vintage automobile for her gangster boyfriend. Now having been on-screen, albeit with no lines, she was even hungrier for a legitimate career as an actress.

The reinvention continued. But there is a gaping hole in her resume from the 1969 filming of Pretty Boy to her debut on TV as the villainous Jennifer Phillips on Search for Tomorrow. This is when I suspect she landed the role in J.C., used a stage name, then dropped that in favor of the more flamboyant Morgan Fairchild and headed to NYC to find her fame and fortune. (Trust me, you would not want J.C. on your resume and you would not want anyone to see the performance that the young woman - whoever she is - gives. It is overloaded with gestures and facial contortions that Fairchild learned to keep in check.)

Could the caterpillar on the left really have emerged as the butterfly on the right? Look at the pose, the head shape and features (along with some weight loss and the bangs to cover up any unsightly lines.)

There is the issue of the teeth to contend with. Thus, I went to New York City and had her dental records pulled (no I didn't...! LOL) But I contend that Miss F. certainly had some very discernible cosmetic dentistry performed. Take a look at these choppers. They bear the signs of tampering (and were updated/augmented again later to be sure.)

Compare those to this earlier photo in which her teeth more closely match the lady in J.C. The two front ones are uneven like the actress in the film, the bottom ones are similar and the canines are also very similar. (Note the easily-crinkled forehead, too.)

I looked at a LOT of Morgan Fairchild footage and photography as you can imagine and, as I said, I went back and forth time and again. But two pictures in particular, apart from everything else I've put forth, decided it for me. Obviously, I'm in no position to definitively state for a fact that "Judie Frazier" was really an emerging Morgan Fairchild, but for my own part, I am convinced. This photo from an early gig (with clearly better lighting & makeup) helps solidify my feeling. 

And this one clinched it for me. Wiped almost clean of the glamour she's known for and demonstrating some martial arts moves from the earliest days of her career, I see in that face and in that gaze the same woman who was in J.C. In fact, I just re-watched all of her scenes one final time and I am convinced it is she. Before you dismiss me, I'm the guy who dug up Roger Herren of Myra Breckinridge (1970), who had no further known credits in the wake of that debacle, in an old episode of Emergency! and had his imdb.com resume updated accordingly. See what you think in this link to the movie, which is even better in quality than the one I watched.

Is that you, Patsy Ann??

Moving on for just a moment to another costar of the film, I give you the staggering, near-constant presence of the boom mic! It is positively unbelievable how many times you can be looking at the screen and then, right on cue, the boom mic drops into position, most often directly above the performers' heads, dead center! These are but a few examples:

After a while, I would begin to sort of miss its hovering dominance over every other scene and begin to feel withdrawal symptoms, even resentment, if it wasn't there in place as I was expecting! Ha ha ha!

Well, I hope I haven't caused any sort of distress for Miss Morgan Fairchild in digging up this long-lost mess of a movie. 

She's since moved on from the face we all grew to know and love in the '80s anyway! A constantly morphing tribute to complete reinvention of self, if it indeed she, I doubt she would have too much trouble convincing people otherwise. But I remain a believer that there's a missing link in her filmography.