A Moment with Marvelous Monica

Recently, I happened to unexpectedly rub cyber-elbows with a personage who figures into several of my favorite movies, yet who - as a supporting player in them - hasn't won the same sort of attention as the showier, in some cases downright feral, stars.

I was tottering around on Facebook and ran into Miss Monica Lewis, the 1940s vocalist-turned-actress who after a spate of early-1950s films went into semi-retirement (augmented by occasional TV appearances) until popping up again in a series of 1970s disaster films. Anyone who comes here with regularity knows of my deep affection for the studio disaster films made between 1970 and 1980!

Lewis was born to musically-inclined parents (a conducting-composing father and an opera-singing mother) in Chicago in 1922 and wasn't even out of her teens before achieving success as a radio singer and eventual recording artist. Club dates and TV appearances with many famous entertainers and hit recordings followed until she was signed to a movie contract.

She landed at the very best studio in the world, MGM, where the full force of that company's publicity machine kept her in the public eye. Already the first guest ever featured on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1948 (her brother was co-producer of the program), she next took on the big screen.

After getting her feet wet as a cafe singer in David Brian and Arlene Dahl's Inside Straight (1951), she won a featured part opposite Red Skelton in Excuse My Dust and played a rendition of herself in Mickey Rooney's The Strip (both 1951 as well.)

She also became the face of many 1940s and 1950s products, be it hosiery (as Miss Leg-O-Genic!) beer or cigarettes, though she also provided a familiar voice when she became the woman behind the character of "Miss Chiquita Banana," for over a dozen years.

In 1952, she danced with Gower Champion on the big screen in Everything I Have Is Yours, one of only a small handful of ladies to ever do so besides his then-wife Marge Champion. Next came 1953's Affair with a Stranger with Victor Mature and Jean Simmons.

Miss Lewis was also notable for her entertainment of and support given to American servicemen, be it at home or in the field, such as these shots taken during the Koren War demonstrate.

A variety of other movie and TV work followed, though in 1956 she married movie producer Jennings Lang (truly a name, his own real one, that belonged on cinema posters and in credits on screen!) She had been briefly married before to songwriter Bob Thiele (who composed the oft-recorded and used "What a Wonderful World" and later married singer Teresa Brewer.)

Lang had once been part of Hollywood's most eye-popping scandals when he was shot during a scuffle with producer Walter Wanger, who reportedly caught his wife Joan Bennett making love to Lang (who was at the time her agent) in Lang's car. Lang was shot in the groin (!) and Wanger went to jail for four months, but both men went on to much further success in the business. (Pictured at left are the rollercoaster couple Wanger and Bennett, who nonetheless remained wed from 1940 to 1964.)

With this husband, Lewis was blissfully happy and the couple raised three children, two from Lang's prior marriage, which Lewis adopted (and two of whom went on to work in the business themselves in direction/ production and music.) Her focus shifted to motherhood and her position as the wife of one of Hollywood's important executives and eventually one of its prominent producers. She emerged as the hostess to countless industry shindigs and, thus, knew practically everyone! Some of Lang's output includes The Beguiled and Play Misty for Me (both 1971), High Plains Drifter (1973), Charlie Varrick (1973) and House Calls (1978), revealing his close association with Clint Eastwood and Walter Matthau.

But it is his contribution to the disaster genre which makes him a hero in Poseidon's Underworld. He was the producer behind Airport 1975 (1974), Earthquake (1974), Airport '77 (1977), Rollercoaster (1977) and The Concorde...Airport '79 (1979), putting him on par with Irwin Allen when it comes to those making the catastrophic scene! And Monica Lewis wound up with roles, medium and small, in many of these.

Chief among her credits in this phase is the role of Lorne Greene's loyal and devoted secretary Barbara in Earthquake, in which she not only has to contend with and console Greene's emotional daughter Ava Gardner (a close friend in real life) but also is rudely shoved out of an elevator by a panicking client during the big event (though he paid for his selfishness.)

She also is the recipient of one of the genre's most unforgettable lines when Greene, in need of something to strap people in to a makeshift chair-lift barks, "Barbara, take off your pantyhose dammit!" We love Barbara, from her blonde hairpiece to her sensible wash & wear polyester dress to her little head injury that leaves a decorative blood streak just below the hairline.

In Airport '77, Lewis played one of James Stewart's longtime friends and employees, a flight attendant trainer who serves as the head stewardess on a flight that is bringing a gaggle of his associates to the grand opening of a museum of his. The plane never gets there because it is hijacked for its art treasures on board and winds up, intact, beneath the surface of the ocean!

In this film she gets to operate the now-hooty laserdisc equipment that was then state-of-the-art and provides a comforting presence to the many injured and frightened people on board the disabled aircraft. In the expanded TV edition of the movie, her role is far bigger as she is shown preparing all the other girls for the flight in question.

For Rollercoaster, she has only a walk-on role as a festively-attired amusement park customer, but she was back again for The Concorde, as a former jazz great on her way to a festival. Once more (in what is really quite a lunatic movie in all regards), the plane runs into tragedy when a desperate industrialist decides to shoot it out of the sky with rockets because his girlfriend (who knows too much about his shady dealings) is on board! Lewis' primary work in this was opposite Jimmie Walker. Oddly, just two years after she'd played one character in the series, she was back as a wholly different one while George Kennedy was still playing the same one, venerable George Patroni!

Lewis continued to make sporadic appearances in the films produced by her husband from The Sting II (1983) to Stick (1985) along with occasional TV gigs (such as on Falcon Crest, seen at left). She also reignited her cabaret career, enjoying several stints and even recording some new material on a few albums, one of which (shown directly below) was a tribute to her forty-year marriage, a union that only ended when Mr. Lang passed away in 1996 at age eighty-one. (He had suffered a stroke in 1983, precipitating his retirement.)

So what is happening with Monica Lewis nowadays? It's my pleasure to report that she is ninety-two years old and is very active online, with sharp senses and a gleeful attitude, full of joy and humor. She has a Facebook page that is PACKED with photos and anecdotes from her long life in Hollywood (none of which I nabbed for use here. The pictures in this post were culled from other sources including myself.) I encourage even a casual fan to check it out because it features all sorts of information and amusement including a recent lunch meeting with Don Mancini, creator of the demonic "Chucky" of the Child's Play movies (1988 and beyond!) See if you think she resembles Lana Turner in some of those ultra-glamorous older portraits.

She has also penned a photo-packed book that documents her long career in music, TV, cabaret and film that is available for sale here. I cannot describe to you how friendly and accessible she was to me (and patient because, as you know, I can go on and on...) She had some complimentary things to say that I am adding to the "Food From the God" column above right, in which a couple of folks in the know have been kind enough to relay to me their impressions of this site.

If you visit Facebook to check her out, you'll soon see that she's just a doll!

Stop by and give her some attention. I promise you will be delighted at the many photos, either sultry or with her more familiar and infectious ear-to-ear grin!

Back at the "Camp"ground...

Well, here we are again, looking at some photos that tickle our funny bones thanks to their campy qualities. (We went down this road once before here.) What is camp? I probably don't even define it right. To me, it's something that was never intended to be amusing, but is, or something that's sensibilities have passed through time in a way to make it funny (or funnier than it was beforehand.) Thus, you are in store today for some glitzy awkwardness and a dollop or two of the bizarre. Our cover girl is Miss Joan Crawford in Torch Song (1955), warning you not to "spoil that line" with your clumsiness! Whether you regard these items as "camp" or not, I hope you enjoy the pictures!

Something about the way Miss Jane Russell is contorted here in a shot from The French Line (1954) gives me a snigger, too! The gnarled expression, the spread legs and ill-chosen angle of her rear-end make me scratch my head.

Did you know that Frank Gorshin and John Astin were not the first ones considered to play The Riddler on Batman (1966-1968)? It looks as if Yvette Mimieux did a wardrobe test as well. Ha ha!  To paraphrase Bette Midler, I never miss a Yvette Mimieux musical.

Hungry? How 'bout something from the world famous restaurant The Brown Derby? Anita Ekberg is serving up exactly that in this hooty publicity photo. (But, hey, she looks very trim and svelte! Something she wouldn't be able to claim several years after this...)

Until the moment I saw this publicity still, I never associated Thanksgiving with Liza Minnelli. Somehow she has managed to infuse the holiday with a sort of tragic wistfulness that, again, had not previously been associated with the occasion before!

There are probably eight to ten things I could point out about this hysterical shot of Jayne Mansfield. The heaving pose isn't unusual for her at all, but how about the poor little guy caught in-between her bosom and the tiger-skin rug? How about the expression on the tiger's face under the buxom body of Miss M.? What about that red trim on the rug that makes it look as if it's blood and viscera are being squeezed out of it along the entire perimeter?!

This one I'm turning into a "Guess Who!" Do you know this roller-skating mama with beach-blown tendrils and the perky bosom?

Take a look and see if that enigmatic half-grin rings a bell at all, though her notoriety is primarily limited to a baker's dozen appearances on a major-league cult TV series from the mid-1960s (and later some of the movies it spawned.)

Yes, our curvaceous cupcake above is Yeoman Janice Rand of Star Trek (1966), Grace Lee Whitney. I've remarked before at how awestruck I was as a kid looking at Whitney's ornate, basket-weave beehive on Star Trek and here she is out scouting the universe with her state-of-the-art flashlight.

Everything about this shot of Valerie Perrine from Superman (1978) is off. The pose is dreadful, the "dress" tacky and ill-fitting, the hosiery too dark, and the lighting wretched. (I happen to have an abject hatred of any portrait in which the catch lights are only hitting one eye and not both...) 

There's an awful lot of frost going on in this static portrait of Connie Stevens (from The Sex Symbol, 1974?) There's the frosted hair, the frosted eye shadow, the highlighter under her eyes, the shiny pillow and sheets....! (And, to boot, an oddly manly set of arms.) 

In this awkward looking wardrobe still from The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Carol Lynley was trying out different uses for her macrame belt, which thankfully remained slung around her hips in the finished film. Why is she tugging at the hem of her shorts? They shrank even shorter once filming began and they were repeatedly exposed to heat and water!

Get a load of Miss Ann-Margret in this pose for one of her song and dance spectaculars. She's wearing something akin to the Chrysler Building on her noggin! Not sure about the French cut on that costume paired with tights that allow her tan line to show through...

Stand back, lest you become caught in the ferocity of sultry song & dance gal Joey Heatherton!

This gaggle of glitz contains Miss America Lee Meriwether posed alongside Knight Rider's Patricia McPherson, a very un-The Waltons-like Judy Norton-Taylor, CHiPs' Randi Oakes and Riptide's Ken Olandt during the 1984 installment of Circus of the Stars.

Buxom B-movie queen Sybil Danning is seen decked out in a typically tacky 1980's sci-fi get up (from Battle Beyond the Stars, 1980.)

There's something so stiff and staid about Erin Gray in this portrait from Silver Spoons (1982-1987.)

Enjoy the lunacy of this seductive shot of Cheryl Ladd, taken for one of her television specials. I only wish it were in color, so we could truly taste the rainbow of those flowing streamers!

We adore Fay Wray, in and out of King Kong (1933) and enjoy this overwrought glimpse of her freaking out after apparently having had the big ape rip her dress to kingdom come (or should that be kingdom kong?) 

While we're talking about simians, take a look at these two hooty shots of Tarzan Lex Barker and his chimpanzee companion Cheeta. First, Cheeta accepts a gift from Barker upon his arrival via airplane.

Then the two pals pore over the latest script that will pair them up again, Tarzan's Peril (1951.)

In this publicity shot, Barker is held at bay by a native who is likely meant to be grimacing in fury, but who - if you look at him long enough - seems like he is about to burst out laughing!

If that native seems at all amusing, get a load of Joel McCrea's cohort during Bird of Paradise (1932.) Paging Jane Russell to bring a case of Cross-Your-Heart Playtex bras to the island IMMEDIATELY!




Since we've managed to segue over to the arena of beefcake, let's examine this magazine spread featuring several Hollywood hunks in the water. The humor here is gleaned from the copy as this article explains what these gents are looking for in a girl...  "George Nader: Just be yourself-- that's what I like.  Cary Grant: Don't chatter-- listen to what he has to say, too.  Hugh O'Brien: Be cool-- make the boy think he's chasing you.  Tony Curtis: Keep him guessin'-- like Janet did to me.  Rock Hudson: Gals who play hard to get are not for me."

We always enjoy looking at Ty Hardin (of Bronco, 1958-1962) in his prime, but this picture is more than a little awkward. He seems to be climbing into a lifeguard chair, but his position is heinously contorted and uncomfortable looking (and it almost looks like a child's highchair, to boot!)

Fellow TV western star Dale Robertson (of Tales of Wells Fargo, 1957-1962)  has a situation on his hands. He's trying to burp a baby that I doubt is going to cooperate in the end!

One-time figure strap model turned actor Gary Conway (of Land of the Giants, 1968-1970) poses with his family in what has to be one of the most unintentionally creepy portraits of an ostensibly happy clan ever! His expression doesn't help, nor do those of his enigmatic-looking spouse, Miss America Marian McKnight, the strangely morose daughter or even the displeased baby!

Here's what Mr. Conway looked like back in his posing strap days (as Gary Carmody.)

He posed semi-nude for Playgirl years later (and it happens that I prefer this type of body, personally, to his chiseled one of before.) This photo isn't necessarily campy, this is :::cough::: supplemental research!

Land of the Giants, with its over-sized props and situations, lent itself to some campy publicity portraits like this one with the band of lost travelers camped out on a plate.

But it gets worse! Look at this one in which the ladies are all set to become a sandwich for a giant!

But we aren't completely finished looking at some (tacky) beefcake. Here's a shot of John Travolta in Staying Alive (1983), which we took an in-depth look into once before (just click on the movie's title.)

Another craptastic movie from that same year is A Night in Heaven, which starred Christopher Atkins as a college student/stripper who carries on an affair with one of his teachers, Lesley Ann Warren.

Joan Collins certainly has her hands full with this assortment of specimens, one of who is Jon-Erik Hexum, from The Making of a Male Model.  Um... this was from 1983, which makes me think that must have been a banner year for guys on parade!

Can you imagine how gooey this book must be by The Lawrence Welk Show's Tom Netherton? I don't think I've ever fully recovered from sitting in front of the TV set as a tot, watching him sing and thinking that he was the human embodiment of Malibu Ken, the male ideal to my preteen eyes. Then having my bubble burst as my mother strolled through, got a look at the television and exclaimed, "Now that's what my friend Wanda would call 'a fag!'" I did get over my crush on Netherton, but I still like to get tan and blonde in the summer.

How stiff and awkward is this promotional photo of talk show legend Merv Griffin, in anticipation of the new year?

What could be campier than having Gloria Effing Swanson playing your mom on Broadway?! This still photo shows David Huffman and his "mom" Glo, overseen by none other than Pamela Bellwood in the kooky neighbor role. Huffman, who vaguely resembled Keir Dullea in the part, was very tragically murdered at only age thirty-nine by a teenage punk wielding a screwdriver after Huffman caught him robbing a motor home.

Why does it look as if boxing actor Leon Isaac Kennedy (from Body and Soul, 1981) has only a little bit less makeup on than his wife Jayne Kennedy?! Jayne was everywhere in the late-'70s/early'-'80s and I was mesmerized by her for some reason. They split up shortly after this movie and are now married to different spouses.

In more makeup than either one of them is Grandpa Munster, Al Lewis, of The Munsters (1964-1966.) We rarely got to see him in color as the show was filmed and broadcast for its two-year run in black & white.

Check out this horror magazine called "Thriller" in which a lustful female vampire hovers over her handsome prey. The title of one of the articles is "Lay Me in My Grave!"

There's something funny about Maurice Evans relaxing on the steps of his trailer during filming of Planet of the Apes (1968) in full orangutan drag except for his little plaid hat!

Likewise, this trio of apes is amusingly planted on the streets of the Fox back lot, where seedy hotels and strip joints proliferate and a studio carpenter/painter relaxes on a stoop.

Now we're going to finish out the home stretch of this post with a passel of pics from one of my favorite camptastic movies, the disaster epic Earth-quake from 1974. This cracked film has been a part of me all my life (I was seven when it came out.) I've seen it countless times, can recite lines from it and have read about it in depth. Similarly abstract as the Apes photo above is this one of director Mark Robson and producer Jennings Lang casually chatting amidst a street-full of rubble!

In this hooty pic, Robson instructs the divinely scenery-chewing leading lady, Miss Ava Gardner, on how to approach a part of the film in which her husband Charlton Heston abandons her and her dying father in order to go out and scour a decimated Los Angeles in search of his mistress.

Here we see the delicious results of his coaching as Gardner bursts away from doctor Lloyd Nolan and secretary friend Monica Lewis to chase after Heston's SUV!

Miss Lewis, by the way, suffered one of the movie's most hysterical indignities when she was barked at to "Take off your pantyhose, dammit!" in order to create a suitable seat-belt for those being lowered from one level of a damaged building to another in an office chair rigged up with a firehose!

Gardner's papa in the film, and the one giving Lewis the pantyhose directive, was Lorne Greene, with critics stumbling over themselves in order to find ways to poke fun at the fact that he was not even eight years older than her himself!

Now if you look at the photo above and at this one below of Miss Gardner, you will see the magic of movie-making when it comes to makeup and lighting. She was fifty-two at the time and while not necessarily a staggering example for a woman her age, she still had that amazing face.

But take a look at this photo of her, snapped ON HER WAY to makeup. With this snapshot, women everywhere ought to breathe easier knowing that the Ava Gardner they saw on their movie or TV screen didn't just wake up that way! She had to have her face and neck tugged up under a wig and be polished and shellacked by the technicians on hand.

But all these reflections about Earth-quake and Ava are merely foreplay for the "camp" that is to come. I just wanted to include them because it seemed like a good place to. If you look at this composite (which makes me drool, by the way.  I LOVE "box movies" and collections of stars all aligned together this way), you will see portraits of ten of the top stars from this movie. (For years, the one of Ava hung on the wall of the "Earthquake" attraction at Universal Studios Florida. I was staring at it intently just before getting to be part of the hilarious demonstration there, though I understand it's all been changed to something else now...)

I've seen countless photos from this movie over the years, but somehow these final ones escaped me until just now. How, I'll never know because I am obsessed with 1970s disaster and can never see or read enough about those movies. I came upon this shot of Richard Roundtree and I thought, "Hmmmm... I guess they wanted to shoot one of him looking worried during the title event (and Earthquake was billed right on the posters as "...an Event!")

Then I saw this one of Oscar-winner (and disaster movie fixture) George Kennedy! I thought, "Wow, that's weird... they had him pose as if taking in the seismic occurrence as well..."

So even though hers is far more hysterical, I wasn't all that surprised to then come upon supporting player Victoria Principal screaming in horror at a nonexistent bit of destruction.

Even "serious actress" Genevieve Bujold, who only did Earthquake in order to excise herself from an unwanted contractual commitment, was compelled at knife-point (out of frame, ha!) to partake in this exercise...

Still numb to the idea that Universal would put these people through photo shoots in which they were instructed to look up and behave as if something was falling apart or falling upon them, I really didn't expect to see anymore of them, but lo and behold, there in all his glory was the STAR, Oscar-winner Chuck Heston, struck petrified by the happenings around him! (Wouldn't these make an uproarious framed arrangement in a rec room or maybe even a bedroom! LOL Young people who don't know what the actors are reacting to would be dumbfounded by it all.)

But you know what's coming. The parade of hysteria was not complete. Though I never did see shots like these of Marjoe Gortner, Barry Sullivan or Lorne Greene (and you know I tried!), I did at last unearth one with Ava Gardner giving her best rendition of experiencing a tremor. 

What's more, she's in her second of three costumes, one which only appears in the movie momentarily because the scene in which she (at fifty-two, mind you!) informs Heston that she has recently aborted his baby was cut from the final print. She gives better face in the film itself, but it's still a campy riot to see her and these other folks enacting their own little versions of Earthquake... and Event!  Till next time, loves...  Poseidon!

:::::UPDATE:::::

A loyal reader of Poseidon's Underworld was kind enough to e-mail me additional photos of the cast of Earthquake, shaking in their boots! We are eternally grateful for this generosity of spirit and proudly attach these pics to the tail end of this post:

Barry Sullivan looks more intrigued than frightened.

Lorne Greene is startled, but maybe he just saw the shooting script...

...and finally Lloyd Nolan seems to be having some sort of physical or medical episode!