Some of Yvette’s fondest childhood memories are of getting up onstage to sing with her parents. “That really started it,” she says of her desire to get into show business. Nevertheless, her original career objective was to become a writer; she was inspired by the example of her maternal grandfather, a renowned editor for the Kansas City Star.
She attended high school in Los Angeles, where she learned ballet and first got the acting bug. It was at her first little-theater job in San Francisco (at age fifteen) that she changed her last name for professional purposes — the producer decided that Yvette Vedder was not sufficiently mellifluous, and he picked the name “Vickers” out of a telephone book.
In 1950, the youngster was selected by Billy Wilder for a bit part in the classic Gloria Swanson-William Holden film Sunset Boulevard. She appeared as a giggly girl who won’t get off the phone at a party. “I was already socially active in L.A. — I’d bleached my hair, and pushed up my bra to look eighteen, so I could get into any bar,” she recalls. “I was with a girlfriend to see Bobby Short in a nightclub when someone sent a note to our table asking if I’d like to appear in a Billy Wilder film. I told them I had to go to school, but we worked it out so I could do the scene in between classes. I wasn’t thinking of being an actress at the time, but I was curious and open to adventure.”
While attending Catholic high school, she performed in school plays. One of these was seen by a casting woman for Hal Roach Studios, which hired Yvette for a television commercial shot in New York. She became “the White Rain girl” in a shampoo commercial that was seen by millions, since it ran nationally for several years and was regularly aired during World Series games.
It was, however, as a dancer that she first began to make her name. With classical ballet training, she joined the Sonia Shaw dancers, which developed a crowd-pleasing style of modern ballet. She danced with the troupe for about six months. “I was a bit of a wild child during this period — I was dating a lot, getting around, and was a little hard to handle. I didn’t yet have the discipline to stay in one place for long.” By 1955, pictures of the svelte, shapely blonde were beginning to turn up in national magazines.
In 1955, Yvette made the decision to seriously pursue acting after playing the ingenue in a play called The Man Who Stopped the City. Before long, she was landing frequent television roles, including Dragnet (three episodes), M Squad, Ford Theater, Alcoa Theatre, and Mike Hammer, among others. While on occasion Yvette would play the sweet ingenue, most often she was already being cast as the juvenile-delinquent bad girl. In addition to the Dragnet episodes, she was hired by Jack Webb for the film Pete Kelly’s Blues (as a 1920s flapper) and, years later, an episode of Emergency!
Meanwhile, her local theatrical roles continued, making Yvette a very busy young lady. One big thrill came when Marlon Brando came backstage to see her following a performance as Susan in Finian’s Rainbow at the Hollywood Repertory Theater and chatted with her for thirty minutes. Brando told her, “You have an erotic, animal quality like a wood-nymph. You bring so much excitement to the part.” Today, Yvette recalls Brando’s visit as “incredibly exciting — he walked directly to me, held both my hands, and looked into my eyes as he spoke. I just soaked it up, I was in shock.”
The quality Brando noticed in Yvette was one that casting directors and fans were beginning to appreciate. In 1957, Brigitte Bardot had emerged as the world’s hottest sex symbol, and Yvette was seen by many as a potential American counterpart to Bardot with her lithe and compact five-foot-three, 35-22-35 figure, light blue eyes, and teasing appearance. The comparison was not accidental, for Yvette was a great Bardot fan. “I adored her. I saw all her movies. I thought she was much more than just a body — there was something very spiritual I saw in her. Her independence appealed to me. I also had a look and style that was similar to hers, and people noticed.”
Yvette’s first major film appearance was in Short Cut to Hell (1957), a remake of This Gun for Hire and the only film directed by the great James Cagney. She played Daisy, a “little tramp” who starts an affair with a man who turns out to be a hired killer; he decides that she knows too much, and tries to use her as a hostage. “It was a very ballyhooed film with big studio backing. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite have the magic in trying to recapture the film noir feeling.”
Also in 1957 came Reform School Girl, featuring Yvette as a teenage tramp in a genre classic from American International Pictures. Edd Byrnes (of later 77 Sunset Strip fame) starred as a lowlife who is responsible for getting two girls packed off to reform school. The character of Roxy was even nastier than her usual bad-girl role — “She was one mean little teenager,” Yvette laughs. Roxy is tough, cynical, and boy-crazy; one rival cracks that “if you were alone on a desert island with forty boys, there still wouldn’t be enough!” Offscreen, Yvette and Byrnes were romantic partners for about two years and remained friends long afterward.
Cult Movie Queen
Yvette’s enduring place of affection in the hearts of B-movie lovers was ensured with her roles in the so-bad-they’re-good cult classics Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and Attack of the Giant Leeches.
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) starred Allison Hayes as Nancy Archer, a troubled former asylum patient married to nogood philandering husband Harry (William Hudson). Harry at least has the good sense to select Yvette (as Honey Parker), the town’s seductive good-time girl, to do his philandering with. Their affair is not subtle, as the couple go out drinking and dancing almost nightly, and he puts her up at a fleabag motel.
The couple’s schemes to get Nancy institutionalized again so that he can get access to her considerable wealth appear to strike pay dirt when she begins raving about encountering a flying saucer in the desert. She brings Harry to see for himself and, when the UFO returns, winds up getting snatched by a hilariously phony giant alien hand. Authorities find Nancy unconscious and begin treating her; the remorseless Honey eggs Harry on to give her rival a lethal injection. But, overnight, Nancy grows to gargantuan proportions due to the outer-space radiation she absorbed. When Nancy regains consciousness, she decides that it’s payback time. The fifty-foot woman, clad in sexy shorts and a halter top that just happen to fit snugly, stalks through the town and finds the conniving couple at their usual hangout. She attacks it, and in the ensuing fallout Honey is killed by the roof caving in. When the beautiful monsteress carries Harry off, police open fire with a riot gun and she dies in a blaze of glory.
The special effects are grade Z, the acting (aside from Yvette’s spirited performance) is wooden — and it’s fun from start to finish for B-movie lovers, thanks to the delicious silliness of the story and the sultry charms of Yvette and Allison.
Yvette’s role in 50 Foot Woman came about because her agent also happened to represent Allison Hayes, and he told Yvette, “You and Allison would bounce off each other perfectly in this film.” Even though the picture was to be a “quickie,” Yvette would at least have a featured role. “I was all for working, so I said fine. I had no idea [that it would become a cult phenomenon]. I was just praying it wouldn’t ruin my career! But when I look at it now, I’m really delighted I did it. My Lady Macbeth scene in the car, telling [Hudson] how to inject her, is terrific — I really got into that.”
Almost immediately after 50 Foot Woman was released, Yvette’s agent called and said, “Well, are you ready?” She was already set to do a Broadway play (The Gang’s All Here), “but I was smokin’ for work.” That work turned out to be her second cult classic:
In Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), Yvette (as Liz Walker) is a sexy, Dixie-fried tease married to a meek, overweight older man, Dave Walker (played by Bruno Ve Sota), for whom she has only contempt. Showing off her legs while rubbing in skin lotion and displaying her lovely form in a low-cut casual outfit, she winds up making out in the grass with the handsome young local lech. But they’re discovered by her husband, gun in hand. Dave forces them to wade into the ominous-looking swamp, and the two are suddenl
y dragged underneath by giant leeches. Police won’t believe Dave’s story, and he ends up killing himself.
The leeches (guys in preposterously cheesy rubber suits with suctions) subsequently claim two more victims, whereupon we learn that Liz and the others are not dead, but have been stashed in an underwater cave so the leeches can suck their blood. A dynamite blast releases all but Liz, their now-dead bodies floating to the surface with their blood sucked dry, and it’s soon discovered that Liz is dead as well. They finally dynamite the swamp to finish off the creatures.
Making Leeches was “a strange experience, but exciting in a funny way. I have an adventurous, curious spirit.” Yvette is quite aware that her fans’ favorite scene is when she’s putting lotion on her legs. “They love that scene! Most of that business was my own, and [director Bernie Kowalski] just let the cameras run.” Her own favorite scene is when she explains to her handsome young lover the reason she married beer-bellied old Dave — “He had been nice to me when no one else was.”
Still, she’s quick to acknowledge that the film’s flat ending was a disappointment. “I keep moaning and groaning, taking so long to die, and after that huge rescue effort my character dies and they barely comment on it.” And, of course, there’s that ever-present stigma of being associated with B movies. “Francis Ford Coppola once asked me what movies I had done, and I mentioned Attack of the Giant Leeches. I never heard from him again!” she laughs.
Among the several other films Yvette made during 1957-59, the most noteworthy was I, Mobster (1959), a well-done tale of a gang leader (played by Steve Cochran); Yvette has a supporting role as “the blonde.” A well-known lothario, Cochran was also involved offscreen with Yvette for a time.
Playboy and Broadway
While making her way in Hollywood, Yvette was also becoming one of the favorite pinup models of the late fifties — most importantly for her Playboy Playmate layout shot by Russ Meyer for the July 1959 issue. “I loved working with Russ. I just thought of [the layout] as publicity — I didn’t get paid, I just did it to promote my work. He brought me up to a little cottage wearing marine boots and a camouflage outfit. Russ had a powerful presence, but as a photographer he had a knack for disappearing into the background, letting you be yourself.” The centerfold pictured a bottomless Yvette lying facedown on a sofa, her blue shirt pulled fetchingly above her waist as she smiles prettily for the camera. Yvette’s only quibble with the layout was the look on her face in the centerfold. “Russ told me that Hefner wanted an Elvislike sneer on my face. I thought it was a joke, so I said, ‘Like this?’ And that’s the pose they used!”
Playboy called her “the Beat Playmate,” and indeed Yvette regarded herself as a beatnik. “I loved jazz and Jack Kerouac, I went to the coffeehouses, and I would get into all these long intellectual discussions.” Many of these discussions were with comedian Mort Sahl. It was purely a platonic relationship, she says: “He was one of the few men who really tried to get to know me without making a move on me.” Yvette has only positive memories about the Playboy experience, calling it “a constructive career move.” The only drawback was that “some people got the wrong idea that I would be an easy mark.” But when she went to New York after the magazine appeared, it brought needed attention to her Broadway play. “I think it was all to the good.”
In 1959, Yvette’s hard work took her to Broadway in The Gang’s All Here, a satirical drama starring Melvyn Douglas as a fictional U.S. President resembling Warren Harding. The stellar cast also included E. G. Marshall and Arthur Hill. Yvette portrayed a dancer friend of the Douglas character. “I was a wild flapper who was playing around with the president, and at first I don’t know who he is. When I find out, it doesn’t matter.” She also got to do some dancing in the show. The play, written by the author of Inherit the Wind, ran for ten months.
During the 1960s, Yvette continued to turn up regularly on television, with over one hundred programs, including The Red Skelton Show, Bat Masterson, The Rebel, and Bus Stop. She was also featured in a local theater production of Bus Stop. She loved playing Cherie and calls it one of her favorite roles.
Yvette was staying continually busy in theater, TV, and films, but still felt a sense of frustration. “At this point I needed to break through and get leading roles, or just forget films and focus strictly on theater,” she says. Then she received an offer to appear with Paul Newman in Hud. “It was just a little part as his lover in town, but at least there were three decent scenes for me. Then the day before shooting, they told me my one long scene was cut. I wish I’d walked out, but I didn’t. It was a terrible mistake. After everyone saw the film and saw me in that one little scene, I got all these offers for other bit parts, which I turned down.”
In the classic Hud (1963), a tough, gritty Western drama, Yvette is Lily Peters, whose affair with Newman is discovered by her husband, leading to a fistfight between the men. While her big scene with Newman at the beginning of the film was cut, she does have a scene with Melvyn Douglas, her Broadway costar.
Yvette’s disappointment in Hud was soon forgotten with one of the highlights of her theatrical career in 1964. She made a big splash in Los Angeles’s New Club starring in a series of stage adaptations of horror plays from Paris’s Grand Guignol Theatre. In one, A Day with Henry, she was stabbed with a power drill and chopped up in a blood-filled bathtub. The shows ran for about a year, and she recalls that “the Hollywood people came in droves to see it.”
Cary Grant, Jim Hutton, and Career Rebirth
One important element of Yvette’s very full life has been her relationships with men. Her marriages were the least of it: In the mid-1950s she was married for four years to jazz bass player Don Prell (who played with the Bud Shank Quartet). A second marriage came and went quickly in 1959 to writer Leonard Burns (“I knew immediately it was a very big mistake”). And ten years later came another “horrible mistake,” a marriage annulled after just a few months to actor Tom Holland, whose credits included an appearance in the Russ Meyer film Good Morning … and Goodbye. Meyer had asked Yvette more than once to accept a role in his movies, but she declined each time. “I loved his photography, and I thought his pictures were fun, but I just couldn’t do it. I felt strongly about outright sexploitation.”
In between these marriages, Yvette was involved with a number of men. Soon after her two-year relationship with Edd Byrnes came an affair with Cary Grant. He was already in a serious relationship with Dyan Cannon, and Yvette had been warned by Mort Sahl and others about the legendary star’s dalliances with multiple young ladies. But she was totally charmed by Grant, who for a time helped to choose her roles. “It was mainly a social and intellectual relationship that became romantic.” It ended when he learned that Dyan was pregnant and decided to marry her.
There were a number of other romances, but, Yvette emphasizes, not as many as some have suggested. “It got tiresome with men wanting to go to bed with me as soon as they met me,” she remarks. “If I’d actually gone to bed with all the men who said I did, I’d never have had the time to do anything else! I’ve always been attracted to men, but the feeling has to be mutual.”
But the most important romantic relationship of Yvette’s life was with Jim Hutton, the tall, youthful-looking actor best known for his good-natured romantic comedy roles in Where the Boys Are, Bachelor in Paradise, and Walk, Don’t Run. They met in 1964, about a year after his divorce, and hit it off immediately. “We’d talk for hours on end, and the waiters would practically have to drag us out of the restaurant. We were inseparable twenty-four hours a day.” After the two had a spat in 1969, Yvette impulsively flew to Las Vegas the next day to marry Holland; after the quick divorce she and Hutton reunited.
Walk, Don’t Run, which costarred Grant and Hutton in a comedy set at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, presented a delicate situation — particularly because Grant’s character served as Hutton’s mentor in wooing the film’s female lead, Samantha Eggar. “But they were both sophisticated gentlemen,�
� says Yvette. “Jimmy would call from Tokyo and say, ‘You know, Cary really likes you.’ There was no trouble at all, since Cary was married to Dyan, and he was happy for us.”
Marriage was a subject that came up often. But Hutton was haunted by the failure of his previous marriage, and the three-times-burned Yvette acknowledges that “I was scared, too. We were happy, romantic, and in love. Why do anything to ruin it?” By 1979, they were thinking about the possibility again when Hutton received the stunning news that he had terminal cancer. Doctors operated immediately, but it was too late and he died a month later. “It was the most serious relationship of my life. I’m lucky to have had that with someone I cared so much about.”
During the 1970s, Yvette scaled back her acting schedule except for three small film parts (including the 1976 Kris Kristofferson picture Vigilante Force) and an occasional local theater role. She had already gotten into real estate investment, including buying thirty acres in Malibu, and during the early eighties “really concentrated on it to make money for my retirement years.”
It was in 1987 that a remarkable new phase of Yvette’s life opened up. A feature on her in Filmfax magazine reminded cultfilm fans that one of their favorite stars was still “alive and well.” (This status was reaffirmed a few years later when she was featured in Jewel Shepard’s popular book Attack of the B-Movie Queens.) Suddenly, the mail started pouring in — “intelligent, sweet, caring letters.” So did offers to make guest appearances at conventions around the country. “It was astonishing to me — it all seemed to come from out of nowhere,” she reflects glowingly. Some of these special events included screenings of 50 Foot Woman and Giant Leeches, and “there would be lines around the block at theaters that seated 1,200 people. I had no idea there were so many fans!”
Bombshells: Glamour Girls of a Lifetime Page 10