by Jackie Ganiy
The show was a study in contrasts. A wealthy, white, middle-aged widower with a daughter adopts the two sons of his late black housekeeper, resulting in an evenly mixed yet unrealistically happy family. The set was tense almost from the start. Gary Coleman, who played the youngest boy, immediately stole the show. He was precocious and impossibly cute, owing much of his appeal to a genetic kidney ailment that stunted his growth, keeping him perpetually childlike. Dana and Todd Bridges (who played the elder boy) soon had reputations for wild behavior, on the set and off. The first three years were relatively smooth. Gradually, Bridges and Plato grew resentful of Coleman’s spotlight. Coleman seemed to not age at all ,while Bridges and Dana grew further every year from childhood cuteness into teenage awkwardness. The show soon revolved around Coleman, who became a huge star and cultural icon with his catch phrase “Whachu talken ‘bout, Willis?”, while Bridges and Dana saw their importance steadily diminish.
Dana was struggling with another crisis in her life. Kay was diagnosed with scleroderma, a truly awful disease that causes the slow hardening of the body's soft tissues—both inside and out—essentially mummifying the body, and resulting in a slow death. Kay was all Dana had, her adopted father having left them when Dana was a baby. The only contact she had with him was after she became famous, when he sued her for support, and lost. Kay spent long periods in the hospital, while Dana turned to alcohol and drugs to help her cope. When she was fourteen, she OD’d on Valium in her first suicide attempt.
In 1983, five years after she was cast on Diff’rent Strokes, Dana was fired. She had told the producers that she was pregnant by her rockstar boyfriend, Lenny Lambert. An unwed teenage mother had no place on the squeaky clean series, and she was let go. It was the last straw for the producers, who had put up with a lot from Dana, including coming in drunk and smoking pot on the set, and just not coming in at all. She was no longer the cute little girl they had originally cast, so it wasn't a hard call to make. It would be all down hill for Dana from there.
She married Lambert in April,1984. Wedding photos show a beaming Dana, looking like a little girl playing dress-up, with the lights of Las Vegas behind her. In July, she gave birth to a baby boy named Tyler. The marriage crumbled almost immediately, due mainly to Dana’s inability to adjust to life outside the limelight. She and costar Todd Bridges would stay out all night together, clubbing and getting high, while Lambert was left at home to take care of their son. When she was home, they had terrible fights, and Lambert claims Dana was often reckless and irrational. She once threw herself into a plate glass window. Finally, Lambert had enough, and walked out on Dana, taking Tyler with him. Alone, addicted and angry, Dana walked into the hospital room of her gravely ill mother, and screamed at her to hurry up and die. Kay obliged, passing away the same week Dana’s husband walked out.
Broke, feeling abandoned and without options, her addictions grew. She did what many desperate actresses do when trying to boost their career; she got breast implants and posed nude for Playboy in 1989. How many hopeless actresses have littered the glossy pages of Playboy? This only backfired on her. The public was aghast that little Kimberly Drummond would bare all in a nudie magazine after they had grown to love her as the spunky girl-next-door.
Dana received no acting offers after Playboy, and by the following year—having spent her centerfold money— she was forced to work for minimum wage at a dry cleaning store in Las Vegas. The press lapped this up, publishing videos and photos of her at work, with salacious headlines blaring how far the Diff’rent Strokes girl had fallen. It got her fired too.
In 1991, she held up a video store with a pellet gun, absconding with less than $200. The cashier recognized her, and told 911 she had been held-up by Kimberly from Diff’rent Strokes. Dana must have thought better of it, as she returned to the store with the money, only to be promptly arrested. So began her troubles with the law. When singer, Wayne Newton, heard about her arrest, he put up the $13,000 to bail her out, even though they had never met. Again, the press had a field day. She was given six years in prison, but the judge took pity on the freckle-faced defendant, and commuted her sentence to five years probation with four hundred hours of community service. She was also appointed a psychiatrist, whom Dana claimed got her hooked on Valium. She was brought before the court again, for forging Valium prescriptions, and again placed on probation. She behaved herself,and all seemed well when she her legal scrutiny ended in 1995.
Her legal problems might have been behind her, but her financial ones were not. She worked in soft porn films to pay her bills, the most notorious of which was Different Strokes...The Story of Jack and Jill...and Jill, which exploited Dana’s previous role as an innocent girl on a family sitcom, showing her completely naked and making love to a woman. The contrast between these themes was enough to garner serious publicity for the movie and Dana, though not the kind she wanted. She opted to come out as a full-fledged lesbian, even appearing on the cover of Girlfriends magazine. In an interview conducted by respected lesbian journalist, Diana Anderson-Minshall, she announced to the world that she was a lesbian. Later, when Howard Stern and others interviewed her, she passionately denied it. This girl was seriously confused. Then, there was the video game. The less said about this truly degrading episode, the better. The game was called Night Trap, and was one of the first games to overlay live actors with CGI to create one of the slimiest, most violent pieces of crap ever sold to the public. Was there anything that Dana considered beneath her?
She cleaned up her act briefly, when she moved out to Oklahoma to get back with her ex-husband, and thier beloved son, Tyler. Managing to play the perfect mom for one year, she then fell off the wagon, gave up the pretense, and was using again, even in front of her twelve-year-old son, who found her drug paraphernalia strewn about the house when he came home from school. Lambert asked her to leave. She went to a bar, met a man, struck up a conversation, and was engaged to him a few days later. She scraped together enough money to buy a used motor home, and the two set up house in the camper, parking the vehicle in front of his mom’s house. House warming gifts to themselves included lots of drugs.
Howard Stern to the rescue. Or not. Dana decided to do the infamous Howard Stern show to clear her name, as an acquaintance had gone on days prior, claiming she and Dana were hot lovers and that Dana was living on the streets. Howard had the most successful radio show of its kind in the country at the time, with three million daily listeners. Dana needed the exposure like she needed another drink, but she must have bought into the old adage, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” It was a disaster. Dana came off sounding pathetic, desperate, and less than honest about her current life and her substance abuse. In the high- camp fashion that he was known for, Stern waffled between feigned sympathy for her feelings, and tasteless gestures, such as forcing her to give a hair sample to prove she was clean. He made lewd offers to comfort her when she broke into tears at the sympathetic comments of one listener, and asked if she wanted to sit on his lap. Most of the callers were brutal, spewing cruel, senseless vitriol at Dana who tried to fend them off with insincere indifference. It was great stuff for the ratings, and everyone seemed to be having a good time, until Dana went home to her camper, and killed herself the next day.
Dana died of a drug overdose at the age of thirty-four. The coroner listed her death as suicide. It was mother’s day. Her son, Tyler, was at home, clutching the gift he had picked to give him mom for mother’s day, waiting for a call that would never come, and he never got over it. At his mother’s memorial service, he wept openly, a little boy in a big man’s suit, trying so hard to be brave. He followed in his mother’s footsteps, becoming an addict like her. In 2010, at the age of twenty-five, on the eleventh anniversary of Dana’s death, he blew his brains out, three days before mother’s day.
There is a video of this beautiful girl, her face sprinkled with sun kisses, doe-eyed and innocent, patiently explaining to a reporter that people who have addictions do
things they are not proud of, and that those people need help. She looks like a child, but her words betray her. She possesses the essence of innocence, but her eyes are full of a pain that innocence does not know. She is alone, even with a camera shoved in her face. She was everyone’s little girl, and then she was just a little girl lost: lost to herself, lost to her dreams, lost to her son, and lost to us.
Section VI
Tragic Blondes
Blondes: a word conjuring images of gorgeous and curvaceous women, posing in cheesecake splendor, or shimmering in pure Technicolor glory on a silver screen. Descriptions such as “Blonde Bombshell”, “Buxom Blonde”, “Blonde Goddess”, “Dumb Blonde” have been around since Jean Harlow—the first platinum blonde—blew audiences away back in the 1930s. Tragic blondes could easily be added to this list. A brunette can be stunning, but she is never referred to as a bombshell. A redhead is fiery, but she is not a goddess. Neither are ever “dumb” by virtue of the hair color. What is it about blondes that make them special/infamous/ridiculed? It’s just a hair color, isn’t it? Or is it? Perhaps there are more complex reasons for our cultural fascination with blondes; their lives, their figures, and ultimately, their downfalls. Blondes seem to suffer more often from tragedy than their brunette and red-haired sisters, and to top it off, they are often perceived as deserving such hardship. Society seems to run hot and cold on these women based solely on the color of their hair, and how much a part that plays in their fate can be understood by looking into the lives of tragic blondes.
Jayne Mansfield
Mention Jayne Mansfield today and the first image that pops into most people’s mind in that of a headless corpse, lying beside of a two-lane highway. She is not remembered for her vibrant wit, nor her amazing curves, or her glowing platinum mane. Her few movies faded into oblivion, her tireless publicity stunts long forgotten. The woman who took the stage by storm with a single role, played classical violin, and had an IQ of 164, is sadly remembered today only for her horrific death. What’s even sadder is that this image is a lie, another of the falsehoods Kenneth Anger graphically detailed in that trash heap of a book that will not die: Hollywood Babylon.
Vera Jayne Palmer was born on April 19, 1933, and into the quite suburban landscape of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Vera, was a school teacher, and her father, salesman Herbert Palmer. Her father died suddenly from a heart attack when Jayne was just three years old. Some believe that this left her with emotional scars that filled her with a constant, almost unnatural need for male attention. When Jayne was still in elementary school, she showed signs of being a violin prodigy. The violin is one of the hardest instruments to master, and most children can’t play it at all. Jayne probably could have been a professional violinist, had she not developed stars in her eyes just then. She was also gifted at piano, viola and bass fiddle.
One day, Jayne woke up, and realized that she had the breasts of a well-endowed, grown woman. She was barely a teen. Boys and men also noticed this, and despite her mother’s struggles to keep her all buttoned up and well-hemmed in, she became popular for all the wrong reasons. She didn’t seem to care about the reasons. Attention was attention, as far as she was concerned. This motto would stay with her throughout her life. An older man seduced her when she was sixteen, and Jayne panicked at the possibility of being pregnant—a huge no-no in 1950s small-town America. She immediately jumped into marriage with the first gawking, drooling, high school boy who asked her: Paul Mansfield. It turned out to be a false alarm, but the following year, she did give birth to her first child, Jayne Marie.
Domestic life bored this bursting bundle of jittery energy to tears. She loved her husband, and doted on her baby girl, but Jayne never stopped yearning to be a movie star. It’s interesting that her ambitions did not include becoming an actress first. She told Paul, shortly after they were wed, that she would soon leave for Hollywood, and that he could see her starring in the movies after that. When Paul returned from a stint in the army reserves, Jayne pleaded with him to move out to Los Angeles so she could pursue her dream. He obliged. They packed up the family car, and Jayne Marie, drove out west, and bought a small bungalow in the San Fernando Valley. Jayne began to pound the pavement.
She hired an agent, who immediately had her hair dyed platinum. Hollywood did not roll over and beg. She began to spend money like a star, purchasing a hot pink Jaguar, and an expensive wardrobe, while her husband and daughter toiled away in the valley. She probably figured that if she wanted to be a star, she better look the part first: blonde ambition made manifest. She was cast in a B thriller titled Female Jungle, as the third or fourth lead, but it was a paying gig, and covered a few car payments.
Paul decided he didn’t want to be “Mr. Jaynie Mansfield” for the rest of his life, so he ditched Jayne and his daughter, and moved back to Texas. Undaunted, Jayne continued to pose for cheesecake photos, and cut ribbons at supermarket openings. Then she met James Byron, publicity wizard extraordinaire! Byron saw a diamond in the rough in his new protégée, and assumed control of her career. He booked her on a publicity tour to promote a film she wasn’t even in, Underwater, starring Jane Russell and Debbie Reynolds. The press seemed to lose interest in Reynolds and Russell when Jayne showed up, bursting out of her too-small red bathing suit and cooing, in that little girl voice of hers, that she just wanted to be a movie star, like Shirley Temple. Then, when she jumped into the pool, and the top of her bathing suit came off, well...cut, print it boys. A star, or something, was born.
There was no stopping her after that. Soon she posed nude for Playboy. Surprisingly, that didn’t kill her career. In fact, Warner Bros. actually decided to give her a seven-year contract because of it. She signed with the studio on the same day she filed for divorce from Paul. She kept his name, though, saying it sounded like a star. Warner Brothers lived up to it’s reputation for signing new talent and wasting them in one awful film after another. Jayne was cast as a cigarette girl in Pete Kelly’s Blues, as a knockoff Marilyn Monroe in a knockoff of Asphalt Jungle titled Illegal. She played a gangster’s moll in Hell on Frisco Bay. She did have a juicy second lead in a Columbia film, The Burglar, and got decent reviews for her role as a jewel thief ’s ward.
She was soon gracing the covers of every kind of magazine imaginable, from Showgirls to Mr. Annual (Mr. Annual?!) This was the mid-'50s, and huge breasts were “in like Flynn”. Men returning from the Korean war wanted their women buxom, flirty and gravity-defyingly curvaceous. Jayne fit that bill perfectly. She wasn’t coy about her assets, even posing for a photo in a director’s chair with her 40-21-35 measurements printing on the back. Really? Subtle was not in her vocabulary. She did not believe there was such a thing as being overexposed, and never met a publicity stunt she didn’t like. She cooed like a child, and oooed like slut, always on cue, and in front of the cameras.
After a promising start, her career stalled. With her film career going nowhere fast, Jayne accepted the lead in the Broadway play, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. Coincidentally, the character was a blonde bombshell. Hmm. Of course, she nailed it, and the play went on to become a smash hit, playing more than four hundred forty-four times. Suddenly, she was the toast of Broadway, and a respected comedic actress. Hollywood again took note of Jayne, and she appeared on the cover of Life magazine.
While living in New York, she attended Mae West’s new club act in the Latin Quarter of Manhattan, out of curiosity. Jayne lit up when she saw one of the dozen beef hunks with whom West surrounded herself on stage. His name was Mickey Hargitay, and when they locked eyes, it was lust at first sight. This didn’t go over well with the queen of ego, Miss West, who insisted the married Hargitay renounce Jayne—also still married, by the way—at a hastily arranged press conference. Mickey, instead, went all gaga, publicly professing his undying love for “Miss Thang”, until one of Mae’s bodyguard’s shut him up with a right cross in the jaw.
Jayne returned triumphantly to Tinseltown swathed in mink, escorted by her n
ew muscleman boyfriend, and talking up her new lead role in the major motion picture, The Girl Can’t Help It. Still regarded today as pioneering in the genre of popular-music-meets-high-camp, The Girl Can’t Help It combined Jayne’s cartoonish sex appeal, with performances by some of the greatest rock-n-roll legends of the day. Jayne essentially played herself, as she had done in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, except this time she was a singer rather than an actress. One scene had her wiggling out on stage in a skintight, red-sequined, strapless evening gown; looking for all the world like the Disney cartoon character, Jessica Rabbit. The resemblance is striking, and it’s clear Jayne was the inspiration for Ms. Rabbit four decades later.
The film was a hit, and Jayne was immediately cast as the star in the movie version of her smash Broadway play, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. The studio sent her on a forty-day, sixteen-country, European tour to promote it, which included an invitation to meet the Queen at the film’s London premier in 1957. Jayne was riding high. She would never reach this level of legitimacy in her career again.
Jayne’s over-the-top mannerisms mimicked her over-the-top lifestyle, which she happily shared with the entire world. No shy, reclusive star here, folks, just a huge publicity whore willing to do absolutely anything to keep her name in the papers. She invited cameras into her pink mansion in the hills of Benedict Canyon, bought with inheritance money. It came complete with a heart-shaped pool, pink heart-shaped bed, and a pink heart-shaped tub, nestled inside a bathroom that had been covered from floor to ceiling with pink shag carpet. She even had a fountain in the foyer that spurted pink champagne. I guess pink-colored water was too ordinary. The entire house was pink, inside and out. There was usually a pink poodle wandering around as well. In case you’re still in the dark, pink was Jayne’s signature color. Of course, it wasn’t actually her favorite color, but she felt it photographed well.