Queen Angelyne

A few weeks ago, while on the productivity-sapping vortex of endlessly clickable links also known as Buzzfeed (Greatest Things That Ever Happened On Tumblr? Yes please! Mitt Romney in Disneyland? Sure it'd be rude not to! Some excuse to show a whole bunch of Mean Girls gifs? DON'T MIND IF I DO) I ended up reading a list of 35 Signs You Grew Up in Los Angeles in the 90s for some reason. Even though growing up in the middle of nowhere but quite near Dungarvan in the 90s is probably as far removed from L.A. in the 90s as you could possibly get.

(Goddammit, about 20 minutes have passed since I typed that last sentence, because I've ended up on Buzzfeed AGAIN reading about things that Taylor Swift said this one time. HELP. ME.)

Anyway. One of things on the L.A. in the 90s list was the following:


Angelyne? Who IS she? Is she a real person? That hair! That rack! Is it an ad for a strip club? WHY WON'T THIS BILLBOARD TELL ME ANYTHING?

So off I went to find out more about this mysterious woman, as I'm sure was the exact point of the sign in the first place. It turns out that Angelyne is something of a cult icon in L.A. and commonly known in the area as The Billboard Queen. She's actually a model-slash-actress-slash-singer, but became famous for the self-promoting billboards of her in varying bodacious pin-up girl poses that popped up all over the Los Angeles landscape throughout the 1980s and 90s.


What's interesting, considering that she's primarily famous for being famous (locally, at least), is that not much is actually known about her. She mostly refuses to answer questions, but when she does, gives contradictory information, so there's all this mystique surrounding her, which is kinda awesome. She's even listed on the Los Angeles County registrar of voters as simply "Angelyne". Because Angelyne don't need no surname.

There were rumours that the billboard companies or a millionaire sugar daddy paid for her giant ads when they went up, but she has credited investors with the financial side of things in the past, as well as claiming that it was all her own doing. The initial idea behind the billboards was to promote the rock band she was in at the time (called Angelyne, naturally) but once the signs went up, Angelyne the Billboard Queen was born. 


Over the years, she's been known for driving around L.A. in her hot pink Corvette with a vanity plate that reads ANGELNN and there are websites dedicated to sightings of her, but not in a creepy way, in more of a "oh my God, there she is!" kind of way. It's like she's a mythical creature from the city's gritty, sleazy past, a time before any idiot could be a star through the means of reality TV and YouTube, a self-made cult heroine.

Angelyne still drives around the city, reportedly selling t-shirts and merchandise out of the boot of her pink car to her fans. She's a much older woman at this stage, but has resolutely maintained her human Barbie doll brand, normally head to toe in eye-watering pink and leopard print. Recent pictures of her are all either unflattering paparazzi shots, or fan photos where she'll strike her signature pose with her leg raised and coquettishly hold a magazine with her as the cover girl over her face. I find her quite endearing, and while her outfit choices may be debatable, well that's her look and by god she's sticking to it.


While she never quite got her big break, she had bit parts in a few different films, one of which was 1988's campy and fun Earth Girls Are Easy, which starred a rather young Jim Carrey, Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. The director decided to give her a walk-on part, or rather, "a lean-in part", as he felt that she was "the Patron Saint of a certain side of L.A."



She released a song some time in the early 80s called My List, and made a music video that featured her driving her pink Corvette around town. Considering some of the videos from this particular decade, I think hers holds up pretty well. I mean, it's SUPER EIGHTIES, but it's fun and cute and the song is actually pretty catchy and when she smiles around the 1:50 mark, she looks really beautiful.



Angelyne's billboards have appeared in an estimated thirty five films and tv shows, including Get Shorty, Volcano and the title sequence of Moonlighting. Her signs have all disappeared at this stage, but they were such an iconic part of the Hollywood landscape, that a replica of her first one was built as part of a recreated Sunset Strip for the filming of the Eighties-set movie version of Rock of Ages.

She ran for Governor of California in 2003, the year that Arnold Schwarzenegger won, finishing 28th out of 135 candidates and has claimed in interviews that she's an alien being from another world. (Which makes me wonder what the deal is with human Barbie dolls believing that they're aliens, as Ukrainian woman Valeria Lukyanova appears to have similar beliefs. Maybe they're on to something?)


She's become so ingrained in L.A. pop culture, that she's had a robot based on her in Futurama (Remember Angle-een? That's her!) and Fergie dressed up as her for Halloween last year. The pink Corvette bag was a nice touch. She was also featured in the video for Moby's We Are All Made Of Stars in 2002, along with her billboard, obviously.


There are great (although fairly brief) interviews with her here and here, if you want to know more about Angelyne. I for one can't get enough of her, I just find her so fascinating for some reason.

A pink unicorn out and about in downtown L.A.

Yes She Can

As much as I love pin-up girls like the winking, oopsie-my-skirt-blew-up cuties that adorned the walls and plane noses of WWII soldiers, I also have a soft spot for Rosie the Riveter. The be-headscarved lady of the now famous We Can Do It! propaganda posters encouraging women into the workforce, who looked like she could snap an Elvgren girl in two.


What I didn't know was that tough-girl Rosie's image was based on a photo of a seventeen year old hottie who worked as a metal presser in 1942 to help the war effort. Oddly enough, the girl in question, Geraldine Doyle, didn't know she was the inspiration for the poster either until she was 59 and completely by chance, happened upon a magazine article that explained Rosie's origins.


Geraldine actually packed in her factory job after two weeks, as she played the cello and feared an injury to her hands. Since then, the image of Rosie has permeated pop culture big time, becoming an eighties symbol of feminism and empowerment and so recognisable that Christina Aguilera, Pink and Beyonce have all referenced her in music videos over the last while.




I think my favourite incarnation is this Princess Leia version of the poster though. She'd make bits of the aforementioned pop tarts without a hair of her twisty Danish buns getting out of place.


While I couldn't say with certainty who'd win an arm wrestling match between Original Rosie and Leia Rosie, they'd both beat me and you hands down.

Along Came A Spider And Sat Down Beside Her

As you'll no doubt have gathered from my Winchester Mansion post not so long ago, I do rather enjoy stories that entail a mysterious old house. So while I was skipping about the internet looking for pictures of Tura Satana for my last post, I happened upon a link that led me to the story of the Spider Pool, a strange and elusive site secreted in the hills of Los Angeles that was also the setting for thousands of cheesecake and nudey camera club photos in the fifties. And I thought to myself, "Why yes indeed Mr. Internet, I'll be having some of that."

In 1920s Hollywood, John McDermott, an actor-turned-director of silent films, had seen his fair share of beautifully designed movie sets being used for an hour or two and then unceremoniously consigned to the scrap heap. Balls to that, thought he, and he proceeded to build himself a crazy-ass house in the Hollywood hills constructed of the various pieces of sets he collected. The result was an amazing, rambling house that was Algerian looking one minute, Navajo next and Egyptian too just for the craic, along with dozens of other styles. There were three canons mounted on a parapet, tombstones from the set of The Hunchback of Notre Dame built into a wall, a tunnel staircase that spiralled up to a mirrored bedroom that had a fireplace under the bed and most importantly, a gorgeous swimming pool area that featured a huge mosaic of a spider with a hornet embedded in the tiled web.

The dwelling became known locally as The House That Jack Built and gained notoriety for the wild parties thrown by McDermott. A Hollywood columnist wrote an account of her visit to the house for one of its legendary shindigs, in which she describes underground passages, trap doors, duck ponds and pieces of elk meat being roasted on a spit. Stories abound of party shenanigans such as dollybirds dressed as harem girls shimmying out of said trap doors to the sound of John beating a drum and also of the host surveying the beautiful pool from a throne atop the infamous spider mosaic, as apparently it was his wont to furnish lady guests with swimsuits that dissolved when they hit the water, the absolute HOUND.

So, it's that pool area that all of this is leading to. A few years ago, a group of people online were trading vintage pin-up and cheesecake photos and became fascinated by this one recurring location, the Spider Pool.





It was a hugely popular backdrop for girlie photography, the tiled spider wall had countless hotties in varying states of undress pout and pose on it and near it. Including my heroine du jour, Tura.


Anyhoodle, the various fans of this mysterious locale did their damnedest to work out where it was. As it happens, a relative newcomer to their cause, whose post was the first article I read about it, set off on a mission into the hills and only went and FOUND the bloody thing. After McDermott's death, the house passed through a few owners, barely survived a fire and eventually fell into disrepair at the hands of vandals and squatters, before ultimately being condemned and bulldozed to the ground. All that remains of the once wondrous home is the chipped and weathered spider wall, which still must have been overwhelmingly exciting to uncover.



It's a shame that there don't appear to be any pictures of the house itself from its debaucherous heyday, but I do love that somewhere hidden away in the hills of L.A. lies this weird memento and one time playground of showbiz stars and cheeky pin-up models. There's a hugely detailed timeline of the house here, put together by a member of the discussion group, and this is the post by the intrepid Jacy Young who rediscovered the amazing Spider Pool and took the present day photos above. Colour me obsessed.

Smoke and Mirrors

For someone who hates cigarettes as much as I do, I have something of an odd fascination with the cigarette girls that could be found in American nightclubs and cafes of the 1940s and 50s. Their outfits were cheeky and cute, rocking fishnets or seamed stockings and pill box hats, with a great big tray of sweets, novelty items and emphysema slung around their pretty necks.





Cigarette girls popped up all over the place in the 40s and 50s, celebrity hotspots, comic books, cartoons and pin-up art to name but a few pop culture appearances.

Ciro's was a famous nightclub and moviestar hangout in Hollywood from the forties through to the sixties, where little hotties like this could be found flogging tobacco.

An issue of the 1940s aviation-themed comic book Link Thorne featured this deadly sci-fi looking cigarette girl.

Foxy cigarette girl pin-ups by Enoch Bolles and Al Moore. Mega gorgeousness.

Hollywood starlets like Jayne Mansfield and Elizabeth Taylor were snapped posing as cigarette girls in nightclubs in the fifties at charity events, Audrey Hepburn had a bit part as a cigarette girl in 1951's Laughter in Paradise and even Betty Boop jiggled into the still-excellent Who Framed Roger Rabbit? brandishing a tray of cigars and Camels.

Josie Maran as a rather alluring Egyptian style cigarette girl in The Aviator and Audrey as her minor character in 1951.

I'm so in love with the look and reckon it would make for a rather terrific fancy dress costume, although I'd almost certainly get fed up of lugging the tray around. But it would look deadly altogether, which would be some consolation I suppose.

Drawn This Way

As most of you are surely well aware by now, I'm a tad obsessed with old school pin up girl art. I've previously mentioned that I wrote a dissertation in college about the origins of the pin up girl, the coasters on our coffee table are tiles adorned with saucy thigh-flashing hotties and for my birthday last year the Bear knocked it out of the park with a Vargas girl double whammy of a vintage deck of cards and a 1972 collection of Playboy centrefolds. So when I spotted a link on Facebook, courtesy of Anne-Marie, that contained a gallery of pin up girls and the photos on which the artist based them, I got a bit excited. It's a mad kind of before and after, where the artist quite clearly selects bits and pieces of the models in the photos to put together a winking, impossibly streamlined and downright gorgeous Frankenstein cutie.









If you want to see more, and let's not kid ourselves, of course you do, the full gallery is here.

Table Top Hotties

Since we got our sexy table, the Bear and I have had to balance our cups o'tay on various old issues of Style magazine or whatever else came to hand, to avoid the heat from the mugs messing with its lacquered surface. So when we came upon these cheeky pin-up girl tiles at a market in Amsterdam, they seemed like the perfect method of not melting Greta Garbo's face with tea. Success!


At the same market we also picked up this 1950s style table lighter for a scandalous €2. You're welcome, sexy table!

Pin Ups and Presents

Birthdays are great, aren't they? People you like give you nice things and more often than not there's cake involved. And cake being involved in any situation is never a bad thing. (Go on, try to think of a situation where cake wouldn't be a good idea.) For my birthday this year, I absconded to Edinburgh for the weekend with seven foxy ladies, which totally beats last year, where Michael Jackson selfishly went and died the day before and stole my thunder. The absolute cheek of some people.

So I've decided to show off some of my lovely presents, including a stack of graphic novels and some rather brilliant DVDs.


The Bear went and outdid himself this year, (seeing as I'm so ridiculously gay for classic pin-up girls) with a 1972 Playboy collection of Vargas girls and a vintage deck of Vargas playing cards. Drool.

Oh, and Dita Von Teese button pins. Allow me to say - Schwing!

I can't even begin to describe how amazingly gorgeous every individual card is, so I won't. I'll just use this photo instead.


They just don't make sexy playing cards like they used to.

Coco Pops

These are from back in January, but just LOOK at the gorgeousness! Burlesque badass Miss Dirty Martini was featured in V Magazine's Size Issue running riot around the Chanel fashion studio in Paris and doesn't she just look like the best craic ever?




Bombshell!