By Groovy Duke Lewis
If you’re tired of how you look, do what the stars do—change your image. If it doesn’t work out, then you can tell it goodbye and try on another image for size.
Once upon a time there were four hungry short-haired scroungy, scruffy musicians who called themselves the Moon Dogs. Nothing was happening so they scrubbed up, switched from grubby to groovy garb, grew hair to their earlobes and eyebrows and changed their name from Dogs to Beatles. Yeah, the rest is history. And they’ve changed their image again—and look what they look like now; Wow!
Hayley Mills and Patty Duke dropped their sweet-young-thing images to swingy mod types. Patty’s career goes from saint to sophisticate in her first adult film, playing a psyched-out singer with too much make-up and not enough clothes, in Valley Of The Dolls, based on the best-selling book. Barbara Parkins co-stars with Patty in this 20th Century Fox film.
Sandra Dee, shedding her kookie Gidget image, went to the opposite extreme coming on like a dowdy dowager until producer-pal Ross Hunter talked her out of that bag and converted Sandy into smart young-adult elegance. Stefanie Powers scissored her beautiful long hair a la Mia Sinatra when Girl From UNCLE died. Sex kitten Brigitte Bardot has become a short-haired pussycat without the pout. Short skirts have replaced her tiny towels. She’s also toned down her wild make-up except for the exaggerated eye make-up described by Dorothy Manners as “two sets of false eyelashes, presumably her own mixed in somewhere.”
Danny Hutton who introduced the mustache to the pop world, now wears his face bare of hair. Dick Van Dyke sports a cookie-duster like a young David Niven. The Seeds, new sprouts of the Flower Generation, changed their hairy monster look, even organman Darryl Hooper, last hold-out, shaved his Rennaissance beard, cut two inches from his shoulder-length hair and wears it in a neck knot.
“You change or you rot,” declared Sky Saxon, Seed leader. “People who are afraid of change are decomposing vegetables and don’t know it.”
It was like old times here when swarms of music-maddened maidens freaked-out and rampaged onto the Hullaballoo Club stage during a Seeds show. Some had dance-fits up there, others covered Sky with kisses and went for the other three. Although the security guards kept their cool, they did carry the kids back into the audience area. One teenie-screamie we saw being carried away four or five times.
The next set was a classy, crashy, mind-blowing rave-up to remember. Nothing was wrecked and nobody was hurt. It was a riot all right—a laugh riot.
“Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children,” wrote the English philosopher Lord Rochester. “Now I have six children and no theories.”
Dorothy Malone now has two kids and one theory left: “Kids are like kites—you can give them freedom to fly but there should always be a string attached.”
The Beach Boys now have two girl babies and one boy baby. Latest addition to the BB family roster: Jennifer Beth Wilson, born to Carole and Dennis Wilson a couple of weeks after they schmoozed over their marriage difficulties and reconciled. Suzanne and Mike Love love baby Hayleigh. Lynda and Al Jardine begat Matthew.
Despite hot denials, Paul McCartney and Jane Asher have cooled it. The coy way she acted at a Daisy Club (Beverly Hills) poetry reading led us to conclude she’s hung up on David Hemmings, the Blow-Up character who was here for Camelot. Jane played Juliet with the Old Vic Shakespeare Group, or something like that, on a U.S. circuit.
Sue Lyon was adding too much suet to her shape until she discovered a new reducing exercise. She places both hands against the table and pushes back. Now she looks better in a leopard bikini than a leopard does.
Troubador Trini Lopez is not wild about women like some musicats. Don’t take that wrong. He’s a devoted girl-watcher and lady-dater but we’ve never known him to blow his brain-pod over any one member of the tender gender. Then it happened. He flipped out for Lost In Space actress Angela Cartwright, drool, drool, drool, and asked her for a string of dates. Alas, he had to postpone their late-date social scene for nearly 3 ½ years when she told him she was 14 ½.
Lana Wood didn’t like it when she was written out of Peyton Place but what could she do? Natalie’s kid sister won’t have to live on a hovel and wear hand-me-down threads, however, as she has more film offers than she can shake a ballpoint at. Leigh Taylor-Young respectfully requested release from P.P. to devote herself to Ryan O’Neal. One breadwinner in the family is enough, she says. The studio isn’t ready to turn her loose so she’s stuck on the sound stage for awhile yet.
Faith is a beautiful thing and that’s what Columbia Records has in Keith Allison, ex-Shindig star, now a regular on the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars. The label has issued several Allison singles, none chart-makers, and has now spun his album, Keith Allison In Action.
It’s a long road back for Jan Barry who wrecked himself in a horrible car crash last year. Jan and Dean have been able to work in a recording studio but not travel on personal appearance tours. Jan is still paralyzed on one side. His foot drags when he walks and his speech is still blurry. You wouldn’t recognize him now, he’s grown so big and heavy.
We’ve waited a long time for a true-to-life moving picture of the current youth scene. Maybe The Flower Generation is it; screenplay co-authored by Sal Mineo and Russ O’Neill, co-starred by Nancy Sinatra and Sal.
The average film about teenage life in the big cities shows only the seamy side as viewed by grandpa producers and old boozy writers who read the crime news for picture plots.
Quite a batch of movie bummers will sick up the screens of your neighborhood theaters this summer. Take ’em with a grain of salf [sic]. Hippie-trippie juvies are not all acid addicts, pot heads and free-love faddists, any more than all motorbikers are Hell’s Angels freakers.
The new rich of the music mob are sportscar commandos charging around on their iron steeds. But when they get super-charged on loot they go to the sedate crate route.
Rolls Royces are the ultra-ultra status symbols now. It can’t be all show-off, however, as most of them don’t need to prove they’re rich or important. They just dig magnificio machines.
Trini Lopez jet-flitted to England to take delivery of and make the trial runs on his very first $31,000 custom convertible Rolls, and he awaited dockside to oversee its arrival in New York harbor. He may have the only drop-top RR in Southern California.
John Lennon, George Harrison and Albert Finney equipped their Rollses with purdah glass completely blacking out the side and back windows. Elvis Presley’s new R-Royce is so loaded with TV, stereos and other extra goodies that he and Priscilla have to corkscrew into it. Brian Wilson nurses his like it was a fourth Beach Boy baby. Andy Williams dusts his with a silk hankie. Cary Grant’s is a town institution. Steve McQueen, a cycle head, wore a tailored suit and drove a Rolls in the currently-shooting Crown Caper picture. He dug it so much he bought one (A Rolls, not a suit.) Monkee Micky Dolenz: “I put a down payment on a Rolls and promised to pay in 36 installments and who knows, perhaps I shall.”
Herb Alpert is so raunchy rich he could probably buy the Rolls Royce factory in England and who knows, perhaps he will. He’s buying everything else in sight. Backstage at the Grammy Awards we said to him: “Hey, Herb, I’m getting tired of reading all the stories about how rich you are. Isn’t anything else happening in your block?”
“I’m fed up with those one-note articles myself,” he sighed. “Interviewers come out to the place and I tell them all kinds of interesting things. When I read what they wrote I read again how rich I am. I wish they’d shut it down.”
A panel of pretty pussycats, at our behest, listed the best-looking, sexiest and charmiest minstrels of 1967. Choice was limited to one per group which eliminated dozens of contenders. After considerable soul-searching and head-scratching they submitted the following:
Mick Jagger, Dennis Wilson, Peter Noone, Dino Martin, Mark Lindsay, Paul McCartney, Dave Clark, Sky Saxon, Gordon Waller, Neil Diamond, Herb Alpert, Donovan, Tommy Roe, Johnny Tillotson, Marvin Gaye, Dobie Gray, Mitch Ryder, Davy Jones, Cat Stevens, Danny Hutton, also Jim McCartney of the Yardbirds, Scott Engel of Walker Brothers, Michael Stuart of Love, Lee Kiefer of Hard Times, Mike Clarke of Byrds, Dickie Dodd of Standells, Keith Moon of Who, Joe Butler of Spoonful, Richie Furay of Springfield, Stevie Winwood of Spencer Davis Group, Graham Nash of Hollies, Bill Combest of Badd Boys, Dino Danelli of Young Rascals, Ted Bluecher, Jr., of Association, Denny of the Mama’s and Papa’s, Mike of the Left Banke, Larry of the Knack, Big Don of the Good Times.
Speaking of gobbledook doubletalk, that’s what you get when you ask ABC-TV why they cancelled Where The Action Is while it had the highest ratings of any daytime show on that or any other network.
“The 4:30–5 p.m. time slot that Action had on our network was returned to local stations to sell to local sponsors,” we were told. “However, local stations opened up their 10 a.m. half hour to the network, so it was merely a time swap but it excluded the Action show.”
That doesn’t make sense. We think Action was wiped out when some ivory tower power in New York came down with a fit of idiocy which, after all, isn’t rare in television.
Dick Clark himself can’t explain it any better. However, Dick takes care of his own. All the Action singers, dancers and musicians will join his wandering Caravan of Stars this summer until he can think of another idea to keep his people out of the breadlines.
My friend, Dino Martin, Jr. is going to become a full-fledged movie star at last. He’s just signed to make a film this spring in which he’ll play a straight dramatic part. The movie’s going to be directed by John Derek, who used to be, married to Ursula Andress. Dino will have the male lead in this film along with a new young feminine star. He’ll be very romantic as only Dino can be.
The VIP platter artists are shooting down the airtime ban on records longer than three minutes. Pop music stations claim longer records cut their time for deejay patter and radio commercials—the pause that depresses.
For busting the ban on longer platters you can thank the Beatles, Beach Boys, Sonny and Cher, Herb Alpert, Donovan and Bob Dylan whose four to five minute wax can’t be ignored by station programmers in the ratings rat race. Recording artists take the view that us disk-buyers are entitled to more music for our money, and we won’t beef about that.
