Thu May 05, 2011 5:31 am
Yeah, I hear you. Sadly this is not a unique phenomenon. I can remember a case in Detroit some years back where an elderly lady had passed away alone in her home and they didn't discover her for an estimated six years!
I find it bitterly ironic that so much fan mail was in Yvette's house. I guess the long delay in finding the body is what makes her death so much harder for me to accept. At least it tentatively appears that she died of natural causes. My disdain to the media, though, for sensationalizing the story and thereby probably guaranteeing this is what she'll be remembered for the most. Still, maybe publicizing this will help to prevent it from happening to some other people in the future. At least now she can be decently laid to rest. It's bizarre, really: in recent years she'd been doing conventions, recording audio commentaries, writing her memoirs, etc., and seemed thoroughly outgoing and humourous in interviews. It just defeats my imagination she could "disappear" for so long without anyone noticing, though apparently a lot of people simply assumed she was away at her other house. I'm confused by the listing of her age as 82. Every source I've ever read (including herself) claimed she was born in 1936, and she sure looks closer to 14 than 21 in SUNSET BOULEVARD.
Well, what I'll remember is not how she died but how she lived. She had a pretty interesting career, beginning with the aforementioned SUNSET BOULEVARD (I asked her if she happened to meet Buster Keaton, but apparently not). She did meet, and work with, many other notables, though: Roger Corman, Steve Cochran, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin and Jack Webb, to name a few. She was essentially "discovered" by James Cagney, who put her in his film SHORT CUT TO HELL. In the late 1950's she was seen in several B-pictures such as REFORM SCHOOL GIRL and I, MOBSTER, before cementing her cult status as the delicious white trash of ATTACK OF THE FIFTY-FOOT WOMAN and ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES. She's also visible, all too briefly, in BEACH PARTY and HUD, a waste of her acting talents.. Her film career seems to have been torpedoed by her essentially fleeing Hollywood and an abusive husband (she married three times). Less well known is her stint on Broadway, where for one thing she took the lead in BUS STOP and worked with such notables as Melvyn Douglas, E. G. Marshall and Bert Wheeler. She can be seen in a multitude of television shows and was an accomplished singer. She dated many famous actors like Cary Grant, Ralph Meeker and Jim Hutton (the man she regretted not marrying), and counted Mort Sahl and Allison Hayes among her friends.
Of course, she was also Miss July 1959, photographed by one Russ Meyer (whom she remembered shooting the centrefold while wearing army fatigues). In those days, obviously, posing for Playboy was about forty times more daring than it is now, but they kept offering it to her. Hilariously, the magazine's own lawyers tried to 86 the centrefold on the grounds that it was "too hot" (how's that for backhanded flattery?), but "Hef" disagreed and Yvette went down in history as the "Beatnik Playmate," having been emboldened by the example set of Marilyn Monroe's own career not having been harmed by doing the same thing. For me, Yvette's centrefold is right up there with Marilyn's and Stella Stevens' as one of the greatest examples of pin-up phtotgraphy ever done. If you've never seen it, gents, look it up sometime: it's amazing.
Yvette always signed off with me using the phrase "Many Blessings to You Always." Back at you, Dear Lady. Heaven is now a lot more gorgeous...
