The Passing Tide 4: Deceased Artiste Dolores Fuller

Back in the days before reality shows ensured that everyone had a chance to prolong their show-business careers indefinitely, there were few “second acts” in entertainment. One of the actresses who successfully escaped the B-movie “underground” and scored a second career was Dolores Fuller, who died a few weeks back at 88. She was best known for her work in front of the camera, as the female lead in her then-boyfriend Ed Wood’s astounding Glen or Glenda? (1953), but she refashioned herself in the Sixties as a songwriter, contributing a dozen songs to Elvis movies.

I interviewed Ms. Fuller back in the mid-Nineties, and she was quite a sweet lady who was more than willing to talk about the highs and lows in her life. By that point, she was again working in front of the camera — she appeared in micro-budgeted genre pics like The Ironbound Vampire and The Corpse Grinders 2, directed by the only surviving no-budget auteur, the redoubtable (and unstoppable) Ted V. Mikels.

She began her career with a bit as a child extra in It Happened One Night (1934), and then returned to Hollywod in the early Fifties, appearing in uncredited roles in a few films before meeting and becoming the girlfriend of the legendary Edward D. Wood Jr. — who, as we all know, is not the “world’s worst director” he was labeled as, because his films are compulsively watchable, no matter how incompetent they got (his scripts were astounding too, especially in the later years).

Ms. Fuller did the convention circuit in the mid-Nineties, thanks to the resurgence of interest in Wood, which culminated in the extremely upbeat and touching Tim Burton biopic. In that film she was played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who publicly said (I believe it was on The Tonight Show) that it was hard to play Dolores because she was such a bad actress (SJP is capable of so much more as a performer — insert joke *here*). Glen or Glenda? does remain one of the most stunningly bizarre movies ever; just on the off chance you haven’t seen it (or want to be reminded of its angora genius), here is the famous finale, in which Dolores gives her sweater to Ed to complete his transformation:



Ms. Fuller was unabashed about all aspects of her B-movie career — when I met her for the interview, I was surprised to find that she was selling color nude sunbathing pics of herself from the Fifties, which she said were shot by none other than “Eddie” himself. She noted publicly that her relationship with Wood ended when he became a heavy drinker, but one has to assume it was also a function of her embarrassment over his transvestism (see the interview clip below).

As to her “rebirth” as a songwriter, the story goes that she asked her friend Hal Wallis for a part in the Elvis picture Blue Hawaii (1961) and didn’t get one. Instead, she got to write the lyrics for a song Elvis sang in the pic, the extremely Presleyian (check out that classic finale) “Rock-a-hula, Baby”:



With her partner Ben Weisman (he wrote the melodies, she wrote the lyrics), Dolores went on to write a total of twelve songs for the Elvis movies. She also wrote tunes that were recorded by Nat King Cole, Shelley Fabares, and Peggy Lee. In addition, she started a record company named Dee Dee Records that launched the career of Johnny Rivers, and she is credited with getting Tanya Tucker her first break in the music industry.

Since I think she was prouder of her musical accomplishments than for having been Ed Wood’s angora-object-of-desire, I’ll include a few of her Elvis tunes here. First, a jumpin’ little tune, “I Got Lucky”:



Then “Steppin’ Out of Line.” At first I thought this fan-created bit of video (using a lot of anime images) was silly, but then I realized it’s sort of a welcome break from Elvis’ cookie-cutter movie musical numbers (which, aside from Viva Las Vegas, were rarely staged creatively):



Perhaps the silliest song Ms. Fuller co-wrote for the King, “Do the Clam” from Girl Happy (1965). The “Bo Diddley beat” is used to support this dance tune. And yes, Elvis does do the dance at the clip’s end. It is entertaining and ridiculous:



Ms. Fuller had a song in Elvis’ very last film as an actor, the stunningly campy A Change of Habit (1969), which I heartily recommend to everyone reading these words (it is up on YouTube in its entirety at this moment, and certainly can be discovered on DVD). Mary Tyler Moore is a nun, Elvis is a ghetto doctor, and they both try to cheer up an unhappy little girl in this scene. The film’s sub-theme is whether MTM will leave the nunnery for Elvis — at this point her gleeful single-shots are a little too weirdly orgasmic (especially in front of a kid on a merry-go-round). The song is pretty wacky too:



Since I’ve linked to the silliest, let me link to the best tune Fuller co-wrote for Elvis, this rewrite of the old North Carolina folk tune discovered by John Lomax called “Cindy.” The original is sung by Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo. The revamped version by Fuller, Weisman, and Fred Wise is reputed by Wikipedia to be the one covered by numerous artists (including Warren Zevon) in the last four decades. Then again, a nimble YT editor has matched up the Ricky Nelson version with the great duet by Johnny Cash and Nick Cave, and it appears they were singing the traditional version. In any case, Elvis' version does indeed rock, and belongs to the "comeback" period where he seemed to actually give a damn about his music again:



I have the feeling that while she was steadily working as a lyricist, she rarely thought about her ex-boyfriend Ed Wood (who was then writing, and occasionally appearing in, softcore pictures) and never dreamt that his movies would enter the mainstream decades later (does anyone remember that Warren Beatty’s name was somehow linked with the arthouse canonization of Glen or Glenda? back in the early Eighties?).

Whatever the case was, she was charming and gracious when I interviewed her at the Chiller Theatre convention in the mid-Nineties. I’ve always particularly liked her looking away in a dramatic fashion as I ask the question here. Like many of the older ladies I’ve interviewed, she was a class act.

The Passing Tide 3: Deceased Artiste Randy "Macho Man" Savage

I haven’t talked much on this blog about my love for professional wrestling, which started when I was a kid and has been revived throughout the years whenever a master mic-worker has appeared. See, I’m not as interested in the matches as I am in the promos and in-between business when it’s amusing — which it only is when it’s in the hands of seasoned ranters or crazy people (and of course the best wrestling stars are both). “Macho Man” Randy Savage died a few weeks back, and I need to pay tribute to him because he was a mighty mic-worker, a guy whose promos at worst were vaguely coherent; at best they were, well… brilliantly, superbly insane.

There was a special on cable-access here in Manhattan years ago called “Professional Wrestling: The Spoken Word,” which simply intercut thirty minutes of the craziest interview segments from the more obscure federations (obscure to those of us up here in the North). Now that YouTube exists, you can readily find hours of this stuff, and when you watch it in sequence, you find that, yes, these guys are manic spoken-word artists, standup comedians, and even in some cases (the mute George “the Animal” Steeles and Bugsy McGraws), performance artists.

So we salute Randy Poffo, aka Randy Savage, who could wield a mic with the best of them (that’s why he became a cartoon voice-talent after his wrestling career was over). He came from a wrestling family (his father Angelo was in the business, as was his brother — "Leaping Lanny Poffo") and had a career as a minor-league baseball player before making his in-ring debut in 1973. Throughout the three decades he worked as a wrestler he was both a successful “heel” and a “face” — although he was FAR more interesting as a heel, it goes without saying.

Savage was diminished in WWE history since he left the franchise in 1994. Vince McMahon held a grudge over something — fans speculate on the Net over rumors that “Randy took Stephanie McMahon’s virginity” to “Randy gave Shane McMahon cocaine” to “he took Slim Jim's sponsorship with him when he went to WCW” to “there was a business deal that went sour between Randy and Vince.” Whatever the case was, McMahon has praised Savage since his death (including a few-paragraph statement in Time magazine), but was completely against him when he was around.

Sure, Savage had massive personal problems — he used drugs, was rumored to be extremely difficult, and sometimes the plot strands of his “storyline” (with women entering and exiting, and him punching out guys for lusting after them) mirrored what was going on in his real life. But I think the entertainment the guy afforded us playing a human cartoon (that he himself created, then lost control of, and then brought back to life as “the Madness” in WCW) compensates for whatever personal gripes people had against him. I offer in evidence the clips below.

The best way to start a very select survey of clips is to offer a solo Randy ramble, in which he notes that “history beckons the Macho Man!!!”:



Diehard fans have deep VHS collections. Here Randy is in 1980 in a fed called ICW that his father had a hand in founding. The joy of watching clips from the smaller feds is seeing how the mic-workers fill time (they sometimes had to fill large clumps of it in the clean-up between matches). The seeds of greatness lie in this insane rambling (the best bit: staring all night at a candle):



Randy’s brother Lanny was the poem-spouting wrestler “Leaping” Lanny Poffo. The two brothers made a music video set to an AC/DC song, but this beefcake-riddled, homoerotic item with the two set to “State of Shock” by the Jacksons and Mick Jagger is quite wonderfully nuts:



Looming large in Savage’s legend was his manager (and real-life wife) the “lovely Miss Elizabeth.” I never found her the least bit compelling in the ring or as a mic presence, but he had her in-ring with him for over a decade. Here he proposes to her, and here is her WWF debut, with the announcers trying to make her seem more glamorous than she was:



Here we hit the real mother lode, a feud narrative told in two frenzied interviews. The participants are the “Nature Boy” Ric Flair,” Mr. Perfect, Bobby “the Brain” Heenan, and Randy and Miss Elizabeth:



Randy informing us that he’s insane:



Sometimes you got double or triple the terrific mic-work. Here Savage is joined by the equally insane Ultimate Warrior, and here he is with Zeus (action movie perennial Tiny Lister) and “Sensational Sherri” Martel:



The King and Queen of Madness, Randy with his new manager Sensational Sherri, command the camera. Martel was everything Miss Elizabeth was not (a compelling presence on screen, an in-ring wrestler, a great villain):



And cross-promotion is important, so of course there had to be a cheeseball rap video for Randy (he did a later, mega-raspy-voiced rap album that is quite special). Here it is, with background singers praising what sounds like the "Matcho Man" (what do they care?):



Before I conclude with the best-ever period of Randy’s mic-work, let me flash forward to him doing a promo this year for Comic Con (and Macho Man action figures), looking much older (he died at 58), but still possessing a great raspy voice and capable of rambling ("that’s a secret, no it isn't…”) like nobody’s business:



I must close on Savage’s promos cut with the great “Mean” Gene Okerlund, a Howard Cosell-sounding announcer who was arguably the best straight man for wrestlers in the WWF. Take a look at Randy being interviewed by Jesse “the Body” Ventura, and then check out the condensed power of Savage cutting promos with Mean Gene:



My two favorite-ever Macho Man moments. First, he gives his hated opponent Ricky “the Dragon” Steamboat a small respite with “a cup of coffee in the big time” (awesome):



And what must be one of the most kinetic, crazy-ass interviews he ever gave to, of course, Mean Gene: