Trick
shot golfer, Hollywood party girl, Marilyn Monroe pal, kiss-and-tell
autobiographer;
Jeanne Carmen is all this and more. In the
early 1950's,
Carmen took the road often traveled by glamour
gals. She competed and won several beauty contest and then tried to parlay
that into an acting career. Her first stop was New York, and then it was
off to Hollywood. Along the way, she became a favorite of the cheesecake
crowd first as a brunette and then later as you classic blonde bombshell.
At the age of 18, she was taught to be a trick golfer by tirck shot master
Jack
Redmond. This was all a gimmick done just to sell women's golf
wear, but it wound up being Carmen's passkey into the world
of the Hollywood's elite.
At the Actor's Studio she met up with fellow
glamour gal Marilyn Monroe. This
friendship last until Monroe's death and included enough
juicy escapades to fill page after page in Carmen's tell-all
book "JEANNE CARMEN: MY WILD, WILD LIFE AS A NEW YORK PIN UP QUEEN,
TRICK-SHOT GOLFER & HOLLYWOOD ACTRESS" And those celebrities,
according to Carmen, included JFK, RFK,
Elvis,
Sinatra, and Bob Hope, just to name a few.
(You can read her true confessions here: page
1, page 2,
page
3, and
page
4.)
During her party girl heyday, she did manage
to become a B-movie Queen with such films as "The Three Outlaws," "The
Monster of Piedras Blancas" and "Untamed Youth" (alongside Mamie
Van Doren).
Carmen never made the sort of
cultural impact that her pal Monroe made, but became of those
great Hollywood icons known more for their exploits off screen rather than
on.
Carmen's legacy as a glamour gal has been brought to
a new generation with a recent
E! True Hollywood Story based
on her--where the still fabulous
Carmen kiss-and-tells all
over again.
There is a great website about her, JeanneCarmen.com,
run by her son Brandon James. Carmen can still
be seen around hitting all the cool night spots. In fact, she was one of
the special guests at the first JBP
Cocktails & Cheesecake Party in April 2006.
You can read an exclusive interview with Jeanne
Carmen here: Jeanne
Carmen Interview Part 1. Jeanne
Carmen Interview Part 2.
|