Mamie Van Doren: The Mr. Skin Interview

I read that Henry Kissinger came on to you.
Big time. Henry was a horn dog; he really thought he was hot shit. He was always bragging to me that when he went to Russia they'd have seven big Russian women waiting for him when he got off the plane. I was at a White House dinner and he was trying to feel me when I'd just met him and I'm going, "Wow, this guy's nuts!" He got around. He loved sex. In a second he was all over me when I went to his townhouse in Washington. He was jumping on me, pinned me against the wall, it was incredible.

So he wasn't attractive to you?
He would have been, if he'd had clean socks and no denture breath. It was really bad.

You dated Howard Hughes when you were very young.
I was just sixteen, so we always had to go through kitchen doors in clubs, you know. We'd go to the Players [director Preston Sturges's notorious club on Sunset Boulevard]. Howard was a nice guy, but everything had to be his way. You didn't have a choice of doing anything. It had to be what he exactly wanted.

Did he seem kinky or creepy back then?
No, not really. Though the last time I saw him (in the late '50s) he was really weird. Something was wrong there. He didn't like the bra I had on. He thought it made me droop too much. I had one of those strapless bras on and he said, "It pulls you down." He was always checking the bra, or saying, "Don't wear a bra!" He was always taking pictures of me without a bra on.

Were you the creator of the bullet bra?
There was only one original bra, and it was made by Universal for me. I have large breasts, and they're natural, but I wanted them to be more pointed so I wanted the bra to make them stick out, so I named it the bullet bra.

Boob jobs are rampant today. What do you think about that?
I hope they don't have any problems later on, and I don't know how they sleep if on their stomachs. They're so different looking than natural breasts, stiff looking. The girls in the '50s, we didn't have access to making ourselves better. We had to be pretty in the beginning.

You were friends with Marilyn Monroe for many years. Were you aware of her Kennedy connection?
Yeah, I was. Judy Exner [alleged girlfriend of JFK] was a friend of Bo Belinsky, who I was engaged to at the time. Kennedy had bought her a lot of jewelry at this shop in Beverly Hills, and I was getting my engagement ring and Bo wanted Judy along to help me pick out a good diamond. She was Kennedy's mistress. She helped me pick out a flawless diamond; that was right after Marilyn died. She had been instructed by Kennedy to go out and find his next victim, and that was me. And I thought, "He's got his hands full if he tries to screw around with me." Everybody knew that he was fucking everybody in Hollywood that he could. I knew the girls he was screwing, but I don't want to mention them now. But I was on the list, I suppose, and Judy was trying to fix it up. Now I think, gee, I should have tried him. But I heard if you put all the Kennedy dicks together you wouldn't have one good one.

Cary Grant was an early proponent of LSD. Did he try to turn you on?
Oh yeah, he was always telling me how great it would be and how it saved his ass. He wanted to take me to Palm Springs with him and do acid. He loved to talk on the phone. He had phone-itis, but I just kept turning him down.

Eventually you did trip, with Steve McQueen.
I met him at the Whiskey A Go-Go, and he was sexy and wild. He wanted to know if I wanted to go to a party that was up at Jay Sebring's house, the guy that later got killed by the Manson people. So I said okay. It was Jean Harlow and Paul Bern's old house. It was where Bern committed suicide, and I was in the bedroom where that happened. There were mirrors on the wall; it was a very bad scene. It was the first and last trip I ever did. Steve was always trying to get higher than heaven. I hope he's there now.

Were you comfortable in the 1950s as a sex symbol?
I wanted so much to do other types of roles and they just wouldn't give them to me. It was very frustrating. The studios were completely dominated by men. You're under contract; you do what they tell you to do. They changed my name, which I didn't really want, but they didn't keep anybody's name then. They took "Mamie" from Mamie Eisenhower, the least sexy woman I could imagine. Going against the grain, eh?

I've read the studio had cleavage watchdogs on the sets of your films.
It's true. Every time I had a scene in a bedroom, I'd have to put a handkerchief or a flower in to cover that cleavage, to cover that I have big breasts. There's nothing you can do about it. They just pop up, you know? I had terrible problems, and I know Marilyn had problems. Anytime there was a scene involving sex, there they were, right on the set.

What are you doing now?
Well, I live at the beach and I have a couple of miniature pinschers and a couple of birds and I'm enjoying my life probably more than I ever have. As far as Hollywood, I go up to the Playboy Mansion when they have parties and I go to openings in Las Vegas. As far as working, I haven't done any since Slackers. I was an old whore in that. I just let it all hang out on that one (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5) .

At the Mansion, how do the current crop of Playmates react to you?
The girls either love me or they hate me, and most of them love me. They go down on their hands and knees and do "Allah, Allah! It's you! You're alive!" It's really wild!

images courtesy of MamieVanDoren.com