Today would have been the 81st birthday of elegant actress JEAN SIMMONS … but sadly she died just nine days (02) short of celebrating it with us! As this New York Times obituary began: “Jean Simmons, the English actress who made the covers of Time and Life magazines by the time she was 20 {actually 21} and became a major mid-century star, died Friday at her home in Santa Monica, California. She was 80.” And quite a lady …

“Jean Simmons was the most beautiful actress I ever saw in the movies,” a fan wrote to Parade magazine in the 1980s … and Sleuth concurs. But after countless costume dramas in the Fifties such as playing Napoleon’s nymph in Desirée—where Sleuth managed to unearth a wardrobe test in which Jean’s costume was decidedly see thru {blow it up for maxi•mam exposure}—she derisively dubbed such roles “poker-up-the-ass parts … very boring.”

One playboy who found Simmons anything but boring was billionaire Howard Hughes {with Ginger Rogers}, who made it clear he’d like to poke•her up the ass … alas, he was overheard by her then-husband, actor Stewart Granger: “I’d sure like to get my teeth into that,” Hughes drooled to Cary Grant in the men’s room. “That Granger is a goddamn lucky son of a bitch.” The reclusive romeo was unlucky again, when he told Jean over the phone: “When are you going to get away from that goddamned husband of yours? I want to talk to you alone, honey.” Granger grabbed the phone and shouted: “Mr. Howard Bloody Hughes, you’ll be sorry if you don’t leave my wife alone!” As for Hughes being “sorry,” it was only a matter of Time.

And it was only a matter of time before the straight-laced Simmons would strip on screen: “I hope I don’t shock anybody,” Jean wondered when news leaked she’d skinny-dip in 1960’s Spartacus. “I must say I shocked myself a little in consenting to do it.” The nude swimming scene “was not in the original script,” the actress revealed, “but director Stanley Kubrick and Kirk {Douglas} both suggested that it would be more effective if played nude {and we’re betting Kubrick didn’t keep his Eyes Wide Shut!}. I kept agreeing, and then realized: ‘What have I said?’” What she’d done was prove her beautiful buoyancy … but only on HER side of the pond … as American audiences only saw her bare back before “doing” Douglas.

Yet unlike Spartacus, Sleuth is no slave to the censors … so he rebelled by importing these European exposures of Jean’s elegant epidermis from an overseas print of the film: Sipping some bubbly while her boobies bobbed below the surface, sultry Simmons showed a pair of flotation devices that might have saved the Tit•anic!

Jean would get along swimmingly for the next five decades … remarkably reprising the 1946 Great Expectations debut that made her famous forty-three years later … only this time as the malicious Miss Havisham! In her later years, the actress said she continued to receive fan mail but that younger writers “often confused me” with someone else: “One day a letter arrived from a 10-year-old,” she recalled. “It was the usual fan letter, saying things like, ‘I think you’re wonderful.’ Then I got to the P.S.:  ‘I love it when you spit blood!’ That’s when I realized,” joked Jean Simmons, “the letter wasn’t for me.”

But Sleuth’s favorite story concerns the time amorous Ava Gardner—then the lover of “Simmons-smitten” Howard Hughes—burst into Stewart Granger’s bedroom at 2 a.m. while on location in Africa in 1956 filming Bhowani Junction and demanded to know why he didn’t find her attractive. “Ava, you’re probably the most attractive woman in the world,” Granger gasped, “but I’m married to Jean.” Griped Gardner: “Oh, fuck Jean!” Grinned Granger: “I’d love to, darling.” Who wouldn’t …

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Sleuth has been on a figure-finding mission to Europe over the past three weeks … it’s a tough job but someone—ME—has got to do it … and thus missed the death on Thursday of Farrah Fawcett. Alas, many seem to have missed it, since the demise of singer Michael Jackson just hours later seems to have overshadowed her  in the media {like this 10-year-old kiss-off}. Fitting then, that on the day she’s laid to rest in a private ceremony, we publicly note her brave battle and sad passing.

“She’s gone,” sobbed longtime love Ryan O’Neal. “She now belongs to the ages {with apologies to Abraham Lincoln!}. She’s in a better place now.” There are few worse places to get cancer than in the anus, though an article in today’s Washington Post headlined: “Cancer That Killed Fawcett Is Rare but Often Treatable.” In fact, anal cancer strikes only about 5,000 Americans a year—compared to 215,000 cases of lung cancer—and according to the American Cancer Society: “It occurs most often in people who have many sexual partners, have receptive anal intercourse or have a weakened immune system” from drug use {widely rumored after her dazed demeanor with David Letterman in 2004}.

Farrah was just 62—it seems like only yesterday she was halfway there—so we prefer to remember her finer points: the ever-erect duo on her chest! “I can’t really put my finger on why the show is such a big hit,” the sexy starlet said when Charlie’s Angels took off in 1976 … so let’s tweak her memory: “Farrah’s major focal point on the show was her very erect nipples that were always pushing against her too-tight shirts,” notes the AngelsForever.com tribute site. “When the show was number three [in the ratings],” Farrah later quipped, “I figured it was our acting. When we got to be number one I decided it was only because none of us wears a bra.” That should put any other explanation to bed …

Once Farrah’s “very erect nipple” pushed too hard on “her too-tight shirt” … and managed to escape on prime-time television (a broadcast first!) at the same time she and Angels Jaclyn Smith and Kate jackson were escaping from prison in its highest-rated episode ever, 1976’s Angels in Chains. And it also managed to escape the network censors! Admits series producer Leonard Goldberg: “Angels in Chains was my favorite episode. The show got a 56 share {more than half the homes watching TV}! The rerun got a 52 share. I told Aaron Spelling we should just run it every week until it dropped below 40.”

Or in Farrah’s case, 33½ B. “In high school,” Fawcett admitted {her 1964 senior pic from W.B. Ray High in Corpus Christi, Texas}, “the football players all went for the girls with tremendous bosoms, and I was a little flat, if you know what I mean”—as Raquel reveals in Farrah’s Myra Breckinridge debut. So a•pair•ently she decided to remedy the tit•uation, boosting her bust to a 36D. Clearly she was drawn to the enlarged assets, even painting her pert pair in her mid-40s!

Yet her God-given gifts were sufficient to send her 1976 poster over the top: it remains the best-selling wall-hanging of all-time! “The key was Nipples,” her agent Jay Bernstein boasted. “Those nipples reached every guy going through puberty” {rare outtakes from the swimsuit session}. They also reached the Sleuth guy … my Collection includes an extremely hard-to-get original poster signed by Farrah just two months before her death!

We can’t think of a more (form) fitting farewell … as she takes a final bow.  R.I.P., FF.

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MARILYN MONROE would have been 83 this past Monday, June 1…and we don’t wish to blow it by merely paying lip service to the Greatest Sex Symbol in Hollywood History! {Guess whose picture appears on Wikipedia under “Sex Symbol”?}

Her early years were shrouded in mystery, but in case you doubt the date, Sleuth has unearthed a copy of the actual birth certificate of “Baby Norma Jeane Mortensen”…and even the original microfiche from which it was made! Not to mention a Department of Health Certificate verifying its accuracy. And since Sleuth is all about accuracy, let’s specify that she was born at 9:30 a.m. on June 1, 1926 in the charity ward of Los Angeles Hospital, as this detailed natal chart she had done later, attests.

And while Edward Mortenson’s name is listed as her father on the birth certificate, Marilyn’s sire was almost certainly womanizing Charles Stanley Gifford, who had an affair with her lookalike mother Gladys Pearl Monroe, when they worked together as film cutters at RKO Studios in 1925. This family genealogy chart seems to seal the deal. Sleuth has learned that Gladys had married a Martin Mortensen in 1924, but they separated before she became pregnant…so the scared 23-year-old named the father as Edward Mortensen, with residence listed as “Unknown” on the birth record—hoping to avoid the “stigma of illegitimacy” for her daughter. To further cover her tracks, Gladys listed her last name as “Monroe” {her middle moniker and the source for Norma Jeane’s future nom de vroom} and the occupation of the fictional father as “Baker.”

But when the child was old enough, Marilyn recalled being shown this photo that Gladys identified as her “real father”—the cad who had deserted his lover on Christmas Eve 1925 when she told him she was pregnant! Gifford—whose wife Lillian charged him with “addiction to narcotics, abuse and associating with women of low character” in her divorce petition—had a pencil-thin mustache that reminded young Norma Jeane of then-heartthrob Clark Gable, and she thus carried the picture with her throughout her life! Near her death, she reportedly fell in love with “father figure” Gable—blatantly trying to “seduce him” by secretly going au naturel under the covers (though nudity couldn’t be shown in 1960) and then letting the sheet slip while making The Misfits, her final finished film!

Her very first nude, however, came when her troubled mom left her with a foster family just  two weeks after her birth … and, as the song goes, she “musta been a beautiful baby cuz baby look at you” then! Her second nude was taken as she played in front of the foster home of Ida and Wayne Bolender, where she spent the first 7 years of her life. And she only got more beautiful as she grew: check out this photo booth snap taken when she was just twelve! Just two years later, she was already unsurpassed.

Everyone knows her iconic images, so Sleuth prefers to include a few of the rare “firsts” from his mountain•ous Marilyn files, such as: her first ever glamour pose at age 18 in 1945; her first ever magazine cover for the airplane factory at which she was discovered, in 1946; her first ever billboard for Pabst beer; her first parking pass for the 20th Century Fox studio lot; her first starlet publicity shot; and her first national ad … for photo mounts! But what about, I hear you say, her first pubic mound?

“Throughout recorded history,” reads one review of The Seven Year Itch, “certain images and people become entrenched in the public consciousness. In 1955, wearing a dress {Sleuth even has the wardrobe test for the garment!} and standing over a subway grate, Marilyn Monroe became a sex symbol like no other. The dress flitting about in the breeze while she futilely tries to hold it in place became an image that was sought after as the very definition of sexuality. Yet, in the film quick cuts and angles stop you from actually seeing anything too revealing.” Yet they don’t stop Sleuth…

As an eyewitness to the legendary shoot in the early hours of  September 15, 1954 put it: “About 1,500 stay-up-late New Yorkers formed an audience—very appreciative, too—as the synthetic breeze unveiled the Monroe legs and nylon whatchamacallits.” What it gets called is many things…but, in this rare outtake, bountiful bush would seem to fit! “Here comes the wind machine,” recalled one lucky observer, “up goes the skirt and damned if she isn’t wearing something filmy. From back of me I hear a voice, pure New York, saying loud and clear, ‘Chees, I thought she was a real blonde!’”

The observer, a Mr. Morse, continued: “Her husband Joe DiMaggio hears it too, and this is his wife! He walks on the set, sorer than hell, and makes Marilyn go into the trailer and change into some underpants that you couldn’t see through with a spotlight” {actually two pairs}! The Yankee Clipper then stormed off the set, with what the film’s impish director Billy Wilder later called “the look of death” on his face. And when a 52-foot billboard of a mild image from the scene was erected over the theater for its opening night on Marilyn’s 29th BIRTHDAY, their marriage was dead. So, it’s only fitting that we present this one-of-a-kind rarity in its Digital Age fully expanded equivalent of her Times Square triumph! No wonder a young stringer on the scene that day recently remarked: “I hate the term ‘photo-op,’ but this was certainly the most important photo-op ever staged, notwithstanding George W. Bush landing on a battleship”—with similar, though much more padded, crotch focus.

“Do you wear underwear?” the sexy starlet was asked shortly after her nude calendar surfaced. “Men seldom jump hurdles,” MM mused, “for girls who wear girdles.” Which might explain why her next national calendar pose—for which Sleuth unearthed the original insert—was entitled “Southern Exposure“! Or that her favorite fur—a fetish inherited from her mom—was Beaver. Only when she married esteemed playwright Arthur Miller, in fact, did Marilyn finally decide to “Wear the Pants.”

Now she belongs to the Angels—amazingly, Sleuth snapped these glowing halos of light circling above her crypt when he paid homage in 1993—so let us fondly remember not only her current birthday but also her final one, on the set of the unfinished Something’s Got to Give in 1962, just days after filming her only screen nude scene {to which the cast’s card refers}. And what a fitting END it makes …

So Goodbye, Norma Jeane … and Happy 83rd Birthday {a good guess how she’d look today}! You were truly, and uniquely, A Candle in the Wind.

Cheers!, my dear. Dots all she wrote…

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“I’ve seen Spider-Man 3 twice,” a fan posted on the popular IMDb message boards in May 2007, “and I hope LUCY GORDON gets better roles after this, as she seems like a really talented young lady with a bright future.” Oh what a tangled web …

When the young British actress was “found hanging from the ceiling of her mansion block apartment near the River Seine” in Paris two days before her 29th birthday last Wednesday, most of the post-mortems echoed Wikipedia in saying “she starred as the reporter Jennifer Dugan in the 2007 film Spider-Man 3.” In truth, she was in the film for a grand total of 13 seconds—reporting breathlessly outside the scene of the Arachnid Avenger’s latest sting operation when he was strangled and left for dead.

Frenzied news crews would gather outside her French flat exactly two years later: “It was a horrific scene,” gasped one grizzled gendarme. “The young woman has taken her own life in terrible circumstances. We are not seeking anyone else. It was a clear case of suicide.” But despite Lucy leaving two personal notes, her live-in lover—bespectacled, bearded cinematographer Jérôme Alméras—was questioned for two days by French police! The forty-something father of four became famous for his brilliant camera work last year on I’ve Loved You So Long … which recounts an inexplicable murder … but had only loved Lucy for a matter of months when she moved from Manhattan to Paris to be with him.

“It must have been very impulsive,” recalls her New York neighbor Amitabh Gordon {no relation} of the actress’s abrupt flight from her East Village apartment to join her new lover. “I asked Lucy how old Alméras’s kids were and she said there was quite an age spread. One maybe close to college age and one quite little.” Added another New York girlfriend:  “She packed up all her things and moved to Paris a few months ago. She trusted everyone. She was very sweet and kind. When she told me she had a new boyfriend, I thought, ‘What’s the real situation?’ She said he was in his 40s and had four children. I wondered, ‘Is he still with the mother of his children, is he divorced?’ Lucy didn’t say. She was just very excited.”

“She told me she was in love with her boyfriend,” confirms photographer Michel Haddi, who photographed Gordon just before her death for an Italian layout in which the guy was left hanging. “I told her she must like older men,” recalls the 42-year-old lensman. “She looked like a girl with a plan. She had everything to live for. But she was hiding that turmoil inside {though being choked by a pearl necklace in the Rome shoot was quite a harbinger}. It’s devastating. All of us have a tendency to want to kill ourselves {let’s not get carried away!}, but it’s different to just think about it.”

“Call the police, my girlfriend has hung herself,” Lucy’s lover screamed as he ran into the street after cutting her body down, insisting he “was asleep” when she hanged herself. “Why? Why?” Alméras wailed … though neighbors “reported that the couple had been heard arguing” late that night “and Lucy was audibly crying” through the apartment wall “before being found dead the next morning.” A judicial source stated: “We will try to establish a motive for her sudden suicide {Almeras alleged that she “had been deeply affected by the recent suicide of a friend in Britain,” so Sleuth offers her Facebook page as possible evidence}. She was flourishing in her professional life {glowing at the Spider-Man 3 premiere in New York}, so emotional problems related to her personal and love life would be a principal line of inquiry.” Despite reports of the loud “lovers’ tiff,” a French police spokesman stated: “The autopsy is a routine procedure which follows an apparent suicide. Hanging appears to be the obvious cause of death, considering the horrific circumstances in which the young woman was found.”

So let’s concentrate on what was lost: Born May 22, 1980 in Oxford, England, Lucy was attending her  $20,000-a-year hometown Oxford High School—whose most famous pupil is Dame Maggie Smith {Sleuth unearthed this topless outtake of mid-40s Maggie deleted from 1978’s California Suite}— when she was “spotted” by a modeling talent scout as she and her  mother visited a local clothing exhibition. Signed at 16, Lucy quickly became the face of prestigious Cover Girl cosmetics in 1997…while continuing her studies in history, biology and French. “I’m terrified about taking my A-levels {Advanced Placement Exams},” the Sweet Sixteen (with garotte like scarf) said at the time, “but equally terrified about not having any option apart from modeling in the future” {her last major ad}. Though hardly in Dior straits, Lucy listed “a number of things that keep me at school. I could get bored with being a model. I could even get fat {hardly—with her then 32B bust}. I don’t want to be stuck for choice at 25 {she didn’t make it to 29}. If I’ve passed my exams, then I will still be able to do a lot with my life.” Instead, in one of the more bizarre international headlines in Internet history, she was reportedly “baffled and devastated” by her own death! As another Cover Girl ad of hers noted, “Life is complicated.”

And ironic: Lucy’s first acting role was alongside hearththrob Heath Ledger in The Four Feathers {at its 2002 premiere}. Just 16 months before Gordon’s demise, “The Joker” was found dead of a mysterious drug overdose—meeting his end in an apartment owned by Mary-Kate Olsen!

“Being a model,” Lucy lamented, “doesn’t make you immune to your insecurities, either {evaluating her ass-ets in the mirror}. One thing you get used to is rejection.” It’s been speculated that perhaps her “distraught” fortyish Frenchman wasn’t…but there’s no doubt that gamine Gordon’s career was headed straight to the top: She had just won raves for her portrayal of model-turned-actress Jane Birkin in the upcoming biopic of legendary lover Serge Gainsbourg, Vie Héroique, which was previewed at the Cannes Film Festival on the eve of her death! In fact, Lucy “had been due to appear in a live interview at Cannes” within hours of when she was found hanged. “We are devastated,” gasped the festival’s official spokesman. “All those attending had been hugely impressed by Lucy’s work. Lucy was a star in the making.” Read ‘em and weep…

“The film owes a lot to the generosity, gentleness of spirit and immense talent of Lucy Gordon,” the producers of Gainsbourg, A Heroic Life said in a statement. Not to mention her uncanny resemblance to the bohemian beauty of the Swinging Sixties. So much so, that she beat out Birkin’s own daughter by Serge, lookalike Charlotte Gainsbourg for the part! And in a final macabre twist to the harrowing hanging, Charlotte won the Best Actress prize at Cannes within days of Lucy’s death. How’s this ad from Gordon’s early modeling days for foreshadowing the grim Gainsbourg connection?

Yet Sleuth can’t help noting that the still-striking 62-year-old Birkin’s other lookalike daughter, mad hatter Lou Doillon is now represented by the same modeling agency, IMG as fronted for the late Lucy.  And speaking of fronts, they also shared identical 32.5 inch bust measurements! As did mom Jane…so it’s transparently clear that little Lucy was born to play her. And that daughter Charlotte’s web couldn’t quite measure up to the Spider-Man starlet. Why even Gordon’s boyish pose mirrored Jane sans clothes! Speaking of which, I’ve managed to uncover Lucy’s one and only nude image … which stands as a fitting leg-acy. “Her career had just been taking off,” sighed her forlorn father Richard, “and it’s a tragedy that it has been cut short so soon. Her death has come completely out of the blue. Everything about how she died is just speculation at the moment, and we want to concentrate on paying tribute to our daughter. We are obviously devastated.”

Her only famous film, Spider-Man 3, became “the most successful new release in history” two years before she “ended her own days,” as Gordon’s agent put it—taking in $148 million in its opening weekend. “There were many factors that contributed to it,” the studio’s chief executive explained, “and there’s a part that you just put down to ‘We’ll never know.’” Perhaps the most fitting epitaph to lovely Lucy in the sky…

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I’ve been of two minds whether to blog about the tragic death of elegant and alluring NATASHA RICHARDSON, who died suddenly yesterday after a ski accident on a beginner’s slope in Canada. But in the end, it seems she was so full of life that the proper mood should be celebratory rather than merely solemn.

“Liam and I believe we are going to be together for the rest of our lives,” Natasha gushed just after her 1994 marriage to Irish heartthorb  Liam Neeson, whom she met playing lovers in the play Anna Christie: “The two were thought to be courting right on stage,” noted the New York Times. “I didn’t feel these different kinds of love and intensity before. This, this is…um, as deep as it goes” (deeper even than her considerable cleavage). Ominously, Natasha’s horoscope—she was born at 5 p.m. London time on May 11, 1963—begins with a warning: “Fire is the dominant in your natal chart and endows you with courage, self-confidence and enthusiasm! You move forward, come hell or high water. The relative weakness of this element is the difficulty to step back, or a kind of boldness that may prompt you to do foolish things.”

A novice on the slopes, Natasha was a self-proclaimed “klutz” in most things athletic, but also espoused the exuberance of her Tony Award-winning character in Cabaret—many called her the “finest Sally Bowles since Liza Minnelli.” As Sally states in the title song: “Put down the knitting/The book and the broom/Time for a holiday…”—the “life enthusiast” loved to travel and was on holiday till the end. “On opening night,” Ms. Richardson recalled of the musical, “I’m wearing just a tiny corset and I look down from the front of the stage and there’s this guy there {in the front row} just staring up between my legs. And I missed three dance steps because I was thinking, ‘Now, when did I get that bikini wax?’”

A ‘Brazilian’ would also have come in handy before Natasha’s infamous entrance last May at, of all things, the Costume Institute Gala at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art: “The 44-year-old cut an elegant figure when she arrived on the red carpet,” wrote one reporter, “but as she gathered up the hem of her pale pink evening gown to negotiate the steps, she unwittingly flashed her flesh-colored underwear at the assembled photographers. The embarrassing wardrobe malfunction appeared to go unnoticed by Natasha, who was accompanied by former Gucci creative director Tom Ford, despite the fact that her “nude look” lingerie was clearly on display. Thankfully, Natasha has not fallen victim to the trend for ‘going commando’—wearing no underwear—and her tiny thong just barely spared her.” Alas, nothing could just 10 months later…

“Start by admitting/From cradle to tomb,” she sang as Sally, “It isn’t that long a stay/Life is a Cabaret, old chum/Only a Cabaret, old chum/And I love a Cabaret!” We—and many others—loved Natasha … and should celebrate her oft-overlooked sensuality {in early 1999} … which had only increased a decade later at age 45! “It really messes with your head {we won’t go there}…to do that stuff,”  the actress admitted after filming “very explicit love scenes”–in which her lovemaking was never less than luminous. “I mean, it is all well and good between two people—consenting adults—in a closed room. But to do it with a bunch of other people there, to really let yourself go {her final sex scene, in 2005’s Asylum} feels a bit defiling. But I don’t want to sound like, ‘Oh yes, poor little me.’”

Indeed, Natasha was never one to feel sorry for herself {though we can’t even imagine how her beloved family is feeling}, and said of living in mother Vanessa Redgrave’s shadow: “You want to quietly work away and make your own name and place for yourself…but that time has passed. My mom’s just totally inspiring because she’s one of the greatest actresses that’s ever lived. I owe her an enormous amount”—the feeling was obviously mutual. As it was with bisexual director dad Tony Richardson, who won an Oscar for helming 1963’s Tom Jones, before succumbing to AIDS in 1991: “When I asked him what he was writing,” Natasha recalled of Richardson’s posthumously published autobiography, “he said, ‘Oh, just memoirs. Nobody will give a shit and they’ll never get published.’ And then, of course,” she gulped, “the book ends with this message to his daughters to carry through  life. I get choked up even talking about it now, actually.” We know the feeling…

We close this ebullient eulogy—”No use permitting/Some prophet of doom/To wipe every smile away,” she sang in “Life Is A Cabaret”—with my favorite photo of the ravishing Richardson, seemingly sensing that all might not end well: “I’d like a blockbuster paycheck!” Natasha mused two years before her death.  “But I don’t think they’ll give me that. You feel a burning passion to play something, but nothing has been presented to me, and I don’t really feel inspired at the moment. I just give a lot of myself to what I’m doing and I don’t think I can do that unless I feel I’ve really got something special.”  That she had…
With sadness,

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A lovely and romantic Valentine’s Day with Mrs. Sleuth alas began with the sad news of the death of Our Gang’s blonde baby girl “Shirley“: Long before SMG (playing Buffy on The Vampire Slayer) or SJP (as Carrie on Sex and the City), there was SJR—SHIRLEY JEAN RICKERT, the Littlest Rascal {hats off to her!}.

Born March 25, 1926 in Seattle, her stage-mother mom moved the family to Hollywood after the 18-month-old tot won a local Beautiful Baby contest. Joining Central Casting at age 3, Shirley snagged an interview with movie mogul Hal Roach and a part in his Our Gang comedy series at the ripe old age of four as “the little vamp in the platinum pageboy” haircut {her first test shot was a pinup}! In all she made five films in 1931 as the cutest of “The Little Rascals“—the adults’ term for the naughty neighborhood tykes—the first filmed was suggestively titled Love Business {sitting on teacher Miss Crabtree’s lap) as rising star Jackie Cooper glares at Chubby}. And male fans got a “Chubby”–today it would be considered “kiddie porn”–when Shirley slurped milk with Norman “Chubby” Chaney {the first Rascal to die, at just 21}, “Mary Ann” Jackson {who lived past 80} and “Pete the Pup” {whose iconic eye circle was drawn on by an unknown Polish makeup artist named Max Factor!}. And when Shirley Jean—whose curls were “developed by Mr. Factor and glued to my face every morning with Wave Set”–joined Dorothy DeBorba, one of the few Rascals to outlive her {she’ll be 84 next month}, in licking an ice cream cone, in “Little Daddy,” the censors became aroused as well.

Our Gang “broke new ground,” according to film historian Leonard Maltin, by putting “boys, girls, whites and blacks together in a group as equals, which had never been done before in cinema.” As another historian added, “Italian Americans were also depicted without stereotyping, notably Mickey Gubitosi” {with brown bangs}—who 9 years later changed his name to Robert Blake…and 66 years later was charged with shooting his wife,  a bottle blond who proved it in this exclusive Polaroid sent to potential “sugar daddies.” Platinum blond Shirley Jean enjoyed her most memorable moment in the Gang with bowler-hatted black boy Matthew “Stymie” Beard in their classic “Watt Street” sketch: “What street?” Shirley asks about a candy store. “Watt Street” replies Stymie. “That’s what I’m asking you!” she grows exasperated.  The bit later inspired the “Best Comedy Sketch of the 20th Century,” according to Time magazine, the classic “Who’s on First?” by Abbott and Costello. “I now live in Albany,” Shirley Jean joked in April 2007, “and darned if they don’t have a Watt Street!”

And darned if her pushy mother didn’t insist she leave the show after Fly My Kite in late 1931–telling Hal Roach to “go fly a kite” by jumping to “the competing Mickey McGuire comedy series starring Mickey Rooney.” Of her time with the Gang, Rickert recalled: “We had fun. the mothers on the other hand, were awful. Stage mothers are just vile women, including my own.” Still just six, Shirley Jean took her Mae West persona upstairs with debonair dwarf Rooney {think they’d allow this today?} and later wrote a poem about her time as temptress Tomboy Taylor: “With that screwball Mickey Rooney/Though Mick was only eight/Even then he was looking for a mate … Mickey grabbed me one day behind the railroad station/I wasn’t drowning/Why did he tell me it was artificial respiration?”

Her first on-screen smooch came from a much bigger star: “I can proudly say that I’m one of the few females who can boast that I kissed John Wayne. Of course I was only seven years old, but it still counts.” As her obituary confirmed: “She donned a black wig to play a young half-Indian oil heiress in the 1934 John Wayne B-western ‘Neath the Arizona Skies.” Future child stars Rooney, Judy Garland and Shirley Temple had never even made it past the audition stage of Our Gang, so by this time the “Little Girl with the Curl” was “perhaps the best known youngster in the country,” according to a leading scribe. Shirley Jean and “Mary Ann” became the Mae West and Louise Brooks-type tykes as best-selling paper doll cutouts, and she even had a sit-down with Mary Pickford, the most popular actress of the day! However, SJR remarked, “Stardom was my mother’s dream. It wasn’t mine.”

FROM TOT…TO HOT!!

“By then, I had made a small fortune,” sighed the small fortunate one, “by the standards of the day. In a few years it was all frittered away in one bad real estate deal after another {welcome to today!}. At the age of 12 I was washed up in show business. I was literally a has-been .” And not only had mom’s investments gone bust, but little Shirley Jean was beginning to “blossom”—proving the point in starter starlet bra—so she decided to go en pointe to dancing school. Renaming herself “Juli Mason” to avoid the Gang bangers, she got uncredited work as a background dancer in over 100 musicals—culminating in 1951’s Royal Wedding with Fred Astaire {Sleuth spotted her as the blond at back left) before moving up to be one of Gene Kelly’s fine feathered femmes (far left) the next year for the classic Singin’ in the Rain.

“The pay was good and the work was glamorous, but jobs were few and far between,” Juli Mason learned. So she searched for “something steadier and with more of a future”…. before becoming burlesque queen “Gilda and Her Crowing Glory” in 1953. “When they stopped making movie musicals,” Shirley freely admitted, “I became a strip tease in Burlesque and traveled all over the U.S. and Canada playing in theaters and nightclubs.” Her Crowning Glory was her long-flowing hair, those forehead curls still bang-in’, which added the “tease element” to her routines: “Once peeled down to her pasties, she swings her long blond tresses in a wide head roll, fore and aft,” read one review of her revue, “alternately revealing and concealing her well-formed 37-1/2 inch bosom.” Since her married name—which she kept for the rest of her life—was Shirley Jean Measures, we should fill in the flanks: a 24-inch waist, 36″ at the hips, with 118 lbs. displaced evenly across her 5-foot-5 frame. A full C cup by then, Gilda was top billed among her zipper-sorority sisters in the 1953 movie A.B.Cs of Love.

Quickly dubbed “Burlesque’s Sexiest Blonde,” Shirley said of her fellow Rascals: “I don’t think the kids would mind if they knew what I’m doing.” And the platinum peeler made sure to point out her roots while taking it off: “As Shirley Jean I played the flirt/In Our Gang comedies,” she purred when stripping to pasties. “I never dreamed I would wind up as Gilda/But who does it hurt?,” as her panties hit the floor. “The women in the audience will be taking inventory,” the patter continued. “Oh, but I seem to be getting a little behind in my story.” Butt she’d always stop her tale before showing too much: “I won ‘t do anything that could get the owners into trouble,” Gilda stressed (while dressed). Some girls will do a ‘flash.’ Just before the lights go out, they’ll take everything off for a second to let the boys in the audience see what little girls are made of. That’s the phony and easy way out. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll take off everything the law allows.”

But not enough for famed critic George Jean Nathan, writing partner of jug-eared icon H. L. Mencken {who famously coined the term ecdysiast in 1940}.  Nathan—on whom cold-blooded theater critic Addison DeWitt of All About Eve was based, winning an Oscar for George Sanders while introducing Marilyn Monroe—blasted Gilda in Esquire as “that over-clothed stripper who doesn’t taken enough of it all off”! Never mess with a former Gang member, as Shirley shot back: “That doddering old idiot thinks I didn’t take enough off ? Do you know how far down we strip at Minsky’s, where he saw me? To a G-string and nothing else, I mean nothing! And you know how big a G-string is? Why, that old man {what a dummy} could fit one into his hearing aid!” So this old man put his ear to the ground to unearth this ultra-rare glimpse of Gilda’s nipples sans pasties on the Night They Raided Minsky’s {a 1968 film starring blond Britt Ekland}.

By 1959, Gilda had grown tired of the (bump and) grind…and Little Miss Curly quit the Burly. “I like burlesque,” she snapped at her critics. “It’s what a person is, not what they’re doing. A lot of idiots are secretaries.” Over the next 50 years, Shirley became a secretary, bartender {”One of my husbands’ ideas”}, and a traveling saleswoman for industrial hardware. “I walk in and they say, ‘Not another nuts-and-bolts salesman,” Ms. Rickert told the Associated Press in 1993. “And then I open my sales folder and show them an 8×10 of me in Our Gang. I say, ‘You grew up with me.’ Then they do a 360.” So let’s come full circle with what must Shirley be the finest finds ever of this ravishing Rascal: a nude set taken in a hotel room shortly before she quit stripping for good! Starting out shyly in a see thru negligee, the Our Gang girl slipped it off to reveal a bare breast … then doffed her undies for the only time…losing the prop to reveal her pillows … before laying back on the bed to fulfill the areolar fantasies of fans who’ve wanted to sleep with “Shirley Jean” for nearly 80 years!

“I guess once you’ve been bitten by the Show Biz Bug, the bite mark never goes away,” Shirley Jean Measures observed two years before her death…and she continued to do burlesque skits in local playhouses, attend conventions in her retro roadster, and speak to classes about her nine decade career. “It’s really great to be over 80,” the retired Rascalian remarked in March 2007, “and know that a lot of people have had good memories of you for so long.” Those good mammaries landed “Gilda” on the Dancers Wall of Fame, selection in the Top 10 Strippers of the ’50s by the Erotic Dancers League, a museum exhibit tribute to her remarkable run 5 months before her death, and now a posthumous place atop a classic 2009 calendar as being among the all-time greats.

“My mother was very full of life and proud of what she had done in show business,” her only child, lookalike daughter Melody Kennedy said upon her parent’s passing in Sarasota Springs, NY. “I had a child,” mom once mugged, “found out what caused it and quit. (Yeah, sure!).” Observed that offspring: “Her whole thing was making people happy and making them laugh.” They cried when she died…but let’s leave her last words as those she chose when asked why hers was the only website run by a surviving Little Rascal: “I’m just about the only one left who can both sit up and type on a keyboard,” the youngest comic in recorded history quipped. “It was a fun life and I enjoyed it. Ain’t life grand?”

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