At the end of ”How to Stuff a Wild Bikini,” their sixth and final `60s
”beach party” movie, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello are romantically reunited on a Malibu beach.
She has spent much of the film pining for Frankie while fending off the advances of slick ad man Dwyane Hickman. Meanwhile Frankie has been in the South Pacific, on naval reserve duty on the Goona Goona islands, playing somewhat hard-to-get with the native girls.
At the end of the movie, Annette on the beach says to a pelican who has been chirping at her every move with rival Dwayne Hickman: ”Why are you always hanging around?”
”Because I love you,” answers Frankie, materializing in place of the bird.
”It`s magic,” says Annette.
”It`s magic for sure,” says Frankie.
Well, good news, the magic continues in the very funny ”Back to the Beach,” the new beach comedy that opens Friday nationwide and reunites Frankie and Annette in a surprisingly clever comedy packed with self-mocking humor.
It`s the best piece of musical comedy nostalgia since ”Grease.”
What makes the film work is that Frankie, now 48, and Annette, 45, agreed to play themselves–at least the public image of themseves–but, now, as an older couple dealing with children of their own.
That they are willing to laugh at themselves and at their old beach movies is very wise, and we can`t help but join in the laughter.
”Back to the Beach,” opens with them as a harried, married couple in Ohio. Frankie, known as ”the Big Kahuna” in the old beach movies, has put his surfboard in drydock after wiping out in a big wave, a story he never tires of telling.
Yet when we first see him, Frankie appears to be surfing. It`s only when the camera pulls back that we can see it`s a TV commercial for Frankie`s new job–selling Fords.
Sporting a leatherette tan that would make George Hamilton jealous, Frankie yells at the the camera crew to be careful around his hair. He`s vain. He`s a workaholic. He hates the beach, and later in the movie he will have to deal with his daughter who is living in Malibu with a surfer. It`s there he runs into old pals, including an old flame played by–who else?–Connie Stevens. It`s that kind of movie, with a bunch of `50s and early `60s actors, from Stevens to Bob Denver (”Gilligan`s Island”) to Barbara Billingsley (she played Beaver Cleaver`s mother) mangling the name ”Big Kahuna.”
The film is directed by Lyndall Hobbs, whose previous credits include a film for ”Saturday Night Live” and several music videos; this is her first feature film and is an impressive debut.
After we see Frankie, we meet Annette. Living in a `50s pink ranch house and wearing her same polka dot outfits with matching hair bows and fabric-covered shoes, Annette is still squeaky clean and irrepressibly cheerful.
She seemingly spends all day puttering about her kitchen making an endless supply of peanut butter sandwiches for her wiseacre, 14-year-old son, Bobby, who is into punk and black leather and carries a switchblade.
Bobby can`t stand his parents. He thinks they are outdated and queer. When Annette offers him some advice in a homily, Bobby snaps, ”Gee, I bet this is what it`s like having a conversation with the Kissinger family.”
Bobby also tells us, wearily, over vintage footage of Frankie on
”American Bandstand” and Annette on ”The Mickey Mouse Club,” that: ”A long time ago my parents were the most popular teenagers in the world.”
That`s not much of an exaggeration. Frankie did have several Top 10 hits in `50s, including his first song, ”De De Dinah,” which was followed by his all-time smash, ”Venus.”
Annette was by far the most popular Mousketeer, and she too had a few pop hits, including ”Tall Paul.”
Together, between 1963 and 1965, Frankie and Annette made six beach movies for low-budget, American-International Pictures.
If you can name all six, you probably flunked high school. They are:
”Beach Party,” ”Muscle Beach Party,” ”Bikini Beach,” ”Pajama Party,” ”Beach Blanket Bingo,” and ”How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.”
Last week in a Cleveland hotel room–a site selected because the couple Frankie and Annette play is from Ohio–the two of them sat down to talk about their new movie, their funny past and their seemingly very happy present.
For someone who grew up during their heyday, it`s more than startling to meet them; it`s a hoot. Frankie, looking as youthful as ever in yellow slacks and a white jeans jacket, was seated on a sofa.
First his visitor thanked him for recording ”Venus,” a great slow dance song that allowed many an adolescent boy to press up against many an adolescent girl. ”I know,” Frankie said with a smile, ”I hear that all the time. You`re welcome.”
And where was Annette?
”She`ll be here in a minute. She wanted to get pretty for you.”
Before she arrived, Frankie–it`s ridiculous to call him Avalon
–acknowledged the secret of what he hopes will be the success of ”Back to the Beach.”
”It was a real battle,” he said. ”For a long time everybody wanted us to do a simple sequel, which would have been boring and nobody would have believed it. The key was the idea that we should play our old selves, but set the movie now in the 1980s, where the last thing I want to do is to go back to the beach. I`m caught up in my work selling cars, I never want to take a vacation, and Annette is forever trying to talk me into having a good time. It`s a good premise for a comedy.”
Annette arrived. She was wearing a laced trimmed, pale-blue jeans shirt and skirt. You couldn`t miss the big, heart-shaped, fake diamond earrings.
She looks sensational in the movie. Here, however, with less makeup, her face was drawn. And she was a little slower to relax than Frankie.
She looked as if she had led a more emotionally strained life than Frankie. Or maybe she just needed his tan. But her eyes did glimmer as she warmed to the subject of the old days.
”I really didn`t know how popular I was at first,” she said. ”I became a Mouseketeer when I was 12. Mr. Disney kept our fan mail from us because he didn`t want to start any jealousy. But then it got out of hand after about a year.”
”She was getting something like 7,000 letters a week,” Frankie said.
”And marriage proposals and rings and gifts.”
”Eventually I did find out when I went on tour,” Annette said. ”I remember visiting a lot of hospitals, and the effect on the kids was something I`ll always remember.”
Walt Disney had two adopted daughters of his own, but it was generally thought that he was equally close to Annette.
”I loved him dearly,” she said. ”I`ve heard stories about him being tough in the boardroom, but everything I saw him do he did with the greatest love for children. I really think that was part of his genius.”
Annette was under contract to Disney for 10 years, and he controlled her career, requesting that she not wear bikinis in any of her beach pictures. Her coverup outfits became absurd by the time of ”How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.”
”I was pregnant,” she said. ”You could tell, right?” Right.
Frankie was arguably a bigger star at the time of the beach movies, at least in terms of films. He had already appeared in ”The Alamo” and ”Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.”
But with the Beatles` invasion in 1964, the beach movies quickly became Frankie and Annette`s swan song.
She said she was greatly relieved to be out of the limelight; he fought it.
”I was so excited when I got pregnant,” Annette said. ”I gained 65 pounds. And Gina only weighed six pounds at birth. It was the first time that I was in charge of my own life and my body. (She got pregnant on her honeymoon, and her daughter was born 9 months and 2 weeks after her marriage.) I had always led a completely controlled life and was driven everywhere and told what to wear. Now I was on my own, and it was easy for me to `retire.` ” Her marriage to talent agent Jack Gilardi produced two more children and lasted 16 years. They were divorced in 1981. It seemed to be the only rough spot in her life.
”I suppose so,” she said. ”We realized we were living a lie. The children knew; they always do. We`re friends now, and it`s much better.”
She remained unmarried for five years.
”My mother told me not to worry–that all kinds of guys would be calling to date me. But the phone hardly rang, and when it did it was usually married guys calling. Can you believe that?”
”I think the reason for that,” said Frankie, ”is that her husband was and is a very powerful agent in Hollywood, and I think that scared a lot of guys off.”
If you`re surprised that Frankie knows so much about Annette, he has the answer: ”Hell, we`ve known each other for–how long, honey?–30 years?”
Both are second-generation Italians from the East Coast. Annette was born in Utica, N.Y., and Frankie grew up in Philadelphia, the rock and roll capital of the world in the `50s.
Despite his wild profession, Frankie has led a remarkably stable personal life, having been married to the same women for 25 years. They have eight children. ”But we had tough times, too,” he said, ”especially when my career collapsed. For a while when I was 18 and 19, I was playing to crowds of 10,000 and 15,000 screaming kids. Elvis was the king, but he was unapproachable. My appeal was that I was the pimply kid who could sing and who young kids could identify with.
”I had a lot of musical training. I was an accomplished trumpeter when I was 12. My most prized posssession today isn`t any of the gold records; it`s a recording of me playing the trumpet at 12.
”But those were great days. I traveled with Buddy Holly and the others on a bus, and we worked our tails off, doing deejay shows during the day before doing the concert at night.
”Then the music changed, and I had to adjust to playing, literally, in front of 40 people in small towns. It wasn`t easy, but it helped me learn how to be an entertainer.”
But surely he had millions of dollars in the bank to insulate him.
”No, I didn`t,” he said. ”At the very top, I had maybe $250,000 in the bank. But I wasn`t well-served by my advisors, you might say. I was put in bad deals. I had to pay the government $70,000 in back taxes. I had to settle my contract with an agent by paying him $100,000.
”My wife held the family together. Even when we did have money, she never wanted help. She insisted on raising the kids herself.”
Annette, it turns out, wasn`t exactly swimming in money either at the time of the beach movies. ”I bet I had about $250,000, too. I didn`t make that much money until the records and the movies. On `The Mickey Mouse Club`
we were each paid $125 for a very full work week.”
”I was paid about $30,000 for each of the beach movies,” Frankie said.
”And, Annette, I think you got about $15,000. But that was good money then because we shot those pictures in just three weeks. I remember the producers were always telling me to turn around and have my picture taken wearing Levis or something. I think that`s how they got the clothes for the movies for free.”
Eventually both Frankie and Annette did get their careers and personal lives in order. In the late `70s, they were reunited in a Dick Clark special, ”Frankie and Annette: The Second Time Around.”
Fueled by the nostalgia craze and by his cameo appearance as an angel in superhit ”Grease,” Frankie began touring again in front of big crowds in golden oldie concerts. He now plays, he said, about 80 one-nighters each year. Annette kept her face before the public on TV pushing Skippy peanut butter. ”I`m the peanut butter lady,” she said. It`s the source of a great many jokes in ”Back to the Beach.” In an early scene she`s shown holding a can of Skippy as big as a suitcase. ”Industrial size,” she said with a laugh.
A little over a year ago Annette remarried. ”My husband, Glen Holt, breeds harness horses. We have a ranch in Bakersfield. I had known him for a long time. My family likes going to harness races, and I met him before I was married. Years later, he saw me at the track, we had dinner, and I knew immediately that we`d get married.”
Annette, incidentally, gave one of the young horses on the farm the name
”Uncle Walt.”
Frankie and Annette were asked if there was anything about themselves that the public didn`t know–anything that didn`t fit their popular images.
”I pout,” said Annette. ”I`m not very good at expressing anger, so people close to me tell me that I pout.”
”I`m barely 5 foot 7,” said Frankie with a laugh. ”I wear elevator shoes, which make me 5 foot 9.”
The obvious question was whether Frankie and Annette ever seriously considered marrying each other. ”Well, I did know her before my wife,” he said. ”We did date, but it never went anywhere. I could have married her. I`ve always loved her.”
”And I`ve loved him,” she said. ”I suppose we could have gotten married. It would have been a wild time with a lot of laughs, I suppose. But I fell in love with someone else while we were dating.
”Right,” said Frankie, his voice rising. ”She fell in love with Paul Anka, and at that time I was dating Ann-Margret.”
Name-droppers.
In addition to a mutual admiration society, Frankie and Annette also share an Italian heritage that, they maintain, has served them well.
”For me,” Frankie said, ”Being Italian has meant having a strong family. It`s what kept me together while a lot of the people I used to work with aren`t around anymore.”
”I`m proud of being Italian, too,” said Annette, ”for it means family and religion. I have always gone to church every Sunday. I still do.
”But I`ll tell you a story,” she said, ”because I wasn`t always proud of my name.
”I won a beauty contest when I was seven under the name of Annette Turner. And I remember going to Mr. Disney early on and telling him that I wanted to change my name. I could get away with it because, remember, we had only our first name on our (Mickey Mouse Club) T-shirts.
”Well, first of all, Mr. Disney told me that my family and I were pronouncing our name wrong.
”See, we pronounced it `foon-a-sello,` trying to make it sound more American.” Right, just as Thomas Jefferson`s home is usually pronounced
”Mon-ti-sello.”
”Mr. Disney said it was, `Foon-uh-chello.` And then he told me: `You be proud of your name and say it right. If you do good work, people will remember it.` ”
”That`s a great story,” said Frankie. ” `If you do great work, people will remember your name.”
Well, a couple of grown-ups named Avalon and Funicello do very good work in ”Back to the Beach.”
They make it easy to remember their names–and their role in a silly, sweet time a generation ago.
