Two days after Annette Funicello’s name, handprint and honorary star were emblazoned onto the Hollywood Walk of Fame in mid-September, fragrant flower arrangements, congratulatory banners and colorful balloons filled her home in Encino, Calif.
“I really enjoy being busy!” she enthused on a drizzly afternoon. “Especially having MS, it’s better. When I have a bad day, I don’t have time to think about it.”
Funicello wore her dark wavy hair swept back and her ears bespangled with rhinestone earrings in the form of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. What appeared on her red, white and black vest to be an abstract Escher-esque design turned out to be a pattern combining roughly 100 Mickey Mouse heads.
Because of the multiple sclerosis she has been battling since the late 1980s, she needs a walker to get around now, her handwriting is a bit shaky and she finds reading difficult.
Yet, she said: “My energy is terrific. It’s my legs-and my equilibrium is shot. I have no balance. But from the waist up, you wouldn’t notice a thing.”
She put away the ears long ago, but at 51, Funicello still radiates the childlike innocence she first brought to the screen in 1955 when “The Mickey Mouse Club” made its debut. (It ran until 1959.)
That same wholesomeness prevailed when she became a sugary pop star in the raucous early days of rock ‘n’ roll. As the permissive ’60s took hold, Annette-one of the first female stars to go by one name only-never so much as bared her navel in a slew of teenage surf movies.
As feminism and other forces changed family life in the ’70s, Funicello represented the All-American stay-at-home Mom in television commercials for Skippy peanut butter.
The dark-haired girl next door then faded from the public eye, making brief comebacks in a television special, the 1987 film “Back to the Beach” and a concert tour with Frankie Avalon in 1989-90.
Her announcement in 1992 that she had multiple sclerosis brought her back into the mainstream, landing her on the cover of People magazine.
Today, Annette-mania seems to be in full swing. A two-CD boxed set, “Annette: A Musical Reunion With America’s Girl Next Door” (Walt Disney Records), was released in September. On Sept. 14, she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and on Nov. 22 she was honored with the Helen Hayes Lifetime Achievement Award (sponsored by St. Clare’s Hospital and Health Center) in New York.
Her autobiography, “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” written with Patricia Romanowski, is due out in the spring. In addition, Funicello is marketing her own line of teddy bears as well as a perfume, “Cello, by Annette,” which is also sold at Disney theme parks.
In September, Funicello’s parents, Virginia and Joseph, were visiting from Palm Springs, spending time together just as they did when they moved their family of two-a third child was born several years later-from Utica, N.Y., to California in 1946. Mother and daughter enjoy reminiscing about Funicello’s early days as a Mouseketeer.
“I was so happy at the Disney Studio and at Disneyland, where I used to work on weekends,” Funicello said. “My folks said that every morning I woke up with a smile on my face. There was a lot of hard work attached to it-but it was fun. It was a fantasy come true.”
For kids glued to the television set, however, Funicello was the fantasy-one that has lasted to this day.
“When I was a kid growing up watching her on `The Mickey Mouse Club,’ she was the first sex symbol,” Fred Schneider, the B-52s frontman, recalled wistfully. “She was like a sex goddess back when you didn’t have any clue.”
Schneider, an avid record collector, owns all but one of her 32 original albums.
Funicello, the first to admit that she is not an accomplished vocalist, hit Billboard’s Hot 100 record sales chart 10 times. Her thin voice was beefed up in the studio.
“I never liked singing,” she said. “I was always so frightened. But the echo chambers and double tracking gave me confidence and made my voice stronger. And it was time for a new sound. Soon, people started copying `the Annette sound.’ “
Decades later, that style is still inspiring performers, said Rodney Bingenheimer, a disc jockey on station KROQ in Los Angeles.
He rattled off the names of other recent Annette-ophiles: “Debbie Harry; Joey Ramone; Redd Kross, who recorded the tribute `Annette’s Got the Hits’; Ed Gein’s Car.”
Perhaps, then, Funicello and her music are a kind of comfort food for those who came of age in the ’60s and the representation of the good old days for those who didn’t.
In the tumultuous ’60s, her marriage to Jack Gilardi, a talent scout, in 1965, and the birth of three children put Funicello’s career on the back burner.
As for the counterculture that rose while she was playing the ’50s-style mom, preparing to issue the Skippy challenge, she acknowledged: “I couldn’t relate to any of that. Coming from an Italian family, where everything is the family unit, I couldn’t understand venturing off and getting your own apartment and so on.”
Two of her children still live at home, she said; the third lives in Los Angeles.
Her marriage ended in 1982. “When I got divorced,” she recalled, “I remember my mother saying, `Your phone is never going to stop ringing, with all these guys who want to date you.’ But it never rang!”
Then, in 1987, Funicello first experienced symptoms that would later be diagnosed as MS. She didn’t let anyone but close family members know.
“People always thought nothing bad ever happens to Annette,” she pointed out. “She’s the original Mary Poppins. And I didn’t want to disappoint them. But it finally got to the point where I was lying, lying, lying, and I didn’t like myself very much.”
In July, 1992, she arranged an interview with a USA Today reporter and told all. Since then, she said, “the outpouring of support has been overwhelming.”
She is also grateful, she said, for the support of her second husband, Glen Holt, whom she married in 1986.
Recently, she founded the Annette Funicello Research Fund for Neurological Diseases. “I’m in a position where I can get to people and make them aware that we need help,” she said. “I think that’s the reason for all this.”
Her courage in dealing with the illness was a consideration when she was chosen to receive the Helen Hayes Lifetime Achievement Award, said George Worthington, an awards spokesman.
“She’s done it in a way that’s dignified, and she’s done a lot to raise public awareness of MS,” he said. “Throughout her remarkable career, she’s expressed in a positive way certain cultural values.”
The weekend after Funicello was the guest of honor at the Walk of Fame ceremonies, she greeted more of her fans at the second annual Disneyana Convention at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, Calif.
At that gathering of 1,800 collectors of all things Disney, purchasers of the $400 limited-edition Annette Mouseketeer doll got to meet Annette herself, who autographed each package.
“My husband is your biggest fan,” said a trim woman in her mid-40s who was accompanied by her bashful mate.
“I was named after you,” said a brunette from Utica, presenting a yellowed newspaper clipping for an autograph.
“Could you please sign this book?” implored a shy young man who worked at the Disneyland Hotel. He handed over a copy of “Annette and the Mystery of Smugglers Cove,” a tome from 1960.
Though she has been hearing these things for 30 years now, Funicello greeted the smiling fans warmly.
The five-hour autographing session was followed that night by a lavish banquet. A floor show in a Disneyland Hotel ballroom featured singing and dancing by the legendary Disney characters-Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and the Genie.
But the finale, which roused the audience of more than 1,000 people to a standing ovation, was the appearance on stage of Funicello, dressed in billowing chiffon and lace and Mickey Mouse ears. Seated alone, she movingly delivered a tribute to Walt Disney, whom she declared a great American hero.
“Mr. Disney was so, so, supportive of me,” she said. “I was very shy and I found a shyness in him, and I think that’s why we got along so well.
“When I was given my star the other day, I missed him terribly. I thought, `I wish Mr. Disney was here.’ I get real choked when I think about it. Mickey Mouse was by my side, though. He’s always there-he’s part of my life. That really is something not everyone can call their claim to fame.”
