Long, streamlined and amply upholstered, Julie Newmar shares certain physical qualities with the 1959 Cadillac El Dorado.
Understand, though, that she is no artifact of the fabulous ’50s. Since the dancer-turned-actress first sprang to celebrity as one of the “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (1954), she has evolved from bodacious starlet to cult goddess.
Witness “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar,” the frolicking film that stars Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo as cross-dressers who compete for the title of Miss America Drag Queen.
Newmar has a cameo in the film–as the celebrity who crowns the winner of the contest–but her title billing and stature as the woman worshiped by these men elevate the 61-year-old 6-footer to a new status: queen of queens.
How did the bombshell who played Stupefyin’ Jones in the 1959 movie musical “Li’l Abner”–and had every kid in America wondering, If she’s a woman, then what does that make my mom?–become a legend?
Seems that ever since Newmar was one of the Catwomen on the ’60s TV show “Batman,” then prowled the catwalk for fashion designer Thierry Mugler in 1990 and made the supermodels look like so many gangly gigglers, her cult has multiplied into a court.
The very idea makes Newmar laugh–a throaty, purring sound that stretches nearly as long as those legs.
Talking on the phone from Los Angeles, where she was born and has lived much of her life, Newmar reflects, in clarinet tones, on the confluence of events leading up to her recent “coronation” as queen of all fabulousness.
She was always “the tall one,” the freak, Newmar says. When she was in “Seven Brides,” “in the all-girl scenes I danced on bent knees,” so as not to dwarf her co-stars.
Today, what with Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford at her eye level, she says, “my stature has finally become a non-issue. We’re very well-fed in America and everybody’s getting taller.”
Another way of putting it is that Americans have caught up to Julie Newmar.
She was statuesque before statuesque was cool. And she was into physical culture from the womb. Her father, “Boomer” Newmar, fabled football hero for the University of California, and her mother, a Ziegfeld Girl, met on the beach in Santa Monica during the early ’30s. Julie was born in 1934.
“I started dancing when I was 5 years old. Ballet. Flamenco. My mother took me to every kind of dance instructor,” Newmar recalls. She took flamenco lessons from Rita Hayworth’s father, Eduardo Cansino.
JN, as she refers to herself, was at UCLA all of six weeks when she auditioned for choreographer Michael Kidd and got the part in “Seven Brides.” Dancing conditioned her body; the Actors Studio conditioned her performing.
On stage, she was in “Li’l Abner” and “Silk Stockings,” and, of course, she was Lola in Bob Fosse’s “Damn Yankees.” Of the Fosse musical, she says in a wholesomely libidinal voice, “I loved his choreography on my body.”
Like so many well-built actresses of the ’50s and ’60s, JN was cast in roles that cartooned female sexuality.
There was the movie “Marriage-Go-Round” (1960) in which she played the free-love-espousing Swede who schemes to bed married professor James Mason: With her body and his brains, they would make perfect babies.
There was the TV show “My Living Doll” (1964-65), where she was the gorgeous robot programmed to do anything her male boss, Robert Cummings, wanted. (“Living Doll” isn’t in syndication, Newmar says, because “CBS burned all the negatives–it didn’t have storage space.”)
So why is Newmar still in circulation when most of the other cartoon sexpots of the ’50s are dead or forgotten?
One theory: “I did not copy Marilyn (as in Monroe). I copied Rita (as in Hayworth). For me, she was the essence of woman–her hair, her movement. I became a Spanish dancer because of her.”
Newmar reckons that the new appreciation of her slim career has much to do with the affection with which the ’50s are now held.
“In part, it’s a hunger for a safer time,” she considers. “It was the golden age of theater on Broadway, when life was a total pleasure. You get a whiff of it from the TV shows of the time. We trusted each other. We were gracious to each other.”
Might it also have to do with the nostalgia for an era when male and female roles were clearly defined?
“It’s true that then men felt they had the space to give us the goodies,” she reflects. She quickly adds, “Not that we’d want to go back to that today. No way!”
Right now, she’s in her Brentwood garden, inhaling the perfume of her jasmine and stephanotis, enjoying the fact that she is the inspiration for a comedy of fabulousness and that she is the muse for couturier Thierry Mugler, who designed a catsuit for the lady who played Catwoman. Not coincidentally, Eartha Kitt, who also played Catwoman, is the muse for couturier Isaac Mizrahi, as seen in the recent release “Unzipped.”
Does anyone have plans for a Newmar/Kitt vehicle? Call it “Catwomen Forever.”
