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“You know, it doesn’t even feel like cleavage hanging out,” says the Ghostest with the Mostest, hostess Elvira of her Igor•ly awaited décolletage. “It feels like a cleft chin or a dimple. In fact, I’ve been wearing this low-cut dress for so long that I’ve nearly forgotten why people are talking to me and not looking at my eyes.”
To refresh her mammary: It’s the fact that her ‘Pumpkins’ are so perfectly carved!
Dubbed ‘The Hair Ap•pair•ent’ to Morticia Addams,’ Elvira hung out with ghoulish Gomez (John Astin) and her horror film idol Vincent Price in the ’80s.
“The ultimate thrill was when Vincent came on my show,” the ex-groupie gasps. “That was like … I thought I’d dropped dead. I asked if he could do a small cameo on my Halloween special, and he came.” Looks like he’s about to spill his demon seed (above right).
“You know,” reminds Elvira, “I’m just a Valley Girl. Death Valley.”
But lately she’s been revived: Cassandra Peterson’s smart-mouthed and sexy horror hostess is as much a part of the horror community as she’s ever been and she’s not slowing down,” wrote Scream Queens mag this April. “Currently, she’s still appearing at conventions across the country and drawing huge crowds.” In or (falling) out of costume:
And still an uplifting corporeal vision: “I don’t want to be Elvira when I’m old,” she said at the widow’s peak of her career in 1992. “With my cleavage dragging down to my knees.”
When she had risen to the top that same year, Femme Fatales magazine observed, “Traditionally, old dudes hog the holidays. The rotund visage of Santa Claus ushers in the Yuletide. We ‘wring out’ every passing year with the retirement of Father Time. Uncle Sam salutes the Fourth of July. But the most appetizing embodiment of any holiday is that of Halloween: Elvira has bumped ’n’ grinded {she did start out as stripper!} the jack o’ lantern as official mascot. And the popularity of the sexy sorceress stretches well beyond October 31st.”
Speaking of stretching, check out Elvira’s music video from Halloween 2014: “I have a new song out called Two Big Pumpkins,” the then 63-year-old {whose singing voice even Elvis admired} announced. “Fred Schneider of the B-52s wrote it {his group takes its name from the distinctive nose of the Boeing B-52 airplane, as reflected in the singers’ beehive hairdos similar to Elvira’s}. And Jack White’s record company just put it out.” And in the video, Elvira’s puts them out:
Yet it was a far less amply endowed ghoul who was the first choice to replace ‘Sinister Seymour’ {deceased Larry Vincent} as the host of the Los Angeles weekend horror show Fright Night in mid-1981. Fifties cult figure Vampira, star of the “worst movie ever made” {and Elvira’s all-time favorite} Plan 9 from Outer Space, was cast in the role but quit when producers refused to hire actress Lola Falana to play her younger self—when she was more stool than ghoul.
Which is when unknown Cassandra Peterson answered a casting call of over 1,500 actresses … and won the role thanks largely to her “tight-fitting, low-cut, cleavage-displaying black gown.” Which, when the show became a huge success, seemed too similar to actress Maila Nurmi’s V-necked Vampira creation ... so she sued for plagiarism {don’t all undead babes look alike?} in late ’88.
“I don’t know why she keeps persisting,” Peterson proclaimed, “it’s really kind of pathetic. The woman had a career and nothing happened with it. Then she takes a 25-year vacation and gets all pissed off when I come out with something similar.”
Asking for $10 million, Nurmi frighteningly fought back: “Elvira is nothing more than an Eighties Vampira. She has a lovely bosom and a delightful figure, but she was never really an actress. She was a bit player in Hollywood and had a layout in a skin magazine.”
Actually many … and Sleuth has the first model release signed by Peterson {called ‘Paterson’ on the form} to prove it!
“I was a struggling model,” Cassandra comes clean … as we dust off her first portfolio composite card.
“I worked in a couple of little strip shows, because I was broke and needed the money” after returning from Rome in 1972. “I worked the Playboy dance club circuit, which was popular at the time.” So were the myriad men’s mags that sprung up in the wake of Playboy’s success … and Sleuth was the first to find literally dozens of Peterson pictorials therein—including several with her real first name!
Which was rarely done back then and an indication that future fame wasn’t anticipated.
“I don’t know what happened to that decade,” says Elvira of the Seventies, when she posed. “I modeled for a lot of album covers, book covers, romance novels—I did all that stuff in the ’70s.”
Yet somehow she rose from the depths of modeling …
… to scale the heights of horror!
“There are guys who only see your boobs!” she complains of her eye-popping costume, but Sleuth has compiled his spookyTop Ten Nudes that display every inch of the future Elvira’s epidermis!
And thanks to her wit … and two assets that rhyme with it … the exposures haven’t come back to haunt her.
10.
“People always say, ‘Who is your audience?’” Elvira exclaims, “and I could never put my finger on it—and I wouldn’t want to put a finger on it!” But on herself is a different matter … and the lady says she still finds the attention “touching.”
9.
Cassandra’s climbed up from sipping ice tea through a straw to champagne straight up!
8.
“There’s no way in hell they’re going to let me on camera with that thing,” she recalls thinking of the low-cut dress she designed back in 1981. “They looked at it for a while and then the station manager said, ‘Could you make the slit on the leg a little higher?’” Thus, when L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley officially declared March 9, 1984 as ‘Elvira Day,’ an unguarded upskirt moment revealed why she calls herself ‘Mistress of the Dark.’
7.
Her character is ‘other worldly,’ so it wasn’t too much of a Space Oddity when Cassandra did an explicit 1975 Playgirl pictorial with a nude dude. Looking eerily like Star Trek blonde Angelique Pettyjohn, she coupled with male model Paul Barresi, who later claimed “a love affair” with actor John Travolta from 1983 to 1985. “He wanted to know how much I made for starring in gay porn,” Barresi boasted. “I told him $400 a day. He said, ‘Then that’s what I’ll pay you to be with me.’” When the story broke in 1990, Travolta suddenly became engaged to actress Kelly Preston.
6.
Rather than deny or be “ashamed” of her nude modeling days, she signed prints of the pics as both “Elvira” and “Cassandra Peterson” for the Celebrity Sleuth Collection!
5.
“My fans are hardcore,” Elvira enthuses. “They are really, really hardcore. It’s pretty awesome.” And so was she … in this anonymous 1976 pictorial called Going My Way which found her riding a trucker’s big rig {another shoot first unearthed by Sleuth}. “How far do you go on the first date?” a Movie Macabre viewer wrote in to the mailbag segment called Sack Timewith Elvira, to which our hostess replied: “I once went as far as Santa Barbara.”
4.
“At 16, I dyed my hair so red it looked like a stop sign,” Cassandra confesses. “I have naturally red hair, but not that red.” No wonder her childhood idol was Gilligan'sGinger.
3.
“I never thought she’d be this popular,” the actress admits. “I thought it would be a kiddie’s show or something.” So, when Elvira was offered “a million bucks” to pose nude for Playboy after taking off, she turned a persistent Hugh Hefner down because, “I just didn’t want to screw up the image.” Unlike when she left a guy spent in a tent …
2.
“A million dollars sounded pretty good to me,” Cassandra comments on Hef’s offer to strip for Playboy. “I was at a convention and asked several hundred fans and they said, ‘No, don’t do it! You’ll ruin the mystery!’ So I turned it down. Which I’m still sort of upset about.” Hell hath no furry …
1.
Few know that legendarily lengthy male nude model Bill Cable—famed in the gay porn biz as ‘Bigg John’—was the future Elvira’s live-in lover for most of the Seventies {he died after breaking his neck in a 1996 motorcycle crash}. That's also him with the tent pole in the No. 3 pic ... and his chosen chick above right and below!
“Everybody expects Elvira to come out around Halloween,” she says today … but few expected Cassandra to join her lover for such intimate images that were later used to advertise a sex manual entitled The Penis. “I don’t get tired of Halloween,” she sighs today, “but I get tired at Halloween. It’s hard.” We won’t touch that.
Echoing how Femme Fatales felt at the outset of this post, Cassandra concludes: “What I would ideally love is for Elvira to remain as an icon for Halloween. Almost like Santa Claus is for Christmas, and the Bunny is to Easter.”
An eggs•cellent way to END this holiday homage to the immortal incu•bust.
Enough of her treats … let’s go out and get some sweets!
