Discussing books on movies … almost as good as watching them, and without the sticky floors!
In her autobiography IF I’M SO FAMOUS, HOW COME NOBODY’S EVER HEARD OF ME?, B-move actress Jewel Shepard invokes the name of Robert De Niro when she describes the moment she discovered that the makers of 1987’s PARTY CAMP actually expected her to wallow in hog feces rather than provide a less-unpleasant substitute. If the most famous Method actor of his generation was willing to gain 50 pounds to play Jake La Motta, she concludes, then she should at least be willing to get herself covered in pig shit.
Such is the glamorous life of a wannabe starlet.
Shepard’s 1996 memoir is a book that would be easy to dismiss if you were to simply flip through its pages without bothering to sample its prose. Barely a page passes by without some arousing example of the many nude and/or semi-nude photo shoots she posed for during the course of her then-16-year career as an actress/model.
Originally written to be distributed through her fan club, it contains so much cheesecake that when it eventually made it to actual bookstores, it was sold in wrapped plastic like a convenience-store HUSTLER.
But it takes only a few pages of those word thingies that fill up the rest of its 223 pages to discover that the book is more than a collection of whack-off pics. It is also a very entertaining glimpse into one of the least-explored but most universal of show-business experiences: the person who just can’t catch a break no matter how hard she tries.
In describing her early years, Shepard paints the kind of picture that would have given Nathanael West a rock-hard woody: After her father committed suicide when she was 5, she eventually was abandoned by her nomadic mother into foster care and soon became a teenage runaway who ended up in the California juvenile detention system after she was caught stealing clothes.
After spending six months in junior jail – during which time she was raped by the one counselor who seemed to care about her problems – she then was released to the world as an emancipated minor with nothing more than the clothes on her back and a bagful of makeup. Picked up on the side of the road by a Good Samaritan named Buck – who extorts her into giving him head in lieu of gas money – she promptly was taken to a local strip joint and advised that the only way to support herself was to get naked in front of strangers, which would become the major theme of her life.
It’s during these first early chapters that the book is at its most schizophrenic; it’s hard to know what to feel when directly opposite the page describing the harrowing ordeal of her first striptease performance is a topless photograph of her that couldn’t have been taken more than just a few years later. The effect of this strange juxtaposition is undeniably creepy, and it is sometimes difficult to reconcile the story we’re being told with the undeniably prurient images that accompany it. The only real way to get through the book without experiencing this strange dichotomy is to ignore one aspect while focusing on the other, but such is the endearingly cynical sincerity of her prose, it is usually worth the effort.
After this initial account of sadness and desperation, Shepard goes on to describe a life filled with equal measures of strange luck and inevitable setback. At times she comes across as a voluptuous Chance the Gardener, with her career path set more by the people she runs into rather than by her own ambition or design. After stripping for several years, she made the leap into modeling and acting when her car conveniently broke down in front of the shop owned by George Barris, the legendary auto customizer who gave the world the Adam West-chauffeured Batmobile. Taking pity on the pretty girl with the blown transmission, he helped her get work posing for car magazines (where she worked with doomed Playmate Dorothy Stratton; see STAR 80) and then helped her get a S.A.G. card when he had her cast as his assistant during his cameo in the 1982 cult car-chase movie THE JUNKMAN.
With this precious card in hand, she managed to book several roles demanding nothing more from her than her exposed breasts (including the title role in CHRISTINA, in which she spent far more of the movie out of her clothes than in them), before she finally got cast in the two movies that earned her the small measure of B-movie immortality to which she could later lay claim.
In an ironic twist, Shepard was able to create the only memorable character in 1984’s otherwise execrable HOLLYWOOD HOT TUBS by convincing the filmmakers to let her keep her top on throughout the entire film. What she offered to do instead of get naked was to wear a tank top without a bra and bounce frenetically in every scene she appeared in. The result was a special miracle of cinema still spoken of with reverence today by all former adolescent boys who saw the movie back when Ronald Reagan still ruled over all he surveyed.
Not long after that, Shepard was offered a part in the only genuinely good movie in which she would ever appear. Never able to support herself purely through her film roles, she still paid her bills by dancing at The Sugar Shack – tales of which fill several non-movie related chapters in the book – and it was there she met a slightly odd, bearded man who told her he was about to direct his first film. At the time Dan O’Bannon was best known for his work on the screenplay for ALIEN and was about to start casting for an odd hybrid of comedy, horror and punk-rock music called RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. While giving him a table dance, she convinced him to let her audition for the movie and eventually won the role of Casey, the girl who really wanted to “parrrr-ty!”
But, true to the nature of her fate, her big break turned to naught when her role in the film was eclipsed by Linnea Quigley’s famous graveyard striptease. In the years that followed the release of ROTLD, she landed a few roles in a couple forgettable T&A comedies, a Filipino women-in-prison movie and – recreating her landmark role – 1990’s HOLLYWOOD HOT TUBS 2: EDUCATING CRYSTAL, before she effectively brought her career to a halt by refusing to appear naked in anymore films.
In less capable hands, Shepard’s book could have fallen into the trap of misplaced egotism and sour grapes that is the fate of most Z-list autobiographies (if you ever read a book by a former GILLIGAN’S ISLAND cast member, you know what I’m talking about), but she avoids these pitfalls with an often self-brutalizing honesty and refreshingly self-deprecating sense of humor. Though it is easy to appreciate why she felt compelled to fill the book with every naked picture of herself she could find, it is to her credit as a writer that it could have easily done without them and remain worthwhile. In telling the least told but most common of Hollywood stories, IF I’M SO FAMOUS, HOW COME NOBODY’S EVER HEARD OF ME deserves to be a part of any serious B-movie buff’s library.
Oh, and all the naked pictures are totally awesome! –Allan Mott
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