She was a cuddlesome foreign beauty queen in the 50's and 60's, and then a scary campy vamp in the Warhol 70's and even the cabaret 90's. She was a legend in her own time. Wasn't she? She'd tell you she was.
So would I, but sometimes people say, "How come you have such a THING for these old sex symbol babes? What's so great about Brigitte Bardot, Diana Rigg, Tuesday Weld....uh, as opposed to who? Anne Hathaway, Kim Kardashian or Mo'nique?
Let's talk about an era when women had class, and real tits. Let's talk about a time when there was no pitch-corrected vocals, and even Monique Van Vooren had to show some skills to get a record deal and to perform LIVE IN CABARET in front of a PAYING AUDIENCE.
Monique van Vooren (March 25, 1927 – January 28, 2020). Not to be confused with Mamie Van Doren, Monique Van Vooren was a Brussels-born beauty queen who also made hearts flutter via her ice skating prowess. She was a cool, cool blonde. Mamie's still around, but the ranks are thinning. Another beauty queen, from Denmark, died not too long ago, Greta Thyssen. She was another who parlayed good looks into magazine work and cult films.
I didn't know Monique well, but I do have some memorabilia that I can still look on with some fondness, and now some sadness. Of course any asshole can buy an autographed item on eBay or haunt some D-list comic-con show, pay for a selfie, and then boast, "She is close personal friends of me." But yeah, there's a big difference between PAYING FOR IT and NOT. There's a difference between holding a conversation with a celebrity on even terms, and pestering one at the stage door. But let's get back to Van Vooren.
Monique turned up on stage in the “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac” revue in the mid 50’s, along with Hermoine Gingold and Harry Belafonte. She wasn't just eye-candy; you didn't get on a show like that just for being famous for being famous. She was in the movie “Tarzan and the She-Devil,” and later was briefly in Dean Martin’s “10,000” bedrooms in 1957. She played nightclub dates. Her ability to at least carry a tune led to her solo album for RCA, “Mink in Hi-Fi.”
She was known for wearing expensive and outrageous fur. Back in the day when bombastic babes routinely tried the patience of newspaper reporters with their publicity games, Monique claimed that she was the victim of theft…and was rewarded with a photo op when the police recovered her missing fur. Was it actually stolen or did her publicist grab it and after suitable time, tip the police off to where it had turnd up? Quoth the wire services, Monique got back her
“…$2,500 light champagne mink stole after claiming it in a police station here today. She said she had left it in a restaurant a month ago.” Why, smirking reporters asked, didn’t she realize she'd left her fucking fur behind in the restaurant for anyone to grab? “It must have been a mild night,” Monique purred. She went on to tell reporters that she owned eleven mink coats, and one of them was valued at $8,000.
You’d think she would’ve been a natural for some furrier’s print ad campaign, but I don’t think she ever got the chance. I do recall that she was hired by Smirnoff Vodka, a company that used a lot of celebrities in their magazine ads.
“Mink In Hi-Fi” has nothing to do with dead animals. Priced high for the cover, not the music, Monique offers up a fairly eclectic collection, sung half in French and half in English, along with a calypso novelty called “My Man is Good,” which is about how she smacked the two-timing jerk in the head. He dead. Perhaps this was inspired by the time she spent having to suffer through Harry Belafonte’s crap when they were both part of the “John Murray Almanac” revue. The song has a male chorus that is so irritating, I didn’t even want to hear it again to make an example of it via download. Instead, you get the poignant “Call Me Again When You’re In Town.”
Hot babe singers almost always end up warbling torch ballads, begging YOU the listener to take her back, romance her the way she needs, kiss her, hold her…whatever. Right, a woman like Monique (or Julie London or whoever you want to name) is sadly pining for…YOU. But that's what sells records (along with a hot album cover).
Skitch Henderson and his orchestra back Monique. His real first name as Lyle.
Li'l Skitch was quite popular at the time. He made albums and was quite visible as the bandleader for “The Tonight Show.” He was notoriously fired by Johnny Carson and his producers. According to “The Music Business and the Monkey Business” by Lynn and Larry Elgart (page 39), “A man from Columbia Records brought vocalists to Skitch’s dressing room for him to audition them. This night, one girl, underage, arrived with her mother. It appeared that Skitch was ready for a different kind of audition. The mother was irate and made a scene. He was let go at once.”
Henderson’s revisionist history: “I very much wanted to start a Pops situation here in New York [aping Arthur Fiedler’s Boston Pops orchestra] and I knew it would never happen as long as I had the security of that paycheck.” He also claimed he ended on good terms with Carson, who gave him the gift of a rare Bible!
Li'l Skitch was known for stretching the truth. He used to insist that he helped Judy Garland learn “Over the Rainbow.” No biographer of Judy’s seems to agree. He was fired from “The Tonight Show” in 1966, and quickly replaced by Milton DeLugg, with Doc Severinsen ending up getting the permanent assignment. Skitch didn’t start his “New York Pops” orchestra until 1983, long after the scandals had died down…scandals that included a 1974 tax evasion indictment. This involved a bogus $350,000 “puff” on the value of donations he made to a university’s music collection. He insisted he valued everything correctly and had advice from Henry Mancini and Leonard Bernstein. Neither backed up his story.
But I digress...and I can, because I write what I feel like writing about, and figure people just might want to read a blog instead of going to it because some asshole is offering photo-and-link discographies out of some sense of egotism, bratty civil disobedience, or ignorance of how there are still people in recording studios, record stores and on the road trying to make a living by having people pay for their entertainment.
Ah, Monique. We never did discuss why the "stars" of today are not only untalented and stupid, but insist on shaving their twats. I did have that conversation with another of my vintage sexy-celeb friends, an Award-winning woman far higher up the fame list than Monique. But we'll save that for another time. See, if you do happen to know people instead of just pay 'em to take a selfie with you, they might spontaneous talk to you in a way you'd never dream of. As in, "is it true that all the stars today shave their private parts? Why in the world would they do that..."
Hmm, I suppose there are geeks out there who would've paid $500 to hear that question put to them by a famous actress. It ain't gonna happen just by giving away all her movies on the Internet somewhere. Do you suppose the assholes who compulsively do their dung-beetle dumps in shoutboxes, forums, or their own pseudo-famous BLOGS, do it because they DON’T know celebrities, AREN’T in the music or film business, NEVER sang or wrote a song, and thus, think that giving shit away makes them cool? When they’re in some armpit town nobody ever heard of, or a shit country like Turkey or Sweden or Holland or Brazil that nobody wants to visit unless they want drugs? Rhetorical question. The assholes that are "having fun" don't have enough brain cells to come up with a rationale, and if they did, it would be just that, a fucking rationale. An excuse.
Along with other eccentrics and exotics, like Hildegarde and Genevieve (no, met Hildegarde once, Genevieve not at all), Monique appeared not only in nightclubs, and variety/talk shows, she was sometimes eye-candy on TV shows. For Monique, that seemed to end around 1968 when she could only manage a cameo on a “Batman” TV episode as “Miss Clean,” with Burgess Meredith starring as The Penguin.
What to do. Retire? Find a new paradigm? Stick a wet finger in the air and check the zeitgeist? In the 70’s, Monique re-invented herself as someone a bit more scary than cuddly, and played the “Queen of Skulls” in “The Decameron” and the Baroness in “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein.” You can see the difference between Monique ONE and Monique TWO in the autographed photos (which were not SOLD to me by Monique.
The new Monque wore high fashion clothes, a ton of jewels, and sometimes, some other-worldly contact lenses. I’m assuming her three husbands were all well off, and she wasn’t totally relying on summer stock or nightclubs to pay the rent. In 1983 she released a book, which may have taken her years to write and she hoped people would take a look. It was called ‘Night Sanctuary.’ In the 90’s…well, if you’re one of the last of the chanteuses, and gays can’t fawn over Judy or even Hildegarde anymore…there she was, doing the cabaret scene, offering stark songs delivered South of Dietrich and East of that newer keeper of the flame, Ute Lemper.
Give her credit for getting up there and gettin’ it done.
Since attention spans are short, and the wistful spoken introductions sometimes used to open ballads are generally not worth hearing, let’s go right into the actual song…”Call Me Again When You’re in Town.” Stay around, it’s only two minutes or so, and the ending is, under the circumstances, rather poignant.
HEAR "CALL ME AGAIN..." Monque Van Vooren - instant download or listen on line, no crappy Eurotrash PAY site, no porn ads, no Paypal donation crap.
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