She's old Hollywood, but she's `for real'

By Al Martinez, Columnist
Posted: 08/21/2011 09:20:40 PM PDT
Updated: 08/21/2011 09:21:40 PM PDT

     When former showgirl, actress and magazine cover model Gloria Pall says "I've got to be me" you know she isn't just doing a song and a dance. She means it.

     All you've got to do is look around her pink stucco North Hollywood home jammed with everything but airplane parts and surgical tables and you know that is true. Every room from kitchen to bathroom is a warehouse of boxes, dresses, hats, books, pictures, papers and I don't know what else.

     A little peculiar perhaps, but it's her.

     It is a collection of stuff that she has gathered for more than 25 years and it leaves only narrow aisles in her rooms to squeeze through.

     There is no place to sit except on the front porch, such is the magnitude of what Pall refers to as "my choice, my joys, my treasures, my pleasures."

     She is a strong 84, and calls herself "old Hollywood" because she was in films, television shows and commercials in the 1950s when she was slim, pretty and scantily clad on the covers of girlie magazines like Frolic, Pix, Gala and Fun. She was called "Voluptua" for obvious reasons.

     A little heavier these days, she still has the naturally blond, shoulder-length curls that once made her attractive to men like Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley, and a manner of dressing that says look-at-me. On the day we talked, she was wearing tight white pants, a knitted lavender top, lavender socks and white shoes sprinkled with glitter.

     The night before, wearing a black sequined gown and feathered hat, she had performed as a flamboyant Mae West before a gathering of publicists to commemorate the 118th anniversary of West's birth.

     She demonstrated the act with the provocative shift of a hip, the come-hither glance and the sexy, honey-coated "Come up and see me sometime."

Did I say she's written and self-published 14 books? It is no surprise that they are mostly about her.

     There is something about this talkative, articulate ex-beauty queen that convinces her listeners that it is OK and perhaps even "creative" to have a house full of stuff. She can laugh about it and seems to enjoy the differences between her and everyone else.

     She bristled only slightly when I mentioned a comparison to Angelyne, the lip-puckered baby doll billboard queen who is a living caricature of faded glamour.

     "Never," she said, making her way through her collection. "I'm for real."

     There is something to be said for and perhaps even admired in the qualities of a Gloria Pall. "I find another life in what others throw out," she declared when I suggested that she might be overdoing it just a bit, for instance saving things like bottle caps to someday create a "Picasso-type" painting.

     She laughed at that, too. "At least at my age I'm not all shriveled up," she proclaimed in a burst of self-definition as I made my way out the front door. "There's still a lot of life in me."

     Ah, yes.