Ode to Joys

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains material which may be deemed male chauvinistic by sensitive readers, a sensitivity not shared in this moviehouse.

What is a guilty pleasure? For each person asked, a different answer will follow. For some, a guilty pleasure might be indulging in a death-by-chocolate dessert. For another, a guilty pleasure is admitting an emotional response to the love ballads of Air Supply. And then there are those who actually laugh out loud watching "Family Guy." Roger Ebert, the respected reviewer responsible for introducing the phrase "Thumbs up!" into the lexicon of film criticism, contributed to the scripts for "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens," a pair of softcore sexploitation sagas from director Russ Meyer, which must have been a guilty pleasure for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

The Germans had a word for guilty pleasure - sort of - "Schadenfreude." One dictionary translates it as "malicious glee or gloating," another defines it as "pleasure from another’s misfortune." In his memoir, Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer described Adolf Hitler’s sense of humor as almost entirely based on Schadenfreude. On the polar opposite, the Buddhist concept of "Mudita" stands out as sympathetic or altruistic joy, a pleasure that comes from delighting in another’s well-being, rather than begrudging it. And when it comes down to it, isn’t that the essence of guilty pleasures? Which brings us to our altruistic joy. Or more accurately - Joys.

Joy of Man’s Desire

Joi Lansing, who was often dismissed as "TV’s Marilyn Monroe," was born Joyce Wassmandoroff, April 6, 1929, in Salt Lake City, Utah. By the late 1940s, she had moved to Hollywood, where she began modeling and landing bit parts in movies. In 1951, she married actor Lance Fuller ("This Island Earth") after they both had small roles in the big-budget musical "Singin’ in the Rain." After the marriage ended in 1953, she returned to modeling, but her acting career was re-energized when she landed a recurring role as a photographer’s model in the comedy series "The Bob Cummings Show" (later known as "Love That Bob").

For a single season in 1960, Joi played a saloon girl named Goldie in the series "Klondike," featuring James Coburn, in one of his earlier roles, as a slick con man in a 19th-century Alaskan gold rush town. She eventually appeared as the wife of bluegrass musician Lester Flatt (of Flatt & Scruggs fame) on a number of episodes of "The Beverly Hillbillies."

Often cast in roles similar to those played by such contemporary blond bombshells as Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren, Joi (whose figure reportedly measured 39-23-35) often had to wear revealing costumes and skimpy bikinis, but she never posed nude. What a lot of fans never knew was that Joi was a Mormon, and she neither smoked nor drank alcohol.

She played an exotic dancer who ends up dead at the end of the famous opening tracking shot of Orson Welles’ 1958 film noir classic "Touch of Evil." Her other film appearances included less-than-stellar roles in "The Atomic Submarine," a 1959 sci-fi cheapie, "Marriage on the Rocks," a 1965 Frank Sinatra-Dean Martin romp, and 1967’s "Hillbillys in a Haunted House," receiving second billing (playing "Boots Malone") in an eclectic cast that featured Ferlin Husky, Lon Chaney Jr., Basil Rathbone and Merle Haggard. Her last movie was "Bigfoot" (1970), starring John Carradine.

Author Danny Peary, in Cult Movie Stars, confessed, "I liked this blond, shapely, round-cheeked starlet … Under appreciated, she would have to take roles in abysmal films toward the end of her career, but she never lost her pizzazz." Sadly, Peary concluded, "She died at an early age (43, of breast cancer) without really accumulating decent credits. Nevertheless, many of us remember her fondly."


Joy of Cooking

Joy Harmon was born in Flushing, New York, May 1, 1940. As a teen-aged high-schooler, she had a walk-on part in "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" (1956), starring Gregory Peck, which happened to be filming near her home in Westport, Connecticut. Bitten by the acting bug, she entered beauty contests - she was a runner-up (at five-feet five-inches and 41½-22-36) for Miss Connecticut - and appeared on Broadway.

She was "discovered" as a guest-contestant on the 1950s TV series "You Bet Your Life" by host Groucho Marx and was later invited to work with him on the series "Tell It to Groucho" (1962). During her stint on that short-lived show, she became a popular pinup model in several men’s magazines.

Roles in movies soon followed, including "Young Dillinger" (1965), as Baby Face Nelson’s Girl, in a cast that featured Nick Adams as Dillinger, Robert Conrad ("The Wild, Wild West") as Pretty Boy Floyd, and John Ashley (a popular costar of the Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello "Beach" flicks) as Nelson. That same year, Joy appeared in "Village of the Giants," as the 30-feet-tall sun-baked Merrie, who frugs while suspending tiny Johnny Crawford (of TV’s "The Rifleman") from her bikini top. In the words of "The Phantom of the Movies" of the New York Daily News, "A loose-screwed revamp of H.G. Wells’ Food of the Gods, (director Bert) Gordon’s stunningly stupid ‘Village of the Giants’ tells the shocking tale of teen troublemakers who, led by young Beau Bridges (and ‘Disney dropout’ Tommy Kirk), eat a magic growth drug called Goo, sprout to Brobdingnagian proportions and terrorize the hick town of Hainesville, California." The movie also features choreographer Toni Basil (who later had an ‘80s hit with "Mickey"), Mickey Rooney’s lookalike son Tim, gigantic dancing ducks, and 11-year-old Ron Howard (on leave from "The Andy Griffith Show") as a brainiac named "Genius."

Joy was also in "A Guide for the Married Man" (1967), starring Walter Matthau, but undoubtedly her best remembered role came in "Cool Hand Luke" (1967) as Lucille, the woman in the flimsy summer dress who transforms the simple task of washing a car with a hose and a soapy sponge into an act of overt sexuality, driving Paul Newman, George Kennedy and the other overheated chain gang convicts crazy. Lasting less than five minutes, it is still revered as one of the steamiest scenes in cinema history.

Shortly afterward, Joy retired from acting to get married and raise a family, although she continued to make the rounds of movie and sci-fi conventions to meet grateful fans and sign autographs. Baking was always a lifelong passion of hers, and she eventually started her own business, Aunt Joy’s Cakes, and runs the wholesale bakery based in Burbank, California. She maintains a website at http://www.auntjoyscakes.com/.

Joy of Sex

Vivacious, voluptuous, tanned, freckled red-haired beauty Joy Boushel (born 1959) appeared in only a handful of films and TV shows in a period of ten years before her career came to an abrupt, inexplicable end in the early 1990s.

Her role as a busty car hop in the sleazy 1980 teen comedy "Pinball Summer" (also known as "Pick-up Summer") had her baring her breasts, establishing a fan-pleasing trend that continued in her appearances in "Terror Train," a 1980 "Halloween" clone starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and "Humongous" (1982), a low-budget monster-on-the-loose movie in which Joy memorably smears wild berries on her naked chest. For her part as one of the prehistoric Ulam tribe in the comparably prestigious production "Quest for Fire" (1981), one can only expect that she appeared topless, as well.

Joy Boushel’s most fondly recalled role was in director David Cronenberg’s terrifying 1986 remake of "The Fly" as the appropriately named Tawny, the barfly taken home by oversexed Jeffrey Goldblum after he handily snaps her burly boyfriend’s arm like a twig in an arm-wrestling match. It is the half-naked Joy whom Geena Davis warns, "Be afraid. Be very afraid." One of Joy’s last feature film appearances was in 1989’s "Look Who’s Talking" as one of George Segal’s mistresses.

Bundle of Joy

We forget who said it, but one astute source on the internet noted that cute, bubbly, engaging, blond Joy Bang blithely epitomized the quintessential, free-spirited, groovy 1960s and funky 1970s hippie girl, almost always playing with infectiously naughty, upbeat good humor the kind of brash young woman who remains very open, unabashed and uninhibited about her sexuality.

Born Joy Wener in 1947 in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised by adoptive parents in New York City, she made her film debut in an obscure, low-budget 1968 feature called "Separation."

Her big break in major motion pictures came in "Pretty Maids All in a Row" (1971), a dark comedy starring Rock Hudson as a virile high school coach and counselor who also happens to be a sex murderer, responsible for seducing and killing a series of nubile students (most of whom, according to critic Roger Ebert, "look like past, present or aspiring" centerfolds), one of whom is the energetic Ms. Bang. The director was Roger Vadim, a European filmmaker known for launching the career of Brigitte Bardot. He would marry and exploit Jane Fonda and later live with French beauty Catherine Deneuve.

Curiously, "Pretty Maids All in a Row" was produced and scripted by Gene Roddenberry, beloved creator of "Star Trek," which would explain the presence of James Doohan ("Scotty) in the supporting cast, which also included Angie Dickinson as a sexpot teacher, Roddy McDowall as a prissy principal, and (pre-"Kojak") Telly Savalas and Keenan Wynn as bumbling police officers.

Cult Movie Stars author Danny Peary noted of Joy Bang, "The name tells all about the type of character she played, always with good humor. Her cute, stoned, sexually uninhibited females graced several pretty good films of and about the seventies," which also included the role of a groupie in "Cisco Pike" (1972), starring Kris Kristofferson, Gene Hackman, Karen Black and Harry Dean Stanton; one of sexually frustrated Woody Allen’s dates, who ends up abducted by a biker gang, in "Play It Again, Sam" (1972); and the girlfriend of dope dealer John Lithgow (in his feature film debut) in "Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues" (1972). "Her scenes were more like cameos," Peary observed, "but she made the most of them. What was exciting was that she gave the impression that she wasn’t playing a role - she was playing herself."

Joy enjoyed a rare lead role in "Night of the Cobra Woman" (1972) as a biology student and snake expert who crosses paths with a deadly jungle priestess whose voracious sexual appetite and addiction to cobra venom prevents her from becoming a snake herself. Filmed in "Sllitherama," the low-budget chiller was shot in the Philippines by New York experimental director and Andy Warhol devotee Andrew Meyer. Joy also turned up as a "flaky lady" attacked in a movie theater full of zombies in "Dead People," an odd 1973 horror outing also known as "Messiah of Evil," scripted by "American Graffiti" writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz.

At one time romantically linked to The Who’s bad-boy drummer Keith Moon, Joy abruptly retired from acting in the mid-1970s. Her final two acting roles were guest appearances on the NBC cop shows "Adam-12" and "Police Story."

As of 2001, she was reportedly working as a nurse in Minnesota. There is a current phone listing for a Joy Wener (her given name) in Minneapolis, and we were tempted to call her, but it’s like when Herbert Lom’s character in the 1983 film "The Dead Zone" found out his mother (presumed killed by Nazis decades earlier) was still alive and dialed her number, only to hang up because he didn’t really know what to say.

No, we prefer to remember her as Danny Peary recalled in Cult Movie Stars: "Watching Joy Bang today, many former male hippies feel nostalgia for that era. Mr. and Mrs. Bang must have been proud of their daughter."