Sixties Sex Symbols
by David Krell
david@davidkrell.com
Television brought 1960’s audiences an amalgam of magnetic women full of appeal and allure in a variety that popular culture never experienced before, and hasn’t since.
From private eyes, to spy girls, from domestic goddesses to villainesses, women exuded sex on the small screen.
For lack of a better term, ‘sex symbol’ became synonymous with these women. But no expression can really do them justice.
As women gained power during the beginning of the women’s lib movement in the 1960’s, television reflected this change. Some shows considered the powers of women quite literally.
Elizabeth Montgomery played Samantha Stevens, a sorceress of sorts in Bewitched. Samantha Stevens was no ordinary housewife in this outing. Bewitched took family fare in the standard suburban sitcom setting and added a twist. Samantha was a bona fide, honest-to-goodness, powerful witch who contravened previous connotations, depictions, and impressions of witches.
Montgomery’s sex appeal is highlighted in Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, an article in the November 28, 1964 edition of TV Guide. In this article, Richard Warren Lewis quotes television critic Jack O’Brian of the now defunct New York Journal-American to make the point.
Miss Montgomery is an uniquely equipped amulet for this feathery hocus-pocus. She has beauty, youth and a splendid subtlety in her reactions, able to register many a mood most girls would indicate simply by sticking out their tongues; she manages with the merest moves, eyelash batting and eyefuls of dancing glints in her admirably suppressed ‘takes’ and just-barely grimaces and amused gloatings.
Despite magical powers at the ready, Samantha’s husband consistently refuses to benefit from them. Dick York and Dick Sargent played Samantha’s husband, advertising executive Darrin.
Columbia’s Screen Gems television division produced Bewitched. The Museum of Broadcasting (later the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) honored the studio with a retrospective in 1987 and a companion book, Columbia Pictures Television: The Studio and the Creative Process: April 24 - August 1, 1987.
In the essay Screen Gems: 25 Years of Prime-Time Storytelling, David Marc describes the general thrust of the show’s husband-wife dynamic.
In episode after episode, he [Darrin] expects Samantha to entertain business contacts at home but forbids her from using her magical powers. Even though she can prepare an elaborate banquet with one short spell (usually a singly rhyming couplet and a twitch of the nose), Darrin demands that Samantha slave over a hot stove all day just to satisfy his incorrigibly puritanical vision of marriage.
Bewitched premiered on ABC on September 17, 1964 and Screen Gems followed its success with another showcase for an exotic female with mystical abilities.
I Dream of Jeannie premiered almost one year later to the day on rival network ABC on September 18, 1965.
I Dream of Jeannie took advantage of the 1960’s space craze inspired by the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Larry Hagman played the show’s protagonist, Captain (later Major) Anthony (Tony) Nelson, a NASA astronaut. While waiting for a rescue team on a desert island after an aborted mission, he finds a bottle and opens it, thereby unlocking the key to every man’s dream -- a beautiful, blonde, buxom genie who wants nothing more than to please her new master as he has freed her after 2,000 years of captivity. Barbara Eden plays Jeannie the genie.
Tony constantly grounds Jeannie’s heavenly capabilities, much to her and the male audience’s dismay, disbelief, and discouragement displayed through Tony’s pal, Captain (later Major) Roger Healey.
In the show’s fifth and final season, Tony succumbs to Jeannie’s succulent charms and they marry.
In addition to women who were fantastic in every sense of the word inspired by its root ‘fantasy,’ audiences also enjoyed the exploits of private eyes and spy girls.
Honey West only lasted one season on ABC from 1965-66, but it proved that a sexy, sassy, smart women can be just as good a private detective as the guys from 77 Sunset Strip, Surfside Six, or Bourbon Street Beat.
Honey West was a spinoff. Anne Francis initially played the character on the Burke’s Law episode Who Killed the Jackpot? The episode aired on April 21, 1965. Six months later Francis debuted the character in her own series.
Aaron Spelling produced Burke’s Law and Honey West. In the 1990’s update of Burke’s Law, he recalls the character as a takeoff -- Honey Best. Francis appropriately played her.
The premise of Honey West is a familiar television story. Honey takes over her father’s detective business after his death.
Skilled in the martial arts, possessive of women’s intuition, and armed with a variety of gadgets to rival James Bond, Honey paved the way for female sleuths in Charlie’s Angels, Remington Steele, and Moonlighting. Skip and Gloria Fickling created Honey West for novels in the late 1950’s.
Also in the crime investigating business was Connie Stevens in Hawaiian Eye. Pert, perky, and adorable with an engaging smile, Stevens played Cricket Blake, a sometimes information provider for detectives Tracy Steele and Tom Lopaka, of the Hawaiian Eye agency. Anthony Eisley and Robert Conrad play Tracy and Tom respectively.
According to the first episode, Malihini Holiday, Cricket has four jobs. In addition to helping Tracy and Tom, she is a photographer at the Hawaiian Village Hotel, a singer at the hotel’s Shell Bar, and a clerk in an airline ticket office.
Malihini Holiday aired on ABC on October 7, 1959.
Stevens softens the edges of the sometimes rough-n-tough detective stories with her girl-next-door charm. Also, the bar setting gives Stevens a chance to show off her singing talents, beginning in Malihini Holiday with a rendition of Let’s Fall In Love. In this song, she refers to a friend who calls falling in love ‘the ginchiest.’ It is a broad allusion to a teen idol on a sister detective show.
77 Sunset Strip premiered two years prior to Hawaiian Eye in 1957. The show enjoyed a heartthrob in the form of Edd Byrnes who plays hip-talking parking attendant Kookie, he of the hip lingo, e.g. ginchiest (best), dark seven (bad week). Stevens and Byrnes recorded a companion song to 77 Sunset Strip and a hit was born -- Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb referenced the character constantly combing his hair.
Warner Brothers produced 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye for ABC in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s along with Surfside Six and Bourbon Street Beat. Crossovers in reference or in person frequented the shows. 77 Sunset Strip lead character Stu Bailey (played by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) makes a brief cameo at the beginning of the Malihini Holiday episode to establish the shows existing in the same televerse.
A little more than a decade after her stint in Hawaiian Eye, Stevens did a 180-degree turn. She shows her deep dramatic talents in a tv-movie conveying the darker side of a sex symbol. Appropriately, the 1974 story is entitled The Sex Symbol.
About 300 miles away from Cricket’s Hawaii home, two contrasting women found themselves stranded on an island with five other castaways. One was a glamorous starlet, the other was a down-home girl from farm country. Millions of men wished for a situation as advantageous as the one facing Gilligan, the Skipper, and the Professor, the eligible male castaways on Gilligan’s Island.
Gilligan’s Island presents Tina Louise and Dawn Wells as quintessential Hollywood sex symbol Ginger Grant and farm girl from the plains Mary Ann Summers respectively.
But which one did the men really want?
The debate is one for the ages. Ronald L. Smith raises some interesting points about it in the 1993 book Sweethearts of ’60s TV. Smith quotes Wells to provide insight.
I got the most fan mail, which surprised me, but I realize now that I was everybody’s kind of girl next door, a fantasy but not fantasy. The reality is that you could probably approach Mary Ann, and she might be the girl you take home to mother, or that you might tell your troubles to.
Smith gives his own summary interpretation. Ginger Grant could make men swoon; a perfumed beauty in slinky gowns. But Mary Ann was a breath of fresh air in sporty short shorts. In fact, the show’s censors were worried more about Dawn than Tina!
On the international front, the success of James Bond during this Cold War era inspired several imitators. Like any popular trend, the spy genre invited parody.
Get Smart partnered Maxwell Smart a.k.a. Agent 86 with a woman who had the winning combination of brains and beauty. Indeed, Agent 99 was a keen, courageous, and attractive spy. Don Adams plays Maxwell Smart and Barbara Feldon plays Agent 99.
86 and 99 work for the U.S. intelligence agency C.O.N.T.R.O.L.. The agency’s purpose is to thwart the operations of K.A.O.S., a rival, foreign agency. The agents’ partnership graduates from professional to personal and 86 and 99 marry before the show ended its run.
Adams and Feldon reteamed as the legendary C.O.N.T.R.O.L. agents for the 1980 movie The Nude Bomb, the 1989 tv-movie Get Smart, Again, and a short-lived 1995 reprisal of the series simply titled Get Smart.
Feldon plays a clever takeoff character in an episode of Mad About You. As a somewhat cold, distant, but still alluring has-been sex symbol, she promotes an autobiography with the same name as her fictional 1960’s television series -- Spy Girl.
Since James Bond begat the 1960’s spy craze, a British import was all too probable. Enter The Avengers, a show with a somewhat complicated broadcast history. It first aired on British television in 1961, but did not reach the U.S. until 1966. Even then, American audiences saw the third go-around for the show.
According to Alex McNeil in Total Television: The Comprehensive Guide to Programming From 1948 to the Present, The Avengers began with an ‘urbane and sophisticated bon vivant,’ John Steed, helping a man search for his wife’s killers. Patrick Macnee plays Steed.
Sex appeal replaces adventure and Cathy Gale becomes Steed’s new partner. The killer search is left unresolved. Steed and Gale become government agents. Honor Blackman plays Cathy Gale.
America saw a version in the 1960’s matching Steed with Emma Peel and later Tara King. Diana Rigg and Linda Thorson play Peel and King respectively.
Rigg pushes the boundaries of innuendo in The Avengers. Smith encapsulates Rigg’s interpretation of a female Bondesque character with consequent visual impact.
As Mrs. Emma Knight Peel she had a cool, wryly appealing British accent and an indulgent, worldly smile. Slim and sexy, she was paradoxically both S and M, the karate dominatrix in black leather and the heroine in bondage. All this before most people knew what S&M meant.
Smith also explains the difference between Riggs and other women of the era.
Diana was one of the very few liberated women in movies or TV. Most, like Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore [of Goldfinger], were karate-chopping hellcats only until melted down by a conquering male. Diana was independent without being strident. She could even be John Steed’s superior without wrecking his ego. In one episode he joins Ransack, an intellectual organization she belongs to -- but he’s only able to join because she took the IQ test for him!
Another female spy entry did not perform as well. Stefanie Powers lasted one season as the title character in The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., a spinoff of the popular The Man From U.N.C.L.E. series.
If you were looking for an old-fashioned sex symbol in the 1960’s, you could find one in a well-known guest appearance on Star Trek. And I do mean old-fashioned.
Widely regarded as the best episode of Star Trek, The City on the Edge of Forever presents Joan Collins as Sister Edith Keeler, a 20th century pacifist at New York City’s 21st Street Mission circa 1930.
Keeler personifies sweetness, understatement, and generosity. Consequently, she wins the heart of Captain James Tiberius Kirk. Not an easy task when the suitor has females at all corners of the multiverse at his whim.
In this episode, Kirk and Spock travel back in time to retrieve Dr. McCoy, a victim of a hallucination induced by cordrasine. To escape imaginary captors, McCoy escaped through a time portal a.k.a. the Guardian of Forever.
Kirk faces an unusual, complex, and dangerous dilemma with unimaginable consequences. He must allow Edith Keeler to die as history originally intended. Otherwise, she will inspire an increasingly influential pacifist movement delaying America’s entry into World War II. Germany will win the war.
Kirk obliges history.
Collins’ portrayal of a sweet character, almost saccharine really, contrasts heavily with her guest shot on Batman as the villainess with a name rooted in seduction -- Siren. Also, Collins made a massive comeback in the 1980’s, reigning on Dynasty as vixen Alexis. Collins’ sex appeal, Machiavellian mind, and confidence provided a character light years away from Edith Keeler.
Television creates fantasy. In the 1960’s, women on television indulged the fantasy.
Who wouldn’t want to be stranded on an island with Ginger and Mary Ann?
Whose cynicism couldn’t be softened by Edith Keeler?
Who wouldn’t crave a shapely blonde who could grant any wish simply by twitching her nose or blinking her eyes?
To paraphrase Shakespeare, To watch, perchance to dream.