Time stops on the movie screen, and Julie Adams is ever and always the pretty girl in the white swimsuit.
She braves a dip in the jungle lagoon, and the merest sight of her strikes the cold heart of the creature that lurks in the shadowy water just beneath her.
The title monster of the 1954 horror movie,Creature From the Black Lagoon, is about to grab her with his scaly claws: “Raging with pent-up passions,” the ads promised, “a woman’s beauty his prey.”
“I always dreamed of the exciting life of a movie star,” Adams, 86, says. With thanks to the creature, “I guess I’ve more or less fulfilled it.”
She grew up in Blytheville, and attended high school and junior college in Little Rock.
School equipped her to be a secretary, but she took a
chance on Hollywood.
“I knew what I want
ed,” she says. Even so,
“I love Little Rock. I enjoyed being there so much.” Traveling from California, the actress will be at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock on Friday to receive the Distinguished Alumni Award from University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
“In Julie’s case, it’s a degree from Little Rock Junior College in 1946,” the university’s director of alumni relations, Christian O’Neal, explains. The university started as a junior college.
“But she’s still in the family.”
Also in Little Rock, on June 7 she will attend the opening reception for the Old State House Museum’s movie exhibit, “Lights! Camera! Arkansas!”
The show will focus on movies made in Arkansas and past and current actors, writers and directors from the state. Adams joins a cast of fellow Arkansans including Academy Award-winners Mary Steenburgen (Melvinand Howard) and Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade), and director Jeff Nichols (the current release, Mud).
“It’s everybody from Broncho Billy Anderson to Dick Powell and Alan Ladd,” curator Jo Ellen Maack says. Maack expects the show will surprise people, especially in regard to Adams.
“She has had a huge career,” Maack says - 50 movies, years of TV appearances - “but everybody thinks about the creature.” SOMETHING FISHY
Adams had been hoping for a solid part in a realistic drama when Universal Pictures cast her to scream at the Creature From the Black Lagoon.
“I looked at the title,” she says, “and thought, ‘Creature from the - what?’”
But she couldn’t say no under the terms of her studio contract, not without risking legal perils worse than anything in the water.
Her previous roles had called mostly for Western get-ups, but this one came with “the first and only custom-made bathing suit I ever had,” she says.
The suit was a one-piece with shoulder straps. But it showed off Adams’ famously insured legs as much as the times allowed: A spectacle once seen, never forgotten in the smitten minds of a certain male demographic. Fans still ask her what became of that suit.
“I say it’s gone the way of latex,” she says. “Bathing suits have a way of going limp. The latex doesn’t hold up.”
The movie imagines a jungle expedition in search of fossils to prove a link between land and sea life. The scientists find too much evidence when they rile up a prehistoric monster, the Gill Man.
The creature has yellow eyes for Adams’ character, the fetching Kay Lawrence. But the actor inside the monster suit, Ben Chapman, had trouble seeing out. As the monster ran to his cave with the dark-haired beauty in his arms, he thumped her head against a rock.
“He was having trouble that day with his goggles,” Adams says. “I was in my bathing suit, trying hard not to shiver.”
Pretending to be unconscious, she took a bang on the cranium from a fake but solid enough rock with “certainly a sharp point.” Sparks cleared to the odd sight of the monster as he knelt beside her, more upset than she was.
“I got a small scrape on my forehead,” Adams says. “Of course, the publicity department made a big deal of it,” and so was born the legend that the creature really was a menace.
In truth, the big hit came when Creature From the Black Lagoon arrived onscreen in the “sheer, stark terror” of the latest in thrill effects, 3-D.
The monster surfaced again in Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956) - and in The Seven Year Itch (1955), the scene where Marilyn Monroe tells Tom Ewel that the poor thing only wants to be loved.
OUT OF THE POOL
Adams was 28 the year of the creature’s release. An actress on her way to better roles, she didn’t especially like monster movies, and she never made another one.
Besides, she says, “I wasn’t asked.”
Other movies cast her opposite many better-looking costars: James Stewart, Tyrone Power, Jeff Chandler, Rock Hudson, John Wayne.
But still - and she knows this - people think of her in the monster’s grasp, and might never guess how she got there.
Born as Betty May Adams in Waterloo, Iowa, she grew up in Blytheville. The Ritz movie theater (today’s Ritz Civic Center) was “the best place in town,” she remembers. By the time she made her acting debut in a third-grade production of Hansel and Gretel, she wanted most of all to be a movie star.
Her dream was a long way from possible in small-town Arkansas, the years of the Great Depression, for the only child of ever-drifting, alcoholic parents.
She lived with relatives in order to attend high school in Little Rock. The beauty pageant title of Miss Little Rock encouraged her to think she might have the looks for Hollywood.
“I had a kind aunt living in California,” she says. “Really, she was my father’s first wife, but she always loved him. She lived in Long Beach, and she owned a bathing suit shop.”
“Aunt” Ruth offered a chance to try for the movies - and a swimsuit modeling job in the meantime - “and so I took her up on it.”
Adams quit a $20-a-week secretarial job at the Arkansas Capitol to fly to California, where it would be some time before she made that kind of money again.
The 19-year-old hopeful’s first part in a picture was practically too small to count. She posed for the cover of a magazine that appeared in Red, Hot and Blue (1949), a gangster movie with Betty Hutton.
The barely true promise that she could stay on a horse led to a series of Westerns made for cheap oats.
“Six Westerns in five weeks,” she says. “But that was the thing that got me a screen test at Universal, and that led to my contract.”
The studio changed her name from Betty to Julia, to Julie, all part of the old-time, star-making machinery.
A voice coach taught her to lose her Southern accent - just in time for her first big role in the war drama Bright Victory (1951), in which the part called for a Southern drawl.
Like other newcomers, she learned to smile for the camera, to sing and tap dance, ride a horse on the run, swing a lasso, bat an eyelash - everything it took to be cast as a cowgirl one week, a showgirl the next.
INTERMISSION
Adams recollects the Hollywood of her swimsuit days in The Lucky Southern Star: Reflections From the Black Lagoon (Hollywood Adventures Press, 2011).
The book is with film editor Mitchell Danton, Adams’ son with actor husband, the late Ray Danton (The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond).
“It was a fascinating time,” Mitchell Danton says, “when you got paid to go to school and learn to be a movie star.”
Creature From the Black Lagoon was early in Adams’ career, released the same year that she co-starred with Donald O’Connor and a talking mule in Francis Joins the WACS.
Done with the mule, she rode west with Rory Calhoun in The Looters (1955), and danced the hula in Away All Boats (1956). She took up television roles from the medical drama of Dr. Kildare (1962) to the forensic crime-fighting of CSI: NY (2007).
Still, the creature held tight, and Adams found an entirely new career of attending monster and science-fiction fan conventions.
“It’s so amazing,” she says. “Young people like this movie,” and the green creature and the white swimsuit go together like tuna and mayonnaise.
In such surroundings as the Monsterpalooza fan get-together in Burbank, Calif., Adams’ fans kept asking her to write a memoir, Mitchell Danton says. And so she did from notes that he assembled as a film editor shapes a movie.
Danton edits the ABC Family series Switched at Birth. But the book has been close to another full-time job for him.
His actor-director father “led a fascinating life,” Danton writes, “but he never wrote down a word of it. ... I didn’t want my mom’s extraordinary life and career to suffer the same fate.”
The book tells all about her, he says, including Adams’ childhood in Arkansas, “but there wouldn’t be a book without the creature.”
Time and again, she arrives at a gathering to find that someone has set up a replica of the creature to surprise her, Danton says. He guesses there must be “several hundred life-size creatures floating around the country.”
In fact, one lies in wait in at the Old State House Museum. Visitors to the movie exhibit will come face-to-fin with a 6-foot-tall representative of the species.
“He’s fiberglass,” museum curator Maack says, “and he’s scary, actually.”
Adams calls the guy “my friend for life.”
Friday’s award luncheon is for members and friends of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Alumni Association. Previous award winners include former U.S. Rep. Vic Snyder; Brenda Donald, director of the District of Columbia Child and Family Services Agency; and about 60 others. More information on the luncheon and the alumni association is available at UALR.edu/alumni, or by calling (501) 683-7208.
Adams will sign copies of The Lucky Southern Star from 1-2:30 p.m. Friday at the Clinton Presidential Center. The book is available from WordsWorth Books & Co. in Little Rock, (501) 663-9198.
“Lights! Camera! Arkansas!” will be at the Old State House Museum from opening day June 8 to March 2015. More information is available at oldstatehouse. com, or by calling (501) 324-9685.
More information about Julie Adams, her movies, book and appearances is available on her website, julieadams.biz.
Style, Pages 29 on 05/07/2013