FULLER FIGURED

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/4052/28/

Ave atque vale
Wednesday, 18 May 2011

Dolores Fuller, 1923-2011

Ed Wood is best known to today's moviegoers from the film Ed Wood, Tim Burton’s big-budget 1994 biopic of the no-budget 1950s director. And, because she was played by Sarah Jessica Parker, that's what Dolores Fuller is best known for, too, even though she loathed the picture and refused to appear in it. As Wood's main squeeze for much of the Fifties, she preferred the near simultaneous and highly diverting documentary, Look Back in Angora. The director had a fetish for this particular knitwear, not only as it clung to Miss Fuller but also as it clung to him. You can see him wearing Dolores' white angora sweater as the latter half of the title role in his sex-change breakthrough movie Glen Or Glenda (1953). Miss Fuller was also in the picture, but recognized that the angora had a more critical role: she preserved it by keeping it in her freezer, and she took it to fan conventions almost to the end.

After Glen Or Glenda came Wood's Jail Bait (1954) and Bride Of The Monster (1955), with the roles getting smaller every time, from Glen/Glenda's girlfriend to a friend of a friend of a bride of the monster. I don't think she was in Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), but it wouldn't have made any difference anyway. She bust up with Wood over the cross-dressing thing. "I loved him in a way, but I couldn't handle the transvestism," she said. "It's hard for me to deviate! I wanted a man that was all man." Hal Wallis, the producer, was a friend of hers and she was hoping he'd give her a part in his latest Elvis film and re-start her career. Instead, he said: "If you can write, why would you want to act?" And he got her an introduction to Hill & Range Music, and a couple of their house writers, Fred Wise and Ben Weisman. The first of many numbers she wrote for Elvis during the Sixties was this appealingly daffy song for Blue Hawaii:

   The way she moves her hips
   To her fingertips
   I feel I'm heaven bound
   And when she starts to sway
   I've gotta say
   She really moves the grass around...

Rock'n'roll scholars are frightfully sniffy about more or less everything Elvis did after the Sun sessions with Sam Phillips, and certainly whatever tolerance they're prepared to extend to the early years at RCA - "Heartbreak Hotel", "Jailhouse Rock" - has pretty much vanished by the time we get to Blue Hawaii. But I must say "Rock-A-Hula Baby" never fails to cheer me up. In my disc-jockey days, RCA used to release Elvis collections every 20 minutes and every time I opened one up I'd run through the track listing and wind up playing "Rock-A-Hula". "Music for the film Blue Hawaii was a challenge," Miss Fuller's writing partner Ben Weisman recalled many years later. "Because of the locale, I thought the music should have a Hawaiian flavor, but with a rock beat. At the time, the twist was very hot, and I found that the twist and the hula were perfect together. Out of that combination 'Rock-A-Hula Baby' was born."

The twist meets the hula? How come nobody thought of that before? Dolores' lyrics rose to the challenge:

   Ro-ock-
   A-Hula Baby
   Ro-ock-
   A-Hula Baby
   Got a hula lulu
   From Honolulu
   That Rock-A-Hula baby of mine...

Alas, she and her comrades rarely hit such heights again, to the point where, come the recording sessions for the Easy Come, Easy Go soundtrack in 1967, Elvis was reduced to complaining to the engineer: "What am I supposed to do with shit like this?" But he did the shit anyway, and in a couple of takes - just as Dolores Fuller had done back in the days of Glen Or Glenda and Jail Bait. From Ed Wood's angora sweater to grass skirts for Elvis, she wore it well. Rest in peace.


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