It is hard work maintaining the site, but Van Doren does it herself every day. She, in fact, designed everything about it -- from the neon, retro, tube-style font, to the pictures at home with her Moluccan cockatoos, to the multifarious tales of her life and times behind the cameras and between the sheets. The site has garnered Van Doren a new generation of fans, kids born some 20 years after her biggest hits -- "High School Confidential" and "Untamed Youth" -- were released to the panting delight of baby boomers everywhere.

This new legion of fans might be inclined to follow Van Doren's link to B-Movie.com where they can nominate her for the B-Movie Hall of Fame awards (to be announced the last week in August). Or, if not, they will certainly go to see her in the forthcoming Destination Films flick titled "Slackers," starring Jason Schwartzman of "Rushmore," in which Van Doren does a cameo of "a really tired old whore" who tries to seduce Schwartzman by "flicking my tongue in my cheek like I'm giving a blow job," and who then enjoys him "holding a sponge over my pussy" while reclining in a bathtub.

"The last thing Jason says to me is, 'You old bitch!' or something like that," Van Doren tells me on the phone from her home in Newport Beach, Calif., where she enjoys roaming around nude and playing with her birds. She laughs, a sound at once bawdy and girlish. "He kisses my nipples and rubs my coochie ... the filming was ecstasy. He got such a woody! And my part," Van Doren confides, "is a scene stealer."

Still don't believe that the boys who got off on the Sarah Michelle Gellar/Selma Blair make-out fest at the MTV movie awards might actually prefer a near-septuagenarian? Then click on Van Doren's "Fan Talk" section, where she posts numerous adoring missives.

"Hello there Mamie," reads one. "I am a 25 yr. old male, and I have never in my life seen a more beautiful woman in my life. You are the epitome of beauty! 69 or 23 you prove that there is such a thing as a true life goddess."

She was born this way -- isn't that the case for all true-life goddesses? No cellulite, thanks to her hearty Swedish stock. Utterly untouched by the surgeon's knife, save for a single facelift a decade ago. Tremendous all-around elasticity, she happily divulges. Her star promise was even evident in her given name, Joan Olander -- a nod to the 1930s siren, Joan Crawford. In fact, the future Mommie Dearest would say, years later, that out of the "three Ms" -- Marilyn, Mansfield and Mamie -- Ms. Van Doren was her favorite.

So it was meant to be. At the age of 6, while the other children of rural Rowena, S.D., were content milking cows and cleaning outhouses, little Joan Olander tried to dance like Ginger Rogers, dreamt of platinum blond hair bleach and practiced posing, one foot coyly before the other, for the cameras. Jo, as she was called, was not yet 10 years old when her father accepted a job at a defense plant in California. World War II was raging, and she and her mother headed west shortly thereafter on a military train, where she slept in the aisle with strangers' children and ate only every other day.

But they arrived, and it wasn't long before her mother saw the article in the paper about the big Hollywood party being thrown on Sunset Strip. So she told little Jo to grab her autograph book; they'd head on down to see what they could see. What they saw was Mae West, who called Jo "baby" and signed her book, "Best of luck to Joanie, a very pretty girl." Little Jo was nearly knocked out by the experience of meeting "this most glittering creature," and she fell asleep on the curb outside of the storied Mocambo nightclub. Her father had to carry her back to the car. That night, Jo slept with Mae West's inscription under her pillow.

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