Steve McQueen was memorable, but he was too into the drug scene. Elvis would've been great. He made her "nipples stand out hard," and they were really about to get down to business in the front seat of his car -- but then she remembered she was married. ("What a fool I was," she says now.) Perennial cowboy Jack Palance was a great fuck, straight up.

And God, if only she'd taken the hint from Marlene Dietrich that day back in 1957, when they were doing a TV pilot together. Dietrich was wearing the "sexiest fucking shoes" Van Doren had ever seen; the woman was just a "bag of sex." She looked Van Doren over once, twice and Van Doren just about told Dietrich to take a picture, it would last longer. But she didn't make a move. If Dietrich, rest her soul, were here today, Van Doren insists it would be a wholly different story.

Van Doren likes to say that she left Hollywood as it was leaving her. After Marilyn's untimely death in 1962 and Jayne Mansfield's in '67, no one wanted to give the third member of the blond trinity a job. Those two tragedies cast a pall on the bombshell mystique, a sense that something darker would inevitably emerge when the cameras clicked off. It wasn't fair, maybe, but Hollywood no longer believed in one of its own creations. Van Doren just wasn't fun anymore.

It was all just as well, really, since she had stopped believing in Hollywood even before the deaths of her vixen counterparts. She took the craft of acting seriously, as Marilyn had; they even employed the same revered Russian coach (while Mansfield, on the other hand, preferred to let her attributes do all the work). But her efforts didn't seem to matter.

"I studied really hard," Van Doren says now, wistfully. "But Hollywood never appreciated my talent. I was just another blond lucky to have a good body. They never looked past that. They never allowed me to be my own woman. So you know what? I said, 'Fuck you, Hollywood.' I just didn't care anymore." She realized -- suddenly, frightfully -- that she "no longer appreciated living." With that in mind, she booked a flight to Vietnam.

She stayed there for three months -- right in the war zone, she says, so close to the trenches she fled bomb and rocket attacks. She saw helicopters shot down and teenage boys dying on dirty cots. The burn units were the worst, she remembers, kids entirely bandaged, slits cut just for their eyes, the acrid smell of charred flesh, the heavy awareness that they would all die. She can still smell it, she says, the blood and the rot. But she took pains to make herself up every day and visit them.

"I wanted to be like an angel to those boys," she says, "so they'd always remember me."

Vietnam was hot, and all the generals automatically hated actresses because of Jane Fonda's antics. Her accommodations, too, were awful; she defecated in paper cups and "fertilized the ground." She performed for no fewer than 45 minutes every night, even though she was losing water and nearly died from dehydration. But she didn't care; she kept singing and dancing in those ridiculous dresses designed to make you look nude. There was just nothing left for her to do.

She ended up, one night, in a medevac unit on her way to a field hospital in Saigon, where President Nixon sent her a letter by messenger calling her "his favorite." (Today, of course, she is a Democrat.) She came home soon after, but it was those performances far from Hollywood that truly resonated, she thinks, with both her audience and herself. She admits it sounds corny, maybe even trite, but nothing can be quite the same after spending 90 days waking in terror at the sound of her own breathing, wondering if she would ever see her only son again. Vietnam made her feel, for the first time in a long time, like she accomplished something.

And sure, she knows she was -- is -- lucky to have the face, the legs, the ass and, yes, the breasts. But they have, through the years, become secondary to her. They're simply not the currency they used to be, no matter how unchanged they may appear to be. "My best asset," Mamie says, "is my brain. Without my brain, I don't think the rest of me would be too hot."

God, just imagine if she had two of them.

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