connie stevens in susan slade (1961).

Anthony Perkins and Connie Stevens meet the press backstage during their Broadway run in the Neil Simon comedy The Star-Spangled Girl which ran at the Plymouth Theatre in Midtown Manhattan from December 21st, 1966 until August 5th, 1967.

Connie Stevens born today in August 8, 1938

Debuted on ABC fifty-one years ago tonight (17 September 1974): The Sex Symbol, a thinly disguised made-for-TV faux Marilyn Monroe biopic starring ultra-kitsch sex kitten Connie Stevens. The Sex Symbol is inept, tasteless, exploitative, deranged – and irresistible! The premise is that we’re witnessing a dark night of the soul for doomed movie goddess Kelly Williams (Stevens) in her Bel Air mansion. In fact, the final night of her life. We’re presumably meant to find Kelly a tragic figure, but she’s insufferable. Her breathless babydoll voice quickly grates. Kelly rages, “Canned from one stinkin’ movie! Anyone would think I was dead!”, swills booze, pops fistfuls of pills, smashes the TV screen, goes on crying jags and lashes out at her Spanish-speaking maid (“No! I’m not hungry!”). Much of the time she’s in bed shrieking into a pink telephone, like the worst-possible adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine. In terms of acting, Stevens’ guiding principle seems to be: “Patty Duke didn’t go nearly far enough as Neely O’Hara in Valley of the Dolls.” The Sex Symbol was clearly made “on the cheap”. Minimal effort is taken to conjure the forties or fifties time periods. As Kelly, Stevens always resembles what she was at the time: an early seventies Vegas headliner with a shaggy frosted blonde coiffure, frosted blue eye-shadow, frosted pink lipstick and costumes (and wigs and hairpieces) straight out of a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue. Still, as far as speculative Monroe biopics go, The Sex Symbol is a LOT more fun than Netflix’s divisive 2023 misery-a-thon adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ book Blonde – plus the cast includes Shelley Winters hamming it up as a vicious gossip columnist! As John J O’Connor of The New York Times concluded at the time, “Every once in a while, the swamp of prime‐time entertainment gurgles up a product that sets its own memorable standards for trashiness.” The Sex Symbol is on YouTube.

Bobby Driscoll and Connie Stevens in Bernard Girard’s THE PARTY CRASHERS (1958).

Connie Stevens with Dean Jones, Virginia Gregg, and Parley Baer in Two on a Guillotine (1965)

Connie Stevens (b.1938) . This is an advertising studio portrait taken in the 1960s.