So, one not-so-sunny California day, I found myself at the end of the Santa Monica Pier, waiting for the lady in question. I had requested perhaps a meeting at some warm, trendy restaurant in Hollywood but Jewel said that she found restaurants not to provide the right “atmosphere” for an interview. I couldn’t help but wonder what she saw in this dreary pier, surrounded by homeless people and bad carnival rides. Not even the occasional seagull seemed interested.

So I waited. And waited.

I was close to giving up when I suddenly spotted her. No, she wasn’t dressed in the attire of a top B-Movie California Hollywood Babe. She wasn’t even in tight jeans. No, she was dressed in sweats, with her back towards me as she leaned over the railing of the pier, dangling what appeared to look like a fishing pole. On either side of her were several men, none of whom were Kevin Costner or even close, and as I approached, I saw that she was indeed holding a spinning rod in her left hand and with her right hand, slowly spooling upward, pausing and cocking her head as if listening to some unheard music. Moments later, the whole scene was repeated. No one was saying a word. I stood there, not knowing what to do. Should I go up to her? Tell her I’m here? Should I wait for her to notice me? Just then, she suddenly yanked the rod and started reeling fast.

“See what lingerie can do?” she screamed and, of course, every man for blocks around peered over the railing. I even found myself hanging over the edge, watching a brightly colored orange fish dangling off of Jewel’s line. “Damn, our state fish. All that work for a fish I have to toss!” She said angrily. As she turned to fling it back it back to the ocean, she noticed me. “Hey, Hugh.”

“What’s all this about lingerie?” I asked.

“I wrap a little lingerie around the fish lure,” she explained. “It looks like a little lacy, glittery thing to the fish and they grab onto it and their teeth get all caught up in the lace. You never lose fish off lingerie. Oh, and it also works with men.” “No doubt,” I remarked.

“So,” she asked. “What brings you down here?”

“You. Remember we have and interview. About your autobiography?” That jogged her memory and she began gathering up her fishing gear and we walked down the promenade.

“Well, I can tell you one thing...you won’t find tips-on-how-to-catch-a-fish with only a garter. But I do talk a lot about me wearing a garter, chains and G-strings.”

“So what kind of fish was that?” I asked.

“Oh, a Garibaldi. You can’t keep that one...protected by law, you know. But you can catch them real easily with a little lace. That’s my tip for the day.” She handed me the garter she’d used to catch the fish and then asked, “So...where do you want to start with my autobiography?”

“Well, why did you write it?”

“I had demons and I wanted to get them out on paper. It started off as a writing exercise and it turned into a way to exorcise demons. When I started writing it, I didn’t think I would ever get around to publishing it. I mean, who wants to read about making B-movies and working in strip joints and taking off your clothes?”

(Jewel had forgotten she was talking to the publisher of Draculina.)

“As I got more and more into it, I found the book was taking over, demanding to be written. And at the same time, I was getting all these questions from guys who’d joined my fan club and even from women who’d seem my movies. ‘How did you get started?’ ‘What’s it like taking off your clothes in front of a camera?’ ‘Where did you grow up?’ I decided that I could answer a lot of questions for all these people and for myself at the same time. Come on. I’ll show you.”

An hour later, we were sitting cross-legged on the floor of Jewel’s living room. Photos and manuscript pages were scattered on the floor. Jewel claimed she knew where everything was but her two dogs, Popcorn and Sushi, were doing their best to disrupt the filing system. “Now, what do you want to know?” she asked.

“Well,” I thought. “I know you spent time working in strip joints. What was that like?”

“Strip joint chapters are over here,” she said, pouncing on a pile near the fireplace. She riffled through the pages, selected a likely hunk and thrust a chapter at me to read. It went...

I was late for work. I realized it, as I exited off the freeway. Like millions of others who commute to work every day, I was going to be late for work. But unlike millions of others, my penalty for being late would be having to follow a naked girl with big tits for the whole night. When you’re a dancer, you always want to follow a girl with small tits, but tonight the management would almost certainly put me on after someone with huge breasts, just because I was late. I hated my job. Following gigantic tits was not going to do a lot for my income. If I had worked at a regular job, they would just dock my pay. But instead, I had to follow humongous TITS!

Turning right on Imperial Highway, I passed the many crack houses and liquor stores that lined the boulevard. Strip joints in California always seem to be located in the slimiest areas.

---

Off in the distance, emerging as a beacon for a probably plane path, a neon sign advertised “TOTALLY LIVE NUDE GIRLS.” What—as opposed to dead ones? I’ve never understood the signs on the clubs. They always seemed to leave out the commas or maybe commas wouldn’t be seen from a distance...so who would care? Obviously, only me.

Driving into the parking lot always gave me the willies. I felt, so...so watched, probably because of the line of cars waiting for the light at the corner to turn green, their drivers’ eyes following me, getting out of my car and rummaging through the trunk, trying to get to my suitcase.

They were all thinking, she’s a stripper. I just knew it. I saw the hunger in their eyes, I felt like...a tuna pursued by a pack of sharks. I was their prey, and they were going to devour me and eat my soul. It was only a walk of twenty yards but it got my workday off to a bad start. I wasn’t yet at work, I wasn’t yet stripping and already, some guy (who wasn’t yet tipping) was contemplating my breasts. Couldn’t he wait until I was inside?

Yes, it was only twenty yards but this walk bothered a lot of the dancers, mostly because they weren’t yet in character. It’s one thing to be ogled when you’re “Spice” on stage naked; it’s another thing when some guy is undressing you when you’re plain old Mary from Culver City.

Once I got inside, I became a different person—one used to bad language, leering eyes, wandering hands, and bullshit macho lines. But outside, all that stuff was encroaching on the real me. When I worked briefly at a law office as a receptionist and some junior partner ogled me, I would steel myself for the inevitable pick-up line. And when it came, I was always faced with a problem. Would turning him down result in my unemployment? Would going out with him encourage him further? I often fantasized about responding to the guy by popping out a questionnaire...with questions like, “Are you interested in dinner or in fucking me after dinner?” Or “Is this a friendship or a seduction?” When your job is dangling by someone’s motives, you have to worry about such things.

Once, the junior partner in a firm where I was employed asked me out and I said I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t and I said so nicely, but from that moment on, he harassed me, insulted my intelligence, and treated me like dirt. I had to put up with this for a whopping six bucks an hour (minus deductions). At the strip joint, if guys treated me like dirt, at least I was making ten times that. And if some guy patted me on the ass, there was a big, burly guy named Bruno who’d remove him and his hands to the parking lot.

This particular club didn’t have a side entrance to sneak into; you had to go through the front door, like everyone else. I suppose it’s logical—men see an attractive woman entering a strip joint, with a suitcase—they’re going to figure she’s a stripper. Couldn’t I have been the Avon Lady selling blush to the nude dancers? They use a lot of it.

Back in the late seventies and early eighties, the dancers’ shifts at all the clubs were supposed to be more or less like this: Seven girls were scheduled to show up at 11:30 A.M. for a lunch shift and stay until six o’clock when the night shift (another seven girls) would arrive. The hitch would always be that at 11:30 in the morning,

---

the average number of women showing up for work would only number four, sometimes less, sometimes more. This meant that there was a girl on stage doing three songs and a girl in back getting ready to go on. That left two girls on the floor, both vying for the then-new concept of table dances. Nobody wanted to be a waitress. After all, why bust your butt for a measly buck tip when there was a whopping ten to be made by table dancing? Three-minute song and ten dollars, as opposed to five minutes of “Would you like ketchup on your hamburger?” and a dollar brush-off.

And that was where the section ended. “Then what?” I asked.

“Uh, the rest of that chapter is out being typeset,” she explained. “What else do you want to ask me about?”

“Well, the question everyone always asks is how you got your start...how did you get into that first movie?”

“That would be the Breaking In chapters, which are right over...here.” She found the pages she was seeking near the sofa and handed them over. I read...

Time passed. I had been in Hollywood a total of four weeks, two days, and six hours and I was depressed. I had no job, no future and tomorrow, nowhere to live. So I decided that a scoop of chocolate chip ice cream was in order. I got into my 1965 blue Ford Mustang with the pony interior and drove off towards the Baskin-Robbins store. (Mike bought the car for me and it only cost two fucks a day for the next year. What a deal.) I didn’t make it very far. No sooner was I on my way than my car’s transmission gave out. No, to be accurate, fell out. Literally. Right there on Riverside Drive. I got out of the car and stared at it. It was at that moment I realized how much I hated this car. The only thing I liked about it was the pony decals on the backseat. In frustration, I started kicking the tire. Why the tire? I don’t know. The car had transmission problems, but I found myself kicking the tire! I was really going at it, when this foreign-looking man came running out of his business and ran up to me screaming, “Hey, hey, what’s the matter?”

My car it’s...it’s...” I started to cry, “...broken.” I sobbed and rambled on about everything that was wrong in my life, starting with my car and climaxing with my failed marriage to Clark Gable.

“Listen, my name is George Barris,” the man said, “and it’s pretty lucky you broke down outside my shop. I can fix your car and get you a modeling job for some car magazines. It doesn’t pay much, but maybe it’ll lead to something.”

I followed him into the shop, the walls of which were covered with pictures of famous celebrities. There was George with James Dean. My first thought was how old he must have been to know James Dean...maybe as old as forty.

“I used to customize James Dean’s cars,” George said. “In fact, I saw him just before he crashed. It was sad.” George continued as he led me around the showroom, “I customized Sammy Davis’ car and I did the Batmobile and the Munsters’ car.” I walked around a golf cart designed as Bob Hope’s face, ski nose and all. George Barris was a living legend; he even knew Elvis Presley. Maybe car modeling would lead to fame.

Just then a beautiful blonde walked in accompanied by a photographer. They had just finished shooting a tire ad and George ran over to the man asking, “Hey, how did the shoot go?” The photographer replied by raving

---

about the girl he had been shooting, and introduced her to me. Her name was Dorothy Stratten. We started talking and she told me that she was shooting a Playboy centerfold and maybe through that, she would land in movies. “You oughta try it,” she giggled. I told her I didn’t think I was pretty enough without my clothes on. She laughed and said, “Well, we’ll probably model tires together. I’ll be the blonde and you be the brunette.” And that’s exactly how it turned out. At first, we modeled tires together, and later I moved up to rebuilt Chevys and John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever car. Dorothy meanwhile became Playboy’s Miss August 1979 and later the Playmate of the Year.

I appeared in the pages of dozens of car magazines: Hot Rod, Street Rodders, Me and My Chevy, etc. I was always wearing a bathing suit trying to look like I was having an orgasm on the top or at the side of some newly-built muscle car or custom-built truck. At least it was better than tires and spark plugs. The few hundred bucks I received from every modeling session kept me from total starvation, but I was still having no luck getting an agent and being the bathing suit girl next to the car wasn’t exactly turning out to be the fast lane to stardom. Nevertheless, it was on one of these shoots that George casually asked me the question that would change my life.

Barely suppressing a big grin he asked me, “How would you like to be in a movie?” I didn’t stop to worry about the paint job on the car I was caressing. I leapt off it and threw myself at George.

“A Movie?” I panted.

“Well, it’s just a small part, but it will get you your S.A.G. card.” I stood there speechless, as I suddenly pictured myself acting out my little part and some big producer in the audience screaming, “Francis! I found the lead to play opposite Brando in your next movie!”

“So what happened after that?”

“Sushi just grabbed those pages. Come here, bad dog!”

“Never mind that. What’s the worst experience that ever happened to you on a movie set?”

She pointed to the largest pile of manuscript pages. “I had a producer who put me in actual pig dung...and I had a few others who belonged there themselves.” She fanned out the chapters like a card trick and I picked one at random and read...

Party Camp was shot at an actual camp in an area of Los Angeles called Topanga Canyon. I was sitting on a picnic bench, eating a tuna sandwich and talking with Mark, when I found out how low-budget this movie really was.

“Mark, it’s all ready. Gary wants you to look at it,” an assistant said.

“Follow me,” Mark said, walking off. I grabbed my soda and trotted after him, thinking what a gorgeous day it was. It was ninety degrees and the birds were chirping.

“Looks good,” Mark said leaning in the doorway to the pig sty. I pushed my way into the doorway to see what everyone was talking about. Then I reeled back...the smell was overwhelming. Over in the corner of the tiny shack were two disgusting hogs. “Yeah. Looks great,” I said, really wanting to throw up my tuna sandwich.

“Excuse me, Jewel, can you change for scene twenty-four?” the production assistant asked. I followed her to the trailers, changed, and looked at my script to prepare for the next scene. My eyes popped out as I read the description.

“Dyanne and Tad are stuck in the pig barn with no way out. Tad lights his lighter and the sprinklers in the shack come on...drowning Tad and Dyanne in pig slop.”

I was shocked: When I had first read this scene, I had assumed some sort of “special effects” pig excrement...maybe even a stunt double. Suddenly, I realized I was the stunt double, the pig poop was real, and that scene was next. “No,” I thought. “They can’t expect me to wallow in that stuff.” But as I came out of my dressing room and saw the look of disgust on my co-star’s face, I knew they did expect it. I was in deep shit...or about to be.

“We added a lot of water to dilute the substance,” Mark explained. “Even so, do you have any cuts or wounds?”

I stood there on the threshold of pig shit, trying to convince myself to take that first step. I wasn’t having much luck.

---

There are times in this world when one must make the supreme sacrifice for one’s art. Robert De Niro gained fifty pounds for Raging Bull. Sigourney Weaver shaved her head for Aliens 3. I took a deep breath (big mistake) and launched myself into the scene. “At least,” I thought, “my next part has got to be an improvement.”

It took two hours to film the scene. I was dragged into the shit in a burlap bag from which I had to escape. Once I was out, I was to “discover” that I was surrounded by pigs and shit. One of my porcine co-stars started ad-libbing and knocked me down and it was impossible to get up in that slippery stuff. After a while, it didn’t smell anymore but it was still the most horrible experience an actress could have.

Once the pig scene was behind me, Party Camp turned out to be a lot of fun to shoot. Even my getting snared in a huge pink net and hung from a tree was fun. But there were a few embarrassing moments. Like, that brief topless scene...

In the script, my character, Dyanne, takes her campers on a trip to the woods where the boys found a plant that was supposed to arouse the sexual appetite of anyone who consumed it. Secretly the boys sprinkled some of this aphrodisiac on my salad causing me to get so excited that I just had to remove much of my clothing. We were gathered around a campfire when I finally felt an uncontrollable urge to rip my bra off my body.

My young campers were fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys who had been waiting for this scene all day. Mark told them to look enthusiastic, which was maybe the most unnecessary bit of direction ever given to an actor. But then he said something odd: “When her bra comes off, look terrified and run away.” I was puzzled.

“Mark, excuse me...but why are they terrified? My breasts aren’t scary...maybe a little pale from a lack of sun, but certainly not frightening!”

“Jewel, read the script,” he said as he strolled back behind the camera.

There wasn’t time to find a script and figure out what was going on before they called for another take. Slowly removing my shirt, I asked, “Did you hear something?”

“Nooooo...nothing,” they all shouted in eager anticipation.

I unfastened my bra and flashed my breasts in the moonlight. On cue, the kids screamed and I looked confused...but only for a moment. Suddenly, Jason, the killer from those Friday the 13th movies jumped out of the woods in his hockey mask, waving a chainsaw and getting ready to pounce on my body. I screamed, less in fear of him than from the sudden thought that somehow I had ended up in the wrong movie.

I sprinted off as Jason, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, chased after me. Long moments later, the director yelled, “Cut!” I staggered back to the campfire, snatched up my bra, and started yelling that no one had told me the script had been changed. Somehow, everyone but me found it amusing.

“That’s amazing,” I gasped. “Now I see why you needed to do a book. Your fans will be most enlightened.”

“Speaking of my fans,” she said, pointing to yet another mountain of mail, “See if you can sneak in a plug for the Jewel Shepard Fan Club. Tell folks they can buy photos and copies of my first book. Plus, I know this wouldn’t be of any interest to your readers, but I’m selling some videos in which I appear naked. They can get all the info by sending a stamped, self-addressed business-sized envelope at the Jewel Shepard Fan Club, P.O. Box 480265, Los Angeles, CA 90048. Or they can just save time and become a member by sending me five bucks.”(Note: The Jewel Shepard Fan Club is no longer around. Please don’t waste a stamp. This reference was included in the interest of completeness...completicity...keeping the article intact. -Ed.)

Our time had grown short and we’d gotten in all her plugs so it seemed like time to go. “Is there anything else you’d like to add, Jewel?” I asked.

“Only that this didn’t all happen, Hugh.”

“Didn’t happen? What do you mean, Jewel?”

“I mean,” she said, “I can’t be dishonest with my fans. You and I didn’t do this interview on the pier and at my home. This has all been a fake interview to push my book.”

At first, I didn’t understand. But then I looked around and realized she was right. I was back in Illinois in my office. Jewel wasn’t there. The whole thing had just been a fantasy to present some excerpts from an exciting new book. But it was all worth it, I decided.

The thing I couldn’t understand was why I had this garter in my pocket.

And it smelled like fish.