video and became a mainstay in disaster flicks: in The Day After Tomorrow, a flying Angelyne billboard takes out a Fox journalist; in Volcano, her billboard is struck by a fiery ball of lava and explodes. Somewhere along the way, Angelyne became an LA icon, the scrappy starlet who embodied everything that kept the city running: glamour and seediness, heartbreak and chutzpah.
‘Control is important to everybody’ …Angelyne during her campaign to become governor of California in 2021.“Angelyne’s real identity is finally solved,” the headline ran. But did anyone truly need Angelyne’s identity to be solved? Why couldn’t Angelyne simply be Angelyne? HR granted the genealogist anonymity, while printing his reasoning that “she forfeited any claim of privacy when she ran, as a stunt or not, for governor of California”, in 2003.
Angelyne is quiet for a moment. “It was horrible,” she eventually says of the article. “What do I say when somebody comes up to me crying, saying, ‘I relate to what happened to you?’ I mean, what do I say – ‘I’m sorry, that’s not true?’ I don’t have the heart to do that.”Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy
What does she think of Rossum’s portrayal? “It’s a bad pastiche. You know, they’ve tried to do Marilyn Monroe so many times and they could never get it right. But Marilyn was an actress – whereas I made myself. I don’t want to watch it. It’s disturbing to see someone misrepresent a beautiful artwork. She’s got a long face.”
Do people sometimes forget that, under the big hair and the eyeshadow, there is a real person? “But I’m an alien!” she says airily. “I came to this planet to help everybody. And this is probably one of the most difficult planets in the whole universe. There is a lot of pain, a lot of problems, but every problem comes with a solution. And I’m the solution.”: “It’s so much fun being famous for nothing.” It’s a line that now seems prescient: we’re used to people being famous for nothing.