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Bob Levin
As "Mildred" in The Wild One, Peggy Maley delivered one of the most famous set-up lines in film history: "Hey, Johnny, what're you rebelling against?" she asked Marlon Brando.
Everyone remembers Brando's answer: "Whaddaya got?"
She'd tossed the perfect insouciant lob, and he, slouching, slam-dunked it. But I always remembered Maley's Mildred, the beautician— buxom, pouty, her platinum blonde D.A. lodged between my 11-year-old synapses like an ember.
That was 1953, and Peggy seemed to me like an older sister"“ or, at nearly 30, an underage mother"“ to the girls on corners or at soda fountains who were beginning to fascinate me. In tight skirts and tight sweaters and zipper jackets flashing with zebra stripes, they hung upon guys in pegged pants and box-toed shoes and pink shirts, the black undersides to their collars hiked up and showing. "Rocks," we called them and, 20 years before Sylvester Stallone, "rocky" was their style.
Although she's wary at first, Maley is quickly heated to party with Brando's Black Rebels. But when they ravage her shop, there is pleading in her voice and terror in her eyes.
"Please don't do this, please," she begs before vanishing off-screen— apparenty lost and forgotten forever by everyone, except me.
A New York "'chorine'
Who was Peggy Maley? My Google search reveals that she was born June 8, 1924, in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. At 18 she was named "Miss Atlantic City." She never wore a larger crown, but one year later she was a New York "chorine," noted for her resemblance to Lana Turner. That was enough"“ or a large part of "enough""“ for Hollywood.
In four years she appeared in 11 films, usually uncredited, as a "show girl" or "dance hall girl," "marine's second girl friend," "girl in officer's club," "pretty blonde neighbor." One assumes she rarely spoke. One contemplates the acts she performed to secure these meager bookings. One wonders, from her position on her back or knees, how far up the heights that were Lana Turner she imagined she might climb.
From 1947 until 1951, Maley's cinematic credit line is empty. One assumes she returned to New York, for she is noted, in 1948, as "the only girl" in Mr. Roberts. She seems to have frittered away few other hours on employment. She "is seen" with a department store heir. She "gives insomnia" to a George DeWitt. (Even Google is no help here.)
She throws a party in which a wastebasket catches fire. She "dates" Artie Shaw and "tells off" Buddy Rich for paying her insufficient attention. She has "a big romance" with Al Capone's cousin. A Greek shipping tycoon leases her an apartment. A British lord hosts her in London. On the continent she "is kept" by King Farouk, who "showers her with... haute couture."
Back in the gossip columns
By 1951, she is back in Hollywood. She is a "very close friend" of Frances Faye. She is a "good friend" of Ava Gardner, Betty Grable, Shelley Winters. She is spotted at the Cresenada, Mocambo, the Bantam Cock. She is linked with Farley Granger, the bon vivant and professional golfer Al Besselink, and Corey Allen, ten years her junior, who will lose (or "win"?) the chicken race with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
She is "one of Harry Cohn's "'girlfriends'," a friendship that, since Cohn headed Columbia and Columbia produced The Wild One, may have profited her as much as Farouk's. (It may explain, for instance, Maley's billing above that of Yvonne Doughty, who, as Britches, Johnny's ex-squeeze, had more scenes with Brando "“ and more lines.)
In a single month (February 1953), Maley is reported to (a) "date" John Hodiak but (b) have "her mind on" Mike Ireland, while being (c) "the love of" Brad Dexter, Peggy Lee's most recently divorced husband. She is said to have a "nasty mouth," a "terrible drinking problem," and not even "a dime to her own." She is married for two months.
An instant on "'Dragnet'
By 1960, she has appeared in 18 more films and 39 TV shows. She is a "showgirl," "tavern maid," "blonde stripper," "blonde barfly," "blond woman." She is "Gladys," "Midge," "Marge," "Gwen." She appears in Tarawa Beachhead, The Brothers Rico and Live Fast, Die Young. She appears on "The Untouchables," "Peter Gunn" and "Dragnet" three times. One wonders if anyone who saw Maley in one role recalled her when they saw her in the next or if, in each appearance, she had registered no more than a firefly's blink.
Within one year of helping launch Brando into immortality, Maley appears uncredited in Saga at Red River and Drive a Crooked Road. Within a few years of that, she has aged into "Aunt Mabel" in "The Rookie."
Envisioning a career ripening into someone's aunt or mother or worse seems not to have sustained Maley. She returned to New Jersey to manage her father's bars, never again to appear on stage or screen. Of her next five decades, the website Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen finds only three items worth reporting: (1) a visit to Las Vegas, during which a "male model" escorts her to a coffee shop, where, upon meeting Troy Donahue, she embarrasses her date with "non-stop" talking and "inappropriate" dress; (2) her marriage (1961-75) to a Long Island policeman, 15 years her junior, whose name (Schoenborn? Schoenberg?) cannot be precisely determined; and, following a 25-year gap, (3) her living "in California."
Other people's shadows
It is a life I associate with those I glimpsed in copies of Confidential or Whisper or Stag on the low table at my boyhood barber shop. These are lives"“ Linda Christian's and Lila Leeds's and Barbara Payton's"“ conjured up for me by the scent of Wildroot Cream Oil or Bay Rum the way Combray was aroused by Proust's madeleine and tea. Lives of beauty pageants and car wrecks, champagne and Percodan, weekends in Acapulco and marriages annulled. They are lives played out in the shadows of more sumptuous and more sustained tales, in alleys that could have led into boulevards were it not for one or two wrong turns.
Maley's is a skeleton on which I weave a flesh of thoughts and associations. The words that come to mind are "glamour" and "tawdriness" and "exploitation" and "her own bootstraps." America sets prizes, like plush bears on a carnival's shelves, that some citizens must possess to plug the holes that riddle their walls. They contort and gyrate and strive"“ and soon only the motions are left, all doors slammed, all hopes locked in the trunks with the pageants' scepters and tiaras.
The pinnacle of her career
One wonders: Was being kept by King Farouk"“ being lain upon by his heaving fat "“ a pinnacle of her career? A pit? A piece of business? An improvement over Pottsville (which after all in those days had its own coal barons' Millionaires' Row and Yuengling Brewery and John O'Hara)? By how much? For how long? Who among us is sufficiently without cravings to judge?
I think again of Maley in Bleeker's Café, happy, dancing, flirting with Brando over Gil Stratton's shoulder. When I first see her I am 12 or 13 and struggling to understand sex. I have danced the box step and spun the bottle but possess little other actual girl-against-boy experience. Maley is telling me it is fun; it is exciting; it is to be held at arm's length; it is to be feared.♦
To read a response, click here.
Everyone remembers Brando's answer: "Whaddaya got?"
She'd tossed the perfect insouciant lob, and he, slouching, slam-dunked it. But I always remembered Maley's Mildred, the beautician— buxom, pouty, her platinum blonde D.A. lodged between my 11-year-old synapses like an ember.
That was 1953, and Peggy seemed to me like an older sister"“ or, at nearly 30, an underage mother"“ to the girls on corners or at soda fountains who were beginning to fascinate me. In tight skirts and tight sweaters and zipper jackets flashing with zebra stripes, they hung upon guys in pegged pants and box-toed shoes and pink shirts, the black undersides to their collars hiked up and showing. "Rocks," we called them and, 20 years before Sylvester Stallone, "rocky" was their style.
Although she's wary at first, Maley is quickly heated to party with Brando's Black Rebels. But when they ravage her shop, there is pleading in her voice and terror in her eyes.
"Please don't do this, please," she begs before vanishing off-screen— apparenty lost and forgotten forever by everyone, except me.
A New York "'chorine'
Who was Peggy Maley? My Google search reveals that she was born June 8, 1924, in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. At 18 she was named "Miss Atlantic City." She never wore a larger crown, but one year later she was a New York "chorine," noted for her resemblance to Lana Turner. That was enough"“ or a large part of "enough""“ for Hollywood.
In four years she appeared in 11 films, usually uncredited, as a "show girl" or "dance hall girl," "marine's second girl friend," "girl in officer's club," "pretty blonde neighbor." One assumes she rarely spoke. One contemplates the acts she performed to secure these meager bookings. One wonders, from her position on her back or knees, how far up the heights that were Lana Turner she imagined she might climb.
From 1947 until 1951, Maley's cinematic credit line is empty. One assumes she returned to New York, for she is noted, in 1948, as "the only girl" in Mr. Roberts. She seems to have frittered away few other hours on employment. She "is seen" with a department store heir. She "gives insomnia" to a George DeWitt. (Even Google is no help here.)
She throws a party in which a wastebasket catches fire. She "dates" Artie Shaw and "tells off" Buddy Rich for paying her insufficient attention. She has "a big romance" with Al Capone's cousin. A Greek shipping tycoon leases her an apartment. A British lord hosts her in London. On the continent she "is kept" by King Farouk, who "showers her with... haute couture."
Back in the gossip columns
By 1951, she is back in Hollywood. She is a "very close friend" of Frances Faye. She is a "good friend" of Ava Gardner, Betty Grable, Shelley Winters. She is spotted at the Cresenada, Mocambo, the Bantam Cock. She is linked with Farley Granger, the bon vivant and professional golfer Al Besselink, and Corey Allen, ten years her junior, who will lose (or "win"?) the chicken race with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
She is "one of Harry Cohn's "'girlfriends'," a friendship that, since Cohn headed Columbia and Columbia produced The Wild One, may have profited her as much as Farouk's. (It may explain, for instance, Maley's billing above that of Yvonne Doughty, who, as Britches, Johnny's ex-squeeze, had more scenes with Brando "“ and more lines.)
In a single month (February 1953), Maley is reported to (a) "date" John Hodiak but (b) have "her mind on" Mike Ireland, while being (c) "the love of" Brad Dexter, Peggy Lee's most recently divorced husband. She is said to have a "nasty mouth," a "terrible drinking problem," and not even "a dime to her own." She is married for two months.
An instant on "'Dragnet'
By 1960, she has appeared in 18 more films and 39 TV shows. She is a "showgirl," "tavern maid," "blonde stripper," "blonde barfly," "blond woman." She is "Gladys," "Midge," "Marge," "Gwen." She appears in Tarawa Beachhead, The Brothers Rico and Live Fast, Die Young. She appears on "The Untouchables," "Peter Gunn" and "Dragnet" three times. One wonders if anyone who saw Maley in one role recalled her when they saw her in the next or if, in each appearance, she had registered no more than a firefly's blink.
Within one year of helping launch Brando into immortality, Maley appears uncredited in Saga at Red River and Drive a Crooked Road. Within a few years of that, she has aged into "Aunt Mabel" in "The Rookie."
Envisioning a career ripening into someone's aunt or mother or worse seems not to have sustained Maley. She returned to New Jersey to manage her father's bars, never again to appear on stage or screen. Of her next five decades, the website Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen finds only three items worth reporting: (1) a visit to Las Vegas, during which a "male model" escorts her to a coffee shop, where, upon meeting Troy Donahue, she embarrasses her date with "non-stop" talking and "inappropriate" dress; (2) her marriage (1961-75) to a Long Island policeman, 15 years her junior, whose name (Schoenborn? Schoenberg?) cannot be precisely determined; and, following a 25-year gap, (3) her living "in California."
Other people's shadows
It is a life I associate with those I glimpsed in copies of Confidential or Whisper or Stag on the low table at my boyhood barber shop. These are lives"“ Linda Christian's and Lila Leeds's and Barbara Payton's"“ conjured up for me by the scent of Wildroot Cream Oil or Bay Rum the way Combray was aroused by Proust's madeleine and tea. Lives of beauty pageants and car wrecks, champagne and Percodan, weekends in Acapulco and marriages annulled. They are lives played out in the shadows of more sumptuous and more sustained tales, in alleys that could have led into boulevards were it not for one or two wrong turns.
Maley's is a skeleton on which I weave a flesh of thoughts and associations. The words that come to mind are "glamour" and "tawdriness" and "exploitation" and "her own bootstraps." America sets prizes, like plush bears on a carnival's shelves, that some citizens must possess to plug the holes that riddle their walls. They contort and gyrate and strive"“ and soon only the motions are left, all doors slammed, all hopes locked in the trunks with the pageants' scepters and tiaras.
The pinnacle of her career
One wonders: Was being kept by King Farouk"“ being lain upon by his heaving fat "“ a pinnacle of her career? A pit? A piece of business? An improvement over Pottsville (which after all in those days had its own coal barons' Millionaires' Row and Yuengling Brewery and John O'Hara)? By how much? For how long? Who among us is sufficiently without cravings to judge?
I think again of Maley in Bleeker's Café, happy, dancing, flirting with Brando over Gil Stratton's shoulder. When I first see her I am 12 or 13 and struggling to understand sex. I have danced the box step and spun the bottle but possess little other actual girl-against-boy experience. Maley is telling me it is fun; it is exciting; it is to be held at arm's length; it is to be feared.♦
To read a response, click here.
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