The Daily Novel

My first crush, Yvonne de Carlo, has just died aged 84. I can still remember the day, when, with sweaty hands, I cut her picture out of a magazine and stuffed it in my wallet. I was probably about 12 at the time. It was a pin-up picture of the kind that British tommies put up their in their dugouts during the war to take their mind off the brutal realities they were facing as the bombs fell all around.

Astonishing The Guardian gave her an obituary filling most of a page. The editor who made the decision must have been nearly as old as me. Because her period of film fame stretched from 1940 to 1967. She was most famous in the early part of that period, not as a great actress, but as a starlet of B movies. She first attracted attention for a small part in Harvard, Here I come (1942) when she played a bathing beauty. Which of course gave her an opportunity to display the maximum allowable legal percentage of her body, for the soldiers and me to ogle.

In 1945 she became a star when she played Salome in an awful film. But it confirmed her talent for playing the seductress, and led to a succession of similar roles. The only firm from that era I clearly remember was The Captain’s Paradise which I saw when it came out in 1953. By that time I was at university. I watched Alec Guinness playing a bigamist. One of his wives was Celia Johnson, who was playing a character very like the English middle class young women in my class. The other was Yvonne de Carlo, the passionate volatile ‘foreigner’ skilled in the bedroom arts.

What The Guardian does not tell us is that she also exercised her talents in real life. The CBS obituary reveals that her 22 lovers included Howard Hughes (the secretive businessman), Burt Lancaster, Robert Stack, Robert Taylor, Billy Wilder, Aly Khan and an Iranian prince. That obituary also reveals that she had two husbands. And that she spent a year out of films caring for her first husband, a stuntman, Bob Morgan, who had a nasty accident which kept him in bed for a year. Not just a pretty face.

She was actually a Canadian born plain Peggy Middleton. Her father abandoned the family when Peggy was three. She was brought up by her mother on a waitress’s earnings. And took her mother’s maiden name, which the Hollywood moguls recognised was much better box office for a vamp than Middleton, and coupled it with own middle name, Yvonne.

Yvonne de Carlo had a later brief success in the Munsters on television. But I prefer to remember her as the vamp of my dreams. So below is a picture from her web site, which is the nearest to the pin up I used to have in my wallet.