October is one of the best months of the year, topped off with the gayest American holiday: Halloween. Okay, so it might not officially be holiday, yet Halloween is deeply embedded in American pop culture. Between the costumes, decorations, movies, music, and TV shows, every generation has left their mark on the ghoulish date. To wet your beaks in the Halloween spectacular that is to come, Patrick Phillips from Pop Culture Tonight has brought you a very special interview with the reigning queen of Halloween marathons: Cassandra Peterson aka Elvira, Mistress of The Dark.
PP: Cassandra, let’s take everyone through your career a little bit if we could. Maybe talk about how it all got started. You were a showgirl in Las Vegas, you dated Elvis Presley briefly, and he encouraged you to push your career into other directions. Could you talk to us a little bit about that?
CP: I sometimes think I owe my entire career to Elvis because I was a showgirl in Vegas—actually the youngest in Vegas history. I was 17. I met Elvis. I was at the Dunes. He encouraged me to get out of Vegas. I thought I had accomplished my dream there. It had been a dream of mine since I had been about 14 to be a showgirl in Las Vegas. I really thought, “This is the pinnacle of show business! I’m done here.” He really, really encouraged me to take singing lessons, that my voice was pretty decent, that I should study vocal lessons, and go on to different paths instead of just sticking with the show. Because he said that the life of a dancer, especially a showgirl, is very short-lived. And after that’s up—you’re old when you’re about 35 as a dancer—and when that’s over, there won’t be anything else. So, he encouraged me to do that. I went out the next day after he told me that and got vocal lessons, and within a month, I was singing in my show. I left from there and moved over to Europe, began a career in singing in the band and just got me out there. I might now be the oldest showgirl in Las Vegas if it wasn’t for Elvis.
PP: Then in 1979, you joined Groundlings comedy troupe, and a lot of people don’t realize that people like Paul Reubens, most of the Saturday Night Live alumn are from the Groundlings. What propelled you into joining the Groundlings to begin with?
CP: I had seen them—a friend had taken me to see their show—and I was just mesmerized. I was like, “Oh, my God. I love this. I want to be part of this.” I had always been kind of goofy, enjoyed comedy, and been a class clown even when I was a little kid, and so doing comedy really, really appealed to me. I worked my way in to the Groundlings after a while, and it was invaluable to me. Absolutely invaluable. Learning to do improvisation is one of the most important things, I think, any actor, anyone in the public eye can learn because it makes you think on your feet. I would say to people in show business, if you’re starting out in show business and wanting to be in it, “If you can learn to improvise, nothing will scare you after that.” Because you won’t be scared of anything if you can get up in front of a bunch of people and not know what you’re going to say or do, make it up on the spot, you got a big leg up on everybody else.
Actress Cassandra Peterson (Elvira) during an interview with guest host Joan Rivers in a 1985 episode of The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson
PP: That came in handy for you in 1981 in the spring when you got a call to host a television series called Movie Macabre. Can you talk to me about that moment for you? Did you have any idea then that it was going to be pretty much what you were identified with the rest of your life?
CP: No, I had no idea. I didn’t think of it in those parameters whatsoever. I thought of it as, “Oh, great. I got a one-day-a-week local TV gig and it’s paying me $300 and I’ll have six other days of the week to go out and look for real acting work!” So, it never occurred to me. I thought it was actually fairly embarrassing. I was wearing that outfit. It was late at night. I was just hoping nobody would recognize me when I went on other interviews. It certainly didn’t seem like a life-changing event when I got that part. I found out very quickly that it was a life-changing event just a few weeks later when my phone started ringing off the hook and I was invited to every opening of every store and everybody’s birthday party and television shows. I just could hardly believe it. Here I am 32 years later still doing the same job.
PP: Cassandra, were you a fan of horror movies at that point before you started the series or was that something that kind of came about because of the television series?
CP: No, it was really, really perfect for me because I was a huge fan of horror movies. Always had been since I’d been a kid. My favorite actor in the world was Vincent Price. But I was into these old horror movies—the Hammer Films, the Roger Corman films. I’d grown up with those and I was just enamored with those. And Vincent Price, I was just like, he just my hero. So for me, it was something I had always been in love with. Also, strangely enough, my mother and my aunt owned a costume shop and I hadn’t grown up in the Halloween business and wore a costume whether it was Halloween or not. I liked to wear costumes because I had access to such great ones. It’s kind of funny that I ended up making my living around Halloween and wearing costumes.
Cassandra without the Elvira make-up.
PP: The iconic look of Elvira—the hair, the makeup, the incredible dress—how did that concept all come about?
CP: After I got the part, I actually auditioned along with a million other people for the role of a horror hostess so the local staging could hoist of these bad B horror movies they had late at night. The whole look came about when I got the part, they told me I needed to come up with a spooky look, even though they wanted me to do this kind of Valley girl character that I was doing at Groundlings at that time. They said, “Now you have to dress spooky.” So, my best friend at the time, Robert Redding, drew a picture what he thought I should look like and he gave me the Ronnettes hair, the Ronnette eyes. Ronnie Spector, from the 1960s girl group, he gave me her hairdo, kabuki makeup that he got out of the kabuki theater book, and then he just made the dress simply as tight and sexy as he possibly could. The priorities they gave us were that everything was black—my hair, the dress, and all of that. Came up with that look and, I don’t know, it didn’t really seem to go together. You know, the Valley girl character, the Ronettes hair and the kabuki makeup. That’s what turned out to be good about it. It was completely unique.
PP: Yeah, she’s not quite a witch. She’s not quite a vampire. What would you consider Elvira?
CP: I don’t know. People ask me that over the years and I really don’t know what the heck she is. Kind of set it up in my first movie, Mistress of the Dark, that her mother was a sorceress but her father was immortal, maybe a television review guy like Siskel and Ebert. That’s how she has one foot in the occult world and one foot in a trailer park.
PP: I know that a few years back, Cassandra, you did a reality television series, The Search for the Next Elvira. What were you looking at that point? Were you looking for someone to replace you?
CP: I was looking for more Elviras. It was very funny, the way I started it out was I got this brilliant idea that if Santa Claus can show up in all the shopping malls every Christmas, why shouldn’t Elvira be able to show up in all the shopping malls at Halloween time? I thought, “I can’t obviously be in every shopping mall across the country, so why don’t I find some more Elviras, just like Santa has his little helpers, and have them go around to the shopping malls and people take photographs with them for Halloween?” The first step of that was to find some more Elviras. We got the idea about doing it as a television show. As long as we were going to go through that whole process, why not have people watch it? So, that’s how it started out. It started out being done by Freemantle, who do American Idol, on a much larger scale with a much bigger budget where the girls would end up in Transylvania in a castle for a week. It got a lower and lower and lower budget until finally we shot the whole thing in one room, and the premise of it really was to find more Elviras, like I said, but the title Search for Some More Elviras didn’t really go over that great with the producers. They had the idea of Search for the Next Elvira, which I said is going to confuse people, but that’s what we had to go with.
PP: I love some of the drag queens on that, by the way. Some of the drag queens really…they’ve got the makeup down!
CP: People very often ask me who does the best Elvira impersonation, and it’s hands down there’s a few drag queens out there, one of them who even now works as my webmaster who is brilliant at doing Elvira. They can almost do it better than I can, which is kind of scary. I mean, think about, “It’s a guy, damn it! I hate being upstaged by a guy looking better than me.” There’s a lot of drag queens. We even make the Elvira costume—the official Elvira costume—from Rubie’s comes in man’s size, so you can be a Manvira. And that’s one of our bestselling costumes.
PP: I love that. I have to tell you there’s just something right and something calm about you being there on television. I was so excited. Really. How did that all come about again? I know that you hadn’t done the show in a while and you hadn’t really been on television as Elvira in that setting since The Search for the Next Elvira. How did that series come about?
CP: That series actually came about when I just took matters into my own hands and said, “I’ve got to do this myself.” Because I’ve gone around for years and years to various stations, cable stations, networks, everything trying to sell Movie Macabre again and get it back on the air. There was generally trouble with getting these movie packages for widespread distribution not buying them just for local markets, getting the rights to show the film all over the country, or other countries as well. That’s been the bane of my existence of why the show hasn’t been on. It’s all about getting the movies and getting the rights to show them. Finally, I went out and just searched down a package of movies for myself—twenty-six films—financed the whole thing myself, got a crew, got writers, wrote the show, put it on, did it, and sold it in syndication. Unfortunately, syndication is a very difficult market right now. I did 26 of them. Didn’t really go as I would have planned. They were usually airing at 3/4 am in the morning, so it was really hard to get people to watch it. And in the markets where it was airing earlier, it did phenomenally well. Unfortunately, we only did one year’s worth and that was that, but you can get the whole package on DVD. We did some really funny things with other actors I wasn’t able to do because of the low budget before I did this time with set pieces and actors and shooting outside. Some really fun, funny things. So, if you get a change, I hope you can check it out—Movie Macabre—and get it. Amazon.com or anywhere. My website.
PP: Cassandra, through the years, has there ever been a time when you were just ready to hang it up completely? You were just done with it? You know, “I just want to continue on and do other things. I’m tired of Elvira.” Did that moment ever come to you or hit you, and if it did, what was that like for you?
CP: Yeah, it comes to me almost every day. No! Not really! Every decade. Every decade. I started out doing Elvira when I was 30, and I said “I’m retiring” when I was 40. I really geared up for it, so I wasn’t going to do it anymore. And then 50. And now, now I’m doing it and I will be 60! It’s hard to believe. I guess next 70, but I don’t know. I really have fun doing it. It’s a great job and I love being the character, so it’s really hard for me to give it up. There is a side of me that says, “Oh, my God. I don’t want to be parading around in that dress when I’m 180 years old.” But then there’s the other part of me that says, “I can still do it. I still look pretty darn good and I’m having fun with it, so why stop?”
PP: I really do appreciate you. Like I said, I know it’s a busy time for you, and I wish you the happiest of Halloween. What are you going as this year?
CP: Let’s see. Let me think. I think I’d wear a muumuu and flip-flops maybe. Something comfortable for a change.
Post written by Patrick Phillips
The post Patrick Phillips Interviews Elvira Mistress of The Dark appeared first on Do You Remember.