According to Cassandra Peterson, “If a party is really good, you can’t remember it.” The actor, best known for her character Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, should know—she’s been to plenty. Before becoming Elvira, Peterson worked as a go-go dancer and Las Vegas showgirl, joined a couple rock bands, then landed bit parts in Federico Fellini and James Bond films. In 1981, because she was on her honeymoon with her now ex-husband, Mark Pierson, she missed an audition to host Movie Macabre, a campy show that broadcast low-budget horror movies on a local Los Angeles TV station. A few weeks later, the producers still hadn’t found anybody, so she wound up getting the part—for $350 a week, before taxes. Peterson admits that “people were likening the show to a car wreck.” Even so, Elvira’s Movie Macabre became a hit, and Johnny Carson invited Peterson on The Tonight Show. “After that, I got a Coors beer ad campaign.” Today Elvira is the best-selling female Halloween costume ever, says Peterson, and she maintains a merchandising empire around the character. “My family was surprised that I made it. I had been a struggling actress, dancer, and singer from the time I was 14,” she says. “But the fact that I became a Halloween legend? I don’t think that was ever in their heads.”
Born in Kansas, Peterson moved to Colorado Springs with her family when she was young. At age 7, she won a $100 savings bond at a local costume contest for dressing like Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke (right, with a friend). “That was, like, a million dollars back then, so it was a really big deal. Look at my costume: I’m a little baby hooker. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing in heels and fishnets already. I guess that started me down this path.”
In 1956, when Peterson was 5, “my mom asked me what I wanted to be for Halloween, and I said, ‘I want to be the Queen of Halloween.’ And guess what? I am.” When her family moved to Colorado, Peterson’s mother and aunt opened a costume rental business. “It was just a hobby in the beginning—something to do besides being housewives—but it really, really took off.” Most of their customers came from the military bases in town. “The military really gets into Halloween and also Oktoberfest. A lot of the soldiers had been stationed in Germany.”
Peterson’s love of horror movies began when she was 8, after she watched the 1959 film House on Haunted Hill. The Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, look came together quickly for her Elvira’s Movie Macabre gig thanks to Peterson’s best friend, the late costume designer and actor Robert Redding. Their original idea, based on Sharon Tate’s look in the 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers, involved a pink nightgown. It was shot down by the show’s director, who demanded an all-black costume. “It was so boring and typical. Morticia Addams? Boo,” says Peterson. “Robert tried to make it a little more hip, a little different, a little ’80s. The hair was based on Ronnie Spector, and he tried to make the dress as tight and low-cut as possible.” The makeup was based on Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft, from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
A natural redhead whose original goal in show business was to be “as sexy as possible,” Peterson idolized the actor and singer Ann-Margret after seeing her in Bye Bye Birdie and Viva Las Vegas, which also starred Elvis Presley. “I think everything happened via manifestation. I was dreaming, eating, and sleeping Viva Las Vegas. The next thing I know, I’m auditioning for a show called Viva Les Girls! in Las Vegas, meeting Elvis, meeting Ann-Margret, and becoming a showgirl. It was pretty strange for a small-town girl to just wind up there.”
“Weird group, right?” says Peterson of the photo above, where she’s seen with (from left) musicians Juice Newton and Donny Osmond, and the Italian composer Giorgio Moroder (right) with his date. This party was hosted at the Directors Guild of America, in Los Angeles, for Moroder’s rescored and rereleased version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. “I had once held Osmond on my lap in Las Vegas, when I was a showgirl. I brought that up to him, and he asked if I could sit on his lap, but I said no.”
“Before he was Pee-wee Herman or I was Elvira, I met Paul Reubens at the Groundlings,” says Peterson, referring to the famed Los Angeles improv group. “Nobody recognized Paul when he was not in character. One of our favorite things to do was go to a party together, then spring it on somebody. We ran into Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. He recognized Paul, and he flipped out. Then Paul said, ‘Yeah, and you know who my date is?’ He said no, and Paul said, ‘Elvira.’ The Rock literally fell down on his knees.”
“Nina [Hagen] and I were once at a restaurant in London, and she was wearing a bra and a loincloth,” Peterson recalls. “I was thinking about having a baby but was too scared of the pain. So Nina knocked all the plates off the table and went through the whole birthing process. We all got thrown out.”
As gay men, theater kids, and drag queens have long known, the best parties often involve drinks, your closest friends, and a box of wigs. Those elements were present one night when Peterson was at home with Reubens, the singer and choreographer Toni Basil, and other friends. “We all put wigs on, and we were dancing around,” she remembers. “At the Groundlings, all of the characters would just come from this gigantic box of crappy old wigs. We probably got bugs from them.”
Throughout the 1980s, Peterson’s fame steadily rose. As Elvira, she made appearances on MTV, WrestleMania 2, Saturday Night Live, and even a Disney television special. Here, she’s pictured running into Billy Idol at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards. “It was a huge party. I met him, and I met Axl Rose. I was so in love with Guns N’ Roses back then.”
In the ’80s, Peterson was landing roles beyond Elvira—from parts in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to episodes of Alice and St. Elsewhere—but she was still primarily known as that character. One benefit: privacy. “Back then, no one ever, ever recognized me,” says Peterson. “This picture [above] was just outside the Rainbow Bar & Grill. I was there with Nic Cage. Too bad he’s not in the picture. We were hanging out together for a while. That’s all I remember about that night.”
On a trip to New York in 1988, Peterson hit it off with Dianne Brill, then known as the city’s Queen of the Night. How was it that Peterson always managed to find herself in fabulous company? “A lot of it has to do with hanging out with drag queens. I worked in Provincetown for a long time. I met Mink Stole and John Waters there through drag queens. I met Dianne and Andy Warhol through Joey Arias. That’s what happens to you when you’re with drag queens all the time.”
One night in New York, Arias took Peterson, in full Elvira costume, to an underground punk club. Peterson was used to the rock ’n’ roll world: She had fronted a band while living in Italy in the ’70s, and later toured America with Robert Redding and other friends in a band called Mama’s Boys. “I was Mama and I had seven gay men with me, and they did a little drag. We sang, we danced, we told jokes.”
Peterson was close friends with the Queen of Kitsch, Allee Willis (center). Famed for cowriting “September,” by Earth, Wind & Fire, and the theme song for Friends, Willis had a second career as an art director. She hand-built the set and props for Just Say Julie, the MTV show starring comedian Julie Brown (left). Elvira made a cameo in an episode, in which she and Brown were PMS-ing. “We were both complaining that we had cramps, and we were taking big bottles full of Motrin. What do you take for cramps? What is that stuff? It’s been so long since I had that problem. Whatever it’s called, she and I were just eating it by the handful.”
For the New York City premiere of her 1988 film, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, a horror-comedy in which Elvira is accused of witchcraft, Peterson made her grand entrance in a gondola at the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park, accompanied by an entourage of Speedo-wearing bodybuilders. “In my movie, at the end, there’s two muscle guys. We tried to get the same guys, but they were not available.”
Years before the late costume designer Chris March became a contestant on Project Runway, he caught Peterson’s eye by attending the New York premiere of her second movie, Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001), in full Elvira drag. “I wanted to be his best friend. Look at that damn wig. It’s better than what I was wearing.”
The starriest parties Peterson attended were held at her ex-husband Mark Pierson’s parents’ house in Malibu. “My mother-in-law was an amazing chef. She and my father-in-law would have these dinner parties, and everybody would come: Angie Dickinson, Roy Orbison, Burt Lancaster, Robert Altman, Gene Hackman, Larry Hagman.”
In 2009, the Queen of Halloween crossed paths with Mariah Carey, the Queen of Christmas, at a birthday party for the late Prince Azim in London. “Ursula Andress, Sophia Loren, Faye Dunaway, Janet Jackson, and Mariah were all there,” says Peterson. “All the most beautiful women in the world.”
Peterson arrives in her “Macabre Mobile” for the opening night of Elvira’s Horror Hunt, a project she created with the San Francisco drag queen Peaches Christ. “Peaches and I put out the call to budding directors and producers to make horror films under a certain amount of money. The winner got a trip to L.A. and got introduced to different distribution companies. There were some incredibly good movies made on a shoestring that came out of this little endeavor.”
The film Elvira: Mistress of the Dark features appearances from Arias, Peterson’s parents, numerous Groundlings alums, and at least one of Peterson’s ex-boyfriends. A joke from the movie—“How’s your head?” to which Elvira responds, “I’ve never had any complaints”—has achieved cult status thanks to its frequent use on RuPaul’s Drag Race. “So many people go, ‘Oh, RuPaul’s line, you used it in your movie?’ And I’m like, ‘Bitch! Okay!’ But RuPaul knows, and he always gives me credit for it.”
In 2007, Elvira hosted her own reality competition show, titled The Search for the Next Elvira. Naturally, her fellow judges were two Elvira drag queens. “That’s Christian Greenia on the left, who is not only my official Elvira drag queen but has also been my social media person for many years now. A hundred years later, he’s still working for me, and he looks fabulous. And the other drag queen, on the right, we dug up from somewhere.”
Source: W Magazine
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