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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ClassyCo" data-source="post: 215583" data-attributes="member: 7">Well, many will try to sell the idea that sometime during the early-to-mid fifties that Mamie was indeed the second to Marilyn, and that she always played "the Marilyn Monroe role" in her pictures. They will tell you that she was practically begged to play the spoofy movie star in the play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, but she turned it down. They say that, unlike Marilyn, Mamie could easily get top billing because she did not need a man to get the top slot because she was more than capable of carrying the films herself. Once Marilyn and Jayne were both gone, she was apparently ousted by Hollywood because she was an "embarrassment". I keep saying "many" or "they", but really it's Mamie herself trying to sell these stories. While I won't necessarily try to defy the fact that Mamie was popular, I also won't buy into the notion that she always played roles that were vague Monroe-types, or that she was considered the only woman in movies able to act as an alternative to Marilyn. Of course, the story goes that Universal signed Joan Lucille Olander in 1953, and rechristened her Mamie Van Doren, to market her their version of Fox's Monroe. But Mamie never did the type of films that would put her in the same league as Marilyn. Sure, her look would vaguely remind casual fans of the insanely popular blonde bombshell, but her movies never would. Mamie's roles were almost always secondary ones, and usually in low-brow B-pictures that cluttered the drive-ins back in the day. There was some truth to Mamie's name could carry a picture. She usually got top billing (or at least had her name in big, bold print on the posters) and posed seductively on the film advertisements, but she was rarely the star of her films. She was almost always the part of someone else's movie, and she was basically there for the teens that she might happen to draw, providing some since of untamed youth (which was actually the title of one of her pictures) and whatever marketability she managed to possess. Mamie was never as big as Jayne, and she was never going to get a major studio, such as 20th Century-Fox, to promote her or give her pictures like The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which were popular successes in their day and have become classics. Jayne was Marilyn's only real competition, and Mamie was always hovering in the shadows of both of them really, never with any significant going for her. She did star in few B-pictures that were reasonably popular, and some of them have even gotten well-known in the cult classic realm, but not a single picture she did as a headliner can be defined as a box office smash.</blockquote>

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