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In 1987, Diane went from working in an Alabama music video to an entirely new kind of gig for her: modeling women’s nightwear in a lounge show called Lingerie Lady. “I began doing that as a supplement to performing. There were five to eight of us and we modeled mainly in Holiday Inn Lounges. Yes, we were the lounge entertainment!  (laughs) If I got a singing gig, I could take off from modeling, so it worked out well. We had a moderator and an upbeat mix of background music. The other girls and I modeled the outfits onstage, and then walked around to all of the tables to take orders.  If we made a sale, we would go back to our dressing room to change into another outfit and then we’d bring the sold item back to the customer. After the show, our door was open and the outfits were on racks. Patrons were invited to come in and purchase the lingerie. Believe me, it was not a sleazy show. We didn’t dance, no one could touch us, and there was no sitting in laps or anything. Our objective was to sell the lingerie…period.

“We had a weekly show at two Holiday Inns in Nashville, on opposite sides of the city. We also had a Monday night show for a year at a Holiday Inn in Huntsville, as well as shows at Chevy’s Night Club, Cajun’s Wharf Night Club, Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, and other locations around Nashville. One month, we did 20 lingerie shows…it’s a wonder that we didn’t overdose on polyester. (laughs) When we went out of town, we traveled in a van, which we called The Teddy Wagon. It really was a lot of fun.

“The show lasted for three years, ending in 1990. We did really great the first year, pretty good the second year, but by the third year, sales really fell. That’s when several strip clubs opened in Nashville. Believe me, a ‘naughty nightie’ will lose out to a birthday suit every time. (laughs)

“A lot of country music performers and well-known record producers came out to see the shows. One night, a waitress told me that a gentleman at the back bar wanted to talk to me. I went back there and saw that it was Charley Pride. He was obviously interested in me, not in purchasing my teddy. I told him that I was married and then he asked me what my ‘sign’ was. I told him that I’m a Leo. Charley frowned and said, ‘Oh, if you’re a Leo, forget it.’ (Although there was nothing to ‘forget’ because I had already turned him down.) I couldn’t resist asking, ‘Oh, did you have a bad time with a Leo lady, Charley?’ He looked disgusted and said, ‘I don’t even want to talk about it’, and then he walked away.

During her time as a Lingerie Lady, Diane added another music video to her resume when she was hired to participate in Hank Williams, Jr.’s video for the song We Are Young Country (from his Born To Boogie album). “That was in the winter of 1988”, Diane recalls. “At the time, Lingerie Lady had a regular show on Wednesday nights at the Holiday Inn on Briley Parkway. One night when we came in for work, we were told that if we wanted to participate in a Hank Williams, Jr. video, we could stay after the show. We were told that it didn’t pay anything, but of course we all wanted to be in it. The little crew brought in lights and cameras and we waited while they set everything up. They wanted us to wear our teddies and they also supplied us with cowboy hats to wear. We were all to stand, in a row, and on cue, throw the cowboy hats into the air. That was it! I remember that I was in the center, wearing a bright blue teddy. After the shoot, the guy in charge said that he’d really like to buy each of us a drink. I remember saying to one of the girls, ‘Oh, good, I’ll put that in the bank on my way home.’ Still, it was a kick to say that I was in a Hank Williams, Jr. video. Anyone who has ever seen it knows that it’s full of people and we are all presented very rapidly. Sometimes, freeze-frame comes in handy.” (laughs)

Diane eventually went from modeling lingerie to promoting a different kind of aesthetic when she became a nightclub Rose Lady. It was yet another example of the singer’s amazing ability to adapt to whatever new opportunities came her way. “Two of the lingerie models in the show had silicone implants, then quit the show and became strippers. One of them was also a Rose Lady who sold them in various places for a fireman named Bill. He came to the show one night and met me. When Kitty quit modeling, she quit selling roses for him, too, and he asked me if I was interested in taking her place. So, when the lingerie show folded, I sold roses. Bill had contracts with Dad’s Place, a hangout for older divorced people, and The Stockyard, which is a classy steakhouse in downtown Nashville, with the Bullpen Lounge in the basement.”

Diane admits that the experience was not without its difficult moments. “My first night of selling roses was very hard for me. Someone bought a rose for the singer and I had to bring it to her. Up until that time, I had always been the singer that the Rose Lady had brought roses to. I could see the look in the singer’s eyes…she knew who I was. But, I decided that I would ‘bloom where I was planted’ and if I was going to be a Rose Lady, then I was going to do it with class. I never, ever asked anyone to buy a rose from me. I stood at the back of the room with my basket and when the band took a break, I walked through the club slowly, smiling at everyone. The patrons would often talk to me and tell me their troubles because the bartenders and waitresses were too busy to listen. (laughs) I made many friends there and received some very nice gifts from some of them, too. One night, I was talking to an older man when I noted that my watch had quit running. He came back a week or so later and handed me a box. It was a beautiful Seiko 10K gold bracelet watch. He said, ‘You need to have a good watch.’ Another regular customer gave me a beautiful gold bracelet for my birthday. I sold roses until the Fall of 1995.”

By the mid 1990s, Diane’s singing career was clearly winding down. “By 1996, I was doing very few shows. I did a couple of shows that year with Tommy Cash, Charlie Louvin, Alex Houston, and Elmer (a ventriloquist), and a great impressionist named Johnny Counterfit.  We played a few dates in New Jersey and a casino in Minnesota, and then in 1997, we played a show in Ohio. In 1998, I performed for the third and last time with the Louis Brown Orchestra at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel’s New Year’s Eve Big Band party. I suppose I would say that after 1998, I no longer really considered myself a performer.”

Still, the new millennium found Diane rediscovering a creative part of her soul that she had forgotten even existed. “Merle Kilgore is a singer/songwriter whom I knew casually for years, but I had never even had a long conversation with him. In 2002, I saw Merle at a funeral home when my musician friend Hillous Buttram passed away. Merle told me that he had an office on Music Row, and invited me to stop by sometime. One day, a couple of months later, I did. We laughed and talked and told stories for two hours. Merle was going to dinner at Valentino’s, and asked if I would join him. At dinner, I got up the nerve to ask him if he would write a song with me sometime. Well, he loved the idea and promised me he would.

“That Labor Day [September 2002], Merle and his wife Judy invited me to a party at their lake house in Paris Landing, TN. After we ate, Merle picked up his guitar and looked right into my eyes—and it seemed, right into my soul—and said, ‘Let’s see if we can write this.’ He sang just one line, ‘I’ve tried everything humanly possible.’ I immediately sang the next line, and within an hour we had written the entire song. There were people all around us and his grandchildren coming up to ask him questions and showing him things, but apparently nothing could stop that song! Merle said he had first tried to write it back in the 1960s with Eddie Rabbit, but they couldn’t do it, so it was strange that he thought of it that day with me. For a while, we were stuck on the last line of the second verse and everyone was trying to think of something for it. Finally, these words popped into my mind: ‘But I can’t imagine I could be that wrong.’ Merle yelled, ‘That’s it!’, and I felt on top of the world.

“The air was charged with electricity and energy that day and I will never forget it as long as I live. The song is called Humanly Possible and of course the perfect ending to the story would be for it to one day be on the charts. After we wrote the song, Merle and I wrote two other songs together. We later demoed all three songs: When Does It End (that was a song idea that was mine), And Then Some (that was also mine) and Humanly Possible (which, as I already mentioned, was Merle’s idea). The songs turned out beautifully and I put all three of them on a CD that I made a few years ago of some of my recordings, titled The Diane Jordan Collection.

“I recently got the demo of Humanly Possible to Willie Nelson, and to several well-known record producers in town. I also think that the song would fit Alison Krauss really well. I hope to see it out there, soon.

“In 2003, I sang backup with Merle Kilgore on a couple of shows as one of his three ‘Merle-etts’. One of the events we performed at was the Harlan Howard Birthday Bash. It was great fun singing on Ring Of Fire (which Merle had written with June Carter) and Wolverton Mountain (which Merle wrote alone).The day after the birthday bash, Brenda Lee, who had been the show’s MC, called Merle to tell him, ‘Merle, you and those Merle-ettes did it. You got the only standing ovation of the night.’ That made me feel great.

“Merle and I wrote easily together and we had planned to keep writing more songs. Sadly, his health took a downward turn soon afterward and he died in February 2005. Before he passed away, Merle said that I was ‘one hell of a lyricist’ which is probably the greatest compliment that I have ever received. Whether the songs we wrote together ever get recorded by anyone, or not, I’ll always be grateful to Merle Kilgore for giving me confidence and credibility as a songwriter. What a wonderful gift he gave me.”

With Merle Kilgore’s belief in her talent as a songsmith continuing to be an inspiration, Diane is constantly developing new ideas for songs. One of these is a bittersweet Christmas song that begs to be recorded. Though she doesn’t want to give out too many details about it (song ideas are stolen all the time), the song is a nostalgic-sounding ballad with a gorgeous melody that is destined one day to be a classic. “I wrote the song in 2007,” Diane says. “I had said the line in conversation a couple of years ago and wrote it down. It just came to me in two parts, five months apart, which is the strangest thing that has ever happened to me. You know, I had kind of a difficult childhood with my violent home life and all, but there were good times, too, and Christmas was one of them. My family always spent Christmas Day at my grandmother’s house with my aunt and uncle and cousins. There was never any trouble that day—it was always a sort of cease fire and it was always a wonderful day for me.

“Many people who have heard the song have said that it has the feel of an old standard, but no one has said that it sounds like anything they have heard before, which is a relief. I would love for a big star to cut this song one day and make some money for me. Trisha Yearwood is my favorite female singer and I would be thrilled if she were to record it. But then again, Alison Krauss’s voice would be awesome on it, too. Getting that Christmas song cut is a big goal of mine, so we’ll just have to wait and see if I can do it.”

Despite her recent interest in songwriting, Diane doubts that she will ever record again. “I do not foresee my recording any new material in the future, unless it was a demo session for songs that I have written. I am not interested in distributing my music on the Internet, either, and signing with a major record label is no longer within the realm of possibility at my age. The last master session that I did was for Grand Prix Records in 1984. I have recorded only demos since then. Demo sessions are exciting for me, because of the creativity that it takes to make a song come to life for the first time. [Other than that] I enjoy sitting in with a band every now and then to sing a couple of songs, but that’s about it.

“I always preferred a country-pop sound and that’s the type of material I wish I’d had the chance to record during my career. Actually, to show you how much the industry has changed, I think I would be considered more country now than I was back when I was recording. In the 1960s and 70s, I was often told that I belonged in L.A. but that was never an option for me. I didn’t know anyone out there, nor did I ever have the money to relocate. Before we got married, Larry did go to L.A. to audition for a new group, but he hated the place. They were all into drugs and pot, and he felt he didn’t fit in. After we married in 1971, Larry and I were firmly planted in Nashville.

“You know, in all my years in the business, I never had a bad experience working with musicians in the recording studio. I always recorded with Nashville’s A-Team, and they were top notch in every way. They were very witty, so the atmosphere was always relaxed and fun. They were always complimentary, too, which I appreciated. On the other hand, most of the material that I was given to record was really, really weak. I remember going to Harlan Howard’s office once to look for songs. He played me some of the worst junk I have ever heard in my life! It was really an insult. I have been told that I had an identifiable sound that was also commercial, and I think I did, too. It’s a shame that no one cared…

“In 2002, I had two of my old cuts released on compilation discs that were sent to Europe, UK and Australia. Home To Houston was released on Western Heart and Not Tonight, I’ve Got A Heartache was released on Hero Records’ Twangtown Project 2. Though it meant nothing in the big picture, it was kind of fun to check the online play lists and see that I was being heard in Australia, England, Holland, Belgium, Sweden and Germany.

“Since 2005, I have done a charity show in Fayetteville, Georgia every May. It benefits the battered women’s shelter there and it’s called The Johnny Cochran Celebration Of Life Show. It was started by Stella Parton, who is a friend of mine. And in April of 2007, Steve Hall (the voice of Shotgun Red, who was Ralph Emery’s sidekick for many years on Nashville Now) asked me to perform on a show with him at the New Salem Country Opry in New Salem, Illinois. It was a lot of fun and the crowd was very responsive.

“I must say, I’m not really close to the entertainers I knew and worked with in the business. However, I still talk to a few of them. Tommy Cash is one; also, Jim Glaser (of Tompall and the Glaser Brothers), Leroy Van Dyke, Jeannie Seely, Stu Phillips, Norma Jean, and Stella (Parton).

“If money were no object, I admit I would like to choose twelve songs that I really love and go into a studio and make a CD, just for the enjoyment of it. But, otherwise, I consider myself retired from performing. I hung on to the music, and to my career, for as long as I could, but then I had to let it go.

“As I look back on my life and my career, I admit that I feel kind of gypped. I don’t believe that things turn out the way that they’re ‘supposed to’. That would be predestination, and I don’t believe in that. I worked very hard for many, many years, and I thought things were going to turn out differently for me than they did. I am a pretty cheerful person, though, and I’m grateful for what I do have: my health and my friends, a nice home, and the chance that someone will have a hit with one of the songs I have written. I spent most of my adult life trying to become a country music singing star, and I couldn’t get the job done. If I could do it all over, I would definitely be more aggressive…but I still wouldn’t go to bed with the creeps!

“The men who sexually harassed me early in my career changed my opinion of males, in general, but especially of those in the industry. I had a family background of men who bullied me, so obviously, I never was totally trusting of them. But I was always careful never to lead industry men to think that I was interested in anything but singing. Still, some interpreted that as playing hard to get. One guy who towered over me, sneered, ‘Come on, everyone has a price.’  My answer to him was, ‘Well, you’ve just met somebody who doesn’t.’ And I’m glad I didn’t. I have no regrets whatsoever in that area.”

Asked  how she wants to be remembered by her fans, Diane is typically candid in her response. “You know, for years I have read [as I’m sure everyone has] of the undying loyalty of country music fans. I had fans, too, and they were loyal…for a while. They would come to see me and some of them even invited me to stay in their homes. They would drive me to and from the airport, even when the airport was a few hours away. Several of these people corresponded with me for many years. Finally, at some point, I guess they decided that I wasn’t going to make it big, or be a star, and the letters stopped. Everybody loves a winner, right? But I wasn’t a winner…not to them, anyway. When I was 20 years old, Dottie West told me, ‘Diane, fans are not friends.’ You know something? Dottie was right.

“I didn’t get what I wanted, but these days I do very little of what I don’t want to do. I did not want to be a mother and today I am very glad that I don’t have any grandchildren. Larry and I own our home and we have done a lot of work on it. Instead of singing, I am pursuing my songwriting now, hoping to become a ‘late bloomer’. To write just one hit song would make the long road worth it. As you can probably tell, it all still feels a bit unfinished to me. But I’m not through with the music business…not yet, anyway.

“Back at Sutton High School, I remember our class motto was, ‘Not at the top, but climbing.’ I didn’t realize my dream of making hit records, but I still believe, with all of my heart, that I can still write a hit song. I don’t think that there is a time limit on being a late bloomer. And even if I don’t ever write a classic song, all of the wonderful memories I have are mine to keep. Those memories alone are a beautiful gift to have.”

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Although her recording career wasn’t working out the way she had thought or hoped it would, Diane continued touring all the time. In 1977, she even brought her show to the high seas when she was booked to entertain aboard the Commodore Cruise Line. “In early 1977, I did my first of nine Country Cruises for Commodore. Johnny Paycheck (of Take This Job And Shove It fame) was the star on the first cruise. I remember we left from Miami and had been sailing for about an hour and a half, when we felt the ship turning around. A voice came over the PA telling everyone on-board that there had been a bomb scare and that we were sailing back to Miami to have the entire ship searched. Police dogs were brought on board as soon as we returned to port. They didn’t find a bomb, but they did sniff out Johnny Paycheck’s drugs! Johnny and his wife (and their baby) kept a very low profile for the remainder of the cruise. They never came to the dining room or to the deck. I can’t imagine them taking a cruise and then staying in their tiny cabin all week. The next year, the captain told me that he saw Johnny in the bar shortly before his show one night. It was the last night of the cruise and Johnny had shown no signs of bathing. The captain actually had to ask him to please take a shower before the show. Several years later, I was booked to do a show on a military base in Hawaii with Johnny. It would have been a dream trip for me, as I would have only had to work three days out of five. However, right before we were to leave for Hawaii, Paycheck shot a guy in a bar and was sent to prison. The man who booked us loved Johnny, and he wouldn’t accept a substitute for him. So, that killed it for the rest of us, too. I will never forgive Johnny Paycheck because, to this day, I still haven’t made it to Hawaii. (laughs) The popular country singer T.G. Sheppard was the star on the second Country Cruise I did for Commodore. After that, the cruise line figured out that all they needed was a good country show for their guests because the cruises were always sold out anyway.”

In 1977, Diane’s friend, former Hank Williams sideman Hillous Buttrum, called her with the news that he had gotten her a guest spot in a country music feature film documentary titled That’s Country. “He said [excitedly], ‘I got you in a movie with Lorne Greene!’, recalls Diane. “Hillous knew the director and writer, Clark Da Prato, who was with Film House in Toronto, and he was helping him find the performers that Clark wanted for the film. That’s Country is a historic tribute to 25 years of country music. Lorne Greene narrated it and old footage of country stars from the 50s was used and integrated with those same performers performing live in 1977. It includes the only color feature-length footage ever taken of Jim Reeves. Ronny Robbins and I were in it as examples of the ‘new Nashville Sound.’ They let me choose the song I wanted to do when I got there, so I selected Mac Davis’s I Believe In Music. Lorne introduced me, saying, ‘Here’s Diane Jordan. She believes in music, and I believe in Diane.’ It was exciting to be in another feature film that was going to be shown all over the world, you know?

“We filmed my spot at night and no one had gotten clearance for the Mac Davis song ahead of time. When the publisher was called the next day, he told them that it would cost $8,000 to use the song in the movie. That was quite an exorbitant amount back then but it was already done and they liked it so well, that they agreed to pay it. To utilize it all they could, they used it in the film’s trailer, as well, so the theatergoers heard my voice again, as they were leaving the theater. In the film, Lorne Greene sang a song called Old Tin Cup, and there was talk of releasing that and my song, on a 45. But, as was usually the case with me, it was just talk.

“The night we filmed my performance, Larry, my brother Jim, who was visiting, and I got to hang out for hours with Lorne Greene. He was such a fun and down-to-earth person and we thoroughly enjoyed listening to his stories. I remember that he did not like Jerry Lewis. He told us that contrary to what people think, that Jerry Lewis is paid a million dollars to host the MDA telethon he does every year. [I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but that’s what Lorne said.]

“The world premiere for That’s Country was held at the Ogden Hyland Theater in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada on September 15, 1977. Lorne and I were the only invited performers from the film. I had a terrible dilemma, however. I was booked on the Country Cruise with Johnny Paycheck for the same week. I was determined to do both, and somehow I did! I explained it to the booking agent and he worked it out with Commodore Cruise Line. The cruise left on Saturday, so the agent worked it out that I could perform on Monday night. Larry and I got off the ship in San Juan and flew from there to Halifax and Film House paid for our First Class tickets. It took us all day to get there and we had a suite waiting, with a lovely fruit basket and a bottle of wine to welcome us. At the premiere, Lorne Greene and I were called onstage and I was presented with a dozen roses. All the while, I’m thinking, ‘Wow, this is how my life is going to be from now on.’ Wrong again!

“Lorne, the producer, Henning Jacobsen, director Clark Da Prato and Larry and I were all invited to lunch at the mayor’s chambers, on the day of the premiere. Lorne had planned a tour of the island by limousine the next day, and invited Larry and I to join him. We were just sick that we had to decline, but Larry had to fly back to Nashville to leave town on a gig, and I had to fly to Ontario to do a show with Ronny Robbins.

“That’s Country was released first in Canada. In March of 1978, a champagne premiere was held at the Capri Theater at Harding Mall, in Nashville. Larry and I attended it, and also drove to Atlanta to attend another premiere. There was a huge movie poster with an artist’s renderings of many of the performers’ faces. I’m right in the middle, next to Ray Price. At the premiere, we were standing next to the poster. A guy looked at the poster, and then at Larry and asked, ‘How does it feel to have your wife that close to Ray Price?’ Larry answered, ‘That’s as close as he’ll ever get!’

Diane went from film work straight back to touring and and appearing on the Ralph Emery Show, and in 1979, she  re-entered the studio to once again try to get her recording career off the ground. With producer Jack Gilmer in charge of the sessions funded by Paul Richey Productions, Diane cut the song Isn’t That Just Like Love (which was later recorded by Debby Boone on her 1981 WB album Savin’ It Up),and two other songs. “The other songs I cut for Richey Productions were Stay The Night and What’s A Little Love Between Friends. (I would also remix and redo my vocals on the last song in 1984, for another label.) Jack Gilmer had produced T.G. Sheppard’s first five albums, so he was certainly a capable producer. Unfortunately, I later found out that he was also a drunk…and a thief.

“I actually did two sessions for Paul Richey Productions but the first one was just experimenting with some songs, two of which were not mastered. I also did a session for a songwriter who was trying to find a backer. He found one in town and told me that the guy was super wealthy. I remember he said, ‘You don’t have to do anything with him, but just make him think it’s down the road.’ I said that I wouldn’t do that because sooner or later, it will get down to sex, if that’s what the guy wants, and I wasn’t willing to go that route. In my opinion, that’s a very dangerous game to play. I have never traded sex to further my music career…ever. So, the guy wound up calling it off and said that he’d get ‘the little girl who sings down at the Hall of Fame Lounge’ and that she’d be glad to do it. Nothing ever happened with her or the songwriter’s songs, that I know of, but I didn’t get the songs, either.

“When I did the sessions for Paul Ritchey Productions, Paul’s wife worked at the Richey’s office building and Jack Gilmer was hired as an engineer by the Richeys and he also ran the studio. In my opinion, I cut my absolute best record there. It was a beautiful ballad called Stay The Night and it had previously been recorded in 1978 by pop singer Jane Olivor. It’s my favorite song by far of all the songs I ever recorded. I would have bet my life on that one to be a hit. The night I put down my vocals, it was just Jack and me in the studio, with the lights down. After I sang it, I broke down, crying. I remember Jack said, ‘Diane, we just cut your first hit record.’ I believed it, too…with everything I had. But, of course, that wasn’t the case. I would never have that ‘hit record’.

“After the session, Paul really thought we had something and took it to all the major labels. He had three labels interested but he was demanding too much money for me as I was an unproven artist. Paul had a promotion budget written into the contract, and none of the labels would sign it. By that time, his wife said that he couldn’t work with me anymore and that she didn’t ever want me in their offices again. Paul gave me the master tapes (which was nice of him), and that was the end of that production deal.”

Sadly, Diane would have to wait five long years for another record deal (her last, to date). In 1984, she signed with fledgling label Grand Prix Records in Memphis, a company that was owned by a man named Ed Dubaj. As she explains, “My closest friend Michelle had a friend named Sarah who had gone to work for a record label that had a lot of money. Ed Dubaj was negotiating with the same label to sign a young singer named Linda Nail. He managed Linda and was using Grand Prix as a stepping stone for her to get signed to a larger label. Danny White, a popular player for the Dallas Cowboys, was also on Grand Prix at the time. Anyway, Sarah gave me Ed’s phone number and suggested that I call him. He was very nice and said he would like to meet with me when he came to Nashville. We met and after we talked a while, Ed signed me to both a management contract and a record deal. We eventually cut the songs They’re Not Losing You, Home To Houston (earlier recorded with the title of Brooklyn by Alan Thicke’s ex-wife Gloria Loring, when she went by the name of Cody Jameson), Son Of A Preacher Man and Not Tonight, I’ve Got A Heartache. We also remixed What’s A Little Love Between Friends from the master tapes that Paul Richey gave me in 1999 and I redid the vocals on it. Ed took the advice of a promotion team he used, Wayne and Joanna Edwards, and released They’re Not Losing You as my debut single. In my opinion, that was a very poor choice and I wish they had chosen Son Of A Preacher Man instead— I really had high hopes for that song. When I met Joanna Edwards, I recall she was very unfriendly to me. After that, I knew they wouldn’t do anything to promote my record…and they didn’t.”

The song Son Of A Preacher Man had been a huge pop hit for Dusty Springfield in 1970, and in 1984, it had yet to be redone as a country single. “It was my idea to record the song,” says Diane. “Wayne Jackson, who was part of The Memphis Horns, had moved to Nashville to do session work, after his work in Memphis had dried up. Jack Gilmer and Wayne lived together, so Jack used him anytime he could. Wayne was also was in Marty Robbins’ band. When Jack told me that Wayne had played on Dusty Springfield’s hit record, I was really excited that he would be playing the horn parts on my record, too. In fact, I thought that was surely an omen that the record was going to be a hit all over again. I got to perform the song, live, on the syndicated TV show, That Nashville Music, but it wasn’t released as a single and so it didn’t become the hit record I had hoped it would be.

“Despite my lack of success there, Grand Prix Records did more for me than all my other record labels put together. I mean, I never had any promotion whatsoever until Grand Prix. They actually bought a half-page ad for me (in color) in Billboard magazine and sent out press releases on me, too. Ed Dubaj even got me booked on the St. Jude Telethon in Memphis. The label also paid for my photo session, which was a first for me. I had always paid for all the professional photos I’d had until then. Grand Prix also paid for a beautiful dress made especially for me by a Vegas seamstress (Loni Anderson had one just like it, in white). However, Joanna Edwards didn’t like the photo because it showed my cleavage.”

Diane’s initial single for Grand Prix Records, They’re Not Losing You, was given the royal treatment by the label: it was pressed in gold vinyl. “Yeah, I had a gold single,” jokes Diane. “And it didn’t even chart. (laughs) The gold vinyl single was Ed Dubaj’s idea, just to get some attention. Colored singles weren’t very common back then. At one interview, he said, ‘When Diane’s record sells a million, we’re going to give her a black one.’ Later, Ed and one of his investors decided to go to London and Monte Carlo for a gambling trip and figured that they could take me to the country music festival at Wembley, and write off the trip. They said, ‘Bring some clothes if you want to go to Monte Carlo with us.’ So, I did, and it was a fabulous ten day trip that I’ll never forget.

“In 1984, music videos were still very new and Ed mentioned to Jack Gilmer that he would like to do one on me for They’re Not Losing You. Jack said that he had started a video company and that he could do it for us, so Ed agreed. Ed wrote a cute story line about a guy who was trying to get into my showcase in Printers Alley. We did the video but I didn’t have a VCR back then so I couldn’t play it. I didn’t know how bad the video quality was, but it turns out it was terrible. I went to Nebraska later that year for my 20 year class reunion. Ed arranged for me to tape an interview on a TV station in Lincoln, while I was there [and to bring along the video to show]. I was highly embarrassed when a guy came out of the control room and said that the station couldn’t play a clip from it because it was so distorted. Ed had paid Jack Gilmer several thousand dollars for a worthless piece of junk. TNN had sent a camera crew to my showcase, probably because Danny White’s name was also on the invitation and he and his wife were there. TNN put together a really nice piece and it was shown on Nashville Now when I was a guest on the show, along with Danny.

“Despite all the drama, Ed Dubaj really tried to do something for my career (and for Linda Nail, too). Sure, the label was a tax shelter, but Ed believed in us. Danny White didn’t want a singing career; he just wanted to make an album. Linda had an album out, too, but after Jack Gilmer got through fleecing Ed, the latter was through with the music business, and I didn’t get an album.

“Here’s more: Ed had recorded Linda and Danny in Memphis at Knox Phillips’ studio. (Knox is the brother of Sun Records founder Sam Phillips.) Knox cheated Ed so Ed wouldn’t record there anymore and that made Knox mad, so he got the IRS to investigate Ed. Though an attorney had set up the label as a tax shelter, apparently it wasn’t done exactly right, and Ed was sent to prison for two years. The IRS had a so-called ‘expert’ testify that Danny White’s album was ‘worthless’. And yet, when a football announcer held it up during a televised Dallas Cowboys game and talked about it, Ed got orders for 5,000 albums. The prosecutor was so rude to Linda Nail on the witness stand that she became hysterical and they had to call a recess. Of all the music business crooks there were (and are) in Nashville, Ed was the one who went to prison. I mean, there were tax shelter labels in Nashville back then that signed 30 singers to recording contracts. This is another reason that I will never serve jury duty. I don’t want any part of our corrupt legal system.”

“Ed had planned to release another record on me after They’re Not Losing You…,but when he got a call from the president of the Nashville Musicians Union asking him why he hadn’t paid the musicians, he decided he had really had it with the business. What had happened was that Jack Gilmer had submitted his budget for the recording session and Ed paid him the money, upfront. It was Jack’s responsibility, as producer, to pay the musicians, but he didn’t do it. I had asked Jack to use my friend, Randy Hauser, on drums, and he didn’t want to use him at first. Randy was a top session player and he worked all of Chet Atkins dates…he was excellent. Anyway, Jack was really rude to Randy at the session, but he did pay him because he knew that he would tell Larry and me if he was stiffed. Ed faxed the signed production agreement with Jack, and a copy of the canceled check to the president of the union, but he kept harassing Ed to pay the musicians. That was the last straw; Ed gave me the masters and said that he wanted nothing more to do with ‘the dishonest and cutthroat people in the music business’. I later tried to get Not Tonight… released on a small label in Ohio but the guy who was going to release it couldn’t even afford to have it mastered. When he talked about selling his RV to pay for putting out the record, I said I couldn’t let him do that, and so that was the end of it.”

Aside from some of the con men and sharks she came across, Diane professes to have mostly fond memories of her 40 years in the business. She says that among these are the many benefit shows she did in the 1980s, as part of a series of Celebrity Golf Tournaments that were held throughout the south and Midwest. Beginning in the early part of the decade and continuing right up to 1988, Diane participated in several of these shows, which supported various scholarship funds for the children of our country’s POWs and MIAs. “The first Celebrity Golf Tournament I did was held in 1983, in Atchison, Kansas. 1960s pop stars Ronnie Dove and Johnny Tillotson were two of the entertainers I worked with. I didn’t play golf in any of the tournaments, I just performed on the shows.

“In June 1986, I participated in The Diamonds Celebrity Golf Tournament, which was held in Hampton, Virginia. In addition to The Diamonds and me, singers Ronnie Dove, Johnny Tillotson, Dee Clark, Ace Cannon and Johnny Lee also performed on the show.” Diane recalls that former teenage heartthrobs Fabian, Frankie Avalon and Bobby Rydell were working in the area at the time and agreed to do a walk-on during the tournament. “I was thrilled to get to meet these guys…especially Fabian! We posed for some photos afterwards and Frankie was holding a beer, which I thought was kind of out of character for him. After the show, most of the performers gathered in the Holiday Inn bar for drinks. Bobby Rydell and I sat at the same table and I actually got to tell him that in 1960 my high school classmates and I had made up a dance to his hit record, Sway. I told him that back then we didn’t even know what ‘marimba rhythms’ were, which were mentioned in one of the lines in the song. He laughed and said, “Don’t worry about it…neither did I.” (laughs) Bobby was a really nice guy and it was a lot of fun for me to get to hobnob with him and some of the other singers who were such big stars when I was in junior high school.”

In 1987, Diane sang at the POW-MIA Celebrity Golf Tournament, which was held in Columbus, Indiana. “I performed on that show with The Diamonds, Dee Clark, Ace Cannon, Ronnie Dove, Ray Peterson and Frankie Ford. Bill Bergie, who played with the Philadelphia Eagles, also participated in the tournament and did a walk-on during the show. He was greeted very warmly, too. Believe me, every crowd loves a pro football player.

“The following year, the tournament was held in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Besides me, the performers this time were Ronnie Dove, Ray Peterson, Frankie Ford, Ace Cannon, Dennis Yost of the Classics IV, Billy J. Kramer, Johnny Tillotson and Carl Dobkins Jr. I remember that Johnny Tillotson got badly sunburned that year playing in the tournament, and he called my room to ask if I had something to put on it. We had gotten to know each other from past shows and he knew that I was into natural health cures, so I gave him some Vitamin E. It worked, too.

“In April of 1989, the tournament was held in Cherry Point, North Carolina. I recently looked up Cherry Point and found that it is a Marine Corps Air Station in North Carolina. The other performers for that show were Tommy Sands, The Dixie Cups, Ronnie Dove, Johnny Cymbal, Tommy Cash, and Johnny Lee; with a walk-on, again, by Bill Bergie. I think we all stayed at a motel in nearby Havelock, and did the show on the air base. However, it’s been so long, it’s a bit fuzzy. I do remember that I was asked, on the spur of the moment, to sing the National Anthem at the show, because no one else wanted to sing it. I was a little nervous, but it went well. I was accompanied onstage by the Marine Corps Color Guard, who did a very dramatic routine around me while I sang.”

Diane also performed at four of the Whitey Herzog Golf Tournaments held near St. Louis, during the time that Whitey was manager of the Cardinals. “Those shows were great as I got to meet some of the ball players for the Cardinals, including Vince Coleman, Ozzie Smith and the legendary Stan “The Man” Musial. A funny story: after I performed one year, I was given a baseball bat which Whitey Herzog had personally autographed for me. I had been dropped off at the St. Louis airport a couple of hours before my flight, and I was sitting there, sleepy-eyed, with the bat across my lap. A guy came walking by, stopped in front of me, and said, ‘I bet you just have to beat them off with a bat, don’t you?’ (laughs)  Ah, those were fun days.”

Diane participated in her second music video in August 1986; however, this time it wasn’t for one of her songs, but for Alabama’s record Touch Me When We’re Dancing (from their album The Touch). “I remember the experience well, “ says Diane, “because my parents were visiting me in Nashville for the last time. My father died the following January. I was called to audition for the part of a video production assistant. I really didn’t want to go because I had plans to have a little get-together with my family, but I went anyway.

“When I got to the audition, I immediately noticed that the room was full of girls. After a while, the man and the woman  conducting the auditions narrowed it down to five of us. The man said to the woman, ‘You decide’, and she answered, ‘No, you decide’. After the third time around, I finally spoke up and asked, ‘Should we all just close our eyes?’ The man said, ‘Hey, I like her sense of humor.’ So, I was in. (laughs)

“On the day of the shoot, we arrived at 11:30 for hair and makeup and didn’t get out until almost midnight. I was paid only $45, and I had spent $42 on the pair of light pink booties that I wore, which were a hot style at the time. It was worth it, though, when Randy Owen walked by and pinched my toe (my legs were crossed) and said, ‘Cute shoes.’  Alabama’s drummer, Mark Herndon, and I really hit it off, due to a common love of jokes. He would jump off the drum stool, come running over and say, ‘I thought of another one!’ Our dinner was catered and the food was really good. There were two young girls about 12, who played ‘groupies’ and their job was to giggle and to appear totally smitten with the Alabama boys. My job was to carry a clip board and look like an assistant. The second frame of the video shows a close up of me, looking pensive, and tapping a pencil to the tempo of the music. They had ratted my hair up pretty big and I remember Charlie Chase asking me, after he’d seen the video, if I had worn a wig. (laughs)

“At the end of the shoot, Alabama thanked us all and asked us to pose for a photo with them. I thought that was a really nice thing to do. The guitar player, Jeff Cook, insisted on carrying my tote bag to my car. He invited me to go with them to California the next day, but I declined. I came away from that job thinking that they were all really nice and down-to-earth guys.”

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“One morning, Ralph walked over to me and said that after I had been on the show the previous day, Chet Atkins called him and was interested in using me on a tour. Then he said, ‘When I told him how happily married you are, he wasn’t interested anymore.’ Then he laughed and walked away. I thought to myself, ‘Yeah, that was really funny, Ralph. It’s only my life and my career you’re joking about.’ A tour with Chet Atkins may have made a big difference in my career. I mean, he could have found out that I was happily married after I was on the tour.  I really resented it that Ralph told Chet that I was happily married and, in doing so, cut me out of  some much-needed work. Ralph came on to me many times but since he couldn’t get anywhere with me, I guess he wanted to make sure that Chet didn’t, either.

“During my years on Ralph’s show, it was always a lot of fun for me to be recognized all around Nashville. It happened often; when I was shopping, visiting someone in the hospital, in restaurants, etc. I once was at Vanderbilt Hospital having a ganglion cyst removed from the inside of my ring finger on my right hand. While the doctor was doing the in-office surgery, he remarked that it may have been caused from holding that microphone too tight on The Ralph Emery Show.’ (laughs) Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium one night, someone introduced me to Dolly Parton’s parents. Dolly’s mother said, ‘We see you all the time on The Ralph Emery Show!’ In 1974, when I worked The Hacienda in Las Vegas, with Tommy Cash, some people came backstage to meet us after our first show. One of the women looked at me and said, ‘I watch you every morning on The Ralph Emery Show.’ Once, when I went to my chiropractor, there was a new receptionist. When she saw me, her jaw dropped and she said, ‘Aren’t you the Outhouse Queen?’ (laughs) I received some interesting bookings, too, as a result of  Ralph’s show. One was an appearance at a little Country Opry, in a small town in Kentucky. My opening act was a guy who played the Boots Randolph song, Yakety Sax, using a comb and a piece of paper. What can I say? My gigs were never dull. (laughs)

“Ralph’s life story, Memories…The Autobiography of Ralph Emery, was released in 1991. I bought a copy and took it to the show to have him autograph it. He wrote in it, ‘To Diane Jordan, The Outhouse Queen…and a great singer. My best to you always, Love, Ralph Emery.’ He wrote a story about me on page 123, but he didn’t mention my name. The story concerned two old ladies, Maude and Dorothy Paul, who attended the show every morning. In the book, Ralph writes: ‘A singer came on the show once with a bare midriff and the Pauls wouldn’t speak to her, and shunned her efforts to be friendly.’ That was true, but those two old women did that to me many times. If they thought I was wearing something too sexy, they gave me dirty looks and wouldn’t speak to me. (laughs) I told the band about it one morning and one of them said, ‘Never mind. You just keep wearing what you’re wearing.’ One morning, I actually wore a black lace hot pants outfit with a midriff top. I was in great shape and I really didn’t think anything about it. That morning, WSM received three telephone complaints about my outfit. One woman said that her 15-year old son watched the show while getting ready for school and she didn’t think that he should be subjected to something as provocative as my outfit. She left her phone number and gave her name as Mrs. Batey. I told Ralph that I should call her back and say, ‘Well, Mrs. Batey, I know that you don’t like my outfit, but what did Master Batey think about it?’ (laughs)

“The Ralph Emery Show maintained the largest lead-in audience for the Today Show of any local program in the United States. It’s now considered an important part of Nashville’s television history and, despite a few disappointments connected to the show, I consider it a great privilege to have been a part of it for all those years.”

Diane got her third record deal in late 1971, this time with the tiny Jack O’Diamond Records, in Nashville. “At the time, I was singing with a group called The Sugar Compound at the Sheraton Hotel’s Camelot Lounge, which was downtown between 8th and 9th Avenues on Broadway. Songwriter Alex Zanetis, who wrote Brenda Lee’s pop hit, As Usual, came into the lounge one night in November of 1971. He waited to talk to me and said that I had the voice he was looking for to sing his ‘masterpiece’— a song called Thanks For These Memories. Alex said that three major labels had told him that they would sign whoever he chose to sing it, so of course, I was excited. He invited me to his office the following Monday so he could play it for me. The song had a beautiful melody, but looking back now, I realize that it really wasn’t commercial. However, I believed his hype that I would be signed to a major label if I recorded the song, so I cut it. In all, I wound up cutting four songs that Alex wrote: Thanks for These Memories, As Usual, If Not Forever,and a very strange song called She’s An Island, which my parents absolutely hated. John Ragsdale, Ray Stevens’ brother, did all the arrangements and we recorded the tracks with a fifteen piece orchestra. For some reason, John used a corny, Tommy Dorsey type trombone intro on If Not Forever. No one could believe it…it was really, really bad. During the session, my husband Larry was in the control room and he told me later that Alex Zanetis was in there drinking the whole time and getting drunk. One song even came out too fast. I was disappointed with the whole lousy experience.

“Alex called a few days later and said that Thanks For These Memories had ‘a real Christmas feel to it’ and he thought that it should be released right away, which was about three weeks before Christmas. That was a ridiculous thing to do…nobody releases a record at that time of year. He said that none of the major labels wanted to do that, so he was going to rush it out on his own label, Jack O’Diamond Records. Up to that point, I didn’t even know that he had a label. He assured me that the record would take off right away and that right after Christmas, ‘one of the major labels will pick it up.’ Of course that didn’t happen; it was all a lie. Ralph Emery wouldn’t even play the record. He said, ‘Diane, that song is a piece of shit!’ He was right…it was. A couple of years later, I got a call from a girl named JoAnne Steele. (She had once been married to Eddie Crandall, who was Marty Robbins’ manager in the 60s). JoAnne wanted to ask me some questions about Alex Zanetis. He had talked her into buying the tracks from my session for $5,000. But when she tried to record with the tracks, she found that she couldn’t sing the songs in my keys. I felt very sorry for her. Alex had really ripped her off.”

Despite the frustrating time she had with her recording career, Diane savors the memories she has of her stage work. “Aside from appearing on the Grand Ole Opry, the absolute highlight of my performing career was a four week engagement in February 1974, at the Hacienda Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, with The Tommy Cash Show. We were required to be there for rehearsal the day before our show opened. That was a first for me, to rehearse with a sound and light crew.  Having worked so many little clubs with poor sound systems, and bands that wouldn’t even rehearse my songs if I sent a tape ahead of time, it was pure pleasure to sing with a really good band and a state-of-the-art sound system.  We did two shows a night for 28 days. During the engagement, I was a guest on a local TV talk show. The other guests were Danny Thomas and Liza Minnelli’s half-sister, Lorna Luft.  Danny, of course, held court in the green room and we all listened to his stories, which I thoroughly enjoyed. He and the producer of the show both mentioned that they thought that I resembled Mitzi Gaynor. I had heard of her but I didn’t know what she looked like, so I didn’t realize what a compliment it was until I saw a photo of her. The magazine Country Song Roundup had a Vegas column back then that was written by a woman who lived in Vegas. She reviewed all the country acts who appeared anywhere in town, and I heard she was going to review our show, too. I grew up reading this magazine, so I was excited, fully expecting my name to appear in her column. However, it never happened. Tommy Cash told me that Joan, the columnist, had called him when we  were in Vegas, and hinted that he should take her out to lunch. But he didn’t  so she left us out of her column. That was very, very disappointing for me, however it doesn’t dull the memory of  what was really a fantastic gig.

“Conversely, I think the most discouraged I have ever been in my career began that April, right after I worked in Vegas with Tommy. I had been booked for four weekends at Fairfield Glade, a vacation home resort, near Crossville, Tennessee, about 140 miles from Nashville. The last weekend of the job, as I was driving there, I began sneezing uncontrollably. By the time I arrived, I had a mound of used tissues on the seat beside me. I thought it was a spring cold but a month later, I wasn’t any better. Later on, Larry, and I drove home to Sutton for my ten-year class reunion. I woke up at 4:00 AM, sneezing and choking. I went to a clinic in a neighboring town and was told that I had allergies. I later found that I had become allergic to feathers, which explained why I became worse, as I was still sleeping on the same old feather pillow I had grown up with. Antihistamines would stop the sneezing and runny nose, but I had terrible headaches, and worse, a very nasal sound to my voice. I mean, nothing would take it away. I was still singing, but there were a lot of songs I couldn’t sing and I knew that I didn’t sound good. I became very depressed and cried all the time. I would cry in the shower, while I was cooking…even while I was ironing. I was not pleasant to be around, and I knew it. In fact, for Christmas that year, I bought a book for Larry titled ‘How To Live With A Bitch’!

“I was really despondent when I heard that Sonny James had just gone through some serious allergy problems and had to quit singing for a while. Larry was working with Bill Anderson’s band at the time and one day he called home from the taping of their TV show to tell me that Sonny James was the guest. Larry had mentioned my allergy problems to Sonny who said that he would be happy to talk with me. I drove down to the TV station immediately. Sonny told me that he had gone to an allergy clinic in Texas. They had tested him and formulated desensitization shots for him that he injected himself with. Eventually, he regained his voice. When I heard this, I was really encouraged. First, I went to a private allergist in Nashville, but he was about 80 years old and was going to give me two thousand tests. I was hysterical all the way home, thinking that it would be a long time before I could even begin the shots. Then I found out that Vanderbilt Hospital had an allergy clinic, so I went there next. They asked a lot of questions and gave me only 30 tests. I began the shots right away and noticed a vast improvement in only two months. I had some days without the nasal sound, so I knew I would get better in time. Until I totally recovered, however, life was pure hell. There were times, in fact, that I wanted to die. I had previously had several encores on the Grand Ole Opry and favorable reviews in Las Vegas and I was getting more bookings, and then all of a sudden, I couldn’t sing. It really changed me forever, I think.

“As time goes by, my allergies have become worse in other ways. I’m now allergic to all kinds of smoke and cannot be around it at all, so club work is no longer an option for me. I recently did a demo and the keyboard player had used some kind of lotion on his hands. As he was running the song with me, the scent stopped up my nose. So, in a way, I guess it’s a good thing that I am concentrating now on songwriting, rather than singing.”

Roughly a year and a half after recovering from her severe problems with allergies in 1974, Diane managed to get a new record deal; this time with industry giant Columbia Records. Diane credits singer Marty Robbins as the primary catalyst for this promising new opportunity. “At the time, I was booked as Marty’s opening act on a show in Denver. Afterwards, he asked me if I was on a record label. I wasn’t  and he told me to come to his office because he was interested in producing me. After we did the session, he played one of the songs for Rick Blackburn, who was the head of Columbia back then (which was also Marty’s label), and Rick agreed to sign me to a contract for two singles. If either of the singles had been a hit, of course, the label would have cut an entire album on me.

“As I said, Marty produced my first session for Columbia, in which I cut two songs that he wrote, and two songs that I found myself. One of them was a cute, uptempo song called Are You A Real Cowboy (Or Just One Of Them Country Singers). I found out later that Marty had played Rick Blackburn only one of the cuts and that was The Way I Loved You Best, which he wrote. I knew then, and I know now, that Columbia signed me just because of Marty. As a result, they did no promotion on me whatsoever. I was booked on some shows with Marty in Canada, and the promoter, Harry Joyce, called the record company’s Detroit office to get some copies of my record. Believe it or not, Columbia’s Detroit office didn’t even know that I was on the label. I guess I didn’t even rate an interoffice memo!

“During the time that I was on Columbia, I was booked on some shows with Marty. However, I never rode on his tour bus and the promoter always had to hire a band to back me.  Marty never allowed anyone to use his band. Still, it was always fun to open for him as he never did his shows the same way. One night, he came onstage and after a couple of songs, talked to the audience. He said, ‘Boy, that Diane Jordan is great, isn’t she? And what a healthy girl. One night I saw her backstage at the Opry, having a conversation with Dolly Parton. They were standing back to back.’ The audience roared.

“I appeared twice as a guest on Marty’s portion of the Grand Ole Opry. Marty had nothing to do with it, though. Both times, someone canceled a couple of hours before the show and I happened to be backstage. Since I lived close enough to drive home to change into a stage outfit, I was chosen to fill in. I also worked some shows with Ronny Robbins, Marty’s son. I remember we had a gig once at the Governor’s Mansion in Montgomery, Alabama. Governor Wallace and his wife, Cornelia, were hosting a dinner party, poolside, for several race car drivers. It was the night before the big race at Talladega and a singer named Jack Barlow, his band, Ronny and I were the performers. Governor Wallace had already been shot by then and he was in a wheelchair. I carried in my tote bag and my dress, and was immediately approached by a garish older women who offered to show me to a room where I could change my clothes. Her makeup looked as if it had been applied in a moving vehicle and there was a large glass stone missing from her gaudy necklace. I later found out that she was Ruby Folsom, Governor Wallace’s mother-in-law. She volunteered to take me on a tour of the mansion. That was pretty cool, however it really embarrassed me when she opened the door to George Jr.’s room saying, ‘’Oh, George, Diane Jordan wants to see your room.’ (laughs) You know, like he was a kid from down the block.

“Due to his busy touring and recording schedule, Marty didn’t have time to keep producing me after we cut my first single for Columbia, The Way I Loved You Best. He had just done that to help me get started [with the label], so Glenn Sutton (Lynn Anderson’s husband at the time) was assigned to produce my next session. Unfortunately, my dealings with Glenn would prove to be very ugly and upsetting. He lied to me and built my hopes up, which I thought was a very cruel thing to do.

“When Glenn Sutton was chosen to produce me, I came across a song that I loved called Undercover Lovers that was written by Tammy Wynette, George Richey and Robert John Jones. The first time I heard it I knew it was a potential hit record. A booking agency called Celebrity International was booking some dates for me at that time and the owner, Bob, had given me a tape to listen to of the song. It had been recorded by another girl singer and her deal was off, so the song was free. Bob told me that Tammy and George Richey wrote it when they were having an affair (even though she was still married to George Jones). However, Tammy never recorded it; in fact, it’s not even listed on BMI. Not long after I was dropped from Columbia Records, Stella Parton had a hit on a song by the same title, but it wasn’t the same song.

“The second song I recorded with Glenn was titled Get Ready For My World, and it was written by Glenn, Billy Sherrill and Jerry Chessier. Sutton told me that Billy had originally wanted to cut it with Janie Fricke but that Glenn had talked him out of it so that I could do it. I would find out later, after I had been dropped by the label, that this was a big, fat lie. My husband and I saw Billy Sherrill one night at Mario’s Restaurant in Nashville when we were there for dinner. While Larry was paying the check, I talked to Billy. I asked him if it was true that Glenn had talked him out of cutting Get Ready For My World on Janie. Billy said, ‘Talked me out of it? Hell, I didn’t think it was good enough for Fricke’s album.’

“The night we cut the song, I remember that Glenn walked me out to my car. He put his arm around me and said, ‘We’re a team, you and I. If Billy doesn’t let us do another session, we’ll just find another label.’ What a liar he was. I found out the true story from Gene Ferguson, who was a promotion rep for Columbia Records at the time. He also managed Johnny Duncan for a while. He was my friend at Columbia and I could count on him to tell me the truth.  I would hang out at his office and he’d show me radio station charts where my records were being played. Once, when Gene was on a promotions tour, he went out of his way to come to the Diplomat Lounge, in Montgomery, AL to see me perform. He was impressed and even told Rick Blackburn that I did a great show with a house band, and that the label should get behind me. It didn’t work, though. Rick had absolutely no interest in my career. Maybe he felt that Marty Robbins had placed him in an awkward situation and that he really had no choice but to sign me.

“Gene said that Glenn was told by Rick Blackburn, ‘We owe Diane Jordan another session…just get it over with.’ He knew this, yet he insisted on putting out Get Ready For My World as a single instead of Undercover Lovers which was the record I wanted out as it was a lot more commercial. I mean, why not humor me [by releasing the better song], when he knew I was going to be let go anyway? After Columbia dropped me, Glenn wouldn’t even return my phone calls.

“In 2007, I found out that a friend of mine could get Glenn’s e-mail address and I was going to write him a scathing letter. Just my luck, he died suddenly. I didn’t even get the satisfaction of calling him a liar for what he did to me.

“Glenn Sutton was just another stone in the road—one of many I came across.”

Diane admits to having a highly disappointing professional relationship with Columbia’s hit-making producer Billy Sherrill, as well. “I never knew Billy all that well but I thought he had a very arrogant air about him. I first met him around 1970 when I was singing at the Western Room in Printer’s Alley. His cousin, Dianne Sherrill, was also singing there at the time. Billy came in on a Saturday night with another young girl singer. He asked Dianne to call her up to sing and then he asked Dianne to have me come over to his table. He told me that he really liked my voice and said to come down to his office the next week. I was thrilled beyond words. We were sitting against the back wall at the Western Room, directly in front of the stage. The girl he had brought with him was onstage singing Crazy and she wasn’t doing a very good job. Billy knew she wasn’t any good, of course. Dianne was sitting in the middle of us and I heard Billy say to her, ‘I  know she can’t sing, but you oughta see her naked.’ I leaned forward and said, ‘I heard that.’ Billy said, ‘Well, you weren’t supposed to.’ The next week, I rode two city buses to get to Billy’s office and upon arriving, I was ushered in to see him. He told me how good I looked and then he proceeded to tell me that I had ‘a weird voice’ and that he didn’t know how to record me. He played a couple of songs for me from a new Jody Miller session he had worked on and that was it. I was dumbfounded—I didn’t understand why he had told me to come to his office [if he wasn’t interested in working with me]. Was he so used to girl singers that would come on to him and offer him favors that he didn’t care enough to make the first move, and possibly be rejected?

“You know, at some point in the early 70s, Marty Robbins had left Columbia and had signed with Decca. He didn’t do well at Decca, though, and so he came back to Columbia in 1976. Marty said that Billy Sherrill told him that he’d ‘bring him back from the dead’ but that he would have to do everything he told him to do. Marty had just written El Paso City and wanted his son, Ronny, to record it, but Ronny didn’t want to do it because he felt it would look like he was riding on Marty’s coattails. So, Marty cut the song himself and it came off so well he told Billy that he wanted that to be his first single. Billy said that he didn’t think it was a hit but Marty insisted that Columbia put it out. It turned out to be his first number one record in eight years. Marty grinned and said, ‘You see, Mr. Sherrill doesn’t know everything.’

“After Columbia Records dropped me, I still continued to stop to see Marty if I saw his car at his office on Music Row. Marty’s inner office had a small adjacent room, which contained a sofa and a piano. One day after my friend Michelle got off  work, we drove by Marty’s office and saw his car, so we stopped in. Marty was in a singing mood and he sang a couple of songs for us. This was after he had released The Way I Loved You Best on an album. I asked him to play the song in his key, and I sang harmony with him on it. Marty seemed surprised that our voices blended so well. He said, ‘If you can find us a hit song, I’ll cut a duet with you.’ I shot right back, ‘If you really mean that, I’ll find a hit song.’ I immediately called my friend, Bob Tubert, a songwriter, producer, publisher and song plugger, to ask him to look for a potential hit for a duet.

“Not long after that, Marty told me that Billy Sherrill was pushing for him to do a duet with either Jody Miller or Tammy Wynette. But Marty didn’t think that his voice would blend with either one of them so he told Billy that he decided he didn’t want to do a duet with anyone. It’s not very likely that Billy would have let him record a duet with me, anyway. I had to call Bob Tubert to tell him that the duet was no longer an option. Bob told me that he could have gotten the song, Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle To You) for us,had Marty been able to keep his word. (author’s note: Old Flames… went on to be a Top 10 record for Dolly Parton in 1980.)

Diane says, “Don’t ever tell me that ‘you make your own luck.’ I believe that we have to do our part and be ready when luck does kick in, but timing is everything. Unfortunately, I came along at a point in Marty’s career when he could no longer call the shots. And I certainly couldn’t either. Not at Columbia.”

With the demise of her deal with Columbia Records (her fourth recording contract in fifteen years), Diane admits that it was often difficult in the late 70s to remain positive about her career. “I remember I used to say that for me to stay in the business [after all I went through] was like a woman who stays with a man who beats her. It felt that way, too. It was tough sometimes, retaining my enthusiasm, but I kept thinking, ‘Well, it’s going to happen for me, it’s just going to take a little longer.’ I went through many periods of depression but then someone would come along, wanting to help me, and I would think, ‘Yes! This is where it’s all going to fall into place.’

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Diane reveals that her experiences with several other stars in the business were much more favorable than her short-lived friendships with Jeanne Pruett, Laura Lee McBride and Dottie West. “In 1970, I decided to have my nose fixed. I had heard that Jeannie Seely had hers done, so I asked her about it. She was more than happy to tell me all about the surgery and what to expect from it. I must say, Jeannie really calmed my fears that day. We had a sort of  bond after that and she’s always been very nice to me whenever she sees me.

“The first show that I ever did with Tommy Cash was probably in 1969. It was in Michigan, and I flew in just in time to take a cab to the auditorium. Tommy came up to me and said that he was leaving right after the show and that if I hadn’t checked into a room yet, I could have his room at Howard Johnson’s. I didn’t make a lot of money at the time and saving enough for a motel room was a big deal to me. Another time, he invited me to ride back to Nashville with Jimmy Peppers and him. Tommy warned me, though, that they liked the air conditioning cranked up really high and suggested that I take the blanket off of the bed in my room. I was glad I did—I think I would have frozen to death without it! Tommy Cash and I worked together a lot in the 70s and 80s. My husband, Larry, played in Tommy’s band for about a year and a half, in 1980 and 81, and I was on some of their dates, which were always a lot of fun. Of all of the bands Larry played in, he liked Tommy’s the best. They did some comedy routines that were just hilarious. Larry and I think the world of Tommy Cash. In fact, he is easily one of our favorite people in the business.

“I was on a show with Glen Campbell once, in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. I knew the promoter, and he wanted me to be on the show. Glen was married to Mac Davis’s ex-wife Sarah at the time, and she was originally from Topeka. After the show, I rode back to town with Glen and the promoter, while Sarah rode with her relatives. It was probably a thirty minute ride, so Glen and I had the chance to talk. I told him that I had loved his TV show and that I’d been so sure that I would be a guest on it some day that I had learned one of his album cuts so that I would have our duet all ready. (laughs) He asked me which song it was and I said it was the Jimmy Webb song, Tunesmith. Glen said, ‘Well, let’s sing it now.’ So, my dream came true, to sing with Glen Campbell, but not exactly the way I had scripted it. Still, that’s a very special memory for me.

“As I said earlier, Brenda Lee was one of my idols as a teenager, so I was absolutely thrilled to meet her at the taping of Marty Robbins’ TV show, Marty Robbins Spotlight, in 1977. A friend introduced me to Brenda and she said, ‘Oh, I know Diane; I see her all the time on The Ralph Emery Show.’ I was totally blown away that Brenda Lee knew who I was! But she has always been nice to me every time I have seen her.

“I was booked on a show with Porter Wagoner once, in Missouri, and he was also very kind to me. He even gave me the ‘star room’ at the back of the bus, and he slept in one of the bunks. How’s that for being nice? (laughs)

“Justin Tubb was very friendly, too. We were traveling to a gig together and a few miles down the road, he brought me a glass of wine. Though I didn’t really want it, I drank it because no one had ever done that for me before, and I thought it was a very sweet gesture.

“I also did a lot of shows with Leroy Van Dyke and his band. On one occasion, I flew to Nebraska to visit my parents and then they drove me to the show in Council Bluffs, Iowa. I was riding back to Nashville with Leroy and the band, and we were leaving right after the show.  Leroy gave his room to my parents, so that they wouldn’t have to drive back that night. They talked about that many times afterward.”

Comedian Jerry Clower made a somewhat different impression on Diane. “I did a show with Jerry, in South Carolina. I had never met him before so I had hoped to say hello before we went on. He finally arrived (he had a car and a driver) just in time to go onstage. Immediately after his show, he walked right out the door and into the car and left. No one there got to meet him. I guess Jerry just didn’t want to be bothered with the rest of us.

“Another time, I was booked on a short tour in Minnesota and a couple of other states up north. A girl who worked for the promoter, and I, were riding there with a booking agent and his friend. They were drinking and driving and we were afraid they were going to crash the car and kill us all. I mentioned this to Margo Smith, who was also on the tour, and she said, ‘You girls get your things and put them on my bus. You can’t ride with them!’ Margo is a wonderful lady.

“Singer Stu Phillips made it possible for me to sing on the Grand Ole Opry, and I will never forget him for that. I was privileged to make about 35 Opry appearances in all. I had earlier been a guest on Stu’s TV show, Music Place, in Louisville, Kentucky, a couple of times. When the regular girl singer spot came open, he called to see if I was interested. This was in 1972. We filmed four shows in one day, once a month. Later on, Stu asked the Opry manager, Bud Wendall, if it was okay to feature me on his portion of the Opry and Bud agreed. I was first scheduled to sing on the Saturday matinée. I had hung around the Opry for so many years by then, that I didn’t expect to be nervous, but I was. My knees were actually shaking. When I came offstage, Hank Locklin was standing there with his daughter, who was collecting autographs. I remember he said to her, ‘Be sure to get Diane Jordan’s autograph.’ I could hardly control my hand to write my name! I always got a lot of applause on the Opry but Stu was reluctant to call me back for an encore, not wanting to make any waves with any of the other stars. One night, though, I literally brought the house down singing Donna Fargo’s The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA, and he brought me back onstage for an encore. Believe me, that night I was the happiest girl in the whole USA! I was young, good looking, newly wedded to a handsome husband, and so certain that stardom was just around the bend. It turns out I was wrong about the last part…”

Despite the many charitable and generous people she has worked with in the business, Diane is quick to admit that she has experienced some extremely unpleasant situations with some of its best known stars. In fact, one of them happened on the very night that she received her first encore on the Opry. “For eight years, my husband Larry was in Bill Anderson’s band, The Po’ Boys, and I’ll never forget what happened that night after their show. I was sitting in the car while Larry was loading his equipment, when Bill walked over to me. Still bubbling over from the great reception I had received that night from the audience, I said, ‘Guess what? I got an encore on the Opry tonight!’ But Bill didn’t smile at me. Instead, he looked at me with disgust and said, ‘Yeah, you got ‘em when they were warmed up; we were on the first show.’ At first I thought he was joking but then he turned his back on me and walked away. Still, I really thought he would turn around, laughing, and say, ‘Gotcha’, or something like that, but he didn’t  I felt my eyes stinging with tears, my heart was pounding and my face was hot. I still can’t believe that a big star like he was at the time could be so cruel to a young singer who was happy and so full of …hope.

“Today, Bill Anderson is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame and is worth many millions of dollars. Why couldn’t he just congratulate me and let me have my little moment in the sun? My encore meant nothing in the big picture [of his life]; it was just something special to me, and Bill had to ruin it. I will never forget the way he made me feel that night. What a mean thing to do…and what a small man.

“You know, Bill Anderson has always been presented to the public as a down-to-earth, humorous personality. He was never a good singer, though, and he knew it. My husband Larry has a great voice and received encores many times when he was with Bill’s show. One time The Po’ Boys played on a demo session for Bill and there was one song that Bill didn’t have the range to sing, even though he had written it. He tried doing it several times and finally he said they would go on to the next song.  By then they had gone over the song so many times that Larry knew it by heart. He spoke up and said, ‘I can sing it, ’ but Bill wouldn’t let him do it.”

Diane also had some problems with several of the wives of  The Po’ Boys. “They were apparently very jealous of me. In those years I sang on local TV quite often and people knew who I was. When I attended Fan Fair, a lot of musicians and stars would come up to hug me and the band wives hated it. (But girls with big chests always get hugged.) (laughs) When Larry and I got engaged, all the band wives ganged up on me and wanted to know if we were going to have children. I said that we weren’t, thus dashing their hopes of my losing my figure!

“Whenever I went to the TV tapings of The Bill Anderson Show, the wives of The Po’ Boys always ignored me. It’s kind of funny, but if only one of them was there, we would get along fine, but if there were two or more, I was the outsider. It was like high school all over again! It was absolutely ridiculous.”

Bill Anderson’s frequent duet partner, Jan Howard, also proved to be a thorn in Diane’s side. “Although I never wanted the job of  Bill Anderson’s ‘girl singer’, I wanted to be able to fill in one time for Jan Howard, just to be able to get on the bus with Larry and sing with that great band, and use the great sound system they had. Larry mentioned this to Bill, and one of the other band members overheard it and said (sarcastically), ‘Oh yeah, we would all like to take our women out on the road with us.’ But then, Jan developed a blood clot in her leg and was told that she would have to stay off it for two weeks. Bill called me and asked if I could fill in that weekend. I was thrilled. I was all packed and Larry and I were ready to walk out the door when the phone rang. It was Bill, telling us that Jan was going after all. She had heard that I was filling in for her and she wouldn’t allow it. She would only let singers like Marion Worth or Jeanne Pruett sub for her since they were both older and she didn’t consider either of them to be a threat.”

Along with Bill Anderson, Jan Howard, and the wives of The Po’ Boys, the perennially sunny and much beloved Dolly Parton was sadly, also a disappointment to Diane. “I met Dolly Parton when she first came to Nashville, in the summer of 1964. I went to the Capitol Building on Music Row, and when I walked in, I saw her with a friend of mine, Bob, standing in the back hallway, next to the soda machine. He introduced me to Dolly, saying, ‘This is Dolly Parton; she just moved here from Knoxville.’ Then he added, ‘She’s a pop singer,’ and he turned and looked at Dolly when he said it. Dolly nodded and said, ‘That’s right’ in her southern drawl. Bob said, ‘She almost bit my head off yesterday for introducing her as a country singer.’ (Years later, Dolly would blame Monument’s Fred Foster for making her record pop music, but that’s what she wanted to be back then…a pop singer.) In late 1965, she signed with Foster’s Combine Music Publishing Company and with his label, Monument Records.

“Dolly Parton was pretty rough looking when she first hit town. She had brassy, home-bleached hair that was piled high on top of her head, and terrible makeup. I saw her at the Tennessee State Fair that year and she was wearing a crinkled plastic mini skirt and jacket and high heeled ankle boots with poodle fur, tied on the side with poodle balls hanging down! At the time, I was dating a singer named Pete who’d had a Top Ten pop hit in 1962 that I would rather not name, as I don’t want to identify him without his permission. Pete was then working in Foster Studios on 7th Avenue, in downtown Nashville, setting up the studio for recording sessions. The engineer, Bill Porter, was a Church of Christ member. It soon became apparent that Pete would have to go to church with Bill and his family in order to keep his job. I started coming around and it soon became apparent that I would have to go to church, too, in order for Pete to keep his job. (laughs) I was happy to go, though, as I’d have gone anywhere with Pete. I got a babysitting job for a week, watching the children of a musician and his wife, so I had to miss church with Pete and the Porters. The next week, on the way to church, one of the Porter children said, ‘We like you better than Dolly.’ There was an awkward silence. I didn’t know what was going on, but Pete explained it to me later on. He said that he had taken Dolly to church, the previous week.  He picked her up and she was wearing an orange plastic mini skirt and of course she had that brassy, frizzy hair and garish makeup. Bill Porter took Pete aside and said, ‘Son, don’t ever again bring trash like that to our church.’

“One day, I was downtown shopping and as I was just going into Cain Sloan’s Department Store, Dolly was coming out. She was carrying four boxes of shoes. She told me that she was getting a $50 a week ‘draw’ (against future royalties) from Combine Music. I was really envious. By this time, Fred Foster had sent her to a local ‘finishing school’ and Dolly looked very classy that day. Her hair was an ash blonde, her makeup was beautiful, and her clothes were very tasteful. Through the years, Dolly would always speak to me whenever she saw me backstage at the Opry, and she was always very nice.

“Fast forward to 2004. Dolly and I have a mutual friend, Johnny Cochran, who lives in Fayetteville, Georgia, near Atlanta. Johnny first met Dolly at a show in Georgia when she was still in high school. He became her friend and eventually came to know all of the Partons. To this very day, in fact, he can always get tickets to Dolly’s concerts, and he always gets backstage to see her, too. Well, in 2004, I drove to Georgia to go to Dolly’s concert with Johnny and two other friends. We went to the ‘Meet and Greet’ afterwards and Dolly was happy to see Johnny. She hugged him, and they spoke. When it was my ‘turn’ I smiled and said, ‘Hi Dolly, I’m Diane Jordan; I haven’t seen you for a long time.’ Dolly looked me up and down without smiling and said, ‘Yeah, I thought that was you,’ and then nothing. Total silence. I quickly said, ‘I’ve been writing with Merle Kilgore, and he wanted me to give you a CD of three of our songs.’ I handed it to the ever-present Judy Ogle [Dolly’s longtime best friend and personal assistant]. Immediately, Dolly said, ‘How is Merle?’ It had been in the news that he was fighting cancer, and I told her that he was doing better at the time. I just couldn’t get it out of my mind that Dolly was so cold to me. Why? I mean, we hadn’t known each other well enough to have ever had a problem of any kind.

“Dolly Parton became not only a superstar, but an American icon, and is worth about 400 million dollars. If our situations were reversed, I can’t believe that I wouldn’t have been kind to someone I knew personally, who worked for years in the business, but didn’t ‘make it’, and who had driven over 250 miles to see me. Why couldn’t she just smile and say, ‘Diane, it’s nice to see you after all these years. How are you?’ She was deliberately rude to me that day, and it still hurts.

“Everything ever said and printed about Dolly is that she’s just a wonderful, down-home, friendly person, totally unchanged by her success. But, believe me, I did not imagine how she treated me. Cold is the only word for it. The only satisfaction for my making that trip to Atlanta was getting to see Dolly up close—believe me, she looks much, much better on television! She was nothing but skin and bones…(and) like Michael Jackson and Cher, she looked neither young nor old. Even Johnny Cochran, who is a good ole country boy, said (with a frown), ‘Wow! Dolly don’t look good.’”

“You know, among those of us who were Nashville performers—especially those of us who weren’t stars—there has always been a lot of backstabbing. Someone would ask, ‘Have you been working?’ If I said that I had been, the next question was ‘Who’s booking you?’ Then, he or she would go to the agent and try to get work. One girl singer who had no credits at all, pretended to be my friend and then used me to meet people. She went to one of my agents and said, ‘Well if you can book Diane Jordan in that club, you can book me there, too.’

“Many times back then, when I was out there performing and wearing sexy clothes, a lot of the older women singers weren’t very nice to me. I think I realized then that there is nothing more aging to a woman than a jealous look on her face. I swore that I would never turn into that type of woman, and I am happy to say that I haven’t.

“By the end of the 1970s, Nashville no longer had the friendly, ‘small town’ feel that it once had. In the 1960s, the atmosphere was actually quite bohemian. Writers, singers and musicians would hang out in Music Row offices and most of them had very little money and many (including me) didn’t even have cars. Many of them took pills and roared around town and then bragged about how many days they had gone without sleep. (laughs)

“The 1970s brought more discipline and professionalism to the business. The musicians were a lot more serious about their craft but they also had to be if they wanted to play in a star’s band. I mean, the Johnny Cash Show (on TV) used a full orchestra! Back then, the stars usually kept the same musicians in their bands for several years. Opryland USA opened in 1972 and it provided jobs for many singers, musicians and dancers until its closing in December of 1997. It was a wonderful training ground for young performers. I sang there with Stu Phillips, who is a Grand Ole Opry member. Stu had a syndicated TV show called Music Place that filmed four shows, once a month, in Louisville, Kentucky. I worked on his road shows, his TV show, as well as on the Grand Ole Opry with him. In July of 1972, Opryland had started getting complaints that they didn’t have enough country music. So they added Eagle Lake Theater, which was an outdoor theater. Stu, his band, and I did three, half-hour shows per day, Thursday to Sunday through the end of the season, which was early November. It was a lot of fun and a very easy gig, with an air conditioned trailer to hang out in between shows. The 1980s brought cable TV production to Nashville, which meant more jobs for musicians, singers and production people. Those were really great years for country music. The business has changed so much since then.”

Diane gives a lot of credit to legendary country music disk jockey and TV host Ralph Emery for greatly helping her visibility in the 1970s. “The Ralph Emery Show was on Nashville’s Channel 4, from 1972 – 1992 and it would be a very special part of my career. I had done some guest spots on the Channel 4 Morning Show in 1969 and 1970, when other people hosted the show before Ralph took it over again in 1972. I would occasionally appear on Ralph’s show everyday from Monday through Friday, but usually I was only on it one or two days a week. As a child, in tiny Sutton, Nebraska, I thought that anyone on TV was a star, so being on TV every week was a big deal to me.

“Of course, in those years I was working the road a lot, too, and was sometimes out of town for several weeks at a time. Sometimes, Ralph would call me at 4:00 AM and say, ‘I need you to do the show.’ Sleepy-eyed, I would turn to Larry and say, ‘Ralph needs me’, and I would get up and start getting ready. At first, it was an hour show from 6:00 to 7:00 AM. It was later extended to ninety minutes, starting at 5:30. Being a night person, it was never possible for me to get a good night’s sleep before doing the show, but I did my best. After the show was over, I was exhausted and I would go home and go back to bed. Sometimes I would even wake up later thinking that I had missed the show altogether. (laughs)

“Doing Ralph’s TV show was great as I could sing any song that I wanted to sing, which was a real treat for me. I usually worked with club bands that would stumble through standards, so it was wonderful to finally get to sing current songs with the right chords being played behind me. I would bring in a record or a tape and the band would play it and then write a chord chart for it. I did Janis Ian’s At Seventeen, Abba’s Fernando, Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now, many of Karen Carpenter’s songs and lots of other songs that weren’t even country. In fact, Ralph preferred it that I sang pop songs during ratings week. He would also sometimes ask me to bring my husband, Larry to sing on the show. We did some duets and sometimes Larry would sing a solo, too. At the time, Larry was in Bill Anderson’s band. One morning, after his performance, Ralph said, ‘Great singing, Larry. Better than ole ‘Whisper’, in fact’, (which was Bill Anderson’s nickname). That didn’t help Larry’s position with Bill at all. (laughs)

 “In the mid 1970s, Larry and I had a custom-built Mako Shark Corvette. To promote the Nashville Corvette Club’s upcoming car show, Larry actually drove the car into the studio one day on Ralph’s show. That was fun. The show gave me the opportunity to meet performers whom I would never have met otherwise. Burl Ives was there one morning, as were Jimmy Dean, NASCAR winner Darrell Waltrip, and actor Randy Boone. A funny thing happened when Merle Haggard and Leona Williams (they later married and divorced) showed up on the set one morning, looking like they had just rolled out of bed. One of my friends, a platinum blonde, Barbie-doll type named Kelly, was with me that morning. Leona was across the studio, talking to Ralph, when Merle walked over to Kelly and me. He asked us, ‘You girls got any kind of drugs?’ Kelly, in her best Barbie voice, piped up, ‘I have some Go-Go Pep Pills.’ She immediately reached into her tiny, hot pink train-case purse. Merle said, ‘What?’ Kelly repeated, ‘Go-Go Pep Pills. I get them over the counter at K-Mart.’ Merle looked totally disgusted and walked away. About forty-five minutes later, though, he must have been feeling pretty desperate. He walked back over to us and said, ‘What are those things you’ve got? Let me try a couple of ‘em.’ So, Kelly gave him a few of her caffeine pills from K-Mart. I can’t remember if they did anything for him. (laughs)

“The Outhouse Races were a popular feature of Ralph’s show for about three summers, and they were a lot of fun to do. Ralph dubbed me the official ‘Outhouse Queen’. I wore a bathing suit and a ribbon banner that I had made, with the words ‘Miss Outhouse Speedway’ written in glitter. I also bought a rhinestone prom tiara to wear and Larry made a tiny little wooden outhouse to attach to the front. The ‘vehicles’ in the races were actual outhouses mounted on two long poles. There were two runners holding the poles in the front and two in the back while one person rode inside. They also had a ‘pace house’ which was an outhouse mounted on a riding lawnmower. (laughs) The races were first held in the parking lot at WSMV-TV and then later on at the Fairgrounds Racetrack. At the racetrack, of course, a lot more people came out to watch us. One of the races was called The Mayors Race. Several mayors from  nearby towns attended the event, in addition to Nashville’s mayor at the time, Richard Fulton. Governor Lamar Alexander came along that morning with Mayor Fulton (who won the race). As Outhouse Queen, it was my duty to hand the trophy to him and give him a kiss, which I did. After I kissed him, Mayor Fulton said, ‘Wait, you’ve got to kiss the governor, too.’ He pulled him over so I kissed Lamar Alexander, too.

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Not surprisingly, perhaps, the experience of recording with Chips Moman had a definite down side for Diane. “After we did the Padre session, Chips came on to me,” she alleges. “He said he wanted to move me to Memphis, buy me a car and set me up in an apartment near where he lived. He also said that we could just keep recording stuff together until we got a hit. I told him that I couldn’t move to Memphis because I was in love with someone else. His reply was like a line out of a cheesy Hollywood movie. He actually said, ‘You’re young…you’ll forget.’ Then I remembered that one of the musicians on the session had told me that Chips had a thing going with Merrilee Rush. Maybe he knew that Chips would hit on me and that was his way of warning me. So, I just smiled very sweetly at Chips and said, ‘But then what would I do when Merrilee Rush comes to town?’ Just as I thought, he had nothing more to say.

“[Despite what happened with Chips] I absolutely loved the finished version of Padre. The record was very well produced and really quite Phil Spector-ish in sound. With any promotion at all, I think Padre would have made it. But it was released about a year after I had first signed with Monument, and I don’t think the label was still interested in me. There was no promotion at all for the record, and no ads for it in the trade magazines, either. Believe it or not, back then they waited for a record to get some action before they would start promoting it. The whole time I was at Monument, Fred Foster didn’t do a single photo session on me. After Padre had been out a few weeks, and still hadn’t charted (which, in those days, meant the single was dead), Mike Figlio, who did promotion for Monument, called me and said, ‘I think we lost the record.’ I was devastated.”

In December 1970, roughly a year and a half after Diane’s version of Padre was released, singer Marty Robbins recorded it for Columbia and had a Top Five hit with it. However, rather than being bitter at Robbins’ success with the song, Diane says, “Marty would later be very instrumental in my career. He got me a singles deal in the mid 70’s with Columbia Records and also produced my first session with the label, and I will always be grateful to him for that.” Diane adds that Elvis Presley also recorded Padre on an LP titled Elvis in 1971, however it appears that it was never released as a single.

Some time after Padre’s undeserved failure on the charts, Diane received a call one day from Fred Foster saying that Chips Moman had called and said that he and Dan Penn had written “a smash hit” for her. Foster told Diane that she would be flying to Memphis to record the entire session at Moman’s studio. Diane recalls feeling a great deal of excitement and optimism at the time. “I was over the moon [with the news]. Chips and Dan had written a lot of smashes—how lucky could I get? I flew to Memphis by myself and thought it was strange that there was no one there to meet me at the airport. I called the studio and the receptionist said that Chips hadn’t come in yet. I waited for a while and then called again. Chips still wasn’t in. She said that she would try to reach him and for me to call back. When I called back, she said that Chips would be in later and for me to take a taxi to the studio. After I got there, I was surprised there were no musicians setting up to record. I had to sit and wait alone for a couple of hours before Chips finally came in, around 4:00. I remember he walked over to me, sleepy-eyed, and asked, ‘Well, where are the songs?’ My heart sank. I said, ‘Fred said that you and Dan Penn had written a song for me.’ Chips said, ‘Fred misunderstood.’  Then he asked if I was staying at the Rivermont, which was a Holiday Inn, and I told him that I was. He took me to eat and then took me back to the Rivermont. Chips insisted on carrying my bag to my room and then he wouldn’t leave. I finally sat, Indian-style, in a big chair and said, ‘I can sit here all night.’  Finally Chips said, ‘Well, you’re in luck; I told Dan Penn that I’d write with him tonight.’ And then he left.

“I couldn’t believe it then, and I’m sitting here now, sobbing, as I relive it. What a cruel thing to do to me. I later told Fred, of course, what Chips had done, and it didn’t even seem to anger him. In retrospect, I really have to wonder if Fred deliberately set me up for Chips. After that, I didn’t hear another word from Fred. I should have left the label then, but I waited for him to call me, and he didn’t  I called the office several times and was always told that he was unavailable. I kept thinking that he would do the right thing because his birthday was the same as mine. I’m a Leo and I’m honest and trustworthy, so I thought he would be honest and trustworthy, too. Finally, I told the secretary to tell Fred that I wanted a release from Monument. She called me back within a day or two and said that my release was in the mail.

“You know, I saw Fred Foster again in the winter of 1996, when Kris Kristofferson was playing in Nashville at the Wildhorse Saloon. I went to the door that led backstage, hoping to get in to talk to Kris. Fred was there, too, and I introduced myself. He let me go backstage with him and I got to talk to Kris. At one point, Fred looked at me with a puzzled look on his face and asked, ‘Did I record you?’ I couldn’t believe it. I should have said, ‘Yes, you did, and you also wasted three precious years of my life.’

“I recently found an old scrapbook of mine in which I had pasted a Billboard magazine ad of the Monument Records roster. The clipping isn’t dated, so it could have been 1968, ’69 or ’70. According to the ad, some of the acts on the label back then were: Arthur Alexander, Henson Cargill, Don Cherry, Chris Gantry, Grandpa Jones, Ivory Joe Hunter, Charlie McCoy, Chris Noel, Boots Randolph, Ray Stevens, Billy Walker, Tony Joe White, and The Graduates. The ad listed 47 artists, in all. In an article describing several of his Monument acts, Fred Foster said, ‘Diane Jordan is a good music singer who could go Top 40 at any time.’  Yeah…right.

“I don’t know if Fred ever believed in my talent as an entertainer. I do know, however, that he never came to see me perform anywhere. None of my record producers ever expressed an interest in seeing me perform, live. Nor did any of them ever say to me, ‘Bring me tapes of everything you have recorded so I can hear what you can do.’ This just amazes me.”

While the beautiful and talented Diane had languished in undeserved obscurity on the Monument Records roster, Fred Foster had spent a lot of money trying to erect a singing career for another beautiful girl on the label—film starlet Chris Noel. A sexy blonde who did a slew of teenage/beach party movies in the 60s as well a film with Elvis (Girl Happy), Noel may have been an attractive woman but she was totally devoid of any singing ability. Diane recalls, “Chris Noel sang so bad, in fact, that a background vocalist named Ricki Paige had to sing in unison with her on her record. When they all listened to the playbacks, Chris thought it was just her voice. Fred proudly told a friend of mine that Chris was going to sing her new record on the Mike Douglas Show. Somebody asked him, ‘Is Ricki Paige going on the show with her?’ (laughs)

“The famous movie star Robert Mitchum also recorded for Monument. He cut an album for Fred in 1967 and the song Little Old Winedrinker Me was released as a single. It became a big hit, too. [author’s note: the song reached the Top 10 on Billboard magazine’s country chart.] Fred wanted to do another record with Robert Mitchum but he couldn’t reach him on the phone and he wouldn’t return his calls, either. Fred finally tracked him down on a movie set somewhere. He walked up to him and said, “We need to make another record.” Mitchum’s reply was, “Nah, I already did that.”

Following the end of her deal with Monument Records, Diane put the whole disastrous experience behind her and resumed her busy touring schedule. “I lost myself in work, I guess. Some clubs that I worked at during that time were Nic’s Nicabob in Milwaukee, Roger’s Gin Mill in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Eddie’s Hollywood Palace in Green Bay, Big Moe’s in Louisville and Club Stabiles in Baltimore. I appeared at Club Stabiles for two weeks, with a Nashville singer named Willie Samples. I rode to Baltimore with Willie, who drove an old car at the time. He had been driving about 75 mph when Willie noticed that he needed to get some gas. We got off the expressway and as Willie drove up to the gas pump, the front tire on my side of the car, blew out. I wasn’t hurt, but since wearing seat belts was not required at the time, it could have been a very bad accident.

Willie and I sang with the house band at Club Stabiles and none other than Guy Mitchell (of the ill-fated Guy Mitchell All-Star Revue tour in Japan) was brought in for two nights while we were there. On the last night, we all went out to eat at an Italian restaurant, in Washington D.C.’s “Little Italy.” When Guy found out that I am a vegetarian, he ordered something for me that he said I would absolutely love. It was my first time tasting eggplant parmesan, and you know, it’s my favorite dish to this day. Guy was fine during the gig, by the way…he showed up and sang, and was no trouble at all.”

Another memorable gig for Diane during this period was her engagement at Henry’s Tavern in Brooklyn, NY. “The first time I worked there, the band was great and I loved it. The club owner had suggested a hotel for me, which was one of only two hotels in Brooklyn at that time. Believe me, both of them were crummy. When I saw the room I would be staying in, I was disgusted with how filthy it was. The lampshades were stained and crispy and the drapes were hanging off the window, due to missing hooks. To make matters even worse, I was scared to death and couldn’t sleep because somebody kept rattling my door knob all night. The club owner wanted to book me back. I said that I would like to but that I was afraid to stay in that same hotel. So, he and his wife invited me to stay with them at their house. I went back to Henry’s Tavern four more times but the bands were never as good as they were the first time I was there.

“One night at Henry’s Tavern, I worked with a husband and wife duo named George and Joni Day. It wasn’t a good experience, though, as their band wouldn’t kick off any of my songs and they played really badly for me, too. As I was leaving one night, they were doing the last set. They started playing the Tammy Wynette song D-I-V-O-R-C-E for Joni and they played the intro, the turnaround and the modulation, just like on the record. When I sang the song earlier that night, they just gave me a single chord. I soon found out that if there was a girl in the group, they would make her sound good and do a crappy job on all of my songs. Several years later, when I was playing Hurley’s Tavern in Chester, Pennsylvania, George and Joni Day came into the club one night, looking for work. They sat in with the band to audition for the bar’s owner, Jack Hurley. They obviously didn’t remember me and while they were onstage, I told Jack how they had treated me when we had worked together at Henry’s. He said, ‘Don’t worry, they won’t ever work here’, and he sent them on their way. I guess George and Joni didn’t realize what a small world it is!”

Back in Nashville, Diane’s career hopes brightened a bit in the spring of 1969 when she auditioned for a spot on an upcoming comedy/variety show on CBS-TV called Hee Haw. Destined to become a television classic, the program was a mix of hillbilly humor coupled with live performances from some of country music’s most popular acts, and it featured a huge cast of regulars, headed by veteran industry musicians Buck Owens and Roy Clark. Even before the show debuted, there was a huge buzz about it in town, and while Diane wouldn’t get the job, she remembers the experience very well.

“I recall I wore a blue floral cotton one-piece outfit to the audition that looked like a mini skirt, but it was really shorts. When it was my turn to read, one of the guys who was there said, ‘We’re looking for girls that are built exactly like you.’ He then proceeded to put his arms around me from behind while I read my lines (which I found to be very strange). I’m not certain, but I am pretty sure the guy was Bill Davis, who was one of the show’s producers.

“People who have seen Hee Haw must remember Cathy Baker, the bubbly blonde with a high pitched voice who was on the show for many, many years. The day of my audition, she was also there with another girl and I recall they were wearing paint-splattered overalls. I recall Cathy saying, ‘We’re not here to audition, we’re just here to paint the set.’ Huh?

“After the auditions, exactly eight girls were invited back to a party on the set at 6:30 that evening, and I was one of them. Another girl and I had kind of hung out earlier in the day, so we went back to the party together. Right away, we noticed that there were exactly eight guys at the party, too. Before long, the pairing off began. When it got down to just two guys and the other girl and me, we knew where it was headed, so she and I left. I often wonder what would have happened if we had stayed.

“I must admit, it was quite a surprise to me when Cathy Baker was chosen to be a regular on the show. The first time I saw it,  I remembered her right away from the day of the auditions when she was wearing those overalls, and of course, she always wore overalls on the show, too. I have to say that I hated seeing Cathy Baker all those years on Hee Haw. I mean, the woman had absolutely no talent. She just grinned, swung her blonde bob from side to side, and said (with a high-pitched voice and a lisp), ‘Here’s Buck!’, and ‘That’s all!’ at the end. Need I add that she later married the show’s director, Bill Davis? (laughs) When I attended Jim Hager’s memorial service last year [2008], I immediately saw Cathy sitting in the front row, still swinging that blonde bob of hers. She’s older and heavier now, but the hair is still the same!”

Her dubious loss of a regular gig on Hee Haw aside, from the late 1960s on Diane continued to perform at various military bases, both here and abroad, and in the process, racked up thousands of miles on the road. “I worked a ton of military shows, traveling with different bands to military posts in places like Goose Bay, Labrador, Sondrestrom and Thule in Greenland, and Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico. I got to see parts of the world I had never dreamed of seeing as a little girl.

“In April 1968, I worked for a month at the military base in Goose Bay with singer songwriter Mack Vickery and a country comedian named Elmer Fudpucker. The three of us and three band members first flew to Baltimore, where we picked up a bass player named Clay who worked at a club there. When we arrived in Goose Bay, I put my hand in my coat pocket and felt something strange. I pulled it out and it was a bottle of pills. Just then, Clay stepped up and said, ‘I put the pills in your pocket. I figured that if you were caught with them, the authorities wouldn’t do anything to a pretty girl.’ I thought that was a low thing to do, and I was quite angry with him for doing it.

“The base at Goose Bay had its own little TV station and one day we were all invited to perform there on an afternoon variety show. I had heard there was an Eskimo town nearby called Happy Valley (which I kind of liked). I sang the song Kansas City on the show and when I did the last chorus, I sang Happy Valley instead of Kansas City and ended with ‘…they got some crazy little Eskimos and I’m gonna get me one.’ I added, ‘Just one’, thinking that it would be cute. Well, apparently the Eskimos took that as an insult because I said ‘just one’. Believe it or not, a bunch of them called the base and complained about me!

“During this period, I also did some shows with Opry star Billy Walker. I remember one time when I was really proud of a new outfit I had just bought. The outfit consisted of a black sequin top and the new ‘elephant leg’ pants that were popular at the time, and I couldn’t wait to wear it onstage. When I walked out ready to go on, Billy looked at me with total disgust and said, ‘You and Skeeter Davis just don’t know how to dress country, do you?’ I was crushed.

“Still, in all the years that I worked in the business, there were many entertainers who were very nice to me. And there were also a few who started out being nice, but didn’t end up that way —like Dottie West, I’m sad to say. In 1966, when I was 20, I was dating (well, sort of) a member of Dottie’s band. (I will call him ‘Sam’ from here on out as he may not want his true identity revealed because of something he and I did later on.) Anyway, one night I was backstage at the Ryman Auditorium when Dottie came up to me and said, ‘We’re leaving tonight to go play in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Seaforth, Ontario. Why don’t you come with us?’  I said that I would like to but I really couldn’t afford to go. Dottie said that it wouldn’t cost me anything, that she and I could share a room, and that Sam and her husband, Bill, could share a room, and that she would pay for all my meals. So, I said that I would love to go with them. Dottie told me to bring a stage dress because she wanted me to sing on stage with her, too. We left, and I had a fantastic time. On the shows, I sang The Tips of My Fingers and it went over really well, which was absolutely thrilling for me. It was my first time in Canada, and that was exciting, too. Dottie and I went shopping together and she bought me a pair of purple suede bedroom slippers. She also gave me $20 to pay for my food on the trip. I thought she was a saint.

“I remember Dottie and me, in our beds one night, talking, and she mentioned that she always missed her children when she was on the road. Then, she asked me if I had ever heard that Patsy Cline ‘liked girls.’ I was a bit shocked and said that I had never heard that before. Dottie then told me that someone had told her that once when Patsy was drunk, she made the comment that she ‘would rather have Wanda Jackson in bed than any man.’ I was very young and naïve at the time, and I am still surprised that she would have said something like that to me. After the show in Ontario, Dottie told me that I came across really classy and ladylike onstage, in addition to having a great voice. She said, that she was going to help me. She actually said (I swear), ‘Diane, I am going to do for you what Patsy Cline did for me.’ Dottie said that she was going to sing at The Black Poodle, in Printer’s Alley, the next week, and for me to come down there every night and sing with her. I didn’t have a car, so I couldn’t go there every night, but I did make it down on Saturday, which was the last night of her gig. I got there at 9:00 for her first show, but she didn’t call me up to sing. As the night wore on, she called up many guest singers from the audience to come on stage to perform with her, except me. Finally, at 2:45 in the morning, Dottie called me up and as I walked up to the microphone, she said firmly, ‘Do one song only…we’re almost out of time.’ She hadn’t talked to me the whole night. Not long after that, I was backstage at the Opry (and no longer sort of dating Sam), when Dottie’s drummer, Bob, asked me if I was going to a jam session at Dottie’s house. I said that I hadn’t been invited and he said, ‘Well, Dottie knows you and I’m inviting you.’ So, I rode out to Dottie’s house with him. That night, Dottie (again) asked everybody there to sing, but me. I was embarrassed and bewildered. She had said she was going to help me and now she wouldn’t even speak to me.

“A few years later, in 1969, I was living at The Brinkhaven Apartments. I had been at the Municipal Auditorium, downtown at a telethon and ran into Sam. He brought me home and we turned on the TV to watch the telethon. I told him my story about Dottie and he told me that she had done that to her band, too. She would promise them a band album or a big TV show, and then she would never mention it again. Sam said that Dottie started coming on to him by buying him gifts and giving him money. He said that nothing really happened, that they had just ‘messed around a little.’ He didn’t want to get involved with her because of her husband, Bill. Dottie then went after another musician in her band, who was married and had a small baby. The musician told Sam that Dottie told him that she was in love with him. He was even thinking of leaving his wife. Sam told him not to do it because Dottie had done the same thing to him. Well, the musician told Dottie, and she fired them both, right on the spot. She actually stopped the bus and put them out on the side of the road. We were both unhappy with the way she had treated us and Sam said that we ought to call the telethon hotline that night and make a big pledge in Dottie’s name. I thought that was a great idea and I said that I would do it. I called and said that I was Dottie West and that I was pledging $10,000. (laughs) The telethon phone worker asked for my phone number and I said that I didn’t give out my home phone number but that my booking agent was Lucky Moeller. We kept watching, and finally Ralph Emery came out with another stack of pledges to read. Suddenly, we saw him do a double-take. And then he turned to the band and said, ‘Oh, we need a drum roll for this one.’ Ha, ha…we knew what that meant. He excitedly said, ‘Dottie West is pledging $10,000. I can’t believe this…her house just burned down. What an unbelievably generous thing for her to do.’ (laughs) Yep, I admit it was a crummy thing for us to do, and I didn’t even own up to it until a couple of years ago, but believe me, that night Sam and I laughed until tears fell down our cheeks.”

Satin Sheets singer Jeanne Pruett was another female who initially befriended Diane, only to do an about face later on. Diane feels today that professional jealousy was at the root of their falling out. “For many years, Jeanne’s husband Jack Pruett played guitar in Marty Robbins‘ band. Jeanne was signed to Marty’s publishing company and Marty recorded several of her songs. In the early 70s, Jeanne had a couple of hit records of her own and then she had a huge hit with Satin Sheets in 1973. Afterward, she was made a member of the Grand Ole Opry. In 1972, Jeanne did a guest appearance on Stu Phillips’ TV show out of Louisville, when I was appearing on the show as a regular. Jeanne had driven to Louisville alone, and asked me to ride back to Nashville with her. We chatted with each other the whole way back and had a great time together. I really thought we had become friends. A few years later, in 1977, after word got around that Marty Robbins was going to produce a record on me, I tried to speak to Jeanne, as I always did, backstage at the Opry. But this time, she ignored me. The next time I saw her it happened again, and then I knew that something was up. It really hurt my feelings. I finally confronted her and said, ‘I thought we were friends, Jeanne. We had a great time, driving back from Louisville that night, but now you won’t even speak to me.’ She said something to the effect of, ‘I come to the Opry to work…not to socialize.’ She added [coldly], ‘I can pick my own friends.’ I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Appearing on the Opry consists of singing two songs, which can hardly be considered serious ‘work’ that prohibits socializing.

“I later told Marty what Jeanne had said to me. He told me that Jeanne had once asked him to produce a record on her but he told her he didn’t want to do it. Marty said that she was probably jealous that he had produced a record on me, but wouldn’t do one with her. He added, ‘You don’t need people like that anyway.’ [Still] Jeanne Pruett was the one who had a big hit song that became a country standard…not me.

“Another female artist who was apparently jealous of me was Laura Lee McBride, who rented an office in Marty’s building. (Laura Lee’s father, Tex Owens, wrote the classic song, Cattle Call.) She was always friendly if I saw her in the hallway, but after she found out that Marty was producing me, she totally ignored me and refused to speak to me. Laura Lee’s signature song was the well-known, I Betcha My Heart I Love You, but that was out in 1950. When I knew her, in 1977, she was 57 years old. She’d already had a successful career…I should have been jealous of her.

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“The audition was just a matter of them looking me over, checking out my legs and my figure, and that was it. They pretty much hired me right away and I got the part of  Diane, one of the six dancers in the film. The night that I went to audition, I was surprised to see stripper Lynn Fontaine walking out of the studio as I was walking in. I had met her the previous year, when I sang at The Stork Club, a strip club in Bossier City, Louisiana. Lynn was the featured stripper at the club and I was the (very) green singer. When I saw her again, I immediately remembered how she had always taken delight in saying things to embarrass me. ‘Lynn!’ I exclaimed, ‘What are you doing here?’ She said, ‘I’m here to do this fuckin’ flick, what do you think I’m doing?’  The f-word wasn’t commonly used back then, as it is now, so, once again, Lynn had embarrassed me!”

With her role in The Monster And The Stripper, Diane would unwittingly be working with one of the most beloved auteurs of 1960s schlock cinema: Louisiana-born Ron Ormond (a.k.a. Vittorio Di Naro and Vic Narno). Beginning in 1948 and continuing over the next thirty years, Ormond produced, directed and wrote over three dozen feature films that ran the gamut from bottom of the barrel westerns and burlesque-type musicals, to hayseed action flicks that were aimed primarily at the rural drive-in crowd. While his career was admittedly a checkered and low-rent affair, it has been dissected and analyzed in recent times with an almost fervent devotion by a fan base that amazingly, continues to grow.

Arguably at the forefront of Ron Ormond’s filmography is his final “secular” effort before he focused solely on producing religious propaganda films: a gory, mind bending, and blood-splattered gem that he and his wife June and son Tim also starred in, called The Exotic Ones (although it would eventually be retitled The Monster and The Stripper). Touted as “one of the most amazing exploitation movies ever made” by psychotronic film expert Michael J. Weldon, the picture centered on the denizens of a down-and dirty-nightclub in New Orleans and the bedlam that ensues when a rampaging caveman is captured in the Louisiana swamps and is brought in as a kind of sideshow act to help save the club’s faltering revenue. With its gruesome scenes of human and animal dismemberment set against a psychedelic canvas of tassel-twirling strippers and backstage catfights, the film was a cinematic blast of color, sleaze and gore—the likes of which had rarely been seen onscreen up till then. “Regurgitating horrors! The night shrieks with the shredding of soft flesh!” screamed the original poster art for the film…and it was a promise the 91-minute feature more than delivered. With little to no effort on her part, Diane had taken a sharp detour from the music business and had landed in what is now considered a cult film classic.

“The Monster And The Stripper was filmed in about one month’s time recalls Diane. “I was hired for four days and I received a whopping $200 for my work. The interiors were shot in the same Nashville studio where Elvis had recorded the song Heartbreak Hotel, owned at the time by the United Methodist Church. I had wanted to be in a movie since I was a little girl, so even though it was an extremely low budget film, to have a part in it (and to be paid) was pretty exciting to me. I was disappointed, though, when the film came out as my name had been misspelled in the credits. For some reason, they listed me as Diane Jordon. (laughs)

“As far as the other girls that were hired for the film, Pauletta Lehman was a very sweet person, and she and I sort of bonded. When our costumes arrived, all us girls tried them on. The other three girls were quite flat-chested, while Pauletta and I were both size 36-D. Pauletta and I looked terrible in the tiny black and hot pink tops because they had no support. We suggested to June Ormond that we purchase black bras that fit us and have the wardrobe lady sew the tiny costume over the tops of the bras. June agreed to pay for our bras and Pauletta and I were thrilled that we didn’t have to quit the film. This new development (no pun intended!) infuriated the other girls, because we both looked great. Our second costume was white with polka dots. It consisted of a tiny short skirt and a cone-shaped bra top (you know…just like the kind Madonna wore on stage in the 1980s). This top had a stiff lining so that Pauletta and I were supported sufficiently. Completing our ensemble were sequined masks, fishnet hose, green satin stilettos, and cone shaped hats with balloons on the top. Wild, huh?

“After June paid for new bras for Pauletta and me, the other girls decided they hated us, and it became them against us. Once, when we were all together in the dressing room,  a girl named Judy invited all the other girls to a barbeque at her home, in front of Pauletta and me. Pauletta and I just exchanged looks and laughed about it later. She and I were just grateful that we had each other to hang out with, because the other girls were not friendly. The real-life strippers in the film didn’t like us, either. Believe it or not, they, too, were much less-endowed than Pauletta and me!

“Georgette Dante, the stripper who was one of the main characters in the film (she played Titania), was a real-life contortionist with a background in carnivals. I thought that she had a mean look, and I took great care to stay out of her way. She brought her pet snake with her, which was even more reason to stay out of her way. (When I found out that snakes have to be fed living hamsters and mice, as opposed to dead ones, I just never liked people who kept snakes after that.) Gordon Terry, one of the other main characters, was quite smitten with Georgette. One night during filming, they were in such a hurry to leave together, Gordon forgot his expensive boots in the dressing room!”

Diane’s role in The Monster And The Stripper consisted of several background scenes and just a single line of dialogue. “Oh, yeah, my one line in the dressing room scene. We were all seated, primping at the mirrored makeup table. Pauletta’s character says, ‘Diane, I didn’t like the looks of that guy you were with last night. He looked like a real hustler.’ Then comes my line (and believe me, I gave it all I had). I slam down my nail polish on the dressing table and say, ‘Oh, he wasn’t a hustler, honey…just a cat who likes to jump.’ With that, Ron Ormond shouted, ‘Oh hell, cut…and print!’ THAT was the extent of his direction. (laughs) I was later told by Harris Martin, a Nashville journalist who was also in the film—he played an artist painting a naked girl—that Ron always referred to me as ‘that Russian looking girl.’

“Ron Ormond was very busy on the set, not only directing, but acting in his role as Nemo, as well. Add to that, the fact that he couldn’t have been getting much sleep during that time. Though all of this must have been pretty stressful for him, I got the feeling that he loved what he was doing and that he liked us all. There was a down-to-earth, approachable quality about him and he really put everyone at ease. I wasn’t intimidated by his presence at all. There was also a sweetness in the way that he interacted with June and Tim, while still being totally professional, that I thought was wonderful.”

The plot of The Monster And The Stripper, with its melding of a superhuman swamp creature with a seedy nightclub full of redneck gangsters, circus acts and strippers,was pretty novel, even by 1960s exploitation film standards. “It was definitely over the top,” says Diane. (laughs) “The film centered around a caveman-like monster killing people in the swamp regions of Louisiana, outside of New Orleans. Other than the footage at the beginning of the film, Ormond shot the picture in Waycross, Georgia and Tullahoma, Tennessee.

“The film opens with a man in a small boat, fishing on a bayou. (The man was played by Nashville musician Luther Perkins, who was Johnny Cash’s first guitar player until he died in a house fire in August of 1968.) The fisherman screams as the monster pulls him into the water. Cut to the seedy New Orleans nightclub you described, where Nemo, the nightclub’s owner (played by Ron Ormond, in a really bad wig) decides that if he can capture the thing, he can build a show around it to boost his business. He sends a group of guys into the swamps to capture the monster (played by Arkansas rockabilly singer, Sleepy La Beef). Sleepy was not really muscular, but he was really, really tall. He had no hair on his chest at all, so they had to glue fake hair on him to make him look more like a Neanderthal. (laughs)

“Anyway, back in the swamps, the monster is captured and brought back to town, but not without a couple of casualties first  (of course). I should add that the huge, heavy-looking rock that the monster picks up and throws in one scene, was really made of very light-weight paper maché. It was on the set one day and someone picked it up and we all started tossing it to each other. Word got around the music community in Nashville about the filming, and some of the booking agents and musicians dropped by to watch us work, which made it a lot more fun.

“Back at Nemo’s nightclub, the new show now has a circus type atmosphere, with the performers doing their acts in front of the monster’s cage. In the film’s finale, Gordon Terry announces that it’s time to feed the monster. Judy, one of the chorus girls, walks out, carrying a live chicken in a cage. Had I been the one chosen to do that scene, I would have refused.”

Sadly, a live chicken was indeed killed during the film’s shoot. “I am an animal lover and it still saddens me to think of that poor chicken,” says Diane. “I have always regretted not doing something to stop it but I really don’t know if there was an active Humane Society in Nashville at the time. The filming of that terrible scene was done at night. Earlier that day, word had circulated on the set that right after the dinner break, the monster feeding would be filmed. Sleepy La Beef would actually tear apart a live chicken. For this horrible act, Georgette Dante’s carnival background elevated her to consultant status. I’m told that she demonstrated the ‘fine art’ of taping razor blades to the monster’s fingers, having seen carnival geeks do this. This would make it easier to rip apart the chicken, which was just totally appalling to me. I later did some research on what a carnival geek does, and I found this description on the Internet: ‘A geek is an unskilled performer whose performance consists of shocking, repulsive and repugnant acts. This ‘lowest of the low’ member of the carny trade will commonly bite the head off a living chicken, or sit in a bed of snakes.’ Just the thought of that sickens me.

“I was there on the set that afternoon, when a farmer brought three caged chickens into the studio. My scenes for the day were finished and later, as I was leaving, I noticed that I was the only one around. I saw the cage of chickens sitting there and I almost broke down crying. Saddened and terrified by what I knew what was going to happen, I seriously considered letting the chickens out of the studio. But, I reconsidered, because I knew that even if the chickens weren’t caught,  Ron Ormond would just have the farmer bring more. I was afraid, too, that I wouldn’t be paid if I caused a delay in filming. I have never watched that scene in the movie…and I never will.

“I remember someone saying that Sleepy said that he really didn’t want to rip up the chicken. I guess that could mean that he didn’t want to, but he did, or that he didn’t want to, and he didn’t! If he didn’t want to do it, then he should have stood his ground and refused. Whether Sleepy actually killed that chicken (or not), I’m sure that the Ormonds could have come up with another way to simulate it. After all, they managed to make another scene in the film where Sleepy pulls out a guy’s arm and then beats him to death with it, look pretty darn authentic. (When they shot that scene, I was already finished filming my part and off the set, so I didn’t get to see it.) In those days, Cecil Scaife, the guy who ‘contributed’ his arm, was an executive at Columbia Records and a good friend of Ron Ormond. Unfortunately, Cecil died in March 2009. I attended his memorial service and reception but I only saw a few people from the music industry there, and no one from the film. Cecil had been living in a nursing home for probably ten years or more, which, to me, is just so sad.

“After I finished working on the film, Ron Ormond said that he was going to use me in another project but just before The Monster And The Stripper he and his family were in a private plane crash in Nashville, and were severely injured. After doing our picture, Ron apparently decided to make only Christian films. You know, several years ago, I searched the Internet to find a contact for Tim Ormond, Ron and June’s only child. He was just 17 at the time we shot the film. Anyway, Tim and I talked on the phone and met for lunch. It was great fun reminiscing with him about the movie. Over the years, Tim has kept up with most of the other performers in the film, which I find very interesting.”

On June 6, 2002, thirty four years after its initial release, The Monster And The Stripper was shown at the Nashville Independent Film Festival. “That was such a hoot”, says Diane. Larry and I had seen the film at a Drive-In when it was first released, but that was the first time we actually saw it in a movie theater. The theater at the Green Hills Cinema was full that night and there was considerable audience response all the way through the film. Let me tell you, a comedy should get so many laughs!

“After the screening, Tim and his mother, June, who was 90 at the time (she died in July of 2006 at age 94), hosted a Q & A session. June’s memory was excellent and she delighted the audience with her humor and her candor. She spoke of her early days in vaudeville, as June Carr, when she performed with Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, and Ginger Rogers, among others. (Tim’s godfather was the great Bela Lugosi.) ‘Ginger Rogers,’ June said, ‘was a lovely person, but that mother of hers was a real bitch.’ That comment brought the entire house down! (laughs)

“Apparently, there had been very few movie posters made for the film when it first came out, but Tim had one made for the showing, to place out in the lobby of the theater. I later borrowed the poster from him and took it to Kinko’s to make some copies. I had one of them framed and it’s currently hanging on the wall of my Hollywood-themed computer room, along with a poster from my other film, the documentary That’s Country, in which I performed one song.

“No, I didn’t have an impressive acting career, but still, it’s pretty cool to be part of a film that is now considered to be a cult classic. Recently, I went on eBay and I found a photo of me for sale, along with a description that referred to me as a ‘1960s Scream Queen’. All because of The Monster And The Stripper! I must admit, that’s pretty funny to me.”

In the fall of 1968, following her brief flirtation with filmmaking, Diane moved into The Brinkhaven Apartments in Madison, a few miles outside Nashville. “I had hoped to get a car but I couldn’t afford both a car and an apartment, and I decided that it was more important to have my own place,” she says. “For some reason, my roommates had become jealous of me. In fact, one of them had gotten drunk and had even admitted to me that she was jealous. I was on the news one night when I had been on a Christmas show at an orphanage, and the girls wouldn’t let me watch it. In fact, I had to go to a neighbor’s house just to see it. When I was dating John Ashley in 1967, one of his movies was shown on TV. The girls said, ‘We’re watching The Flying Nun, instead,’ so I had to again go to the neighbor’s house. I didn’t feel like I was wanted, which is just crushing to a Leo. Another reason I had decided to move was because we had found our garbage can moved to underneath the bathroom window, and we suspected we had a  Peeping Tom. I told Kris Kristofferson about it and he said, ‘Don’t kid yourselves, it’s always a neighbor.’ He went on to say that he and his ex-wife once went through that themselves. One night, my then-boyfriend (and future husband) Larry brought me home and we pulled into the driveway right behind my roommate’s car. We sat in his car and talked for a while. Some time passed and I happened to look over to the right and I saw a man creeping up to the kitchen window, where the light was on. Though there were blinds on the window, one could see in through the sides because the blinds weren’t an exact fit.  Larry jumped out of the car and said to the guy, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’  The guy said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know who you were and I was checking on the girls to make sure they were all right.’ I got out of the car and said, ‘Well, then, why don’t you get on the trash can so you can see better?’  I was shocked as the man I was looking at was our next door neighbor Jim!  He just slinked back to his house like a dog with his tail between his legs. What a creep. When we first found out that we had a Peeping Tom, I told the neighbor women on either side of us. Earlier, the guy’s wife, Waunice, had said, ‘Well if you hear anything, just call us because Jim has a gun.’ So when I saw it was him, I immediately thought, ‘Oh, great, our Peeping Tom has a gun!’  I felt it was a good time to move after that.

“My new, one-bedroom furnished apartment at The Brinkhaven was in the building right across from the office, and the owner, Mr. Selley, was an older gentleman who was very friendly. Dolly Parton had once lived at The Brinkhaven before she married her husband Carl Dean. One day, out at the pool, Mr. Selley came up to me as I was sunbathing, and said, ‘You sure aren’t like Dolly Parton.’  I was puzzled by his comment and asked him what he meant by that.  He said, ‘Oh, not what you’re thinking! You keep your apartment neat and clean. Believe me, Dolly was no housekeeper.’” (laughs)

Six years after the end of her deal with ABC-Paramount, Diane got another chance to record that fall when she was signed to Monument Records. Unfortunately, it would be another experience she would soon come to regret. In 2009, Diane recalled her three years at the label: “Before I signed with Monument, I used to ride a lot of city buses down to Music Row. (I still didn’t have a car at the time.) Going there meant changing buses downtown. I would get off a block or so past the music offices and then walk back so that no one would see me getting off of a bus. For some reason, that was very embarrassing to me. Anyway, I was singing at the time at The Black Poodle, a club in Printer’s Alley. They changed it to a strip club shortly after that, and moved country music next door to The Western Room. Tex Davis, who was a promotion person at Monument, talked to me after my show and asked if I was on a label. When I told him that I wasn’t, he suggested that I go out to Monument to talk to [label head] Fred Foster. Monument was located in Hendersonville, just a few miles outside where I lived in Madison.

“When I went to see Fred, I brought along some demos that I had made. He listened to them and afterwards said that he would sign me. As you can imagine, I was pretty excited because Monument was a really good label to be on in those years. Right away, Fred and I started to look for material for me to record. For Fred, looking for material consisted of making a trip out to Boudleaux and Felice Bryant’s house. They had written many, many hit songs in the 1950’s and 60’s, including Rocky Top, Bye Bye Love, Wake Up Little Susie, and All I Have To Do Is Dream (the last three for The Everly Brothers). As Felice and Boudleaux played their songs for me, I remember their pet mynah bird contributed background ‘fills’ to the music. (laughs) It was really hilarious! And then, each time the phone rang, the bird would start saying ‘Hello’, over and over. When he was not getting any attention, he would say, ‘Think of that! Think of that!’  (laughs)

“I chose two of the songs the Bryants played for me that day as songs I wanted to record: Your Love Will Stay and Bruises. I didn’t think that either one was a potential hit, but I didn’t want to be impolite and say that I didn’t really like the songs, either. Then I remembered a song called Padre that was a big pop hit when I was 12 years old. I always loved that record and I always wanted to sing it, too. I didn’t even know the original singer’s name, but a guy named Ernie, who I was friendly with when I worked at Hurley’s Tavern in Pennsylvania, contacted a record locator service and they sent the album to me. It was by a 1950’s pop singer named Toni Arden, and it was just a beautiful, beautiful record. I played it for Fred and he agreed to let me cut it. I really thought it was a hit, so it didn’t really matter to me that I didn’t love the other two songs the Bryants had given me.

“Felice and Boudleaux picked me up at my apartment and drove me to the Bradley Barn recording studio the day I cut Padre. They had a beautiful Mercedes 600 with a copper floorboard—I was very impressed. Felice said she wanted me to meet her two sons. I recall her saying, ‘We need a good singer in the family.’(laughs) Dane and Del Bryant were both nice guys and they took me to breakfast one morning after my nightclub gig in Printer’s Alley. I didn’t date either of them, though, as I was already in love with Larry Fullam by then. Had it worked out with Dane or Del, I would probably be a wealthy woman right now—and probably divorced, too.” (laughs)

After Diane finished her work on the Padre session and delivered it to Fred Foster, he told her that he felt the song needed some “tweaking”. He arranged for her to go to Memphis to do some overdubbing on the record with producer Chips Moman, at Chips’ recording studio, American Sound. Diane recalls their meeting vividly. “Chips had driven up to Nashville, and Fred had me come out to the office to meet him. I’ll never forget it. I was sitting on the sofa, next to him and he offered me a cigarette. Before I could say, ‘No, thank you,’ Fred said, ‘Diane doesn’t smoke, Diane doesn’t drink, and I’m not quite sure yet what all Diane doesn’t do.’  I had a very bad feeling right then and there that my record had better hit right out of the chute, or there would be no future for me at Monument Records.” For Diane, who had remembered Tom T. Hall’s disrespectful treatment of her just a short time earlier, Fred Foster’s comments and smarmy attitude towards her that day had a familiarity to them that cut right to the bone.

By the late 1960’s, Chips Moman was renowned in the recording industry for his prowess in both songwriting and producing. Prior to Diane’s meeting him, he had written the stunning song Do Right Woman, Do Right Man for Aretha Franklin, and had produced folk singer Merrilee Rush’s smash hit, Angel Of The Morning along with many other chart hits for such r&b and rock and roll acts as Carla Thomas, Booker T and the MGs, and The Box Tops. “I was beyond excited at the thought of getting to record with the great Chips Moman,” recalls Diane. “When I got to the studio to do the overdubs on Padre, Chips had already added a church bell to the intro and had also added some horns (Fred already had violins on the track). Right away, I began working on my vocals with the two background singers that Chips had hired. I was quite impressed with them knowing that they had just recorded with Elvis Presley. I later found out that the high background vocals on Elvis’s hit, In The Ghetto were done by these same two guys. When we did the overdubs for Padre, I remember Chips telling us, just before a take, ‘Think Catholic!’ One of the guys in the group said, ‘Does that mean we should throw away our pills?’ (laughs)

While in Memphis, Diane would learn an interesting back story to Elvis’s recording of In The Ghetto that painted an extremely unflattering picture of her new producer. “When I went to Memphis to overdub Padre, there was a newspaper article on the wall in the studio, about Elvis’s recording at American Sound. It stated that Elvis loved the studio and said that he was going to record all of his albums there in the future. He said he was happy that he could record right there at home, in Memphis. But Chips Moman messed that up. While I was there, Chips played a new record for me that he had just produced and said it was coming out on Bell Records. He said it was going to be a monster. The title was In The Streets Of The Ghetto. It had a powerful storyline, and once I heard it, I had no doubt that it would be a huge hit. Not long after that, Larry came over one day and said that he had just heard a fantastic new record by Elvis, called In The Ghetto. I said, “Isn’t it called In The Streets Of The Ghetto? He said that he was certain it was In The Ghetto. When I heard it, I knew that it wasn’t the same song, but it was the same story! I then found out that when Elvis had cut the song, Felton Jarvis, his producer (and my former producer) said it would be Elvis’s next single. Chips tried to talk him out of it saying, ‘It’s not a hit…I don’t feel it.’ Then he got his writers to write around the song and rushed it out on Bell Records. Well, that was it for Elvis and American Sound Studio. He never recorded there again. Many Nashville publishers later quit sending songs to Chips when he was looking for material because he would let his writers listen to the songs and then they would write around them. I have searched BMI, ASCAP and SESAC and have found no listing of a song called In The Streets of the Ghetto. I also found a list of records and artists on Bell Records in the 60s and 70s and couldn’t find it there, either. I wonder if there was ever a lawsuit filed and they were forced to just scrap the song?”

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“He then said that he wouldn’t call me a cab until I agreed to go to a movie with him some other time, so I agreed to do it, since I just wanted to get out of there. Our ‘date night’ came and we were driving to a movie theater, downtown on Church Street. Once again, Tom T.’s old Cadillac stalled about two blocks from the theater. He gave me some money and said to go on to the movie and that he’d meet me there. This was more than I could have hoped for. (laughs) I paid the admission and went inside, finding a seat way down in the front. I scrunched down in my seat, so that he couldn’t find me. It worked. After the movie was over, I left by the side door and walked the six blocks home to my sister’s apartment, which wasn’t really a dangerous thing to do back in 1965.

“After that incident, Tom T. Hall told some people (who later told me) that ‘Going out with Diane Jordan is as about exciting as going out with your sister.’ The next time I saw him, he told me that he didn’t want to date me anyway because I was ‘about as sexy as a box of graham crackers’. After that, he always called me ‘Graham Crackers’ whenever he saw me.

“One night, two or three months later, my friends and I were sitting in Linebaugh’s Café and had decided that we were going to go over to Possum Holler, a nightclub that was nearby.   Tom T. came into the café and when he sat down at our table, we got up and left. He saw us at Possum Holler later that night and came up to me, and with a sarcastic look on his face, said, ‘Oh, gee, Graham Crackers, you really broke my heart, just getting up and leaving me like that.’

“My retort couldn’t have been better if I’d had a week to think of it. I said, ‘Well, you know how graham crackers are…they always leave crumbs.’ (laughs) He was speechless.”

Diane flashes forward to September 1980. “At the time, I was performing on a five-day tour of Canada and the northern US for Canadian promoter, Harry Joyce. There were a total of 17 Nashville acts on the tour, including Tom T. Hall. He came up to me backstage at the Saturday matineé and seemed really glad to see me. I thought that perhaps all of his great success had changed him for the better. He asked me to have dinner with him between shows so that we could talk about the Linebaugh/Lower Broadway days. We had a nice dinner and he asked where I was staying, which was not a major hotel chain. He asked, ‘Why aren’t you staying at the Holiday Inn?’ and I explained that my room was provided for me, free of charge. He said, ‘I’ll move you to the Holiday Inn and pay for it and we can get a pizza after the show and talk some more.’ I was very wary, and I told him, in essence, that nothing had changed and that if he really wanted to just talk, that I would enjoy that, but that was all. He assured me that he was just enjoying talking and seeing me again after all those years.

“After the show, I rode with him and his band on their tour bus and they moved me to the Holiday Inn. Tom T. said to order a pizza and he would come over to my room to pay for it. Well, the same thing happened as before. I was eating the last bite of pizza when he jumped on me. I got really mad this time. I told him to get the hell off me and to get out of my room. He started to leave and then he stopped in the doorway and said, ‘Oh, by the way, how are you going to get to the next show?’

“Without hesitating, I said, ‘I can ride with Jimmy C. Newman,’ feeling sure that Jimmy would let me, which he did. I actually flew back from Detroit at the end of the tour, two days later. I later found out that Tom T.’s tour bus had major mechanical problems and they had to stay two extra days to get it fixed. Two of his band members had to get back to Nashville right away, though, so they rode back with Jimmy C. Newman.” (laughs)

Finally, Diane says, “Tom T. Hall was a real jerk to me, that’s for sure. I gave him a second chance and he hadn’t changed one bit.”

In February 1966, Diane performed for a week in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba with a group called The Homesteaders. “This was the first subtropical place I had been to and I loved it. It’s a huge base and we did a show for a different crowd every night. I remember my dressing room had large mirrors all around the room.  I was told that Zsa Zsa Gabor had been there a few months earlier and demanded the mirrors on all the walls so that she could see herself from every angle. Nancy Sinatra’s song These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ was a big hit at the time and I was a big hit singing it to the sailors. At every show, a sailor would take off his boots and bring them up to me onstage. I would kick off my high heels and put the boots on, just in time to say (as Nancy said on her record), ‘Are ya ready, Boots?  Start walkin’!’ I’d walk off the stage to thundering applause and cheering. I felt like a rock star!”

After a week in Cuba, The Homesteaders and Diane traveled to Wheeling, West Virginia to perform on the long-running radio show The Wheeling Jamboree. “I enjoyed working with The Homesteaders and really felt I was making some headway in the business,” she says.

Diane moved in with her sister Carol and brother-in-law Bert in the spring of 1966, when the couple bought a small house 12 miles outside of Nashville. “Their house was several blocks away from the nearest bus stop, so it was always a long walk for me to get a bus to take me into town. Bert was making $200 a month and Carol quit working when she became pregnant with their daughter Carrie. As I was too far away to hang out in Nashville and meet music people, I got very little work during this period. I would walk to the bus and go to the Opry on weekends and always got a ride home from someone on the show. At the time, I was dating Dottie West’s bass player, whom I had met when he played bass with The Homesteaders, but we didn’t date for very long.

In March of 1967, Diane worked a week in Toronto at the Edison, with male singer Larry Kirby, and a girl duo named Dude and Bobby. “We actually did several gigs together,” says Diane, “including a few at some military bases in Fargo, North Dakota and Valdosta, Georgia.”

That May, Diane dated a man whose Elvis Presley-like countenance had made him a heartthrob of the teen set since the late 50s…handsome Hollywood actor John Ashley. Unbeknownst to Diane, however, Ashley had actually seen her for the first time several months prior to their meeting in Nashville. “To tell the story of how I met John Ashley, I have to go back to November of 1966. An agent in town named Grace Hall called to ask me if I’d like to work a week at a club called King Arthur’s, in Kansas City. If it went well, I could stay for four weeks. The gig paid $200 a week, and I could stay at a hotel, next door for $25.00 a week. Needless to say, I was elated. I took a train to Kansas City and when I saw the crummy hotel I would be staying in I was a bit put off by it, but I checked in anyway and paid the $25.00 in advance (as required). I walked into the club for an afternoon rehearsal and the horn player asked, “Where are your charts?” I was so green at the time I didn’t know what he meant by ‘charts’. I didn’t know that charts were arrangements. I had worked very little, and only with country bands and the Christmas military tour with Ronny and the Daytonas. So, my gig at King Arthur’s was a fiasco, to say the least. I remember singing Your Cheatin’ Heart, Jambalaya, Tom Dooley, and Bye Bye Love. My only consolation was that there were only about five people in the audience that night. (It’s important that you keep this in mind.) That was the first time I had ever been inside of a strip club. The stripper told me, “Believe me, honey, I am the tamest stripper you’ll ever meet.” Well, she was right…she was not sleazy at all. In fact, she had a sewing machine in the dressing room and when she wasn’t out front stripping, she was backstage making a red corduroy jumper for her little niece. What she didn’t know was that while she was onstage, her husband was trying to kiss me and feel me up! I felt so bad for her that he would be after me, and she didn’t even know it. The comedian, Joey Gerard, felt sorry for me and spent the next afternoon with me at the club teaching me the Dean Martin song, You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You. He even gave me his silver St. Christopher medal, for good luck. I needed it. Joey and I worked a bit too long and I still had to go back to my hotel room and change clothes. I was five minutes late in arriving at the club. The manager told me that I had broken my contract and he fired me. I told him that I didn’t have any money for food and that I had worked one night. He reached into his pocket and gave me five dollars! The hotel manager wouldn’t refund any of the $25.00 that I had paid in advance for my room, even though I had stayed there only two nights. So there I was, stranded in Kansas City, with no money to buy a train ticket back to Nashville. I had to call my parents back in Nebraska, which, believe me, was a very hard call to make.

“My dad came to get me the next afternoon. Sutton, my hometown, was only two and a half hours away. Well, I ended up staying with my parents through Christmas. All that mattered to my mother, of course, was that her baby was home for the holidays. My brother Jim saw the St. Christopher medal and wanted it. I said that Joey Gerard had given it to me for good luck and that I wanted to keep it. He took it anyway, saying, ‘Aw, you’ll never see him again.’ It was probably a year or so after that, when I worked The Stork Club in Bossier City, Louisiana. Lo and behold, the comedian on the bill was Joey Gerard. He asked me why I wasn’t wearing the St. Christopher medal he had given me and I lied and said that it was in my suitcase. Small world, isn’t it?

“Now, to my meeting John Ashley in May 1967: Thanks to my brother Jim’s interference, my sister and her husband had kicked me out of their house by then and I was living with three other girls in a rented house in East Nashville. I was backstage one Saturday night at the Grand Ole Opry. John was in town for the premiere of Hell On Wheels, a drive-in movie that he did with Marty Robbins. I don’t recall if John did a walk-on at the Opry that night on Marty’s portion of the show, or if he was just visiting backstage. Anyway, he walked over to me and asked, ‘Excuse me, but didn’t you sing at a club in Kansas City about six months ago?’ I was stunned…and embarrassed. It turns out, he had been in Kansas City for a business meeting and they had gone to King Arthur’s that night for dinner. I explained what had happened and he said, ‘We felt so sorry for you. We knew that a strip band was the wrong kind of band for you.’ John said that he had wanted to come over and talk to me but didn’t know if he should. He asked me to go out with him after the Opry. I told him that I already had a date and he said, ‘Well, can’t you break it?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t do that.’ I could see he was visibly surprised, of course, at being turned down. John was very, very handsome, and I had seen him in Beach Blanket Bingo. What girl wouldn’t jump at the chance to go out with him? So, when I turned him down, he said, ‘Oh, well. I’ll be in town until Monday morning. Would you like to go out to dinner and maybe a movie, tomorrow night?’ I very happily agreed to that. (laughs) So, the following night we went out to dinner and a movie with Eddie Crandall and his wife, JoAnne Steele, who was also a singer. I can’t remember which movie we saw, but I know that John nixed the idea when Eddie said, ‘We could go see Hud. John’s in that one.’ When I finally did see Hud, I discovered that John had only one line in the entire film! No wonder he didn’t want us to see it! Anyway, we had a great time and after the movie, Eddie and JoAnne dropped us off at John’s hotel. I stayed the night, but kissing and heavy petting was really all that went on. Eddie was coming over the next morning to take John back to the airport. John wanted me to ride to the airport with them, and to have breakfast there. I was very embarrassed that Eddie would know that I’d spent the night.  John told him that I’d just come over to ride to the airport with them. Of course I was wearing the same clothes, as the night before, so I’m sure Eddie knew better.

“After our meeting in Nashville, John and I talked on the telephone nearly every day. That July, he wanted me to visit him in Tulsa. He prepaid a plane ticket for me and I even flew First Class. I actually flew from Nebraska, where I had been visiting. The night before, I had gone to a county fair with my cousin, and a local boy won a teddy bear for me. When I got off the plane, I was carrying the teddy bear and a copy of the Jacqueline Susann book, Valley Of The Dolls. John thought that was really funny. (laughs) I had just had a birthday and John had told me on the phone that he had a big surprise for me. I thought it would be a beautiful gift, but the big surprise was about five or six 8-track tapes of country music that he had bought to play in the car. Needless to say, I was very disappointed. John took me to meet his parents in Tulsa, where he was living at the time. He and his ex-wife Deborah Walley’s child, Tony, who was then about four years old, was visiting him for the summer. His nanny, Mabel, was there, too. (Mabel had also been Deborah’s nanny when she was a child.)

In the 60’s, John and his business partner had a company called Snyder-Ashley Enterprises. They owned several movie theaters in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, including some new twin theaters in both cities. John and I went downtown on my first night in Tulsa to pick up the ticket money. The theater concession counter sold big dill pickles, in plastic packages, which I found to be strange. The manager of the theater told John that when a sexy movie played (such as an Elvis movie), he would find several pickles in the stalls of the women’s restroom. John laughed and said that this could be a whole new way of rating movies. ‘Yeah, I would give that movie about 12 pickles!’ (laughs) The trip was really fun and John didn’t pressure me to have sex, which was a relief. And yet I was a little puzzled when he said, ‘Diane, I won’t rest until I make you fall in love with me.’ Okay…

“The next time I flew to see him was probably in August or September. By this time, my ticket was Coach. We stayed in Oklahoma City and didn’t go to Tulsa at all. He got a motel room for us and I was really upset and even in tears. I said, ‘ I’ve never stayed in a motel with a boy before.’ He laughed because I had said, boy instead of man. This time, there was some pressure from him for sex, but I knew I still wasn’t ready for it. Still, he assured me that he loved me. That’s when he told me, ‘You can make your little record and then we can settle down and have a family.’ Wow…I didn’t like that at all. I wanted a career, not just one ‘little record.’ Music was my top priority, and no one  who got in my way was going to stay in my life.

“John and I continued to talk on the phone and he told me that I could always call him ‘collect’ at his parents’ house. It didn’t have to be person-to-person (that cost more), because no one answered the phone in his bedroom. I flew to see him a third time, and again, it was a Coach ticket. I still wasn’t ready for sex, and I’m sure that was really wearing thin with a 33-year old divorced man. After that last visit, we talked a few more times on the phone and then I didn’t hear from him for a week. I tried to call him and his phone just rang and rang. I knew the name of the motel where he always stayed in Oklahoma City, so I called his room. A woman answered the phone. I asked for John and she said that he wasn’t there. I said, ‘Who are you?’ Can you believe that she said she was the maid? Of course, I knew that a hotel maid wouldn’t answer the phone, so the next night I called his Tulsa number (collect) and John answered. The operator asked, ‘Will you accept a call from Diane Jordan’ and John simply said, ‘No!’ and hung up on me. I remember I sat there just staring at the receiver in my hand.

“I think what made me the angriest was the fact that I had already been out once with my future husband Larry (whom I would marry in December of 1971), and had really, really liked him. I didn’t even care about John, but it was just very insulting to have him break up with me that way—you know, over the phone. I certainly didn’t want a future with a man who said, ‘You can make your little record and then we can settle down and have a family.’

“As it turns out, John Ashley married someone within a year of our breakup and had more children. It worked out the way it was supposed to, though. I married Larry Fullam in 1971 and we’re still together…38 years later.”

Diane had first met Larry in the summer of 1965, when he came to Nashville after his discharge from the Army. “My friends met him before I did and one of them said to me, ‘If he asks you out, don’t go because I saw him first.’ I had a good reputation, so he didn’t ask me out until the fall of 1967. I went to a movie with him just before John Ashley dumped me. I liked Larry right away, so I really didn’t care about breaking up with John. He wounded my pride, but he certainly didn’t break my heart.”

When asked what first attracted her to Larry, Diane answers, “I was initially attracted to him because he was good looking and talented. I love great voices, and when I heard a demo that he did, of a song called Tender Persuasions, I knew that I had to kiss him on the mouth! (laughs) When I met Larry, I immediately liked his clean-cut appearance and the fact that he was not a typical musician. In other words, he didn’t drink, smoke or take drugs. He also didn’t hunt or fish. I dated guys who did some of those things but there was no way that I would ever marry a man who did any of them! (laughs)

“As I got to know Larry, I could see that he was easy-going, which was totally unlike the men in my family. He didn’t use profanity as part of his regular vocabulary, he had respect for his mother and sisters, and he was kind to animals. We dated for three years, and then became engaged. We chose a house together and Larry moved into it about nine months before we were married in Madison, Tennessee on December 19, 1971. Larry was definitely one of the good guys that I met back then, and he hasn’t changed one bit, I am happy to say.”

Diane and Larry were already dating when she got a two-week singing gig at a Huntsville, Alabama nightclub in the fall of 1967. “A former Nashville musician had moved there and was managing the club. He’s the one who booked me. I had told the musicians about my being able to work a Ouija Board, and they decided to buy one and try it out. They all came to my room one night after we got off work. I had always noticed a peculiar smell when they were around but I had never been around marijuana before, so I had no clue that’s what I was smelling. Imagine my surprise when the guys came into my room and started smoking. I remember I fell asleep; apparently the pot smoke had that effect on me. One of them shook me awake as they were leaving and said, ‘Hey, Diane, thanks for the pot party.’ I can’t help but think of how innocently I could have gotten into trouble for something I slept through.”

In December of that year, Nashville agent Jack D. Johnson got Diane another overseas gig, this time in Asia. “Jack booked me on a three-week Christmas tour of military bases in Japan, Marcus Island and Iwo Jima,” she recalls. “The show was called Guy Mitchell’s All Star Revue, with The Heralds, Donna Dee Anderson, Diana Duke and me. The Heralds were a folk trio that usually toured with the popular orchestra Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians, and Donna Dee Anderson was married to one of the guys in the band. As you can tell from the name of the show, 1950s pop singer Guy Mitchell was supposed to be the star of the tour, but it never happened.

“The day we were to leave, we were all at the airport early, eager to begin this exciting adventure. It was getting closer and closer to flight time, but Guy Mitchell still hadn’t arrived. Jack was there to see us off, and he was not happy. Finally, we boarded the flight without Guy. Jack said that he wasn’t going to let Guy take a later flight. ‘Just do the show without him,’ he said. ‘You don’t need him anyway.’  Jack died in 2008, and I attended his wake. I met his wife and told her that Jack had booked me on tours to Germany and to Japan.  She immediately remembered that Guy had missed the Japan tour. She said that Jack was really disgusted with him and that his missing the flight was the last straw. She and Jack had even invited Guy to stay in their home once, but she said, ‘Guy Mitchell was a real drunk. He didn’t appreciate anything that Jack tried to do for him.’

“We were a bit apprehensive about doing the tour without Guy, but no one really seemed to care. In fact, only one person—a ten-year old boy, of all people—asked why he wasn’t there. He had recently seen Guy’s old movie, Red Garters, and he wanted to meet him.”

Diane and the Guy Mitchell Revue traveled all over Japan and then did some shows on Marcus Island and in Iwo Jima. “Marcus Island is a tiny triangular-shaped island in the northwest Pacific. At only 700 acres in size, much of it is taken up by the airstrip. (The island was given back to Japan in 1968.) The guys that were stationed there hadn’t seen any women for a while, and they were really happy to see us. I remember wearing a red sparkly mini dress (which I made) and thigh high silver boots. I thought that it was such a cool outfit, but the guys didn’t like it at all; they wanted to see legs! For our safety,  the other girls and I had to spend the night in the infirmary, with a guard at the door. (laughs) Donna Dee Anderson and her husband Dennis were newlyweds, so they were not happy about this arrangement.

“The soldiers on Marcus Island prepared for our visit for several weeks. They built a beautiful little fish pond in our honor, and made gifts for us (which I still have). The fishermen attached glass balls of different sizes to their fishing lines, to keep their nets afloat. In these glass balls they had stamped different Japanese characters (probably to identify the owners of them). The sailors later collected the balls that washed up on the island and wove jute rope around the large ones to create a netting effect. That was one of the gifts they gave me. It was really very cool, and to this day, I have it displayed on the mantle in our den. Another guy gave me a beautiful piece of ‘brain coral,’ which is actually shaped like a human brain. It, too, is displayed on my mantle. During our  stay, we were shown a movie about what happened at Iwo Jima, and then we were taken to Mt. Suribachi to see the flag, which was very impressive.

“Here’s kind of a funny story. One of the popular ‘catch phrases’ of the day was, ‘Later, Baby.’ One day we asked our Japanese bus driver to teach us to say it in Japanese. He thought for a few seconds and then said, ‘Sayonara, hockachung!’  After driving us around for three weeks, we became very fond of him, and he became fond of us. The day he drove us to the airport, he wouldn’t say goodbye to us. He just looked at us very sadly, and said, ‘Rater, Baby.’ (laughs)

“My earlier trip to Germany was a great experience, of course, but traveling to Japan was just totally fascinating to me. It was like entering another world. The monetary gain was a pittance, but the experiences were priceless. Those memories will last a lifetime.”

Once back in the States, Diane might have done well to ask her ex-boyfriend John Ashley for some advice on making B-movies when her next job came along: a part in a low-grade horror film titled The Monster And The Stripper. As Diane will admit, it was easily her oddest gig ever.

“I received a phone call one day in early 1968 from a booking agent named Jeane Matthews. She told me that a movie was being produced in town and that they were looking for some young chorines for it. I told her I wasn’t a dancer and she said that only a couple of simple routines were involved. ‘They just want sexy girls,’ she said.  ‘Go over to Trafco Studios and show them your legs.’ So, I did. There were also some real-life strippers in the film but I want to be sure people know that I was one of the chorus girls…not a stripper.

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“Two years later, when I was 18, I was babysitting for a week at the home of another WKDA disc jockey named Eddie, and his wife, both of whom I had met through Kris Jensen. Audie came to the house to drop something off for Eddie and he was surprised and embarrassed to see me there. He apologized for propositioning me at the pool. He said he knew that I was too young and that he shouldn’t have treated me that way.“Speaking of which…neither should have Felton Jarvis. When I didn’t do what Felton  wanted, he eventually lost interest in Come On And Dance With Me, and the record died. It’s a shame, too, as it was getting played. But, instead, Felton got the label excited about a record called Boney Maronie that he produced for the group The Appalachians, using the same open 12-string guitar sound of a big hit at the time, Walk Right In. ABC forgot about my record and promoted Boney Maronie instead, and it became a hit.“ABC-Paramount should have done more promotion on me, but as I said before, they did next to nothing. I feel so bad when I listen to the song now because it was as good as anything out there at the time. It had a sound and I had a sound. I think that first record was an omen of what to expect in my recording career later on. The trouble is, I didn’t know it at the time.

“After I lost my deal with ABC, I spent the summer of ’63 in Nashville,” says Diane. “Through Kris, I met and became friends with singer Mark Dinning’s niece Shay, who was living in Nashville with her grandmother, and who, like me, was also pursuing a singing and songwriting career. (Shay’s mother, Jean Surrey, wrote Marks’s monster hit Teen Angel. In the 1940s, she and Shay’s aunts were quite famous as The Dinning Sisters.) Gary Walker cut some demos with me that summer for Lowery Music. My parents and my brother Jim, who had driven to Nashville to take me home to Nebraska, got to go to the recording session with me. I was so pleased that they could watch me ‘in action’.

“After the summer was over, I was devastated that I had to go back to Sutton, and high school, where I was always pretty much an outsider. On the drive back home, I must have cried for the first hundred miles. In retrospect, though, I know that it was smart that I went home and finished high school. Without my sister and older brother, John, living at home, I was able to become very close to my mother. I didn’t want a boyfriend at the time, and I went out on only a couple of dates. I went to the football and basketball games and that was about it. My sister Carol came home to Sutton for a visit, arriving by bus a couple of days after my graduation in 1964. The plan was for me to go back to Nashville with her so we hopped on a Trailways bus and I left Sutton for good. I had about $75 to my name, which I had saved from my allowance and from selling my bicycle to a neighbor. But I was perfectly happy to live with my sister in a dumpy old apartment with no air conditioning, and no car. After all…it was Nashville!

“Once I was back in town, Kris Jensen and I resumed dating. He and I appeared at the Billy Bowlegs Festival in Florida in June of 1964. We weren’t paid anything for the show, but all our expenses were paid. That was my first time on an airplane, so that was really exciting for me. Whenever we could, Carol and I hung out at Linebaugh’s Café, which was just a block away from the Ryman Auditorium, on Lower Broadway. After a while, we got to know a musician there named Ralph Davis. He had a couple of road shows coming up with Opry star Roy Drusky, and they needed a girl singer. I got the job, which paid $35 a night, or a whopping $70 in all. I sang five songs per show and I was so timid I couldn’t even talk to the audience. But Ralph was very kind and helped me through it by doing all the talking for me. I remember singing Marty Robbins’ song, Don’t Worry. We did shows in Paragould, Arkansas and Biloxi, Mississippi. Dottie West’s husband, Bill, played steel guitar in the band, and I later came to know Dottie quite well.

“My sister had a friend named Clyde Beavers, who was a singer in town. Clyde and his band performed mainly at military NCO Clubs, which was a source of work back then for many entertainers who weren’t stars. Clyde paid me ten dollars a show, plus all my expenses. When he paid for my food, one of the musicians sneered, ‘Wow, I wish I was a pretty young girl so Clyde would buy my food.’  I was embarrassed by his insinuation, but it taught me that things are not always what they seem to be. I knew that I needed experience and I was grateful for the opportunity to learn.

“Kris Jensen’s friend from Ft. Lauderdale, Bert, had just been discharged from the army and came to Nashville with dreams of singing and writing songs. Kris brought Bert along with us to go to church. After church, they brought me home and came up to the apartment. When Bert saw my sister’s Hank Snow album collection, they struck up a conversation and soon afterward started dating. Three weeks later, they were engaged, and were married in April. For a while, I moved in with the Jensen family, sharing a room with Kris’ sister, Karen. That didn’t work out, though, and after two or three months, I broke up with Kris and moved back to the apartment with Carol and Bert, where I slept on the living room couch.”

It was around this time, Diane says, that she started getting a lot of demo work. “I began writing for Tuckahoe Music, which was owned by Jim Reeves’ widow, Mary. Soon afterward, I started doing demos for Combine Music, and several other music publishers, as well. The break- up with Kris was traumatic for me and I was really, really heartbroken. Of course, everyone knows that a heartbreak is conducive to writing songs. Tuckahoe published the songs, and one of them (Sleeping Giant)was recorded that year by Bonnie Guitar on Dot Records. Bonnie had been a pop singer in the 1950s and one of the first songs I learned as a child was her version of Dark Moon. How cool it was that she was now recording one of my songs! I really wanted to be at the recording session, but I didn’t have a car, so I couldn’t go. When I heard the record later on, I was amazed. It was a big session, with lots of violins, which wasn’t very common back then in country music, and Bonnie sang it beautifully. The song was on her album, Miss Bonnie Guitar. I saw it listed in a Dot Records ad in Billboard magazine as one of their hottest selling albums that year. However, I was paid no royalties on the song, so I inquired about it. I was 19 years old at the time, and Clarence Sellman, who ran Tuckahoe Music, decided that it wasn’t legal for me to sign a songwriting contract because I was under 21. Even though my sister could sign as my guardian, he said that it would be considered ‘enslavement’. (laughs)  The only thing to do, he said, was to go to court to have my minor disability set aside. I could then legally sign my own contracts. I was a year and a half away from 21 and another singer/songwriter with Tuckahoe, Barbara Cummings, was six months away from 21. She had to go to court, too. The court costs came out of our royalties and, according to Clarence, my song didn’t make any more than the court costs. That figures, doesn’t it?

“Another person I met while hanging out at Linebaugh’s was Jack D. Johnson, who later discovered and managed Charlie Pride and Ronnie Milsap. In 1965, he was booking some shows overseas and he asked me if I wanted to do a three week Christmas show on several military bases, with Ronny and the Daytonas. Wow, did I ever! Singer/songwriter Marijohn Wilkin, who was the mother of Ronny (really John Buck Wilkin and nicknamed Bucky), and Sue York were the other two females on the show and our comedian/MC was Merv Shiner. My act at the time consisted of all pop songs. I remember I sang I Only Want To Be With You which had been a big hit that year by my favorite singer at the time, Dusty Springfield.

“I was scared to death but the very warm welcome I received by the all male military audience gave me confidence. After a few shows, I could actually joke with the crowd and move around on stage. We were traveling for the Department of Defense, not USO. To explain the difference, the USO paid $150 per week, plus $10 per diem. However, the Department of Defense paid us only $10 per diem, and we had to pay for our own food and rooms. (laughs) Rooms in the billets, on base, were just two dollars and twenty-five cents per night back then. Marijohn and Sue shared a room but I was the odd one out. Sometimes I would come in from a show and a strange girl would be sleeping in the other bed, which wasn’t too pleasant for me. However, the food was very cheap and we even got some meals for free, too. Still, we had to take some money along if we wanted to buy anything. In those days, we took whatever gigs were offered to us, and we worked hard.”

Back in Nashville in 1965, Diane crossed paths with the handsome and brilliant Rhodes Scholar (and future songwriting legend) Kris Kristofferson. Nearly 45 years later, she retains fond memories of a charismatic man whose genius was tempered at the time by a wild streak of self-indulgence. “One day at Linebaugh’s Cafe, I became friends with two girls named Karon and Mickey, who lived in an old building on 7th Avenue,  just a block away from my sister’s place on 8th Avenue and Demonbreun Street. Karon and Mickey were sisters who had moved to Nashville from South Dakota so that Karon could pursue a songwriting career. I sometimes slept on the girls’ sofa, as I was trying to stay out of Carol and Bert’s way as much as I could. Karon and Mickey didn’t have a car and neither did I, but we could walk the five blocks to Linebaugh’s and to the other little nightclubs on Lower Broadway where all the songwriters and musicians hung out. The Ryman Auditorium was just around the corner and on Saturday nights, the Grand Ole Opry performers went there to eat at Linebaugh’s between shows. Karon and Mickey were older than I and could get into the clubs. I turned 19 that summer and the legal drinking age back then was 21. I had learned my lesson one night earlier when I was in a police raid at the Honey Club. I didn’t drink; I was just there to sit in with the band. But after that experience, I hung out mostly at Linebaugh’s Café, and that’s where I met Kris.

“On Saturday nights, Karon and Mickey would invite whomever was at our table in Linebaugh’s to go to their apartment for jam sessions. No one did any drugs there and the only beverage the girls served was instant coffee. (laughs) Kris and I were attracted to each other and though he never took me to a movie, or anything, one could say that we were dating. He had explained to me that his wife had refused to move to Nashville with him when he gave up the opportunity to teach at West Point. Kris’s decision to move to Nashville to write songs had met with his parents disapproval, as well. (His father was a retired Air Force Major General.) In one of his past interviews, Kris spoke of the letter that he received from his mother, in which she had pretty much disowned him. He read parts of that letter to me and I remember he was very hurt by it. Kris’s mother said that if ever he did write any songs that were recorded, no one they knew would ever hear them. Of course that meant that they and their friends didn’t listen to country music.

“The jam sessions at Karon and Mickey’s house were a lot of fun and usually lasted until daylight. I remember one time Kris left around six o’clock in the morning and went across the street to talk to some of the homeless guys sitting outside of the local rescue mission. He came back laughing, saying that one of the guys said that the food there was pretty good but that they had to ‘sit through a damn prayer service to get it.’ (laughs)

“In those days, Kris rode a red Honda motorcycle, which I think was the cheapest one made back then. One night, we drove out to Percy Warner Park and watched the sun come up. Kris also drove a cheap little car and one night after taking me home, he had a wreck and totaled it! He used to drink a lot.

“I’m not sure when it was, but I think it was probably in the fall of 1965 when Kris told me that he couldn’t see me anymore. His wife had reconsidered and she and their little girl were moving to Nashville to be with him. I vividly remember when he told me that, and then added, ‘Hell, I even wrote a song about our breaking up.’ The title was There’s Just No Other Way. I liked Kris a lot, but I didn’t like his drinking and he was really too old for me, so I can’t really say that he broke my heart. Still, it was kind of nice that he had written a song about me.

“In 1976, right after I signed with Columbia Records, Kris and Rita Coolidge, his second wife, played a concert in Nashville. I found out that Columbia was hosting a party for Kris after the concert, and I finagled an invitation to attend it. Kris came to the party alone and Rita came in later. Someone said, ‘Hey Kris, do you remember Diane Jordan?’ He laughed, shook his head and said, ‘Do I remember Diane Jordan? As if I don’t have a memory now.’ Then he said to me, ‘I totaled my car after I took you home one night.’ He was very surprised to see me and seemed happy that I had been signed to a record deal with Columbia.

“I saw Kris again, in 1996, when he played the Wildhorse Saloon in Nashville. I attended the show and then went to the stage door afterwards. Fortunately, for me, Fred Foster, who had owned Monument Records and Combine Music (the company that published Kris’ songs), was waiting at the stage door. He said that I could go backstage with him. When Kris saw me, the first thing he said was, ‘I totaled my car after I took you home one night.’ (That experience must have had quite an impact on him.) (laughs) We talked a few minutes and though we didn’t agree with each other politically, he said, ‘Well, good for you; at least you’re not apathetic.’ He seemed glad I was still in the business. I asked him what he ever did with There’s Just No Other Way. He immediately said (as though it had been only a few weeks ago, instead of over 30 years): ‘Rager (meaning Eddie Rager, who was a songwriter friend of both of ours) warned me that I was on somebody’s melody with the song, so I didn’t do anything with it.’ Then he added, ‘It’s still at Marijohn’s.’ When he first came to Nashville, his initial contact was Marijohn Wilkin, whom I believe was a relative of someone he knew in the Army. Marijohn published all of Kris’s early songs in her Buckhorn Music publishing catalogue.

“It wasn’t until a few months after I saw Kris that I went to Marijohn’s office to see if the song had ever been cut or even demoed. She looked through her catalog and said that it wasn’t there and that she had never even heard of it.

“That’s pretty embarrassing. I dated Kris Kristofferson —he even wrote a song about our breakup—and then, the song not only isn’t a hit, it totally disappears!” (laughs)

During this time, a local booking and modeling agent named Dottie O’Brien got Diane some work in a few nightclubs in and around Nashville. Diane remembers a particularly harrowing incident from this period where she came across someone far less benign than the raucous and goodhearted Kris Kristofferson. Sadly, it was the type of incident that had happened to her before and would, in fact, be repeated several more times over the course of her career. “One day, Dottie had a call from Cole of California, a famous swim suit company, asking for a girl to model a new line of swimsuits for some fashion buyers in Nashville. The suits were designed for more voluptuous women, like me. This was during the Twiggy era, and most of Dottie’s models were very thin. She called me and asked me to do it, even though I wasn’t a model and had absolutely no previous modeling experience. Dottie said that I could come to her office and that she would show me the basic turns, etc., which would be all I needed to know in order to model the swimsuits for the buyers. I agreed to do it, although I was a bit nervous. But Dottie assured me that she would explain to the sales rep that I wasn’t a trained model, and that everything would be okay.

“Dottie dropped me off at the client’s hotel, The Downtowner, which was in the heart of Nashville, on the corner of 7th  Avenue and Union Street. I knocked on the door and an ugly, middle-aged fat man opened it, smiled, and invited me in. His first comment was, ‘Ah, this is better than I had hoped for.’ He had racks of bathing suits and other clothing in his room. He picked out a bikini and said, ‘Here, put this on.’ He kept holding the suit, as though he expected me to just take off my clothes right there in front of him. I finally said, ‘I’ll change in the bathroom.’ He shrugged and said, ‘Whatever you want.’

“When I came out, he said, ‘Do you really want to learn something and do a really good job?’  I said that I did, of course, and then he told me to stand in front of the mirror. With that, he came behind me, laughed and whispered in my ear, ‘This won’t hurt a bit’, and then he jerked my top down. I shrieked at him and said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ and then I ran to the bathroom. I put on my clothes and came out, easing my way very slowly to the door. He said, ‘I’m used to girls who will do anything to model and get beautiful clothes from me.’ I had the door open and turned around and replied, ‘Well I don’t even want to be a model. I want to be a singer…and I don’t care anything about your beautiful clothes.’ His last words were, ‘Yeah, well come back if you change your mind. I’ll be waiting…’

“At the time, I was dating a 6’7″ guy named Bill, who was an aspiring singer-songwriter who worked as a bouncer at Boots Randolph’s Carousel Club in Printer’s Alley. I knew that he was working that night and it was only a few blocks away, between 3rd and 4th Avenues, so I ran all the way there, half crying and almost hysterical. I told Bill what had happened to me and asked him if he would go back to the guy’s hotel room with me, later that night, just to scare him. I said that I could knock on the door and say that I had changed my mind about his offer. Then he would open the door and see a 6’7″ man standing there and it would scare the hell out of him. But, Bill wouldn’t do it. He was tall, but he was also pretty much a coward. He was afraid of fighting, though I’m sure the dirty old man in the hotel wouldn’t have even tried to fight him.”

Unfortunately, Diane’s close call with the overheated swimsuit buyer would not be an isolated incident for her, and she would soon learn that sexual harassment was an all-too prevalent part of the business. “I was naturally endowed with no silicone necessary,” she explains, “and with measurements of 37-24-35, you can imagine what I went through. There was a casting couch at every turn, it seemed.” The next man to allegedly try to assault the serious-minded singer was Kelso Herston, then Vice President of United Artists Records. Diane recalls, “Kelso heard me at a club in Printer’s Alley and asked me to come to his office on the following Monday to talk about a recording contract. I didn’t have a car at the time and had to ride two city buses just to get to Music Row. Right after I entered his office, Kelso shut the door, and then immediately tried to unbutton my blouse. When I grabbed his hands and told him to stop, he said, ‘Well, I don’t know now if I want to sign you now or not. Why don’t you call back in two or three weeks?’ I said, ‘Oh, I think you know right now.’ He kind of sneered at me and said, ‘Yeah, you’re right. I guess I’ll pass.’ I told him, ‘Well, that’s fine, I’ll make it without you.’ Of course I didn’t make it, but I did have the pleasure of sending him an email in 2007, reminding him exactly what he did to me. I congratulated him on his lucrative career and the respect he has enjoyed within the music community, and then ended with, ‘But to me, you are nothing but a stone in my road of life.’ After all those years, it did make me feel a little bit better telling him that.”

According to Diane, another similar experience happened the same year, when producer/songwriter Norro Wilson, who in those years ran a publishing company, locked his office door and actually chased Diane around his desk. Diane says, ‘I laughed right in his face and said, ‘This is like something right out of a movie!’ What a jerk. He actually advised me to get out of the music business and get a job, because he didn’t think I would make it.”

Despite the frequent displays of galling disrespect and overt male chauvinism she was encountering in Nashville, Diane was determined to keep working toward advancing her career—but only via her hard work and her professionalism. Still, she would have many other unpleasant experiences in town, like the trouble she had with singer/songwriter Tom T. Hall, whom she met the same year (1965) that she dated Kris Kristofferson. Though their association would be brief, her memories of the dry-witted and often sardonic singer remain painful today. “I don’t like the man,” she says. “Not at all.”

Born in Olive Hill, Kentucky in 1936, the performer who would one day be billed as “Nashville’s premier storytelling singer” earned to play the guitar by the age of eight and was fronting his own country band, the Kentucky Travelers, at 16. Hall later worked as a disc jockey on WMOR-Morehead Radio in his home state and in 1964 he moved to Nashville to pursue a recording career. When Diane met him, Tom T. Hall was still a good three years away from writing his first major hit record, Harper Valley PTA, for singer Jeannie C. Riley. Despite the fact that he had yet to make it big in the industry, Hall had already apparently developed a formidable ego to match his scathing wit.

Diane recalls their meeting thus: “One night at Linebaugh’s Cafe, I was introduced to Tom T. Hall and after a while he said he wanted to drive me home. I didn’t really like him that much so I declined his offer, but he kept asking me, so I finally said, ‘Well, only if we can get a banana milkshake first at the Big Boy Drive In.’ As luck would have it, Tom’s old Cadillac stalled about half a block away from the Big Boy, which was on Division Street, near Music Row. He said that he lived right across the street and that we could get some food and take it to his apartment to eat. He promised he would call a cab to take me home after we ate. We got the food to go, and then walked across the street to his efficiency at the Barbizon Apartments.

“I sat on the sofa and we talked, and then I was finishing my last bite of food, Tom literally grabbed the food out of my hand and jumped on top of me. I got really mad and told him to get off. ‘You were supposed to call me a cab,’ I reminded him. His smart-ass reply was, ‘Okay, you’re a cab.’

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Cary Grant, Friend and Lover

It was during this heady period in Yvette’s life that she entered into her next serious relationship, this time with one of Hollywood’s most elegant stars, the classy and debonair Cary Grant. “I met him in 1959 through my friend Stanley Shapiro, who was a screenwriter we both knew, and I was immediately blown away by the man’s character. What a kind person Cary Grant was. He had absolutely no ego; he was just totally sweet and down-to-earth, and so funny. Cary not only had the best sense of humor, he also made you feel like you were the most important person in the world. I was young and spirited, and I think Cary was kind of fascinated with me. I really enjoyed our relationship and if I had played my cards right, maybe we would have even gotten married.

“But when we began seeing each other, I was still very gun-shy about marrying again. I had already gone through two failed marriages and I certainly didn’t want to take the chance of having another one, especially with a man as nice as Cary Grant. It wasn’t just me, though; at the time, Cary said he didn’t want to get married either. So we dated off and on, right into the 60s, and it was wonderful. And then one day when he did start talking about marriage, I began to panic a little—until he explained that he didn’t want to marry me, he wanted to marry Dyan Cannon. So, there you go. (laughs) We roared over that one! Cary felt bad about it at first, but I told him it was perfectly okay because I still wasn’t ready to get married! Cary and I had a lot of fun together. He took me out to dinner a lot, to wonderful places like Madame Wu’s in Santa Monica and The Luau in Beverly Hills. Cary was class personified, a gentleman through and through, and I still miss him. We were friends right up until he passed away, and I’ll always remember him with the most utmost respect.”

Hollywood’s Beat Playmate

Surely one of the more exciting events in Yvette’s life during her self-described “hot property years” was her selection as Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Month in July 1959. The subtly provocative spread, which revealed her Beat leanings—and her shapely, unclothed derriere—was photographed by Russ Meyer in Malibu, and also at Yvette’s hillside home in Beverly Hills, and was designed to promote Yvette’s sex kitten persona. To this day, she remains unsure if the layout helped or hindered her overall career. “The whole objective behind it was to stir up some interest in me and help me get better parts in films. It wasn’t necessarily an unusual thing to do at the time…several other young actresses posed nude for Playboy in the late 50s (Mara Corday, Sally Todd, Dawn Richard, et al.) with the same goal in mind. Marilyn (Monroe) had her centerfold out a couple of years earlier and the rest of us were hoping ours would get the same kind of reaction her spread had received. In retrospect, it didn’t help my film career—that much, I know—but I still don’t regret doing it. The layout was understated and tasteful, and the photo shoot was a fun experience for me. Russ Meyer is a great guy, and he was a complete professional. He later took some gorgeous photos of me in a kind of rustic setting up in the Malibu mountains, which are just incredible. Russ is a genius with women.”

Following her splash as Hollywood’s Beat Playmate, Yvette headed to New York City in the fall of ‘59 to co-star in a Broadway show called The Gang’s All Here. The actress was hired to emote as a fun-loving flapper amidst an otherwise all-male cast of industry veterans (including Melvyn Douglas and E.G. Marshall). She recalls her New York sojourn today with great fondness and remembers the flurry of activity that surrounded her Broadway debut. “The fact that I was a Playboy centerfold was not lost on the play’s writers, director and producers. In fact, they loved all the publicity I was getting. So I would say that my doing the play was good for me and good for the play’s business, too. We had a nice, healthy run of about a year, which may not sound like a long time, but I think we all accomplished what we set out to do. While I was in the show, I got into that whole New York social scene, and when I wasn’t on stage working hard, I was out having fun. Every day, a group of us would hit Joe Allen’s or Elaine’s Restaurant or Michael’s Pub, and we would have the best time. I loved everything that New York City had to offer back then, and I took in all of it: from the museums and the nightclubs, to the stores and the beatnik bars in the Village. I was very young, and while I was totally dedicated to my acting career and loved working hard, I really enjoyed playing during my off time, too.

“My co-stars in The Gang’s All Here were all veterans of the stage and I was in awe of their talent. Melvyn Douglas was a dignified man in his late fifties, and he kept me enthralled with his stories of all the people he knew back in Hollywood, including my childhood idol, Greta Garbo. One night, Melvyn took me out for dinner and told me he wanted to get to know me better, but I nipped it right in the bud and he behaved just fine after that. I was flattered, but with me, the interest has to be mutual. Still, he was such a wonderful man. And what a brilliant actor!

“I met actor Ralph Meeker, the next man I was seriously involved with, while I was doing the show. He was a very romantic guy, and he took me to some of the most exclusive French and Italian restaurants in town. We hit it off right away and wound up having a love affair that lasted for five years. Ralph was a real straight shooter, and he always encouraged my career aspirations. He was constantly telling me, “Don’t let anyone try to hold you back, Yvette. You go for it.” Ralph and I did everything together: we played tennis, worked out together at the gym, and sometimes took couples massages at a health spa. Even after the romantic side of our relationship cooled down, we always stayed friends. Ralph and I were together for quite a while…both in Manhattan and on the west coast.”

TV Westerns, Hollywood Stage Plays, and HUD

Although she received reams of favorable press during her stage stint in New York, upon her return to Hollywood in the early 60s, Yvette met with some resistance from the industry when she attempted to follow up on her Broadway success with more film work. “I tried very hard to get some strong film roles in those years, but it just wasn’t happening for me. The thing is, from about 1955 to the early 60s, I guest-starred on well over 100 television shows (the number is probably a lot closer to 200), so although my film resume may not be as extensive as I would have liked, I did work a lot more than many people realize. In the late 50s I did a lot of bad-girl roles on shows like Dragnet, Mike Hammer, and M-Squad, and then right into the 60s I guest-starred on a ton of TV westerns (including Bat Masterson, The Rebel, Wyatt Earp, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Texan, Shotgun Slade, The Rough Riders, and several others). I did two or three episodes of each of these shows—the producers would always call me back, which always made me happy—and although a lot of those parts were different variations of the cheap, tough-talking vamp, there were some nice exceptions. For instance, on one of The Rebel episodes that I did, I played a sweet and sympathetic young girl who worked with a deaf child. I learned sign language for the show and was quite happy with the way it turned out.

“I had a fun time on The Texan, which starred Rory Calhoun. We had worked together a few years earlier at Universal, in a western called The Saga of Hemp Brown, and we got along great. Rory was an absolute doll, and he had a terrific sense of humor. In fact, on the set of The Texan, he and the show’s producer, Vic Orsatti, busted my chops unmercifully. I remember one time, I was in my trailer getting dressed and they snuck up to the window and scratched and giggled and pretended they were peeking in. (laughs) Now, of course, they couldn’t see anything, but they sure as heck wanted me to know they were back there. Rory was happily married, so it was definitely all in good fun. I thought the way he liked to tease me was adorable. Totally harmless fun.”

In 1963, Yvette felt a renewed surge of hope for her movie career when she was offered a good part in the Paul Newman film, Hud. “I thought, ‘This is it! This is exactly the kind of film I need to put me over’. I played “Lily Peters,” an unfaithful wife who is running around with “Hud Bannon” (Newman’s character), a nasty, no-good womanizer who treats everyone like dirt. I originally had four, dynamite scenes in the picture, but then some very innocent flirting on the set between Paul and me apparently caused some waves somewhere, and the powers-that-be responded by cutting my part down to nothing. Paul and I had been photographed goofing around on location in Texas and it upset some people who thought our onscreen interaction might come across as too intense. (Obviously, a ridiculous excuse.) In the end, I was left with just one tiny scene in the beginning of the film. I was crushed.

“But it got even worse. Right after that happened, one of my ex-boyfriends got into a terrible screaming match with my agent, a man named Abby Greschler, causing Abby to have a near-fatal heart attack. The story spread through town like wildfire. The coup de grace, though, was when someone began planting vicious rumors all around Hollywood that I was selling myself on Sunset Strip and picking up drunken sailors in bars. It was horrible––an outrageous lie. The damage that was done from those last two events, especially, was incalculable. Most of the interviews I went on after Hud were only for bit parts, instead of starring roles. So, just like that, my film career kind of dried up. It was tough on my heart, it really was. I went back to working in the theater, and although I had several great stage roles over the years, I never managed to pick up the pace and get back on the same track (in films) that I was on before. I did two more small parts in motion pictures during that time (1962-63). I was in a Sidney Poitier/Bobby Darin movie, Pressure Point, where I played a lush, and then I did a silent bit as a Yoga girl in AIP’s Beach Party. I was duped on that last one. I had originally been signed to do a ‘celebrity cameo’ in the film, and I thought, ‘Why not?’ The producers told me it would be a lark to see me in leotards, doing a silent meditation. They said that I would get special billing and that it would be a great gag. Well, the gag turned out to be on me because in the end, they stuck me in the background with another girl (Sharon Garrett) and took away my ‘special billing’. Needless to say, during the early 60s I had much better luck with the stuff I did onstage.

“One such job was Grand Guignol, which was the umbrella title of two very scary one-act plays I did at The New Club in Hollywood. It was a very innovative production, based in part on the shock theaters that were so popular at the time in Paris. The show was quite a grisly affair and people came out in droves to see it. In the first play, I was a chi chi Hollywood reporter who was chased around onstage by a mad scientist and a gorilla, and in the second play, I played a nagging, trailer-trash-type wife who ends up being murdered by her husband. After he kills me, he cuts off my head and puts it in a potbelly stove––how’s that for gross? (laughs) My co-stars in the show were Tom Troupe and Charles MacCauley, two really good actors. The production values for Grand Guignol were very strong and the director, Jim Collier, was just great. We opened in early ‘63 and it ran for almost a year. I remember it closed right after President Kennedy was shot. Somehow the money for the show had disappeared, and I don’t know if it’s ever been found. (laughs)

“I’ve acted in over 25 stage shows, and Frenzy and Phoenix Too Frequent were two, in particular, that I found to be very interesting. I produced Frenzy, which was an adaptation of an Ingmar Bergman film that had been translated by Peter Ustinov. It was about a college student named Bertha (my character) who is having an affair with one of her professors until she meets a concert violinist with whom she also falls in love. Everything explodes, of course, and I wind up getting killed in the end. It was a dark piece of work, very powerful. Phoenix Too Frequent took place in ancient Rome and I was in full regalia as a woman of royalty. My husband has just died and I’m down in the catacombs with my handmaiden and a guard. Well, the guard and my character get drunk on wine and proceed to have an affair right there in the tomb. (laughs) I got totally lost in that role. I remember going on stage and immediately going into this deep, dreamlike state. It was a breathtaking experience. Both plays were extremely well-received, and I got some of the best reviews of my career.

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Steve Cochran and Yvette’s Classic Cult Films

“A guy I did see exclusively for a time was actor Steve Cochran—although our initial meeting was less than promising. In 1958, the same year I did The 50 Ft. Woman, I played a junkie in a crime film titled I, Mobster, and Steve was the leading man. I had one brief scene with him where he delivers some drugs to me at my apartment, and I try to seduce him. I’m sure everyone knows how good-looking and wild Steve Cochran was (and how charming he was with the ladies), but on the set, he was very cold to me––real aloof, and not at all friendly. However, I didn’t take it personally. I just accepted it for what it was, and figured he had his reasons. So it kind of surprised me one evening after we finished the shoot when, out of the blue, he invited me up to his house on Mulholland Drive, for dinner. I was very curious about this change of attitude in him so I went up there and we wound up having a wonderful meal together. I guess you could say that he really fooled me.

“That night, Steve had two female servants waiting on us hand and foot, and I remember thinking, ‘Aww, what nice little old ladies’. Later on, I learned that these two wrinkled, old women were actually only fourteen years old. Someone told me that they both looked so weathered because they would stay up all night, drinking and partying with Steve. Whew…I won’t comment on that!

“I began seeing Steve after our dinner date that evening, and ours was an exciting—if relatively brief—romance. He had his pilot’s license, and we flew up the California coast a lot in his private plane. Steve was a very handsome and sweet man. I remember him helping me when I was trying to get the role of the trashy, pregnant farm girl in the Universal film This Earth is Mine. He very patiently did line readings with me and helped me prepare, but I wound up losing the job anyway. It wasn’t his fault; I never do my best work at auditions. I’m at my best when I already have the part and can just throw myself into it. So, I suppose I wasn’t in the proper mindset for that role.

“Rock Hudson, the star of the picture, wound up pulling some strings and got his friend Cindy Robbins the part. That was a real bummer—I felt I could’ve done some really good work in that film, and it broke my heart to lose the opportunity. I think it would have built on what I had already done in the business, and it might have also kicked up the heat a little on my film career. As it turned out, though, it didn’t do very much for Cindy Robbins. I have no idea why.

“Anyway, Steve and I split up after a while, but we remained friends. I know his drinking habits increased greatly over the years, which is a shame. I last saw him just a short time before he died. We bumped into each other at a local marina, and he was very excited about his boat. It looked like an old pirate ship and Steve just went on and on about it. It was clear to me, though, that he had been drinking very heavily that day. Well, just a few weeks later, Steve died of a sudden heart attack on that boat while he was out at sea with a group of young girls. It was horrible. For several days, those poor girls had to float around in the middle of the ocean on that thing, along with Steve’s dead body. When I heard that story, I cried my eyes out. Steve Cochran was a sweet, funny, loveable rogue, and he was gorgeous, too. But, my God, he drank way too much.”

In the months following Yvette’s slinky bit as the predatory drug addict in I, Mobster, she made the two classic cult films for which she will forever be known. “I’ll never tire of talking about Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman or The Giant Leeches. The fans love those films and they’ve done an awful lot for me. I was offered the part of the honky-tonk harlot in 50 Ft. Woman the same time I was up for a really good role in a Lana Turner film at Universal (Imitation of Life). My agent, Jack Pomeroy, told me to take the part of “Honey” and worry about the other job later. Although I didn’t get the Turner film, it was not because of 50 Ft. Woman. It all worked out the way it was supposed to. I mean, who would have ever thought back in 1958 that 50 Ft. Woman would still be the object of discussion all these years later?”

A robust—if sometimes unintentionally hilarious—marriage of space-age paranoia and pre-feminist revenge, the film’s cornerstone is a disaster-bound love triangle involving a warring married couple (played by Allison Hayes and William Hudson) and the husband’s sluttish, roadhouse paramour (played by Yvette). Whether shaking her hips to a hot, r&b sax blaring from the bar’s jukebox, or undressing behind a wardrobe screen in her tawdry bedroom, Yvette is tough and sexy—and makes the most of every frame she is in. Throw a flying saucer, a bald, male giant in a Nordic breastplate, and some cheesy special effects into the mix, and you have the stuff of which legendary cult classics are made! The irresistible combination of alluring female pulchritude, the star’s colorful histrionics, and a fun script that featured a transparent Hayes prowling the California desert in a jumbo-sized bikini, has endeared the film to fans the world over. Says Yvette, “People just can’t seem to get enough of that picture. If only we had known we were creating something so lasting when we filmed it! I loved working with Allison and Bill. They were kind and wonderful people, God bless them…very professional and serious about doing good work. We did 99% of our scenes in one-take. Since the picture was shot in just eight days, there was no time for fooling around. The special effects might have been lousy, but I think the acting holds up pretty well. I thought Allison, in particular, was very good. She played that role so believably and so straight.”

The Giant Leeches followed in 1959, and it found Yvette once again enacting the part of the naughty tramp—this time, as a cheating wife in an isolated swamp village that’s been targeted by the titular creatures. “The Giant Leeches was another eight-day shoot. Roger and Gene Corman produced it, and they were adorable. They both have such an appreciation of actors and such respect. It makes a big difference.

“Again, we were restricted a lot by the budget, as you can tell when you see the stuntmen writhing around in those plastic garbage bags! And yet, a lot of it works, somehow. Those scenes where the leeches have a bunch of us stored (and ripening) in the underwater grotto, where they’re slowly sucking all the blood out of our bodies, were very frightening. It was also kind of haunting the way it took me so long to die. At first I didn’t understand all that prolonged moaning and groaning I was asked to do, but now I think it really added to the film’s overall creepiness. The down-and-dirty, white trash ambiance really worked, too. The characters were interesting and believable, and I think that parts of the film almost resemble a play by Tennessee Williams. I loved the character of Liz, and I appreciated the fact that they took time to explain her history a little bit. She was married to this heavyset, middle-aged shopkeeper (played by Bruno Ve Sota), which, on the surface, doesn’t make much sense, but then that two-shot by the water with (co-star) Michael Emmett reveals the events that had brought Bruno’s character and her together. That one little scene really strengthened the film.”

When not fending off mammoth mutants and blood-slurping worms, the late 1950s found Yvette an active participant in Hollywood’s Beat scene, a gathering of poets, writers and artists who reveled in a liberating—and groundbreaking—environment of nonconformity and self-expression. “It was absolutely where I belonged at the time. The people I surrounded myself with all shared an interest in jazz, literature, and social issues, and we took our various career goals very seriously. In those days, there were a lot of beat clubs and coffee houses down on Sunset Boulevard and I went to all of them. I was a bit of a nocturnal creature back then, so that whole trip suited me just fine. We were a fun loving group––very politically aware, a bit idealistic, maybe, and a little rebellious. But we all had a passion for living that couldn’t be tamed. I know I sure did.

“You know, I’ve always done exactly what I wanted to do; whatever my heart told me was right. That’s probably what got me into health food.” (This was an interest of Yvette’s that sustained her until old age and bad luck sadly took their toll.) “I can assure you,” she continued, “that very few people in the 1950s were into eating right and taking nutritional supplements, but I intuitively knew those were things I needed to do to stay healthy, so I followed that regimen religiously. I had a health guru back then, a wonderful lady in town named Marie Deauville Ellison, who showed me how to prepare all these wonderful vegetable juice concoctions, and they helped me stay at the peak of my game. I would say that whole part of my life, especially my involvement in the Beat scene, was very important to me (and to my growth as a person). It was an intellectual setting…very vital, very exciting, and absolutely alive with energy and ideas. It was great.

“I sometimes refer to that period of time (1956 to 1963) as my Hot Property Years. I worked non-stop during that stretch… doing a lot of television (especially), plus my stage work, some modeling, and of course the two cult movies and the other film work I did. Along with all of that, I was also taking three ballet classes a week, studying acting in various workshops, and having a ball in my personal life. So, it really was a jam-packed couple of years, but I loved it.”

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