Hello All! We’re working on all brand new merchandise for the 2012 season – bringing back T-Shirts and other super cool gift items and accessories. Check back soon to our new designs!!!

Thanks for stopping by the store! You’ll find rare autographed memorabilia that you simply cannot source anywhere else. And where else can you find rare DVDs of my performances in films like Vixen! and Caged Heat?

Vixen became the first American film officially to be given an “X” by the Motion Picture Association of America.

Local law enforcement officials in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Utah attempted to stop the film from showing.  Ohio courts approved a permanent ban against Vixen as obscene because it depicted ‘purported acts of sexual intercourse’ — in a case brought by future bank-fraud felon Charles Keating.  It was also withdrawn from some theaters in Wisconsin.  Says Erica, “Would you believe that today, more than 30 years later, it’s still banned in parts of Ohio?”  With a mischievous gleam in her eye, she suggests, I would absolutely love to go to Ohio now and try to show Vixen at a theater, and let them arrest me if they dared.  That’d be so cool!”

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Nevertheless — and perhaps in part helped by publicity over the censorship battles — Vixen was a popular phenomenon unlike any previous film of its kind.  The picture’s official premiere was on October 15, 1968, but really began to generate a head of steam at the year’s end.  It hit big in such key markets as Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Denver.  The film cracked the Variety national box office Top Ten on January 20, 1969.  Eventually, it would earn more than $6 million in the U.S. on a budget of only $76,000.  Meyer’s previous films always had a core audience, but he had never experienced anything like this before.

“I had no idea what to expect,” Erica admits.  “I felt that if I’m going to have a chance, I’d better grab the chance while it’s still in front of me.” So she designed and paid for her own full-page ad in Variety quoting Ebert’s review and noting the film’s box office breakthrough.

One dramatic event that brought home to Erica how Vixen was perceived in certain quarters was her appearance opposite feminist Betty Friedan on the local ABC talk show Chicago in early 1969.  “I was totally traumatized because she came out and started telling me that I was a disgrace to women.  That took me by surprise.  I’d never thought once about that before, but after the show, and after seeing the marchers protesting Vixen, part of me felt that maybe I should be standing up for women.  Part of it was because I felt like I never fit in, and wanting to so badly.

“The women’s movement was so big at that time—women were burning bras, and here I was taking mine off!  I didn’t want to be seen as dogging my own sisters.  So for several years after that, I was critical of Vixen.”  But now, “I really don’t feel that what I was doing was putting women down.  Vixen was totally on top.  I think it’s great when you can feel that control in a sexual way.”

–by Steve Sullivan
excerpted with kind permission from Glamour Girls
You can find this rare out-of-print issue right here!

To all of our fans, friends, and anyone else reading this…

I am still reeling from the news of the loss of my sweet angel friend and costar in BVD, Cynthia Myers. Thank you for all of your communication regarding this sad event. Last nite I watched some of the clips, as well as the interview with the two of us on the BVD DVD.

As hard as it was to watch it rolled me back in time when we had “the time of our lives”. Times shared, without a care and free of the painful knowledge that times to come would not be, quite so “carefree”.

In Cynthia’s case, a real Angel is joining the Land of Angels where she will Rest In Peace and again be carefree. She will be deeply missed.

Erica tells biographer Steve Sullivan about her changing
sexual nature and erotic escapades with actress Maria Schneider.

[Maria Schneider passed away on February 3, 2011. This article is dedicated to her memory.]

Although from a conventional perspective, Erica underwent a gradual evolution from straight to gay, she says it’s not that simple. Even in the late 60s when she was primarily going with men, her friendship with Bebe Louie also had an erotic component. Says Erica, “I guess the question is, am I gay and just that? I think you’re only in the box you want to put yourself in, and I think everything changes.”

“I had a long-term relationship with one woman who I still love dearly, and she’ll always have a place in my heart. And then fairly recently, I had a relationship that was based purely on lust. It was more amazing physically than I ever expected anything could be. I went nuts over this woman. I was so sexually charged for the first time in my life—I mean, more than Vixen could have ever been. I was driving down the street in my car very slowly masturbating, for days! I was looking at people outside, and fantasizing about having sex with them. It was really intense. I never realized that sex could be so great with a woman. You’re always taught, that’s not the way it is.

“I’ve always liked being with women, and I’ve had different sexual encounters off and on with women like Maria Schneider. But they were short-lived. I couldn’t get to the point where I was really having a relationship.”

Briefly one of the top international sex symbols for her role opposite Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, Maria hooked up with Erica sometime around early 1975.

“I was waiting tables at the Rainbow for lunches, and working nights at the Roxy, serving drinks for the shows. I was living off Laurel Canyon with my friend Manny (whose cousin played the Mountie who mounts Erica at the start of Vixen) and his boyfriend. One night we heard this crash outside. Manny looked out the window—he’s one of these people who recognizes everybody—and said, ‘oh my God, Maria Schneider just had an accident in front of our house!’ Right away, I’m racing down the stairs—’is there anything I can do for you? Why don’t you come up?’” She chuckles at the memory. “Well, she came up all right!”

“Her producer was on a photo shoot, so she and I played around for a few weeks.  She’d come to pick me up from work, and sometimes we’d do heroin together.  Her body type was like Angelina Jolie, she was so hot! Later, she’d even call and write me from Italy when she was shooting Caligula.  It seems like I was always the ‘other woman’—I was never the one who actually got the girl!”

One relationship that might have been was the doomed supermodel and five-time Cosmo cover girl Gia.  “She was seeing my friend Elmer Valentine. He used to come to Fred Segal and show off to his girls, and I always made a big deal about it. He was in his late 60s at the time and was going with these young girls. He loved watching them with other girls. So, when he was seeing Gia he told her, ‘I have this friend, she’s really hot!’ He introduced me to her, and she was sort of making a move on me. She wanted me to come up after work. But at the time, hanging out at the Improv after work was more important to me than having an actual relationship, so I never took her up on it. But boy, was she hot. She was like Maria, she knew what she wanted.”

“I have become Vixen in different sexual
situations in my life. And it’s fabulous!”

“Sometimes I would be into a relationship not for love or anything else, but for sex. If you put your mind out there so that’s what you want, you can become that character. It’s fun, but it’s a different person than someone who’s looking for a deep and meaningful relationship.

“When you can’t escape into that person, that’s when you start to miss the thing that first got you there—that freedom, when nobody knows anything about you, and you can start wherever you want. You should be able to do that, and to feel that power as a human being, with anyone you make love with. But it’s very hard to have both—the feeling of sexual freedom, and actual love. So far I haven’t succeeded in having them both wrapped into one for more than a few months.

“I never thought I’d be lucky enough to be gay. I thought I’d be straight and boring, and just have these brief periods [with women]—even in my heart I felt gay. And you know what? I am!” Laughing, she adds, “today… I don’t know what’ll happen ten years from now. Maybe I’ll be part of a harem in an old folk’s home!”

-by Steve Sullivan
excerpted with kind permission from Glamour Girls
You can find this rare out-of-print issue right here!

In this blood-curdling excerpt, writer Steve Sullivan interviews Erica about the eerie connection between Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and the murderous Manson Family.

The blood-splattered final sequence of Dolls, dark and disturbing as it was to viewers, had a far deeper resonance to Erica because of the events in her own life.  Meyer and Ebert based the finale on the gruesome Tate-LaBianca murders committed by the Charles Manson “family” on the evenings of August 9 and 10, 1969, just a few months before Dolls began shooting.

While planning to make Erica’s character one of the victims of the film’s murders, they had no idea of the multiple connection the real life events and people had—or would have—to her.  “It’s scary when I think about Russ having an insight into people… it’s like someone looking into your head and your future, and viewing your life,” says Erica.

“I remember when those murders happened, and how shocked I was, because that was the circle in which I traveled.”  Two of the victims (on the second night of the killing spree) were businessman Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary.  “I grew up with the LaBianca kids. They lived in Silver Lake, and I went to school with their daughter, Susan.”

Jay Sebring, one of the victims that awful first night, was well known to several of the women of Dolls.  Cynthia and Lynn Carey had both dated him, and Erica (as we’ll see) had a memorable experience with this colorful and doomed character.  One of most celebrated ladies’ men in Hollywood, Sebring was the foremost hair stylist to the stars, including Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen.  Sharon Tate was one of the many Hollywood beauties he had romanced; she broke off her relationship with Sebring when she became involved with Roman Polanski.

“I knew Jay Sebring through my friend Bebe, who had been seeing him after he and Sharon had broken up.  Jay had set up this little rendezvous with us and Steve McQueen, to get all of us in bed together.  Jay was also Elmer Valentine’s best friend, and at one time Elmer was going to marry Bebe. [Note: Valentine was the owner of the trendy clubs The Roxy and The Rainbow.]

Erica recalls the day the first group of murders became public: “I remember when Bebe called me to say that Jay had been killed, along with Sharon and the others.  I was in San Diego for a meeting in connection for some possible movie work. I was freaked out.” Bebe had seen Sebring just a month before the tragedy, on Sunset Boulevard. “Jay asked if they could start seeing each other again, and she said sure.  But she never heard from him again.”  Relating an even deeper connection, Erica continues,”what made [the Manson connection] come full circle is that I ended up dating one of the Manson attorneys.

Paul J. Fitzgerald was a brilliant and colorful attorney in the Los Angeles County public defender’s office.  He was briefly assigned by the office to defend Manson; soon thereafter Manson was switched to another attorney, and Fitzgerald represented Patricia Krenwinkel, one of the three Manson followers accused in the murders.  When told by his superiors three months later that he would have to give up the case because the office had a possible conflict of interest, he refused on March 24, 1970 resigned.  For the next year he continued to represent Krenwinkle at no charge, and because he was the most experienced and skilled of the defense team, became the chief strategist for the other two Manson followers as well.

“I met Paul in court through Elliott Mintz who had a talk radio show on KABC and a TV show.  Elliott was attending the trial because he knew Sharon and Jay, and he brought me in one day.  Almost right away, Paul and I started seeing each other.  It was one of my crazier times.”  The trial itself began on June 15, 1970—just two days before the Hollywood premiere of Dolls, as fate would have it—and their affair began a few weeks later.

“Going through the whole trial was a bizarre experience.  I would get letters from Susan Atkins and drawings that sort of showed mirror images of me and her. That was really hitting close to home, since I had re-enacted that same scene in Dolls!

“Having the Manson girls being a part of my life was so strange. [Note: Female members of the family not on trial basically camped out in a van near the courthouse and included the notorious Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme.] We’d visit them on the street corner and give them money.  I got to know them well.  One night, they just crashed on the floor of our home. It was insanity, it was true insanity.”

Erica and Paul would remain together until about 1975, with a couple of brief reunions.  Reflecting on the eerie synchronicities between her real and cinematic lives in this context, she mused: “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m really alive, or on the other side.”

-by Steve Sullivan
excerpted with kind permission from Glamour Girls
You can find this rare out-of-print issue right here!

I can’t sit down when this is spinning! One of my favorites from the early 1980s.

Here’s another great song from CHICANE. I just can’t seem to get enough dance/trance music lately. Know of any new sounds? Let me know!

Erica tells biographer Steve Sullivan about her
early years, family, and growing up in Hollywood.

Erica’s father, Fred Graff, was a Bronx, New York-born actor who studied at the New School of Social Research and the New Theater School in Manhattan. He did extensive work with the Actors’ Lab in Hollywood, and was signed to a movie contract by Columbia Pictures.

Graff appeared in at least twelve films from 1944-51. His two most notable roles were among his last: The 1950 William Holden drama Union Station in a pivotal role as the leader of child kidnappers whom Holden seeks to foil (as the railway detective) and the Tony Curtis adventure The Prince Who Was A Thief (1951), playing the royal right-hand man to the star.

It was in Hollywood that Graff met the woman who would become his wife, Madeleine Rosenteil. “My mom was in the business too, but not to the extent of my dad. She was beautiful, and did some modeling.” She also did some acting, and they met at the Actors’ Lab in Hollywood.

Erica was born Donna Graff in Hollywood on July 22, 1947. (We will generally refer to her as Donna until she changed her name upon entering show business.)

When she was born, the family lived at the corner of Western and Third Street in Los Angeles. “My first childhood memory is of sleeping in a drawer, because sometimes that’s how my parents would transport me as a small child—they’d take out one of the drawers from a chest and drive me in the car.” Not much more than year after her birth, the Graffs moved to Silver Lake. Located mere blocks east of Hollywood, near Sunset Boulevard, she describes it as “the other side of the tracks” across from posh Beverly Hills.

We lived in what was called “The Project”—one row of five connected houses on hill, then another row of five. Each person owned their owned their own house, but they’d have project meetings, sort of like a condominium.”

She describes the social environment as “progressive, maybe what some would consider left-wing.” As Cold War tensions heightened by the end of the 1940s and Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950 began rabble-rousing about alleged Communists in high places, her father carefully instructed young Donna that if anyone came to the door asking questions, she was to say that she wasn’t allowed to talk to them, and that she didn’t know anything. “I later realized that was because the FBI was snooping around to find out who was a Communist.”

“My dad was blacklisted, like a lot of people who didn’t do anything wrong. He went to these project meetings, and he was politically outspoken. He also spoke his mind at parties and on movie sets. He went to meetings through the Actors’ Lab that some would consider liberal. When the blacklist came down, someone at the studio who testified [before the House Committee on Un-American Affairs] was told they could get out of trouble if they named someone else who had participated in certain meetings, and this person named my dad. He was no Communist, of course, but when they asked him to name names, he wouldn’t. By then, Columbia had already dropped his contract.”

Her dad’s movie career ended just as it was on the rise. “He, Jeff Corey, Robert Conrad, and others with the Actors’ Lab would still get together for classes and workshops. Most of them weren’t working because of the blacklist.” With one chapter of his life over, Fred Graff provided for his family by selling televisions and home furnishings. He later became an interior designer and would take occasional jobs, even in semi-retirement.

When Donna was four years old, her mother contracted polio, and became pregnant before the disease had been diagnosed. Polio was perhaps the most terrifying of all diseases in America during this era. 1952 was the peak of America’s polio epidemic, attacking some 58,000 children that year and killing about 1,400; a year later the introduction of the Salk vaccine began the gradual near eradication of the crippling disease. “My mother was taken to the hospital, and was there for about seven months. I had no idea what was happening.” Her sister Lisa was born prematurely in an iron lung while her mom was temporarily paralyzed—as reported in the L. A. Times, the first ever child born in this device, designed to help her breathe.

“The night when my sister was born, I had a nanny staying at the house. I woke up in the middle of the night, and my dad had left a note on the bed that I couldn’t read. I just got hysterical because I thought my dad had gone away. They had to call a doctor to calm me down. I don’t remember any of this, but it was pretty traumatic.” Of course, from the standpoint of her father, he had been professionally blacklisted and was facing the possible loss of his wife and new baby, so the distress he was undergoing was far deeper than a four-year old could possibly understand…

In school, the kids used to gang up on me, and they’d brand me. They’d hold me down, put tape on my arms, and pull it off. Whenever we’d play ‘pony’ in the schoolyard, I was never allowed to be at the front; I’d always be in the back.” Growing up Jewish sometimes presented its own challenges. “Silver Lake is pretty multi-cultural. But it’s mostly upper-middle-class—which we did not fall under. We were middle-class, not upper, and there was a big distinction in that small difference. Most of the kids in my school were not Jewish. It was one more thing that made me different, and when you’re a kid you want to feel like I belonged at home, much less at school or with my peers.

“When I was ten, before my parents got up every Sunday morning, I would sometimes go to the small Presbyterian church at the bottom of our street for the 7:30 a.m. service. I don’t think it was a denial of my religion, but maybe wanting to have some higher power in my life and my desire to fit in. I’d put on a dress, a scarf over my head, steal my mom’s nylons and a dollar from her purse, and put the dollar in the hat at church. It was all about standing there with others, feeling like I belonged, even though it was a lie, and being able to contribute like everybody else. And having someone other than myself to rely on. I think I knew, even at age ten, that I was going to have a hard time feeling a sense of self.”

A few years later came another kind of lesson in religions. “My first boyfriend, the first guy I slept with, was a great, sensitive guy. He later turned out to be gay. I lost my virginity with him in his car. He had given me an Ethiopian cross on a leather strand. I wore it, and my mother had a fit. I learned that it wasn’t OK to deny your religion, even though that wasn’t why I wore it.”

Part II… coming soon!

-by Steve Sullivan
excerpted with kind permission from Glamour Girls
You can find this rare out-of-print issue right here!

I just can’t seem to get enough of Charles Schilling’s music the past few weeks. I would love to find more music like this!

I love Chicane. I’ll be posting up some more of this wonderful group throughout the summer! Tell me, what are you’re favorite songs at the moment?