Cecil B. DeMille reportedly saw her inside the Paramount studio commissary and stopped in his tracks.
The legendary director told the striking red-haired beauty that she had one of the most exciting faces he had encountered in decades. He was considering her for the leading role in Esther, an enormous biblical production that could have transformed an unknown model into a major Hollywood star.
Agents began circling. Representatives wanted to sign her. For one dazzling moment, everything she had dreamed about since childhood appeared within reach.
Then federal agents entered the story.
Follow @allchronologyThe next time DeMille saw her, she was reportedly being escorted from New York’s Plaza Hotel for questioning about the finances of her boyfriend—a feared Los Angeles mobster.
The biblical epic was never made.
Instead of becoming Hollywood royalty, she became a convicted felon.
Born Pearl Elizabeth Dobbins in Chandler, Arizona, in 1926, she grew up in a poor family dominated by a deeply religious mother and a father who reportedly drank heavily. She later recalled visiting another family’s home and mistaking their bathtub for a boat because she had never seen one.
But her grandmother, a former beauty-contest winner, encouraged the girl’s belief that she was destined to become famous.
She began running away from home at 13.
By 15, she had entered a brief marriage with a soldier and given birth to a daughter. It was the beginning of a complicated romantic life that would eventually include seven marriages, numerous celebrated lovers and one of the most provocative memoir titles in Hollywood history.
Her first major encounter with the camera arrived almost accidentally.
In 1950, a production company came to Phoenix seeking hundreds of extras for a lynch-mob scene. She joined the crowd, but a photographer from Life magazine noticed her. Instead of concentrating entirely on the established stars, the magazine published a multipage feature about the ambitious young hopeful.
The title was “Pearl’s Big Moment.”
She soon moved to New York, became a fashion model and appeared on the cover of Esquire. After reinventing herself with a glamorous new name, she pursued nightclub work and Hollywood opportunities.
Follow @allchronologyShe even won a Marilyn Monroe look-alike competition.
Yet the person who changed her life was not a director.
It was Mickey Cohen.
Cohen was one of the most notorious figures in the Los Angeles underworld—a flamboyant crime boss whose name appeared in newspapers alongside stories of gambling, violence, corruption and tax investigations. She met him after arriving in Hollywood in the late 1950s and became his girlfriend.
Their relationship made her famous for all the wrong reasons.
Reporters called her the underworld’s newest darling. She was summoned repeatedly before grand juries investigating Cohen’s finances and criminal connections. Prosecutors believed she knew more than she was willing to reveal.
She chose loyalty.
In 1959, she was indicted on five counts of perjury. She received a three-year federal prison sentence and ultimately served 27 months at Terminal Island.
Years later, she said she had wanted to protect Cohen because he had treated her well. She understood the price of that decision: prison had destroyed the Hollywood momentum she believed would have made her a major star.
But even behind bars, she refused to disappear.
She taught oil painting to other prisoners, created murals and organized a theatrical production called Terminal Island Follies. She wrote, directed and choreographed the show, transforming incarceration into another stage.
When she emerged from prison, mainstream Hollywood was no longer waiting.
So she created a different kind of fame.
She appeared in exploitation movies such as The Thrill Killers and Lady Godiva Rides. She performed in nightclubs and burlesque shows, using the very notoriety that had damaged her conventional career to build a cult identity.
In 1974, she staged her most audacious publicity stunt.
At midday, she ran unclothed along Hollywood Boulevard to promote a nearby burlesque production. Authorities charged her with indecent exposure and lewd behavior, but a jury acquitted her.
Her flamboyant life attracted director John Waters, the filmmaker who turned bad taste into underground art. He had admired her autobiography My Face for the World to See—a title he had already referenced in Female Trouble.
Waters cast her as Muffy St. Jacques in his outrageous 1977 black comedy Desperate Living.
Follow @allchronologyThe film gave her the role for which cult audiences would remember her best. Surrounded by grotesque characters and deliberately shocking situations, she appeared entirely at home in Waters’ anarchic universe.
Her offscreen stories were even more extreme.
In her memoir My First 2,000 Men, she claimed romantic encounters with famous figures including Joe DiMaggio, Cary Grant, Glenn Ford and Regis Philbin. She later admitted the number was greatly exaggerated—estimating the true total at closer to 600 and joking that even she could not have managed 2,000.
But behind the outrageous humor was an unbearable family tragedy.
During the 1970s, she toured in a mother-and-daughter striptease act with Brenda, the child born from her teenage marriage. Their unusual partnership continued until 1982, when Brenda died by suicide on her 39th birthday.
The loss introduced a darkness that no publicity stunt could transform into comedy.
Still, the mother continued performing, painting, writing and appearing in films. She published beauty advice, cookbooks and memoirs, remaining unapologetic about a life that conventional society might have demanded she hide.
Her final screen credit came in Mark of the Astro-Zombies in 2002.
Follow @allchronologyFive years later, she died in Las Vegas at 80 from cardiopulmonary arrest and gastric bleeding. By then, she had been a teenage bride, mother, model, mobster’s girlfriend, federal prisoner, painter, stripper, author, Hollywood streaker and cult-film star.
She never became the biblical queen DeMille once imagined.
Instead, she created a legend far too scandalous for any studio to have invented.
The woman who sacrificed her Hollywood future for Mickey Cohen, survived federal prison and became John Waters’ unforgettable Muffy St. Jacques was Liz Renay.