Vikki Dougan had a brief moment of fame in the late 1950s, mostly because of the backless dresses she wore.
Another Hollywood correspondent referred to her as “the most notorious ca-rear girl in town.” She was praised for her “marvelous exits” in the June 1957 issue of Playboy. Ms. Dougan was said to have been banned from another star’s preview party because her backless formal dresses were drawing too much attention, and Jayne Mansfield, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Mamie Van Doren were all, supposedly, jealous.
But she quickly disappeared.
Ms. Dougan is also widely cited as the inspiration behind Jessica Rabbit in the 1988 film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” — though Richard Williams, its animator, attributed the character’s look to a composite of Rita Hayworth, Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall.
Now. in the Internet age, she’s been rediscovered.
Ms. Dougan, who was born Edith Tooker the same year as a major stock market crash but prefers that you not do the math, lives in a rent-controlled apartment building for seniors in Beverly Hills, and gets by on her monthly Social Security check. The woman who once graced the cover of Life magazine and dated Orson Welles, George Getty II, Frank Sinatra, Mickey Rooney, Barry Goldwater Jr., Henry Fonda, Huntington Hartford and Warren Beatty sleeps each night on an Ikea pullout couch in the living room.
(Subject line hattip, which is the first thing I thought of when I read this article. You should really pay the writer and find this story somewhere. Unfortunately, I can’t find a Kindle-based collection or a reasonably cheap physical collection containing this story on Amazon.)
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