Mamie van Doren is 91 years old now, but she hasn’t tempered with age.
van Doren was a blonde bombshell model-actress of the 50s and 60s who was married five times and had dozens of celebrity lovers. She was the Pamela Anderson role model. She was on the cover of every magazine and in tons of B movies.
Today, van Doren– an animal enthusiast and author of two memoirs — weighed in on Twitter when a fan asked what Bob Hope was like. van Doren did USO shows with Hope in the 60s.
Her answer may leave a lot of jaws dropped. She wrote:
“He was an asshole that made a living off of the troops. Plus he got plenty of ass doing it. A miserable human being. Not from me. I was Miss Palm Springs here and just turned 17…He wasn’t funny at all. He had to have a comic writer with him all the time. He treated girls like whores.”
She added: “And he always had his hands in his pockets.”
Now, as they say, tell us what you really think!
Hope was a huge movie star in the 40s and 50s, particularly with singer Bing Crosby in his “Road” movies. Genuinely funny, Hope is revered for those movies by many comics who followed. But in the 60s — doing USO shows for US troops at the height of the Vietnam War– he turned into a Nixon Republican, and all his “cool” went out the window. People my age derided him as he became an emblem for conservative, wealthy warmongers. All his outlier wisecracking disappeared, which was too bad, He could have been a subversive hero in the time of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor but his success did him in.
van Doren included a picture of her and Hope, seen here.
