At Home With The Heathertons

Yes, it’s true! The birthday of Joey Heatherton (b. 1944) is a couple of days after that of Lola Falana (b. 1942). I don’t know if Catherine O’Hara knew that when she cooked up her satirical character of Lola Heatherton, but I bring it up in order to stress that I schedule most of my biographical posts on birthdays, i.e. I haven’t suddenly become obsessed with Las Vegas lounge acts. It’s actually not my type of entertainment at all. I’m uncertain whether I’d ever done a post on Joey Heatherton at all if not for the fact that her father Ray Heatherton (1909-1997) was a star of Broadway, radio, and television, with many ties and affiliations to formative figures in show biz history. He’s the one who anchors this intergenerational story for me.

The elder Heather grew up in New Jersey and on Long Island, and began singing at local functions when still a teenager. He was only 20 when he was hired to sing with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, performing with them on The Old Gold Hour on CBS radio for the 1929-30 season. In 1930 he was cast in the chorus of The Garrick Gaieties on Broadway, and thus began his professional stage career, which also featured performances in Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolics, Anniversary Waltz, The Desert Song, and the original 1937 production of Babes in Arms. All this while continuing to appear on radio. In the late ’30s he fronted his own big band at the Biltmore Hotel, and appeared in two experimental television productions of Gilbert and Sullivan. A brief appearance in the film Follies Girl (1943) was Heatherton’s last performance prior to serving in the U.S. armed forces during World War Two.

After the war, Heatherton resumed working in radio. The emergence of television as a competitive medium shortly thereafter permanently altered the course of his career. He was to be a local television personality in New York city for nearly 40 years. In spring of 1949 he got his first show, the talk/variety program Heatherton House on WJZ (channel 7). In 1950 he got the gig he was best known for, a children’s show on WOR Channel 9 called The Merry Mailman. The show was on the air through 1956, with a radio edition on the Mutual Network from 1953 to 1955. In 1956 he was accused of being a Red and all of his sponsors pulled out, ending the original run of The Merry Mailman. (Government-run parcel delivery? Use of media to teach children to share? Sounds pretty Commie to me!) For a time, Heatherton played a sea captain on a kid’s show on WPIX Channel 11, showing Popeye cartoons, until that station gave him another iteration of The Merry Mailman, which ran until 1963. He made many live personal appearances at Freedomland during this period. In the late ’60s he hosted his own syndicated radio talk show Ray Heatherton’s Breakfast Club.

Meanwhile, Ray’s daughter Joey (Davenie Johanna Heatherton) had attained her own notoriety. Ray may have enjoyed the limelight as all performers do, but Joey was an attention seeker at near pathological levels. She started out as a kid performers on her dad’s Merry Mailman show, while studying ballet (with Balanchine!), voice and dramatics. She followed her father into Broadway as part of the ensemble in the original production of The Sound of Music (1959). Her first national attention came the following year when she landed a regular bit on Kraft Music Hall with Perry Como, as an obsessed fan. In 1960 she appeared on Broadway in There Was a Little Girl with fellow nepo baby Jane Fonda. Throughout the ’60s and beyond she worked every angle she could think of in show business. She launched a recording career, she performed live, she sang and danced on variety shows, and she played dramatic roles in film and TV. Many of her early roles were as troubled over-sexed teen girls, and she doubled down on that image by sexing up her variety performances with provocative sixties dance styles, suggestive song interpretations, and skimpy outfits. For better or worse, this is what she became known for, a sort of younger Mitzi Gaynor, combining elements of Ann-Margret and Tuesday Weld.

Joey appeared on Bob Hope’s TV variety specials and with his USO shows in Vietnam. She appeared on Hullabaloo and the Hollywood Palace and on the variety programs of Ed Sullivan, Jerry Lewis, Andy Williams, Steve Lawrence,Tom Jones, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Glen Campbell, Garry Moore, Jackie Gleason, Johnny Carson, and Dean Martin. She and Frank Sinatra Jr. co-hosted a summer replacement variety series in Dean’s Goldiggers slot in 1968. Meanwhile she acted on shows like Route 66, I Spy, The Virginian, Love American Style, and It Takes a Thief. Her first film roles was in Twilight of Honor (1963) with Richard Chamberlain. It was followed by the racy Where Love Has Gone (1964) with Susan Hayward, based on Harold Robbins’ fictionalization of Cheryl Crane’s murder of Johnny Stompanato. (She played the Crane character). Her first lead role was in William Conrad’sMy Blood Runs Cold (1965) opposite Troy Donahue. In the late ’60s she was in a couple of surprisingly tasteful TV movie projects, a version of Of Mice and Men (1968) with George Segal and Nicol Williamson, and The Ballad of Andy Crocker (1969) an impressionistic drama about a soldier’s homecoming from Vietnam, penned by Stuart Margolin and starring Pat Hingle and Lee Majors.

In 1969 Heatherton married NFL flanker Lance Rentzel, a union that proved doomed when a year later he was arrested for exposing himself to a ten year old girl. In all the hoopla it was revealed that he had done the same thing in 1966 in an incident that had been hushed up. Heatherton immediately divorced him. This is often regarded as the point in which her career lost its upward trajectory. Though her only hit single (“Gone”) went to #24 in 1972 and live stage shows in Vegas were still thriving, her acting career now relied on stunt casting, as when she played one of Richard Burton’s wives in Bluebeard (1972), or when she had a cameo as herself in the TV movie/variety show Old Faithful (1973) starring Zero Mostel.

Then, in the summer of 1975, a kind of high water mark for father and daughter, a CBS summer replacement variety series called Joey and Dad. An attempt to clean up her image? After all, she was “somebody’s daughter”! There were only four episides of this brief diversion, but it’s notable for having a cast of regulars that included Pat Proft, Bob Einstein, and Pat Paulsen, and for the booking of special guests like The Captain and Tennille, Sherman Helmsley, Frankie Valli, and Henny Youngman. In the mid to late ’70s you could also see her on Sammy and Company,Sonny and Cher, Doug Henning magic specials, Circus of the Stars, and Jerry Lewis MDA telethons. In 1977 she played Xaviera Hollander in The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington — because we always return to what we know.

The early ’80s were when Catherine O’Hara began to poke fun of her on SCTV. It is interesting to me that this is the precise moment when Heatherton’s attention seeking behavor extended into a true crime direction. In 1985 she was arrested twice for entirely unrelated beefs: an unpaid hotel bill amounting to nearly $5,000, and an altercation in which she assaulted a U.S. passport office employee for not moving her to the front of the line. The following year she was arrested yet again when she got into a spat with her ex-boyfriend and manager Jerry Fisher, stabbing him in the hand with a steak knife. When police came to sort everything out, they found a small amount of cocaine in her purse. Such was the reputation and public persona of Joey Heatherton that the revelation that she did coke was not a shock.

You might think that such shenanigans would make an actor unemployable. Not when the producer-director doing the hiring is John Waters! Waters gave Heatherton a role in his 1990 movie Cry-Baby, in much the same spirit as when he had also employed Patty Hearst and Traci Lords.

In April 1997, a nude layout of 53 year old Joey Heatherton was featured in Playboy magazine. Ray Heatherton passed away four months later. Coincidence? Well…maybe. After all, he can’t have died of suprise.

There is a third significant show biz Heatherton to report of, Joey’s brother Dick (b. 1943), a local radio and television announcer across many decades.

For more on show biz historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.