Getting to Know Angelyne

It’s 40 years since Angelinos first learned the name Angelyne (Ronia Tamar Goldberg, b. 1950). As an East Coaster, I’d never heard of her prior to the 2022 tv series starring Emmy Rossum.

Those of us who weren’t there in 1984 missed the moment of mystery. Angelyne turned up on billboards one day and no one knew who she was at first. The new tv series, and I’m sure some commentators, have tried to paint her as a “fame whore”, in it purely for the attention, implying that she focussed on the trappings of fame without having done anything worthy of achieving it. It’s not true though. She sang in punk bands, and then new wave/pop bands, and the billboards were there to promote her records. Do you need to know anything else to convince you that she’s a legitimate show biz figure? I don’t. Record labels and management companies advertise and promote their unknown artists and clients all the time. That’s HOW they become better known. They were doing the same thing on behalf of Madonna at the very same moment Angelyne burst on the scene. If Angelyne arranged her own billboards, for her own label, so what? I call that entrepreneurship. If you don’t acknowledge the legitimacy of that, go hang yourself, Clyde!

Angelyne also had bit parts and extra roles in movies like Phantom of the Paradise (1974), The Wild Party (1975) and The Frisco Kid (1979). In the wake of the billboard blitz she was cast in movies like Earth Girls Are Easy (1988) and The Malibu Beach Vampires (1991), and in MTV videos from artists like Sheena Easton, Neil Young, and Moby. The billboards were the biggest stars of all though. You can see them in the credit sequence to Moonlighting and in such films as Get Shorty (1994), Jimmy Hollywood (1994), Volcano (1997), Rush Hour (1998), 8mm (1999), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Rock of Ages (2012), and Behind the Candlebra (2013).

Her penchant for pink, her retro-style affection for sunglasses, leopard prints, and a big blonde mane of hair, and her massively enhanced bust were all very much in keeping with the trends of her time. None of it makes her extraordinary or more depraved than anyone else in show business, as far as I can see. My take is that a lot of people in that town of whores and sleezebags are jealous that they didn’t think of it first. As someone who has spent time looking at the gimmicky ephemera generated by vaudeville performers in order to get the attention of bookers and performers, all I can tell you is that Angelyne’s large scale calling cards were different by degree, not by kind.

Anyway, some have appreciated her. She has been the topic of documentaries. She’s gone on talk shows. No one learned who she really was until 2017, when Gary Baum revealed all in a piece for The Hollywood Reporter. It turns out that she was born in Poland to two Holocaust survivors. The family then moved to Israel, moving again to the U.S. when she was nine. This fascinating backstory does indeed merit the bio-pic treatment I think, though the subject would have been adequently covered by a single feature length movie as opposed to an entire series. We tried to watch the show when it debuted and abandoned it pretty quickly, both because too little was happening, and because the show seems pretty judgmental in how it painted its lead character. If you hate her so much, why tell it?

For more about show business 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.