And I always thought she was Swedish, because of I'll Take Sweden, a silly movie that titillated me as a 12-year old, even though I now know that Elke Sommer didn't even appear in it. Instead, I must have been thinking of another Bob Hope turkey, Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number! which also starred . . . Phyllis Diller, who surely was cast as the anti-Elke, or maybe I've got that backwards! Or more likely it was A Shot in the Dark in which Somer and Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau visit a nudist camp, the kind of place I associated with Sweden. Once again, memory proves unreliable.
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| 1964 |
In any case, it turns out Sommer was German, born in Berlin through no fault of her own at the height of Naziism. But to me, she and and Ann-Margret (a year younger and still kicking) were equally alluring, the kind of women I wanted to babysit me (Sommer, in fact, worked as a nanny). In retrospect, I realize they were the sex kittens I wanted to be, even though I'm a perfectly happy cisgender male.
Somer also colonized my adolescent imagination with a series of smutty Hollywood movies that were an early inkling of my developing fondness for camp and homosexual identity.
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| 1963 |
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| 1966 |
In the end, however, Sommer lingered in my consciousness only as a very pretty face. I didn't know she painted and I'm not sure I was even aware of the $3.3 million dollar defamation lawsuit she won against Zsa Zsa Gabor, a sum much larger than what either of them would have earned for appearing on "Circus of the Stars" where their feud began (paging Ryan Murphy).
But while perusing IMDB this morning I also learned that Sommer and Sharon Tate appeared together in a 1966 Dean Martin spy caper called The Wrecking Crew, old news to Tate-stan Quentin Tarantino. In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it's the movie for which Tate excitedly buys a ticket to see herself on screen.
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