Irish McCalla

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Without Her Wrap

Long before Xena: Warrior Princess, before Lynda Carter donned red, white and blue to play Won-ider Woman—even before Raquel Welch con--^""~ quered the world in a prehistoric bikini for One Million Years B.C.—Irish McCalla made an indelible impres­sion on a generation of pubescent boys as the title charac­ter in a short-lived but long-remembered black-and-white

Before achieving superstardom in the mid-1950s as TV's Sheena (above, bottom left, bottom right). McCalla was a hugely successful pinup model for the burgeoning postwar girlie magazines. The other images on this page were taken by famed Hollywood photographer David Sutton in the early 1950s.

TV series, Sheena, Queen of the Jun­gle. The Amazonian blonde bomb­shell clad in a skimpy, formfitting leopard-skin outfit quickened the heartbeats of impressionable viewers in the 1950s and became a pop-culture icon.

McCalla had already made a considerable impression on adult males through repeated exposure on the covers of men's magazines, which in those pre-PLAYBov days were often sold under the counter or in adult bookstores. Like those of her contemporary Bettie Page, McCalla's face and form were in­stantly recognizable to a sizable au­dience, even if they didn't actually know her name.

Despite her knockout figure (and many offers) she never posed in the nude—except once, out of respect for the eminent pinup artist Alberto Vargas. He asked McCalla to remove her clothing for a series of reference photos he would later use to create a painting of her in a flimsy negligee. These photo­graphs have never been published until now.

McCalla explained that by the time she had achieved stardom as Sheena she had two young sons and didn't want to embarrass them. Decades later, when a friend showed McCalla these pictures, she report­edly admired them. By then she was working as an artist full-time and painting nudes herself.

The Sheena character was cre­ated in 1938 by comic-book legends Will Eisner and Jerry Iger. She was featured in Jumbo Comics from 1938 to 1953 and, beginning in 1942, was the star of her own eponymous comic. Sheena was essentially a female Tarzan, a magnificent physi­cal specimen orphaned and raised in the jungle, at one with the animals around her.

Others had tried to fulfill this ripe male fantasy, especially in Saturday-matinee serials. Tarzan's creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs, had con­ceived a similar idea and introduced Jungle Girl in a pulp-magazine serial of the same name in 1929. She was brought to the screen in 1941, per­sonified by the beautiful actress Frances Gifford. The character was subsequently played by Kay Aldridge in Perils ofNyoka.

But television doomed movie serials. When a plethora of filmed adventure series flooded the airwaves in the 1950s it was inevitable that someone would hit on the idea of bringing Sheena to the small screen. Irish McCalla was in the right place at the right time, (text continued on page 68)

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McCalla, with her va-va-voom figure and blonde locks, was the quintessential 1950s movie heroine.

To understand the impact she had on a generation of awestruck boys, it's important to remember the mixed messages sent out to the youth of the 1950s. Fatherly Dwight D. Eisenhower presided in the White House while scurrilous Senator Joe McCarthy was ruining reputations in the Senate hearings chamber. Ozzie and Harriet espoused all-American family virtues and slept in twin beds while Marilyn Monroe redefined sexuality and cre­ated a mini-industry for buxom blonde starlets. American women wore long dresses with high neck­lines—and bullet bras. No wonder so many baby boomers were confused.

No four-letter words were uttered on television or in the movies, which were still under the jurisdiction of the Motion Picture Association of America's strict production code. Even the word pregnant was con­sidered verboten, and when Lucy Ricardo gave birth to Little Ricky on / Love Lucy, the writers were forced to use euphemisms (she was "expect­ing" or "with child," and the couple was "having a baby").

Sex was the ultimate taboo. Cre­ative scenarists could imply all sorts of things in adult dramas for the large and small screen, but noth­ing explicit could be said or shown. Yet in the wake of Monroe's emer­gence as the ultimate American sex symbol, blondes with hourglass fig­ures dominated the landscape, and America accepted them in the spirit of good clean fun. As with almost every aspect of the 1950s, there was a gulf between the veneer of respect­ability that ruled the culture and the emotions that simmered just beneath the surface. (That's why Page wTas an underground heroine: No reputable bookstore would sell her scandalous photos, postcards and magazines.)

McCalla, with her va-va-voom fig­ure and blonde locks, was the quint­essential 1950s movie heroine, and if no innuendos were to be found in the Sheena scripts, plenty of viewers were happy just to gaze on her stun­ning presence.

Irish Elizabeth McCalla was born on Christmas Day 1928 in Pawnee City, Nebraska, one of eight children. She sprouted to a height of five feet nine and a half inches by the time she was 14 and within a few years boasted a 39'/.>-24-37 figure.

Her life story was later docu­mented in an adoring (and defini­tive) book-length biography, TV's Original Sheeiia—Irish McCalla. She told authors Bill Black and Bill Feret, "I've never understood why it is so important to be bigger busted than someone else. I was full grown in height and had a 39-and-a-half-inch bust at the age of 16 and was very embarrassed by it all. I was always proud of my long hair and my flat stomach, but no one seemed to men­tion them, did they? But let's face it, if it hadn't been for my measure­ments I would have been just another pretty gal and possibly led an aver­age life, which wouldn't have been half as much fun."

After graduating from high school, in 1946, McCalla sought out the warm weather of southern Califor­nia, where she landed a job at the McDonnell Douglas Aircraft factory. She also worked as a waitress but soon came to the attention of a photogra­pher who thought the budding busty beauty had promise as a model.

Before long, Globe Photo Syndi­cate put her under contract, and her face and figure were on display in such pre-PLAVBOV girlie and pinup magazines as Night and Day, Vue, See and Laff. She even helped launch Eve ("The Woman's Magazine for Men"), in 1950. McCalla specialized in active or athletic poses, as well as peekaboo pinups.

Around this time McCalla married an insurance salesman named Pat­rick Mclntyre. While working as a showgirl at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas she discovered she was pregnant with her first child; she kept the job for several months until she began to show. Her son Kim was followed a year and a half later by another boy, Sean, though the marriage that produced them hit the rocks.

Photographer Tom Kelley, famed for shooting the Marilyn Mon­roe nude calendar, recommended McCalla to the producers of a pro­spective Sheena, Queen of the Jungle television series. McCalla had no act­ing experience but was assured that little would be required of her. Her only serious competition for the role was another voluptuous blonde, Miss Universe contestant Anita Ekberg. According to McCalla, Ekberg actu-

ally won the part but didn't show up for the first day of shooting, having gotten a better gig in the movies. McCalla was recruited at the last min­ute. She later recalled that she signed Ekberg's contract—with McCalla's name hastily written in.

A pilot for Sheena was filmed on the cheap in Pasadena. California in 1955. The crew on the shoot took a liking to McCalla and helped her through the process, though she mastered the athletic scenes and rudimentary stunts better than the dialogue.

Once the series was finally sold, it was filmed over a period of seven and a half months in a remote loca­tion in Mexico. Stock footage of wild animals in Africa was clumsily edited into every episode. In real­ity, the wildest animal on location was a chimpanzee named Chim, who according to the star was paid $35 a week more than she was.

Alpha Video recently released two DVD collections of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Revisiting the black-and-white show, one can easily see why McCalla was an ideal choice to star. The scripts are simplistic in the extreme, and virile co-star Chris­tian Drake (as "white hunter" Bob Rayburn) does all the heavy lifting in exposition and dialogue. Sheena strikes poses, speaks pidgin English, hurls her trusty spear at bad guys and charging beasts, swings through the trees and swims. Whatever she does, she looks great, and her sin­cerity in delivering cheesy lines is positively disarming. As often as not, the episodes end with Sheena and Bob throwing their heads back and laughing at Chim's antics.

McCalla did many of her own stunts until she had a collision with a tree and held up production for two weeks while she healed. She also admitted to having a fear of heights, so a Mexican circus performer named Raul Gaona donned a blonde wig and leopard-skin loincloth to act as her double in many action scenes from that point on. But McCalla took exception to claims that she never did her own stunts. "This always burns me up," she said, "as my part-time double gets all the credit while I got the scars and bruises."

The producers pulled the plug on Sheena after 26 episodes but kept those shows in syndication for years. In 1959, when Disneyland recruited popular TV stars to march in a tele­vised parade for the rededication of the Anaheim, California park, McCalla took her place alongside Lassie, Guy Williams as Zorro and (concluded on page 118)

(continued from page 68) a young Clint Eastwood, then riding high as Rowdy Yates on Rawhide—even though she hadn't filmed an episode of the series in three years. (Show-business friends advised her, when she signed her contract, to retain the right to make personal appearances as Sheena, which kept her busy and bolstered her income long after the show's demise.)

To McCalla's surprise, the show was a hit around the world, dubbed into many languages. On trips abroad she discov­ered she was as well-known in Australia and Japan as she was at home.

Following Sheena, McCalla found herself a victim of typecasting and had difficulty getting casting directors and moviemakers to consider her for parts. She did make a number of guest appearances as herself on television shows, including the 1956 Milton Berle Show on which Elvis Presley made his second national TV appearance.

But aside from roles in a couple of B movies (The Beat Generation, She Demons) and occasional guest shots on episodic television, her acting career never really took off. She was content to raise her sons and, following a brief second marriage to actor Patrick Hor-gan, moved to Malibu and pursued her first love, art. She had studied from the time she was a girl, and after her children were grown she devoted herself full-time to painting.

At a fan convention in 1979 she admitted, "I had my first gallery show as an artist after the Sheena series. I knew the gallery wanted me more because I was Sheena. It was good publicity for the gallery, but it gave me my first show. It made me realize I didn't want to be an actress; I wanted to be an artist." With her third hus­band, Chuck Rowland, she moved to Prescott, Arizona and lived out her life, surviving several bouts with can­cer and brain tumors.

McCalla returned to the spotlight when a Hollywood feature film of Sheena was released in 1984 with for­mer Charlie's Angels star Tanya Roberts in the leading role. Interviewed exten­sively on TV and in print, McCalla was gracious about her successor, but die-hard fans insisted there was only one Queen of the Jungle. (Gena Lee Nolin later essayed the role in an updated TV series that ran from 2000 to 2001.)

McCalla died in 2002, but boom­ers who grew up watching her in the 1950s will always cherish the memory of their first sex symbol. And thanks to these revealing photos, she may acquire a new generation of fans.