The Vivian Blaine Blogathon on Taking Up Room is live! You can find all the entries here by clicking the banner:

Thanks so much to Taking Up Room for hosting, and for introducing me to Vivian Blaine. I found a movie I would never have otherwise seen, and I can’t wait to tell it to you all. Click below to listen on YouTube, or scroll down for the transcript if you’d rather read.

This is for the Vivian Blaine blogathon, on Taking Up Room. I’m going to be telling you a little bit about Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold, which was the ’70s TV movie starring Kim Basinger and Vivian Blaine and a really good cast of others, and I’ll get into that, but I really do want to talk about Vivian Blaine and Dorothy Malone.

Together, they have a small part in the film, but important, playing sisters Marietta and Myrtle Cutler. They run a modeling agency that’s basically a scam. When Katie, played by Kim Basinger, first gets to Hollywood, they take $400 from her and tell her that they will get her jobs. She doesn’t know that you’re not supposed to pay an agent, and the two ladies have a funny montage of teaching all the girls how to model.

Vivian Blaine tells them that the choice of projects in Hollywood is almost as important as your choice of hat. Then she tells them that a model is someone to be an example to others, to be held up for others to follow.

I think that may be the message of the film, but remember, I’m going to come back to that.

But remember that Vivian Blaine, about whom we are celebrating with this blogathon, does give us the most important message that we can carry through the film.

Now, Dorothy Malone has kind of the funniest, weirdest, most absurd line as they are learning to do their own manicures: that some ancient culture believed that the fingernails were the arms of the soul. Which is a memorable line.

But see, Katie, she’s won a beauty pageant in Texas. She’s so naive, and everybody is so happy to see her go to Hollywood. And the Cutler sisters, they’re just sneaky and evil, but in a silly way, not really of any consequence evil.

And what they do, and all the other things that happen in Hollywood, don’t really ruin Katie’s life. They make her realize that she’s more than her looks and more than her body.

And you’ll read the synopses of this film online that are wrong. It doesn’t have a sad ending. For most of the characters, it doesn’t have a sad ending for Katie. And Don Johnson, who plays her friend’s boyfriend, doesn’t have anything to do with saving her.

Katie makes some bad decisions, and then she makes her own decisions. And she has a fabulous scene towards the end of the film where she has realized that her body is just a body, and that she doesn’t have to be ashamed of having been the centerfold in the portrait.

She’s back in her town in Texas, and everybody’s treating her different. And she gets up on the lunch counter at the diner, where all the men who used to be friendly to her are now just staring at her and drooling.

And she says, “Look at this. It’s just a body.”

“Look at this. I have a face, you have a face. I have an arm, you have an arm. I have a leg, you have a leg.”

And then she knocks some dishes on the floor and rides off into the sunset with her real friend, who is played by Melanie Mayron, who has a wonderful part in this film as a magician in LA who was from Katie’s hometown.

So it goes back to what Vivian Blaine had said at the beginning of the film: you’re the standard for other people to be held up to when you are a model.

And at the end, Katie is the standard because she says, “I’m a woman. I am beautiful, but I’m more than my looks. This is not all I have to offer. I’m going to learn to become an actress. I thought I could use modeling as a stepping stone to become an actress, but I’m really going to have to put in the work.”

And I’m more than this face.

And Kim Basinger herself was more than this face. She’s a fabulous actress.

And Vivian Blaine. Now, I don’t know too much about her experience with Hollywood.

She does have a line in the film. “This is Hollywood. Nothing is free.” And tips a wink, and I think she’s tipping it at the audience. She’s speaking from experience, playing this terrible character that she probably ran into, that type.

I’m sure her life in Hollywood was difficult when she started out. She started young. But I do know that she was a great person and more than a beautiful face, because Vivian Blaine was the first celebrity to do AIDS PSAs, starting in about 1983, and to do benefits for AIDS.

So what a legacy to have left behind. What a model for other people to be held up to, to show people how they should be, for being the first one to say that I’m going to do these PSAs for AIDS. That this is not something that we have to be ashamed of. We are more than our ailing bodies. This is something that we’ve all got to go in together and fight.

So what a gal. I’m so glad I learned of her from this blogathon, and that I learned about Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold, which is such a fun movie.

You think it’s starting out naive and silly. It’s a satire, I think, and a feminist picture, definitely. How wonderful that it has so many strong women in it to be held up for us as models.

And you can find a great copy of it on YouTube, so go and check it out. And be sure to go over to Taking Up Room and read all the other entries in the Vivian Blaine Blogathon.

I’m going to ride off on my motorcycle into the sunset now.

Good night, y’all.