“The past is another country.” That’s certainly something Angelyne believes about Renee Goldberg, her Semitic self from long ago. In the eponymous show starring Emmy Rossum in the titular role, that name gets changed to Rachel Goldman—just one of many liberties taken, especially in the last episode, “Pink Clouds,” when flashback scenes are key to helping us better “understand” Angelyne’s road to reinvention. The article (written by Gary Baum) that outed her in The Hollywood Reporter was released in 2017, and gleefully made the comparison that this Billboard Queen was the forerunner to Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. And yet, Angelyne had to suffer so much more to claw her way to the literal top.
Unlike Paris or Kim, however, the last thing Angelyne would want is to broadcast any of that pain in order to gain sympathy. In fact, pain was the antithesis of her brand. She was (and is) all about hot pink, fairies and Marilyn emulation. Of course, the irony of that, as anyone can see, is that Marilyn had her own very dark past. Back when she was Norma Jeane Baker. In addition to Angelyne’s aesthetic and over-the-top baby voice (which Paris also later took on), she shared that in common with Marilyn, to whom she refers as her mother in the series (so Lana Del Rey will need to get in line behind her for that claim). Namely, in the first episode, “Dream Machine,” a nod to both Hollywood itself and the signature pink Corvette she would soon come to drive.
It’s in this episode that we’re also introduced to Cory Hunt (Philip Ettinger), who claims to have “made” Angelyne into what she is today by letting her join his band, Baby Blue. He further comments, “Music was never her passion, it was just her vehicle.” Sounds like something Madonna’s ex-boyfriend from The Breakfast Club could say. Indeed, Angelyne bears many parallels to Madonna, who also happened to come up on the other side of the U.S. at the same time (apropos of New York, it’s more than somewhat sacrilegious to have a New Yorker play such an L.A. icon). This doesn’t feel coincidental in that America was experiencing the beginnings of its full-tilt descent into post-modernism, complete with the birth of MTV in 1981. This birth being part of a confluence of events and technological innovations that suited Madonna’s need to highlight the still-germinal notion that image and marketing were everything before “real talent.” In that regard, the two women shared much in common. In addition to losing their mothers to cancer while they were still young (Madonna at five, Angelyne at fourteen) and then having their fathers almost immediately remarry.
As for the concept of familial trauma being baked into one’s blood, Angelyne, as Renee Goldberg, certainly knew something about that. For her parents endured unfathomable horrors at the concentration camps they managed to survive. L.A. was the perfect dreamland for her own parents to reinvent themselves and forget about such a hellacious past—so one could say we know where Angelyne got her skills for “airbrushing” the truth from. Best of all, no one in the City of Angels wanted to question “truth.” If you said it was your truth, then it was. L.A. was still so “new,” had so little history, and that seemed to suit the Jews just fine as they flocked to Hollywood and Anglicized their names to become key players in the filmmaking industry. Itself still so new. Too new, in fact, to understand a very unique phenomenon specific to women in the business: “aging out.” Becoming day-old bread. The psychological effect of suddenly becoming invisible after being deemed a “star” for so long was like experiencing severe whiplash. And it was a concept not really addressed until Billy Wilder brought us Norma Desmond (meta-ly played by former silent movie star Gloria Swanson) in 1950’s Sunset Boulevard.
Another film that would brutally dissect what happens to “bright young things” who commit the “sin” of aging in Hollywood is 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And, just as Baby Jane Hudson (Bette Davis) does, Angelyne clings to her persona like a security blanket, retreating so deeply into it that she genuinely believes that’s who and what she is. One could also say it’s even likenable to Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) retreating into his mother’s persona in Psycho.
The subject of age and how it tends to take away a “job” from those who bank entirely on sex appeal is broached several times, both in the show and in the article on which the former is based. Baum writes, “…she kept on rambling around the city over the decades while she aged.” What else would you have Angelyne do? Get a “real” job (which she sort of tried to do by running for governor again). Descend to the depths with all the little people? Incidentally, one of the key documents in proving her identity was related to age—the time had come for Angelyne to be eligible to collect social security benefits, and the county required proof of her identity. Cut to Emmy Rossum as Angelyne saying, “I have an insatiable appetite for three things: attention, teasing and money… Isn’t money adorable? It’s so green and pretty.” Sadly, Angelyne would have to live to see cryptocurrency.
Not to mention everyone living out the very fantasies she said she would help fulfill for them. That much is made clear in the short 1995 documentary about her (directed by Robinson Devor and Michael Guccione) in which her longtime assistant, Scott Hennig (on whom Hamish Linklater’s character in the series is based), offers a prescient Andy Warhol-esque statement by remarking, “Here she came from out of nowhere and made it just through perseverance and determination, and if you’ve got that yourself, then you can make it too… Because everyone is going to be a star in the future. That’s one of her main beliefs is that everyone will be a star, and she’s working toward guiding things in that direction.”
This philosophy is shown throughout Angelyne, with the Billboard Queen telling another hopeful documentary filmmaker named Max Allen (Lukas Gage), “You are what you say are.” Angelyne insists upon this to Max when she tells him to essentially “manifest” being a “great filmmaker” by saying it, then believing it. In that regard, Angelyne was also ahead of her time on how much of an industry “the power of positive thinking” shit would take off in the 2010s and beyond. Yet here we are, about to watch the world burst into flames with all of our positive thinking that’s supposed to save it.
Despite her frequent claims of empowerment, Angelyne, by the same token, constantly needs to latch onto a man to help her get what she wants, fully acknowledging in the ’95 doc that she knows how to manipulate them to get ahead. Yet the show wants to ensure we still see her from a feminist slant when she claims that the best way to control men is to seduce them. And how, by doing that, she actually regains her power and control. In truth, everything about Angelyne refers to maintaining control, most expressly over her narrative. This, in part, is why she has made her open distaste for Angelyne known. Nonetheless, she reportedly sold her life rights for one million dollars, acting amenable to the project until she wasn’t. The showrunner for Angelyne, Allison Miller, is thusly the first to admit, “This isn’t a biopic. This is about, maybe, the failure of biopics to be able to really fully illuminate a person. And to have those people point it back at us and say that we’re also trying to tell someone’s story and failing, because who can really tell someone’s story but themselves?” With this statement, we’re led to Madonna once again, who just got into her own tango with studios throughout Hollywood for trying to tell “her story” and clapping back, “Only I can tell my story.” Which is what M plans to do with a forthcoming biopic that she wrote and directed.
Angelyne will also have her own documentary coming out (she says) called Angelyne: Billboard Queen that will set the record straight. Or at least the record she actually wants to be documented. In this sense, it has to be stated that “stars” can rarely be objective about themselves or their pratfalls. Which is why Angelyne as a limited series is beneficial to portraying her as the psychological field day that she is. This includes the moment when Max asks her what she wants this documentary to say about her upon her death. Angelyne responds, “That I escaped.” More to the point, that she escaped the pain of life. And that in escaping she helped others find a brief reprieve as well. All of which speaks to her bleak past and how desperately she needed to suppress it in order to carry on. One might say she escaped her own original body altogether. An element that plays into her frequent insistence that she isn’t of this world. She could be “extraterrestrial,” as she tells an audience member during the filming of conservative, OC-based talk show Hot Seat with Wally George.
In the real interview, which aired in 1987, Angelyne is asked, among other misogyny-drenched questions, about Jessica Hahn and Donna Rice, “fallen women” of the day who were caught up in the scandals of Jim Bakker and Gary Hart, respectively. Among a crowd filled with what would surely be MAGA Repubs in the present, it’s clear how committed Angelyne truly is to promoting herself, willing to appear before an audience that wouldn’t normally be exposed to her. And this is something the series touches on when they re-create the interview, showing a distraught Angelyne when the lights are down and the music video is playing. Because the disgust one feels at Wally George demanding, “She certainly isn’t as much of a bimbo as Jessica Hahn or Donna Rice, is she?” is just one of many grotesqueries that hardly feels worth indulging such men for the sake of airing a video.
To drive that point home, one of the elements of the appearance that the writers leave in is the moment when an audience member rudely asks her, “Are you gonna do this until they won’t let you anymore or until you have too many wrinkles or…?” This, too, echoes the Madonna phenomenon of being expected to pack it in after a certain age because there are “rules” for women (and women only) about how long they can be seen as sexy. Angelyne, with her gift for the aphorism, replies, “Wrinkles are darling.” Of course, Madonna does not agree. And telling Madonna to go “au naturel” would likely result in her quipping, as Angelyne says in the series, “You can’t bring that negativity into my spaceship.” Just another “I’m an alien” affirmation, which comes up many times in Angelyne thanks to the billboard star’s repeated insistence that she is positively interplanetary. Her assistant in the 1995 documentary corroborates, “Angelyne borders on out of this world or from another planet.”
If that’s the case, then Marilyn must have been too—because Angelyne’s entire persona is founded upon the one Norma Jeane herself grafted from Jean Harlow. As we go deeper into “Rachel’s” past in the series, we see her on a boat bound for the U.S. where a Marilyn lookalike performs as part of the entertainment (obviously, that didn’t happen, but creative license says otherwise). She sings the Marilyn staple “I Wanna Be Loved By You,” featuring the lyrics, “I couldn’t aspire to anything higher.” Angelyne took that message as a challenge, finding her “higher” in a billboard perched above the denizens of L.A. In the referred-to black and white documentary from the 90s, Angelyne herself coos, “And you know what higher consciousness is, don’t you? It’s just feeling higher, that’s all. We all wanna feel higher, don’t we?”
The same documentary has Hennig explaining, “She’s a new type of star. Her main goal is to enlighten the world through the persona of sex goddess. That, you know, there is a better kind of life and everyone can have a better life. That’s why celebrities or stars are looked up to, because they seem to live such a glamorous, clean, carefree existence.” Clearly, that type of myth was already shattered when Marilyn’s childhood and rise to the top backstories came to light, plus the many subsequent prices she paid for fame. Now, of course, we have the Depp-Heard trial to remind us that celebrity is anything but “glamorous.” It’s not even tantamount to the “Stars: Just Like Us” section of Us Weekly.
As mentioned, Marilyn had stolen her own act from Harlow, making it even campier based on her vaudevillian flair. So no, you can’t really say Marilyn was the original blonde bombshell, but she was the first truly modern icon. And her arcane aura and parody-like oozing of sex appeal would influence not only Angelyne, but Paris Hilton. Two women who have key parallels when it comes to abuse via a scene of Rachel getting locked in her closet as punishment. This draws the line to Hilton’s own form of “discipline” while at Provo Canyon School.
Something she suppressed until seeing a reason to talk about it in her documentary, This Is Paris. Angelyne has been better at long-term suppression, her character in the show expounding, “Emotions are the things that hurt people the most. Emotions are our tortures. They’re the connection to the pain. I want to stay in the positive.” As Rachel, she repeats to herself, “I’m okay” in that closet, and she seems to resolve to do the very same thing that Paris did in a similar locked-up state. Become empowered. And be the “most fun,” never addressing anything “dreary” (read: so horrible that the only way one can go on is to repress it) like this again. And so emerged, as Baum says, “a Jew who has found refuge in shiksa drag. It’s a fascinating, only-in-L.A. story of identity, history and a symbiotic yearning both to be forgotten and to be famous.”
With the creators’ ultimately limited cooperation from the Billboard Queen, Angelyne has no choice but to get meta (this is a series rooted in postmodernism, after all) and alludes to the real Angelyne’s own dissatisfaction with the series despite giving permission to make it. So it is that Rossum acknowledges that by saying, as Angelyne, “I’m gonna write my own story. This…isn’t it.” The meta parade continues as Rossum breaks character at the end of the final episode when the director yells cut and calls her “Emmy,” who then asks where Angelyne is. Wasn’t she supposed to make a cameo?
Going back to the Madonna parallel (and yes, Angelyne actually could have taken her “performance” to the next level by continuing to pursue a music career more seriously), an ex-roommate of hers in college (before Ciccone decided to drop out), Whitley Setrakian, once said that Madonna’s greatest project was herself. Something that takes a refined level of self-involvement, and yet, ironically, a lack of self-awareness. One could say precisely the same thing about Angelyne, and now, pretty much everyone else obsessed with social media presentation.
As the credits to the finale of Angelyne roll to the tune of Sheila E.’s “Glamorous Life,” we know that this sonic decision is more than somewhat sardonic. For, although Angelyne carved out a glamorous life on the surface, like Los Angeles itself, there is something far bleaker just beneath that veneer of glamor.
