Carol Lynley: A Fan Magazine Remembrance

She never reached the top tier of stardom but Carol Lynley, who died this past September, certainly captured Tinseltown’s attention for a time. She made her first appearances in the fan magazines as a nameless teen model in cosmetics and Coca-Cola ads. By age seventeen she’d collected acting kudos for her role in Blue Denim both on Broadway and in Hollywood, and moved onto the features pages.

The fan magazines’ coverage of Lynley followed a familiar trajectory for young ingénues, starting with homey getting-to-know-her profiles like “108 Things You Never Knew about Carol Lynley” (Movieland and TV Time, July 1959). Among the things we never knew: “She has ‘a passion’ for food, especially coffee ice cream, but she usually has enough will power to say no.” “She likes to walk barefooted, especially in the summer, and often sheds her shoes at home and in the country.”

Then there were wholesome “date layouts” with co-stars James MacArthur and Brandon de Wilde, followed by the inevitable “I Want to Get Married!” “Carol Lynley is not a career woman… Her goal is marriage and a house full of children… ‘I don’t want to be an imitation of life’” (Stardom, May 1960). Lynley, however, failed to follow the studios’ prescribed formula of yearn-for-love-but-wait-as-long-as-possible-to-find it. Instead, only eighteen, she eloped with a publicist, Mike Selsman.

No sooner had the Hollywood media machine adjusted, picturing a contented wife and mother (“The Best Things in Life Are Hers,” Screen Album, July 1963) who put her career in the background and happily performed “the everyday work of a wife” (Movieland and TV Time, Sep 1961), than Lynley threw another wrench into the works. She resumed her pursuit of stardom, at times prickly and demanding: “Carol Lynley is uppity, indeed. She’s refused to star opposite Fabian” (Victoria Cole, Screen Stars, Dec 1961). Then she walked out on Selsman, who promptly “rushed into divorce court making bitter and sensational charges” and seeking custody of their baby daughter (Screen Album, Oct 1963). An item in Hedda Hopper’s monthly gossip column (“Under Hedda’s Hat,” Photoplay, Oct 1963) added detail, with her breed’s masterful ability to deliver both specificity and ambiguity.

Preminger was actually subpoenaed, but Selsman and Lynley managed to work out a deal before the divorce came to trial. Yet “if the dirty laundry was not to be aired publicly, there was still plenty of private laundering to do: Carol lost ten pounds and admitted, ‘Inside I’m a seething, steaming mass of emotional jelly” (Modern Screen’s Hollywood Yearbook No. 7, 1964).

In salvage mode, the fan mags were forced to adjust their previous accounts of Lynley’s background to explain away an ill-advised marriage and its messy dissolution. Earlier articles had emphasized that “melodramatic exaggerations about their hardships is something Carol and her mother hate.” Instead, Lynley — who began modeling and acting professionally when she was ten — had claimed “a very normal life when I haven’t been actually working,” with good friends, dates “with boys who aren’t ‘names’” and “marvelous” summers with her grandmother in Massachusetts (Stardom, May 1960). Revisionist stories, however, posed the question, “What turns a lovely girl into a human volcano?” and pointed to her childhood for the answers (“Why Carol Lynley’s Marriage Exploded,” Movieland and TV Time, Aug 1963).

In the updated version of Lynley’s history, her struggling, single-parent family “moved around a lot when she was a child, usually from one drab New York flat to another” (Screen Stories, July 1963). Her teen years were both friendless (“When I meet other teenagers I just don’t know what to say”) and dateless (“Dates? I don’t have any dates”) (Movieland and TV Time, Aug 1963). Despite gossip column notices as early as 1958 that “teenage Carol has started to go places, and the stag line is forming fast” (Movie Life, Dec 1958), Modern Screen (Oct 1964) went so far as to claim “she never even had a date until she was 18.”

With Lynley’s abrupt transition into scandal-tinged adulthood, she graduated from shy ingénue to up-and-coming “love goddess,” touted as “a next Liz Taylor” (Screen Stories, July 1963) and compared to such legends “as Garbo, Dietrich, and Turner” (Modern Screen, Oct 1964). “Today,” noted Modern Screen, “she is every inch the screen queen her new career status demands, complete with exquisite wardrobe, expensive jewelry, Jaguar sports car and a beaver coat trimmed in mink.”

Despite posing for Playboy in 1965, Lynley never managed the transformation. Her starring role as Jean Harlow that year failed to make its mark, thanks largely to the barely mediocre black-and-white production that was rushed into release just ahead of a competing, same-titled Carroll Baker vehicle. The New York Times (May 15, 1965) called Lynley’s Harlow “anything but alluring,” and noted, “The picture took eight days for filming, the last two due to inclement weather. It didn’t rain long enough.” (Baker’s turn fared little better: A photo synopsis in the September 1965 Movies Illustrated carried the subtitle, “Only Improvement in the Agony is the Color.”) Lynley was thirty when she played her best-known role as the vulnerable young singer in 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure, still looking every bit the young innocent “whose very name conjure[s] up visions of ice cream sodas and saddle shoes” (Modern Screen, Oct 1964).

Lynley films to see (for better and worse): Blue Denim (1959), The Cardinal (1963), Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963), Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), The Poseidon Adventure (1972).

Image credits, clockwise from upper left: (1) Photoplay July 1960; (2) Modern Screen Oct 1964; (3) Modern Screen Apr 1961; (4) Movieland and TV Time Aug 1963.