The other day we were watching The Danny Thomas Show and one of the guests was an Italian girl named Piccola Pupa, who was Danny’s protege at the time. I remember her as being everywhere when I was ten and he and her publicists managed to get her there, Shindig,Hollywood Palace, Sullivan, and even a beach movie, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, where she shook what little she had (she was 13 or so) in a middle-school two-piece. Her sudden disappearance was hardly surprising as she simply could not sing, could hardly dance, and was ten years away from growing into her face*.
In recent years she posted a YouTube comment explaining how she got sick of show biz and retired 36 years ago, having run out the clock on her fifteen minutes. Good for her. However, I’m more interested in how she got “famous” in the first place. As a wee lad I was baffled that anybody found her talented. She was more like what adults wanted young people to like than what we really liked, and I’m looking for similar examples of manufactured, but otherwise inexplicable, attempts at stardom. Not the Monkees as much as Pink Lady.
I found what was purported to be a recent-ish photo and she did grow into it very nicely, indeed.
In the summer of 2001, Lennon Murphy was being widely touted as a Britney-slayer, taking the next step from Avril Lavigne and company. That assessment had some validity, and indeed she is legit and authentic in many ways, but it was obvious to anyone who saw the promotional materials showing up in record stores and magazines that there was a very conscious push happening. On top of all that, just get a load of the video (and listen to the hokey production) for “Brake of Your Car”!
Then her CD arrived, on the eleventh of September, 2001. For that and other reasons, her career trajectory was seriously derailed, the “push” evaporated, and she’s been on a long, hard, slog, with some success to show for it.
Pink Lady was a Japanese music duo in the 1970s and 1980s. NBC tried to build a variety show around them in 1980 but it didn’t work; their success in Japan didn’t repeat in the US.
I started a thread on this topic a few years ago. My OP nominees were:
Terence Trent Darby - his debut album was launched with a massive, massive PR push. He was touted as being the new, improved versions of Michael Jackson AND Prince. The public disagreed apparently.
Hothouse Flowers - A group of Dublin laddies with a strong & very opinionated lead singer performing old school rock & roll anthems (sound familiar??), came out about the same time as Darby (late 80s), faded just as fast.
Another band from the same period that didn’t go over half as well as their record label marketers probably expected were the band Cowboy Junkies. Around about '88, acoustic folk rock was making a bit of a mini-comeback, and these guys were given the big PR push. They didn’t become icons of the age, although they did manage to last a few years in the indie music world.
Artistically, Terence Trent Darby actually did have the chops and his first album was an unqualified success along with his #1 single, “Wishing Well”. Unfortunately, because he was also perceived as a whiny prima donna with a huge ego, the public’s reception to him had cooled considerably by the time he released his second album.
Nobody expected the Cowboy Junkies to be mega-popular. Their music appealed to the Alt-Rock and Alt-Country crowds and in those niche markets, they have been quite successful for the last 25 years.
Finally, as you would expect, there’s a TV Tropes page for this topic: Hollywood Hype Machine.
P Diddy or whatever he was calling himself, heavily promoted them via reality show and heavy MTV rotation to huge initial success, but the members themselves couldn’t keep it together and destroyed themselves from the inside, not to mention the lack of substance in their songs and the typical manufactured group weakness of a few talented members dragging along the eye candy
Keefe Brasselle. He was given multiple shows by CBS in the early 60s, none of which hit. One year CBS even gave his production company three different shows without benefit of a pilot, which almost never happened back then. They all bombed and cost CBS Network boss Jim Aubrey his job. The reason? Brasselle had big mob connections, and out of admiration or fear Aubrey gave him what he wanted.
How about an entire genre? In 1968, MGM Records claimed a hot new scence was coming from Boston called the “Bosstown Sound”. But the public and critics slammed bands like the Ultimate Spinach as psychedelic copycats.
Well, especially back in the old days, the casting couch was the reason! In my youth I had an older female best friend who years before had worked as a professional escort in her youth. And it wasn’t a euphemism for hooker, she didn’t sleep with her clients, she was just very good looking & classy and got paid to be arm candy for rich guys. Anyway, she told me she was at a few parties that Danny Thomas attended (she never escorted him) and said he was a total pervert. He not only propositioned her, but even offered to get her young daughter (who was also very pretty) into show biz. Needless to say she politely declined (on both counts).
Bobby Sherman? If you consider a pitcher to be an artist, David Clyde. Samuel Goldwyn promoted Anna Sten as the next Garbo for two years before she was dropped into obscurity.
This happened a number of Dublin bands of the era, due to the post-U2 A&R frenzy. The Hothouse Flowers are still about and still reasonably popular on the Irish live circuit. They were not and could not be another U2.
According to The Other Glass Teat by Harlan Ellison, the reason that James Aubrey ran three programs owned by Keefe Brasselle’s production company and a variety show starring Brasselle himself was that Aubrey had a habit of picking up women for sex. This would always end with Aubrey beating the woman up. One day in Las Vegas he did this with the daughter of a Mafia don. The don put a hit out on Aubrey. Brasselle knew a more powerful don who had the hit cancelled. Aubrey was forced to do favors for Brasselle like schedule programs that he produced:
That’s how I remember it. He was everywhere for a couple of years in the late 80s because his music was really good. His success faded because of his atitude, definitey not because of lack of talent or too much hype.
Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby is one of the best pop/soul albums of that (or any) era.
Jobriath was an attempt to manufacture an American David Bowie, but despite massive hyping his career crashed and burned, and is barely remembered now except as a cautionary tale.
Martin Henderson, a NZ actor of middling talent but charismatic good looks who was pushed to be a “star” instead of an actor. Has been subsequently outshone by his contemporary Karl Urban, by quite some margin.
A very attractive woman and a decent actress, nothing more. But she was handed big roles in a number of high profile projects in the Nineties, when she was a relative unknown. She wasn’t bad in any of them, but she wasn’t great either, and I couldn’t figure out why she was getting so many huge opportunities.
I figure that either
She was some Hollywood VIP’s mistress, or
She just WOWED some people during auditions, the way mediocre linebacker Mike Mamula wowed scouts at the NFL combine.
Judith Cohen.
According to one of the comments on her message board:
The episode of “Good Times” always struck me as odd that they would devote a whole episode to a complete unknown. But if Lear was trying to push her career along, I guess it makes sense.