Annie Ample, Death of a Sales Woman
Matthew Kruk
Death of a Sales Woman
Busty entertainer Annie Ample strived for fame, attained it, then
shunned it and died in utter obscurity
Ed Koch
Thu, Apr 22, 2010 (midnight)
When Annie Ample decided to give up the spotlight she had sought for
most of her adult life, she moved 75 miles away from the glitzy neon
Strip into a remote double-wide mobile home in Nye County that had no
phone.
She had no contact with the show-business world-or anyone but close
family members. A virtual recluse the last 16 years of her life, Ample
wanted nothing more to do with fame and fortune. She changed her name,
dyed her trademark platinum tresses back to their original
color-black-and had her infamous 44DD breast implants surgically
removed.
Although during her lifetime her name and photos appeared in hundreds of
newspapers and magazines worldwide, not one media source reported her
death when she quietly passed away of heart failure complicated by
multiple sclerosis on New Year's Day 2008 at a Las Vegas rest home.
What would cause a publicity-generating machine like Annie Ample-who
garnered worldwide attention with stunts like insuring her boobs for $1
million-to forsake her stardom for a far more simplistic and obscure
life?
One family member says a combination of poor health, caused in part by
leaking silicone implants, and disillusionment with her place in show
business played a role in Ample's sudden disappearance in 1992. She
simply grew tired of being Annie Ample.
"Mom had really come to hate the persona she had created," said Ample's
daughter Holly Trede. "In her later years, Mom would not respond to
anyone who called her Annie Ample. She changed so much in her
appearance. You would not have recognized her from her days as a
celebrity."
In addition to being one of America's highest-paid strippers of the
1980s-Ample took in $5,000 a week at top East Coast clubs-she appeared
in a half-dozen mainstream movies and television shows, won a handful of
beauty pageants and, near the end of her career, portrayed her childhood
idol Jayne Mansfield in Legends in Concert at the Imperial Palace.
She was a pioneer in becoming modestly famous simply for being famous,
setting the table for fellow busty blondes Pamela Anderson and Anna
Nicole Smith, who took the art of achieving fame without really doing
anything special to superstar levels.
Ample moved to Southern Nevada in 1983 from her native San Diego and
almost from the start became the quintessential Las Vegas character.
"The story of Annie Ample is essentially a story about Las Vegas and how
much of the world perceives the city," Jack Sheehan wrote in the June
1984 issue of Las Vegan Magazine. "Las Vegas to most outsiders means
neon lights and feathers, big breasts and eye shadow. And that's where
Annie Ample fits in."
Ample took her craft seriously and put everything she had into being the
best she could be at whatever she did, no matter how silly or trivial
her career may have seemed to others. In doing so she happily bounced
along the fringe of stardom for years.
"Mom was not just some blonde who took off her clothes for a living,"
said Trede, 41, a Las Vegas medical biller, who three years ago also was
diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. "She was an intelligent woman-way
ahead of her time, especially when it came to getting publicity. She was
a master of it."
Ample first made worldwide headlines in 1981, when she was a virtually
unknown starlet romping topless on the French Riviera beaches at the
Cannes Film Festival-and got her photo in scores of newspapers for doing
it. It was the first of what would be many successful publicity stunts
during that decade.
Also in 1981, Ample had her breasts insured for $1 million against loss
or theft by Lloyds of London. She said it was a stunt that cost her
$22,000 for the insurance premium but brought her millions of dollars
worth of free publicity-and much of the world's attention.
She appeared nude in numerous men's magazine of the era. One of them,
High Society, offered Ample a job as one of its columnists, offering sex
advice. She often lamented that the majority of questions for her
column-and fan mail-came from creepy male prison inmates who described
in detail how they would like to worship her.
In 1974, Ample, at the suggestion of a then-boyfriend, got
breast-enlargement surgery in Mexico. Her bra size went from a 34B to
44DD, and the boyfriend got her jobs in San Diego strip clubs, including
The Box Office, where she danced under the stage names of San Diego
Annie and Athena. In her prime, Ample stood 5-foot-8-inches tall and her
measurements were 44-24-36.
By 1983, Ample was working regularly as a featured stripper in places
like Boston's Combat Zone and at the Zanzibar Club in Toronto. Her
dancing also provided her the opportunity to travel to England,
Scandinavia and other spots around the world. And she wrote a critical
autobiography about her years as a stripper.
During a '70s appearance on The Dating Game, Ample won a trip to Las
Vegas. After watching the Hallelujah Hollywood show at the old MGM Grand
(now Bally's), lounging in a bikini poolside at the old Hacienda Hotel
and playing nickel slots, she vowed to one day make Las Vegas her home.
When the low-budget 1985 movie Mugsy's Girls was filmed in Las Vegas,
Ample landed the role of a girl-gang leader appropriately named Lungs.
She became a member of both the Screen Actors Guild and the American
Guild of Variety Artists, further legitimizing her celebrity status.
Ample often said that her proudest accomplishment in the adult-oriented
entertainment industry was that she never made a porno film. Once, porn
mogul Al Goldstein offered Ample $20,000 to do a hard-core scene with
adult film legend John Holmes. Ample rejected the offer, telling
Goldstein her reason for not doing a nude sex scene was that "I catch
colds easily."
Locally, Ample did a stand-up routine in amateur comedy shows, produced
and starred in her own burlesque revue and in 1988 capped her local
resume by portraying 1950s' sex symbol Mansfield in Legends.
Ample also sang in a rock band called Nasty Habits, appeared in Alice
Cooper's "Welcome to My Nightmare" video and did a 21-page photo spread
for Frank Zappa's Thing Fish play in a 1984 issue of Hustler magazine.
"It took three of the wildest days of photography I'd ever gone
through," Ample wrote of the Zappa shoot in her memoir. "Naturally, I
stripped through the pages of the magazine. I started out in a Santa
Claus outfit and went slowly down to a pencil and a briefcase."
While doing the Zappa photo shoot, Ample was invited to the opulent
Southern California home of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. Ample said
she met Flynt by accidentally walking in on him in his bathroom while
Flynt was receiving therapy for bullet wounds from a 1978 shooting that
had confined him to a wheelchair. Ample said Flynt talked lovingly about
his mother and of his desire to run for president. He offered Ample the
job of being his topless campaign promoter on stumping stops and in
television ads. Ample, who thought the idea was in poor taste, declined.
Ample was born Karen Ann Bell on October 30, 1950, in San Diego. A
number of websites say her birth year was 1960, but Ample admitted that
she lied about her age throughout her career for fear she would lose
jobs to much younger performers.
She said she was raised by a hard-working, devoted mother who supported
her career decisions, and an abusive, alcoholic father who popped in and
out of Ample's life during her formative years.
At age 12, Ample brought home a stray dog who days later bit off her
upper lip. Doctors grafted skin from the back of one of her legs to
reconstruct a lip, the first of several operations to repair her
deformed face. She was in the hospital for months. She fell behind in
school and eventually dropped out. As an adult, Ample wore gobs of
lipstick to hide what eventually became a tiny scar.
Although she took two years of drama at San Diego State University and
had five years of modern jazz dance lessons, performed as a stripper
until 1987.
In October 1988, Ample's autobiography, The Bare Facts: My Life As a
Stripper was published. In it, Ample wrote about corruption in the
strip-joint industry, including how club managers would gain control of
many of the dancers by getting them hooked on cocaine to force them into
prostitution and, in the process, destroy their lives.
In one of her last interviews before disappearing from the public light,
Ample told the Las Vegas Sun in a story published on March 2, 1992, that
she was constantly ill during her career because of leaking silicone
breast implants.
Her revelation came on the heels of the Food and Drug Administration
urging doctors to cease cosmetic breast implants, which at the time were
linked to lupus, a disease that weakens the immune system, and other
ailments. In the Sun story, Ample revealed that she had been diagnosed
with lupus in 1986.
She quit show business shortly after that story was published and moved
to Lathrop Wells, 75 miles northwest of Las Vegas, and later to the
Pahrump suburb of Crystal, Nevada. She married for a fifth and final
time. Because she had no phone, there was virtually no way for booking
agents to contact Ample to try to entice her into resurrecting her
career as Annie Ample. Embracing her Chickasaw Indian roots, Ample took
an unassuming job as a clerk in a Native American store.
Shop patrons would occasionally comment that they had seen her somewhere
before but just could not place her face. Ample would just smile and
tell them that lots of people told her that she looked like someone
famous, but that she was really just a regular person.
Ample also had her breast implants removed at the University Medical
Center, saying goodbye forever to the attention-grabbing body part that
had brought her both fame and frustration.
Ample also told friends she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis,
which she also blamed on her leaking implants. The coroner's records do
not indicate whether Ample's MS was linked to faulty implants. Ample's
daughter Trede never had breast implants and says her MS likely is
genetic.
Ample again returned to Las Vegas late in 2007 and was checked into The
Torrey Pines Care Center, where, three weeks before she died, she told
her daughter she was feeling the best she had felt in more than 20
years.
While not everyone who dies gets a story obituary or even a death notice
in newspapers, celebrities, even minor ones, generally find their way
into print almost immediately after they pass away.
Ample's death was concealed for so long in part because public records
list her death only under her real name, which few people outside of
Ample's family knew, and not by her more recognizable stage name.
The Clark County Coroner's Office records show that a Karen Foxx of
Pahrump died on January 1 two years ago at a local convalescent home.
Foxx was Annie Ample's last married name. She often mused that it
probably was a better stripper name than her stage name.
Trede said that no obituary for Karen Foxx or Annie Ample ran in any
newspapers. There were no services. Ample was cremated. In addition to
Trede, she left behind a husband and son.
Because her death never became generally known to the public, several
website biographies still list Annie Ample as being alive. No site could
be found that lists her as dead.
Trede said she plans to write a book about her mother's final years as a
celebrity, her withdrawal from the public eye and what she did in the
reclusive years leading up to her death.
"My mother's legacy is her courage-she was never afraid to try things
that were new or different and did not care what people thought of her
for doing what she wanted to do," Trede said. "I was so proud of her.
She did not smoke cigarettes or use drugs. She was a hard-working parent
who did everything she did to support her family.
"As Annie Ample, she just wanted to be famous. It is a shame that few
got to know the real Karen."
Ample used to say that to a celebrity publicity-good or bad-is
everything because "if you disappear from the public light even for a
short time, people will forget you and your fame will die." The irony is
that the ultimate fame that Annie Ample once sought eluded her and, in
the end, she died in obscurity.
Ed Koch is a former longtime Las Vegas Sun reporter who was Annie Ample's
publicist from 1983 to 1987.
Hoodoo
(Central Daylight Time), spoke thusly:
> Ample also sang in a rock band called Nasty Habits, appeared in
> Alice Cooper's "Welcome to My Nightmare" video and did a 21-page
> photo spread for Frank Zappa's Thing Fish play in a 1984 issue of
> Hustler magazine.
>
> "It took three of the wildest days of photography I'd ever gone
> through," Ample wrote of the Zappa shoot in her memoir. "Naturally,
> I stripped through the pages of the magazine. I started out in a
> Santa Claus outfit and went slowly down to a pencil and a
> briefcase."
>
> While doing the Zappa photo shoot, Ample was invited to the opulent
> Southern California home of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt.
http://home.online.no/~trohen-b/annie.htm
Thing-Fish: Annie Ample's Story
Frank Zappa's group, The Mothers of Invention, was one of
the major groups in the 1960s. He'd concentrated on making and producing
records right through the '70s rather than going on tour. He was one of
those politically outraged musicians, who was also outrageous.
He picked me out of the Faces book that most performers are
in if they have an agent. I was perfect to play a part in what was going
to be his first big musical stage production. Before I went to LA, Frank
and I spent hours on the phone talking. In fact, he auditioned me on the
phone, and when we talked he always wanted me in character. I was
supposed to be a domineering housewife with a horrible, high-pitched
voice. "Harvey, yer a worm," I repeated over and over again when we were
talking.
I went to Zappa's studio, which is in his basement, and is
technically as good as any around. He showed me how he does the
recording and the mixing right there. Then I met his wife and children.
They all are terrific people. Zappa doesn't drink or do drugs. He proves
that you can be in show business and have it all together.
Zappa decided that he first wanted me to do publicity for
his new album, "Thing-Fish." In it, he had a song about a rubber doll.
He'd heard about Slutty Suzy and Sluts Are Us in my act, and thought
that Suzy and I would fit right into his plans. As part of the
promotion, he was producing a celebrity layout for HustIer magazine.
That was fine with me as long as I didn't have to do any acrobatic
shots. It took three of the wildest days of photography I'd ever gone
through. I was paid $2,000 a day. The magazine got twenty-one pages out
of it. As usual, I was underpaid given the results.
My hair was white and ratted out about a foot around my
head. I wore crazy-looking glasses, which had boxes with nude legs
hanging out of them. They put a scar on my chest, and naturally I
stripped through the pages of the magazine. I started out in a Santa
Claus outfit and went slowly down to a pencil and a briefcase.
The set, like Zappa, was bizarre. They must have spent
thousands of dollars on it. There was a house with phony snow and dozens
of pink flamingos in front of it. In the background, there was a huge
poster of Pat Boone with his penis hanging out. Someone had found a
Polaroid and sold it to Larry Flynt, Hustler's publisher. Since he
couldn't use it anywhere else, he used it here. Don't ask what the
significance of any of this was. I was just doing my job.
The shoot took place just before Thanksgiving, and I was
keen to get back home for the holiday. I was invited to Larry Flynt's
place for dinner the night the shoot was over. I'm not impressed by
much, but I have to admit that Flynt's house was beautiful. The foyer
was filled with antiques. It was hard to imagine the porno king and his
wife with her pink Mohawk cut in such an elegant setting.
I was wearing black leotards and a brown dress -- very
understated for me. The dining room was just as elaborate as the foyer.
Around the dining room table sat an odd bunch of people. There was Tom
Laughlin who starred in Billy ]ack, two Indians who were leaders of AIM
(the American Indian Movement), Watergate figure John Dean, and the man
who invented the Uzi machine gun. There was also a general and an
evangelist.
The butlers were all wearing Uzi machine guns. I wasn't
sure if this was decoration in honor of the inventor or because of the
nature of the crowd. It was bizarre to say the least. No matter how
delicious the food was, I felt extremely uncomfortable. The conversation
was about developing a magazine that would compete with SoIdier of
Fortune, the magazine for mercenaries.
Larry Flynt was in a wheelchair because he'd been shot and
left a paraplegic. I'd been told that his bedroom was bomb-proof because
he's worried that someone will try to kill him again. I didn't get a
chance to talk to him until I went to the bathroom after dinner. I
happened to walk in on him by mistake. There he was with a therapist,
who was massaging his body to keep his circulation going. The bathroom
was huge. When I tried backing out the door, he waved me to the edge of
the bathtub to have a talk.
Unlike the standoffish Hefner, Flynt was friendly. He
talked about his mother, who'd come from a small town. Because she
didn't want to leave her house, he rebuilt it in his backyard out there
in Hollywood so that she'd be near him.
Flynt was starting to run for president at this time. He
told me a lot of things that I didn't want to hear. About tapes that
could, he said, hurt several people in high places. He said he knew who
shot him, and that it had been set up by people who were high up in the
government. He said he knew that the KAL jet that had been shot down
really was a spy plane. He said he had films of the shooting of John F.
Kennedy. "You're welcome to see these films. We're going to have a
screening after dinner." I didn't want any part of any of it.
Flynt invited me to be part of his presidential campaign.
He gave me buttons and a T-shirt. He wanted me to go on national
television, he said, as his campaign promoter -- topless. As far as his
attorneys could find out, there was no law that said you couldn't do this.
I left as soon as dinner was over. I felt ill. I'm not
political, and I certainly didn't want to get mixed up with these macho
politicos. I was so nervous that when Flynt offered me a ride back to
Las Vegas the next day, I said no thanks. Frank Zappa drove me out to
the LA. airport, and I was still so upset that when I walked out to the
airport, I had my shoes on the wrong feet.
--
Trout Mask Replica
WFMU.org or WMSE.org; because music channels on
Sirius Satellite, and its internet radio player, suck