By CASSANDRA PETERSON (Hatchett Book Group; 2021)

Fact: everyone loves Elvira.  A onetime horror movie TV host who became a cultural icon, the extremely well-endowed, poufy wig wearing Elvira, a.k.a. Cassandra Peterson, is that rare beast: a performer who appeals to all demographics.  She’s popular with heterosexual males (having fronted a Coors Halloween campaign that reportedly resulted in an enormous increase in sales), yet also led several gay pride marches, and has a fair amount of female fans.  A horror icon Elvira also very much is, even though her act, consisting of hacky puns delivered in a valley girl accent, would seem to be a turn-off to most horror buffs (with her physical attributes, it would seem, a mitigating factor).  In short, the woman has something for every taste.

In this tell-all, the now 70-year-old Peterson reveals that becoming Elvira wasn’t something she planned for, nor initially took too seriously.  She, at age thirty, was simply looking for acting work, and turned up at a 1981 audition being held by a Los Angeles TV station with an extensive B-movie library.  Nobody was prepared for how famous the character would become, with a slew of public appearances and endorsements that were lucrative enough to buy Peterson a Hollywood Hills mansion and allow her to self-finance a movie.

Nobody was prepared for how famous the character would become, with a slew of public appearances and endorsements that were lucrative enough to buy Peterson a Hollywood Hills mansion and allow her to self-finance a movie.

The above encompasses the second half of YOURS CRUELLY, ELVIRA.  The first half recounts Peterson’s earlier years, which commenced with an authentically horrific incident: a severe scalding as a toddler, which required extensive skin grafts and has resulted, Peterson claims, in an insatiable drive that carried her through the dark portions of her life.

Those portions include a decade long attempt at forging an acting career, which as rendered here presents us with an unforgettably blunt depiction of some of Hollywood’s grimier corners.  As a pretty young woman with two over-large attributes, Peterson was hit upon by a slew of famous and not-so-famous men, resulting in flings with Robert De Niro and Jon Voight, and far more unpleasant sexual encounters with Wilt Chamberlain, Frank Sinatra (who’s remembered for telling her she had “nice tits!”) and Tom Jones (whose penis was so large it ruptured her insides).  We also learn about her time as a Las Vegas showgirl, a singer in two Italian rock bands, an extra in Federico Fellini’s ROMA and Carmelo Bene’s SALOME, and as a part of the legendary Hollywood comedy troupe the Groundlings (alongside her longtime pals Phil Hartman and Paul Reubens).

Cassandra Peterson

Difficult though Peterson’s early years were, life as Elvira wasn’t entirely idyllic, with crippling debt, controversy over her revealing outfits, periodic harassment by former TV hostess Vampira (a.k.a. Maila Nurmi), a slew of miscarriages and much mental abuse dished out by her husband of 22 years, who to compound matters got Peterson embroiled in a costly divorce.  Yet there was a most unlikely silver lining to all this strife: a nineteen year romantic relationship with a woman (identified only as “T”), although Peterson assures us that her (and Elvira’s) heterosexual preferences haven’t changed.

…an unforgettably blunt depiction of some of Hollywood’s grimier corners.

This book, in summation, is a good one.  As a tell-all it satisfies, naming names and dishing out enough dirt to fill a cemetery while revealing, in easy-going prose (with the Elvira-esque puns confined mostly to the opening twenty pages) the inner world of the woman behind a character we’ve all come to know and love.