![]() She moved on to checking out drag queen bars in Fort Carson, Colorado, and realized the performers were doing what she had been doing as a youngster - “mouthing the words to songs.”įor a time, she took on the role of a hippie, trying magic mushrooms, opium and LSD. There were frequent fights, slaps in the face and orders to leave the house. ![]() Indeed, her parents were furious with Cassandra’s lifestyle. “I was a hormonally charged know-it-all rebellious teenager,” she writes. Club A-Go-Go, 1968 Courtesy of the author “This was the beginning of my junior groupie escapades,” she writes. By age 14, she frequented nightclubs, won second place in a go-go girl contest and got a gig “shaking my ass in a glass cage” at night, wearing a tassel-twirling bra while swilling White Russians and smoking cigarettes. The Beatles came on the scene when she was in seventh grade and their influence on her was “staggering.” She became a “mod,” adopted a British accent and spent hours listening to the band.Ī push-up bra from Frederick’s of Hollywood helped kick-start her hormones, and she became boy crazy, music crazy and band crazy in short order, following around bands who came to town - first backstage, and then in their hotel rooms. “I knew when I put on that skin-tight, sequined gown and red bouffant wig, I was home!” she writes. ![]() courtesy of the authorĪfter the accident, her mother, who had long hated the farm, insisted that Cassandra’s father, Dale, find himself a normal job and “get them the hell out of there.” Shortly after, they moved into the nearby town of Manhattan.Īn obsession with dressing up in costumes, heels and fishnets won her a $100 bond in a costume contest when she was 8 years old. In childhood, Cassandra Peterson would discover a flair for costumes and dress-up that would serve her well decades later as the delightfully over-the-top Elvira. Skin on her stomach and thighs was grafted onto her badly burned body and required months of painful healing – and left permanent scars. The scalding water etched third-degree burns into her skin, melted the hair on her head and fused her eyelids shut. She lost her balance and grabbed onto the handle of the cast-iron pot, pulling it over on her. An accident that occurred when 18-month-old Cassandra was home alone would later, ironically, turn out to be “one of the best things to ever happen to me.” The toddler had dragged a kitchen chair over to the stove to inspect eggs her mother was boiling for Easter. Cassandra Peterson would become famous worldwide as “Elvira, Mistress of Dark.” But before that, she was a rebellious teen from Kansas (inset).īorn in 1951 in Manhattan, Kansas, Cassandra’s parents were farmers in the neighboring, smaller town of Randolph. “I had to wonder how many of those women actually consented to having sex with him,” writes Peterson. “When a 7-foot-1, 300-pound man has his hand wrapped around your neck, there’s really not a lot you can do,” she writes of the athlete, who boasted in his 1991 memoir “A View From Above” that he had slept with 20,000 women in his lifetime. Now, in “Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark” (Hachette, out September 21), she details her trick-or-treat life in a candid memoir revealing her 19-year romantic relationship with a woman - a female whom she only identifies as “T” - as well as encounters with some of the celebrity world’s biggest names - among them late basketball star Wilt Chamberlain, whom she claims forced oral sex on her. The woman behind the Elvira brand, Cassandra Peterson, now 70, spent four decades building her iconic macabre persona into an international cult icon. She beckons the late-night viewer to come closer before launching into a vintage Saturday midnight movie “crème de la crap” horror film, as she calls it, many of which were shot low-budget in Mexico or Italy. In the dark doorway of a faux haunted house with lightning striking and coyotes howling in the background, the undisputed Queen of Halloween and Mistress of the Dark, Elvira, appears on the TV screen with her witchy long black hair, heavy makeup and deep cleavage. Jennifer Grey calls Johnny Depp relationship ‘a bonfire’: ‘There was some heat’ Kathleen Buhle, Hunter Biden’s ex, married a total sleazeball Matthew Perry’s ‘Friends’ and addiction memoir ‘is now done’ Arnold claims she was raped by Ike Turner in new memoir
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