Hollywood teems with lusters after fame, rock stars of tomorrow, would-be symbols of sex. But none of them has managed to make herself more conspicuous than Angelyne, whose pouting likeness has adorned traffic light switching boxes and bus shelters through the ’80s, and who, as this is written, reclines sultrily atop her fuchsia Corvette on a jillion flourescent back-lit billboards from Capitol Tower to the sea.

She’s blonder than Deborah Harry and she sings. Life imitates art—she’s Little Annie Fanny incarnate. She’s made records and videos. She pouts and poses, protrudes and poses and preens. Primarily, she protrudes. She says they’re real. One wonders. She says she’s 25. One wonders some more. About her being sheer, undiluted Eleganza there can be no doubt. There’s been talk of putting her Corvette billboard up all over Manhattan.

A Los Angeles printer leased the Corvette for her because he expects that she’ll become “a very powerful force in the motion picture industry.” By her estimate, he’s put half a million dollars where his mouth is. He writes both the car and the billboards off as a business expense.

She thinks that the most distinctive thing about herself is “that I’m willing to be the way I am. People tell me, ‘Something radical must have happened to you for you to look and be the way you are.’ But it was Cosmic Forces that made me this way.” When she isn’t doing the sex goddesses of the ’50s, she has an unusually pleasant speaking voice.

She regards herself as a genius “because I can do anything I have to to achieve my goal, which is to be famous, visually and vocally.” She supposes she’s a sex symbol too. “I’ve been pushed into it,” she sighs. “I do find that I get my point across much better by being sexy.” Her point being “whatever I’m tryirtg to get across—my talent or whatever.”

She craves nothing less than “the adulation of all the people in the world. I’d even like to reach the people in Africa.” She couldn’t choose between wealth and fame, for “I’ve got to have both. Who wants to be famous and poor? God! You have to keep your image up. You have to have enough money to sign autographed pictures and buy shoes and clothes and lipstick to look cute. I want to make my own movies without anyone else telling me the parts to play. If I have a lot of money, I’ll be able to be in complete control of my...artistic ventures.

“Sometimes when I see a movie with Marilyn or Jayne or Brigitte,” she confides, “I think about how I can be more hip or more rock and more better than they were. I’ve taken the best of all of them.” She buys all her clothes at Playmates, a starlets’ outfitter just up Hollywood Blvd. from Frederick’s.

Asked how he became interested in Arigelyne, her printer patron replies, “Everybody's interested in Angelyne. Her belief in herself is very infectious.” He regards her as “a throwback to the ’20s, and yet with her own fresh approach, which is really delightful.”

She says that she achieved her present proportions at 12 or 13, and claims never to get tired of her top-heaviness. “I love them,” she says. “Guys love them.” She loves guys loving them even when they— and the way she dresses and walks and poses—inspire them to the most vulgar displays, the most boorish proclamations of machismo. “It’s darling,” she tells Eleganza in her airiest sex kitten voice. “I like it when they say to each other, ‘Put your eyes back in your sockets,’ or, There go your eyes, rolling down the aisle.’ Or when they throw things in the air—you know, cigarettes or food or whatever they’re carrying. The eyeballs on the floor is my favorite, though.”

One particularly smitten young stud followed her to her apartment in the hills above the Sunset Strip recently, and she was frightened enough to lead him back down to the nearest police station. And yet she claims to have found even that.. .darling. “It taught me not to let it happen again,” she muses. “If somebody follows me now, I know enough to say something like, ‘Oh, gosh, I’ve got to go. I hope you don’t mind’ —something so that they don’t get hurt or think I want them to follow me.”

She isn’t disturbed by the realization that many of those who are most demonstrative in their appreciation of her are boorish simians. In her eyes all men were created equal. “I’d consider going out'with anybody,” she says. She obviously has never met Rick Johnson. “I feel it’s my duty to give everybody a chance.”

Asked how many lovers she’s had, she gets even coyer. “I really don’t remember. It could be one and it could be none. Maybe I haven’t even had sex. Maybe I’ve only gone to the point right before it when you’re lying naked and somebody says, ‘No, I can’t.’”

She’s a great deal more demure than her billboards might lead you to expect. “I expect men to be gentlemen and not touch me until after they wash their hands. And they’re very lucky if they get that far. I’m very strict with my morals.” She keeps a list of all the men she’s kissed. Life imitates art. “I always keep a list of all the boys I’ve kissed,” is the hook line of her most recent single. “It’s just kissing,” she insists. “I don’t want you to think that I’m promiscuous.”

She’s a great deal more demure than her billboards might lead you to expect. She declines CREEM’s invitation to pose nude. “It’s a challenge to become a sex symbol without doing that,” she avers. “I don’t have to take off my clothes to prove that I’ve got what it takes. And third, it would make women dislike me, and men wouldn’t respect me as much.”

She’s a great deal more demure than her billboards might lead'you to expect. She declines to talk about sex. “Who am I to talk about it?” she asks. “Sex and people are private things. That’s something you do when you’re alone, not when you’re onstage. I’m no authority on sex.”

She demures too to reveal how she kept the wolf from her door between dropping out of Hollywood High School and becoming Our Lady of the Switching Boxes. “I don’t remember,” she insists. “Maybe I lived with someone. I’ve always gotten by.”

She can conceive neither of feminists being outraged by her nor of being perceived as a lurid caricature of femininity. “Women,” she claims, “come up to me all the time to ask for autographs for their husbands and boyfriendsi They’re real nice to me. Perhaps I’m their hero in a sense because I have the balls to do what I want to do in the way I want to do it.”

She doesn’t think it’s a woman’s place to cook, clean, sew, and have a hot dinner on the table for hubby when he arrives home from work. “Oh, I think the opposite. I think the guy should stay home and make a hot dinner for me. I like to be spoiled.” She’s aghast at the notion of knowing how to cook.

She claims to have had several steady relationships—with “artists, musicians, and one who was into real estate”—that lasted as long as a year. “But I just got bored with them and wanted to move on to somebody new.” You could be next.

When she’s alone, she does “whatever I’m in the mood for. I’m very unpredictable. Sometimes I like to paint or write or just look in the mirror and practice flirting, or try on clothes or make-up.” Her bedroom walls are covered with very bad self-portraits.

She’s been working on a rock TV show with Moon Zappa and Elvira. Remember where you read about her first.