In real life, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, Eleganza’s and every heterosexual American boy’s favorite television personality, is actually Cassandra Peterson, who’s hip, vivacious, and friendly, disdains heavy metal, and has avidly supported handgun control since John Lennon’s murder, when “I just flipped completely out.” She contributes time and money to organizations dedicated to the welfare of abused children, abused women, and animals, and says, “I like to help underdog kinds of people.”

Robert Redding designed her wig, makeup, and dress not to evoke a vampire, it turns out, but the Ronettes, which, as Peterson laughingly notes, “is the next best thing.”

She wears two wigs at a time, one for height and one for length, and gets them at the same Hollywood Blvd. shop where Lobsterhead Kenhart and Donna Quixote buy their false eyelashes, the infamous Shakey Imports. “I get the same wig every time,” she reveals, a little disconsolately, “but every time it costs more. I say, ‘But I bought this same wig last time for $50.’

‘No,’ they say, ‘not the same wig.’

‘Look,’ I say, ‘I’ve bought 27 of them— I’m Elvira.’

They say, ‘Elvira Who? We never heard of no Elvira.’

Most of her fan mail is “from people in institutions like prisons and mental hospitals. I have one guy who writes things like, ‘Thank you so much for that wonderful sweater you knitted for me and for saying hello to me on your show last week.’ I have no idea who this guy is or what he’s talking about, but every week hp sends me another letter.

“Different people take me in completely different ways. By S&M people I’m perceived as some sadist-with-a-whip type. ‘This is my wife and I,’ they write. ‘We’re into bondage. You’re our kind of gal. Let’s get together.’ Then I’ll get mail from high priests of black magic cults, devil-worshippers who send me all these books. And I get a lot of mail from little kids who think I’m hysterical because I tell stupid jokes that only they can understand. A lot of kids write to say that they want to look like me when they grow up!

“There are guys who only see your boobs and assume you’re a loose, sleazy type, but I also get a lot from women who think I’m a feminist who’s really helping the cause by warning women about the dirty disgusting guys out there!

“I’ve never actually been propositioned, but I have been asked out a lot. They’ll write something like, ‘Stop over—I’d like to take some pictures of you some time.’ Lots of them send pictures, but I’ve never made any attempt to contact any of them since they’re actually about 45 and bald and fat. The pictures they send are of them with their wife and kids, but with the other faces cut out so that it’s just them left.”

At least one famous pop star has tried to coax her into the darkroom to see what would develop, only to be rebuffed. “Gene Simmons called me up,” she reveals. lil guess he thought I was his twin sister or something. But I’m into more Joe Strummer-type guys.”

Speaking of, uh, boobs, as we were a moment ago, Peterson describes her Elvira corset as “a miracle of modern science” for the way it makes her appear a great, great deal more voluptuous than she does in real life. “I found it in a store called Lily St. Cyr [as in the famous pre-Eisenhower era stripper]. When I found out a couple of weeks ago that it’s a discontinued style, I went to the factory and bought every single one they had left, about 56 of them in different sizes. I’ll have to have them reconstructed. But my career depends on them.”

Having been asked to appear at everything from Jaycee conventions to punk clubs, she regrets only having accepted an invitation to introduce a Motley Crue video. “At the time, I was just starting to be Elvira, and I jumped at any chance to make some money.” Quickly besieged by offers from similar assholes, “I finally put my foot down and said that I didn’t want to be associated with that heavy metal kind of thing. I guess people think that’s what I’m into because I wear leather bracelets, but that’s not at all what I’m into—philosophy-wise, musicwise, men-wise, or anything.” .

She recently declined an invitation to appear in an Ozzy Osbourne video because “I think anybody who’d tear the head off a dove is a scumbag.” (An animal lover from ’way back, she owns “a Rottweiler at home named Vlad, after Vlad the Impaler, an Abyssinian cat, and a six-foot python whose name I’m about to change from Monty to Dick because he looks more like Dick.”) Her musical taste runs more to the Eurythmics, Cyndi Lauper, and Siouxsie & The Banshees.

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Had Michael Jackson asked her to be in Thriller, she’d have accepted in a second. “I met him at the Grammies. There were so many guards around him it was like meeting Elvis or the queen of England. He said,-‘Oh Elvira, I love you—you should have been in Thriller.’ I go, ‘Yeah, now you tell me.’ Shaking his glove hurt—it was heavy and pointy.”

Avid readers of Eleganza (and what Eleganza reader isn’t avid?) may recall Gun Club’s Patricia Morrison’s having accused Elvira of rippng off her whole shtick in this column. Apprised of this accusation, Peterson titters, “She’s about the eighth person who’s accused me of stealing the idea from them. I’ve gotten letters from the woman who played Morticia Adams before she died, from Vampira, who used to have a show here in L.A., from Moona Lisa, from some girl in Texas who said that I stole from her. But the thing is, Elvira’s such a generic Dracula character. So you have long black hair and a lot of make-up—so do 5,000 other people in L A.! I just can’t believe people’s naivete. They should take law in school and learn about life.”

In real life, Peterson looks just slightly more like Elvira than, oh, Shelly Long of Cheers does, so maitre d’s, for instance, don’t exactly rip their tuxedos ushering her to the choicest seat in restaurants. Consequently, you might suppose that she’d have grave misgivings about having become famous in disguise. But she hasn’t. “I feel like the luckiest person in the world,” she claims. “I don’t have to dress up and put make-up on every time I walk out the door. If you’re a movie star and they happen to catch you in the . drug store without your makeup, everybody says, ‘Oooh, she looks so horrible.’ But I can go anywhere 1 want without being bothered.”

Nor does she mind in the slightest that her character’s sultriness is played mostly for laughs. “I’ve never fallen out of the dress or anything, except on the set, where the crew’s so bored that they never notice anything anyway. But I did trip on the bottom of my dress once while getting out of a limo. If I were real cool, like Tina Louise in Gilligan’s Island or somebody, it would have been real embarrassing. But the good thing is that when you do comedy, you can make a joke out of it.”

However much she enjoys her out-of-costume anonymity, though, there are times when she wishes she could become The Mistress Of The Dark in a great deal less than the two hours the self-transformation customarily takes. “The weirdest thing happened about a week ago, at a club in Palm Springs,” she recalls, by way of illustration. “A guy comes over and asks, ‘Are you who 1 think you are—Are you Elvira?’ When 1 say yes, he gets real excited—he’d bet $40 that I was. But he comes back a minute later with this big fat guy who goes, ‘You’re not Elvira. Prove it, man.’

“I’m sitting there having a drink, and 1 don’t care if the guy believes me or not. But he starts making a scene, calling me a liar and demanding to know my sister’s name. I tell him and he goes, ‘Ha! 1 knew you was lying!’

“That really upset me—here was this real nice guy losing $40. In a situation like that, I wish I could instantly have switched into Elvira and made the fat guy eat it.

“People always say to me, ‘Why don’t you do something as yourself?’ 1 say, ‘Are you crazy? As myself I’d make scale. As Elvira I can demand the big bucks.’ I was an actress, dancer, and singer for 10 years—even longer than that—and I never got anywhere. Now that I have something that’s really working and that people like and that I like to do—something that gives me a lot of freedom—I say, ‘Why blow it?’ I’ll keep doing it until people get sick of it.”