For decades an enigmatic blonde woman in pink lounged across billboards throughout Los Angeles, seemingly famous for being famous, and now thanks to Peacock's Angelyne, the world wants to know how much of her life is true and how much is sprinkled with Hollywood stardust. Starring Emmy Rossum as the titular character, she portrays Angelyne from a small-town woman new to La La Land through her various triumphs and tribulations in the film industry, and finally as a revered Hollywood icon.
Part of Angelyne's appeal has always been her aura of mystery, and the series does its best to separate truth from fiction despite the fact that her image is something she's maintained close control of. Several articles over the years have put together pieces of her life's puzzle, and in 2017, an article in The Hollywood Reporter by Gary Baum (Jeff Glasner in the series) came the closest to exposing everything there is to know about the famous bombshell, but for a woman known for bearing it all, how much does Angelyne?
Angelyne's High Voice
Like Marilyn Monroe before her, Angelyne appears to have a coquettish, breathy voice that becomes increasingly more high-pitched as the series progresses. Does the real Angelyne really sound like that or is it all an act?
The Hollywood Reporter article mentions the "cartoonishly girly lilt of her voice" is sometimes strong, and other times completely absent. It's clear that it's an affectation that Angelyne uses to create her persona, which Rossum replicates very well, and Angelyne's real voice can be heard in a brief cameo at the end of the series.
Angelyne's Positive Attitude
Rossum seems to flutter around the series like a character from Sleeping Beauty, a fairy godmother saying things like, "I am a bright, pink light here to inspire joy." As it turns out, the real Angelyne is every bit as bubbly and positive, encouraging people everywhere to be themselves.
In The Los Angeleno, Angelyne explains, "I have the latitude to facilitate inspiration to the world, especially now I think people need to keep their spirits up." Even as recently as 2020, Angelyne still believes in people becoming the best version of themselves that they can be.
Angelyne As The First Self-Branded Influencer Before Social Media
"I want to advertise myself," Angelyne explains to dumbfounded printer Harold Wallach at one point, and he proceeds to make her "radical Avante Garde advertising" into a reality. While no one really knows if Wallach was the actual wealthy facilitator behind her famous billboards (the series is mum on that point), someone like him certainly helped her become the original social media influencer.
One of the original influencers herself, Paris Hilton, chatted with Angelyne for Interview Magazine and called her, "the first one to do something like that, to build yourself as a brand before social media. You became the face of Hollywood." Being famous for nothing other than being herself, with her persona as the product and the public draw, certainly paved the way for influencers like Hilton.
What Angelyne Does For A Living Now
At the beginning of the series, Angelyne wants to act, sing, and be part of everything to do with show business, but as she gets older, she has to find a way to capitalize on her particular image in new and innovative ways. These include self-publishing issues of Hot P!nk, Angelyne’s fan magazine.
What does Angelyne actually do for a living? According to The Hollywood Reporter, Angelyne claims that she's able to perpetuate "the Angelyne phenomenon" by selling "lucratively marked-up and vigorously hawked merchandise sales out of her trunk" along with "licensing and appearance fees."
Angelyne As A Singer
Angelyne is never far from a microphone in the series, beginning with her singing in Baby Blue, by no means a fictional TV boy band, and then later on in vibrant music videos. There's some discrepancy about whose band it was, Angelyne's or her boyfriend's, but according to Weirdo Music Forever, the recording Baby Blue made in 1978 was the first thing she ever recorded for herself.
A Courier-Journal article mentions Angelyne's later career as a singer, mostly in the early '80s with songs like "My List", which is available on YouTube and captures a very specific time in Angelyne's musical metamorphosis. The Los Angeleno article highlights her more recent music catalog including "Kiss Me L.A.," "Driven to Fantasy" and more, reflecting a taste for punk, heavy metal, and pop.
Angelyne As An Actress
Angelyne shows a shrewd woman who is ambitious, determined, and creative. She sees opportunity in every form of entertainment and doesn't limit herself to the billboards that still grace the streets of Los Angeles today. Like celebrity influencer Kim Kardashian, who's in many projects fans forget about, Angelyne explored many artistic directions.
The same article for Interview Magazine lists film credits including Get Shorty, Earth Girls are Easy, and even Terminator Genisys. Television series are mostly animated, with her lending her signature voice to The Simpsons and BoJack Horseman. Her wish to leave her mark on every type of media has certainly been fulfilled.
Angelyne's Real Story Being A Mystery
Angelyne does her best to avoid direct questions about her life from the very start, until certain figures from her past emerge to disrupt her carefully crafted image, such as Danny Katz, who claims to be her former husband (back when she used her real name, Rachel Goldman).
Danny Katz appears to be based on Michael Strauss, a man Angelyne allegedly wed in the late 1960s when her name was Renee Goldberg. According to The Hollywood Reporter article by Baum, "Strauss had tender memories of Goldberg, referring alternatively in the past and present to her as 'Angelyne' and 'Renee.'" Just like Katz in the series, he kept her yearbook photos and passports, but because they destroyed Angelyne's reality, she refused to give credit to them.
Angelyne's Fractured Family Life
Angelyne is very secretive about the exact nature of her childhood in the series and in real life, but it's implied that her father and mother were Polish immigrants, both of whom survived concentration camps during World War II, and she has a sister she seldom sees.
The Hollywood Reporter article mentions a father who could be "controlling, cruel and narrow-minded, propelling her to flee home early." It's possible that her desire to escape whenever necessity dictates, in a bright pink corvette, originated from having a problematic home life in her early years.
Angelyne Turning Down Posing In Playboy
Halfway through the series, Angelyne goes head to head with famous editor-in-chief Hugh Hefner over posing nude for Playboy Magazine, an opportunity which she turns down in a dramatic and emphatic way. But what's the real story behind the encounter?
According to The Cinemaholic, Angelyne "was asked to pose nude for Playboy in the early nineties," which she considered doing until her lawyer advised against it because of "a pending role in a kids cartoon show." So although she did get approached by Playboy and turned it down, she may or may not have met Hefner himself, but the scene does service the sense of fantasy surrounding Angelyne's life.
Angelyne Running For Governor Of California In 2003
According to Jeff Glasner's source, Angelyne forfeited any right to privacy "when she ran for governor [of California] in 2003." Under the slogan, "We've had Gray, we've had Brown, now it's time for blonde and pink!" she ran the same year as Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Baum's piece for The Hollywood Reporter mentions many of the documents that had to be made public for her to run for political office, including taxes and DMV records. Running for governor seemed like an odd choice for someone who was so devoted to not only their privacy but also maintaining a certain image.