Rhonda Shear back in NOLA to promote book
By ALAN SMASON, Special to the CCJN
The phone rings right on time as it has for countless other interviews. The Caller I.D. prominently displays the name Van Fagan, but I know right away who it is. It is not Van Fagan, but rather his lifelong obsession, the girl he fell in love with in a New Orleans junior high school and the Hollywood starlet and cable TV star he married 26 years later, breaking the hearts of billionaires, moguls and lustful teens across several generations.
A glamour shot during her starlet days in Hollywood, hometown beauty Rhonda Shear never lost her love of New Orleans. (Photo courtesy Rhonda Shear)
It is Rhonda Shear: The statuesque former Miss Louisiana title holder three times over. The Floral Trail Queen who had appeared in Playboy fully clothed, only to be stripped of her title and who posed twice more in Playboy with substantially less on years later. The former candidate for Register of Conveyances, who almost beat the incumbent office holder. That Rhonda Shear.
She is the hometown girl who took Hollywood by storm as the quirky and funny star of USA’s “Up All Night,” only to abandon the glitz and glamor of Tinseltown to become a home shopping phenomenon: a multi-million dollar manufacturer of women’s intimate apparel and an advocate for women’s causes.
That voice could easily belong to anyone from New Orleans, but her voice is unmistakable. It’s part no-nonsense and part-teasing. It’s a voice which she has used over the course of many years to deliver snappy rejoinders as a stand-up comic and to great effect in small, often sexy roles in films like Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs” and “History of the World, Part One.
And now the sultry blonde is using that voice to promote her latest endeavor, a book she has penned about her life along with invaluable lessons and advice for women and men. Titled “Up All Night: From Hollywood Bombshell to Lingerie Mogul, Life Lessons from an Accidental Feminist,” the book’s cover shows her seductively spread across a red sofa in a leopard-skin outfit while holding a fluted glass of champagne. One thing Rhonda Shear knows full well is how to sell. The book is only the latest of her sales efforts.
At first, I remind her that we are of similar ages, but that she always seemed to date older boys, her eventual husband notwithstanding.
She laughs and recalls two brothers from Sigma Alpha Rho, the Jewish high school fraternity, who dated her, one to whom she was engaged for a time, that is, until she caught him cheating.
What an idiot, I think to myself.
“I went out with a lot of Jewish guys, but I was never part of the Jewish female clique,” she disparages. “Jews really shunned me in New Orleans. They really did.”
Rhonda Shear as Miss Hollywood World U.S.A., a title she won after winning three straight Miss Louisiana titles. (Photo courtesy Rhonda Shear)
Perhaps that was true for her fellow female Jewish counterparts, I consider, but there were few Jewish men who would discount her as anything less than one of the most attractive and charming women of her generation. Despite her reputation as an empty-headed blonde – an image she milked to be disarming to others – she was nothing less than a very intelligent woman who saw opportunity and took advantage of it.
“In this book I wanted women to know that I had – men too, (because) men have enjoyed the book for sure – I wanted people to know because people look at your life as a whole and they go: ‘Oh, you were lucky.’ or ‘You were on TV. ‘Or you were this or that.’ But, there was never one moment of anything I did where it was easy and I was always told ‘No,'” she says.
This negativity has informed much of her life. “I basically was told: ‘No, you can’t run for office. You can’t be Miss Louisiana; you’re too short. You can’t be a comic; you’re too sexy,” she recalls. “You can’t start a business at 46. What do you know about the intimate apparel business or the fashion industry?’”
She has proved all of them wrong. In New Orleans. In Hollywood. And now in Florida, where she oversees her busy manufacturing plant headquartered near the Home Shopping Network (HSN) offices in St. Petersburg. Sales of her lingerie line, mostly hawked over HSN include the popular Ahh Bra and now register over $100 million annually. Now she’s the one saying no.
The book is her story, but it’s more than that. “When I first wrote it – I guess everyone has a book or wants to tell their story – it was more autobiographical,” she says.
The book jacket from Rhonda Shear’s “Up All Night.”
After reading the initial draft, her book agent in Los Angeles called her. “He said: ‘Rhonda Shear has done more than anybody I know, but – ‘” She begins to laugh out loud as an acknowledgment that she still can’t take herself very seriously.
“‘I feel that you need to do something in it that speaks to women and has a little bit more of a feminist slant,'” she continues. “That’s when I went back and added the life lessons; kinda like the bubble over my head.”
The book has numerous “Fourth Wall Breaks” in which she breaks the narrative of the book to make comments or to elucidate an item she has raised. Her “Shear Honesty” pieces are scattered throughout the work with editorial comments on a variety of topics like women’s body images and achieving success in business.
With levity, self-deprecation and stories noone else knows, Shear recounts the fun times and the lecherous occurrences in Hollywood as she tried to achieve her career goal of landing a situation comedy gig, while performing as a stand-up comic and acting as a beauty queen and model.
Along the way, she met Hollywood royalty. One of her biggest early supporters was comedian Bob Hope, who had her appear with him on one of his “Starmakers” specials. Being a stand-up comedienne, she made appearances at Hollywood roasts for other celebrities like Muhammad Ali. Soon, she was seen next to stars like Sammy Davis, Jr., George Burns and other up-and-coming performers like Alan Thicke (She appeared on every program in which he starred including “Growing Pains.”)
Shear with Pamela Anderson. (Photo courtesy by Rhonda Shear)
Thicke recently passed away due to a sudden heart attack, which she regrets.
Meanwhile, another one of her staunchest supporters also recently died of natural causes: Hugh Hefner of Playboy Magazine fame. Her initial pose in 1977 featured Shear in a pictorial with other scantily-clad ladies, but she resisted overtures to remove any of her clothing. Despite this, the fact she had appeared with nudes on the same pages led to her dismissal as Floral Trail Queen, a position paid for by her parents.
She blames the dismissal on the women in the organization, whom she labeled as hypocritical. “That’s the funny thing about New Orleans that cracks me up,” she notes. “You can show everything at Mardi Gras for beads, but woe is me! It’s kinda still like that. New Orleans has such a dichotomy.”
She sued the Floral Trail organization, headed up by Gaspar Schiro, the local Register of Conveyances, but lost the case despite local celebrities Jimmy Fitzmorris and Blaine Kern, Sr. speaking on her behalf at the six-hour trial. In response, she threw her hat into the political ring when Schiro sought re-election and he narrowly missed defeat by a mere handful of votes.
But the hoopla over the Playboy pictorial kept the magazine and Hefner interested in her career. “That led to a lifetime of an amazing relationship with Playboy,” she recounts. “If there was anybody who helped my career more than anybody – who was my champion – it was Playboy.” She recalls Hefner was very supportive of her comedy and invited her on numerous occasions out to the Playboy mansion.
In her characterization of a ditzy hostess, Rhonda Shear still hears from fans of her USA Network’s “Up All Night” program she shot in Hollywood for eight years. (Photo courtesy Rhonda Shear)
Shear is not very happy with the recent fallout over the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandals in which the Hollywood mogul has fallen in disgrace, lost the company he founded and been booted permanently from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“I haven’t been in Hollywood in years and I thought, well, at this point, it can’t be as prevalent, because nowadays with social media, people could just blurt it out there,” she muses. “There was no voice when I was out there. On top of that, there was that whole sexual period where it was a jiggle world when I was in L.A.”
But the days of serial sexual abusers may be over for power brokers like Weinstein. “He had the power and the audacity to feel like what he did to hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of women,” she considers. “I hope a lot of people go down with him and I hope that at least it puts the fear of God into guys who do this.”
Several Hollywood stars like Courtney Love, Angelina Jolie and Gwenyth Paltrow, whom Shear describes as “Hollywood royalty,” don’t escape her critical eye either. She blames them for not speaking out about Weinstein years earlier when they had a chance. “One tweet from Angelina Jolie,” she says, “One tweet and that man would’ve been brought down.”
Indeed, the book speaks about her being propositioned on numerous occasions, but she maintains that she never did succumb to the casting couch philosophy of getting ahead. She does name names of some of her more intimate relationships.
Some of the stories of recalcitrant sexual behavior border on the unbelievable. One time, for example, a Hollywood figure called her parents to admonish them to have her engage in sex with him in order for her to achieve stardom. When that failed, he threatened to destroy her. She recounts instances where she literally had to outrun executives.
Rhonda Shear, a successful businesswoman, who considers herself an advocate for women. (Photo courtesy Rhonda Shear)
After performing in several films, a misunderstanding led to her firing from the set of “Happy Days” when star Henry Winkler was not informed that she had been given permission to miss a rehearsal. Filmmakers Garry Marshall, Ron Howard and others were all associated with a number of series that Shear wanted to be a part of (“Laverne and Shirley, ” “Joanie Loves Chaci” and “Mork and Mindy” among them). “I was really getting in with those people and that was my dream,” Shear recounts. “They never used me again. It took the casting director ten years before he called me in again for a soap opera after “Happy Days” was off the air.”
When the USA Network was looking for a replacement for its late-night female host in Hollywood, she fit the bill. The slot, which she shared with Gilbert Gottfried, who shot his show out of New York, taught her about the business. “I got to learn about TV, and directing and writing,” she claims. “That gave me everything and also being on a show, the money I made as a stand-up comic was awesome. All my male friends were so mad at me and jealous.”
After eight bountiful years, “Up All Night” was canceled and she began examining her life and career opportunities. After some missteps with relationships, she decided to rekindle her relationship with her first boyfriend, Van Fagan, who by now was divorced with two grown children.
Eventually, they were married. It was her first marriage and she was 45 years old. That first year was a rough one as the couple assumed each other’s debts and lived for a time in Lafayette.
Rhonda Shear shows off one of her products. (Photo courtesy Rhonda Shear)
After working off some debt they had accrued, they seized upon the opportunity to sell re-purposed ladies undergarments over what became HSN. In order to cut the bottom line, they began to outsource the sewing of the garments and Shear Enterprises was born.
Later, they sold both his home in Lafayette and her Hollywood apartment as their business became more profitable. They relocated to St. Petersburg near the HSN broadcasting complex, when their company’s knitted Ahh Bra became the darling of the industry and the two of them set out to erect a business empire built upon Lycra and lace.
To date, they have sold 34 million Ahh Bras in 40 countries. She claims it is the largest selling brassiere in the world and credits the success of their business to Fagan’s acumen and to her tireless promotions. “Van is an amazing businessman. At the end of the day that’s the teamwork that we are,” she points out. “He understood the financial side of the business, which was different for me and I understood the marketing side, the P.R. side.”
The company was listed as one of Inc. 5000’s list of “Fastest Growing Companies” and has consistently racked up awards for outstanding business sales. All along Shear has become an advocate for women and the way they feel when using her products. She has been the chair of the local run for the American Cancer Society in St. Petersburg and been cited as a major donor to women’s causes in the area.
The book meant early morning TV show appearances on WWL-TV and a taped return on “Steppin’ Out” on Fri., Oct. 27 at 7:30 p.m.. on Channel 12. Her signature event to promote the book was a live, in-person gala at the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel Grand Salon Complex, 621 St. Louis St., from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. where she recounted her career, regaled guests with humorous stories and read from her “Up All Night” book.
Additionally, Shear appeared on Sat. afternoon, Oct. 21 at the Barnes and Noble Bookstore at 3721 Veterans Boulevard. Copies of the book were sold on both occasions.
To order copies from Amazon.com, click: “Up All Night: From Hollywood Bombshell to Lingerie Mogul, Life Lessons from an Accidental Feminist,
