Gloria Pall

Brooklyn-born Gloria Pall came to Hollywood by a somewhat circuitous route. While working in the aircraft industry as an airplane mechanic during World War II, she entered a "Miss Flatbush" beauty contest in 1947, and won. That led to modeling jobs on the East Coast, which eventually led to her becoming a showgirl in Nevada, first in Reno and then in Las Vegas. In 1954 she developed a TV show built around a character she had created, "Voluptua," which aired on ABC. It lasted seven weeks before protests from some viewers shocked by the "torrid" content of the show - tame by today's standards, but a bit too much for the general public of 1954 to handle - caused the network to cancel the show. In the meantime she had begun to get small parts in TV series and movies and was soon working in films with stars like Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster and Elvis Presley, in addition to taking modeling jobs in such publications as "Esquire". She began a real-estate career in 1959 and in 1962 she opened a Lavender Real Estate office on Sunset Strip, attracting such celebrity clients as Howard Hughes. He had been fascinated by her aircraft background, which he learned about in 1953 when he sent a note backstage while she was working as a Las Vegas showgirl. He was even more amused by the fact that, in her youth in 1945, she just happened to be working for the USO on the 56th floor of New York's Empire State Building when a B-25 bomber crashed into the building's 79th floor.