Ask the Flying Monkey: What Ever Happened to Pia Zadora?

Have a question about gay male entertainment? Contact me here (and be sure and include your city and state and/or country!

Q: What ever happened to Pia Zadora? Is she dead, alive, rich or poor? – Michael, New York NY

Pia Zadora then and now

A: For those who weren’t around or aware in the 1980’s, Pia Zadora was a young starlet who, in 1977, married a much older businessman, Meshulam Riklis, who decided to make her a star. He financed a soapy movie vehicle, 1982’s Butterfly, that ended up being one of the most reviled movies of the decade. But (allegedly) because Riklis had wined and dined the members of Hollywood Foreign Press, which give out the Golden Globe Awards, Zadora ended up winning the Golden Globe for “Best New Star of the Year” (over Kathleen Turner and Elizabeth McGovern).

Meanwhile, the movie racked up major Razzie Awards nominations (given to the year’s worst films). Her next big movie, The Lonely Lady, was just as reviled and won even more Razzie nominations. Zadora won “Worst Actress” both times.

Both films are now considered camp classics in the so-bad-they’re-good Showgirls vein (you really do have to see them to understand just how bad they are). And it doesn’t help that as a child actress, Zadora also appeared in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, which is considered another one of the worst movies of all time.

Pia (right) in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

Now at this point, there are only two places this story can go: Pia Zadora can remain a punchline the rest of her life, taking some solace in the fact that at least she had her fifteen minutes of “fame,” or she can go on to prove everyone wrong, overcoming the dismissal of the entire world with some kind of triumphant, completely unexpected talent and success.

Basically, Zadora could either turn out to be Cher, who overcame decades of kitsch and camp with her 1988 Oscar, or she could turn out to be Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane, the untalented opera singer mistress that Charles Foster Kane insists on turning into a star (famously based on the real-life couple of William Randall Hearst and his acting mistress/wife Marion Davies).

Artistic triumph or late-night punchline. Farrah Fawcett or Gary Coleman: those are the only two options here.

(Okay, I’ll grant those aren’t the only two options: Suzanne Somers and Donny Osmond, for example, are both more than the punchlines to jokes, even if neither ever gained any real respectability.)

Still, the Pia Zadora story was so outrageous, so over-the-top, so in keeping with the ridiculous plots to her terrible movies, that pop culture aficionados such as I demanded an equally over-the-top conclusion: complete disaster or triumphant success.

Many people (and I’m sure our own 80s-lovin’ Snicks is among them) have tried to claim that Pia’s story is basically Cher’s or Farrah Fawcett’s or George Clooney’s.

And it’s true that after abandoning her much-mocked acting career, she had minor success with a singing career (mostly “in Europe”), and even landed an actual, unpaid-for Grammy nomination in 1984.

Alas, it wasn’t to be. Her singing career soon nosedived too, and today if Zadora is remembered at all, it’s for her disastrous acting career. She gets points for having a sense of humor about it, parodying herself in 1993’s Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult. But whether she’s in on the joke or not, she is a joke.

Case-in-point: there’s now a (false) urban legend floating around that as a child actress, she starred in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank, but she was so bad that when the Nazis came to the house where she’s hidden, the audience shouted, “She’s in the attic!”

At 56, Zadora is still alive, but she seems to have retired from entertaining. She and Riklis divorced in 1993 (long before his “successful” career as a businessman was exposed as a scandalous shell-game). She remarried in 1995 and divorced again in 2001 (amid accusations that he was abusive to their disabled child).

But don’t weep for Pia. Thanks to marrying well, she’s now fabulously wealthy. And maybe, just as in The Lonely Lady, she finally has her self-respect as well.

Have a question about gay male entertainment? Contact me here (and be sure and include your city and state and/or country!