Out of Hollywood's version of cold storage this season came a 19-year-old, sugar-'n'-spice pretty girl named Piper Laurie [front cover]. Movieland's freezer is a limbo where Hollywood starlets cluster while studio publicity men beat the drums for them - in an effort to make them favorties of fans before they've made a single picture.
Piper Laurie got probably one of the most effective pre-film-debut drum-beating productions of the year. When she was 17, before she had finished high school in Los Angeles, Piper spent all her spare time trying to nab a studion contract. Three studios turned her down before Universal tested and signed her.
Into the freezer went Piper; into fever-heat went Universal's publicity mill. Glamour photographs [see p. 57] were sent to magazines and papers. She posed for dozens of leggy gag shots. Then a deluge of publicity items descended upon fan magazines and columnists. [Sample: "Piper Laurie just tried to return her first paycheck to Universal. She said she hadn't earned it!"]
But one press agent really hit the jackpot when he dreamed up the story that Piper ate flowers. Piper, quietly ambitious and obliging, came through like a trouper: "For three days at lunch I sat at one of the corner tables in the studio commisary and ate salads made of flowers- roses, gardenias, camellias - for three different news people."
Such publicity got her roles in four movies (most successful: The Prince Who Was a Thief, (insert- b&w photo from the film showing PL and Tony Curtis)) Now unfrozen, Piper Laurie has a hot future was named in the current LOOK as one of Hollywood's most beautiful women.
Says Piper: "It was certainly worth the stomach ache, but I may never be able to look at another flower."