Arlene Dahl, a flame-haired Hollywood actress, beauty products entrepreneur and syndicated columnist whose dramatic off-screen life included tempestuous marriages to actors Lex Barker and Fernando Lamas and a climb back from bankruptcy, died Nov. 29 at her home in New York City. She was 96.
With alabaster skin and a signature beauty mark near her upper lip, Ms. Dahl was a made-for-Technicolor actress who enjoyed a steady career in musical comedies, period pieces and romantic dramas in the late 1940s and ’50s.
None of her films, bearing such titles as “Desert Legion” (1953), “Sangaree” (1953) and “Slightly Scarlet” (1956), remotely registered as classics, and Ms. Dahl had little illusion about her screen legacy. By her own estimation, many of her films were “an embarrassment.”
“Talk about past sins,” she later told an interviewer.
She was a decorative presence in a vast majority of her credits, exuding an effortless glamour, as if she had floated off the glossy pages of Harper’s Bazaar. She appeared only sporadically in films after 1960, having transitioned to a second career marketing her own line of lingerie and other boudoir merchandise and writing a syndicated column called “Let’s Be Beautiful.”
“A woman’s greatest beauty secret?” she once mused. “Love: to love and be loved.”
She had vast experience in the subject.
As a starlet, she was courted by a rich but disheveled young lawmaker, John F. Kennedy. “He was charming, articulate and attractive,” she told People magazine, “but every time I saw him he looked like an unmade bed. He had no fashion sense until he married Jackie.”
Her first marriage — to Barker, who played Tarzan in the movies — lasted less than a year, although she rated him “the best undressed man I’ve ever known.” His raging temper, she said, doomed the marriage.
Her subsequent union with Lamas, the Argentine-born screen heartthrob, was undermined by his machismo, including a demand that she give up her career. She said she cared for him during a bout of depression after a car accident, only to have him leave her for aquatic-musical star Esther Williams.
“He was in her picture ‘Dangerous When Wet,’ ” Ms. Dahl told People. “Believe me, she is very dangerous when wet.”
She later married and divorced oilman Christian Holmes III, Russian-born wine authority Alexis Lichine (“a terrific temper, even worse than Fernando’s”) and TV producer-cum-yacht broker Rounsevelle “Skip” Schaum.
Her sixth and final marriage, in 1984, was to Marc Rosen, a perfume executive 18 years her junior. “Arlene was very concerned about the age difference, but not me, ever,” Rosen told People. “She needs someone younger to keep up with her.”
She was a whirlwind of energy, feeding off her ardent devotion to Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking.” She teamed up in 1970 with the Sears department store to produce skin-care and health products that she said brought her nearly $750,000 annually.
Ms. Dahl left Sears in 1975 to create her own fragrance, Dahlia, but said a confluence of events forced her to declare bankruptcy five years later.
“I was in debt for a million dollars over a perfume that was selling well,” she told People, adding that her fifth husband, Schaum, left her with “a pile of debts.” “Then I found myself with no contract, no title to the fragrance and a business partner who had run off. Everything was gone, including my 14-room apartment.”
“If I were a material woman,” she continued, “I would have had a nervous breakdown. But I knew I could make it again.”
She made regular appearances on the soap opera “One Life to Live” and on programs such as “Hotel” and “The Love Boat,” and a rare big-screen reappearance in the action film “Night of the Warrior” (1991), starring her son Lorenzo Lamas. She also wrote an astrological guidebook to romance.
Arlene Carol Dahl was born in Minneapolis on Aug. 11, 1925, to strict parents of Norwegian ancestry. Her father was a Ford dealer, her mother an amateur actress. She said she developed an interest in acting during a family picnic.
“My father put me up on a picnic table and asked me to sing,” she recalled to celebrity interviewer Nick Thomas. “After hearing the applause, they couldn’t get me down.”
She was 15 when her mother died, and her father allowed her to decamp the next year for Chicago to start a career. By 21, she had been a model in Chicago, an actress in a short-lived Broadway musical and tapped as the Rheingold beer girl of 1946. She was soon under contract to Warner Bros. studios and had a leading role in “My Wild Irish Rose” (1947) opposite Dennis Morgan.
She objected to the studio’s constant meddling. When executives proposed re-christening her Andrea Lord, Ms. Dahl suggested they give the name to another actress. (“I felt she needed it worse than I did. Her name was Ethel Czap.”) In addition, she told People, “They tried to eradicate my beauty spot, red hair and cream coloring.” She said she was vindicated after her first piece of fan mail arrived, addressed care of “Hollywood, California,” bearing nothing but a drawing of lips and a beauty mark.
By 1948, she was working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In “Three Little Words” (1950), as the actress wife of songwriter Harry Ruby (played by Red Skelton), she performed the standard “I Love You So Much” with pink feathers and a chorus of male admirers.
Her other credits, with various studios, included an array of adventure fare: “Ambush” (1950) with Robert Taylor, “Jamaica Run” (1953) with Ray Milland, “Bengal Brigade (1954) with Rock Hudson and “Journey to the Center of the Earth” (1959) opposite James Mason and Pat Boone.
Hollywood, she once said, was “nothing but an interim. What I always wanted to be was a musical comedy star.” She won favorable reviews for her nightclub acts in New York and Las Vegas. She returned to Broadway in 1972 as an aging actress threatened by a ruthlessly ambitious young upstart in the musical “Applause,” a stage version of the Bette Davis film “All About Eve.”
She wrote more than a dozen books, including “Always Ask a Man” (1963) and “Arlene Dahl’s Lovescopes” (1983).
In addition to her husband, Rosen, survivors include a son from her second marriage, Lorenzo Lamas; a daughter from her third marriage, Carole Delouvrier; a son from her fifth marriage, Rounsevelle “Sonny” Schaum; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Of her various relationships with men, Ms. Dahl told People that she remained a romantic, ever hopeful even in the worst of times. “Blondes may have more fun,” she said, “but redheads never have regrets.”
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