Karen Abbott

So yes, thankfully, the breasts are still among us. And they’re still 34 F — the F “as in fun,” Van Doren says. There are reasons why they are especially fun. There is an anatomical quirk, for one thing. Most breasts, in case you haven’t noticed, start a good 6 inches directly below the clavicle. Not Van Doren’s. Hers are extra wide and begin swelling all the way from underneath her arms, the ultimate effect being that her “entire front is all breasts.”

Then there is the bra. No generic Maidenform for breasts like these, no sirree. Van Doren has her bras specially made in England, the same exact brand endorsed by the queen mother; indeed, they bear the imprint of the royal family’s emblem. But most of the time, Van Doren eschews bras, preferring instead to “let them all hang out.” And why not? When you do arm lifts every day, a weight clasped in each hand, it “helps them considerably to stay lifted,” as she says. Though, when pressed, even she concedes amazement that her breasts remain exactly as everyone remembers them.

You can buy Van Doren’s breasts. Go to her Web site and, if you can pry your gaze from that first voluminous cheesecake shot (the one above the words “The First Authentic Sex Kitten In Cyberspace” — a phrase with the trademark symbol after it), click on the “Autographs” icon and scroll to the bottom. There you’ll see Doren dutifully making a “nipple print” for a loyal fan, which costs just $59.95 plus postage and handling.

There is more to the site, of course, pictures and stories and video clips you would not want your grandmother to see, let alone star in, which makes the fact that Van Doren is old enough to be your grandmother quite … something. How many 67-year-old women do you want to see canoodling a magnum while writhing on a couch (designed to look — not surprisingly — like a breast), as Van Doren does in her new clip, “Girl, Gun and Black Stockings”? How many women, let alone a senior citizen, could pull off — and quite well, thank you very much — a two-minute movie titled “A Girl and Her Banana,” in which Van Doren clutches the “biggest banana I could find in my kitchen,” and then, well, you just have to see it to believe it.

It is hard work maintaining the site, but Van Doren does it herself every day. She, in fact, designed everything about it — from the neon, retro, tube-style font, to the pictures at home with her Moluccan cockatoos, to the multifarious tales of her life and times behind the cameras and between the sheets. The site has garnered Van Doren a new generation of fans, kids born some 20 years after her biggest hits — “High School Confidential” and “Untamed Youth” — were released to the panting delight of baby boomers everywhere.

This new legion of fans might be inclined to follow Van Doren’s link to B-Movie.com where they can nominate her for the B-Movie Hall of Fame awards (to be announced the last week in August). Or, if not, they will certainly go to see her in the forthcoming Destination Films flick titled “Slackers,” starring Jason Schwartzman of “Rushmore,” in which Van Doren does a cameo of “a really tired old whore” who tries to seduce Schwartzman by “flicking my tongue in my cheek like I’m giving a blow job,” and who then enjoys him “holding a sponge over my pussy” while reclining in a bathtub.

“The last thing Jason says to me is, ‘You old bitch!’ or something like that,” Van Doren tells me on the phone from her home in Newport Beach, Calif., where she enjoys roaming around nude and playing with her birds. She laughs, a sound at once bawdy and girlish. “He kisses my nipples and rubs my coochie … the filming was ecstasy. He got such a woody! And my part,” Van Doren confides, “is a scene stealer.”

Still don’t believe that the boys who got off on the Sarah Michelle Gellar/Selma Blair make-out fest at the MTV movie awards might actually prefer a near-septuagenarian? Then click on Van Doren’s “Fan Talk” section, where she posts numerous adoring missives.

“Hello there Mamie,” reads one. “I am a 25 yr. old male, and I have never in my life seen a more beautiful woman in my life. You are the epitome of beauty! 69 or 23 you prove that there is such a thing as a true life goddess.”

She was born this way — isn’t that the case for all true-life goddesses? No cellulite, thanks to her hearty Swedish stock. Utterly untouched by the surgeon’s knife, save for a single facelift a decade ago. Tremendous all-around elasticity, she happily divulges. Her star promise was even evident in her given name, Joan Olander — a nod to the 1930s siren, Joan Crawford. In fact, the future Mommie Dearest would say, years later, that out of the “three Ms” — Marilyn, Mansfield and Mamie — Ms. Van Doren was her favorite.

So it was meant to be. At the age of 6, while the other children of rural Rowena, S.D., were content milking cows and cleaning outhouses, little Joan Olander tried to dance like Ginger Rogers, dreamt of platinum blond hair bleach and practiced posing, one foot coyly before the other, for the cameras. Jo, as she was called, was not yet 10 years old when her father accepted a job at a defense plant in California. World War II was raging, and she and her mother headed west shortly thereafter on a military train, where she slept in the aisle with strangers’ children and ate only every other day.

But they arrived, and it wasn’t long before her mother saw the article in the paper about the big Hollywood party being thrown on Sunset Strip. So she told little Jo to grab her autograph book; they’d head on down to see what they could see. What they saw was Mae West, who called Jo “baby” and signed her book, “Best of luck to Joanie, a very pretty girl.” Little Jo was nearly knocked out by the experience of meeting “this most glittering creature,” and she fell asleep on the curb outside of the storied Mocambo nightclub. Her father had to carry her back to the car. That night, Jo slept with Mae West’s inscription under her pillow.

She looked like Jean Harlow, people said. Almost too much like Marilyn. But she had It — that all-important intangible, and that was good enough for them. She didn’t need formal education — she was going to be a movie star, after all — and so she dropped out of Los Angeles High School. She won local beauty contests, taking titles once held by another blond named Norma Jean, and then she met Howard Hughes. Mamie will not discuss their relationship, except to say that he was 40 and she was 16, and how, really, was a girl that age supposed to deal with Howard Hughes, especially when he asked, during their very first meeting, if she was a virgin.

She will talk about the others, though — the ones she had after she got contracts at Universal and MGM; the ones who met her after Eisenhower was inaugurated for his first presidential term and suggested she take the first name of Ike’s wife; the ones who understood what the actresses of the day had to go through to get off the casting couch and onto a movie set. The sexual mores of that era meant — and still mean — nothing to Van Doren. She would not sleep with a man just to get a job; neither would she turn him down if he happened to turn her on. She even carried condoms with her everywhere she went; the men would stare incredulously when she pulled them out of her bag.

“I have had more of a sex life than a love life,” Van Doren admits, sounding damn proud. “Love was secondary to me.”

She did not love Tom Jones, for example. Hell, she didn’t even like having sex with him. She went to see one of his concerts — it was during his “What’s New Pussycat?” phase, if she recalls correctly — and afterward they ended up in his room. He told her he’d seen her pictorial in Playboy, and he told her, nervously, that he couldn’t believe he was going to sleep with her. This, from the guy she thought followed his dick every time he strutted across a stage.

“He must have socks stuffed down there,” Van Doren insists, “because his penis is very, very small.”

Burt Reynolds was even worse, Van Doren says. Not that there was no there there, but what was there didn’t last very long. One champagne-skewed night, as they were just a minute into “the pony ride,” as she puts it, Reynolds gasped the name “Judy” and then promptly began to snore.

Warren Beatty didn’t have Tom Jones’ problem either. In fact, Van Doren says, even she — a proponent of the size-does-matter theory — grew timorous when he unzipped his pants. “He’s got a big salami in there,” Van Doren recalls, serious. “I mean, goddamn. I looked at him and knew it was something you would fondle, but you just didn’t want it in you. It was too large for me — though it’s probably large and soft by now.”

Then who was good? Certainly not Jack Webb, star of the cult classic ’50s and ’60s TV show “Dragnet.” One night, Universal Studios set them up on a date. Webb fed her dinner and a rather potent Mickey. The next thing Van Doren knew, she was tied spread-eagle on a bed and “Sergeant Joe Friday was humping me with a wild look in his eyes.”

Football great Joe Namath was just OK. She dated him in ’65 and ’66 and claims he was well built but, frankly, not that interested in her. “Not a good lover,” Mamie asserts, “but a good lay.”

Steve McQueen was memorable, but he was too into the drug scene. Elvis would’ve been great. He made her “nipples stand out hard,” and they were really about to get down to business in the front seat of his car — but then she remembered she was married. (“What a fool I was,” she says now.) Perennial cowboy Jack Palance was a great fuck, straight up.

And God, if only she’d taken the hint from Marlene Dietrich that day back in 1957, when they were doing a TV pilot together. Dietrich was wearing the “sexiest fucking shoes” Van Doren had ever seen; the woman was just a “bag of sex.” She looked Van Doren over once, twice and Van Doren just about told Dietrich to take a picture, it would last longer. But she didn’t make a move. If Dietrich, rest her soul, were here today, Van Doren insists it would be a wholly different story.

Van Doren likes to say that she left Hollywood as it was leaving her. After Marilyn’s untimely death in 1962 and Jayne Mansfield’s in ’67, no one wanted to give the third member of the blond trinity a job. Those two tragedies cast a pall on the bombshell mystique, a sense that something darker would inevitably emerge when the cameras clicked off. It wasn’t fair, maybe, but Hollywood no longer believed in one of its own creations. Van Doren just wasn’t fun anymore.

It was all just as well, really, since she had stopped believing in Hollywood even before the deaths of her vixen counterparts. She took the craft of acting seriously, as Marilyn had; they even employed the same revered Russian coach (while Mansfield, on the other hand, preferred to let her attributes do all the work). But her efforts didn’t seem to matter.

“I studied really hard,” Van Doren says now, wistfully. “But Hollywood never appreciated my talent. I was just another blond lucky to have a good body. They never looked past that. They never allowed me to be my own woman. So you know what? I said, ‘Fuck you, Hollywood.’ I just didn’t care anymore.” She realized — suddenly, frightfully — that she “no longer appreciated living.” With that in mind, she booked a flight to Vietnam.

She stayed there for three months — right in the war zone, she says, so close to the trenches she fled bomb and rocket attacks. She saw helicopters shot down and teenage boys dying on dirty cots. The burn units were the worst, she remembers, kids entirely bandaged, slits cut just for their eyes, the acrid smell of charred flesh, the heavy awareness that they would all die. She can still smell it, she says, the blood and the rot. But she took pains to make herself up every day and visit them.

“I wanted to be like an angel to those boys,” she says, “so they’d always remember me.”

Vietnam was hot, and all the generals automatically hated actresses because of Jane Fonda’s antics. Her accommodations, too, were awful; she defecated in paper cups and “fertilized the ground.” She performed for no fewer than 45 minutes every night, even though she was losing water and nearly died from dehydration. But she didn’t care; she kept singing and dancing in those ridiculous dresses designed to make you look nude. There was just nothing left for her to do.

She ended up, one night, in a medevac unit on her way to a field hospital in Saigon, where President Nixon sent her a letter by messenger calling her “his favorite.” (Today, of course, she is a Democrat.) She came home soon after, but it was those performances far from Hollywood that truly resonated, she thinks, with both her audience and herself. She admits it sounds corny, maybe even trite, but nothing can be quite the same after spending 90 days waking in terror at the sound of her own breathing, wondering if she would ever see her only son again. Vietnam made her feel, for the first time in a long time, like she accomplished something.

And sure, she knows she was — is — lucky to have the face, the legs, the ass and, yes, the breasts. But they have, through the years, become secondary to her. They’re simply not the currency they used to be, no matter how unchanged they may appear to be. “My best asset,” Mamie says, “is my brain. Without my brain, I don’t think the rest of me would be too hot.”

God, just imagine if she had two of them.

It might be a familiar drill, but the cops and the City Hall reps are on Cheri Honkala’s turf, and goddamn if she’s going to let them forget it. Honkala, the 37-year-old director of KWRU, a woman whose diminutive frame and girly manicure belie her propensity for battle, gestures the cops to join her and a couple of KWRU volunteers at their conference table.

It’s less than a week before the Republicans descend on this overwhelmingly Democratic city, and there is serious protest planning to do. Honkala’s group — easily the most high-profile and organized in Philadelphia — has no shortage of civil disobedience in the works. Out-of-town media have already heard about Honkala’s widely touted “reality tours,” which bypass the Liberty Bell and other Apple Pie relics and focus instead on the city’s sweatshops, unemployment offices and entire neighborhoods that are literally sinking into the ground.

There will also be a tent city, where homeless families will protest welfare reform and hold “poverty workshops.” And on the first day of the Republican National Convention, Honkala is planning to march from City Hall to the First Union center, where the convention-sanctioned events will be in full effect. She expects 5,000 protesters to join her.

That the city denied her a permit for this last activity, which she’s named the “March for Economic Human Rights,” has only made Honkala all the more determined to pull it off — and pull it off big. Protesters are coming in from all corners of the country, including celebrities such as former Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten. (Honkala has no problem attracting celebrity support: Bonnie Raitt, Danny Glover, Steve Earle and Jackson Brown have all worked with her.) The whole thing, truth be told, has the Philadelphia police in a bit of a frenzy; the department’s still smarting from the recent videotape that caught cops pummeling a suspected carjacker.

So the police have been summoned to Honkala’s place as a sort of precautionary measure, an attempt to figure out the logistics of what will likely be their biggest headache during the convention. They don’t like being there — their discomfort is almost palpable — but they will like it a hell of a lot less if there is a melee and mass arrest on Broad Street. But melees and mass arrests, for Honkala, are all part of a day’s work.

The cops sit down and Honkala watches them from across the table. She drums her fingers; her long lilac nails make a staccato beat against the wood. The noise stops abruptly when she notices the two City Hall reps pulling out chairs and making to join her and the police.

“I believe,” she says, “that we agreed to meet with two of you.”

“What?” asks one of the cops, clearly irked. “The two ladies can’t stay?”

“Noooooo,” Honkala says. Her native Minnesota drawl curls the word so that it sounds almost like a question. “You can go now,” she says, shooing them toward the door. “Go — and have a good day.”

The two City Hall reps leave, heads down.

“The city wants the poor and powerless to be invisible,” Honkala says, her tone stentorian. “And we’re not gonna be invisible.”

The cops don’t dare say a word.

What would be the use? Words don’t mean much, not to a woman who’s been kicked, punched, spat upon, mauled, arrested 70 times (once for slugging a cop during last year’s World Trade Organization protests in Seattle), barred from being anywhere near the Liberty Bell, dragged out of abandoned houses, kicked out of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion and seen the skin peel from her feet after marching across five states. But all of it — every slight, slap and blister — has been a mere prelude to Honkala’s convention protest fandango.

“It’s been crazy for a solid month,” Honkala tells me after the cops leave. “I feel like my whole life has been building up to this. The entire world is going to know that poverty does exist in the belly of the beast.”

If the whole world is not exactly interested in debating poverty, it has at least shown an increasing fixation on Cheri Honkala. The broadcast networks have called, as have CNN and MSNBC. Messages from the wire services, the Washington Post and the New York Times are buried, unanswered, in a pile on her desk. There was a recent write-up in Mother Jones, and a lengthy, fawning profile in the current issue of George magazine.

Honkala has no illusions that a good part of the media attention isn’t because her son, Mark Webber is a movie star. In 1997, the moppy-haired, formerly homeless 20-year-old landed a Foot Locker commercial, and he’s been box office booty ever since. Last year, Webber starred in the teeny-bopper flick “Drive Me Crazy,” with Melissa Joan Heart and Adrian Grenier. This year, you might’ve caught “Snow Day,” with Chevy Chase and Pam Grier.

So far, he’s donated most of his earnings — about $100,000 — to mom’s cause, and he’s vowed to do so as long as the roles keep coming. And in a case of bizarre timing, Webber begins shooting a new, as-yet-unnamed Todd Solondz film this week (costarring James Van Der Beek), just as his mother’s group will be collectively flipping the bird at all things capitalistic.

“The Hollywood stuff is not me,” says Honkala, who still lives in a squalid one-bedroom apartment not far from her office. “I was at the premiere of “Snow Day,” and I was a movie star’s mom. It was incredibly exciting.” She pauses. “But also incredibly painful.”

We’ve already established that pain is nothing new to Honkala, but now for some details. Deadbeat father; abusive, alcoholic stepfather; brother who committed suicide; various and sundry stints in reform schools; brief career as a teenage prostitute. Got pregnant on purpose to collect welfare; left Mark’s heroin-addicted father; lived out of a car; danced topless on bars; somehow got through high school and three years of the University of Minnesota before being kicked out for misappropriating her student grants. Came to Philadelphia in 1989 for a convention, married a union organizer and divorced him. Settled in Kensington, the city’s most destitute, end-of-the-earth enclave, and hasn’t left since.

In Philly, ironically, Honkala is sometimes a better-known actor than her son; her homeless encampments and subsequent, theatrical arrests are common fare. Former Mayor Ed Rendell called her a “constant pebble in my shoe.” Don’t be fooled, either, by Honkala’s impish countenance; she is a sophisticated, savvy self-promoter. She has a volunteer staff of about 40 who alert the press to every protest fiasco and permit denial. During her cross-country treks, Honkala dispatched frequent updates via cell phone, detailing every police misstep and civic injustice along the way.

Honkala often garners criticism — locally, at least — that she is hurting the very people she is trying to help. City officials wonder why she moves her members into abandoned properties — only to be arrested — instead of directing them to organizations with established track records on housing the homeless. They also wonder why Honkala doesn’t get a “real” job herself, which might allow her to be more proactive. She’s had no shortage of offers: Social work, overseeing housing programs, a position with the Women’s Cooperative.

“I say ‘no,’” Honkala says sincerely, “because the No. 1 thing I need to be doing is using my skills to build a movement … a massive movement to end poverty in this country.”

And then, of course, there is the Joey Merlino factor. “Skinny Joey” — an aptly named, scrawny fellow, reputed to be a Philly mob boss. Skinny Joey, who has survived numerous attempts on his life (including a bullet that missed its mark and implanted firmly in his buttocks), called Honkala one cold winter day a few years ago.

“He made me an offer,” Honkala deadpans, “that I couldn’t refuse.”

The offer was this: Let Merlino and his gang join her cause. They could give out turkeys for Thanksgiving, and even have a catered Christmas dinner for the 60 or so people in her group. Toys for the kids, the whole nine yards. Good news for everyone, eh? Honkala apparently agreed. She said publicly that she didn’t care about Merlino’s underworld occupation; if he was helping to feed the hungry, she was in.

And so began a tradition that has lasted through this year, even with Merlino currently in jail awaiting trial on federal drug charges. Last Christmas, burly guys named “Ralphie Head” and “Mousie” put down their Cuban cigars and highballs, sat kids on their laps and asked, “Yo, so whaddaya youse want for Christmas?” During last November’s fete, Merlino called an associate’s cell phone and expressed holiday greetings and cheer to everyone. The cameras, predictably, are always there for the catered Christmas affairs, and Honkala tries to finesse questions about her alliance with such an unseemly character.

But the turkey handouts are another story, and are more heavily monitored by black-suited G-men than by news crews. I remember one in particular, on a cold November day back in 1997, when Merlino and about a dozen men parked trucks in a lot across from North Philadelphia’s Richard Allen Homes, one of the city’s poorest public housing projects.

Silently, methodically, they began hauling turkeys from the flat beds and handing them to a line of residents. Honkala stood by, keeping close and careful watch, expressionless, uncharacteristically silent. She was not yet a national figure, not even close. It was almost three years before the Republican National Convention; she could not yet even know that it would be her life’s great, climactic moment.

There wasn’t a camera in sight; in fact, I believe I was the only reporter around, and there was little of the gust and bravado that typically characterizes a Honkala event. Just as the supply was drying up, a limping, elderly lady appeared at the head of the line, took a turkey from Skinny Joey’s hands and looked directly at Honkala. “God bless you,” she said, nearly in tears. She turned and waddled away, and only then did Honkala allow an absent smile.