Beverly Adams came into the world in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1945, a Catholic girl born in the kind of cold that makes you dream about other places. Canada: snow, silence, and people who apologize for breathing too loud. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Wayne Adams, probably figured they’d raise a nice normal daughter who’d marry a dentist and bake cookies for the church bazaar.
Instead, they moved to Burbank.
After the war the family heads south, down into the land of heat and headlights and television antennas. Burbank, California – factory town for dreams, where they stamp out sitcoms instead of carburetors. The girl grows up under the shadow of studio gates and soundstages instead of grain silos and steeples. Roman Catholic, yes. But also California, which is a religion of its own. You get God on Sunday and glamour in the drugstore aisles.
As a teen, she starts winning beauty contests. Of course she does. Some people come out of the factory with all the parts aligned: the face, the hair, the smile that makes men talk too fast and women look twice. Everyone tells her she’s pretty; no one tells her what that will cost. The trophies and sashes are just receipts for future trouble.
She’s got plans though. She wants to be a doctor. Not a starlet, not a hostess, a doctor. White coat, hard work, the whole heroic package. So while the town is losing its mind over movie stars, Beverly is doing what sensible, ambitious people do: going to Valley State College, working during the week as a secretary to a Superior Court judge in Los Angeles, and picking up a weekend job in a dress shop. A life with structure, paychecks, and very little champagne.
Then comes the fashion show.
The dress shop puts on a televised fashion show. She models some clothes. Just a side thing, a bit of fun, a way to pick up a few extra dollars. But the camera is a predator and Beverly is exactly its type. An ad man sees her on the screen and suddenly she’s in a TV commercial. One minute you’re pinning hems, the next there’s a makeup girl patting your face and someone yelling “We’re live in 5.”
At the station, Ozzie Nelson happens to be hanging around. Show business is full of these stupid accidents that change everything. He sees the girl from the fashion show. He invites her to play a bit part on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. It’s nothing, just a small role on a harmless little sitcom, but it’s the first crack in the old life.
You can almost hear the medical school brochures slipping into the trash can.
She starts modeling more. Then acting. Guest spots in those 1960s television shows where the men wear suits, the women wear eyeliner thick enough to stop traffic, and everyone talks like they’re selling something. She gets a recurring role on Dr. Kildare – a medical show, just not the way she planned. The white coat goes to someone else; she gets the close-ups instead.
Columbia Pictures takes a look at her and says, “Yeah, we can use that.” She’s selected for Columbia’s New Talent Program. Translation: fresh meat with a contract. They put her on Screen Gems television series and into a handful of movies. You work, you smile, you sign your name, you become part of a system that will happily forget you the second your face falls out of fashion.
Then there’s Lovey Kravezit.
Dean Martin’s Matt Helm movies are swinging, smirking, drunk-on-themselves relics of the era: sex, jokes, guns, all filtered through the haze of martinis and casual misogyny. Beverly shows up as Lovey Kravezit, the kind of name a middle-aged writer gives a woman after his third drink. She plays the part like she knows exactly how ridiculous it is and doesn’t mind cashing the check anyway. Lovey becomes a recurring role, her calling card in that goofy spy universe, and people remember her. The movies might be fluff, but she pops off the screen.
Before that, she’s in two Elvis films – Roustabout and Girl Happy – uncredited. Just another pretty girl in the background of The King’s endless parade. Elvis sings, the camera adores him, the world hums along, and Beverly is somewhere behind his shoulder, doing the work and getting no name on the poster. That’s a lot of show business right there: on set, not on paper.
She scores a bigger splash in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, playing Cassandra, the redhead in a beach movie with a title that tells you exactly what you’re in for. Sun, surf, double entendres, jokes written on napkins. It’s nonsense but it’s the 60s and nonsense sells. She wears the bikini, hits her marks, laughs her lines. Somewhere in the middle of this circus you can still see the woman who once wanted to hold a scalpel instead of a script.
Then love, or whatever twisted form of it you get in this town, wanders in with a pair of scissors.
While making Torture Garden in London, she’s sent to the Vidal Sassoon salon. Sassoon is not just a hairdresser; he’s building a shampoo empire with his name stamped on it. He cuts her hair, or maybe he just looks at her and she looks at him and the usual chemical disaster happens. They marry in February 1967. She becomes Beverly Sassoon: actress, wife, soon-to-be mother, and the walking, talking advertisement for the man who turned haircuts into religion.
She retires from acting. Hollywood is a jealous lover; when you leave, it shrugs and replaces you in a week. But she doesn’t disappear. She writes books under the name Beverly Sassoon, plays spokeswoman for Vidal Sassoon, Inc., smiles on talk shows, tells women how to be beautiful and put-together while dealing with the usual chaos at home. It’s the era of the Perfect Wife, and she plays the part with professional polish.
Four kids. Catya, who becomes an actress and then dies young of a drug-induced heart attack like some grim footnote to the whole swinging-liberal, California-dream experiment. Elan BenVidal, David, and Eden. Four lives tossed into the world from two people who probably spent half their time in airports and studios, trying to stitch together something like a family in between flights.
She even starts a pet care line—Beverly Sassoon Pet Care System. Of course she does. If somebody will buy shampoo because your husband’s name is on it, they’ll buy dog shampoo because yours is. You do what you can in the margins while the big machine runs.
In 1981, the big marriage cracks. She and Vidal divorce. The brand keeps going; the marriage doesn’t. That’s how it is here: the logo outlives the love nine times out of ten. She goes back to acting, as if to say, “Fine, if I’m not your billboard, I’ll be my own woman again.”
She marries a matador, Antonio Migoni. A matador, for God’s sake. You can’t make that up. It’s pure paperback romance: beautiful actress, handsome bullfighter. The stuff lonely people read on airplanes. Only in real life it doesn’t stick. The marriage gets annulled, the story folds, and she moves on again.
Then comes Philip Neal. No famous shampoo, no matador costume, just a man she calls “the love of my life.” That’s the kind of line that means something when you’ve already collected a few rings and grave markers. They’re together until he dies in 2004, because of course he does. The universe has a dark sense of timing.
As the years go on, the world changes mediums, from film to tape to disc to stream. The kids who once watched her as Lovey Kravezit grow old, their grandkids scroll past her picture without knowing the name. In November 2022, Classic Images runs a profile on her, talking about the old days, the onscreen career, the whole wild run. That’s the sort of magazine that exists just to prove the past ever happened.
Beverly Adams – Beverly Sassoon – wasn’t one of the tragic drunks or the tabloid lunatics. She was something more common and, in a way, stranger: a woman who could have had a safe, ordinary life, who chose the circus instead, rode it hard, got out, came back, loved hard, buried a child, outlived husbands, turned herself into a product, then back into a person.
She wanted to be a doctor and ended up a bikini redhead, a spy’s girl, a shampoo queen, a writer, a mother, a widow, and one more beautiful face in the archives. That’s Hollywood for you: it takes whatever you meant to be and makes you something else entirely. If you’re tough enough, you live long enough to tell the story yourself.
