5 Things We Learned About Angelyne, the Unofficial Mascot of West Hollywood

Photography by Larry Lombardi. Billboard Painted by Scott.

If you’ve spent some time driving in Los Angeles or West Hollywood and looked up to see a busty woman on a billboard and wondered who Angelyne is, you're not alone. She zooms around town in her custom-pink Corvette — she says she's on her eighth and clocks 100 miles a day — says she's the "most photographed celebrity in the world." Writer Chadwick Moore recently caught up with the woman in pink to discuss her status as the city's unofficial mascot. Here's five things we learned.

It's easy to meet Angelyne — if you're willing to pay for the pleasure of her company:

If you leave a message on her fan hotline, she’s usually amenable to meeting just about anyone for a cup of coffee to discuss unicorns or aliens or spiritual pathways to enlightenment — it will probably set you back the price of a beverage, and an Angelyne T-shirt ($42), or other ephemera she hawks from the trunk of her car all day long (her assistant suggested I arrive to tea bearing “some Starburst candy, for good luck”).

One of her favorite spots to hangout and shop is Baby Jane of Hollywood:

The movie star memorabilia store “famous for our celebrity earthquake ruins,” is owned by her friend Roy Windham, who considers himself the pre-eminent Angelyne expert. “She’s huge in Germany,” Windham said. It seems Angelyne has been hanging around Baby Jane for 20 years, stopping in weekly to admire autographs and old movie posters. She loves Marilyn Monroe, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis. “Angelyne is the first self-made celebrity. She didn’t have money. She didn’t come here with the Hilton or Kardashian name,” Windham said. “She was the first person to get appearance fees for being a celebrity, but not a movie star or TV star.”

Why she's an icon (like a unicorn), not a publicity whore:

“I’m a pink entity on top of a yellow unicorn. I want to maintain my mystery and the totality of the magic of who I am. I’m not a publicity whore,” she said. “Unicorn has the word ‘icon’ in it. ‘Unicorn’ and ‘icon.’ ”

How her billboards made her famous, in typical Hollywood fashion:

When of her buxom billboards was featured in the opening sequence of the hit 1985 ABC series Moonlighting, starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis, Angelyne made it big and TV appearances and interviews soon followed. As Moore explains, "In 2003, during California’s chaotic recall election, she ran for governor. She has been presented with a key to the city of West Hollywood, where she was proclaimed an "honorary Mayor."

She's used to having "out of body" experiences:

“I got up and turned off my alarm, and I just floated up from my body. And this is what I want to aspire to for good. You can’t feel the body, and it just feels wonderful,” she said, explaining the time when she was on the set of the 1988 film Earth Girls Are Easy, where she and her car have a cameo. Having “achieved everything I’ve planned to achieve so far,” these days Angelyne is questing to re-obtain this weightless euphoria permanently.

Read the full story at Out.com