October 28, 2003
SIMONE GRIFFETH
I haven't blogged about Simone in a long, long time, mostly because it's too painful. She's the first girl I ever fell in love with, and to this day she has no idea who the fuck I am. Life's funny like that.
Simone was born in Savannah, too, 3 days shy of being two years older than me. When I was a kid my parents had a river cottage on the May River in Bluffton, South Carolina, and we'd spend the summers there. Simone's family lived just down the road, on Myrtle Island, on the same river, but in a great huge brick 1920's southern mansion, with enormous live oaks that blocked the sun, dripping Spanish moss and somnolent decorum. They had a long gravel driveway that circled around a fountain in front of the house, the Sure Sign of Old Money to me. This was obviously their primary residence.
I first heard of Simone the summer of '71, when our next door neighbor told us who she was and where she lived. Simone was enjoying great notoriety for a sixteen year old, because she'd just starred in a low-budget flick called Swamp Girl, about a girl raised in the Okeefenokee Swamp with no contact with the outside world.
They call it stalking now; I called it innocent curiosity, and spent the better part of that summer pedaling around her house and Myrtle Island, desperately trying to catch a glimpse of Simone, even as the hired help chased my pimply fourteen-year-old ass out of their driveway for attempting to cut doughnuts in the gravel with a Kolkhoff ten-speed. The fourteen-year-old boy's equivalent of scratching the grass with his hind legs.
I'd often see Simone as she water-ski'd by our dock, blond hair slicked back, bikini aquiver (you know what I mean). There were usually one or two GQ-looking boys in the boat with her, all studly and such, but at least she had the decency to wave back to the skinny geek with big ears and big wood in his banlon nut hugger bathing suit.
Unrequited love. Man. Actually, unrequited acknowledgement of existence. But we stalkers never recognize that fact until it's too late.
Simone did a lot of B movies and TV work after that, but I don't think she did anything after the mid-eighties.
You want to know when she broke my heart? In 1975, when I was in college, and I saw her do a nude scene in Death Race 2000 with David Carradine. Because I felt betrayed? Hell, no. Because she'd seduced Grasshopper. Some things a man just can't forgive.
Damn it, man. I thought I was the love of your life!
Posted by: Venomous Kate at October 29, 2003 7:59 PMOh, you ARE, Katie, you ARE. She was merely the first, back when I had no sense of style...
Posted by: Velociman at October 29, 2003 8:08 PMDoes Crystal Beach, Alljoy or Estill Colony sound right?
Posted by: turner at January 25, 2005 11:03 PMI just came across this, and lemme tell ya, for me Simone will always be CHRISSY--"yutz" Stan's flight attendant wife in a hilarious episode of The Golden Girls.
"I miss you, Big Stan."
Posted by: XavRush at June 28, 2005 6:58 PMThis is pretty funny and a neat remembrance of my family from the outside. I'm Simone's sister. I love running into stuff like this. Did Katie (hired help) actually chase you out of the yard?
Posted by: Rosie at September 15, 2005 10:19 AMwhat's all this about?
Posted by: teenfeet at December 23, 2005 3:54 AMI recently found an original film print and movie poster of "Sixteen" which was Simone's second picture following Swamp Girl. It had apparently been abandoned in an old film depot back in the 70's and is a little splicey in places but the color is still astonishingly good. It looks like a low-fade dye-transfer print.
The screenplay is hardly Oscar material but it has its funny moments and Simone, of course, is beautiful. I liked it when Simone's mother (Mercedes McCambridge) starts chasing off the preacherman with a mop (LOL). Her little brother is also a funny character and is played by Jodie Foster's actual brother Buddy Foster.
Supposedly it was released on VHS some years back--worth checking out if you can find it.
I'd love to be able to find a copy of Swamp Girl and some of Simone's other movies.
Ed
Posted by: Ed at May 5, 2006 10:29 PMI came from Boston to St. Simons Island the summer of 1967. There I met the young Simone, had a few dates. Wrote a poem for and about her just before I left but couldn't find her, so I gave it to her friend, Joy George for forwarding. Hope she got it.
Posted by: Robert Guarente at January 2, 2007 5:26 AMSaw this cheesey promo for Swamp Girl on the Something Weird channel on On Demand. Movie looked sucky, but WOW! Simone was beautiful! So I looked her up on imdb.com and was surprised to find that she was in Deathrace 2000 and did a lot of TV work in the 80's. Thought she looked familiar. Anyway, not that I'm stalking or anything, just curious, so I looked her up on Google and apparently she's married and has a company with her husband that sells luxury property in Hilton Head, N.C. There's a pic of her and hubby on the site, and she's older, of course, but still damned gorgeous. Nice to see a happy ending for a lovely woman. Now I gotta go buy me a DVD of Deathrace...
Kid Z
Posted by: Kid Z at January 25, 2007 8:23 PMI went to school at Windsor Forest High School with Simone for one year in Savannah. I was a ninth-grader dating a senior (tall for my age), so knew Simone (somewhat) and some of her friends. She was a TOTAL blonde goddess, but pretty friendly, as far as goddesses go. She had three or four friends who I might rate nearly as high -- don't recall their names.
Note of interest: Desiree Cousteau, the (former) porn film actress, went to our high school also. I remember her as a kind of geeky girl with glasses in my latin class. Who knew?
Posted by: CP at August 1, 2007 11:04 AMI like Simone too! Very nice!
Posted by: Bouncy Techno at October 19, 2007 5:14 AMI just recently saw an old movie called "Hot Target" starring Simone made in 1985 when she was 35 and she was gorgeous.I can see why you were smitten.
Posted by: mick at October 8, 2008 12:26 AM