"I am L.A.", she describes herself accurately. The pinch of words holds more truth than her miles of tapes, videos, merchandise, posters, photographs, signatures, paintings, and billboards: the world’s Angelyne paraphernalia couldn’t beheld by a ship the size of Cyrus. Alien TV waves. Truly, she was all image, and image everywhere, all the time, always. But what else? No one was too sure. The speck of her true, or more truthfully, past self could only be shrunk in tactics of relativity. Relative to the cosmic self she had created. Two round massive hot pink balloons collated from a mâché of billboard posters float and bounce over a Californian sky, casting a satellite shadow. Glamourized, but within its squeaky 10,000 cubic feet of ditzed out helium gas liesa 5’3 girl sitting alone inside on the plastic. History. Not legend. Angelyne became Angelyne the second she was believed. Or seen. A prophet through presentation rather than preach, incarnate. The manifestation of God’s pink pinky poking through the jelly mesosphere to warn us of the Kardashians to come. Are seeing and believing the same? At least in Hollywood. Angelyne first appeared on the corner of Hollywood and Vine in the warm winter of 1984 as a matte, sex, rosy, sunglassed mirage, a timeless hourglass theophany picture on an 85 foot billboard. This image could not be traced to any past. This image of course (which, according to her, is “all you need to know about [her]”), had her self, name, and number on it. Her image;

an amalgamation of the public subconscious, old Hollywood and Barbie, but it was the 80’s, and breast implants and hot cheap pink were a nerve stem in our brains. Still, she drives her old (b.1982-now) pink Corvette: an energy/motion and an object at the same time, a magenta light buzzing across the L.A. county grid at a frequency no one can ignore. Or catch. Both her and the machine emerge as a UFO out of nowhere, seeming to have come from so far outside our universe that by chance the shapes of our reality repeated themselves there, but only at a much larger scale. So we look, take a breath, and can’t think to question it properly. Squinting up, citizens tried to figure out exactly who this large-breasted blonde was. It seemed, she fit in so well with the city, like she was something that we had known existed all along, yet we didn’t know where. But, of course, she only existed in our collective minds, and somehow Angelyne churned that thought into flesh.

She has called herself a “Rorschach test in pink”: what you see in her says more about you than it does about her. For almost four decades, no-one could figure out who Angelyne was. She simply existed like an object, or a god: void of past. The rumours are funny, the most boring ones were told on occasion– when not outright turning down questions about her past–by Angelyne herself: a girl from Idaho-Iowa- Indiana with no parents, who came to the city to make it big. No siblings (not true, she had a sister). She never seemed to get her states straight. Some more vibrant claims were offered up by the public: that she’s married to a sheikh, or she might be a man, or a gay guy died and left her all his money, or there’s a new Angelyne created every two years. It isn't her own constructed lies about her past that allowed her to repaint her reality, rather her adamant denial that she ever had one. Angelyne was the child of two Holocaust survivors and is a first generation immigrant, born Ronia Tamar Goldberg on October 2nd 1950 in Poland. The truth was only publicly revealed in a 2017 Hollywood Reporter article decades after her first pink appearance across the billboards of L.A. Her parents met in Chmielnik ghetto, and were of the 500 out of 13,000 jews there that survived WW2. They endured Skarzysko, a forced labour camp, then Buchenwald and Bergen- Belsen–amongst other concentration camps. They married in the Foehrenwald displaced persons camp in Germany. From there they moved to Israel and then finally, when Angelyne was 8 years old, to the district of Fairfax, L.A. To escape her strict father, Ronia Goldberg later married the jewish son of a Beverly Hills executive, moving to live in Hollywood with him. The last documentation of Angelyne’s non-life are their divorce papers in 1969.

I write this from a hot bubble bath, eating grapes alongside duck foie gras on a pappadam. I’m trying to get into Angelyne’s head, but all I feel is bliss. That is the answer. Maybe she wouldn’t eat the same things, but a ‘Bubble Bath America’ (one of her singles) is something she strongly vies for. “Take a bubble bath,” she tells Leelou demeaningly, “and do some soul-searching”. Bliss. “What’s the one thing you know”, she asks, and when Leelou replies incorrectly with “Uhhh, that the earth is round?” Angelyne interrupts, “what I’m trying to get at here, is that the one thing you know for certain is how you feel”. This is how we get to the core of Angelyne's headspace, her personal religion. Through interviewing her, it becomes apparent that her denial of her past goes deeper than publicity, or ugliness. Her self, therefore her identity, and therefore her spirituality, are at stake. “Goodness is just feeling good,” she states directly. This ties beyond her simple magenta material indulgences, and into her self-creation. Accepting that your parents suffered through and witnessed the brutal extermination–via starvation, gas chamber, torture–of their entire community is not “goodness” by Angelyne’s standard. Though she does oftentimes state how the world is a cruel and ugly place, to her this is all the more reason to leave it. Angelyne’s concept of “goodness” materialises in her bimbo image. Crawl back to the root of your mind, to what you thought beauty was as an infant. Always wanting the blonde, blue-eyed and white barbie, socially injected subconsciously, but consciously assuming these qualities to be an example of beauty. No. These traits were the definition of beauty: communicated through the hive of ads, shows, people, products, as “goodness”. Before that the concept of ‘beauty’ itself could not exist in an infant mind: there were perhaps normal symmetrical faces, familiar faces, then abnormal alien faces, defected ones. But no ‘beauty’, really. Angelyne goes to this root, or second to primary root, to the 20th century concept of beauty, being born in Poland and raised in midcentury L.A. But she was no Aryan specimen, and achieved her look through bleach and plastic surgery, burning herself up to perform human → the image metamorphosis long before today, where we are adapted to 10 years of daily piles of reality TV apple-cheeked liver-lipped insta face. Angelyne practices a personal syncretism of Bimbofi cation, Z en, and Mysticism. This Bimbofication is hersexual on its surface; she was always quick to make sexual jokes/advances on TV interviews, she speaks in a bubbly baby voice, she would even pop little “ooohs” and “aaahs” to finalise

sentences. She also performs the same soul-bleaching as many bimbofication fetish lifestylers: a practice of complete assimilation into female social standards to achieve inner peace via vapid ignorance, to therefore attain bliss. “I used to play with my Barbie doll when I was a little girl. You can stick her with things and she won’t cry. She doesn’t hurt. Wouldn’t it be nice, never to hurt?” But Angelyne’s bimbofication is at heart asexual. Ex- boyfriends report being lured into Marylin Monroe seances by candlelight shrine over at her apartment, when they thought she was inviting them over for something else. Angelyne would use her sexuality to convince men to pay for her billboards, her pink corvette, her shoes, but would only give them enough to “tease”. This “tease” is just another tool in her gemstone box of manipulation tactics. Angelyne always got what Angelyne wanted. In her mind, the second she wanted something, it might as well have already happened. Manifestation. Her desire was a sword of destiny and the second it was up it would surely swoop down.

Zen is a word for the inner state Angelyne strives for. In a room full of pink, faux fur, high heels, and self-approved self-portraits: “I meditate, and I surround myself with beautiful things. And I imagine going there, you know, to, not being touched, just being safe from everything. The mind is safe. I’m not safe”. Despite her best efforts, nosy news reporters and the lack of funding for her autobiographical movie keep poking through the bubble (she has been trying to sell her used bras and underwear on an auction site to raise money for filming, but has earned net $0 for the project). If you don’t have zen completely, you may just not have it at all. Through complete denial of self, rather than total self acceptance, she has reached some 99% inner peace. She has gone a long way by simply believing. She guards this peace as a rabid dog. Any questions slightly leaning into truth- territory send her biting and slobbering back with counter-questions, or accusations. Evidence: Leelou ditched Angelyne before their third planned phone call, mentally pretzelled, and didn’t even follow up on our free T-shirts. Much like monks, Angelyne seems to abstain from sensual pleasures and, like a monk, has dedicated most of her years (at least 50 out of 73) to her.. well her. But the “higher consciousness” her. She perceives the same separation of soul and body to the cosmos: “When a person is addicted to drugs, when they die, is their consciousness still addicted or is it the body that is addicted? There's a line between how integrated the

consciousness is with the physical form”. The state of Angelyne is an existential anomaly. Pure reliance on feeling, a rejection of time and senses: “How do you know animals exist? If you didn’t have your eyes, would you know they were animals? If you had your eyes closed, what would you know for sure?”

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When Angelyne isn’t going for PR-bait quips in interviews – “I do the splits. The gym? Oh God, no-I'm glamorous!”– the largest chunk of her speak is spiritual. Earnestly proclaiming experiences in astral projection: “I was pure, pure spiritual energy. And that's the state of consciousness that I'm questing to reach. And not coming back here, not to come back to this state of consciousness”. Her beliefs are very California (the USA’s most cult-ridden state): all over the place,

syncretic, narcissistic, but at her core, mystic. Through self-surrender, she believes she will melt into and become the hot mass of the higher and beyond, something she believes she represents, à la Jésus: “My astrologer, when I projected for the first time- she lived to be 104, she just died recently - told me ‘Oh Honey, that’s your quest in life. You want to become part of God’. ”

Angelyne is recognized as the world’s first influencer, in the format we know of today. She’s famous for being famous. It seems her billboard idea came as a celestial revelation, placed in her mind by something separate from humanity. Putting her face in everyone else’s face, she became important through pure advertisement, for no product but herself. But Angelyne is Angelyne. She isn’t pretending the way others like Paris Hilton did, who’d drop her voice to a sulky teenage boy pitch when not in front of TV cameras. But Angelyne never evolved, and possesses a stubborn streak that got her started but also stopped. “Don’t trust anything you read about me on the internet,” she began, before Leelou even started the interview, “It’s all untrustworthy. Come to me directly”. If this zine were not in print, she would have refused to do this interview. At age 73, reaching out through the pink palm tree sky, the light is fluttering out, in her resistance to the present, it seems perhaps now she is more of a tical hard-headed old lady than anything. Yet still, she maintains her image, herself, and wizzes along at speed in her pink corvette, eating cherry pie, waiting to pass on to the satellite above, and to be transferred then, to the stars.