Tuna, Star Trek, Marilyn, and Project Runway

How do you combine Tuna, Star Trek, Marilyn Monroe, and Project Runway all into one post? If you’re asking, you’re apparently new to the Daveland rabbit holes. Welcome aboard! While doing my usual dinner on the couch with Willis and a movie/TV show, I put my Star Trek season one discs into the blu ray player. Watching the episode “Charlie X” (September 15, 1966) caused me to wonder what happened to Grace Lee Whitney, who played Yeoman Janice Rand. She is pictured above with Robert Walker, Jr. (son of Robert Walker and Jennifer Jones), who played Charlie. She was a more than capable actress and her chemistry with Kirk (William Shatner) seemed like it could have generated some interesting story lines. And yet, she disappeared before the first season was over. The official reason was that producer Roddenberry didn’t want to limit Kirk’s romantic adventures to Rand; the real reason was more rooted in budgetary concerns. In looking her up, I discovered an amazing (to me, at least) tidbit: Grace Lee Whitney was the original model for the Chicken of the Sea mermaid!



From the Chicken of the Sea website:

The first products sold under the Chicken of the Sea brand appeared in 1930. A little over 20 years later, in 1952, our mermaid mascot made her debut. The original illustration, with her tall blonde beehive and button nose, was modeled after Grace Lee Whitney—the actress who played Yeoman Janie Rand on the original Star Trek series. Over the decades, the mermaid has changed up her hairstyle and even the color of her tail, but her blonde hair and wand (or, most recently, her trident) have remained fixtures of her look.

She made radio show appearances with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy wearing the mermaid suit and a ton-o-hair! As she recalled:

Even though “Bergen and McCarthy” was radio, we did the show on a stage before a large studio audience, so the visual part of the show was still important. It was important that the mermaid who sang the tuna jingle look the part. Because I couldn’t walk in that costume, stagehands had to pick me up and carry me out onstage. I would sing the commercial, then they’d pick me up and carry me off again as I waved my wand to the audience.

She even had a doll modeled after; that’s how you know you’ve made it big!



All good things must come to an end, and in 2023, Chicken of the Sea changed their mermaid. Where was the outcry?!?



To think that at Disneyland, there was a Star Trek connection! The Mermaid on the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship restaurant was originally painted in all gold:





Eventually, she got the full-color treatment, as seen in this October 1966 image:





She could also be found on the bow of the ship:



When Chicken of the Sea left as a sponsor, the mermaid was turned into a ginger:



Finally, in a move of economy, she was converted back to all-gold again. No real craftsmanship needed to upkeep that!



Back to Grace…

She also had a bit part in one of my favorite Marilyn Monroe movies, “Some Like It Hot” (1959). As a member of the all-girl band, she can be seen at far left, along with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn.



And finally, the Project Runway connection. When I was looking at Grace’s hair in high definition during the “Star Trek” episodes, I couldn’t help but think it looked familiar. As Whitney later recalled:

It was so heavy it kept listing to the left, I swear they had to nail that thing to my head! It was gorgeous Max Factor hair. It cost a lot of money and somebody stole it. I still have visions of that damn wig turning up. I go down to Skid Row for my recovery program - I'm clean and sober now - and I keep expecting to find some bag lady or drag queen wearing it!



I’m not sure where the wig ended up, but it surely was the inspiration for this outfit from Project Runway, season 5, episode 7, where designer Korto Mormolu wove car seatbelts together to create a coat.



And there you have it. Another rabbit hole completed. I’ll leave this post with Whitney’s 2015 obituary from the ​​​Hollywood Reporter:

Grace Lee Whitney, who played the loyal Janice Rand, the personal assistant who served Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) aboard the USS Enterprise during the first season of Star Trek, has died. She was 85. Whitney, who reprised her role as Rand in four Star Trek films and in a 1996 episode of Star Trek: Voyager, died Friday at her home in Coarsegold, Calif., her son told The Fresno Bee. The attractive blond also appeared in two Billy Wilder films that starred Jack Lemmon: 1959’s Some Like It Hot (as one of the members of the all-girl band) and as Kiki the Cossack in 1963’s Irma la Douce. There was much sexual tension between Whitney’s Yeoman Rand and Shatner’s Kirk as the actress appeared in eight of the first 13 episodes of the 1966-69 NBC space drama. But then she suddenly was released from her contract. “There was a scene that Shatner and I did — and I remember when it happened — that scared the producers, because they said, ‘Uh-oh, they’re getting too close. This is getting too hot,’” she recalled in a 2011 interview. “We have to remove her because he’s going to look like he’s cheating when he falls in love with other women on other planets.” Whitney wrote in her 1998 book, The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy, that she was sexually assaulted by an executive at Desilu, the production company behind Star Trek, and suffered from drug and alcohol abuse for years before turning her life around.

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