Dolores Erickson celebrates 76th birthday

[Harry]

Dolores Erickson, the WHIPPED CREAM cover lady is celebrating her 76th birthday. Stories can be found in various Seattle sites and papers:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018926566_whippedcreamlady16m.html

By Erik Lacitis
Seattle Times staff reporter

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GREG GILBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES​

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Guys, the girl of your teen dreams now is 76.
Her name is Dolores Erickson and she has been living in Longview for around 35 years, after a career than included being an Eileen Ford model in New York.
She appeared at a Seattle record store Wednesday and wants to tell you teen dreamers, "Enjoy the memories."
You don't know her by name — maybe as the "Whipped Cream Lady" — but certainly by the album cover on which she is featured: the 1965 Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass' "Whipped Cream & Other Delights."
There she is, seemingly naked but covered in what is supposed to be whipping cream looking at YOU.
Whenever a list of the most memorable record covers is put together, that album is right at the top.
How did a 2006 New Yorker magazine article explain the impact of that photo?
Oh, yes, it: "fogged the minds of many young men, as they gazed at the... personalized come-hitherhood to the woman staring back ... the inner portion of a bare breast protrudes from the foam. She is licking cream from the index finger of her right hand... in the virtually pornless atmosphere of the suburban mid-sixties it was ... the pinnacle of allure."
The record spent 141 weeks on Billboard's Top 40 albums chart.
In later years, at concerts, Alpert would tell audiences, "Sorry, but I can't play the cover for you."
Erickson drove up here to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Golden Oldies, the used-record store in Wallingford. A steady stream of fans stopped by, including, surprisingly, women.
Toni Weschler, 56, got signed copies for her brothers. She remembers growing up in New York and playing the album.
She remembers how her brothers couldn't take their eyes off the LP. "They stared at it constantly. It was very risqué. They hadn't seen this much breast in their life."
For Erickson, the photo shoot was one of many in her career.
She is a 1954 Cleveland High School graduate, and her modeling began when she was 14 and won a contest at the venerable Frederick & Nelson department store in downtown Seattle.
Her modeling career blossomed, and she ended up a staff model for Macy's in San Francisco, in the days when department stores could afford such things.
Erickson spent time in Los Angeles, signed to contracts by Paramount and then Warner Bros., but her movie and TV career mostly consisted of bit parts.
At age 24, she went to New York City and ended up being signed by Eileen Ford. She was in ads for Max Factor and was in all the women's magazines. Erickson is 5 feet 7, with dark brown hair and green eyes, and still weighs about the same as in the modeling days, which is around 119 pounds.
But she's cognizant of time having gone by. "Please don't do any close-ups," she tells a photographer.
In 1965, she got a call to fly to Los Angeles for a photo shoot for A & M, a new label started by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. The photographer was Peter Whorf, with whom she had done other covers.
Payment would be around $1,500 ($11,000 in today's dollars), plus expenses.
The shoot began midmorning and lasted through the afternoon. Erickson put on a bikini, but with the straps down.
She was 29 and three months pregnant. "But I wasn't showing," she says.
Erickson sat on a stool and from the waist down, Whorf placed on her a white Christmas tree blanket.
Then shaving cream was sprayed on Erickson. Under the bright lights, whipping cream would melt, although it was real whipping on top of her head.
The shoot kept going, Erickson remembers, and she didn't notice that the shaving cream kept slipping down.
Months later, Whorf mailed her two outtakes.
"He sent them to shock me. And it did shock me. I screamed," says Erickson. "I was a Christian girl."
Erickson has kept a copy of one of the outtakes, and it is a bit more revealing, but not by that much.
But she worried that her then-husband, a New York shoe manufacturer, and "conservative," would become upset. She hid the two photos behind the refrigerator at a girlfriend's home. Later, she'd tear up the photo she deemed the most revealing.
In the mid-70s, raising a young son, Erickson moved to Longview to be near her sister, and for years, ran an art studio.
Actually, it was by happenstance that back in 2000, while visiting here, that recognition began for Erickson's role on that memorable album cover. She had stopped by Golden Oldies to buy some used copies of "Whipped Cream."
She didn't have any copies herself and wanted to sign some for friends. Before that, the album's importance in pop culture hadn't registered with her.
But when Dean Silverstone, owner of Golden Oldies, found out he was dealing with the actual Whipped Cream Lady, he thought, "It was like finding a jewel that's been buried in the desert for 40 years. Everybody knows about the album cover but nobody knows about her."
By 2012 standards, that album cover is demure.
Yet it endures. Teen dreams.
"I looked at it as being an ice cream sundae," Erickson says.

And here: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/arti...d-has-sweet-Seattle-3791680.php#photo-3333429

One of the best selling albums of the 1960s, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass' "Whipped Cream & Other Delights," topped the Billboard pop albums list in both 1965 and '66 and has sold more than 6 million copies.
But the songs are rarely played on oldies stations, and chances are you don't remember the album because of the tunes.
As trumpeter Alpert would say in concert, "Sorry, we can't play the cover for you!"
The cover, still a head-turner now, was salacious in the 1960s, showing a seductive-looking young woman wearing what appeared to be only whipped cream. It sparked the imaginations of young boys at record stores, was rarely re-shelved, and has become a piece of pop culture art with a place in the Smithsonian.
Few people know that Dolores Erickson, the young model, grew up in Seattle and was once Miss Greenwood.
"It was a little risqué for the time," said Erickson, who turns 77 next month. "But I didn't think it was, because I wore dresses that had lower décolletage from France. So I wasn't embarrassed."
In Wallingford, Erickson's "Whipped Cream" image was painted last year next to the door of Golden Oldies, the record store that will celebrate its 40th anniversary this fall. The Longview resident went there Wednesday to greet more than a dozen fans who had records in hand.
Wallingford resident Tasha Tempest Turner, who had a copy signed to her and her fiancée, recalled her older brother talking about the album while growing up in New Orleans.
"I remember always looking at it and finding it very charged," she said after posing for a picture with Erickson. "It was lovely to meet her and see how beautiful she still is."
Erickson, who moved to Seattle from Port Angeles, was 14 when a friend wanted to go to Frederick and Nelson for a modeling contest.
"When I went to the event, Jean Calkins, who was the fashion coordinator, asked me to try out," Erickson recalled Wednesday. "I'm the one that won.
"And that started everything."
Erickson modeled while still a student at Cleveland High School and in 1954 won the Miss Maritime title. The following year, she was Miss Greenwood and competed to be Seafair Queen.
Money she earned modeling helped pay tuition at the University of Washington, though years later Erickson later graduated from another school, where she focused on her art career. She also spent time as a model in San Francisco and with the Ford Modeling Agency in New York.
In spring 1960, Erickson was signed to Paramount Pictures – "a tribute to her beauty and charm," the P-I wrote at the time – and was slated for a role in "The Pleasure of His Company" with Debbie Reynolds. She had roles in "The Ladies Man" with Jerry Lewis and the ABC television show "Surfside 6."
That year Erickson also appeared on the cover of The Kingston Trio's album "Sold Out" – one of 13 album covers she's posed for, including "Whipped Cream." Two of them were Nat King Cole records.
Erickson worked on many Capitol Records shoots with art director Peter Whorf, who was engaged at the time to her best friend. Through Whorf, Erickson met her first husband, Gil Friesen, who was general manager of A&M Records.
The A is for Alpert, the M is for businessman Jerry Moss.
Later, Whorf had the idea for the album cover and when Erickson posed in his garage that was converted to a photo studio, the bikini she wore was covered with shaving cream because it had a better consistency under the hot photo lights.
Only the dollop on her brown hair was actually whipped cream. She also was three months pregnant.
By December 1965, the album went gold. It remained on the Billboard sales charts for more than three years, Alpert was nominated for an Album of the Year Grammy, and the demand for live performances skyrocketed.
"Every time they had an award I was flown out from New York to be in person," Erickson said. "Everybody knew who I was because I looked like the album."
Though it's been 47 years since "Whipped Cream" was released, Erickson's cover image is indelible in the minds of music fans.
"Older people come in and say, 'When I was a kid I used to have that,'" Golden Oldies owner Dean Silverstone said. "And then we have young people come in and they say, 'My grandpa used to have that LP.' So this has gone on for generations now.
"This started in 1965 and it's probably just as popular currently as it was almost 50 years ago."
Casey McNerthney

Harry