The girl about to make her way into the maw of the monster is Mimi Gibson. This is from the 1957 film The Monster that Challenged the World. She was one of the hardest working child actors in show business in the 1950s and 1960s. I knew very little about her and her career. This despite the fact that I personally knew her. She was my aunt.
Her career had pretty much wound down by the time I came along and was old enough to understand what an acting career was. It was barely spoken of. We never watched movies or television shows she was in. Until the Internet came along, I knew virtually nothing about her career.
The reason was that my aunt had a lot of simmering anger over her forced career in show business as a child actor, so she would not talk about it, and my mother to this day has a pathological jealousy of her sister’s career, so she would never talk about it. I do cover some of Mimi’s remarkable career in more detail in my book, The Greatest Adventure. When my mother skimmed through an early draft of my book and saw that her sister was mentioned, she went into a screaming rage and I did not talk to her for a year. I assume it wound up in the trash unread as we never spoke about the book again. That’s a shame because it is quite a good read, and she comes across much better in the book than in real life.
I just discovered that Mimi had recently published an autobiography called Working Kid. I bought a copy and it filled in a lot of the gaps I was missing. Though Mimi makes frequent trips to Los Angeles, we have not spoken in maybe 20 years. Our family is dysfunctional that way.
I learned a number of things. I already knew that she started doing calendars at 22 months, but I had no idea of the extent of her print work in advertising where she was in magazines and on billboards. She rode in many parades. She was the very last of the Hollywood USO Mascots, which she did for many years. She was the Tonette Girl. She had a doll produced with her likeness. I knew none of this until I read her book.
She did film and television, and a lot of both. There is no official complete record, but there were some 34 movies and over 200 television shows, along with countless commercials. She worked with a number of legendary directors such as Anthony Quinn, Cecil B. DeMille, and William Wyler. She performed in productions with actors including Joanne Woodward, John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Jack Benny (my personal inspiration for comedy as a child), Red Skelton, Danny Thomas, Doris Day, Mickey Rooney, Ricardo Montalban, Ida Lupino, Van Johnson, Joel McCrea, Barbara Hale, James Darren, Anthony Quinn, Angie Dickinson, Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, Tony Randall, Charles Coburn, James Garner and countless other big name actors.
She still has some resentment about her life in show business, along with a lot of appreciation. Besides being absolutely adorable, she was also quite a talented child actor. As an adult, I have been able to watch a lot of the things she was in. Being burdened from infancy with being the family’s sole breadwinner, with my grandmother spending every penny she made, did not sit well with her. Even so, she had an amazing career working with some of the top directors and a roster of almost every major A-list actor of the time.
Going through her book, I was amused that we had worked with some of the same people. I tell stories about many of them in my book, not knowing when I wrote it that my aunt had also worked with them. By the time I worked with them, though, they were quite old.
She played the daughter of Cary Grant in the 1958 film Houseboat. I first met Cary Grant when I was directing awards shows. Amazing man. Hanging out backstage with him is something I will always remember. Even at 80 he had amazing charisma.
She was in the 1956 The Ten Commandments directed by Cecil B. De Mille. Despite my being involved in theater since high school and taking directing classes, no one in my family ever bothered to mention that she worked with one of the most legendary directors of all time (and many other legendary directors). My mother’s only comment when I found out Mimi was in it was “You can hardly even see her.” Actually, she is hard to miss. While I never worked with Charlton Heston, my wife Belle did when she was organizing the Screen Actors Guild commercial strike. She liked him more than she thought she would.
She was in the 1954 Ethel Merman film There’s No Business Like Show Business. It also featured Johnnie Ray, and I have a rather long and humorous story about both Belle and I working with him in my book.
She was on Leave it to Beaver a couple of times. I never worked with Tony Dow, who played Beaver’s older brother and who recently passed away, but I did know him socially. I never knew to ask him about working with my aunt.
She appeared on Johnny Carson’s daytime show. I never made it to the Carson show (several friends did), but as described in my book, I did spend a lot of time on the Carson Tonight Show set.
Her final film was in 1968 titled If He Hollers, Let Him Go. It was one of the earlier blaxsploitation films, albeit not a well-reviewed one. It features Kevin McCarthy, who Belle had to deal with in a live production of a Christmas Carol when she was a rep working for Actor’s Equity. Kevin’s well-known problem with alcoholism led him not to just chewing up the scenery, but to literally knocking it over. It is the only film in which Mimi appeared topless, and I was on national television in the nude, so we both had more exposure than we ever imagined we’d have in show business.
I think that she would agree that her most significant accomplishment was her work on a committee for child actors at the Screen Actors Guild that led to major legislation to protect child actors. This led to articles in the Los Angeles Times where my grandmother’s abuses were made public. Those articles and the Internet are where I learned about my family. Interestingly, Belle was working at SAG at the time and would see her come in, but there was just no interest in any type of relationship. While Belle fought hard every day on behalf of the actors, I think Mimi saw SAG as the enemy.
In some ways I followed in my Aunt’s footsteps, although she had a far more successful career as an actor. The irony was that she was forced into it as a child and I desperately wanted it as a child. Because of Mimi, my mother did not allow me to act in shows until after I graduated high school when she had little say. People often get into show business because they have a working relative, but I got into show business despite having had a relative in the business.