Pat Priest

[Findcandor]

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While working on another post, I was collecting screen shots from Airport (1970), and how delightful was it to discover Pat Priest played one of the passengers? I remembered that last post of mine from over one year ago (when I learned Pat had a VEF thread), and naturally I wanted to make a record of this lovely lady from the film (miniscule though her part was).


Pat appeared in a collectors' show in Studio City,
California in March of 1996, posing with Don
Knotts in this photo. I recall reading some article
once where Pat expressed her dismay at how her
fans would be surprised upon meeting her, not
taking into account that she would have aged like
everyone else. She was sixty-years-old, here.

Are you telling me in over one year, there have been no other posts on this thread? I don't get it; after all, wasn't she absolutely gorgeous? I see in my post I referred to another post that sat on the bottom of the thread's page two (my post was on the top of page three, which is where this new post now sits), meaning some posts have also disappeared in the interim. What this amounts to is even less Pat, and by golly, that's just not right.



As she appeared in the hit movie, Airport (there was barely a clear shot of her):


Also pictured: Whit Bissell, Helen Hayes, Van Heflin. Pat was just shuffled into the background.

Another thing that doesn't make much sense is that here she was in a beloved television show, The Munsters, becoming no less than a household word (what with her alliterative name showing in the catchy credits; how often does that happen with regularly-working actors?). Once she appeared in this big-budget movie with a star-studded cast (where she had a "nothing" role, serving as little more than an extra, with no spoken lines), aside from a respectable part in a 1971 episode of the prestigious TV show, Mission: Impossible (the leading lady was Lesley Ann Warren)...


Pat in Mission: Impossible

...The best she could manage was a bottom-of-the-barrel horror film in 1971, The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant. (I remember watching the film's star, Bruce Dern, on a late night talk show, and he claimed the producer flew the coop and he — as well as no doubt other cast members, likely including Pat; the IMDb claims her salary was $5,000 — never got paid.)


With Bruce Dern and Casey Kasem; from THE INCREDIBLE 2-HEADED TRANSPLANT.

Pat actually did get a few parts in reputable TV shows between 1966 (when The Munsters ended; she was thirty) and 1970's Airport (for example, she appeared thrice in Bewitched, although one of those times was as a "nurse"), but after Airport all she could muster (after Transplant) was a low-budget feature in 1973 that bombed in the USA (but did well in Europe; it appears to have been an artistic retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story, and I can't be sure if Pat even had a role to speak of... as another "nurse"). She received another slap in the face when told her role of "Marilyn" in the 1966 feature film (Munster, Go Home!) would be played by another, since Pat was deemed to be too old. At least she went out with a kind of a bang in 1976, playing Betty White's character's sister in the hit series The Mary Tyler Moore Show, before hanging it up.


Her IMDb bio begins with, "This sweet, wholesome, porcelain-skinned beauty was your typical bouffant blonde of the early-to-mid 1960s. She was picture perfect..." Sure, there are many other beautiful actresses, but Ms. Priest was a notch above. It's difficult to understand how she could have been so dismissed.

A blog site named "neptsdepths" (which presented a detailed and helpful page on Airport) featured some fine photos of Pat, and after checking to see they had not appeared here (Cuzzyman927 offered the bikini view from above, in his delightful Post #19 from the last page, but the aspect ratio was off), I've made use of them for this post. One of her more noteworthy roles after The Munsters was Easy Come, Easy Go (1967), when she cavorted with The King himself.


With Elvis Presley.

As for nudity, VEF's major force behind the Pat Priest thread, thread-starter "Gregj1967" (member since 2006, and still around) offered a page from Celebrity Sleuth in his Post #5 from 2009. The 1989 Sleuth article stressed her big shot mom who served as Treasury Secretary in the Eisenhower administration (later, also serving under California Governor Ronald Reagan), and presented this nude view (which I've "fixed" in a bad way so that the image may be focused on), where nothing could be made out.



If Pat was no prude, as she demonstrated from the photo above and a clearer bare-backed view from the article, one thing she could have done was to pose for Playboy. Even if what might have been explosive attention (she was, after all, known as "pure") did not pay off, at least she would have delighted scores of men (including some from half-a-century later; thanks a lot, Pat).



Luckily fans would remind Pat of their love
when she attended conventions as with the
one above, the Chiller Theatre Expo from
April of 2017, held in New Jersey. (81, here.)

At least she remarried after her first marriage broke up, at which time she had given birth to two children. She has since worked as a home renovator and as co-owner of an antique store, per the tidbits from her IMDb bio, which also informed (depressingly) that she had developed lymphoma (cancer of the lymphatic system, part of the body's disease-fighting network) in 2001, although the disease was being kept under control.











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[sidaris]

Pat has signed trading cards to serve as premiums several times, making her autograph fairly easy to come by. I have all of these except one of the Pop Century ones. The last two are not singed but the front and back of a wardrobe card. I've watched a video on the process for making these, so a lot of people have touched that material since Pat had it on, but still nice to have something that touched her lovely body.

The Elvis card of her in the dress and Elvis in the black shirt is easy to come by, but I rarely see the one of Elvis (that's him although it may be hard to tell because of how covered he is in the scuba outfit) and Pat in the bikini. I have one and I paid a lot more for it than I did all the others.