A homage to The Classic Cat, “The Hollywood Hangover” and the journey of two sisters trying to make it on the Sunset Strip in the ‘60s.
(NOTE: This story appears in the March 2025 issue of ED Magazine.)
Peace, love and rock and roll. These words defined the sixties for so many but for the youth who were trying to make it in Hollywood at the time, it barely touches on their experiences.
During this period, aspiring actors and musicians flocked to the Sunset Strip in California, hoping to capture even a sliver of fame and fortune. The bars and clubs on the infamous boulevard were known for launching the careers of stars like Lana Turner, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, giving them an air of glitz and glamor. But as many later learned, it was all an illusion.
Still, the fantasy spread far and wide, reaching two sisters who grew up on a farm in central Illinois. To them, living on Sunset Boulevard was the ultimate indicator of success.
“We had to have a Sunset Strip address so that our family and friends back home would be impressed and assured we were doing well,” writes the late Nancy Deedrick in her blog “The Great Hollywood Hangover.”
Big city people
In the mid-sixties, Nancy, better known by her stage name “Simone,” convinced her younger sister “Dixie” to move to California under the false promise that she’d get to meet her idol, pop singer Gary Lewis. Upon arrival, the siblings lived in an apartment at the St. Regis, spending their days looking for work as dancers and their nights cruising in Simone’s ‘63 white Corvette. Being just 16 years old, Dixie had trouble getting into a lot of the bars, which resulted in a chance meeting with the infamous Jim Morrison before anyone knew his name.
“We tried to get in the Whisky a Go Go one night, but the doorman refused to let us in,” Simone recalls. “So we walked up the block a few doors and tried again at a place called London Fog. A band called The Doors was playing. The club was almost empty. I think that’s why they let us in. They needed the business.”
Simone and Dixie sat at a table right in front of the stage, hearing The Doors play for the first time. It was about a year before the band would find success and seven years before Morrison would be found deceased in a bathtub in his Paris apartment. Between sets, he and the band’s drummer, John Densmore would sit with the sisters to chat. During their conversation, the girls claimed they were dancers from a “suburb of Chicago” with “many auditions lined up.” Both were lies.
“We were just trying to impress these big city people,” Simone writes. “We couldn’t tell them we were really from a farming community! Anyway, we had already rehearsed it in the car on the trip from Illinois—what we were going to say, where we were going to be from and the kind of image we would try and convey to people.”
She was obviously a big smash, but if the room hadn’t been so hideously loud, I swear you could have heard her knees knocking.
— Simone
Their new Hollywood image worked on the guys, and while Densmore’s sandals gave Dixie the ick, Simone and Morrison dated for a few weeks. However, Simone found him boring, and even though the vocalist was nice to look at, she ditched him for Cooker, a “New York character” and the guitarist of a band called The Groupies. She describes Cooker as “barely five feet tall, green teeth, a monkey on his back and his hair was falling out!”
Around this time, Simone and Dixie were getting desperate for cash. Simone had found a job dancing at the Body Shop, a topless bar on Sunset Boulevard, but she struggled to support her sister, Cooker and his bandmates on her wages.
“We needed rent, food, drugs, clothes, a fancy car that was mechanically sound and club money,” she reveals, which led to Dixie getting into the industry. Despite her age, Simone got Dixie started dancing topless at a biker bar in San Bernardino.
“She was gorgeous, and the bikers were hooting and hollering like cavemen,” Simone recalls. “She was obviously a big smash, but if the room hadn’t been so hideously loud, I swear you could have heard her knees knocking. She was scared to death of them.”
Dixie danced at the biker bar a few more times before she decided that if she was going to be a topless dancer, she was only going to work at the best clubs in Hollywood. She auditioned and landed a job at the first club she walked into: The Classic Cat.
The Classic Cat
Owned by TV western actor Alan Wells, The Classic Cat was right on Sunset Boulevard. According to Simone, it was “the largest, most luxurious topless club of them all” featuring the most beautiful women in Hollywood.
“When you pulled your car up under the large carport at the front entrance, you were greeted by the valet parking attendants,” Simone writes. “I remember once when I was walking up to the front door, Don Knotts and a date were getting out of his Mustang.”
The Classic Cat was packed almost every night of the week. Everyone from tourists and locals to big celebrities like Adam West, Chevy Chase and “Hogan’s Heroes” actor Bob Crane made sure to stop by the club. Crane was at the club so often that it was replicated during the filming of “Auto Focus,” a 2002 biographical drama covering the events surrounding the actor’s murder.
As someone who was there, the movie producers consulted Simone on the club’s layout and other details used to create the set. She drew them a crude map that includes a side room with pool tables that she refers to as “one of Jim Morrison’s haunts.”
Despite her sister dancing there and visiting regularly, Simone never worked at The Classic Cat.
“I did the amateur topless contests twice a week and hung around the place almost daily,” she writes. “I tried to get Alan Wells to hire me many times, but he never did. I wonder if it had something to do with my flat chest and big nose.”
Despite her “flat chest and big nose,” Simone often won Miss Topless California and the
Miss Classic Cat contests and became a legend on the Sunset Strip.
“I was a dancer at the Body Shop on Sunset Strip and gained notoriety as the first all-nude dancer on the Strip, so I’ve had about one second of fame,” she recalls. “As a popular tourist attraction, I caused a few traffic jams in the area of the Body Shop for a while. I was even asked to be on Johnny Carson’s show, but I declined because of the scandal I would have created for my family back home. Granny would have had a fit!”
Still, her “one second of fame” allowed her to keep the promise she made to her sister back in Illinois. While popping over to a friend’s house one night, Simone walked in to find Gary Lewis sitting on the bed. After excitedly telling him the story of how she got her sister to move to California with her, Lewis told Simone to call Dixie and invite her over. The conversation, however, didn’t go as planned.
“When I got Dixie on the phone I said, ‘Hey, I didn’t break the promise I made to you. Come on over to Leon’s. Gary Lewis wants to meet you,’” Simone recalls. “She never came. By that time she had gotten so hoity-toity with herself that her response was, ‘Nancy, don’t be ridiculous. He’s so corny now. I have no desire to come over there and meet him.’ All I can say is that I did keep my promise.
I was a dancer at the Body Shop on Sunset Strip and gained notoriety as the first all-nude dancer on the Strip, so I’ve had about one second of fame.
— Simone
The Hollywood hangover
Like many in the Hollywood crowd, life became difficult for Simone after the sixties ended. For two decades she struggled with her mental health and frequently got in trouble with the law.
“The twenty years from 1970-1990 were rough,” she recalls. “That was the worst part of the hangover, and there were times when I didn’t think I would make it.” I really had a hard time trying to figure out my purpose for a while and what was ever going to become of me.”
The aftermath of the ‘60s caused turmoil for many who’d flocked to Hollywood in pursuit of their dreams, as they were used to a life where fame was always within arms reach. There was always a party to go to and a celebrity hanging out at the club around the corner. Once that lifestyle started catching up with them, people began dying from drugs and depression in droves.
“What happens when the intensity and magnitude is gone from your life?” Simone asks. “What do you do? How do you fill the gaping holes? How do you go back to Kansas or Illinois and adjust to Midwestern mediocrity after the brilliance of yesterday?”
It may have taken a while, but Simone eventually figured things out. In 1994, she moved to Nashville as an aspiring songwriter where she got a job in a health food store. There, she had access to nutritional books and supplements that helped her to improve her mental health, ultimately ending her extended hangover. She continued to write music after her retirement and passed away in 2016.
Despite the anguish it caused her, it’s clear through her writing that Simone had many fond memories of her time on the Sunset Strip. Her touching tribute to her companions not only sheds light on the importance of this period in history but also flawlessly expresses the weightlessness of presumed immortality we only get to enjoy in our youth. She writes:
“The Hollywood crowd played a distinct role in historical road-paving in the ‘60s. We were first at everything! Our intense behavior and radical thinking created a deluge of brain waves that washed across the nation drenching millions of other young minds in our electrifying incredible music…Still is!
“So who were these mad mortal forces? I’m sure of one thing. We were a distinct rare breed and there will never be another group like us. Youth and fearlessness, brazen curiosity, dreams and aspirations; these things are certain in every generation, but in the ‘60’s, on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, these passions were magnified in the lights, the money, the music and the drugs; amplified in a noble velocity–honorable and glorious, on a day to day basis. Our feet never touched the ground! Living in suspension several feet above the earth was normal to us. Mind-blowing incredible events happened every day.”
For more information, visit www.hollywoodhangover.com.
