Remembering Joy Harmon

Joy Harmon died Tuesday at her Los Angeles home. She was 87.

Hers is not a household name.

She was Groucho Marx’s assistant on a 1961 game show, and appeared in classic ’60s-era TV: “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “My Three Sons,” “Gidget,” “Batman,” “Bewitched,” “The Monkees” and “The Odd Couple.”

But those were not her most famous roles.

It was a brief — but memorable — appearance in “Cool Hand Luke” that seared her into the American (male) consciousness.

Harmon was, in the Hollywood Reporter‘s words, “the young woman who provocatively washes a car with lots of soapy water as overheated prisoners in the chain gang look on.”

Still, it’s not that scene — with, of course, Westport’s own Paul Newman in the title role — that earns her an “06880” obituary.

She was also a Staples High School graduate.

Eleven years before that legendary film, her 1956 yearbook writeup hinted at  things to come. (She was just 16 when she graduated. She skipped 2 grades during Westport elementary school.)

Yet her time in the limelight did not last long.

After being a “pin-up girl” in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Harmon retired from acting, married and had a family.

Baking was always a favorite pastime. She started Aunt Joy’s Cakes, and ran a wholesale bakery in Burbank, California.

Joy Harmon, in a screenshot from a video about Aunt Joy’s Cakes.

Westporters recall 1950s Staples graduates Mariette Hartley and Christopher Lloyd, who went on to movie and TV fame. We claim Michael Douglas too, even though he was shipped off to boarding school after Bedford Junior High.

We never remembered Joy Harmon.

Though — as Paul Newman and the other men working on the chain gang quickly realized — it was hard to forget her. (Hat tip: Christian Hunter)

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ENCORE!

So how did Joy Harmon’s most famous role come about?

The Hollywood Reporter says: In an interview with author Tom Lisanti for his 2007 book Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood, Harmon said her agent told her that she should wear a bikini to her “Cool Hand Luke” audition for Newman and director Stuart Rosenberg, so she did.

“I remember Paul Newman said to me, ‘Gosh, you have the bluest eyes!’ she recalled.

‘They just talked to me, and that was it. It was a small part with no lines, but I wanted to work with Newman, so when they offered it to me I accepted.”

In her scene in the 1967 film, Harmon, in a tattered housedress, turns on the portable radio and washes a 1941 DeSoto under a hot sun as if she’s making love to a man. (George Kennedy’s character imagines her name is Lucille.)

Joy Harmon, in “Cool Hand Luke.” (Photo courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter)

“Stuart was very specific and knew exactly what he wanted,” she told Lisanti. “I guess you can tell that by the way the scene comes off — but I didn’t realize it. And I don’t think I even realized it right after I did it.

“There were a lot of things he made me do a certain way — soaping the windows, holding the hose — that had a two-way meaning. He would tell me to look different ways, and we kept shooting it over and over again. I just figured I was washing the car. I’ve always been naïve and innocent. I was acting and not trying to be sexy.

“I never had any inclination that this would be such a memorable role. Except for being in a movie with Paul Newman, I never expected this part to be so notable and get the reaction it did. After seeing it at the premiere, I was a bit embarrassed. Of all the things I’ve done, people know me most from this film.”

(Click here for the full Hollywood Reporter story.)

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