Janis Paige – From Miss Damsite to Hollywood Icon
Janis Paige, center, with Mrs. Charles McNary and Oregon Gov. Earl Snell. Source: Army Corps of Engineers
From McNary Dam to the #MeToo Movement, a Hollywood Icon Endures
Hollywood came to celebrate the groundbreaking of McNary Dam in 1947.
In April 1947 Janis Paige was crowned “Miss Damsite” and appeared at the ground-breaking ceremony for the dam on the Columbia River at Umatilla, alongside Oregon Gov. Earl Snell and Cornelia Morton McNary, Sen. Charles McNary’s widow.
In 1941, Congress approved dam construction and a groundbreaking followed in April 1947. Consistent with tradition, “People demanded that this event have its queen,” the McNary Dam employee newsletter reported. Janis Paige, a Tacoma native who had become a Warner Bros. screen star known as the Contour Queen for her shapely form, had received so many honorary titles she barely remembered them all. “But I’m sure I’ve never been called anything quite so startling as ‘Miss Damsite,’” she said.
Born Donna Mae Tjaden in Tacoma in 1922, Paige began singing at amateur talent shows at age 5.
She didn’t intend to hit the Hollywood screens. Instead, as she recounted in a column for The Hollywood Reporter, she was studying opera. After singing an aria for the World War II armed forces at the Hollywood Canteen, a talent scout sought her out.
The next day she signed a contract, and two days later was filming “Bathing Beauty” for MGM. She co-starred in “Romance on the High Seas” (1948), in which Doris Day made her movie debut.
Paige appeared in a 1951 Broadway hit, “Remains to Be Seen,” co-starring Jackie Cooper. Stardom came in 1954 with her role as Babe in the musical “The Pajama Game.”
Other films to her credit include “Her Kind of Man,” “Of Human Bondage,” “Two Guys from Milwaukee,” “Love and Learn,” “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” and 20 more. Her final film was “Natural Causes” in 1994.
Janis Paige and Squeakie, 1960. Source: Wikipedia.
Although she started with MGM, many of her movies – westerns, musicals and dramas – were for Warner Bros.
During her television career, spanning from 1949 to 2001, she appeared more than 70 shows, including high-profile guest spots in the 1970s sitcoms “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “All in the Family” and “Eight Is Enough.”
Paige was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard on Feb. 9, 1960.
In a 2017 interview with The Miami Herald, Paige said she “wasn’t jealous of anybody. I just felt like the luckiest kid in the world to be there. I never had those feelings. Trust me, I was too busy to worry about it.”
When the “Me Too” movement gained traction in 2017 exposing sexual harassment and assault, Paige added her voice to the millions speaking out about their experiences.
In her October 2017 essay in The Hollywood Reporter, Paige came public about the sexual harassment she suffered as a young actress in Hollywood. She wrote, “As a child and coming from a small town, I’d been taught nothing about life, about being a woman or about the future relationships I would have with the men I would ultimately meet.”
She ended her account with these words:
“Maybe there’s a special place in hell for the Alfred Bloomingdales or Harvey Weinsteins of the world and for those who aid and then deny their grossly demented behavior. At 95, time is not on my side, and neither is silence. I simply want to add my name and say, ‘Me too.’ ”
Miss Damsite died on June 2, 2024, at her home in Los Angeles. She was 101.
