Angelyne is Taking Her Billboard Act to the Sky Above Los Angeles

Hollywood billboard queen Angelyne has spent four decades putting her image exactly where she wants it.

So when Marc Jacobs put a busty blond bombshell bearing a striking resemblance to her on a handbag without asking, she did what any self-respecting icon would do: She lawyered up.

“My attorney contacted them and they paid me,” Angelyne tells The Hollywood Reporter over lunch at a Hollywood Denny’s, a favorite meeting spot where she eats and strategizes several times a week.

She declines to disclose the amount because, she says, she is not supposed to, adding that she also demanded merchandise from the company. According to Angelyne, her lawyer later spoke with Jacobs himself, who said he loved her and blamed the whole thing on “a glitch in the system.” Someone hired to work on the bag “just took liberties with it.”

THR reported in January that the bag, part of a Los Angeles-themed collection, had vanished from the Marc Jacobs website after complaints that its bombshell caricature appropriated Angelyne’s famously protected image without her involvement.

The label did not explain where the bag had gone. Angelyne now supplies the answer: The remaining stock was destroyed.

“They had to burn everything,” she says. Representatives for the fashion company did not respond to a request for comment.

Asked how she protects the persona she has spent decades meticulously constructing, she sounds less like a bubbly celebrity than a one-woman licensing department.

“My name is trademarked,” she says. “All my music is copyrighted, all my art, all my billboards and all my screenplays I’ve written.”

This is not why we are having lunch, at least officially. The occasion is Sky Ad, a new venture from Heads in the Sky co-founder Kevin Prince that turns formations of illuminated drones into temporary billboards.

Heads in the Sky works with studios to mount elaborate drone shows, like the Masters of the Universe display that placed Skeletor hundreds of feet above Los Angeles, breaking a world record for brightness in the process.

Sky Ad is a more modest spinoff that makes drone advertising accessible, using hundreds of drones versus the thousands employed in full-scale productions. When Prince went looking for a face to launch the concept, he landed on the woman who made putting faces on a billboard a viable career path.

“Of course — Angelyne,” he recalls thinking. “We must partner with the original L.A. iconic billboard queen!”

In July, some 300 drones rose beside the 101 freeway and hovered for 15 minutes, forming Angelyne’s face and a telephone number in the night sky. Prince and his crew shut down an overpass to film it. Angelyne arrived in one of her famous pink Corvettes. Fans gathered, motorists honked and callers left messages welcoming her “to the new century.”

Prince says the number received at least 50 voicemails that evening. Angelyne says he paid her $1 million for the endorsement, which Prince immediately denies, and the figure becomes a running joke for the rest of lunch, as well as a reminder that Angelyne’s claims are sometimes enhanced with their own special effects.

Angelyne arrives late, while Prince is still explaining the technology. She is wearing a colorful, skin-tight minidress covered in peace signs and, despite the sweltering heat outside, a hot pink jacket embroidered in chinoiserie. She surveys the table and moves us to another booth to escape the sun’s glare.

The ordering process is involved. She wants cheesecake with strawberries, the strawberry sauce poured over the berries, and an additional bowl containing only strawberry sauce. A big bowl, she specifies, indicating the dimensions with her hands. She will pay for the extra sauce.

“You understand?” she asks the server, who is visibly annoyed but ultimately produces a soup bowl filled with strawberry cheesecake sauce. Throughout our conversation, Angelyne adds ice cubes to the bowl, swirls it with a spoon, and consumes it like gazpacho.

By the time the check arrives, our table contains strawberry cheesecake, strawberry sauce, french fries covered in ketchup and Angelyne, all occupying the same general color family.

“I eat strange,” she concedes.

She approved the drone partnership because she liked Prince’s energy. He’s a tightly wound businessman, but enthusiastic and seemingly up for the wild ride of being Angelyne’s plus-one. He also complied with everything she wanted, which was a lot. Prince spent nearly a year working with Angelyne and her longtime collaborator Scott Hennig on the details.

Angelyne corrects my attempt to identify Hennig as her artistic director. “I direct everything,” she says. “He supplies what I want.”

The final product fulfilled an old prediction. Hugo Maisnik, the billboard entrepreneur who helped finance her original campaigns, used to tell her that one day he would put her “up in the sky with lasers.”

“If he saw that,” she says of her drone incarnation, “he would be ecstatic.”

But Angelyne has not abandoned the old-fashioned medium that made her famous. The city has been awash lately in traditional billboards and wheat paste ads bearing her familiar image, including recent campaigns for Postmates and fashion brand I. AM. GIA.

The fact that she remains so in demand does not surprise her. “People need me,” she says. “Because I inspire people to be who they are.”

When I ask which younger pop stars admire her, she says she does not pay much attention to other celebrities. She has never heard of Charli XCX. “All my mental real estate is focused on me,” she explains.

This does not mean she lacks celebrity memories. She met Madonna in the mid-1980s at Revolver, the West Hollywood gay bar that, remarkably, is still there and drawing weekend crowds. Angelyne was dancing on the bar, Boy George came over to see her, and Madonna was downstairs “chewing gum,” she says, squinting her eyes and swirling her famous pink pout.

She has owned 12 Corvettes and is currently “down to four.” One, a 2008 model, appeared with her at the beginning of The Disaster Artist. She has never watched the movie. “I never see movies I’m in,” she explains, “because then I can act like a dumb blonde and go, ‘What’s going on?'”

The remaining cars are from the C7 generation. She buys them from a dealer in Westlake, then begins the more important work of making them hers. Pink, I learn, is not merely a favorite color but a controlled substance. For 25 years, that work has gone through Andre’s Auto Body and Paint in North Hollywood, which Angelyne notes “looks like a castle.”

Master color mixer Ruben Hernandez is the man who helped Angelyne develop a proprietary shade called Heroine Pink. The color has evolved over the years from an original lipstick match into a secret mixture of hot pink, metallic pigment and glitter. Angelyne tells me Hernandez has worked on hundreds of films and mixed the green used for the Hulk.

The cars are rolling extensions of the trademark. Spotting one in traffic is considered good luck by many Angelenos, a theory Angelyne has heard before and does not dispute. She is already the honorary mayor of West Hollywood and possesses a key to the city. She says this allows her to park anywhere. Anywhere? Even at a red curb? “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.

She may soon use the car for a more civic purpose. Angelyne says people working with Nithya Raman, who is challenging Mayor Karen Bass in the November runoff, have approached her about driving Raman around Los Angeles and showing her the city. (Raman’s campaign had no comment.) Angelyne has not yet agreed.

“I haven’t met her, and I want to meet her first before I take her for a ride throughout L.A.,” she says. If the meeting goes well, Angelyne plans to pitch Raman on a campaign advertisement in the sky. She is not endorsing anyone yet. Bass, she notes, has never met her.

There is history between Angelyne and this publication. In 2017, THR writer Gary Baum published an investigation into the carefully guarded identity and family history behind her public persona.

The story later inspired Peacock’s 2022 limited series Angelyne, starring Emmy Rossum. Angelyne, the authentic one rather than the TV facsimile, still rejects both the account and the series built from it.

“They made everything up,” she says. “They had to do that to make the film salacious.”

She would prefer that audiences watch her own version. Angelyne says she has completed a self-produced movie that is locked and awaiting final sound and color work. She describes it not as a documentary but as a “fantasy pseudo-document,” combining pieces of her life with invention.

“Oh, like Larry David!” I respond.

“Who?” she replies.

In any case, the distinction is perfectly clear to her, which is what matters. Prince has agreed to put another Angelyne display in the sky when the film premieres, possibly near the Chinese Theatre.

“When you see my movie, you’ll see who I really am,” she says.

She is her own stylist. Every item of clothing she owns, she says, is made for her. She has no clothing line because she is busy with everything else. She does not want an Angelyne doll. (“I don’t want people playing with me.”) Nor does she covet a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (She doesn’t want people stepping on her name.)

“I’m not a publicity whore,” she explains. “I’m seriously specific.”

The specificity extends to her merchandising operation. Angelyne decides I need a T-shirt. She also recommends a $50 metal key chain, which she says will magnetize good luck and perhaps even a house into my life.

Asked to determine my T-shirt size by sight, she settles on medium, then adds: “Like a sex god.” She asks my astrological sign, learns that I am a Leo and gives the answer her approval. She even remembers a Silver Lake birthday party where we crossed paths a decade earlier, or at least she remembers the transaction. The host, a drag queen named Squeaky Blonde, guaranteed her that if she showed up, everyone there would buy one of her T-shirts.

“Did you buy a T-shirt?” she asks.

I had not. This oversight, at least, will now be corrected.

The billboards made Angelyne famous for being famous when that phrase was still an insult. She remembers appearing on A Current Affair with Cindy Adams, who was pleasant until the camera came on and demanded to know just who Angelyne thought she was.

These days, Angelyne considers “famous for being famous” an honor. “I took the heat for everybody,” she says.

Now self-invention is a business model available to anyone with a phone and sufficient self-regard. The difference, she adds, is that today’s TikTok personalities are not icons. She’s right.

Outside, her Corvette is waiting, but with the temperature at 100 degrees, she decides I do not need the full parking-lot merchandise experience today. I take the shirt. She takes the sauce. She throws on a pink veil and poses for a few photos. Then everyone leaves with what they came for.