Salli Sachse, who appeared in lots of beach party movies and in the counterculture cult classics The Trip and Wild in the Streets as a contract player for American International Pictures in the 1960s, has died. She was 82.
Sachse died Monday of an unknown cause at her home in California City, her niece Catherine Schreiber told The Hollywood Reporter.
Sachse also toured with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young for a couple years as their official photographer.
Discovered on a beach near her home in La Jolla, California, the former model and Miss America contestant showed up in Muscle Beach Party (1964), Bikini Beach (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965), Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966).
In probably her best-known role, Sachse played a woman named Glenn who beds a disillusioned director of TV commercials (Peter Fonda) on LSD in The Trip (1967), directed by Roger Corman and written by Jack Nicholson.
And in Wild in the Streets (1968), starring Christopher Jones as a rock star whose push to allow 14-year-olds to vote in America leads to a worldwide youth revolution, she played the hippie paramour “Hippie Mother.”
Born in San Diego on June 25, 1943, Sally Irene Rogers had attended La Jolla High School, won a Miss La Jolla contest and had competed in the Miss America pageant when she was signed to a seven-year contract with AIP.
She often appeared in the beach party movies with Linda Bent, and with their similar facial features and topknot hairdos, they were known as “Bookend Girls” — meaning they were positioned on the opposite ends of a crowd of surf kids in the movies.
In the 2001 book Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema, she talked to author Tom Lisanti about working with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello on the beach.
The two “were very easygoing and a pleasure to work with, but they weren’t real beach people,” she said. “Frankie was raised in Philadelphia, so I don’t think he ever saw a surfboard in his life! And Annette refused to wear a bikini. She would only wear a one-piece, but I think that had something to do with her contract with Walt Disney.”
When the beach party craze ran its course, Sachse played drag strip groupies, biker chicks and the like in Fireball 500 (1966), Richard Rush’s Thunder Alley (1967) and Devil’s Angels (1967).
“Doing a biker film was very different than doing a beach movie,” she told Lisanti. “All that familiarity and innocence of the beach movies was gone.”
Her film résumé also included Pajama Party (1964), Ski Party (1965), Sergeant Deadhead (1965) and The Million Eyes of Sumuru (1967).
Her last onscreen appearance came on a 1969 episode of CBS’ Mannix. (Neil Young of CSN&Y had appeared with Buffalo Springfield on a 1967 episode of the Mike Connors starrer.)
Sachse was in Hong Kong filming The Million Eyes of Su-Muru when her husband of about three years, folk singer and psychologist Peter Sachse, was killed in July 1966 in a crash of a converted World War II training plane near La Jolla. Also killed was the pilot, Philip Bent, the husband of Linda Bent. Both were 26.
Sachse lived in a commune in Laurel Canyon that sprung up at a house owned by Peter Tork of The Monkees and in the early 1970s had a romance with singer Jackson Browne (she said he wrote “Something Fine” for her). She also lived in Europe and would become a painter.
Survivors also include her sister, Judy, and two other nieces, Lisa and Sydney.
10:40 a.m. An incorrectly labeled photo from Everett Collection was originally used for this obituary. It has been replaced.
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