The big year for Susan Oliver (Charlotte Gercke, 1932-1990) was 1964: in that one year she was the female lead in Jerry Lewis’s The Disorderly Orderly, the Hank Williams bio-pic Your Cheatin’ Heart with George Hamilton, the western Guns of Diablo with Charles Bronson, and also the second female lead in Looking for Love with Connie Francis, as well as the original pilot for Star Trek (which aired in an altered version in two years later), and several other TV episodes. Her other movies include The Gene Krupa Story (1959), Butterfield 8 (1960), Ginger in the Morning (1974) with Sissy Spacek, and Jerry’s comeback movie Hardly Working (1980). Her first starring part was in a juvenile delinquency picture called The Green-Eyed Blonde (1957), the title of which described her to a tee. But if those fine features, pale blue eyes, and blonde mane don’t trigger recognition, surely this incarnation will:
She became the dancing Green Chick in that Star Trek episode, often used in the show’s credit sequence. Most of Oliver’s nearly 130 screen credits were in television. She was also a regular on the soaps Peyton Place and Days of Our Lives for part of their runs, and did dozens of guest shots on other shows from live tv dramas in the ’50s all the way to a final appearance on Freddy’s Nightmares in 1988. She received her dramatic training at Swarthmore, and later at Neighborhood Playhouse.
What tipped the balance for me in giving her own dedicated post here though was her background. Both of her parents were remarkable people. Her father was journalist George Gercke (1904-1958), who’d written for the New York World and the New York Herald Tribune, and later became an important producer and director of newsreels. Her mother was the famous astrologer Ruth Oliver (1910-1988), whose clients included many Hollywood stars and whose books included The Basic Principles of Astrology: A Modern View of an Ancient Science (1962), and Astropsychiatry (1968), but who is best known for having played the Library Ghost (or as I think of her, the only halfway decent ghost) in Ghostbusters (1984).
Susan Oliver’s parents divorced when she was quite young and she divided her time between them. At one point she lived with her father on assignment in Japan. The experience inspired a short film she wrote and directed in 1978 called Cowboysan. (In light of which it’s shame she didn’t come along sooner. She’d have been perfect in the Marie McDonald role in The Geisha Boy!)
One more important thing happened to Oliver in 1964. She began piloting airplanes. In 1967, she became the fourth woman to fly a single-engined aircraft solo across the Atlantic Ocean and the second to do it from New York City. Her flight took her to Denmark. She had hoped to go all the way to Moscow, but authorities in the U.S.S.R. did not permit her to enter the country. She’d taken up the hobby in part to confront her fear of flying. A plane on which she had been traveling made a sudden drop in turbulence, from 35,000 to 6,000 feat. Sounds harrowing! The event occurred on February 3, 1959 which just so happened to be the “Day the Music Died” — when Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper all perished in a plane crash. The combined events understandably kept her on the ground for several years. But she overcame it. In 1966, Oliver was even in a crash herself, but she emerged uninjured, which only served to reinforce her courage. Oliver’s personal tribute to an activity she loved was playing Neta Snook, the lady who taught Amelia Earheart to fly, in the 1976 made-for-tv 1976 bio-pic Amelia Earheart.
Oliver was also one of the first 19 members of the AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women in 1974 (same class as Lee Grant!)
Well do I recall the startling reveal of Vina’s real appearance from that Star Trek episode The Menagerie. It reminds me of the final shot of Olga Baclanova in Freaks. Stolen beauty! The actual Oliver actually retained hers admirably ’til the end. Here she is in an 1985 episode of Murder She Wrote:
But nothing lasts forever. Lung cancer took Susan Oliver five years later at the age of 58.