Okay, it turns out that the website which proclaimed Judy Carne's death a hoax was a site that sometimes runs phony stories just to see how many other sites repeat them. Here's what I posted last night…
It is just not turning out to be a good year for women I had crushes on back in the sixties. Judy Carne died last Thursday in Northampton in the U.K. She was 76 and had been hospitalized for pneumonia.
I apparently need to explain to some people what constitutes a "crush." It's not in most cases a basic sexual desire for a certain object of lust; more like a schoolboy fascination for someone you find attractive…and usually someone unattainable, viewed from a distance. I never got any nearer to Judy Carne than watching a Laugh-In taping from the bleachers — and before, when I first got my little interest in her, I never imagined I'd get even that close.
For about eight months starting in the summer of 1970, I was able to roam the halls of NBC Burbank studios and watch folks like Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, Dean Martin and Flip Wilson rehearse or tape their shows. It now seems like an unworldly fantasy existence but I still somewhere have one of Mr. Hope's cue cards to prove it.
Laugh-In taped in Studio 3 and I'd drop in and watch whatever they were doing at that moment. One time, happily for me, it was Judy Carne doing "sock-it-to-me" bits. She had left the show by this point but was back to guest star.
I always thought she was rather special — physically attractive (obviously) but also a good comedienne, singer and dancer. At the taping, I learned she was also pretty damn expert at cussing and telling dirty jokes. And that was about all the insight I got.
I was not the only person who thought she was talented. In the sixties, she was a regular on no less than four TV series on America TV: Two on CBS (Fair Exchange, The Baileys of Balboa), one on ABC (Love on a Rooftop) and one on NBC (Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In). She was also in a couple of pilots that didn't sell, plus she guest-starred on dozens of programs. That's an amazing career just in that one decade.
After about the mid-seventies, she didn't work as much and there were stories about her involvement with drugs and what the tabloids sometimes call "sexual debauchery." She was also in one or two ghastly automobile accidents and had some legal probems. I have no idea if the lack of work was a result of the mess she seemed to be making of her life or the cause of it. All I know is it seemed like a very troubled life from there on and we didn't see much of her as a performer after then. Her autobiography was pretty sad up until the end when she wrote, with a strong suggestion of fingers crossed, that she had put it all behind her.
I hope she did. At least on my TV screen and my one hour or so watching her tape Laugh-In, I really liked her.