ONE HUNDRED PAGES INTO THIS BOOK, and ten minutes into talking to Linda on the phone, the urge is heavy to focus entirely on her salacious stories of late-70s-early-80s Hollywood celebrity and debauchery. The fancy cars. The rock stars. Movie stars. Parties. Drugs. Booze. Orgies. The guardian angels. The backstage passes and front row seats. Secret sex flings in the Playboy Mansion grotto. LSD in Aculpoco. Vials of cocaine being passed around in Aspen, Colorado. Opulent and dirty back rooms of l970s ‘Showbiz’ and the things that happen in those shag-carpeted recessed seating areas of rock star record producers’ million-dollar mansions…
It’s all in there.
But, so is going solo to auditions from listings she found in the pages of Variety. Landing gigs with The Brady Bunch and The Smothers Brothers. Sonny & Cher. A holiday special with the cast from Star Wars. The movie Grease… Not to mention doing the hand-jive with a nervous young child actor named Scott Baio on the hood of a 1950s hot rod, on set with the Bay City Rollers. You can even see a cameo of a 20-something-year-old Linda in the nude on screen in the late-70s campy cult classic ‘The First Nudie Musical.’ It’s out there streaming on the internet. (But you have to know which one is her.)
Charmingly, in my mind, almost none of Linda’s wild life story can be found online. But it’s all laid out in the memoir in the kind of bare, brutal, humorous honesty that comes with looking back over the decades of one’s life. It almost reads like a diary.
“I go from a tap-dancing vagina and a teenage wookie to a swimming nun. That’s entertainment, right?” she quips in the book, in a chapter about an organized swim routine she worked for a Mel Brooks’ comedy.
After high school, Linda left Bremerton on scholarship to a performing arts school in San Diego and landed in 1970s Hollywood. Later in life, she would come back and teach dance in Seattle for decades. Now she said she won’t come back unless she’s wearing a disguise, she laughs.
The 300-some page book focuses primarily on the time spent during her 20s in show business building up to Broadway, narrated by her intimate relationships with rock star lovers over those years. But every salacious gossip story is followed by an incredibly detailed and sober account of the next audition, the next job or the next move from some-50 years ago. It almost feels like a blue collar kind of Hollywood. Always onto the next gig.
Linda never really intended to write a book, she said. She’s on speaker phone from her home in Sacramento, living retired life with her husband. She’s in the middle of the task of watching more than 300-hours of movies and TV shows for a film awards panel she’s a part of. She’s already been mentioned in five other people’s books, she says. Writing her story down was something her husband encouraged her to do. She was guided by her longtime mentor Bruce Kimmel, who cast her in ‘The First Nudie Musical’ all those years ago. She never wanted to write a book and now she knows why, she laughs. “To be honest, most of my stories bore me, because I know them all,” she says bluntly. “I just went out and lived this full experience.” If it weren’t Hollywood, she might have been an archaeologist in Egypt with a whole different set of stories…
SMOKESTACK: SO I JUST READ FROM GROWING UP IN BREMERTON TO ROCK STAR AL KOOPER’S HOUSE IN 1970s LA IN THE BOOK, AND, WOW, SOUNDS LIKE A HELL OF A CHILDHOOD… LINDA HOXIT: I don’t know about my childhood, it was pretty wholesome and kind of normal… I was fortunate enough to have good teachers in Bremerton, very, very fortunate. And then, I was also fortunate enough to have grandparents. My dad had PTSD and my mom was bi-polar, so we lived with my grandparents. And they had resources for us to do things… But, after awhile, I started getting scholarships and started to work for my dance teacher too… So I was able to provide myself with a lot of my education.
AND GOING TO SAN FRANCISCO DURING THE SUMMER OF LOVE? WHILE YOU WERE IN HIGH SCHOOL? Oh yeah… ha![Linda laughs, kind of caught off guard.]
THAT WAS THE LATE-60s CORRECT? 1967/1968? [Linda’s still laughing.] Oh yeah, running around Haight Ashbury with friends who were smoking weed, you know. They sent me home with a baggie full of weed from San Francisco… Yeah, man. I mean, I was very lucky to do that because that started my whole young hippie experience, kind of…
AND ALSO YOUR YOUNG PERFORMING ARTS EXPERIENCE? DID YOU MAKE SOME CONTACTS IN THOSE SUMMERS THAT WERE THERE THROUGHOUT YOUR LIFE? No. But they gave me extra training. (San Francisco) was only ballet, you know, and I didn’t become a ballet dancer. But if you’re a well-trained dancer, the basis of everything is ballet. Any kind of dancing almost. Except maybe hip hop you could get away with not doing ballet… But, anyway, then I went to Joffrey (Ballet School), which is even more impressive, for two summers in Tacoma at PLU. Those were scholarship too. If you transferred the monetary value of those scholarships to today, it would probably be like 50 to 100 thousand dollars’ worth. And then, I got a scholarship to this marvelous performing arts college in San Diego. The people who ran it, all the Deans, were all in movies in the past and they could tell you what to do. So it was just this collision course to becoming a professional, really. And even if I didn’t have all that, you have to train. At least for musical theater or dancing/singing, to get into musicals on a professional level, professional, you have to have some kind of bachelor fine arts degree from a good college…
JUST TO GET IN THE DOOR, I’D IMAGINE? Yeah, I was really fortunate to have all that. Because my mom was a single mom. She was bi-polar. My dad was who-knows-where for a long time, I didn’t even know where he was. He had PTSD from the Korean War so we didn’t have a lot of resources. So I had to, you know, help. But I think that that’s a good thing. Because you have to really work hard. You know when everybody else was out partying… well, I guess not everybody else… I mean… I partied. Oh god, of course I partied…
HA! THERE’S SOME STORIES IN HERE… BUT IT ALSO SOUNDS LIKE YOU WORKED HARD. YOU SAID YES TO A LOT OF THINGS. EVEN SCARY THINGS. IT FEELS LIKE YOU PUT YOURSELF IN PLACES FOR SUCCESS BY SAYING YES TO THOSE OPPORTUNITIES? Well, I had to if I wanted to work, you know? And I did. I wanted to make that my career. I was thinking of archaeology at first because I really loved Egypt. And I’ve been to Egypt now, twice. But back then, you couldn’t dig Egypt anymore because the Egyptian government got upset at everybody abusing their artifacts. They closed it down for a long time. And so, then I thought, well, I like dancing…
AND YOU WERE GOOD AT IT, WHEN DID YOU START DANCING? SOUNDS LIKE YOU HAD A PRETTY IMPACTFUL TEACHER BACK THEN. WHAT WAS YOUR ENTRY INTO THE DANCE WORLD LIKE? It was when I was four years old. It’s got that picture of me in the front of the book. My grandmother and mother wanted me to be the next Shirley Temple, you know. A lot of moms did back then, and grandmas. So, I was four years old, and it was just once a week was all because you don’t have the focus to do more than that as a little kid. I was in a tap, ballet, acrobatic class…I did that for two years, and then I dropped out. But the teacher, Margie Speck, who was the best in the county, moved two blocks away from me. So then, I could trek myself back and forth from the dance studio to my house. I didn’t have to depend on the parents or grandparents or anybody. And that was another very fortuitous and fortunate thing for me, because I could do it on my own and not have to bug them… I started putting in a lot of time to dancing. Then I switched up in my senior year in high school. I switched to the Olympic College drama program. And I can’t say enough about Bill Harvey. We were all, whether any of us became professional actors or not, he was just so… He would just do so much. He was so knowledgeable about everything. And so literate. He could spoon feed us Shakespeare, which he did when I was the lead in his full length Shakespeare play at 18 years old. I was Ariel (The Tempest). I mean, he was just… He was the best acting coach I ever had. And I had many in Hollywood.”
ORDER LINDA’S BOOK THRU YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE at Ballast Book Co, Bremerton, Salmonberry Books, Port Orchard or Barnes & Noble Silverdale… Or online thru Amazon & Kindle
