Best Web Site Devoted To A Local Celebrity

www.acquanetta.com

Comments (0) Thursday, Sep 20 2001

Acquanetta!

During the 1950s and '60s, the former B-movie queen was the most exotic thing Phoenix had to offer, a pre-Cher glamazon equally at home in the society pages or on local television, where she modeled wigs and read poetry during commercial breaks on the Late Late Show sponsored by her car dealer husband. And if you were lucky, you spotted her in the flesh, tooling around town in a pink Lincoln Continental.

Although the female star of Tarzan and the Leopard Woman has disappeared from the public eye in recent years, her legacy lives on in this fan site that includes her poetry, a photo gallery, a filmography and even a multiple-choice biography fashioned from the many conflicting stories of the "Venezuelan Volcano"'s early years. (Was she an Arapaho Indian born Burnuacquanetta -- or was she actually Mildred Davenport of Ozone, Wyoming? And did she really once attend West Virginia State College for Negroes?)

Operated by an admirer identified only as "Captive Wild Fan" -- an allusion to the 1943 flick Captive Wild Women, wherein Acqua portrays a sex-crazed native who'd formerly been an orangutan -- this is one site that will make any Acqua aficionado go ape.