text: Je vous parle d'#angelyne sur #konbini aujourd'hui… A post shared by violaine schutz (@violaineschutz) on Aug 3, 2017 at 8:50am PDT 
   
   If you visited Los Angeles in the mid-1980s through the early 2000s, you’ve seen her. 
   
   Billboards towered over the city’s palm trees and wide-lane highways showing a blonde, buxom woman, generally clad in pink and often reclining on a red corvette. Sometimes they displayed all of her, sometimes just her heavily powdered face, sometimes just her bust, straining against a lacy bra. Near these photos was a phone number, the word “management” in small print, and a signature in looping cursive: Angelyne. 
   
   As NPR put it, she was the self-described “blonde bombshell billboard princess.” 
   
   But that was a pseudonym. Everyone knew what she looked like, but no one knew who she was. 
   
   Until this week, when journalist Gary Baum, reporting with a mixture of public documents and family testimony, published a report in the Hollywood Reporter claiming to have unearthed her true identity. 
   
   Angelyne’s birth name is Ronia Tamar Goldberg, later Americanized to Renee Tami Goldberg, according to Baum, who said she was born in Poland in 1950 to Polish Jews who met in the Chmielnik ghetto during World War II and later settled in Los Angeles. 
   
   Angelyne’s spokesman, Scott Henning, denied the accuracy of Baum’s report, telling him: “This stuff comes up every few years — it seems to get more and more ridiculous. My favorite one of all was this 300-pound black woman who claimed to be her mother. ‘I’m your long-lost brother,’ ‘your twin sister.’ Chalk it up to life in Hollywood. I’ve never heard of ‘Renee Goldberg.’ It’s laughable; it’s outrageous.” 
   
   But Baum insists that he has solved the decades-old Hollywood mystery of Angelyne’s identity. 
   
   The first Angelyne billboard went up in the early 1980s. She just appeared. And like that, through sheer force of will, she became famous around town. 
   
   She was “famous for being famous,” according to the Hollywood Reporter, making her, as the New York Times noted, “a forerunner to Paris Hilton.” 
   
   Famous in Hollywood, that is. 
   
   “She’s a cult figure in Hollywood,” B. Akerlund told the Hollywood Reporter. “When you ask New Yorkers, ‘Do you know Angelyne?’ they don’t. But here, she’s a legend.” 
   
   Eventually, the real Angelyne — still buxom and proud of it, still playing the role of pinup seductress — began zooming around the Hollywood Hills in a pink Corvette. 
   
   But her identity remained unknown. She was both famous and mysterious at once. As L.A. Weekly put it, “Angelyne is the stuff of Hollywood legend. Everyone knows about her and yet doesn’t.” 
   
   Novelist Ajay Sahgal wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 1995, “I have lived in Los Angeles all my life, I have seen Angelyne billboards almost every day for 10 years and I have no idea who this woman is.” 
   
   His readers had their own opinions. One wrote in a letter to the editor, “When my 5-year-old son saw an Angelyne billboard across the street from his nursery school, he summed up her essence by saying: ‘Mommy, that lady needs a bigger bra.’ Angelyne’s people should either locate her billboards to places with an appropriate audience or put some clothes on her.” 
   
   Another offered an answer to Sahgal’s question: “Angelyne is simply a self-made, typically-L.A. character seeking desperately to be a celebrity.” 
   
   That letter wasn’t incorrect. What was missed, though, was how aware of that desperation Angelyne was. 
   
   As she told Baum in 2015, perhaps falsely, “I lost my parents at a young age, and because of that I sought the attention of the world through my tricks. I said, ‘Well, I’m going to get the love of the world.’” 
   
   Those tricks included more than just the billboards, though at one point she had “about 200” of them around town, her spokesman, Hennig, told the Los Angeles Times, adding, “And we have about 100 more bus-shelter ads going up. We have, in the past, had our billboards up in New York, Germany, England. There have been discussions about putting them up in Japan. She has a very large overseas following.” 
   
   Another “trick” was her run for mayor of Hollywood in 2008, after previous mayor Johnny Grant died. The mayor’s role is basically honorary. 
   
   But she went for it with striking aplomb, one of 135 candidates. She came in 28th. 
   
   “I’ve been called the saving grace of Hollywood, the muse of Los Angeles, the inspiration of glamour,” Angelyne, wearing a short miniskirt, told NPR before the election. “If it’s somebody who isn’t glamorous, who cares? But it’s important for me to be in the position. Me, me, me, Angelyne, ’cause I’m so much a part of Hollywood. It just needs to be me. That’s it. There’s nothing else to say. Boom!” 
   
   Her self-created fame led to parts in movies like “Earth Girls Are Easy” and “Dangerous Love.” None of her film roles were large — she has been credited as Busty Lady, Gas Girl and Blonde — but they were roles nonetheless. She also recorded at least four records, according to the Los Angeles Times. 
   
   Perhaps her most lucrative business offerings were her personal appearances and her likeness, which she kept tight, taut and in tune with the help of George Semel, the plastic surgeon known for working on Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Of him, Angelyne once said, “I felt like I was working with an artistic collaborator. Fillers are amazing.” 
   
   The money flowed in. 
   
   She was hired to make appearances at high-profile events, such as the birthday party of David Fincher, the director most recently known for “The Social Network” and “Gone Girl.” She auctioned off rides in the pink Corvette. She sold T-shirts bearing her picture, L.A. Weekly reported. She licensed images of her face for $10,000 a pop, according to the Hollywood Reporter. 
   
   Through it all, she was credited merely as Angelyne. “Like Banksy, there are countless theories as to her true identity, but no concrete proof,” wrote the A.V. Club. 
   
   When Baum asked about her past in 2015, she said, “I want to save it for my memoirs — that’s my right for my own financial interest.” 
   
   Baum suggested Angelyne thought revealing her name or her origin would “detract from her carefully burnished glamour.” What made her famous, in other words, was that very mystery. 
   
   Her profile faded somewhat in recent years, even in Tinseltown. All stars burn out sometime. But she still makes appearances, still drives around in her pink Corvette, still plays coy with the media. 
   
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   Sean Hannity asked people to bash Jake Tapper on Twitter. Most did just the opposite. ||||| Way before Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, the enigmatic blonde bombshell was famous for being famous, perpetually driving the streets of Hollywood in that pink Corvette. But her true identity has remained secret all these years … until now. 
   
   "Would you be interested in a story on Angelyne's true identity?" the man wrote last fall under a pseudonym, referring to the enigmatic L.A. billboard diva who has been a pop culture icon of self-creation and self-marketing since the early 1980s — and is now regarded as a forerunner to Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and every personal-brand hustler on social media. "I have many details on her life — all well documented — from when her parents met to early adulthood. It's very different from her public, concocted story — and more interesting." 
   
   Angelyne is one of the vanishingly few contemporary public figures whose background has remained shrouded in mystery, along with the conceptual artist Banksy, Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto and aircraft hijacker D.B. Cooper. The man, who claimed to work in an undefined role for the federal government, said he was a hobbyist genealogist, occasionally taking on paid assignments in the field as an amusing side gig. A few years earlier, he'd decided it'd be fun to set himself the challenge of cracking Angelyne's case. "And I did," he explained. 
   
   Later, at the 101 Coffee Shop in Hollywood, the genealogist — who looks like Michael Kelly's contained political operative Doug Stamper from House of Cards — unfurled an elaborate story of Angelyne's past, based on material he contended he'd enterprisingly pulled and synthesized from a global network of public databases. He laid down a folded printout of a row of yearbook photos. 
   
   "This one," he said, pointing at a 1967 Monroe Senior High School sophomore from the San Fernando Valley, third from right, "is Angelyne." A schoolgirl with hooded eyes and long center-parted locks, in a button-down white shirt and tie, stared out across half a century. "Also known as Renee Goldberg." 
   
   The Hollywood Reporter has since independently confirmed this is Angelyne's real identity with public records and family members. Far from the archetypal transplant-with-a-dream, as she has tacitly long alluded, she's the locally raised daughter of Holocaust survivors, a Jew who has found refuge in shiksa drag. It's a fascinating, only-in-L.A. story of identity, history and a symbiotic yearning both to be forgotten and to be famous. 
   
   ••• 
   
   The yearbook photo was no smoking gun. By her own cosmetic surgery confessions, Angelyne has had quite a bit of work done — and if the genealogist was right, that high school junior is now 66 years old. 
   
   Copies of immigration, marriage and death records pointed to a cloaked prehistory of Renee Tami Goldberg (originally Ronia Tamar Goldberg), which seems to reveal the trauma Angelyne had both emerged and escaped from. She was born in Poland on Oct. 2, 1950, the daughter of Polish Jews who'd met in the Chmielnik ghetto during World War II — they were among 500 to survive out of a population of 13,000, the rest sent to death at Treblinka. According to the documentation — obtained from the International Tracing Service, established by the Red Cross as an archive of Nazi crimes — her parents, Hendrik (aka Heniek or Henryk) Goldberg and Bronia (aka Bronis) Zernicka, endured unimaginable horrors at a series of concentration camps, first together at Skarzysko, where prisoners' main job was to make munitions, and then apart at the 20th century's most infamous hellscapes, including Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. 
   
   Bronia later submitted paperwork to Yad Vashem indicating she'd lost more than 40 relatives in the Holocaust, including her father, three brothers and a sister. Shortly after liberation, she and Hendrik married in the Foehrenwald displaced persons camp in Germany. They were eventually repatriated to Poland, which remained hostile to Jews after World War II. So after Goldberg's birth, the family immigrated to Israel, remaining in an ultra-orthodox community of Hasidic Jews called Bnei Brak, east of Tel Aviv, until 1959. (A younger sister, Annette, was born in 1952.) 
   
   They boarded a ship leaving Haifa for New York and settled in L.A.'s Fairfax District. Her father worked as a tool-and-die mechanic. Then, in 1965, her 44-year-old mother died of cancer. Goldberg was 14. 
   
   The next year Hendrik (now Henry) remarried another Holocaust survivor, a seamstress divorcee named Deborah, and Goldberg acquired a younger stepsister, Norma. She and her father moved from the Westside to Panorama City, deep in the San Fernando Valley, where she'd begin high school and Henry and Deborah would run a strip-mall liquor store in nearby Van Nuys. She'd have a brief marriage to the son of a Beverly Hills executive, living in Hollywood with him. Goldberg's paper trail ends with their divorce in 1969. 
   
   ••• 
   
   Angelyne had single-handedly created and then inhabited a modern myth of L.A.: the platinum blond bombshell in the bright pink Corvette forever circumnavigating the city, seeking to enchant by dint of her sheer superficial glamour. It had the aesthetic power and emotional resonance of genuine performance art, Marina Abramovic by way of John Waters, particularly as she kept on rambling around the city over the decades while she aged. 
   
   I'd written a profile about Angelyne for THR in 2015. She attempted to micromanage the terms of our time together in sharp-elbowed fashion before agreeing to let me ride in her Stingray 1LT. Once inside, reality quickly shone through her constructed shallow facade: a keen intelligence, a striking vulnerability. Also something else, undefinable but perceptibly troubled, even haunted. 
   
   When I asked about her family and her past, she described herself as an only child and an orphan. "I lost my parents at a young age," she said, "and because of that, I sought the attention of the world through my tricks. I said, 'Well, I'm going to get the love of the world.' " When I pushed for more, she shut me down. "It's just a long story," she said, the cartoonishly girly lilt of her voice gone flat. "I don't want to get into it. I made my way here." 
   
   Angelyne was similarly mum or vague when I inquired about other things that might have forged her, from religion ("I've tried them all — Jewish, Catholic, Hindu: too many dogmas") to her place of origin. Some internet stories suggest that she is from Idaho, but she wouldn't talk about where she grew up. A distant hometown perfectly fit her narrative of an American small-town girl coming to L.A. to fulfill a dream. (I searched Idaho public records and could find no indication of someone named Angelyne, Angelyne Lyne or Angelyne Lynne — all names that have appeared on her business filings.) 
   
   I came away with an understanding of how she'd built and perpetuated the Angelyne phenomenon — including the business by which she made a living: lucratively marked-up and vigorously hawked merchandise sales out of her trunk, plus licensing and appearance fees. (Of course the Kardashians and other proteges have exponentially scaled and digitized the model.) But I'd fallen short in penetrating who she really is, why she'd dedicated her life to transforming herself into what she described to me as a "Rorschach test in pink" — a figure who simultaneously elects to commute among us and hold herself apart, in her formulation, "on top of a pink cloud on top of a pink mountain." 
   
   ••• 
   
   Jews had assimilated in the postwar period. Surnames Anglicized, religious observance ebbed, kosher compliance curtailed — both to better conform to their American homeland and, often, as a conscious or unconscious departure from the trauma of their European pasts. They'd arrived and imagined themselves anew. 
   
   Yet Goldberg becoming Angelyne: That would be a feat far more radical, a leap far more extreme, out of a grim and drab past into a realm of complete fantasy. How fitting it would be for such an act to take place amid the New World shtetl of Hollywood, defined by metamorphosis and make-believe. 
   
   To many Jews, Angelyne reads distinctly gentile, the quintessential shiksa, whether by accident or intent. Her taste and status cues exist in a goyish Bermuda Triangle somewhere between Dolly Parton, Loni Anderson and Traci Lords. 
   
   But once I floated the idea of Goldberg as Angelyne to friends and colleagues who had been fascinated by her over the years and occasionally had had their own fleeting curbside run-ins, the surprisingly unsurprised reaction (particularly from the Jewish ones) was consensus and instantaneous: That makes sense. The stereotypical old-school shmatte-selling, the hardnosed negotiations, the pure all-purpose chutzpah — "I've known that woman," one happily told me, as if welcoming home a long-lost relative, "all my life." 
   
   As thorough as the genealogist had been in piecing together Goldberg's early life, he'd missed an easily Google-able recent connection between Angelyne and her alleged true identity. Late last year, I saw that The Fillmore Gazette, a community newspaper of a small town 60 miles northwest of L.A. in Ventura County, had published online a legal notice on April 28, 2016, that Renee Goldberg had petitioned to change her name to Angelyne Llyne at Ventura Superior Court. (After short-selling her Malibu condo in 2010, she now lives in the Ventura County area of Thousand Oaks.) 
   
   If the genealogist's claim is to be believed, Goldberg recently had become eligible to collect Social Security benefits. (It is unknown whether Angelyne has applied for such benefits under any name.) While the Social Security Administration had previously not required applicants to document proof, the policy changed in 2005 after Congress took action in response to terror concerns. 
   
   I drove to the Ventura County courthouse to get the document. She claimed to have been born on Jan. 26, 1962 (a dozen years after the genealogist's records indicate), and to be from the statistically gentile Louisville, Kentucky. As for the reason for the name change, she states on the form, "This is my stage name that I use and have used since 1978." 
   
   Goldberg also listed a residential address that was 2 miles away. When I headed over, I discovered it was a commercial showroom for personalized trophies, plaques, gavels, medallions and clocks called Custom Awards & Engraving. I decided to refrain from asking owners Jerry and Linda Mendelsohn about Angelyne for the time being. 
   
   ••• 
   
   Scott Hennig, a 60-year-old portrait illustrator from Idaho, has been Angelyne's assistant, close friend and gatekeeper since the late 1980s. We'd spoken many times but always over the phone. He'd declined to meet when I requested an interview while profiling Angelyne two years ago, stating he preferred to remain "behind the scenes." I told him that a self-described genealogist had come forward with documentation attesting to the fact that Angelyne was in fact Renee Goldberg. 
   
   Hennig scoffed. "This stuff comes up every few years — it seems to get more and more ridiculous," he says. "My favorite one of all was this 300-pound black woman who claimed to be her mother. 'I'm your long-lost brother,' 'your twin sister.' Chalk it up to life in Hollywood. I've never heard of 'Renee Goldberg.' It's laughable, it's outrageous." And as for the genealogist? "This guy needs to get a life. It's almost like ..." He thought for a moment. "Like stalker stuff, it really is. It's kind of creepy. It's weird." 
   
   I brought up the name-change document connecting Renee Goldberg to Angelyne, and told him I would be happy to send over some of the genealogist's material for her review. "I'm not saying the paperwork isn't legitimate," he responded, growing testy. "I'm saying it ain't her. Look, I get emails from another Scott Hennig, a karate expert in Texas. People think that's me. There are a lot of girls out there named Angelyne. I don't know what to tell you. And who knows how legitimate this old stuff is, going back to World War II?" 
   
   Hennig went on, wondering, "And who's this guy? He's poking into Angelyne's business — why don't we get his name?" I put that question to the genealogist soon afterward, who'd communicated with me under the pseudonym Ed Thompson. 
   
   "There's a difference between her and me — and she and most people," he reasoned by phone. "She's a celebrity, and beyond that, she forfeited any claim of privacy when she ran, as a joke or a stunt or not, for governor of California" during the recall race that Arnold Schwarzenegger won in 2003. "As for me," he went on, explaining he had a government job that included a top-secret clearance, "reputation is fairly important, and the controversy that might be involved in this situation is not part of that culture. There's a minute possibility that surreptitious activity — not illegal but surreptitious — could reflect badly on a top-secret clearance." 
   
   I sent Hennig the name-change document and the yearbook photos the day after we spoke. Subsequent efforts by phone and email to discuss those materials with him — or, better yet, Angelyne — were repeatedly dodged. 
   
   ••• 
   
   On a rainy Tuesday evening nearly two weeks later, I was reporting on another story at a Sunset Strip tattoo shop when I spotted Angelyne's new Pepto Bismol-hued Corvette Z06 gleaming under a street light across the street. It was parked in front of 1980s hair metal haven the Rainbow Bar & Grill. 
   
   I soon found the reclusive Hennig, clad in a denim jacket and jeans, loitering in an empty upstairs hallway next to a Pantera poster. He looked just like the lanky fellow whose over-exposed vintage photos had appeared beside his boss' in the 2005 premiere issue of Hot P!nk, Angelyne's short-lived glossy fan magazine. Before I could say hello, she emerged from an adjacent restroom, in full regalia. 
   
   Her eyes went wide as she shook my hand. I asked if Hennig had conveyed my queries about Renee Goldberg and the Holocaust. While he stood mute a few feet away, she stammered, "I have a weird stalker who has been following me and hanging underwear outside my home and all sorts of things. We're going to catch him — big time!" Usually, she explained of her history with obsessives, "I use reverse psychology on them and they go away." 
   
   As Motley Crue's "Girls, Girls, Girls" softly piped in overhead, I offered my sympathies, asking if she'd yet taken legal action or informed the authorities. In the past she'd told me she'd filed restraining orders against two stalkers. Angelyne said she and her team hadn't — that they were "building a case." 
   
   Angelyne cast herself as a victim of a scheme, and me as an unwitting — or even witting — pawn. (The next day I spoke with the genealogist, who'd previously told me that he had "no tie to her other than curiosity," and asked him if he was stalking her. "No, not at all," he chuckled. "It's a contorted, convenient way to try to come up with a semi-plausible story. Or not even that plausible. It doesn't even make any sense. How could this kind of information about her past possibly be part of a plot to force her to do anything?") 
   
   I asked Angelyne about the Ventura County name-change document. Her expression scrunched. "It was a complication thing," she said, tipping from one foot to the other. "I don't want to talk about it." I pressed, and she said she'd have her lawyer call me. I asked if it would be her business attorney, William Remery, or the attorney on the document, David Lehr. "Someone else." 
   
   She wheeled around to Topic A. "I know you want it to be true because you're Jewish — and that's adorable!" This last word was enunciated with her breathy falsetto inflection, a stagey girlishness that Paris Hilton appropriated. I told her, without success, why my interest was justifiable on journalistic terms. She nodded, unbowed: "Is your editor Jewish?" 
   
   She bid me goodbye with a hug — "I know you love me and don't want to hurt me" — and a promise that I'd hear from her lawyer. Angelyne also stated that it's her inalienable right alone to share her story as she sees fit — or not. (Earlier, regarding the details of her past, she'd told me, "I want to save it for my memoirs; that's my right for my own financial interest.") Later, when I left, I saw her on the sidewalk beside her Corvette under a translucent pink umbrella, huddled in what appeared to be an intense conversation with Hennig. 
   
   The next day, curious to revisit those Hennig photos, I unearthed from the bottom of a pile on my newsroom desk the premiere issue of Hot P!nk, which Angelyne bulldozed me into purchasing two years ago for $50 — along with other merchandise — before even agreeing to seriously discuss participation in a potential profile in THR. What instead caught my eye were the advertisements, which on closer inspection all seemed to be personally connected to her: the North Hollywood auto body shop that I'd elsewhere read custom-paints her Corvette; the late Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. George Semel, who she'd previously told me was her "artistic collaborator." 
   
   I kept scanning. There was an eighth-page ad from Custom Awards & Engraving, the trophy business Angelyne listed as her residential address on the name-change document. Co-owner Linda Mendelsohn also was mentioned in the text, which congratulated Angelyne on the launch of the magazine. Bingo. 
   
   ••• 
   
   A fortnight passed without word from Angelyne. I rang Hennig and told him I was still looking for clarification. Where, at least, was the follow-up from the mystery attorney? This time he was curt. "I'll tell her you called," he said, his tone cold, hanging up. It would be the last I'd hear from either of them. 
   
   The next day I called Goldberg's stepsister, Norma St. Michel, who resides in Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley. I brought up Angelyne. "Oh, I have no idea," she said, an edge to her voice, cutting me off and hanging up. 
   
   Then I tracked down Michael Strauss, the Jewish boy (scion of a Beverly Hills dynasty forged by the changeable reader board on movie theater marquees) whom she'd wed in the late 1960s. He was now a family man living in Carlsbad after a successful career manufacturing acrylic furniture. 
   
   I told him what I was calling about. "Holy smokes," he said, astonished. "I haven't talked to Angelyne in years. I've kind of followed her on the internet." 
   
   We chatted for an hour. Strauss had tender memories of Goldberg, referring alternatively in the past and present to her as "Angelyne" and "Renee." He'd never spoken publicly about the identity of his first wife before, and only rarely in private, he said. (An exception: In 2016 when she applied for a new driver's license, a DMV investigator contacted him to corroborate her true identity.) 
   
   They'd met through mutual friends while she was still living on the Westside. "She was the most gorgeous redhead," he said. "She was unique, beautiful, smart." Later, during their short matrimony, they lived together with Annette and her first husband at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, "right where Wolfman Jack used to record." Strauss emailed me photos while we were talking: the pair posing barefoot by the pool at a friend's backyard party, a striking black-and-white portrait he'd taken of Goldberg at his family's Trousdale Estates home. (A budding photographer, he shot the likes of Donovan and War.) And, most importantly, he sent the same yearbook photo the genealogist had shown me. 
   
   Strauss explained that Goldberg's childhood had been difficult. Her father, a man with a concentration camp number tattooed on his arm, had been controlling, cruel and narrow-minded, propelling her to flee home early. Like many survivors of trauma, Henry didn't discuss it. This extended, to Strauss' memory, as far as Goldberg's own history; her father told her she was born in Israel, not a German displaced-persons camp. Regardless, "she has never considered herself Jewish." 
   
   Strauss was surprised to learn from me that Goldberg's mother had died just a few years before he met her; he'd always thought it had been much earlier, a hardened scar. "She'd never talk about her mother — ever, ever, ever. It was a subject that couldn't be brought up. If I brought it up, it was shut down." 
   
   After they broke up — it was amicable — he traveled for several years, returning to L.A. in the mid-1970s. "I hooked up with Renee again, and she was Angelyne," he said. "I wasn't there when she made the transition. All of a sudden, big boobs, blond hair, this voice — the voice used to make me nuts. It didn't compute with who I'd known she was." 
   
   It would be another decade before she'd achieve notoriety for her pioneering famous-for-being-famous billboard campaign. "As an entrepreneur, I was sad that she wasn't ever able to be more [financially] successful," Strauss said of her career, which emerged out of punk and new wave bands and occasional bit parts in films. "Why didn't she take it farther? Why not a TV show? She invented this marvelous, crazy, out-of-this-world character but couldn't fully sell it. I was always a Renee rooter: 'Come on, girl, take it to the next level!' But she only had the capacity to take it so far." 
   
   When they broke up, Strauss held on to some of her effects — personal photos, official documents — "because she didn't want them, and I wasn't just going to throw them away. I mean, what if she eventually wanted them back? Except she never did. I saw her in the early 1990s, and I said, 'I have these things.' She didn't want them. She wanted nothing to do with it. She'd created another life." 
   
   Why had she done it? "You'd have to ask her that," he said softly. 
   
   Renee Goldberg had purely committed to the fundamental principle of Hollywood — escapism — by inhabiting the character she conjured to the point of no return. Like many dreamers, she adopted a stage name and altered her body and behavior to better position a prospective entertainment career that, like many dreamers, never panned out quite as intended. Nevertheless, far more than most, by any definition of success, she truly became the person she was pretending to be. 
   
   Strauss eventually, reluctantly, ventured a guess. "It's a persona that must have suited her," he said. "It made her way in life. It's not an easy world out there." 
   
   August 14, 2017 update: Mentions of Annette Block and her husband, Stanley, incorrectly believed to be Angelyne's sister and brother-in-law, have been removed from this story. Subsequent reporting indicates that Annette Goldberg, who was born two years earlier than Block, is Angelyne's sibling. 
   
   A version of this story first appeared in the Aug. 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe. ||||| Thirty years after her iconic billboards and pink Corvette became Hollywood staples, the self-created sex symbol remains an object of fascination, curiosity, and — a rarity in L.A. — profound mystery: "I'm like heroin. I have to dole myself out carefully. I don't want people to overload." 
   
   This story first appeared in the Aug. 14 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe. 
   
   The scent of Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle envelops Angelyne's hot pink Corvette Stingray 1LT as the legendary — and legendarily mysterious — L.A. billboard queen cruises West Hollywood. She nods her platinum 'do as she passes a beauty store on Santa Monica Boulevard. "I saw Paris Hilton there a month ago," reminisces Angelyne in her distinct baby-girl voice. "She was wearing no makeup and had her dog. She told me she was inspired by me before she was known. I whispered to her, 'I'm good luck to you.' She said, 'Yeah!' " A considered pause. "She's vapid but sweet." 
   
   As it happens, that's a verdict people have been rendering about Angelyne for 30 years, ever since she began appearing on hundreds of billboards and circumnavigating the city in that pink Vette. Both the famous-for-being-famous reality culture of the 2000s and the brand-yourself social media hustle of this moment can be traced back to her pioneering DIY billboard campaign. Without Angelyne, the glamorama on your Instagram feed and the glitz on Bravo's and E!'s schedules certainly wouldn't be the same. As she puts it now, "I'm the professor." 
   
   Take an extended drive around town with her, as The Hollywood Reporter recently did, and you'll see that, even if she no longer is gracing all of those billboards and doesn't use social media, Angelyne's fan base remains intensely potent and admirably inclusive across the racial, sexual and gender spectrum. She entrances young and old alike. 
   
   Yet she holds a special appeal to one demographic in particular: the entertainment industry itself. "She's a cult figure in Hollywood," says her close friend of two decades, celebrity stylist B. Akerlund, who has worked on music videos for Beyonce, Madonna and Lady Gaga. "When you ask New Yorkers, 'Do you know Angelyne?' they don't. But here, she's a legend." 
   
   Fergie dresses as Angelyne for Halloween. Courteney Cox sidles up to her out on the town to say, "I love you." Kim Kardashian, after spotting her on the freeway, recalled seeing her as a child while driving with her late father and reminisces on Instagram: "She looks the same & in the same car! Made me smile." RuPaul, out of drag, meets her at a Whole Foods and tweets triumphantly, "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know Angelyne." 
   
   Angelyne on the music-television show 'The Tube' in 1983, a year after she released a self-titled album. 
   
   Her appeal extends to realms you might not expect. (Pee-wee Herman sends Christmas cards; Richard Simmons has bought merchandise.) Angelyne says that David Fincher's longtime girlfriend and producing partner Cean Chaffin hired her to meet and greet at the director's birthday party in Malibu. (Fincher, through a representative, insists the appearance never took place.) Fans also will remember when Angelyne was a candidate in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall, making campaign promises to reduce class sizes, end homelessness and paint the Capitol pink; she finished 28th out of 135 candidates. And the more time you spend with her, the more her fundamentally dark allure comes through — this is a woman who explains she identifies with Barbie not merely for the obvious physical reasons but because she "has no emotions, and I'd like to be emotionless. Emotions are pain." 
   
   She may have perfected self-promotion, but Angelyne doesn't like talking about herself. "I'm not a publicity whore," she insists, pressing an espadrille wedge on the gas pedal on the way to visit her dentist in Century City. (The doctor once pitched a script about an anthrax attack to producers Susan Downey and Joel Silver — he wanted patient Djimon Hounsou to star — and observes that Angelyne invariably arrives on time, unlike directors, who are "always late.") To wit, her contact information remains relatively hard to find and even basic details about her life have long been a riddle. 
   
   "There's a lot of Greta Garbo in Angelyne," says her assistant, Scott Hennig. "She likes the mystery." 
   
   Part of it is practicality. She refuses, for instance, to talk about where she lives (let's just say she's seen barreling down the 101 into the city each morning) because of that eternal celebrity bete noire: stalkers. "I've had two restraining orders — I don't plan to have any more." 
   
   In 2002, Angelyne ran for mayor of Hollywood, a strictly honorary job, on a platform that promised “hot pink glamour.” 
   
   Some of it is anguish. Of her past, she'll announce, curtly, "I want to save it for my memoirs — that's my right for my own financial interest." Later, the only child will confide, the lilt of her girlish voice ebbing for a moment, "I lost my parents at a young age, and because of that I sought the attention of the world through my tricks. I said, 'Well, I'm going to get the love of the world.' " Inquire further, and she's done: "It's just a long story. I don't want to get into it. I made my way here." 
   
   The rest is ethereal. Revealing her real name and age (state records indicate they're Angelyne Llyne and 53), her relationship status ("I have matrimony-phobia") or her origin story (all that she has disclosed is that she's from Idaho) would, she believes, detract from her carefully burnished glamour — a fragile quality she defines as "the front stage, not the backstage." (Muses Brian Scofield, a Terrence Malick collaborator who is at work on a film project about her: "Part of the truth of Angelyne is her enigma. She blends this personality with reality.") 
   
   It's why she says she has rejected umpteen offers for reality shows — "I want to uphold the glamour." Her disdain extends, unsurprisingly, to Kardashian's all-access evolution of her model: "I don't see anything that's inspiring or beauteous. Who wants to know what she does every day? It's boring and gauche and claustrophobic." 
   
   Rumors long have persisted of a sugar-daddy investor behind Angelyne's rise. She clarifies that in 1982, while looking to enlarge a pinup-style poster of herself advertising the eponymous struggling rock band she led at the time to billboard size, she met Hugo Maisnik, the wealthy scion to a display-printing business in L.A. She describes Maisnik, now an adhesive-free-tape entrepreneur and an octogenarian widower, as having been a "very eccentric, bored prankster" who immediately grasped the potential value of her iconography and knew the intricacies of the outdoor-advertising game. Angelyne says that while he was the type of guy who was "obsessed with legs and feet," theirs was a purely platonic relationship: "He was married!" (Maisnik, no longer an active business partner, could not be reached for comment.) 
   
   Soon, she was everywhere. "I felt most normal when I became famous," she says. "The only time I had enough attention, where I never wanted another bit of it ever again, was when I rode in Gay Pride." 
   
   Angelyne's self-branding began before the billboards. Over a shrimp cocktail lunch at Connie & Ted's in West Hollywood, she explains that she only adopted her signature color after installing a New Age metal pyramid over her bed. "I just laid down there, and I kept seeing this vision of pink. Magenta was vibrating. I was compelled." Indeed, she makes it clear that she's on intimate terms with the next level, pointing to an out-of-body moment she had one day around the time she filmed her small role in the 1988 sci-fi comedy Earth Girls Are Easy as transformative. "I don't recommend it," she says wanly of the cosmic event. 
   
   Angelyne puts more than 100 miles a day on her custom-painted Corvette Stingray. 
   
   Angelyne sees herself as forever on a quest to return to that rapture. "It's been torture to be here again. I've tried so much meditation to bring it back," she says. "As wonderful as my flesh body is to me, what I've created, I've exploited the human body to its max." 
   
   Some believe that Angelyne, an aesthete trained in ballet as a child who possesses a disconcerting ability to turn any food into uncanny likenesses (Bette Davis out of mussel shells and spaghetti, Clara Bow out of Swedish fish and coffee grounds) is a de facto performance artist. That her entire presentation — the hair, the clothes, the voice, the pink car, the whole shebang — riffs on femininity, fame and Hollywood ideals. Angelyne brushes off such assertions — she possesses no MFA degree, though she did take life drawing classes at one point, and she claims (or feigns) ignorance of such highbrow luminaries as Marina Abramovic. Yet she allows this: "Warhol would have loved me!" 
   
   Still, she has acolytes in the art world, including acclaimed L.A. conceptual artist Alex Israel, who has utilized the billboard form himself. "I think she's important," he says. "She did something radical. She gave people permission to do things that are now par for the course in our culture. Her work gave people permission to make the public expression of their eccentric selves a goal in itself. This was before YouTube and reality TV, when her available platform was the space of advertising. She found the widest platform that she could." 
   
   Notes Kate Durbin, an L.A. performance artist and culture critic: "She performs the narrative of Los Angeles in a complicated way. The New Age-y stuff. How everything has a price. She's the literal embodiment of those ideals. One of the things we can gain from looking at Angelyne is that life is a performance." 
   
   Back in the car, on the way to Spellbound Sky, a Silver Lake crystal boutique she frequents, Angelyne is chatty about many things. Like religion ("I've tried them all — Jewish, Catholic, Hindu: too many dogmas"). Like her wardrobe (her clothes are made from fabrics from International Silks & Woolens, a Beverly Boulevard shop favored by Cher). Like her radio preferences (as a hard-core NPR listener, she recently auctioned off a ride in her car: "What about that for a pledge?"). 
   
   But off-limits is aging. "Spare me," she says with exasperation. "I just don't believe in it." The denial for decades was abetted by a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, the renowned George Semel, who (he confided to her) also treated Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor. (He died in 2013.) "I felt like I was working with an artistic collaborator," says Angelyne, who won't comment about procedures but acknowledges, "Fillers are amazing." 
   
   At a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in Los Feliz — she visits a franchise location daily, ordering what many baristas know as The Angelyne (a modified cafe mocha with water instead of milk) — she tackles one more personal topic: how she makes money these days (L.A. real estate blogs snickered when her three-bedroom Malibu condo was listed for $575,000 in a 2010 short sale), particularly now that the billboard campaign has wound down. She claims it worked so well that she became overloaded with inquiries. Alternatively, she may have been priced out. As Hennig notes, "The prices were a few thousand a month for billboards when she started. Now it's $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month on the Sunset Strip." 
   
   She says a chunk of her income comes from image licensing interest from abroad, primarily Europe — what Hennig calls a "never-ending stream." Whether when dealing with a person on the street or a major firm, she demands $10,000 to take a picture of her face — which is why the shot accompanying this story in THR, which doesn't pay subjects for portraits, features her visage partially covered by a fan. 
   
   Angelyne began gracing Hollywood billboards during the early 1980s in a campaign largely financed by outdoor-advertising magnate Maisnik. 
   
   The remainder is similarly I.P.-keen: appearances (a brief drive-by in her car with a wave goes for $500, a stop-in is $1,000) and merchandising. Both income streams leverage her scarcity and mystery to ensure interest. Angelyne's Chazerai — $5 bumper stickers, $10 magnets and $60 T-shirts, sold out of her trunk — move for those prices in part because fans can't buy them online. (She has no website: "I don't want to be that accessible. They've got to find me — a unicorn.") Everyone who approaches her is brazenly asked if they'd like to buy something, and she moves on in short order if they don't. (At dinner one night at Musso & Frank, two gigglingly starstruck women introduce themselves as she enjoys yet another shrimp cocktail. Within minutes, they're separated from $300.) 
   
   She's unapologetic about how her M.O. may appear grubby to some. "I'm a rebel," says Angelyne (who has neither an agent nor manager), her eyes narrowing, her lips pursed. "I'm independent. I want my fans to support me! I don't lend my image out to anybody — MAC, Guess, AT&T. Corporations do ask." 
   
   Affirms her attorney, William Remery: "She certainly has a lot of opportunities come her way. But she controls her image. She understands her value and her product, and she protects it." 
   
   Akerlund, who works with some A-list divas, says that she's been chagrined by her friend's prima donna behavior in professional settings and thinks Angelyne would be more financially successful if she were more amenable. "What I struggle with is that she doesn't have more," says Akerlund. "Her demands are her biggest enemy. It's very old school, and it's a huge limitation. These days, people just move on." 
   
   Still, Angelyne remains confident in the marketplace for her wares. As the sun sets, she pulls up curbside at the TCL Chinese Theatre for a moment to provide "a little taste" of the reliable core demographic base she can tap into whenever she so pleases. She rolls down the windows. Immediately, the assembled crowd swarms and heaves. "Wooooos" abound. Wolverine turns away from a picture with Asian tourists to wink at her. Wonder Woman drops to her knees a few feet away, exclaiming: "You look stunning! You're my idol!" A heavyset man saunters up close, his speech slurred: "Big old titties!" 
   
   With that, she peels out. "I could not do this without this car," she says as the Corvette picks up speed on Hollywood Boulevard. "I scram all the time." After a thoughtful interval: "Always have an escape route: metaphysically, physically, financially, emotionally. I don't think I have every base covered. I know I've got this car covered." 
   
   A week later, Angelyne's lounging on a boa- and cheetah-print-festooned chaise in her cramped office in a historic building near the Chinese Theatre, classical music wafting from the stereo. (She's an aficionado — Ravel's "Pavane for a Dead Princess" a favorite; Debussy's oeuvre dismissed: "I come to find out Einstein didn't like it either.") Surrounded by framed, often topless portrait tableaux of herself (many are acrylic self-portraits with Keane- like eyes) and in all likelihood the world's foremost collection of Angelyne memorabilia, she perhaps is her own biggest fan. 
   
   She's reflecting on how she elicits an array of responses — "I'm a Rorschach test in pink," she says — from "an innocent little Barbie doll to, I guess, being a whore or a porn star, depending on who sees me. I spark the spirit." (She's fine with being mistaken for the latter; as she sees it, it's "pretty awesome" she gets to vicariously inhabit people's "sexual intensity without having to go through with it." Unlike Hilton or Kardashian, there never has been a nude Angelyne photograph, much less a sex tape.) 
   
   In the end, Angelyne professes to be unconcerned with how people digest what she puts out there. "I don't blame them if they roll their eyes," she says. "Everyone has a journey. They don't have to come on mine. I'm not a preacher. I'm just here to do my thing, and if people are inspired, then they are inspired." 
   
   She arches her back coquettishly, pulling the boas toward her, gazing at a painting of herself forever young on the wall. "I'm on top of a pink cloud on top of a pink mountain. I'm there, OK? If anybody can think to find me there, I'm there." 
   
   At the 1996 premiere of 'I Shot Andy Warhol,' Angelyne posed with (from left) performers Candy Ass, Alexis Arquette and Nina Hagen.
target: – About a year after Hollywood Reporter journalist Gary Baum profiled Angelyne, the mysterious billboard bombshell he describes as LA's "modern myth," a hobbyist genealogist contacted him claiming to have proof of a compelling back story: that she was born in Poland to Holocaust survivors. Now, also for the Hollywood Reporter, Baum unravels what he believes is likely the iconic blonde's true identity, publishing yearbook photos, marriage certificates, and more. The woman who's adorned hundreds of billboards across LA since the 1980s under the one-name pseudonym Angelyne—she's been called a precursor to other "famous for being famous" celebrities like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian—appears to have started off as Ronia Tamar Goldberg. She came to California in 1959 by way of Israel, and her mother died of cancer at the age of 44 when Goldberg, who upon arrival to LA became Renee, was just 14. Baum reached out to Goldberg's alleged younger sister, now Annette Block, and her husband, as well as an ex-husband and a stepsister, all of whom are generally hazy on details if willing to talk at all. Angelyne, for her part, has gone on AirTalk with host Larry Mantle to claim that the story contains "a lot of inaccuracies" and that the "vindictive" piece can never change the fact that she is "not a woman" but "an icon." Indeed, she ran for mayor of Hollywood in 2008, per the Washington Post, and came in 28th out of 135 candidates; she also ran for governor of California in 2003 and, of course, has made numerous paid appearances at events and is the subject of a documentary. For now, the legend and sometimes-actress/singer who says she was orphaned at a young age and whose Hollywood start traces back to a 1974 porno tells Baum she wants to save her story for a memoir for "my own financial interest." (The Kardashians have erected an elaborate and bizarre business empire.)