LOS ANGELES — Former Playboy playmate and B-movie actress Yvette Vickers kept to herself and tended her flowers on a quiet, tree-lined street perched above Beverly Hills that actors, producers and writers call home.
So it came as a shock when neighbors learned a decomposing body had been inside the home for several months to a year.
“There is a feeling of safety on this street,” said Terri Cheney, an author and entertainment attorney who has lived there since 1994. “You don’t feel like that would happen here — someone being neglected like that.”
It was still unknown whether it was the body of Vickers, who appeared in “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman,” “Attack of the Giant Leeches” and other cult films of the 1950s. If still alive, she would be 82.
It could take a week to determine the identity, coroner’s Lt. Cheryl MacWillie said Tuesday.
By the looks of Vickers’ one-bedroom home, it might have been difficult to detect anything unusual had happened inside.
The two-story, brown dwelling is rustic and sits next to two modern homes that dwarf it. Ivy and bougainvillea are draped on a front window, and the grounds on a steep hillside are overgrown with foliage.
A handwritten note at the front gate reads: “Deliveries, please ring doorbell.” Guests had to climb a stone walkway that wrapped around the house.
Cheney, 51, said she didn’t know Vickers had been an actress or was a Playboy magazine playmate in July 1959. Cheney said hello to Vickers only a few times and noticed that the woman liked to water her flowers.
“She seemed lovely,” Cheney said. “She went with the house, it was a little bit unusual. It has a fairy-tale kind of charm to it.”
Another neighbor, Susan Savage, told the Los Angeles Times she saw letters and cobwebs in Vickers’ mailbox before going into the house and discovering the body last week in an upstairs room with a small space heater that was turned on.
Savage described her neighbor as an elegant woman with flowing blond hair and warm smile.
“She kept to herself, had friends and seemed like a very independent spirit,” Savage said.
Born Yvette Vedder on Aug. 26, 1928, in Kansas City, Mo., she attended the University of California at Los Angeles before discovering acting and leaving school to pursue it.
Her first film role was as a giggling girl in “Sunset Boulevard” in 1950. In 1957, she appeared in “Short Cut to Hell,” directed by James Cagney, but it flopped, and she turned to B-movies.
It wasn’t immediately known whether Vickers had any relatives.
