Sheila Sullivan: The Showgirl Who Volunteered to Man History’s First Spaceship

Sheila is what’s called a belter. Her voice carries. “What I sing, New Jersey can hear,” she warns. What’s a belter exactly?

“It means you aint at The Met,” admits Sheila. “They told me my voice was better suited for musical comedy. It broke my hilarious little heart.”

When Sheila was 19 years old, her childhood friend Kathy Wakefield informed her she had a job if she could get to Las Vegas. It was 1957 and the Tropicana Hotel and Casino, an unprecedented $15 million project was about to open. There had been an exhaustive national search for eight Tropicana Girls, The Most Beautiful Girls in the World. During rehearsals one of the chosen Tropicana girls broke her ankle and that’s when Sheila got the call. “Just get here!” Insisted Kathy.

Sheila and her mother raced to the desert for an opportunity of a lifetime. “Girls, all you have to be is beautiful,” read the ad. “The job: Monte Proser’s latest production at the brand-new Tropicana in Las Vegas, Nevada. The salary – $200 a week. If you can sing, great. If you can walk…it’ll help.” Sheila arrived at the showroom and auditioned for the famed Monte Proser and the boss, Handsome Johnny Roselli, a member of the Chicago Outfit, a Capone associate. At the time, Vegas was a cash machine for the mob. Sheila got the part two days before opening night. “Our bosses were big scary killers but if you kept out of trouble, it was a good job,” explains Sheila.

Opening night all of Tinseltown trekked to Nevada for the Tropicana’s debut. Every star in the solar system showed up: Lucile Ball, Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, Marlene Dietrich and Liberace among others. Well, every white star anyway. Nat King Cole, headlining next door at The Sands was turned away for being Black. There was also a young singer named Elvis Prestley who was dating Dottie Harmony, one of the eight Tropicana girls.

One night there was a knock on the dressing room door. Sheila opened it and there was Elvis. She wasn’t familiar. He asked for Dottie. Apparently when the soon-to-be icon and recent purchaser of Graceland lost at the craps table, he borrowed money from his girlfriend so he could continue playing. “He was greasy,” says Sheila. “I’m not a fan.”

And of course in true Vegas-style, Sheila lost her virginity to a member of the Rat Pack, the Mouse, Joey Bishop. “He never told me he was in a gang,” cracks Sheila.

And maybe it was being around all these stars that got the young showgirl thinking about outer space. Maybe that was the inspiration and why she set her sights on the moon. Vegas was OK, but what she really wanted was to go to the moon. Since the dawn of time, humans have dreamed of space travel, leaving the Earth behind and seeing what’s beyond, but Sheila was the first generation to see the technology develop to do such a thing. This was a giant leap for mankind and Sheila jumped at the chance. This showgirl was serious about space flight.

She wrote a letter to Ned Root, the head of publicity at Convair, a subsidiary of General Dynamics. This was the American company building spaceships and launching mammals into space. “They put a monkey and a dog up there, so I said ‘you can put a woman – take me!’”

The letter Sheila wrote in 1958 reads: “I would like to do something useful with my life. I can be of service to your program – I want to volunteer to be on your first spaceship to outer space.” The letter touched down on the desk of one of the most powerful PR men in the country, Ned Root. He thought it was a hoax and then he met the earnest young actress. They were married within a year. It was then Sheila lived in La Jolla with scientists referred to as the Architects of Armageddon. She’d see Dr. Edward Teller, now of Oppenheimer fame, at cocktail parties. The shockingly famous scientist who developed the polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk lived next door to the newlyweds.

“I was 20 and they were all 42 putting things on the moon. Yep. La Jolla,” recalls Sheila. She admits that during her tenure she never got on a spaceship, just a plane with a couple of Soviet spies.

No, the next frontier for Sheila was Broadway.

It’s important to note that Sheila had been cast in a couple of plays that bombed or closed before ever reaching Broadway. She was a working actress, sure, but still couldn’t call herself a Broadway actor yet. Then she went to audition for a musical re-imagining of a Clifford Odets’ Depression Era play, Golden Boy starring Sammy Davis jr. They auditioned more than 150 actresses for the love interest role of Lorna Moon; Sheila got the role of understudy for the leading lady.

This was 1965 and two weeks after civil rights protesters were beaten with police batons known as Bloody Sunday, Golden Boy and its cast joined the struggle. It was the first play in Broadway history to go dark to support Martin Luther King jr.’s march in Alabama. There’s a photograph of Sheila with Harry Belefonte and Sammy Davis jr. at the demonstration. “We had to go, they were going to kill everybody,” states the understudy. Sheila, it appears, was wearing heels when she traversed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. All the marchers prayed with their legs, Sheila Sullivan did it in heels.

It was then, in the wake of days with no sleep participating in the most significant and celebrated action of the Civil Rights era, Sheila got the call she’d been waiting for: the leading lady wouldn’t be performing that evening. That was Sheila’s Broadway debut: She’d barely washed the Alabama mud off before donning a Lorna Moon costume to perform with Sammy on stage in what was rumored to be Broadway’s first interracial kiss.

The next hit Sheila got a part in was as Woody Allen’s wife in Broadway’s Play It Again Sam. Then she married a movie star, Robert Culp, best friends with a comedian known as Bill Cosby. Culp had four children from an earlier marriage. The Hollywood couple were regular guests at the Playboy Mansion with the likes of basketball player Wilt

Chamberlain and football player OJ Simpson. It was glamorous, but they were broke. Culp was paid like an actor yet spent money like a star. With four children to raise, it put a strain on their storybook marriage.

Shortly after her second marriage ended, around 1980, Sheila got a cancer diagnosis. It was inside her nose. Her mother and sister had each died in their 50s and here was Sheila, in her 40s in a cancer ward for treatment. Would this be her final curtain call? She wondered. No. It turns out. She beat it. She’s been cancer free ever since; her disease a distance memory.

After surviving cancer, in the late 80s Sheila was preparing to buy a condo with her life savings. She’d been living in a tiny studio apartment, half the maids’ quarters of a brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was time, she thought, to buy a little place and invest in her future. And then one morning she woke up to the unthinkable: A bank failure had wiped out everything she’d ever worked for. This would be known as the Silverado Saving and Loan crisis: it would cost U.S. taxpayers $1 billion and Sheila Sullivan everything.

The thing is: Actors get kicked in the teeth all the time. They get rejected. Sometimes when they get accepted they can still bomb, fail and have to move on. One must have resilience to survive in an uncertain industry. You have to be able to get up, dust yourself off and, as Frank says, start all over again. And that’s exactly what Sheila did. She went from working on Broadway to cleaning downtown. And when the OJ Simpson trial hit the headlines in 1996, that’s where she was: in a welfare-to-work program cleaning a judge’s chambers while the world obsessed over every sordid detail of the endless trial.

One afternoon the judge asked his cleaning lady, Sheila, what she thought of the trial. And Sheila didn’t want to tell him that she used to play tennis with OJ at the Playboy Mansion or get into bank failures or failed marriages. No, Sheila just wanted to empty the trash cans, do her job and get on with it. So, instead, she told the judge: “I’m not really paying attention.”

But Sheila still had that little room, her share of the maids’ quarters on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She says it’s her dressing room, outside the theater! Her whole life she’d shared a space with someone: her mother, roommates, husbands. She’d never had anything that was just hers. A place where no matter what went on, she could simply go home and shut the door. There she was safe. There no one demanded anything of her. There she was happy.

And even with a storied and historic resume, that’s still Sheila’s most impressive attribute: She’s happy. It’s with intention and very much on purpose that she lives with happiness. We all have a choice where we can focus on what we don’t have or what we wanted and didn’t get. We can list all the disappointments, the depressing moments, the hurtful slights, or, as Sheila has done, we can choose laughter and levity. As Sheila likes to say: “No one survives without a sense of humor.”

If you ask Sheila, all her dreams have come true. She sees herself as one of the few kids from Kennydale to have escaped. She just celebrated her 87th birthday surrounded by friends, fans and well-wishers. “In this life,” she told the boisterous gathering. “There’s nothing more fun than having more fun!”

Because, as Sheila’s life demonstrates: the stage changes but the work remains the same: entertaining .