I’m trying not to make this a thousand words about how gorgeous Claudia Jennings was. Born Mary Eileen “Miomi” Chesterton in Milwaukee — eventually moving to Evanston, Illinois, where her father was the advertising director for Skilsaw — she was a receptionist at Playboy before appearing in a centerfold (November 1969) and becoming the Playmate of the Year for 1970, in less than thirty years. She was an incandescent star, appearing in movies like Unholy Rollers, The Single Girls, Sisters of Death, Moonshine County Express and Deathsport, to name a few. IMDB may tell us that she took her stage name from the character that Angelique Pettyjohn played in The Touch of Her Flesh — debatable, but I wish this was true — and that Aaron Spelling wanted her to replace Kate Jackson on his show Charlie’s Angels but her four Playboy nude appearances scared network executives off, but the truth is, she was here for a brief time and nearly fifty years after her death, I’m still staring at her in any movie she’s in and sighing.

In the July 20oo issue of Femme Fatales, Ari Bass wrote in the article “Claudia Jennings: The Drive-In Diva,” that she had taken to wearing a gold-plated bracelet that said bitch on it. “That’s what I always play in the movies,” Jennings explained. “Though it’s the opposite of what I am really, I’m cast as a spitfire. Bad girl types. I suppose because being submissive is completely alien to me. There aren’t many good female roles in films nowadays, so I figure I’ll come into my own when I’m about 30. At this point, I can’t play kids or hippies, and I sure as hell can’t play the wronged wife because you wouldn’t believe a man cheats on me.”

Ferd Sebastian said the film was written for Jennings, with whom he and his wife Beverly had worked on The Single Girls. “She wanted to do a film with not a lot of dialogue, so ‘Gator Bait was it,” said Sebastian. “I really like to work with the Cajun people. We all piled into our motorhome and left LA… We were headed for the swamps, Myself, Bev, Claudia, our two boys, a dog and a pregnant cat. It was by far the most fun shoot I have ever been on.”

It’s a simple movie. Desiree Thibodeau (Jennings) lives in the swamps, a barefoot girl at one with nature, yet who looks like, well, Claudia Jennings. Ben Bracken (Ben Sebastian) and Deputy Billy Boy (Clyde Ventura) catch her trapping gators and decide that instead of arresting her, they’ll just assault her. That doesn’t work, and as they chase her, Billy Boy accidentally kills Ben. He tells Sheriff Joe Bob Thomas (Bill Thurman) that Desiree did it. So the cops do what they do worst and head into the swamps to arrest her, along with Ben’s father, T.J. (Sam Gilman), and his son Leroy (Douglas Dirkson), a man who was already castrated by Desiree. They even attack her family—Big T (Tracy Sebastian) and Julie (Janit Baldwin)—before she destroys them.

There’s a twist at the end — T.J. might be closer to Desiree than we believed — but really this is all about men being morons and getting turned against one another by a sheer force of femininity. 

The time Claudia Jennings spent in our reality was short. But she lived a life, and we can only wish that she were still here to know just how well-remembered she is.