Angelyne can barely squeeze into the 8-foot-wide storage room. And not just because she's the buxom, bigger-than-life billboard queen of Los Angeles.
Boxes of printed posters and placards depicting her in glamorous poses fill the Hollywood self-storage space she is renting while she feuds with city redevelopment leaders and developers of a planned $500-million luxury project near the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street.
The curvaceous blond teeters on her spike heels as she reaches into a box and pulls out a handbill.
Its full-color photograph shows her reclining voluptuously across the top of her pink Corvette wearing form-fitting pink pants, a tight, low-cut white blouse, sunglasses and a seductive pout.
But it's the back of the handbill that Angelyne wants to show. It's an invitation to join the Angelyne Fan Club by sending $20 to a Selma Avenue address.
Angelyne operated her promotional company from a Selma Avenue office building for 18 years until she was forced out last fall to make way for a W Hotel, upscale retail shops, condominiums and apartments.
Developers paid relocation expenses for her and about 35 other tenants who were occupying shops and offices in the path of the Hollywood and Vine project.
But they are balking at her demand that they also pay for the reprinting of perhaps 100,000 promotional and souvenir items that list her old address.
"One of the developers said that is too much. He said, 'Honey, take me to court.' He talked to me like I was his ex-wife," she said, adjusting her dark glasses as sunlight streamed through the open storage room door. "I was stunned."
The standoff underscores the changing face of Hollywood Boulevard, which is in the midst of a dramatic gentrification after decades of decline. The W Hotel is rising at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, the famed intersection that has seen better days.
While many in Hollywood support the new bars, upscale eateries and other developments in the district, there are some who fear revitalization is pushing out some old-Hollywood characters.
And Angelyne is definitely a character -- though she'd dispute the "old Hollywood" characterization. She became famous (locally, at least) in the early 1980s when a series of billboards popped up around the city featuring her in various sexy poses. Although she has appeared in several movies, she said her billboards have been shown in "hundreds" of films and TV shows.
