Annette Funicello never planned to be a star.
She was a shy little girl whose mother had signed her up for dance lessons, hoping they would help her come out of her shell. In 1955, at 12, she stepped onto the stage of the Starlight Bowl in Burbank as the Swan Queen in Swan Lake.
Walt Disney was sitting in the audience. He was there looking for children for his new television show.
Annette had no idea.
The call the next day
There was no dramatic scene backstage, no tap on the shoulder. The next morning, her dance school got a phone call from the studio. They wanted to see “the little girl who played the Swan Queen.”
A call wasn’t a job, though. She auditioned, then was called back twice, and in the end she became the 24th and last of the original Mouseketeers. Some tellings of the story say Disney chose her personally. The Los Angeles Times put it more carefully, calling her “one of the few hand-picked by Disney himself.”
The Mickey Mouse Club premiered on October 3, 1955, and it didn’t take long for America to pick a favorite. Annette became the show’s most popular Mouseketeer, and the proof showed up in the mailbox: 6,000 letters a month by the end of the first season.
Walt noticed. He asked her if she had a lot of Italian relatives.
“I wanted to be Annette Turner”
Even with all that fan mail, her name worried her. “In the beginning I wanted to be Annette Turner,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “I really did.” Funicello just seemed too hard to pronounce.
Walt wouldn’t hear of it. It was a beautiful Italian name, he told her, and once people learned how to say it, they would never forget it.
He was right.
He seems to have understood her shyness, too. When she asked whether she should see a psychologist about it, he told her that being a little bit shy was part of her appeal.
The only Mouseketeer who stayed
When the original show ended, Annette was the only Mouseketeer Disney kept under contract. She turned up in Zorro, then in The Shaggy Dog in 1959 and Babes in Toyland in 1961, and she had pop hits of her own, like “Tall Paul” and “Pineapple Princess.”
Then, in 1963, came Beach Party, a low-budget comedy for American International Pictures, with Frankie Avalon as her co-star. Disney agreed to loan her out, but he worried about what it would do to the image she had built.
So he made one request. In her autobiography, she remembered it this way: “I see in here that all the other girls are going to be running around in bikinis, which is fine. But Annette, I want you to be different. You are different. I would simply like to request that you not expose your navel in the film.”
She said yes. She respected him too much to say anything else. She later told UPI she was teased constantly about being the only girl in the beach movies without a navel, while at home she wore bikinis around the pool like anyone else.
The legend says you never saw it on screen. That part is a little too neat. Fans who have gone through the films frame by frame, like the people behind this Beach Party music site, point out that the two-piece swimsuits in Muscle Beach Party and Bikini Beach leave it plainly visible. Annette kept the promise in spirit, and that was the part that mattered to her.
Avalon always said the Beach Party movies were good clean fun. After her death, he put it simply: “She was just a nice, nice girl next door.”
A quiet family life, and the first sign something was wrong
In January 1965, she married her agent, Jack Gilardi. They had three children, Gina, Jack Jr. and Jason. The marriage ended in the early 1980s (Disney’s records say 1981, the Los Angeles Times says 1982), and in 1986 she married Glen Holt, a family friend who bred racehorses.
The next year, she and Avalon got back together for Back to the Beach, a comedy that poked fun at the very genre they had made famous.
Somewhere during filming, something felt wrong. “We’d be shooting a scene on the sand,” she later told People, “and when I’d try to get up, I couldn’t balance. Shortly after that, I noticed that my eyesight was getting worse.”
The diagnosis was multiple sclerosis. She was 44.
She and Avalon still toured together in 1989 and 1990. And for about five years, the public knew nothing.
Telling the world
In July 1992, Annette went public. The Guardian said she “stunned fans and friends” with the announcement, but she was upbeat about it. “I think you only have two choices in this kind of situation,” she said. “Either you give in to it or you fight it. I intend to fight.”
That same year she started the Annette Funicello Research Fund for Neurological Diseases. She was honest about the hard days, too. She told Entertainment Tonight she got down sometimes, but that “maybe I can help others.”
On October 21, 1992, the day before her 50th birthday, the studio that had found her as a girl made her a Disney Legend, and she left her handprints in cement on the lot. Variety covered the ceremony.
A year later, in September 1993, she got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Avalon stood beside her, along with her friend Shelley Fabares. By then she needed a walker and sat through the ceremony. Her husband and children were there too.
In 1994, she told her own story in a memoir.
The years away
By the late 1990s she had stepped back from public life, and Glen cared for her at home. After a 2011 fire at their Encino house, the family moved to a ranch near Bakersfield.
Annette died there on April 8, 2013, at Mercy Southwest Hospital in Bakersfield, from complications of multiple sclerosis. She was 70. She had lived with the disease for more than 25 years.
Avalon said she never realized how beloved she was. “She would say: ‘Really?'” he told the Associated Press. “She was so bashful about it.”
Maybe that’s the best part of the Swan Lake story. Walt Disney saw a shy girl on a stage and picked her out of the audience. She spent the rest of her life being exactly the person he thought he saw, on screen and off.
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