Mother Nature Screwed Up Christie Brinkley’s Big Scene in ‘Vegas Vacation’
After Christie Brinkley’s big splash as the alluring Girl in the Ferrari in National Lampoon’s Vacation, producers were eager to have her back for the follow-up Christmas Vacation. But Brinkley turned them down, thanks to the “only bad advice I ever got from my dad,” Brinkley writes in her new memoir, Uptown Girl. “He was worried I’d be typecast as the ingenue.”
But when Brinkley got a new offer to appear in the next follow-up, Vegas Vacation, she wasn’t going to take Pop’s advice again. “I said yes,” she explains, “on the condition that I have a speaking role. This led them to write a neat little part for me as a slick and sexy card counter in the casinos.”
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Mother Nature, as it turns out, had other plans.
Their initial scene went as scheduled, with Brinkley in her flashy Ferrari picking up her highway flirtation with Chevy Chase. Despite his loving wife and children sitting beside him, Chase’s creepy Clark Griswold mouths, “I love you,” to the beautiful blonde in the passing lane. The two exchange winks and nonverbal come-ons until Clark’s eyes go wide at the sight gag sitting right behind Brinkley: an adorable baby in a car seat.
“Totally fitting,” thought Brinkley, “since I had my own baby around the same age at home.”
But the next scene didn’t go nearly as smoothly. In a trailer parked along the Nevada desert interstate, Vegas Vacation’s hair and makeup team went to work on Brinkley, dolling her up for her big speaking scene with Chase. The script called for Griswold and the Girl to finally meet at last in the Ferrari on the side of the highway.
“But the very moment I stepped outside the trailer, a dust devil flared up from out of nowhere and smacked right into me,” Brinkley said, “whipping me up in an orange tornado of dirt and debris that left my hair, makeup and little white dress dusted in a thick layer of carroty chalk.”
The film crew worked frantically to return the white dress to its pristine state, but by the time they’d worked their magic, the natural light was gone for the day. They tried to film the scene anyway, but the change in lighting looked too different from the ones shot earlier in the day. The scene was lost to history.
Although Chase has a spotty history with co-stars, Brinkley enjoyed her time working with the former SNL comic. When they met on the first Vacation film, Chase asked her for beauty secrets “to make my hair look thicker.”
“As funny as he was, he was also shy, a combination I found endearing,” Brinkley wrote. “We quickly developed a playful chemistry that translated on-screen.”
