Goldie Hawn has detailed her “casting couch” moment with famed cartoonist Al Capp, in which he allegedly came into the room “disrobed” and asked for a kiss.
“I was 19. I went up for the ‘meet,’ and I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’ and it was so scary,” Hawn told People Editor-in-Chief Jess Cagle. “He disrobed, he took off his business clothes and came in in, like, a dressing gown. I got the picture there, and I thought, ‘I’m in trouble. Where’s the door?’”
However, when Capp, known for his “Li’l Abner” comic strip, gave her an acting note, she briefly felt at ease — until he sat down next to her.
“I went, ‘Wait a minute. He knows what he’s talking about,’” she said. “I said, ‘Okay, so I’ll do it, like, more quiet, more real.’ Then he wanted me to show my legs, and I said, ‘You know, Mr. Capp, I don’t know. I don’t think so,’ and then I sat down and he wanted me to give him a kiss, and I went, ‘I don’t do this. I’m sorry.’”
Hawn first told the story in her 2006 autobiography, “A Lotus Grows in the Mud,” and various news outlets reported about the incident in 2012 after she talked about the event on the TV special “Oprah Presents Master Class.” Back then, she had revealed Capp opened up his dressing gown and she got a look at his penis. When she denied his advances, the actress was allegedly told, “Well, you’re never going to get anywhere in this business, you should go home and marry a Jewish dentist.”
She added, “And I started to cry and I said, ‘Well maybe I will.’”
According to People, Hawn later wrote Capp a note after she was cast on “Laugh-In” in 1968 and won an Oscar for 1969’s “Cactus Flower,” telling him she “didn’t have to go marry a Jewish dentist.”
Capp died in 1979 at the age of 70.
Watch the interview below.