The Mickey Mouse Club in Australia
In 1959, seven members of Walt Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club — Jimmie Dodd, Doreen Tracey, Bobby Burgess, Sharon Baird, Tommy Cole, Karen Pendleton, and Cubby O’Brien — toured Australia along with the pop group, The Diamonds. Many people were very surprised that ‘dorky’ Doreen, as seen on the early episodes of the TV programme, had developed into such a ‘bomb shell’ (pictured). ‘I had a mad, torrid affair going at the time with Dave Summerville, the lead singer of The Diamonds, and I used to get drunk in the lounge with Dave and that got into the [Australian] papers and was bad,’ Doreen later told Jerry Bowles, author of Forever Hold Your Banner High (1976). The death of innocence!