Joy Harmon, who was just 19 years old at the time, was crowned the “NYC Donut Queen” at the 1957 USO. She’s better known as the blonde in the car wash scene in the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke.
She was credited simply as “The Girl,” but anyone who ever saw Cool Hand Luke knows her as “Lucille.” Harmon was the 27-year-old actress who tantalized a chain-gang of sweaty convicts in the Paul Newman classic in 1967. In just over 3 minutes of screen time, she left her mark on the film, the 196os, and pop culture at large: the car wash scene in Cool Hand Luke consistently ranks among the most iconic in cinema.
“I was just washing a car to my best ability and having fun with it, with the sponge and everything,” said Harmon. “My concept of the [scene] was not like what came out. I was not aware that there were two meanings to things that I was doing, and I’m still not really that much aware of what they all were.”
Joy Harmon—who had debuted on Broadway in 1958’s Make a Million and then partnered with Groucho Marx on his early 1960s TV show—said she scored the role after Newman marveled at the blueness of her eyes during the audition process. But once she arrived in Stockton, California, to film the scene, Harmon began to have second thoughts. The producers suggested the shoot would be better if Harmon smoked marijuana beforehand in order to act more uninhibited for the camera. “I don’t do that; I never have done that,” Harmon said in the interview in 2017. “I was so upset, and I called my dad and he said, ‘You just come on home. Don’t do the movie.’ I told Mr. Rosenberg I was going home and then they came to the room, and he brought me flowers and chocolate. He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’re not doing marijuana; you don’t need it.’ And it worked out fine.”
Most of the credit for the sequence goes to Harmon, who displays the perfect combination of sexual power and mischievousness. But director Stuart Rosenberg clearly was trying to milk the scene for titillating effect—so much so that he had kept wives and girlfriend away from the set for weeks and then surprised the men with Harmon’s appearance so as to capture their genuine reactions. When she emerges from the dilapidated country house, turns on the portable radio and the hose, and goes to work washing the car, Rosenberg pointed the cameras at the men, watching her from a distance. They didn’t require instruction on how to act. “The only one that I talked to was Stuart Rosenberg and the photographer,” Harmon added. “He just worked it like—‘Now, get the sponge, and squeeze it, and wash the car’ and so forth. I just followed [his instruction]. The shots were all like kind of broken up, you know, how he wanted me to do it. It was easy. It was so easy.”
Harmon realized that she’d made an impression after the film came out. In 1968, she married film editor Jeff Gourson, and their Las Vegas honeymoon was comped and their hotel introduced her at shows as “The Girl From Cool Hand Luke.” But she didn’t chase fame, and she eventually left acting to raise her three children. “I was never one who said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to be a big star,’” Harmon said. “I just took whatever came to me. It got to be the point where I would just get calls—I didn’t have to go in and read for it—go in for wardrobe and do scenes in all those TV shows that were out at that time. It was simple and easy and fun.”
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