Interview by Matthew C. Funk
She always has a history. "There were two managers at the 50s diner where I worked, a pothead and a cokehead,” Jessica Sugar Kiper tells me, and I can hear the train of questioning has long since leapt the tracks, grinding sparks into the wilderness, not tipping and not stopping, carrying me along. And what the fuck, I figure—I bought the ticket; I may as well take the ride.
Sugar is a historical Hollywood legend come to life, after all.
I’m beginning to understand that Sugar is more than a vintage look and a vintage name. She’s a vintage life. She’s got a pulp story, a scandal, a testimony behind everything she is.
"One night, it’s just me and a bus boy, and we’re handling a packed section by ourselves. Cokehead comes in and goes ballistic on us. The next day I turned in a 3-page letter and quit." Sugar sips the lemon drop that teeters oversized in her hand. "And that was that."
'That' is never just 'that' with Sugar.
For those unfamiliar with her career, Sugar has flickered across our screens in shows like Angel, Gilmore Girls and For Your Love, and in movies such as Heathers-creator Dan Waters’ Sex and Death 101.
But her big piece of primetime was as a Survivor belle-of-the-ball back in Gabon. All heart and a pair of blond pigtails, she went all the way to the end before practically handing the crown to her competitor in the final showdown. An actress and a pin-up model, the perks of her publicity have since been few.
“I’m grateful I was on a reality show,” Sugar muses as she heaps honey on a cracker at Café Was. “When I moved down here, I found most people make it because of their personality, or because they are a personality.”
She is that.
At 5’4”, Sugar stands out. Not because of the hair bows and skull earrings. It’s because she lives with a passion, and the life she lives has been part of the classic Hollywood pantheon since before Clara Bow: The hard luck girl who comes to Tinseltown to be discovered.
Sugar’s life glows with the stories of this mythology.
“I was about three — the priest was inside with my mother, performing the exorcism or cleansing ritual or whatever on the house—and the family dog just bit me. He bit me on the face,” leads to her mother’s conversion to an abusively strict Evangelical religion.
“She wouldn’t let me listen to anything but Country, Christian or 50’s...so I’d listen to the 50s,” leads to her fascination with the pin-ups, the diners with chrome-trim counters, the fashion.
And then came Marilyn.
From around age 12 on, Sugar was a Marilyn Monroe look-alike. She became a Norma Jeane Baker encyclopedia. She started stepping into the spotlight—high-school was A Midsummer Night’s Dream; you can find her “Suddenly Seymour” on YouTube; Rocky Horror in Baton Rogue rejected her as too young.
She left town out of high school and, like tens of thousands of starry-eyed girls before, headed West. Jessica “Michele-One-L” Kiper ended up at a 50s diner, It’s Tops, in Frisco. She just needed a name, a persona, like Marilyn. Jessica was in the right place.
And so came Sugar — dropped reflexively by a fellow waitress when they were musing her nickname.
But what is Sugar?
The answers Sugar gives are the answers she’s been given—by casting directors, producers, happenstance:
“I used to get parts as the bratty teenager.”
“I’m getting a lot of roles as the funny-sexy girl.”
“I didn’t like animal print until Survivor.”
“I play a good lesbian.”
Sugar is, so far, what Sugar has been seen as by others. Maybe it’s like she says, “You just can’t give yourself a nickname. I tried in 3rd Grade, but it doesn’t work.”
Maybe. Norma Jeane may have needed Ben Lyon and Fox Studios to make her Marilyn—the new name, new nose, new UCLA degree.
But when Sugar talks to you—no matter if you’re filling her water glass or producing her in a play—she looks you right in the eye. She doesn’t filter her attention or her words. Sugar talks like she wants to know you and is sure she knows herself.
“I’m a spiritual person,” Sugar tells me, sitting up straighter, “and I love God, and I talk to Him, I say thank you,” and you’ll hear her testimony.
“But I smoke and I drink and I enjoy…” Sugar starts to chuckle; lift an eyebrow and half a grin. And it seems no surprise that in most pictures of her, she’s beaming, she’s hugging, she’s leaping through the air, she’s making a face, she’s crying, she’s laughing.
“Irony—I like to look one way and another; have a bow and a nose ring in,” Sugar says, but it’s not just ‘look’. On the same subject—Survivor—she can go from fretting about young girls being over-sexualized by following how she’s portrayed, to roaring about how another contestant was “a fucking motherfucker!”
That seems the real Sugar: The woman with some fierce history—of facial dog bites or voices from above or skydiving to face her fears—who looks you in the eyes to tell it.
And that’s vintage Hollywood—the diner girl on the edge of discovery just as we’d imagined her: Decent. Wild. Faithful. Glamorous. Striding the silver strand between shifts pouring your coffee and starring in your matinees.
It may not be how Sugar sees Sugar. But it is what Sugar is most proud of.
“I got Best Diner Personality for the 1998 Bay Guardian Best of the Bay. I’m very proud of that,” Sugar beams as we begin talking of her persona. And much later, talking of her role in Dan Waters’ Sex and Death 101, her trackless train of storytelling leaps there again.
“I was the hooker with the heart of gold.” Sugar smiles a bit. “The heart of gold was easy. When I won the Best of the Bay Award, they said I had a heart of gold.”
Sugar’s smile is shining now. “That was the nicest thing—my favorite article of all time. I always heard you’ve got to do what you love. A heart of gold means a lot to me.”
And of course it does.
We always wanted to believe it did.
Matthew C. Funk is a professional marketing copywriter and social media consultant, a writing mentor and the author of several manuscripts that illuminate the beauty of human extremes. A graduate of the Professional Writing MFA at USC, his online work is featured at sites such as Flash Fiction Offensive; ThugLit; Powder Burn Flash; Thrillers, Killers and Chillers; Twist of Noir; Pulp Metal Magazine; Spinetingler Magazine; Six Sentences and his Web domain.
Photos by Glenn Campbell
