Cassandra Peterson says she was supposed to be Ginger Grant in The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island until the part was taken away days before she was due to fly to Hawaii. The role went to Constance Forslund instead, a switch that left Peterson, who would soon debut as Elvira, stunned and furious.
The change matters because Peterson was not some hopeful outsider. She says she had been privately assured the part was hers, and the film was one of three TV movie sequels spun out of Gilligan's Island after CBS unexpectedly cancelled the series after three seasons. By 1981, the franchise was still alive, the Ginger Grant role had already been recast once, and the next choice was supposed to be Peterson.
That was the year the part collapsed. Peterson later wrote in Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark that she was beyond devastated after learning Sherwood Schwartz had switched the role to Forslund, who had played Marilyn Monroe in This Year's Blonde the year before. In Peterson's telling, Schwartz said a network executive objected after seeing her perform with The Groundlings, pointing to a sketch in which she played a patient in a gynecologist's office and saying the network did not need that kind of element tied to Gilligan's Island.
Schwartz's explanation was blunt enough on its own. Peterson's was sharper. She wrote that she believed the job may have gone south because years earlier she had blown up after walking in on the same executive in bed with her boyfriend, Matt. She later summed up the whole episode with a line that still hangs over it: Guess we'll never know for sure.
What is not in doubt is the timing. In 1981, Peterson lost Ginger Grant and made her debut as Elvira on Movie Macabre, then went on to reprise the character in Elvira: Mistress of the Dark in 1988. Tina Louise had played Ginger on Gilligan's Island from 1964 to 1967, but she did not return for the sequels, forcing the role to be recast. Peterson's near miss now reads less like a footnote than a pivot point: the casting that did not happen is part of the story of the persona that did.
