{"id":606946,"date":"2026-04-16T01:27:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T01:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/606946\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T01:27:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T01:27:11","slug":"cool-hand-luke-woman-who-washed-the-car-was-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/606946\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Cool Hand Luke\u2019 Woman Who Washed the Car Was 87"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJoy Harmon, forever known for her brief turn in the Paul Newman<\/a> classic Cool Hand Luke<\/a> as the young woman who provocatively washes a car with lots of soapy water as overheated prisoners in the chain gang look on, has died. She was 87.<\/p>\n

\n\tHarmon died Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles, her family announced.<\/p>\n

\n\tBlond, blue-eyed and perpetually tanned, Harmon served as Groucho Marx\u2019s assistant on the 1961 CBS game show Tell It to Groucho, then starred as a girl in Hawaii who gets mixed up in a robbery in the beach party movie One Way Wahine (1965).<\/p>\n

\n\tShe also showed up on lots of TV shows, from The Beverly Hillbillies, My Three Sons, Burke\u2019s Law, Gidget and Batman to Bewitched, Occasional Wife, That Girl, The Monkees and The Odd Couple.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn an interview with author Tom Lisanti for his 2007 book, Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood, Harmon said her agent told her that she should wear a bikini to her Cool Hand Luke audition for Newman and director Stuart Rosenberg, so she did.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI remember Paul Newman said to me, \u2018Gosh, you have the bluest eyes!\u2019\u201d she recalled. \u201cThey just talked to me, and that was it. It was a small part with no lines, but I wanted to work with Newman, so when they offered it to me I accepted.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn her scene in the 1967 film<\/a>, Harmon, in a tattered housedress, turns on the portable radio and washes a 1941 DeSoto under a hot sun as if she\u2019s making love to a man. (George Kennedy<\/a>\u2019s character imagines her name is Lucille.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cStuart was very specific and knew exactly what he wanted,\u201d she told Lisanti. \u201cI guess you can tell that by the way the scene comes off \u2014 but I didn\u2019t realize it. And I don\u2019t think I even realized it right after I did it. There were a lot of things he made me do a certain way \u2014 soaping the windows, holding the hose \u2014 that had a two-way meaning. He would tell me to look different ways, and we kept shooting it over and over again. I just figured I was washing the car. I\u2019ve always been na\u00efve and innocent. I was acting and not trying to be sexy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe continued: \u201cI never had any inclination that this would be such a memorable role. Except for being in a movie with Paul Newman, I never expected this part to be so notable and get the reaction it did. After seeing it at the premiere, I was a bit embarrassed. Of all the things I\u2019ve done, people know me most from this film.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBorn in New York, Joy Patricia Harmon was a child model and a finalist in a Miss Connecticut pageant, and she made it to Broadway in the 1958-59 comedy Make a Million. In 1960, she was a contestant on the final season of Marx\u2019s You Bet Your Life, leading to her gig on the comedian\u2019s follow-up game show.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a 30-foot-tall woman, Harmon found Johnny Crawford<\/a> hanging from her bikini top in Village of the Giants (1965), directed by Bert I. Gordon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer big-screen r\u00e9sum\u00e9 also included Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963), Roustabout (1964), The Loved One (1965), Young Dillinger (1965) and Angel in My Pocket (1969).<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter she left acting, she worked at Disney Studios and owned a bakery in Burbank, Aunt Joy\u2019s Cakes, since 2003. \u201cI get fan mail at the house and at the bakery every week and still send back pictures to people,\u201d she told<\/a> Entertainment Weekly in 2017.<\/p>\n

\n\tSurvivors include her children, Jamie, Julie and Jason, and nine grandchildren. She was married to Emmy-nominated producer and film editor Jeff Gourson (Tron, Quantum Leap) from 1968 until their 2001 divorce.<\/p>\n

\n\tA GoFundMe page has been set up<\/a> to help with her medical costs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joy Harmon, forever known for her brief turn in the Paul Newman classic Cool Hand Luke as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606947,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75,11487,61507],"class_list":{"0":"post-606946","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-obituaries","13":"tag-paul-newman"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}