Goldie Hawn Kick-Started Her Career With a ‘Go-Go Agent’

If you think you’ve had some tough jobs in your time, you need to hear what Goldie Hawn had to do. The 71-year-old stunner recently revealed the lengths she went to in order to make it in the entertainment industry. “My parents always supported me, but I was put to task. My father thought when I sang, I was sharp; my mother was upset when I wasn’t in the first line at recitals,” Hawn told her daughter, Kate Hudson, in a recent issue of Interview. While Hawn conceded that her grandfather did occasionally call Carnegie Deli to tell the staff there to give her breakfast, she largely supported herself during her years in New York City.

But a girl cannot live on pastrami sandwiches alone, so Hawn sought other means of income. “When I started go-go dancing on tables for a living, I didn’t want to tell my mom or my dad. I made 25 dollars a night, and I was able to make my rent, with the four girls I lived with,” she explained. “It was a challenge, but I never once said, ‘One day I’m going to do this and that…’ I never looked at life that way. I just saw where I was and knew that I was going to continue to move on with my career.”

The Snatched star added, “When I went to go-go dance at the Peppermint Box in New Jersey, I took a Greyhound bus and, believe it or not, I had a go-go agent. I don’t know how I got that.” Seriously, how do you get a go-go agent? The world needs to know.

Her go-go career came to an abrupt end, however. “I was slow dancing on a table to ‘Everybody Loves Somebody’ by Dean Martin with my little outfit on. But when some guy in a suit showed me his penis, I said, ‘I need to get home.'” We hear ya, sister. “The bartender was like, ‘You won’t get a Greyhound now. It’s too late.’ I went, ‘Where’s your owner? I want to get paid.’ She said, ‘Oh, he passed out a long time ago.'”

Hawn wasn’t about to spend the rest of the night at the Peppermint Box, though — so she found alternate (though notably unsafe) transportation home. “I went to every guy at the bar — it was a truck stop — until finally two guys said, ‘OK, we’ll take you home.’ And I went home in an 18-wheeler.” Hawn laughed and added, “This was 1965 or something like that.” Hmm. It’s hard to imagine Hawn being too excited about her own daughter getting home that way, but apparently everything turned out fine.

The aspiring actress eventually made her way to Los Angeles, using a plane ticket purchased by her mother, since she had spent nearly all of her own money on a dog. (Oops.)

“I was almost 20, and I was going to dance in a show in a theater across from Disneyland. I had never flown over the entire United States before. I had 250 dollars saved, but my mom bought my ticket because I’d taken 200 of those dollars and bought a dog,” she recalled. “This little puppy poodle came with me on the plane, and I’ll never forget flying across the desert. I wrote — granted this was after one or two Bloody Marys — but I wrote in my diary, ‘If anyone could doubt the existence of god, then they have to look again.'”

Not everyone loved Hawn’s approach to Hollywood, however. “During the era when women were burning their bras — which, by the way, they never actually did — but when women were first becoming liberated, I was 23,” Hawn recounted. “And I met a woman who asked, ‘Don’t you feel bad because you’re sort of acting like the stupid airhead blonde?’ And I totally surprised myself. I said, ‘Liberation can also come from the inside.'” Amen to that.

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