What’s New Pussycat

Tom Jones’s “What’s New Pussycat?” becomes more than a song on the car stereo: when Pussycat finally admits that she likes it, its bombastic playback turns a ride with Cliff Booth into a flirtatious performance. Her response makes the track a small but telling hinge in their journey toward Chatsworth, shifting the mood from reluctant listening to deliberate seduction.

Playback on the freeway

Pussycat first tears the cellophane from an 8-track cartridge, removes its cardboard border, and switches the music system in Rick Dalton’s Cadillac from radio to tape. The Box Tops fall silent. After a loud mechanical clunk and a brief stretch of tape hiss, Tom Jones’s “What’s New Pussycat?” fills the car in full stereo. The sequence gives the song a physical entrance: it arrives not as background radio but as a chosen recording, inserted by Pussycat herself.

Her response is immediate and unexpectedly candid. “Okay,” she admits. “I do like this song.” She turns up the volume and begins moving her shoulders to the music, performing for Cliff as he drives. The scene makes the recording an active part of the encounter: its rise in volume accompanies her change from passenger to performer, while Cliff watches her and keeps the Cadillac moving down the Hollywood Freeway.

Pussycat then draws her bare legs up onto the seat, rises to her knees, and opens the button of her cutoffs. In time with the song, she turns the performance into an overtly sexual display. Cliff remains at the wheel, looking between the road and Pussycat; her teasing conduct prompts him to think that the drive to Chatsworth may be worth the gas. The song’s title thus becomes pointedly personal within the scene, while its loud, theatrical sound gives their otherwise ordinary car ride a playful, erotic charge.

A flirtation set to the title

Pussycat’s performance reaches its most explicit beat while Tom Jones’s song continues: she lies back across the passenger seat, braces her feet against the headrest and windshield, and moves her fingers in time with the music. The title now sounds like a private joke made literal by the woman beside Cliff Booth. The song does not merely accompany the flirtation; its name and rhythm help frame her transformation of a ride into a staged seduction.

Cliff keeps driving, dividing his attention between the freeway and Pussycat. When she invites him to touch her, he answers affirmatively, though he remains at the wheel. The exchange leaves the scene’s balance intact: Pussycat directs the display and tests its effect, while Cliff’s response registers his interest without interrupting the journey. In this moment, “What’s New Pussycat?” is both a popular recording and a cue for play, its exuberant theatricality carrying the encounter from a change of music into an unmistakably sexual performance.

Radio, television, and chosen music

The song’s force gains definition from the novel’s broader soundscape, where music arrives through ordinary media rather than as an isolated performance. On the morning of February 8, 1969, Cliff Booth hears KHJ disc jockey Robert W. Morgan announce, “Good Morgan, Boss Angeles!” as he drives through Los Angeles. The contrast is not simply between radio and an 8-track: one sound belongs to the city’s shared broadcast rhythm, while the other becomes part of a private encounter inside Rick Dalton’s Cadillac.

Elsewhere, music also marks domestic routine. While Cliff is away, he leaves his small television on for Brandy; on the February 7 episode of The Hollywood Palace, Robert Goulet performs “MacArthur Park.” Against those ambient broadcasts, “What’s New Pussycat?” is distinguished by the deliberate act of choosing and playing a recording. The song’s scene turns that everyday popular culture into a cue for interaction, making the car’s sound system part of the drama rather than mere background.

Popular music as private taste and public atmosphere

The novel places Pussycat’s choice of “What’s New Pussycat?” within a wider field of popular music that characters encounter differently. At Cielo Drive, Sharon Tate puts the needle on the first track of Paul Revere and the Raiders’ album The Spirit of ’67, one of several cellophane-wrapped copies left in a guest-room closet by former resident Terry Melcher. The record carries traces of the house’s previous life: Melcher had shared it with the band’s lead singer, Mark Lindsay, before moving in with Candice Bergen. Roman Polanski dismisses the music as bubble-gum, but Sharon neither argues nor agrees. She enjoys the hits she hears on KHJ, including songs by the Ohio Express and Bobby Sherman, and privately prefers the Monkees to the Beatles, a taste she keeps from Roman and their hip friends, including John and Michelle Phillips, Cass Elliot, and Warren Beatty. Her unspoken preference makes popular music a marker of personal taste that need not match a character’s social image.

Music also fills public rooms without becoming a chosen intimate soundtrack. When Rick Dalton, Cliff Booth, and Jim Stacy enter a bar, a pianist is playing O. C. Smith’s “Little Green Apples”; Jim waves to the musician, who nods back, before Jim greets the bartender. Heard in that casual exchange, the song belongs to a social setting and a familiar network of recognition. Set beside Sharon’s private listening and Pussycat’s deliberate turn to the 8-track, the scene shows how recorded and performed music can variously disclose preference, shape a flirtation, or simply accompany people moving through their day.