WASHINGTON — Washingtonians who turned on a TV in the 1970s or '80s, will remember the Ourisman Chevrolet girl.

She was Susan Gailey, the radiant blonde who marched through the car lots in all those commercials singing the most indelible jingle of the era: "You'll always get your way-aay / At Ourisman Chev-ro-let!" The ads, an instant sensation, got her dubbed "Washington's only sex symbol." She was mobbed in local restaurants, recognized on the street as far away as Paris.

Her career seemed so promising; then, she vanished. Now we know why: Gailey's daughter was the 13-year-old girl at the center of director Roman Polanski's sensational 1977 statutory rape case.

Though her daughter, Samantha Geimer, went public with her story more than a decade ago, a still shell-shocked Gailey remained in the shadows — until last month, when she agreed to accompany her daughter to the N.Y.C. premiere of an acclaimed new HBO documentary about the case, "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired."

"She said, `You need to stand up and face this — you're going to feel better,' " Gailey told us. "You know, I did feel better."

We reached Gailey via phone in Kilauea, on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Now 69, she's a real estate agent who hasn't worked in showbiz for years. We read Gailey a quote she gave in a Washington Post profile nearly 30 years ago that, in hindsight, breaks your heart. ("There came a time in my life that I don't want to talk about — I don't know how you'll explain that, but I just went away.") Indeed, she told us, discretion was essential.

"Our first thing was to protect Samantha," she said. "The second thing was to protect my job."

The York, Pa., native had moved her family to Los Angeles a few years after the Chevrolet commercials put her on the map. She quickly won roles on "Starsky and Hutch" and "Police Woman" — but after the Polanski incident, "I stopped dead in my tracks," she said. Gailey wanted to shield her daughter's identity. And because the unnamed mother who would let her young daughter attend a photo shoot with Polanski was being pilloried in the media ("I was so stupid and naive," she told us), she also had to conceal her own involvement. Otherwise, she feared, she would lose the Chevrolet gigs that were supporting her family.

Gailey continued as the Ourisman Chevrolet girl into the late 1980s; she kept shooting ads for Casey Chevrolet in Virginia's Tidewater area into the 1990s.

She passed up a chance to be interviewed for the HBO documentary. "The first time I watched it, it freaked me out, reliving that time," she said. She felt calmer by the time of the premiere. "I met Roger Gunson, the prosecutor, who was just wonderful. He said, `All those things they said about you weren't true.' "

Gailey moved to Hawaii nearly two decades ago — "in the mountains, with peacocks and goats, horses, chickens, ducks, macaws." Both of her daughters and all of her five grandchildren live just minutes away. "We're all happy, healthy, fine, healed, good," she said. So if anyone asked whatever happened to the Ourisman Chevrolet girl, she told us, "You can say she died and went to Heaven."