"In the 1930s, pyjamas were exotic, the sort of thing worn by young flappers. These so-called 'new women' dressed in skimpy clothes, they smoked, they drank, they partied and they laughed at convention" -- and when they were murdered, it was what they deserved. Alessia presents the whole nasty scoop of clumping kitty litter that is The Pygama Girl Mystery in, My Pajamas Made Him Kill Me (Or, In Which I Review A Film I Haven't Seen).
"Her Legs Aren't Legs, They're Dramatic Exclamation Points!"
More from Tip Top magazine, this a bit of gossip about Jill St. John from Notes On The Leg Line, "News and comments from the leg-watching world", a column by Goodwin Stephens:
I only remembered Jill St. John as a Bond Girl (she played Tiffany Case opposite Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever) when I watched Bond Girls Are Forever. That was released in 2002 and Jill looked fabulous.
Oddly enough, I do remember her as being in Hart To Hart with hubby Robert Wagner -- and Jill was only in the pilot episode.
Since the Tip Top bit features a photo of Jill St. John stripping in The Oscar (a film I've yet to see), here's the scene:
I Think I Love You, Sadie, Sally, Whatever Your Name Was
Still fascinated by the Pink Pussycat, of which there is little on the tubes of Internets, I've become drawn to Sally Marr (aka Sally Marsalle and Boots Malloy), the former dean of the college of strip tease who was also Lenny Bruce's mother.
Virtually whenever anyone writes about Marr, and admittedly few do, they mention her 'bawdy' and 'outspoken' nature. The examples are that she's said to have 1) taken son Lenny to see burlesque shows when he was just 12 and 2) allowed him to read adult materials.
These two statements are repeated ad naseum, becoming one-liner legends I'm tempted to dismiss as being copied one from the other in a strange daisy-chain of cut-and-paste -- but I won't. For while those statements are repeated at a frequency worthy of dismissal (further penalized by the blandness that only an absence of documentation coupled with a lack of description can provide) they also represent something else.
First looking at the context of the statements, the on-one-hand 'credit' (these experiences creating the comedian's successful act) and on-the-other-hand mention (a nod to the bizarre foreshadowing the comedian's doomed life), points to the question of Marr's fitness for motherhood. Because moms cannot be sexual or sex positive without damaging herself and her children, her parenting is so unorthodox that no further explanation is deemed necessary.
For the record, I snort & chafe at such beliefs.
In Seriously Funny, by Gerald Nachman, there seems to be some discrepancy over Sally's literal mothering -- some claiming that she was rarely around for Lenny between the ages of 8 to 17. Surely at odds with the stories of how the 12 year old was watching the burlesque shows him mom emceed; make up your minds, people.
(And, speaking of such things again, it should also be noted that at burlesque shows in those days, no strippers went nude -- it was an art form of tease and humor. While I cannot say just what 'adult materials' Bruce had, let alone which momma Marr allowed him to have, we cannot ignore that while complete nudity and even penetration porn may have existed, Marr herself is to have said, "A woman's best weapon is a man's imagination." In that case, it's pretty clear that Marr knew that a g-string dollar was proffered for the teasing suggestion, not any actual delivery.)
Many go further and seem to seek to mar Marr's reputation by depicting her not only as morally questionable, but as opportunistic as well. They mention how she dared to enjoy being famous as Lenny Bruce's Mom; ignoring the fact that Lenny's big break, the gig at Ann's 440 where Hugh Hefner spotted him, wouldn't have happened had Sally not told the manager of Ann's 440 not to hire herself but her son. They mention how she sought Lenny's limelight, even milking it after he was dead; but side-step Marr's willing assistance & support (including financial) to other comedians. (She is credited for spotting the talents Cheech & Chong, Sam Kinison, and others.)
What's really telling about all of this is the irony. While they are busy depicting Sally Marr this way, the truth is seen: It is they who are only interested in Lenny Bruce, and Marr for her relationship with him.
Born Sadie Kitchenberg, Marr had, at age twelve, been a contestant in a beauty contest judged by Rudolph Valentino. She was offered a job on the basis of her provacative performance, but her father refused to let her accept it. She began dancing, winning a variety of contests, giving dance lessons, and always looking to perform.
During World War II, with her son Lenny off in the navy and her husband long gone, Marr worked in bars an an emcee. Audiences responded well to her slightly off-color jokes, and eventually she moved on to larger comedy clubs. When her career waned, Marr transferred her show business ambitions to her son, becoming Lenny's coach and number-one fan, in the tradition of Sadie Berle and Minnie Marx.
Such intriguing brief hints at Marr's life before motherhood -- of her having a life before and outside of being the comedian's mother... I drool from my aroused organ (my brain; sheesh, you're smutty).
Even if she wasn't going to ever win any awards for World's Most Traditional Mother (and who the hell wants that honor?!), even if she was thrilled to bask in Lenny's fame, even if you don't like her -- I do.
I'm intrigued by this woman who impressed Valentino, who taught girls (of all ages & sorts) to dance (all sorts of dances), who understood seduction, who played with risque humor, who not only raised a son so funny & wise but got his humor too. It's her biography I want to read.
And if you've got any more info about Sally Marr, any objects & photos etc., no matter what name she's billed as, please share!
Bran Castle, built in the 14th century as a fortress to protect against the invading Ottoman Turks, was home to the Romanian royal family from the 1920s until the communist regime confiscated it in 1948. At the end of communist rule in the 1980's, Bran Castle was restored, dubbed "Dracula's Castle," and thus became a popular tourist attraction, with some 450,000 people visiting the castle each year.
While Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, aka "Vlad the Impaler", may or may not have ever stayed at Bran Castle, the Transylvanian castle did inspire Bram Stoker's classic 1897 novel Dracula -- and apparently that is enough for millions of people.
Me? I'm not such a fan of horror & blood. But I am a lover of affairs of the heart & hearts themselves... beating with life they literally keep the beat of our lives, turning the rapid pulse of emotion into the racing hearts of passion and then the heated pumping of erotic acts... and how the heart stills with emotional too, be it the skip at romantic introduction or the pause when the heart is broken... I even love them long after they've stopped beating. So, I'd still go see the Bran Castle -- but not for Dracula; I'd go for Queen Marie of Romania.
While married to Ferdinand of Romania, Marie not only had an affair with Lieutenant Zixi Cantacuzene which produced a child "disappeared from history"; a longer affair with Barbu Ştirbey which produced at least one son, Prince Mircea, and possibly one daughter, Princess Ileana; but Princess Maria (called Mignon) might have been the daughter of Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich of Russia.
Certainly all of this had to have affected Marie's thinking regarding her son, King Carol II, and his relationship with Magda Lupescu -- first his mistress, and this his wife after his abdication -- but she publicly stated he had "sinned grievously". The irony seems to have been lost to Marie who only became further estranged from her son.
All such juicy things to further investigate...
And then there's this bit: Queen Marie made arrangements in her will for her heart to be kept in a cloister at the Balchik Palace -- her son Carol II dutifully carried out the request.
In 1940 her heart was transferred to the chapel at Bran Castle (the casket with Queen Marie's heart has since been moved to National History Museum of Romania in Bucharest).
Who doesn't want to pilgrimage to this woman's home?
If that's not enough to seduce you to, how about this quote from Queen Marie regarding a proselytizer:
I have met ..... I did not like him. He seemed to me to be a snob. He spoke of God as if He were the oldest title in the Almanach de Gotha. And all that business about telling one's sins in public -- He wanted me ... me ... to get up before my children and confess everything I had ever done! It is spiritual nudism! Ça se ne fait pas.
In 2005, the Romanian government passed a law allowing restitution claims on properties seized by the Communist government of Romania in 1948. It was due to this law that, in 2006, the Romanian government awarded ownership of Bran Castle to the son and heir of Princess Ileana, Archduke Dominic of Austria, Prince of Tuscany, known as Dominic von Habsburg -- then a 68-year-old New York architect.
Because of Princess Ileana's questionable lineage, among other things, the property distribution was challenged; but as Queen Marie herself named Ileana as the one to inherit Bran Castle, the Constitutional Court of Romania and an investigation commission of the Romanian government reaffirmed the validity & legality of the restitution procedures used and in December 2007 issued confirmation that the restitution to Ileana's son, von Habsburg, was made in full compliance with the law.
According to the contract signed when Bran castle was returned, the government pays rent to von Habsburg for the right to run the castle as a museum (including charging admission) for three years. That period ends in 2009 and full rights to the castle & property will then transfer to von Habsburg.
Having no experience with running a museum, von Habsburg and his family have put the castle up for sale to those "who will treat the property and its history with appropriate respect."
I'm not sure my lusty love of history would meet approval; but as Bran Castle is expected to fetch over $135 million, I don't suppose I could afford it anyway.
At the risk of regression, I have to point out this gem of a quote from Marilyn on the mutual non-love affair between herself & Tony Curtis on (and likely off) the set of Some Like It Hot.
In a letter to a friend she wrote:
"There is only one way he could comment on my sexuality and I'm afraid he's never had the opportunity."
Aces.
The fact that Marilyn owned a child's recording of Walt Disney's Snow White is sweet...
I'm trying to resist all urges to comment on how Monroe had too many dwarfs in her life... How she was not only both Madonna & Whore, but both the Sweet Princess and the Evil Queen, poisoning herself into slumbers that only the kiss of true love could wake her from...
The Beloved Brat, by James Street, an article on Fannie Brice as published in Radio Guide, week ending Sept 22, 1939. (Many thanks to Pop Tart for scanning & sending!) Along with photos of Fannie as Baby Snooks, there are photos of Fannie with her children, Frances & Bill, from her marriage to Nicky Arnstein -- including one of Fannie helping Frances "don 'sock and buskin'" for Frances' debut, at the age of 17, in Ziegfeld's "Follies" in 1936.
Sadly, this is just part one of The Beloved Brat, but the article ends on a rather whimsical note (links added for reader assistance):
The character [Baby Snooks] was created eighteen years ago, quite by accident. There was a song called "Poor Pauline" going the rounds. It was a take-off on the "Perils of Pauline," the old movie thriller. Fannie was at a friend's house one night and sang the song as a child might. It clicked, and Moss Hart and Dave Freedman wrote lines for Fannie and she used "Snooks" in the Follies. Today Miss Brice is "Baby Snooks," not the wife who sang "My Man." The giddy era has passed.
At the top of the heap, she married Billy Rose, but that one didn't take. Mr. Rose and Eleanor Holm are betrothed. Miss Holm is working for Mr. Rose at the New York Fair and recently she was late for a cue. Mr. Rose asked how come, and his sweetheart told him she had been laughing so much at a radio program that she forgot the time. The program was "Baby Snooks" singing "The Little Fishes."
And so the woman who made the world cry with "My Man" now plays a brat who amuses the woman who won one of Brice's men.
When you mention the name Veronica Lake, everyone remembers the hair. (There was one movie, which for the life of me I cannot remember the name of, in which a male character refers to a group of girls -- each sitting there with the trademark Veronica Lake peekaboo hair wave -- as being in their Veronica Lake phase. If you remember the scene, please tell me; it's killing me not to remember!)
But, as evidenced by this vintage photo, Veronica was also sold on another physical attribute: her dirty smirk.
DIRTY LOOK--DIRTY FACE HOLLYWOOD--Constance Keane--Vernoica Lake to-you-- can give the dirtiest of dirty-looks and have the dirtiest of dirty faces and still be charming. She proves this in her second stellar role of her meteor-like film career in :Sullivan's Travels," Paramount Picture to be released in February. Here she turns on that dirty look for Sullivan, played by Joel McCrea, when she finds out that the "bum" she has befriended with her last 35 cents is really a movie director rolling in the lap of luxury.
The seller adds the following info about the photograph: "Vintage 1942, 6" x 8" Publicity Portrait of Veronica Lake as featured in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS – (although this portrait was first used to promote THIS GUN FOR HIRE in 1941)."
* Founding the the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, known as FACT.
* Starting the Pink Ladies Social Club, a club which supports women (performers, writers, makeup artists, directors etc.) who works in the adult industry and works to fight the stereotype of female sex workers as bimbos &/or victims coerced by men into humiliating themselves.
* Being a member of the Board of Directors for the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, an organization that works to advance sexual freedom as a fundamental human right by protecting and advancing freedom of speech and sexual expression), but with her wisdom in faith and religion.
Before any of you pervs get all excited pondering Vic's crotchless undies, remember, the opening was for bodily functions other than sexual reproduction. (However, if the pee and the poo excites you, feel free to carry on; it's not my thing, but no judgements here.) Anyway, this queen wasn't known for her sexual dalliances.
Infamous for her disinterest in sex, I doubt anybody ever really got a good look at these before the internet plastered them all over the world.
Anyway, it think it's cool that a private collector, Barbara Rusch, is taking a quarter of a century to slowly dress (or is that undress?) Queen Victoria.
Pan Yuliang is a wonderful artist -- but one who is often discussed more for her struggle to become one (having been sold at the age of 14 into prostitution by her only surviving relative) and for her nude works (at a time when such works were scandalous).
I'm delighted to have Jennifer's insight here...
SPS: When/how did you first become aware of Pan Yuliang?
Jennifer: I was actually the Guggenheim with my husband and some relatives—roughly ten years ago. The exhibition—which was amazing--was on Modern Chinese Art, and there was just one image by Pan Yuliang on display. But it drew me over immediately; it was a typical Pan Yuliang in that it was very evocative of Matisse and Cezanne, and the bright, bold colors and distinctly Western setting (as compared to the huge propaganda-style images and much more subtle ink paintings around it) really stood out for me.
SPS: What was it that captured you & compelled you to write the book?
Jennifer: Upon seeing the picture, I went over to study it more closely. And when I read about Pan’s story (prostitute-concubine-Post-Impressionist icon; really?!) it just blew me away. I’d never heard of her before—but I couldn’t, at that moment, understand why---it struck me that everyone should know about her. I suppose writing the book was one way to try to understand her, and to try to imagine what making that sort of an extraordinary journey would be like.
SPS: How long did it take to create the book?
Jennifer: From inception to publication it was almost exactly ten years--so a long time! Granted, throughout that period I quite my job at NBC, finished an MFA at Columbia and also had my two daughters, so there were some side-trips.
SPS: Why write a novel, rather than a biography?
Jennifer: Mainly because I'd made the decision--after ten years in journalism--to try writing fiction, which I'd always wanted to do. But also because Pan's story ended up being one of those where I actually had to use creative license in order to get any sort of a complete sense of her. Even the art historians I spoke to confirmed that there is so little actually factually known about her (even the birthdate on her gravestone in Paris is generally agreed to be inaccurate) that in order to get a full sense of her life, one has to simply imagine.
SPS: You mention there is little documentation or biographical information about her... What do you think that is due to? A lack of respect for her, her art? Did her popularity increase after her death, when it was "too late" for much information? Or was it a general lack of respect for women in general? Or just a problem in general of artists from that time? Something else?
Jennifer: I think the lack of documentation was in part a combination of all these factors. But I also think that Pan herself kept a pretty tight grip on her story and was very careful about the versions of it she allowed out. This isn't surprising, given how wildly controversial both her work and her history were, and also given the fact that people tended to pay more attention to the latter than the former.
SPS: Have you seen Hua hun, and if so, what are your thoughts on the film?
Jennifer: I have. I actually knew about the film fairly early into my research, but held off watching it until I was well grounded in my own book and characters---I didn't want to risk being overly influenced by it. think I finally sat through it after I'd already finished with Shanghai in my book and was moving on to Paris. I certainly appreciated Hua Hun for its beauty--it was very well-done, and I loved the intense aestheticism of it visually. But I did feel that--like the biography it's based on--the movie portrayed Pan Yuliang as somewhat less of a self-determined woman and artist than I came to see her as. The general sense I got from watching it was that she was more or less shaped by the actions of the men around her; e.g., rescued despite herself from the brothel, guided into art and school by her husband, etc. I sensed such a strength of character and will in her paintings, though, that I really wanted to give her more of a role in her evolution as an artist.
It's been noted to me, incidentally, that some readers think i made her too strong--they don't find her particularly likeable. But my sense is (both from my own musings and from what I've heard) that she wasn't an easy person in real life to either know or to like--so I suppose in some ways that just makes me hope that I got something right!
SPS: Did she have any children?
Jennifer: She did not. The biographical info points to at least one pregnancy but (as I write [in the book]) that was terminated. She did adopt her husband's son, however; he's still alive I believe, in Anhui province.
SPS: If you could say in one sentence (of what took a decade to create) -- what you think is the sum of the book... I guess that would be two sentences --
Jennifer: The sum, for me, is really the boundless creativity and ingenuity of the human spirit (though I hope that doesn't make people gag!). The truth is, Pan Yuliang was pretty much damned from the start by so many factors--her gender, her class, her country of origin; the fact that her parents died and her uncle was an opium addict; the fact that she was sold into a brothel. It's a set of circumstances that most women would simply not have survived. And yet thanks to her resilience, talent and the sheer bravery she displayed in painting what she wanted, regardless of cost, she has left other women and artists this extraordinary example and legacy. (I'm sorry, that's four sentences and a lot of semicolons!)
SPS: That's OK -- it took me how many sentence fragments just to get near a question. *wink* Do you have a "one sentence bit" of what you hope the reader walks away with from The Painter From Shanghai?
Jennifer: That even in the most apparently dire of circumstances you still have the power to shape your own dreams, goals, life.
SPS: And, in one sentence, what did you walk away from the experience with?
Jennifer: The thrill of having had Pan Yuliang and China as a job for the past decade (how lucky is that!?), and a renewed faith in myself for actually having published a historical novel with family and sanity (at least somewhat) intact!
Call in questions and comments are welcome at 1 (646) 200-3136. (And rumor has it that a copy of The Painter from Shanghai will be given away to live callers...)
If you miss the show, you can listen to the archived show (or download it) here.
Ruan Lingyu: A Decade Of Film & Even More Years Of Tragedy
Ruan Lingyu (also known/billed as Ruan Ling-Yu, Lingyu Ruan, Lily Yuan, & Lily Yuen) is the Chinese silent film star whose works are not very well known here in the US; I myself have TCM to thank for making her acquaintance -- first via The Peach Girl (aka Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of Blood, 1931; I'll be reviewing it soon!) & then The Goddess (1934).
Born Ruan Fenggeng in Shanghai on April 26, 1910, Ruan experienced the difficult life of a child of a poor migrant family from Canton. Her father died by the time she was six, and her mother moved away from Shanghai the following year to work as a housemaid in the home of the wealthy Zhang family. While she sent Ruan to school, by the age of 16 the young girl dropped out -- and moved in with the Zhang's son, Damin.
There was very strong opposition by Zhang's family to this tongiu (the romantic cohabitational love of 'the moderns' who eschewed arranged & even agreed upon marriages). This opposition resulted not only in Zhang not getting any financial support from his family, but in getting Ruan's mother fired as well; she moved in with the young couple. This, along with Damin's gambling & general irresponsibility, meant that Ruan must work to support the household.
In 1926, at the age of 16, Ruan spots an ad for "film actors needed" at Star Movie Studios. With the help of Zhang HuiChong, Damin's elder brother who had starred in swordplay films for the Commercial Press in the early 20's, Ruan went for an interview and audition. (Zhang HuiChong got married to Xu Sue/Wu Suxin, a rather famous actress working at the Great China Film Studios, and together they created the short-lived United Film Studios -- sometimes referred to as the HuiChong Film Company -- from 1924-1927.)
Ruan's diligence & beauty outshone her lack of education and she was cast in 1927's A Couple in Name Only (aka The Nominal Couple), directed by Bu Wancang (aka Wancang Bu &/or Richard Poh).
Prior to 1920, only a few short movies had been made in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and, much like Shakespearean works, all the performers were male, including the female roles.
Public opinion lumped actresses in with prostitutes, actually calling them prostitutes; in their defense, prostitution was one of only two options for women who wanted to work, and as proper modest Chinese women would never boast or promote themselves in public, the willingness to project themselves onto screens for everyone to see put them in the same category as the other indecent women.
She made a few films at MingXing, but it wasn't until she left MingXing and joined Da Zhonghua Baihe Film Company (which quickly merged with other companies to become Lianhua Film Company) that she found real success and Shanghai stardom. That film was A Dream in the Old Capital (aka Reminiscence Of Peking, 1929).
It is said that around this time Ruan adopted her daughter, XiaoYu; yet she and Damin have already parted from each other three times -- and between 1927 and 1928 Ruan is said to have tried to commit suicide. By the end of 1928, their relationship crisis seems to be over, but Damin continues to gamble and live off Ruan's earnings.
Ruan continues to make films for Lianhua and her popularity grows. According to TCM, in Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris says that at Lianhua, Ruan "would find her greatest successes in a series of intense female-centered melodramas, many of them engaged with such pressing social issues as poverty, class conflict, prostitution, illegitimacy, women's rights, suicide, and occasionally a political film that grew out of anxieties around Japan's invasion of Shanghai."
In 1932, during the invasion of Japanese towards Shanghai, Ruan & Damin fled to Hong Kong. As soon as the situation became stable Ruan returned to Shanghai and involved in her first leftist inspired film, Three Modern Women, which brought her to another peak of her career, pushing her into second place on the 1933 list of the Top Ten stars in a Movie Queen contest run by local newspaper & magazines.
It was in 1932, while Damin was still in Hong Kong, that Ruan met wealthy merchant Tang Jishan, the "King of the Tea", at a party; by March of 1933 Ruan had moved into Tang's home.
On April 9th, Zhang returned from Hong Kong, prepared to make a fuss with the press regarding his romance with Ruan. A few days later he signed an agreement saying that Ruan would provide him with 100 yuan per month for the next two years -- and in return he would not bother her again. Sort of a common law divorce.
On August 8th of 1933, Tang and Ruan announce their engagement.
Things continue to go well for Ruan. In 1934 she stars in Cai Chusheng's A New Woman, considered by many to be her best film.
However the press takes issue with the film's heroine, who, having been forsaken by her husband & failing to make a living from writing, was forced to become a prostitute to raise her child -- and then to commit suicide. It wasn't so much the ethics or morals of the plot which angered the press, but the film's accusation that the suicide of the woman had been a result of the press' libelous reports. The film was edited to tone down the accusation, but as the film was inspired by the life & death of actress and writer Ai Xia, who took her own life in 1934, the accusation lingered like the taste of bile in a throat... But the film was very well received by audiences and Ruan's fame soared.
Damin, likely either deeply in gambling debt, or just wanting a larger piece of Ruan's popularity (and yuan) pie, returned to extort more money from the actress. This upset Tang who, despite insider suggestion that it made Ruan unhappy, brought Damin into court on December 27, 1934, resulting in a media frenzy.
Despite public adoration of Ruan and the more or less scandalous living arrangements between herself and Damin, the couple is seen to have a common law marriage and Tang -- along with Ruan -- are accused of fanghai hunyin jiating zui, the equivalent of an attack on family values & marriage in general.
Perhaps this was due to some acceptance of Damin & Ruan's common law marriage; but Damin's old & traditional family name with its history of imperial officers also outranked Tang's "new money" and simple "merchant" status. Of course, Tang's history of divorces and affairs probably didn't win him any points either... Not that Damin hadn't been a louse too.
But in this sordid scandal, it is Ruan who looses pubic favor and is put under great scrutiny and stress. She is summoned to appear in court on March 9th, but sometime during the night of March 7th she wrote several letters & then committed suicide.
She was found dead on March 8, 1935.
It was International Women's Day.
More than 100,000 mourners were drawn to the WanGuo funeral parlour, her funeral procession, on March 14, 1935, reached over three miles long -- and three women committed suicide during it. It was estimated that more than three hundred thousand people crowded the streets of Shanghai for her last journey. The front page of the New York Times pronounced it "the most spectacular funeral of the century."
Every magazine in Shanghai ran memorial issues in her honor. Even after her death, Tang was openly insulted and cursed by the press and Star Movie Studios openly declared they'd have no part in any mourning ceremony held by Tang Jishan, saying he was "a criminal who did harm to the whole movie world, being the direct cause of Ruan's suicide."
This even after some Ruan's last letters were published, described as "tender" towards Tang, in which Ruan asks Tang to take care of her mother and daughter. It matters not. In the movie world Tang is not recognized as Ruan's beloved, official husband; he is the man who murdered her with immorality.
Clearly neither of her lovers were very kind to her in many ways, and the press' field day with her choices and status as a woman, therefore less powerful and respected, was more than she could bear.
In one of the letters written before her suicide, she writes in grief-stricken self-defense of her actions, saying that while she's aware that she's taking a risk that some may take her suicide as an evidence of some guilt, she'd rather die than to continue to face the public slander.
In her suicide note, she wrote, "Gossip is a fearful thing."
Lu Xun (Lu Hsün; Zhou Shuren), a prominent writer at the time, took that phrase and made it the title of an article denouncing the media's exploitation of Ruan. Of the media and Xun's article, however, Stefania Stafutti has some pointed things to say. In The Perception of Privacy: The Case of Ruan Lingyu (published in the International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies) she writes (link added by SPS):
Only the (male oriented) society control over human beings is questioned together with the dramatic fear of loosing one’s own face, but nothing is said on the individual right of carrying on one’s private life with no external interferences. Even if once more referring in general terms to “the feudal society of old China” the Min bao is the only journal which stigmatizes the backwardness of the film-goers, who simply like twisting the knife in the wound: the perception of privacy is strictly connected with people’s perception on what is to be "hidden" and what is to be "protected". With his article published under the pen name Mu Hui on Tai bai, which title “Gossip is a fearful thing” is picked up from one of Ruan’s letters, left behind after her suicide, Lu Xun goes to the core of the problem. As Eileeen J. Cheng points out in a recent article Lu Xun is fascinated by dead women, especially those who are somehow victimized by the society At the same time their choice of dieing is seen as having a cathartic and rather ambiguous function. The blame put on the wild circulation of details on Ruan’s personal life expresses Lu Xun strong objection against the circulation of exploitative images of women but, at the same time, strips the women of their gender issues, to sit them on a throne of purity which radically prevents them from enjoying or inducing any idea of pleasure As a matter of fact, Lu Xun stigmatizes much more the voyeuristic attitude of the readers and of the film goers than the total lack of scruple of the sensationalistic press. Being Lu Xun perfectly conscious of the enormous power of the press, who would rather expect him being more indulgent with the common readers. He goes much farer than Min bao, almost attributing to the readers a sort of cannibalization of their victims (a topic dear to Lu Xun!): “[Ruan Lingyu and Ai Xia] deaths are like but adding a few grains of salt to the boundless ocean; even though it fills bland mouths with some flavour, after a while everything is still bland, bland, bland”. Lu Xun’s utter repugnance for the mass miserable appetites cannot simply be regarded as an “ascetic” gaze towards the female world.
It is true, however, that the press kept a full-press on Ruan & her death.
Stafutti writes of it as a "voyeuristic attitude, even transgressing into the kitsch," as the media described in great detail her corpse, how it was dressed, how her hair was styled, and "about the hopeless Zhang Damin, who wiping two blood drops from Ruans’s mouth seems to have stated that they have to be considered her last gift to him." The media even missed the irony of reporting on Ruan's mother crying to the press that they were to blame for her daughter's death, saying, “It’s all because of you. You killed her. You will reckon with me.”
It would be easy to follow suit here and, 73 years later, discuss Ruan in terms of public out-cry and media portrayals, comparing them to similar gossip witch hunts of today... But I'd like to let Ruan's life and choices speak for her.
Her acting is brilliant -- and plentiful. In less than 10 years she made nearly three times that many films... 29 films in 9 years. Amazing films too, from the ones I've seen.
In them she explored female advancement & exploitation; a rigid patriarchial & feudal system built on class, which maltreated (if not out-right abused) women and men alike, yet was perpetuated by both genders; and a warm naiveté which, even should innocence be lost -- and find itself punished for its supposed immorality, could outlast & outshine the old & cold hierarchical social structure.
For her suffering heroines, Ruan was compared to Garbo; but I think Ruan Lingyu and her luminous acting stands on its own.
I don't just say that as a jealous bitch either; I have my own rack of ample (read: always considering breast reduction) proportions, thank-you-very-much, and while mine doesn't sit a-top a petite 5'2" frame gravity doesn't seem to care. Gravity, like any breast lover, is willing to reach higher to pluck each by the nipple and pull them down. Repeatedly.
Some have asked how Virginia "Ding Dong" Bell's bra managed to hold those breasts up. But the answer is the bra did not; like pasties it just sat where it was placed.
Even as a younger model, you can see Bell arching, with raised arms, to keep her breasts "up". I know it's a rather standard pose, but Bell seems to use it far more often to get lift (and separation of breast from ribcage) than just to proffer boobies to men.
My guess is gravity.
Such a position -- with such a load -- must have been more to bear than any decision to bare.
Here's a (very) short clip of her burlesque routine.
And we finish with my favorite Virginia Bell photo. Perhaps I just too readily identify with the relief of the water carrying the load for awhile; but I do find it sexy as hell.
i) a collection of fifteen photographs of Greta Garbo (Gustaffson), her classmates and 'Aunt Gustafsson', chiefly original prints, one of the portraits the only print to survive from the six copies which Garbo herself ordered from a professional photographer but then tore up, ranging in size from a small passport-size portrait of her in 1918 to large school class photographs of c.165 x 230mm. (plus mounts), chiefly c.1915-1930, traces of mounting
ii) an early autograph postcard signed "G.G." by Garbo (Greta Gustafsson), sending greetings in Swedish, written in pencil, with a mock-postage stamp also drawn in pencil
[literal translation:] "May the sun of joy [shine] its rays in such a way upon you on your celebration day, may happiness not stray from you I wish that out of my heart"
Garbo delivered this card herself after school through Lisa Fager's letterbox.
iii) an autograph four-line note signed by Garbo ("G.G."), in Swedish, written in ink on a magazine illustration
[literal translation:] "...Hanne how sweet I think you are. I have seen you so many times and all equally enchanting..."
iv) two autograph postcards written to Lisa Fager by Greta Garbo's brother Sven Gustafsson, in Swedish, sending greetings from a festive Paris and from London, 1928-1930
Some of this material is illustrated in John Wallin's book Garbo: En stjärnas väg (Stockholm, 1955), a copy of which is included in the lot.
Discovering Pap Smears At The Laundromat, On The Next Virginia Graham Show
It's hard to imagine I was just 5 years old when my mom used to fluff & fold with her friends -- and discuss uterine cancer. Oh wait, that's not one of my memories; that was a "hip" comic put out by the American Cancer Society in 1969.
While this comic seems strange, the premise that ladies do talk about such things isn't. And though it's campy just for the tones of the time (the black lady gets to be the music judge, they call themselves "girls" rather than "ladies" or "women", etc. etc. etc.), it's the comic style which rather reduces the health propaganda to silliness. Small speaking bubbles are limiting, and the style is overly dramatic. The real problem is what 1969 woman was reading comics? Teens? Sure. But they didn't hang out at laundromats --because they didn't do their own laundry.
The celeb endoresment on the back is Virginia Graham. Graham wrote for radio soaps, eventually hosting her first radio talk show in 1951 and then succeeding Margaret Truman (in 1956) as co-host of the NBC radio show Weekday with Mike Wallace -- and then became a daytime television talk show host, including for Girl Talk (1962–1969) and the Virginia Graham Show.
Having survived her own battle with cervical cancer in the 50's, and openly spoke about it, becoming a spokesperson for the American Cancer Society. (Graham also started the Cerebral Palsy Foundation along with 13 other women.) Jokes on the connection between cervical cancer and smoking aside, it is said (by the not-always-so-accurate Wiki) that while Graham was very vocal on smoking cessation, when she was asked what she would do if she knew the world would end tomorrow, she replied that she would smoke.
I wonder if this is true -- but that the politically correct world of today has to remove that bit from Graham's record. Then again, there is little on Graham. (Something for me to work on, huh.)
Michelle Bauer is known as July 1981's Penthouse Pet, for her work on the Playboy Channel, and, after auditioning for Fred Olen Ray, as a queen of scream for her roles in B-films such as The Tomb, Vampire Vixens from Venus, and Dinosaur Island.
You might be more familiar with her from the campy Cafe Flesh -- shown here in a relatively clean (but O-so-fun!) clip:
But did you also know she was Pia Sands, legendary in retro bondage films?
When the B-film career took off, she was getting divorced and he then filed a lawsuit requesting she not use his last name, Bauer, for her films. In 1988, for Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, she tried using the name Michelle McClellen (McClellen was the last name of her second husband), but the press continued to use Bauer, and so her first husband eventually relented & consented.
She also worked under the names Pia Snow and Kim Bittner, and when you add up all the titles, it's pretty clear to see she did perform in more than the trashy topless films she is generally interviewed regarding -- and note that bondage films like Rope Burn didn't make her barefacts list.
In fact, she's bared more & dared more than she actually admits to in interviews. Like in this interview at Evil Dread, where Cafe Flesh is mentioned, but as you can see, is downplayed greatly:
Did you have a limit as to how far you would go?
Michelle Bauer: I know when I was doing the men's magazines, I was married to Mr. Bauer at the time and he preferred that I did not do any layouts with men for the stills. So I refrained from that. There's maybe, if anybody looked and searched , there's only very few magazine layouts that I did with another guy. It was all with other women. And then when I got into the B movies it was just an occupational hazard. You had love scenes with guys and you had love scenes with girls. And full frontal was a requirement. I you weren't gonna do it somebody else was gonna. You were defeating your own purpose if you weren't. You completely trusted the people you were working with and working for. No one was going to ask you to do anything out of the ordinary other than act like you're making love to this guy. Okay, I can do that. No I never had a problem with it.
And then there's the back-peddling...
During your career you've acted mainly in B movies. Have you ever wanted to break into the mainstream and become the next Meryl Streep as an example?
MB: I don't think that's possible. First of all, I don't think I'm good enough. Second of all, I wouldn't want things in the past that I've done, that I'm ashamed of, to come out and I know that they would. I think that's hindered me and kept me back from ever wanting to pursue that. I just don't think I have the ability. I don't have what it takes.
According to this interview, Michelle had announced her retirement from film. And the photo below is of Bauer at at 1990's Chiller Con (click the link and read the comments as they are priceless). The "going out of business" signs are ominous, aren't they?
Or maybe that was just a sales ploy. Because she's been in films as recently as 2008 -- and in 2006 under the McClellen moniker too. Perhaps another try at rebranding? Well, not if 2004's Tomb of the Werewolf is any indication.
In the film she plays Elizabeth Bathory (Countess Erzsebet Bathori, who killed 612 women -- and documented the death of each).
"Tomb of the Werewolf" is about breasts. Naked female breasts. It is not about a Tomb or a Werewolf. There is a wolf man running around but he's just filler until the next breast scene.
And that's a good review -- from a fan of Bauer, boobies, and Bauer's boobies.
Audrey Marie Munson was the 15 year old model for the piece.
It is said that she was discovered by chance in New York City by Ralph Draper, a professional photographer who passed Munson and her (divorced) mother walking down the street. Draper is said to have told mom that her daughter's face is one he longed to photograph. She consented and didn't seem to mind that her daughter would be nude.
Draper took many photographs, some of which he showed to his artist friend, Isidore Konti.
Quickly Munson becomes a society darling and model of choice for artistic nudes by all the big-name sculptors and painters, posing for hundreds of works that still adorn public buildings and museums.
As the "the girl with the ideal figure" Munson was the model for 94 versions of Star Maiden & other sculptures at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition -- said to be 75% of all the female-figure works at the Exposition. From BikiniScience.com:
Munson is chosen to be the featured model for sculptures which tell the story of the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Her nude body rides atop an oxcart (1) , sits atop a fountain (2), and bears water in angelic form (3). She wears a barebreasted halter as she reclines on a phallic fish (4), wears a diaphanous and revealing costume as the "Star Girl" (5), and bares her breasts and pubis as an angel (6).
Likely as a result of her err, exposure in California at the expo, Munson moved to California and got a contract with the American Film Company.
Her first project was as an actress on a special-project basis with Thanhouser. The five-reel film was George Foster Platt's Inspiration (1915), the story of (surprise!) a sculptor's model, in which "the girl with the ideal figure" poses nude in classic artwork poses. (The film was reissued by the Arrow Film Corporation in 1918 as The Perfect Model).
Inspiration is often credited as the first time that a woman appeared fully nude on film. I think it is more accurate to say that this is the first time a mainstream or legitimate full-feature film had the leading actress go completely nude, without body stocking, and that while Munson was the lead, she was not yet a "film star" (still leaving Kellerman her title of first star to go nude in a feature film).
There was, of course, controversy about Inspiration and its nudity, picketing and the like, but censors were reluctant to ban the film, fearing they would then also have to ban Renaissance art & close museums as such art was featured in the film.
The film was big at the box office, and a year later she would star in Rea Burger's 7-reel silent film, Purity (1916), in a dual role as a spirit figure and as (yet another) country-girl turned nude artist's model. From The New York Times:
Just in case there was any doubt that this American Film Company production was meant to be an allegory, the authors helpfully bestowed upon the characters such names as Purity, Virtue, Evil, Luston Black and Judith Lure! Cast in the dual role of Virtue and Purity, Audrey Munson enjoys the attentions of poet Thornton Darcy (Nigel de Brulier) and Claude Lamarque (Alfred Hollingsworth). But watch out for that no-good snake Luston Black (William A. Carroll) and his scheming mistress Judith Lure (Eugenie Forde). "To the Pure, All Things Are Pure" read one of the film's subtitles. Maybe so, but any film that banked so heavily on the undraped beauty of leading lady Audrey Munson) could not have helped but plant a few impure thoughts in the minds of its male spectators.
After the death of his young wife, Phillip Fletcher, a millionaire and sculptor, makes his home on an uncharted desert island. Harry LeRoy, a cad who is courting the widow Mrs. Hansen, desires the widow's convent-bred daughter Norma and persuades mother and daughter to accompany him on a sea cruise. When the ship catches fire, Norma, abandoned by LeRoy and her mother in the confusion, is washed ashore on Phillip's island. Phillip clothes and shelters Norma, whose mind has become childlike from shock, and uses her as a model for his sculptures. Through Phillip's friend Jack, a photo of one of the sculptures travels to America, where LeRoy sees it and subsequently finds his way to Phillip's island. LeRoy tries to rape Norma, and in the ensuing struggle LeRoy is killed and Norma recovers her adult personality. Phillip, who is in love with Norma, sorrowfully returns her to the United States, but Norma does not board the boat, and Phillip, finding her posing as one of his statues when he returns to his hut, finally declares his love.
Talk about your typecasting.
While the films were box office successes, the reviews were mixed, and one can only imagine how quickly the novelty of the nude model turned actress whose only real roles were that of nude models lost its lust-her.
Munson returned to New York and her mother.
In 1919, back in New York, she and her mother lived in a boarding house owned by Dr. Walter Wilkins. Wilkins fell in love with her, murdering his wife, Julia, with a hammer so he could be available to marry Munson. By the time of the murder, Munson and her mother had left for Canada under the "advice" of Mrs. Wilkins and had nothing to do with the murder, but the police still wanted to question them, resulting in a nationwide hunt for them, with headlines announcing, "Syracuse Model wanted in N.Y.C. Tragedy". When finally questioned in Toronto, the police were satisfied & the women left to return to New York. (Wilkins himself was tried, found guilty, and sentenced; but he hung himself in his prison cell before he could meet the electric chair.)
The Beaux-Arts construction boom was over, fickle Hollywood fame had left, and the dark cloud of scandal hung about her, ending both her modeling & acting careers. While some would say that Munson was forgotten, she did continue to work in public view -- not just present in sculpture and art, but as a columnist.
In the 1920s, she wrote a series of 20 articles for American Weekly, a Sunday insert in The New York American (originally the New York Journal, renamed in 1901), one of the preceding publications merged to form the New York Journal-American, which served as the flagship of William Randolph Hearst's communications empire from 1895 to 1966.
In them she criticized society's lack of respect for models and challenged the prevailing standards of decency and beauty. "All girls cannot be perfect 36s, with bodies of mystic warmth and plastic marble effect, colored with rose and a dash of flame," she wrote. "Of course not."
And in at least one article, Munson wrote of "a man prominent in the theatrical world" (she never named names) who had decided to ruin her career after she resisted his advances.
Munson made one more film, Heedless Moths, which she is credited with writing as well as performing in. Again from the New York Times:
The story involves an incident in the life of notorious early 20th century nude model Audrey Munson. Munson herself appears in various stages of undress, but she doesn't actually play herself -- that's left to Jane Thomas. According to the picture, Munson is supporting herself and her mother through her modeling, but she is actually a good girl -- when a painter makes a play for her, she walks out. She is brought to a celebrated sculptor (Holmes E. Herbert), who is inspired by her beauty and asks her to pose nude for a statue. The sculptor's wife (Hedda Hopper) becomes jealous of all the attention her husband is giving his art and has an affair with the painter. The painter dumps his latest model/mistress for the wife, and the rejected girl swears revenge. She writes a letter to the sculptor informing him that his wife is having dinner with the painter. Munson rushes to take the wife's place at the table and pretends to be drunk when the sculptor shows up. He's so disgusted that he destroys the statue he made of her. Eventually Munson orchestrates a reconciliation between the sculptor and his wife.
It wasn't enough to resurrect a film career -- and enough became enough for Audrey Munson.
After failing to find "the perfect man" in a widely publicized search for a husband in 1922, on the afternoon of May 27, 1922, at her home in Mexico, New York, Audrey Munson swallowed a solution of bichloride of mercury.
From the article that ran May 28th of that year, some interesting notes:
Miss Munson still refuses to disclose the contents of the telegram she received shortly before she tried to take her life. It is thought it may have come from Joseph J. Stevenson, of Ann Arbor, Mich., to whom she said was engaged.
...It became known today that since the announcement of her engagement to Mr. Stevenson, Miss Munson has been calling herself Baroness Audrey Merl Munson-Monson, though the derivation of the title is as much a mystery as her effort to commit suicide.
...Some doubt was expressed in Mexico today as the the authenticity of the telegram.
...An extensive search in Ann Arbor for Joseph J Stevenson, reported engaged to Audrey Munson, has failed to reveal any trace of him. So far as can be learned, no man by that name ever lived here.
She was saved from the suicide attempt, but not really saved at all... On June 8th, 1931, she was admitted to the St. Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane, in nearby Ogdensburg. She was just 40 years old.
To the world she was gone and forgotten.
Which was rather as Munson feared, I suppose, as she wrote this in one of her columns in 1921:
What becomes of the artists’ models? I am wondering if many of my readers have not stood before a masterpiece of lovely sculpture or a remarkable painting of a young girl, her very abandonment of draperies accentuating rather than diminishing her modesty and purity, and asked themselves the question, "Where is she now, this model who was so beautiful?"
Just a few wondered about her... Like Barry Popik (links added by SPS):
So I said how about this, I've got another story, there's this woman named Audrey Munson, and she's on top of this building as "Civic Fame," and we just gilted her statues at great expense, but no one knows who she is, or if she's alive or dead...
"Rescuing a Heroine From the Clutches of Obscurity" appeared in the New York Times, city section, April 14, 1996. It was the only article published on Audrey Munson since 1926, in 70 years. The article mentioned, in passing, that I'd also solved "the Big Apple."
I donated my papers and a copy of the article to the National Sculpture Society. I got a call from a book publisher, and I sent copies of all the papers there as well. One woman, a photographer, called and said she was interested in a photo book about Miss Munson. She had contacted me through the Times. I gave her all my papers and met her and another woman, a writer. I told them that I didn't have any book plans at the moment—I was busy with my father and mother dying, and a full time job, and this Big Apple Boulevard/Corner catastrophe. However, if they were interested, they should contact anyone upstate in her home town of Mexico, NY named "Munson." I never heard from the two women again.
"That Metropolitan Woman" was a book review in the New York Times of October 3,1999. Accompanying the review was a photo of a sculpture identified as Daniel Chester French's "Brooklyn" that was really "Manhattan." The book was American Venus. The authors had gone upstate and had found a treasure trove of Audrey Munson material. Audrey had been living in a mental institution for almost seventy years, until her death in 1996 at age 105. The authors, the review stated, "have made an extraordinary effort to reclaim long-forgotten facts, newspaper clippings and vintage photographs of a once -celebrated life." I wrote a letter to the editor of the book review that, just three years before, in the very same newspaper—yeah, my letter wasn't published.
But such efforts seem incidental in comparison with Mr. Popick's obsession with Miss Munson, a woman he calls "more popular than Cindy Crawford but much uglier." A raven-haired native of Mexico, N.Y., near Syracuse, she starred in a handful of plays and silent movies, but they generally received dismissive reviews. It was her modeling career that made sculptors like Daniel Chester French vie for her services and rave over the dimples in her back.
Mr. Popick might well empathize with her history. He has written numerous plays, short stories and research papers. To date, however, Mr. Popick's efforts have received almost as much scorn as Miss Munson.
Audrey Munson died February 20, 1996, at age 105, nearly alone &, in something that's past tolerable in irony, in an unmarked grave. Says Joe Schumacher of the blog Audrey Munson: model, muse, forgotten, remembered:
She had been committed to the Ogdensburg Psychiatric Institution in 1931 for what now are largely treatable diseases of depression and schizophrenia. Her parents divorced when Audrey was very young. After her parents died (Edgar is her father) she had no visitors for several decades before being rediscovered by a niece. Audrey Munson is buried in an unmarked grave in her father's plot in the New Haven, NY cemetery.
The Audrey Munson Fund is "collecting funds to finance a gravestone for Munson, who though deceased for more than ten years still doesn’t have one."
In total, Munson starred in four silent films; but only one print of Purity has survived (said to be in an archive in France). But if you want to see her, all you have to do is look her up -- and then, most likely, look up to gaze upon the face and form that has launched a thousand artworks.
PS While the article on Popik says that Munson was in plays, I wonder if Wiki should be linking to this Audrey Munson at the Internet Broadway Database -- if this is the same Munson, she would have been on the stage at 9 years of age. (Then again, I never know what the hell Wiki's going on at Wiki.)
Of Happy Madmen & Radio covers a story in a 1938 issue of Radio Guide on how the "modern miracle" of radio is working wonders for "America's 400,000 mentally ill." In it we meet the delightful Mrs. Diggs:
Take a look at Mrs. Diggs. Mrs. Diggs is a Negro, a man, who considers himself the most beautiful white woman in the world. He says he has letters from President Roosevelt, Will Hayes, Lindbergh and Joe Louis telling him so. What's more, he's the mother of all the white people in the world.
"Most of the patients like Gracie Allen, all right -- but not because they feel any strange bonds of sympathy or understanding. They think she's nuts, and very, very funny."
The clinically insane of 1938 may have thought Gracie was nuts and loved her for it, but they weren't alone. George Burns felt that way himself.
Once, in the middle of the night, Gracie elbowed George and asked him to make her laugh. Half-asleep, he mumbled, "Googie, googie, googie." It became his pet name for her...
...True, their marriage did have its rough spots. One oft-repeated story has it that whenever Gracie suspected George of philandering, he would buy her an expensive gift. "I wish George would find another girlfriend," she once told a friend. "I could use a silver-fox jacket."
However they managed -- and they did manage for 38 showbiz years -- Googie and Natty did so with humor and love. Right up until the end:
Burns never made a secret of the tough time he had dealing with his loss. "When I miss her a great deal, I crawl in on her side of the bed, in the middle of the day even," he told Carol Channing. "I stay there until I feel warm and good, and then I go on about my business." He also became somewhat of a fixture at Hollywood's Forest Lawn Cemetery, where every month he would go to the mausoleum to talk to Gracie. "I don't know if she hears me," he said. "But after speaking to her, I feel better."
That their chats should continue beyond the grave didn't really seem so odd. Throughout his life, whenever people asked Burns how to make a marriage work, he had a standard response: "I tell them the answer's easy--marry Gracie." Taking his own advice, he never married again.
"I may not be the greatest actress but I've become the greatest at screen orgasms. Ten seconds of heavy breathing, roll your head from side to side, simulate a slight asthma attack and die a little."
I get that Lovelace made porn a household word, but she also turned ninny and denounced porn. And, politics aside, for pure aesthetics, you can't beat the beauty and enthusiasm of either Sprinkle or Del Rio.
In 1810, an English ship's surgeon brought Saartjie Baartman, a young South African woman, to London. She was displayed on stage and made to squat to show her genitals. After she died in 1816, her brain, skeleton, and genitals went on exhibition in Paris, where they remained until 1974.
Baartman, dubbed the "Hottentot Venus," was a victim of colonialism at its most vulgar. She plays a generative role in "Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body," a sweeping, gutsy, and provocative exhibition organized by curator Barbara Thompson at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.
I'd never heard of Baartman. But now I'm fascinated -- in that ashamed awareness of those who rubberneck in ignorance which is combined with anger and sorrow for the woman herself.
From a collector's standpoint, the following reminds me how many nude African female postcards I see:
Partial nudity was common in 19th-century Africa, but imagine the reaction of Victorian-era Europeans landing there, greeted by bare-skinned natives. They deemed Africans primitive and erotic, applied anthropometry - the measuring of body parts - to attempt to understand them, and sent postcards home, many with photos and captions intended to titillate and reinforce presumptions of white racial superiority.
I am rather obsessed with watching the old What's My Line? & I've Got A Secret episodes. The shows' charms lay as much in the panelists themselves as it does with the guests (including "famous" folks I've never heard of) and, of course, the numerous delights that such vintage television provides. I've mentioned my delight in calling panelists names, simply because of what I'm continually discovering about them, but sometimes I'm just darn cruel.
For example, I'm so rigorous in my negative comments about panelist Dorothy Kilgallen's chin, saying things like, "I must Google to see if there's record of the incident with a horse that must have stepped on her face," that hubby was starting to become immune to them.
But now I feel badly about that... And not because hubby rolls his eyes at me with silent judgement for my rudeness or with boredom.
In deciding to investigate Kilgallen's chin, I discovered that Frank Sinatra and I held the same views on it. Performing in Vegas, Old Blue Eyes called her "the chinless wonder", and at the Copa, he said, "everyone in New York is here tonight except for Dorothy Kilgallen... she's out looking for her chin." Just more to love, or hate, about Sinatra, depending your personal views on the man.
But in discovery of such statements, I learned more about Dorothy Kilgallen, history, culture -- and myself -- than I ever could have imagined.
Kilgallen was more deeply entrenched in the romantic, mysterious, fascinating world of the late 50's and 60's that I prefer to live in, at least research wise.
Kilgallen left a small Hollywood career for that of a journalist. She was not only a gossip columnist, but a crime journalist -- which makes her more than the stereotypical female press person you think of, but a woman ahead of her times pursuing a profession deemed unsuitable for females. She also became the first woman to fly around the world.
But more than this, she was a woman. A woman who, lonely in her marriage to a cheating husband, turned to singer Johnnie Ray, a man 14 years younger than she, for what would be not only a passionate love affair, but a long-term one as well. This is where the feud with Sinatra is said to be at least partially rooted:
Sinatra had loathed Johnnie Ray from the moment the young musical upstart hit the scene. Ray's conquest of the pop charts in '51 (the top three spots all at once occupied by the same artist) had come at a time when the once (and soon to be again) successful Sinatra couldn't draw headlines unless it was for indulging in his penchant for punching paparazzi. So in '51, Frank was outraged to see that his place in pop music's upper echelon had been replaced by a skinny, half-deaf, androgynous cry-baby who all the scandal sheets proclaimed as a raging homosexual, and he was further incensed by the fact that the love of his life Ava Gardner had a star-struck obsession with the singer. Frank harbored a lifelong grudge.
Dorothy Kilgallen had been less than flattering to Sinatra in her popular opinion columns, citing his violent behavior and brooding public persona.
All of this melted my cold negative commenting heart a bit, but there is more.
On Aug. 3, 1962, Kilgallen became the first journalist to refer publicly to Marilyn Monroe's relationship with a Kennedy. Within 48 hours, Marilyn was found dead of a drug overdose at her Los Angeles residence. The inquiry into her death was marred by numerous unanswered questions and contradictions in the medical findings.* Dorothy publicly challenged the authorities with tough questions. For instance, she wrote, "If the woman described as Marilyn's 'housekeeper' [Eunice Murray] was really a housekeeper, why was her bedroom such a mess? It was a small house and should have been easy to keep tidy." Kilgallen also wanted to know "why was Marilyn's door locked that night, when she didn't usually lock it? If she were just trying to get to sleep, and took the overdose of pills accidentally, why was the light on? Usually people sleep better in the dark." And she asked, "Why did the first doctor [to arrive on the scene] have to call the second doctor before calling the police? Any doctor, even a psychiatrist, knows a dead person when he sees one, especially when rigor mortis has set in and there are marks of lividity on the surface of the face and body. Why the consultation? Why the big time gap in such a small town? Mrs. Murray gets worried at about 3 a.m., and it's almost 6 a.m. before the police get to the scene."
Kilgallen wrote that "the real story hasn't been told, not by a long shot." Such bold reporting was not common in American journalism at that time.
In a case of what can now surely be called foreshadowing, this is eerily similar to the death of Kilgallen herself, just a few years later.
On November 8, 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her own home. A death with equally strange details, powerful connections, and a poor investigation of its very own.
She was found by her hairstylist, Marc Sinclaire, who after discovering her, told friend Charles Simpson, "When I tell you the bed she was found in, and how I found her, you're going to know she was murdered."
Things amiss include:
Kilgallen not sleeping in that room or bed.
A woman who was normally cold, putting the air conditioning on when it was cold outside.
Kilgallen routinely slept in pajamas and old socks, no make up etc., yet she was found not only wearing a peignoir set, but with hair and makeup in place as if she were going out.
Kilgallen had a book, The Honey Badger, by Robert Ruark, laid out on the bed next to her, but not only was it not in the proper position for her if she was reading it, it was a book she'd already finished reading & discussed with friends -- and while Dorothy needed glasses to read, they weren't found in the room.
There was a drink on the nightstand by the bed, but where Kilgallen sat, it was out of reach.
Oh, and while we're at it, those first at the scene say there was a piece of paper by the door, eluded to by some as a suicide note, but it was never produced and no one claims to have read it.
While there are many other curious things about the way cause of death was noted (and by whom), the story officially touted is that Kilgallen, like Monroe, had over-dosed, either as a suicide or more likely by accident.
As Kilgallen wrote about Monroe, why would a woman seeking to sleep, wear an outfit she never wore, put herself in a room so cold as to be uncomfortable, not remove her eyelashes -- or at least the very uncomfortable to lean upon hair pieces, get a book she's not only already read but then not bring along her glasses, and put a drink (medicated or not) on a table near the bed but then place herself such that she would not be able to reach it easily? And all this in a room she didn't sleep in?
Curiosity only grows when one discovers what Kilgallen had been doing in the years between Monroe's death and Kilgallen's own.
Just months after Monroe's death, on November 22, 1963, JFK was assassinated and Kilgallen was not only upset by the event, but was investigating it. She didn't believe the Oswald story at all, and when Jack Ruby shot Oswald, she arranged to have a private interview with Ruby.
No one is certain what was said in that interview, but Kilgallen often said she had something big, which would crack the JFK investigation wide -- and then some. She continued not only to investigate, but pen columns about it too, and it was said that the Ruby interview and other details would be published in her forthcoming book, Murder One, which was contracted to write for fellow What's My Line? panelist, Bennett Cerf, & Random House -- published without any such chapter(s) after her death. Kilgallen's file of notes on all this, seen by a number of persons, has yet to surface. Both the known and unknown details are fascinating -- and the stuff for conspiracy theorists, such as this article, Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen? by Robert Morningstar.
As easily drawn into such things as I can be, I'm leaving the threads here for you to follow-up as you choose, while I continue a different path.
What strikes me, shames me too, are other thoughts....
I don't like to reduce people, especially women, to such symbolic status that their humanity is removed, but in this case, Marilyn and Dorothy represent far more than just themselves.
While not complete mirror opposites, it's clear they each offer moments upon which to reflect upon their differences. Marilyn Monroe's wish for the sort of respect and admiration Dorothy Kilgallen had is widely documented. And Dorothy, who loved opulent surroundings and personal glamour, likely wished, at least from time to time, for some of Marilyn's beauty and to be seen and coveted in such terms. Neither was granted their wishes, of course, but such personal and private dreams are larger than just these two women.
If the woman of beauty, a man's plaything, is understood to matter less in this world, her afterlife continues to grow her legend. Monroe's beauty & status as sex icon only gathers more strength, even if she herself is batted about and accepted as a pawn at the whims of men and society.
If a woman's intelligence, however threatening, is supposed to matter more than earthy beauty, why is Kilgallen the less known? Her valor and strength are not reported and commented upon, even upon the anniversaries of her death. She is not revered -- in fact, she's nearly lost to history already.
We may never know what happened to each of these women. Their stories may or may not be tied to such grand crimes and cover-ups as the conspiracy theorists argue. But the really horrific facts are the if, how, and why these women are remembered. Conspiracy cover-ups aside, our collective societal values have been uncovered, and I do not like what I see.
Or what I myself have said and done with comments about Dorothy's chin.
If you can hear me now, Dorothy, you have my most sincere apologies.
Something Old, Something New: Barbi Benton For You
Tonight, relaxing from a day of hunting, we are listening to records.
Yes, good old vinyl.
Last week, when out and about, I bought a Barbi Benton album, Something New (Playboy Records). I bought it not for the musicality (and having listened to it, there's nothing really to comment on), but for the giggle factor; I just wanted to call my sister and tell her I had a Boobie Benton LP.
Yes, my sister and I called her Boobie Benton.
I'm not proud of it, or anything.
But let's face it, back then our knowledge of Ms. Benton came from her appearances on Hee Haw, and while we knew nothing of her link to Hugh Hefner, Playboy After Dark, or even that Hef and Playboy existed (yet), we weren't blind. At first, Barbi's corny sexualized costumes may have not meant much to we wee girls, but as we grew (and feared further growth) into puberty, we became more than a bit self-conscious...
What do immature humans do in uncomfortable situations or with uncomfortable feelings? Mock the thing that brings them to mind, duh. (Note: This is normal & find for kids, but adults really should mature their minds along with their bodies.)
So, Barbi Benton became Boobie Benton. And Adrienne Barbeau was -- you guessed it -- Adrienne Barboob. (You don't want to know what we called Connecticut Avenue when we played Monopoly without our parents around.)
Ironically, while sis and I were often too naive to appropiately deal with our feelings about boobs, or know that Hee Haw was inspired by Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, we both were sophisticated enough to realize that Laugh-In was the far more biting & better show.
Back to Boobi...
Barbi Benton was published in Playboy, including covers, but she was never a centerfold... Do you think that has to do with the relationship with Hef? Like he either felt territorial or feared accusations of cronyism? Of course, it could just have been her choice.
But I am struck by how fresh, cute and innocent Barbi's look is compared to Hef's current type (and by that I mean the same plastic blonde bimbo look his girls have had for decades). Barbi Benton more exemplifies the original Playboy magazine ideals of sex not being dirty, that it's something everyone does, including the girl next door.
How far Playboy has drifted in that regard... Much to my personal disappointment.
Today Benton is still beautiful, if blonde, apparently a pottery loving interior decorator, and while her bangs live on, some think she hasn't aged well on the inside, saying, "Some women can age gracefully, trading physical beauty for inner strength. I wanted Barbi to be one of those. Instead, she is a black hole of bitterness, disconnected from reality, obsessed with the few short years she felt alive."
Yikes. (I couldn't get the video to play, so I can't comment.)
But the real burning question on my mind is: Where's the Internet Homage to Sugar Time!
Sugar Time! was the short-lived television series which starred Benton (Maxx), Marianne Black (Maggie) and Didi Carr (Diane -- shown at left on Match Game, via), as a girl band ready to make it big.
Where are the 70's TV fans who should be making pages and posts, if not an entire site, to the show? I vaguely remember it... It's sort of fuzzy -- and bouncy in my recollection. But then I must be on the right track, as it was the show which caused the term "jiggle TV" to be coined. Certainly that merits some actual archival interest, right?
Holy crap!Someone actually owns the belt, slave bracelet and chain of office Theda Bara wore in the 1917 (presumed lost) silent film production of Cleopatra -- and I mean a some one, not an institute, archive or organization.
Girlfriend & creation of the late Paul Raymond, Fiona Richmond became a columnist & a porn star (model and film), recorded an album, worked 'in the fashion industry' (how vague) &, eventually, became the owner of hotels -- with a former pig farmer.
Paul Raymond Presents Frankly Fiona, the LP, is a scarce recording -- which Richmond, in her autobiography, says she didn't even sing on. (Adding to the mystery, some places refer to the LP as a 'spoken word' record.)
The small photo at left is from the record's cover, via Trunk Records (scroll) who adores it. However, whatever, the record makes the #11 spot on the 20 Most Bizarre Albums Ever in Q Magazine's 150 Greatest Rock Lists Ever (2004).
According to the Crystal Palace Football Club forum, pictures of Fiona Richmond and the players appeared in an article in Men Only magazine in either the May or June 1976 issue.
If that's true, then it looks like they'll be found in May issue (vol 41, issue 5, 1976), which proclaims "Fiona's Illustrated Big Mal".
Along with columns in Men Only, Richmond also wrote columns and was featured in other magazines, like Club, aka Club International, published -- surprise! -- by Paul Raymond Publications.
Monica Lewis was born in 1925 in Chicago, Il, and went from hosting, at 17, her own radio show in New York to become an accomplished pop singer and jazz stylist, television personality, and film star.
The blonde beauty who graced many a magazine and advertisement naturally rubbed elbows with giants and would-be giants. From her official bio:
she paused for (and sometimes steered clear of) romantic entanglements with Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra, Ed Sullivan, Herman Wouk, Sidney Sheldon, Kirk Douglas, Richard Rodgers and Milton Berle.
(Shown at right with a young Ronald Reagan.)
My disc-overy of Lewis began with her cheeky backside of her 1945-1949 Song Book Collection, Monica Lewis Sings.
She was discovered by Benny Goodman and quickly was recording at Signature, Decca and Capitol where she worked with such musical greats as Billy Butterfield, Yank Lawson, Bob Haggart and Teddy Wilson. Her early recordings ranged from Gershwin, Kern and Coward, to more risque songs such as I'm Gonna Be a Bad Girl (which she co wrote) and was the first to record Put The Blame on Mame.
A quick search and I discovered Lewis was the singing voice of the animated Chiquita Banana for 14 years (1953 and 1967). This fascinated me, as you'll see, because Chiquita was one hot fruit -- and I don't just mean the banana's exotic tropical local either. Lots of folks find the Chiquita Banana a-peeling.
Seldom does a fruit inspire such lusty thoughts. Wile no doubt part of the sexual confusion is due to the whorish glamorous garb and makeup, I suspect it's really the arched back which sends the libido a message.
When Chiquita became a woman rather than a banana, I lost interest too. A woman's a woman, and as far as illustrated babes go, she's not as exciting as the pre '87 forbidden fruit was.
Back to Monica Lewis.
Her musical success brought MGM a-courtin' and the studio signed her in 1950 as their response to to Lana Turner. She was in a number of films, including, as this still shows, in The Strip.
In 1956, at what many would call the height of her popularity, Lewis would marry Jennings Lang and busy herself with running an 'executive household' and mothering their children. She made the occasional television appearance, but it's for her supporting roles in Lang's blockbuster disaster movies, such as playing the heroic stunt secretary Barbara in Earthquake, that she is often most remembered.
My favorite was when she played a retired jazz singer in The Concorde: Airport '79 (1979), the third sequel to Airport (1970), that she was really 'noticed' again.
Cool Cinema Trash notes that in the film Lewis is joined by her "jive-talkin', pot smokin', saxophone playin' friend Jimmie Walker."
After an impromptu jam session, she worries, "Maybe I don't have it anymore."
"You're like fine wine, you get better with age." He assures her, "And you're gonna get those Russians drunk."
Meanwhile, you can content yourself with reissued CDs and films, as well as collectibles. While her official website teases that memorabilia is available, I've yet to find any there. Until that changes, check eBay.
I'll be honest and tell you that my love affair with Marlene Dietrich began with hearing Lili Marlene. It still haunts in the most pleasing of ways.
But some prefer their Marlene more glamorous...
Others love their Marlene in combat boots.
However you prefer your Marlene, one thing is certain: You can put Marlene on your cover, but you cannot do a 'cover' of Marlene. She's the one and only.
When she seemed to have been bitten by the "get religion" bug, she met with Frank Buchman and endorsed MRA. The Buchmanites exploited her name for all it was worth, and widely reprinted a picture of her posing with Frank Buchman while holding a Moral Re-Armament book, and quoted her praising MRA or Frank Buchman. But the New York Times writer B. R. Crisler came up with one of the best lines when, in his spoof of Hollywood foolishness, he awarded the title:
Profoundest Philosophical Reflection: Mae West's statement to Dr. Frank Buchman, head of the Oxford Movement, on the occasion of their historical meeting: "I owe all my success to the kind of thinking Moral Rearmament is." New York Times, "CIRCUS OF SUPERLATIVES", B. R. Crisler, January 7, 1940, page 135.
One of Mae West's biographers had a very different take on the encounter. He wrote that Mae West was using Frank Buchman in a publicity stunt:
Universal's publicity department, remembering all the attention Mae and Billy Sunday had reaped from their meeting, persuaded a famous but naïve religious leader to come up and see her. Even a bemused B. R. Chrisler of The New York Times devoted considerable space to this manipulation, commenting, "As startling in its way as the Nazi-Soviet pact was the unexpected interview between Mae West and Dr. Frank Buchman, the English theologue, who is the leader of the so-called Moral-Rearmament Movement on the Pacific Coast." Maneuvering Dr. Buchman onto a sofa beneath a nude painting of herself for the benefit of photographers, Mae, effulgent in a sheer pink negligee, assured him that she owed all her success to the kind of Moral Rearmament he represented. The guileless Buchman replied: "You are a splendid character, Miss West. You have done wonderful work, too, in pleasing and entertaining millions with your charming personality." Dr. Buchman apologized that he was an amateur at this kind of thing, but Mae told him he was doing fine and inquired whether he had met W. C. Fields. Buchman hadn't, and Mae regretted this, telling him, "Moral Rearmament is just what Bill needs. Give it to him in a bottle and he'll go for it." Having scored all her points, Mae allowed the press agents to escort Dr. Buchman back to a world in which he was more experienced. MAE WEST, a biography, George Eells and Stanley Musgrove, page 193.
I'm not much of a fan of Flickr -- far too many folks uploading stuff without information, credits, or even keywords/tags/labels which make much sense (whatever sense folksonomy can make). And I see far too many 'sexy self-portraits' which are anything but. I keep searching for every now and then I find something interesting, such as a collection of risque magazines, pulp book covers, photos of burlesque dancers, or something vintage & smutty with enough information to be either useful or intriguing.
Then a light shines.
I found Joey Harrison's set titled Mom's World. It's absolutely stunning.
Currently 232 photos are in this set. They are excellent photographs, mostly black and white, capturing a time and its sentimentality. While the old axiom that a picture is worth a thousand words is likely true, I find one of the most charming aspects of Harrison's Flickr set is the text commentary by Harrison's mom.
Clearly his mother is an intelligent, articulate women, with a warm sense of humor; this is easy to see in the photos she has taken as well as the photographs taken of her. But along with the commentary I find a thoughtful emotional component which endears. It's not the usual "remember when" that you'll find with many who page through their photo albums; it's not a mere analytical comparison of 'then and now' either. There is something more fierce yet elusive to define in her narrative... These are not simply quaint photos with typical anecdotes.
Clicking to see a larger view, I was naturally curious about the photo in the photo -- of what seemed to be a scantily clad beauty. So I read the comments:
I painted the room a dark rosy red and made traverse draperies of black to cover the one window. It was a warm womb for long Saturday afternoons with the Met playing softly on the radio. I totally lost track of time with the birthing of amazing black-and-white photos. Each was a miracle, over and over again. I'm as fascinated with them today as I was 56 years ago.
There was a small downside. As relatives and friends learned of my hobby they would press exposed rolls upon me to develop. I did a few. Oh, it was agony! Drudgery! Dreary, repetitive, unartful, bland photos. (Long before automatic cameras made even dumb photos at least in focus and properly exposed!)
Not all of the requests were refused. Jerry, smirking a little, produced a roll given him by his young brother Tony, who worked in a neighborhood beer store. Tony asked that I pul-eeze develop a roll for him. He'd been my booster since I met him as the 14-year-old son of my landlady, and he carefully kept track of telephone calls for me. His roll had been shot in the back room of the beer store of ladies of questionable reputation and groping young men, who were not exactly Ivy League! There wasn't any nudity, but a lot of hormones flowed! The props and background were strictly cases of beer. It would be pretty tame stuff by today's standards. But the photos were quite funny actually. If I can locate a negative later, I will share.
On another occasion Jerry produced a roll given him in strictest confidence by a handsome and successful young businessman in Grand Rapids, his customer. He implored Jerry to be absolutely discreet with the photos and negatives. I took it seriously and developed and printed the roll, all full of admiration for the beautiful photos and didn't keep a single one. Jerry then yielded the tasteful prints to his customer.
They were of a gorgeous young woman totally in the buff, posed 16 different ways. For many years, when seeing the handsome man on billboards touting his business, I would get a secret tickle. He married the girl and they raised a large Catholic family.
The 4x5 I am pulling out of the fixer in the photo above showing a gal in her black bra, was Rose Bottegal, the wife of Jerry's Army buddy Aldo. He and Rose visited us in 1949, and while on the water in a rowboat on a steaming day, Rose shed her blouse. Wearing just her bra, she said "Just make believe this is a swimming suit top."
If the photo drew me, the commentary mesmerized me.
I continued to visit all 232 posts, finding each as interesting as the next for one reason or another. Here we see in photographs & ephemera covering life in the late 40's and early 50's -- in that post WWII world where America was headed for suburbia and the nuclear family, where women were to return to a domesticity which has moved generations of women such as myself to moaning and retching.
Yet what emerges is far less threatening -- if far more emotional.
The marriage and transformation to wife, including the wedding night:
This could just as well have been captioned "Our Wedding Night or How a Bad Photo Resulted in a Lifetime Hobby!"
Jerry's German camera turned out maddeningly random good or bad photos. Of course it was because we didn't know about setting it for distance, let alone shutter speed and f-stop. We posed this morning after our wedding in front of the hotel where we spent the first night of our married life. The picture turned out so badly I was motivated later to take the camera to a store to learn how to operate it and was sold a light meter. The rest is history: the beginning of better photos and a lifetime hobby.
In the hotel room on our wedding night Jerry suggested I bathe first. Avoiding his eyes, I took a few things from a small suitcase into the bathroom: nightgown, toothbrush, and little round plastic box from Dotty's doctor.
What a long day; it felt like it had been two or three. The shower was refreshing and good. I donned the nightgown Dotty gave me at a wedding shower. The delicate tea-rose rayon fell to the floor, skimming the body lightly, bias cut following all of the curves and hollows, wide lace panels defining upper areas. It was chaste but alluring I decided, viewing a mirrored image. Then panic struck.
How would I get from bathroom to bed?
I fidgeted there in the bathroom, trying to figure this out. I wasn't used to parading around in front of men in a nightgown. Suddenly in great relief I noticed my blue satin raincoat hung on the inside of the bathroom door, and put it on over my nightgown. I crept out to the bed shyly and quickly slipped under the sheets, raincoat and all. Jerry smiled slightly and went into the bathroom himself.
The first big hurdle in married life had been met and resolved. I shed the raincoat while Jerry showered; soon he joined me under the sheets. Appropriate events ensued.
In this 1950 photo we were at a bar owned by Jerry's cousin Al Cimarelli and his wife, Jenny. See the "modern" shape of the bar and the chrome barstools. The seats were surely upholstered in dark red vinyl!
Attending a PSA (Photographic Society of America) convention in Detroit the following year with photographer friends from Grand Rapids, we heard a lecture by Olga Irish, a Brooklyn portrait photographer. She chose me from the audience to come on stage and be used to demonstrate her lighting techniques – fully dressed of course. The next day the Detroit Free Press carried an article about the convention with a large photo of me posing, and all hell broke loose. One of the cousins was appointed to phone Jerry to enquire about my being in Detroit without him, staying in a hotel, not phoning them, etc., etc., all a bad thing in the eyes of these very decent, family-oriented relatives. Jerry wasn't exercising control. I lost favor fast.
That’s Jerry’s Uncle Jim holding his son, another Jerry, on his lap. His wife, Anne, sits in the middle. They spent that evening at our apartment, but we didn't see a lot of them. Anne was a little special, and she had spunk. She was quite pretty, dressed nicely, was animated, imaginative, and intelligent. She had talked Uncle Jim into changing the vowel at the end of their name to make it seem less Italian.
Their life changed drastically when Uncle Jim discovered she was having a romance. Jerry told me, "Uncle Jim got rid of her right away. That day." Indeed, she disappeared from sight and conversation. There's so much left wanting here that I want to scream. A child raised without his mother. A woman probably impoverished overnight. Was she so guilt-ridden she didn't seek legal help? Was she so fear-filled and accustomed to that kind of "justice" she simply accepted it? Hers is the saddest story I know. I should say "theirs."
All made more bittersweet with the knowledge that this pretty amateur photographer wife and her handsome younger husband would divorce... No matter how much fun it looked like they had together.
And that one day, the cute baby boy in these photos would upload the story and the images here, to this fantasy digital world unimagined then, to be shared by us all.
How anyone can lament Young's continued upset over the devastating effects of Woods on her career is astonishing. Labeled a nut-case, a phsyco; black-balled from acting with the brand of "bitch" when she was the victim; what is she supposed to do? Just say, "Hey, that's OK. Lie and treat me like crap and keep me from my career, all because of your twisted ego"?
It's true that women often get the labels while the men get off scot-free -- even if, as in this case, he had to pay a huge settlement. It's the big omission in so many stories, which leads me to believe that something, someone was at work to make sure Young would be left out in the cold & Woods ultimately win.
But what really, really pisses me off is his 'accidental,' "I am sure it is fashionable to bash the guy (yawn) and pity the poor woman."
Playboy's Playmate for May, 1954 was Joanne Arnold. Her pictorial is deemed noteworthy (by me, anyway) as Arnold had a superfluous third nipple on her left breast which can be seen in several of the photos.
I do not mock Arnold and the photographs are exquisite. I am just impressed that Playboy opted to use the photos and not equate supernumerary with imperfection.
Of course, it could also have had something to do with the fact that prior to the June 1955 issue, Playboy purchased photos rather than took their own (at least for centerfolds).
I believe the centerfold photo of Arnold for the May 1954 issue was taken by John Baumgarth Company (the calendar company who had taken Monroe's famous nude), but I'm not certain who took the gorgeous pictorial. As I don't own any Playboy magazines with Joanne Arnold, I'm not even certain which, or if any, issues these photos are from. Any info is appreciated as I'm completely smitten with the underwater shots!
Not that I could afford the actual photos; eleven black and white photographs of Joanne Arnold, circa 1955, some by Lee Friedlander, sold for $3231.25 at auction in 2002. But I'd like the info anyway. (Makes one re-think the high prices of vintage Playboys, doesn't it? *wink*)
Anyway, for more on supernumerary nipples -- in the 'magic number' of three -- see The Superfluous Nipple. Otherwise, just enjoy more photos.
I was up late, into the wee hours, reading pulp novels for you dear readers (ah, the things I do for you -- watch for the reviews) and decided to flip on the TV. It won't surprise you that I'm a huge fan of Turner Classic Movies, so being the last channel I watched, that's the channel that came on. The movie had already started, so I missed the opening monologue by Robert Osborne, but quickly fell in love with Love Me or Leave Me.
The film stars Doris Day in a role -- a film -- which I had not expected. She's much more like Monroe than I had ever imagined in this film, but being so cozy from all the reading, I felt myself drifting off... Until, that is, I heard Day singing Ten Cents A Dance (YouTube). Wasn't that a Ziegfeld Follies song?
Suddenly I found myself leaping off the couch to check the Internet to verify my dim recollection of the song. Sure enough, that song is a classic -- with a classic performance by Ruth Etting (YouTube).
And that's when I discovered that Love Me or Leave Me was the film adaptation of Etting's life.
Well, Ruth Etting's life along with her manager-come-husband, Chicago gangster Martin "Moe the Gimp" Snyder, and her pianist, Myrl Alderman, the 'love interest' -- all of whom were still living and paid well for consulting during the creation of the film (which still took Hollywood liberties here and there). The film portrays the real life story of Etting's discovery, rise to stardom as America's Sweetheart of Song, and the jealously or love triangle, complete with shooting.
While Etting divorced "Moe the Gimp" in 1937, Moe wasn't the kind of gangster to let it go...
Moe returned to California and in a jealous rage shot and wounded Ruth's pianist and boyfriend Myrl Alderman. The subsequent sensationalized trial brought her career to a halt. Snyder was tried for kidnapping and attempted murder. The trial was a sordid scandal and an ordeal for Ruth, lasting from October through December of 1938. Snyder was found guilty and sentanced to prison. When he appealed the decision, Ruth and Myrl Alderman declined to appear in court, and he was released after a year in prison.
One of the more interesting items in our collection is a scrapbook of newspaper clippings dedicated solely to newspaper coverage of the trial. The Los Angeles Examiner had an especially talented writer, James Lee, whose writings on this trial gave an interesting snapshot into journalistic ethics adn trial coverage of the mid-30s. Lee makes a drama of the proceedings, complete with characters: Ruth Etting is "The Little Lady", her ex-husband, Moe Snyder is "The Gimp", Myrl Alderman is "The Piano Player," and that all important scene prop, the gun, is called "The Equalizer." Here, for example, is a description of "The Little Lady" on the stand.
She was dressed sedately, but expensively. She wore a knee-length gray jacket of very wooly lamb, a severe, dark blue tailored dress, and a blue felt hat that looked like the campaign headgear worn by the Union officers in the War Between the States, only with a good deal more chic, of course. (Los Angeles Examiner, 12/13/38)
This kind of writing, plus word-for-word transcription of some of the courtroom scenes, make for entertaining and sometimes painful reading on this portion of Ruth's life.
After the trail and Ruth's marriage to Myrl Alderman, the two lived in seclusion on a small ranch in Colorado Springs.
The reason this film strikes one as so much different than most Doris Day flicks likely lies in the fact that Love Me or Leave Me, made in 1955 with MGM, was the first film made by Doris Day after her 'liberation' from Warner Brothers. It's rather obvious MGM wasn't viewing Doris Day as just another funny, fluffy, cute, good girl who could sing -- because in this role Day wears sexy costumes, drinks, and has the ambitions as well as the actions of a woman who was less girl-next-door and more on the make.
Maybe saying Ruth Etting was "more on the make" seems a bit too much, but we all know Doris Day's image -- and Ruth, the torch singer, was far more sex pot.
It's said that when Mae West first saw Etting (in the Ziegfeld Follies), she said, "The curtains opened, and here was this girl. Not what you'd call a classic beauty--but unusual. She had a sex quality that seemed to mesmerize the audience. And when she finished singing, they just kind of went crazy."
The Ruth Etting we see portrayed by Doris Day is far more aggressive than most of Day's characters (before or since -- however, I'm not a Doris Day aficionado). Day's abilities as an actress and MGM's faith in Day aside, one shouldn't underestimate Day's understanding of Etting. TCM says:
A final irony about Love Me or Leave Me is the fact that the relationship between Ruth Etting and Marty Snyder had some disturbing parallels to the relationship between Doris Day and her husband Marty Melcher. Like Snyder, Melcher also controlled Day's business affairs, made creative decisions for her even though he had no musical experience, and lived through her work. When Melcher died in 1968, Day discovered that he had mismanaged her entire life savings of $20 million dollars, leaving her completely broke.
Clearly Day wouldn't know how well she understood her character until years later, but it's worth noting.
And, she knew as the filming progressed that there was something special about the movie. Most film critics consider it her very best role. She certainly should have at least been nominated for an Academy Award. But there is something strange about Academy voters. A person in a singing role is rarely taken seriously. Few musical stars have ever been been nominated for an Oscar. She worked very hard on her role. During the first seven weeks of shooting, she had only one half day off!
Cagney said of Doris: “As an actress, she perfectly illustrates my definition of good acting; just plant yourself, look the other actor in the eye, and tell him the truth. That’s what she does, all right.” He considered this film one of his top five pictures.
And the picture turned out to be a “smash.” It was nominated for six Academy Awards. Best Actor, Best Screenplay, Best Song, Best Original Story. It makes you wonder what Doris’s film career would have been like if she had been at MGM from the very beginning of her career.
Related:
For more info on Ruth Etting, America's Sweetheart of Song, see www.ruthetting.com, the official and family run website. (Where it seems both JLo and Angelina Jolie want to be in a remake of Love Me or Leave Me.)
Also, this page is run by a "palruth" who is researching Ruth Etting for a book.
New magazine Lucrezia takes its name from Lucrezia Borgia:
Consort, lover, schemer, wife and mother: Lucrezia Borgia, the most notorious consort during the Renaissance, runs rings around the bad girls of the 21st Century. Her clandestine beginning began before birth. A daughter to Pope Alexander VI and mistress Vannoza de Cattenei, her path was primed in her infancy. Was she a lady of privilege or leisure? Artful benefactor or scheming whore; the question of her complicity intrigues our contemporary times. According to a courtier, "her whole being exudes good humor and gaiety." Lucrezia is sex, and the personification of freedom. She is the light and the dark, the subversive and divine: sexuality in all its iridescence. Sexuality is as explosive or spicy as Lucrezia Borgia, hence our title. Sexuality continues to intrigue. Although many try to downplay it, they are still drawn to the mystery. Human sexuality ruffled feathers when it debuted in mainstream society at the time of Freud, and it still manages to ruffle a few feathers in the new millennium.
Belle Gunness was one of America’s most profligate known female serial killers. At 6 ft (1.83 m) tall and over 200 lb (91 kg), she was a powerful Norwegian-American woman. She may have killed both of her husbands and all of her children (on different occasions), but she is known to have killed most of her suitors, boyfriends, and her two daughters Myrtle and Lucy. Her apparent motives involved collecting life insurance benefits. Reports estimate that she killed more than twenty people over several decades–some claim more than one hundred–and possibly got away with it. She became part of American criminal folklore, a female Bluebeard.
The story of Belle caught my eye today as Andrea Simmons, graduate student at the University of Indianapolis, has exhumed Belle's remains, and is now analyzing them, comparing the DNA with DNA samples from Belle's letters, with hopes to clarify if the body is really Belle's. While a good historical mystery is fascinating, the life and deeds of Gunness are even more compelling -- in a morbid way.
Belle Gunness' history was re-examined and reporters wrote about the sudden inexplicable death in 1900 of her first husband, Mads Sorensen, who had been well-insured for $8,500. Two of her adopted children had died a few years earlier from conditions that might well have been due to poison, and several of her insured establishments had burned down. Belle traded her home in Austin, Illinois, for a farm in LaPorte, Indiana, and soon married Peter Gunness, who died eight months later when, as Belle reported, a meat grinder and jar of scalding water fell on his head (although no burns were present on the body and the blow to his head did not quite fit the supposed weapon).
Belle then placed matrimonial ads in various papers to lure men without family ties and with money—many of whom disappeared. That is, until they were found buried on her farm.
Belle Gunness was born in Selbu, Norway in 1858, and emigrated to the United States about 1886. She married Mads Sorenson in 1893. They owned a Chicago store that only turned a profit after it burned and they collected the insurance. In 1900 Sorenson died of convulsions and Belle received about $8,000 from his life insurance.
And she lured men via ads, like today's personal ads:
Belle began advertising in Norwegian language newspapers, "Widow, with mortgaged farm, seeks marriage. Triflers need not apply."
Apparently many answered her letters. Belle would introduce them as relatives. Belle's pretty, 18 year old niece, Jenny Olson, got suspicious because the suitors always left the farm during the night. Soon Jenny was away at school in California, according to Belle.
Do we have to guess where Jenny likely ended up?
It is believed that Belle had killed at least 25 people (other say 40 or more), including children, and the fire April 28, 1908 at Belle's home led to the discovery of many bodies -- but it also appeared as if Belle was now a victim herself.
The prime suspect in this apparent arson was a former hired hand named Ray Lamphere, who had worked for Belle about a year and who continued to have issues with her. He was even seen near her farm that morning, and he admitted he saw the fire, but said he had not felt compelled to warn anyone. Lamphere was arrested and detained.
Ray Lamphere, Belle's hired hand, was eventually charged with murder and arson. He was convicted only on the later charge. Before dying in prison, he maintained that Belle had escaped. For years afterwards there were numerous sightings of the murderess across the country, but none were confirmed.
Already, however, the researchers have made a shocking discovery: The casket they exhumed contained not just an adult woman's body, but also the partial remains of two children.
To Nawrocki, this surprise further confirmed that the initial investigations of the fire and Gunness' crimes were botched from the start.
"It makes me doubt every conclusion these people came to," he says. "Instead of answering questions, it just opened up more."
Found at Infomercantile (becoming an addiction, even though it's rarely smutty), is this slide of Debra Paget:
My guess is that it's an amateur shot taken at a performance sometime in the late 50's or early 60's -- which was around the time of her two marriages and matching divorces, and perhaps explains the confidence-building skirt slit, sans panties.
Strange Are The Ways Of Love (MP3 hosted again by the fine folks at Sex-Kitten.Net), but we all understand the need to bolster one's self-image post divorce -- even if it involves showing a bit more below the belt than the fashions and times warrant. (No wonder some love Paget more than Monroe.) Strange Are The Ways Of Love was nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Song, for The Young Land (1959).
There is more to see and hear from Debra at this fan site -- but be warned, the colors may harm your retinas.
Paget's still alive, but I don't suppose this post will help me garner an interview.
I've loved this photo for a long time -- the image of the waspie waist woman as she tries to inhale off the fancy cigarette was etched into my mind the first time I saw it years ago. However, being posted in a forum, no one knew who it was a photo of; it was just an image which circulated in the kink & vintage erotica communities I've visited through the years. Each time I inquired for info, but even the image name was just a bunch of numbers.
Eventually someone knew this was a photo of Cora; I now had something to work with.
I wasn't the only one searching... Andrea Johnson, before I, was searching for the woman too. She had spotted this photo in a copy of a 1972 Domination Annual and became smitten:
On December 12, 1937, Mae West appeared in two sketches on ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's radio show, The Chase and Sanborn Hour, then the currently the highest-rated program of the year. She appeared as herself, promoting her Paramount Pictures film, Every Day's a Holiday. On the radio show, West, as to be expected, flirted with Charlie McCarthy, Bergen's dummy, and displayed her risqué wit & sexual euphemisms.
Mae: Ah, Mr. Bergen. He’s very sweet. In fact, he’s a right guy. Confidentially, yuh’ll have to show me a man I don’t like.
Charlie: That’s swell! Bergen’s your man. You know, he can be had.
Mae: On second thought, I’m liable to take him away from yuh.
Charlie: Well, if you take Bergen away, I’m speechless. (Laughter.)
Mae: Why don’t you come up … uh, home with me now, honey? I’ll let you play in my woodpile. (Laughter.)
Charlie: Well, I’m not feeling so well tonight. I’ve been feeling nervous lately. I think I’m gonna have a nervous breakdown. Whuup! There I go.
Mae: So, good-time Charlie’s gonna play hard to get? Well, yuh can’t kid me. You’re afraid of women. Your Casanova stuff is just a front, a false front.
Charlie: Not so loud, Mae, not so loud! All my girlfriends are listening.
Mae: Oh, yeah! You’re all wood and a yard long …
Charlie: (weakly): Yeah.
Mae: Yuh weren’t so nervous and backward when yuh came up to see me at my apartment. In fact, yuh didn’t need any encouragement to kiss me.
Charlie: Did I do that?
Mae: Why, yuh certainly did. I got marks to prove it. (Snickering from audience) An’ splinters, too. (Laughter).
If that last line sent the NBC censors and the FCC into panic, it was the earlier sketch which was the most trouble.
The earlier sketch starred West and Don Ameche as Adam and Eve in the Garden Of Eden. Here's part of it, as reported by Time on Jan. 24, 1938:
Snake: That's the forbidden tree.
Eve: Oh, don't be technical. Answer me this—my palpitatin' python—would you like to have this whole Paradise to yourself?
Snake: Certainly.
Eve: O.K., then pick me a handful of fruit— Adam and I'll eat it—and the Garden of Eden is all yours. What do ya say?
Snake: Sssounds all right . . . but it's forbidden fruit.
Eve: Listen, what are you—my friend in the grass or a snake in the grass?
Snake: But forbidden fruit.
Eve: Are you a snake or are you a mouse?
Snake: I'll—I'll do it. (hissing laugh)
Eve: Now you're talking. Here—right in between those pickets.
Snake: I'm—I'm stuck.
Eve: Oh—shake your hips. There, there now, you're through.
Snake: I shouldn't be doing this.
Eve: Yeh, but you're doing all right now. Get me a big one. ... I feel like doin' a big apple.
Snake: Here you are, Missuss Eve.
Eve: Mm—oh, I see—huh—nice goin', swivel hips.
Snake: Wait a minute. It won't work. Adam'll never eat that forbidden apple.
Eve: Oh, yes, he will—when I'm through with it.
Snake: Nonsense. He won't.
Eve: He will if I feed it to him like women are gonna feed men for the rest of time.
NBC wanted to present something special for Miss West, so the powers that be turned to one of their most promising young writers, Arch Oboler. "That script came about this way," Oboler recalled on television’s The Merv Griffin Show on August 2, 1973. "NBC called upon me one day in Westwood . . . they were in trouble on the Edgar Bergen show. I knew they always were in trouble on that show, but they were in particular because John Erskin had written a book called Adam and Eve. Miss West didn’t like it, Charlie didn’t like it, Edgar . . . didn’t matter [jokingly laughs], and Don Ameche was playing the lead. So they asked me, would I write this ten-minute sketch? Well, I wasn’t interested in writing for Miss West. Finally, they waved enough money at me, and my good resolves went down the drain, but I made one condition: I said I would write about Adam and Eve only if I could take it out of the book – which I collaborated with years before – that is the Bible [jokingly]. The show was to be rehearsed on Saturday, going on the air on Sunday. This was Thursday, so I stayed up all night with my dear wife, who I married because she knew how to take things down, and I wrote this sketch. It was taken right out of Genesis."
..."Now one thing the powers-that-be forgot," recalled Oboler, "that in those days, unlike today, there were three things that an actress could not do. One was to have a child out of wedlock. Two, she could not swear, and three, she could not wear glasses. It was thought terrible for an actress to wear glasses. Well, Miss West, having all the usual good sense of all of us, didn’t wear her glasses during the rehearsals so she, being very nearsighted never saw my script. She bluffed her way through. It wasn’t until air time that she walked on stage waving these glasses, put them on . . . and for the first time saw the script. The result was disaster. What she did to ‘Adam and Eve’ the Arabs had never done so miserably."
Dorothy Lamour recounted in her 1981 autobiography, My Side of the Road, "One week our special guest was Mae West, who was to play Eve to Don Ameche’s Adam, in a takeoff on the Bible story. Church groups were outraged and the mail came pouring in. I can’t even remember what she said that was so terrible, but I’m sure it was mild by today’s standards."
What Mae West said wasn’t so bad as how she said it. Telling the serpent that "I feel like doin’ a big apple" was one comment ad-libbed, but when the serpent got stuck between the picket fences in an attempt to fetch the forbidden fruit, West exclaimed with the emotion of a woman going through an orgasm, "They’re – They’re! Now you’re through!"
Edgar Bergen was shocked. "We had to have a star each week," he recalled, "and she seemed a logical choice. She was a sex star. We were fully aware of that. ‘Adam and Eve’ as you probably know, had been performed before without any untoward incidents. Possibly our program being on Sunday and having a little fun with the Bible was dangerous. We always had two rehearsals; one on Saturday evening, after which we rewrite and tighten, and then we would do a Sunday afternoon read-through. At that read-through, Mae read her lines straight. It was obvious she knew what she was doing – how to lay out line – but she didn’t give things that Mae West twist until the broadcast. I’ve always said that we had far more permissive material on a previous show."
The conversation/performance was considered so risqué & bordering on blasphemous that not only was the FCC involved, but West was banned from being featured -- or even mentioned -- on the NBC network. She did not perform again on radio until 1949.
There was nothing offensive in the dialogue or it would never have gotten on the air in the first place. I only gave the lines my characteristic delivery. What else could I do? I wasn't Aimee Semple McPherson. Or Lincoln at Gettysburg, or John Foster Dulles, or even Eleanor Roosevelt. I was Mae West. Sunday on radio doesn't alter one's personality. The trouble wasn't caused by the portion of the program in which I traded wisecracks with the bundle of splinters called Charlie McCarthy. It was the 'Adam and Eve' sketch, with me as Eve and Don Ameche as Adam. The sketch had been approved by the radio people and their usual vice-presidents, as all material must be before it is permitted to be broadcast to an innocent America. I had scarcely had time to read over the sketch before the broadcast rehearsal.
But West's performance wasn't the only trouble with the Adam & Eve sketch.
A woman from Texas had written a story about Adam and Eve and claiming plagiarism she sued the network, NBC, and Arch Oboler. Oboler had to go to court and via that same Old-Time.com link, the writer recalls:
"His first question," continued Oboler, "was ‘Mr. Oboler, where were you on February twenty-second – blah, blah, blah.’ And as long as I live, I’ll remember my answer because I was under oath. I said, ‘In the bedroom’ because, you see, Miss West does all of her business in her bedroom. She pays her bills in her bedroom, and she rehearses in her bedroom. So the judge’s next question – he looked at me very suspiciously as if I were the Henry Kissinger of my time – and he said, "Exactly, Mr. Oboler, what were you doing – and remember you’re under oath – what were you doing with Miss West?’ And his face turned bright red and he said, ‘I withdraw the question.’ And that was the end of that."
Ha!
Few opportunities and heavy NBC censorship means there are few radio shows with Mae; you can find a few of them at Old Time Radio Show Catalog, and at eBay (including this record album).
When asked about being censored Mae West reportedly said, "I believe in censorship. After all, I made a fortune out of it."
It was Marlene Dietrich's birthday on the 27th, so a belated birthday post it is...
Below are some of her poems, found in an old suitcase by her only child, Maria Riva. The poems, some scribbled, others typed on playwright Noël Coward’s typewriter, were written after Dietrich retired from the public eye. Riva claims to have edited them in hopes of publishing them to illustrate that her mother did not retreat from the public gaze because of vanity, as some biographers have claimed. Riva said, "My mother withdrew because she was simply tired of being Marlene Dietrich. She was tired of the endless effort to present an ideal of perfection even though she was not perfect."
However, the poems as of yet have not been published -- and believe-you-me, I've been watching and waiting!
Here are a few of the poems, which strike melancholy, if not romantic, notes. And, interestingly, none of them -- or at least none of the released poems -- are to women... I would have expected something to or for Mercedes de Acosta, at least.
To Ronald Reagan:
A tense silence Grips me Surrounds me Grounds me to the Messy floor Around me
No voice No wind No rain Just silence will remain Around me What a fate ‘Too late cried the Raven, Too late'
To Orson Welles:
Even when you are dead You are not safe, Not out of reach.
To Noël Coward:
No more Body To hold on to While you Sleep Just the Sheet. What a cheat!
Most folks think "Lesbian" and "decorator" when they hear the name Elsie de Wolfe, but she was also an avid promoter of cancer-sticks -- and not just with ads like this Lucky Stikes ad (in the Delineator, February 1929) either.
Of course, one must remember that smoking was not just fashionable; such promotion was well compensated.
For more on Elsie, see Band of Thebes birthday tribute where they say, "Baby boomers who act like they invented being young at sixty are forgetting about Elsie de Wolfe who at sixty-one in 1926 attended a costume ball in Paris dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer and made her entrance doing handsprings."
ONE man on the American stage, and one woman, are possessed--Al Jolson and Fanny Brice. Their daemons are not of the same order, but together they represent all we have of the Great God Pan, and we ought to be grateful for it. For in addition to being more or less a Christian country, America is a Protestant community and a business organization-and none of these units is peculiarly prolific in the creation of daemonic individuals. We can bring forth Roosevelts--dynamic creatures, to be sure; but the fury and the exultation of Jolson is a hundred times higher in voltage than that of Roosevelt; we can produce courageous and adventurous women who shoot lions or manage construction gangs and remain pale beside the extraordinary "cutting loose" of Fanny Brice.
To say that each of these two is possessed by a daemon is a mediaeval and perfectly sound way of expressing their intensity of action. It does not prove anything-not even that they are geniuses of a fairly high rank, which in my opinion they are. I use the word possessed because it connotes a quality lacking elsewhere on the stage, and to be found only at moments in other aspects of American life-in religious mania, in good jazz bands, in a rare outbreak of mob violence. The particular intensity I mean is exactly what you do not see at a baseball game, but may at a prize fight, nor in the productions of David Belasco, nor at a political convention; you may see it on the Stock Exchange and you can see it, canalized and disciplined, but still intense, in our skyscraper architecture. It was visible at moments in the old Russian Ballet.
In Jolson there is always one thing you can be sure of: that whatever he does he does at the highest possible pressure. I do not mean that one gets the sense of his effort, for his work is at times the easiest seeming, the most effortless in the world. Only he never saves up-for the next scene, or the next week, or the next show. His generosity is extravagant; he flings into a comic song or three-minute impersonation so much- energy, violence, so much of the totality of one human being, that you feel it would suffice for a hundred others. In the days when the runway was planked down the centre of every good theatre in America, this galvanic little figure, leaping and shouting--yet always essentially dancing and singing--upon it was the concentration of our national health and gaiety. In Row, Row, Row he would bounce up on the runway, propel himself by imaginary oars over the heads of the audience, draw equally imaginary slivers from the seat of his trousers, and infuse into the song something wild and roaring and insanely funny. The very phonograph record of his famous Toreador song is full of vitality. Even in later days when the programme announces simply "Al Jolson" (about 10.15 P.M. in each of his reviews) he appears and sings and talks to the audience and dances off-and when he has done more than any other ten men, he returns and, blandly announcing that "You ain't heard nothing yet," proceeds to do twice as much again. He is the great master of the one-man show because he gives so much while he is on that the audience remains content while he is off-and his electrical energy almost always develops activity in those about him.
If it were necessary, a plea could be made for violence per se in the American theatre, because everything tends to prettify and restrain, and the energy of the theatre is dying out. But Jolson, who lacks discipline almost entirely, has other qualities besides violence. He has an excellent baritone voice, a good ear for dialect, a nimble presence, and a distinct sense of character. Of course it would be impossible not to recognize him the moment he appears on the stage; of course he is always Jolson-but he is also always Gus and always Inbad the Porter, and always Bombo. He has created a way of being for the characters he takes on; they live specifically in the mad world of the Jolson show; their wit and their bathos are singularly creditable characteristics of themselves-not of Jolson. You may recall a scene I think the show was called Dancing Around - in which a lady knocks at the door of a house. From within comes the voice of Jolson singing, "You made me love you, I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it"--the voice approaches, dwindles away, resumes -- it is a swift characterization of the lazy servant coming to open the door and ready to insult callers, since the master is out. Suddenly the black face leaps through the doorway and cries out, "We don' want no ice," and is gone. Or Jolson as the black slave of Columbus, reproached by his master for a long absence. His lips begin to quiver, his chin to tremble; the tears are approaching, when his human independence softly asserts itself and he wails, "We all have our moments." It is quite true, for Jolson's technique is the exploitation of these moments; he has himself said that he is the greatest master of hokum in the business, and in the theatre the art of hokum is to make each second count for itself, to save any moment from dulness by the happy intervention of a slap on the back, or by jumping out of character and back again, or any other trick. For there is no question of legitimacy here-everything is right if it makes 'em laugh.
He does more than make 'em laugh; he gives them what I am convinced is a genuine emotional effect ranging from the thrill to the shock. I remember coming home after eighteen months in Europe, during the war, and stepping from the boat to one of the first nights of Sinbad. The spectacle of Jolson's vitality had the same quality as the impression I got from the New York sky line-one had forgotten that there still existed in the world a force so boundless, an exaltation so high, and that anyone could still storm Heaven with laughter and cheers. He sang on that occasion 'N Everything and Swanee. I have suggested elsewhere that hearing him sing Swanee is what book reviewers and young girls loosely call an experience. I know what Jolson does with false sentiment; here he was dealing with something which by the grace of George Gershwin came true, and there was no necessity for putting anything over. In the absurd black-face which is so little negroid that it goes well with diversions in Yiddish accents, Jolson created image after image of longing, and his existence through the song was wholly in its rhythm.
Five years later I heard Jolson in a second-rate show, before an audience listless or hostile, sing this out dated and forgotten song, and create again, for each of us seated before him, the same image-and saw also the tremendous leap in vitality and happiness which took possession of the audience as he sang it. It was marvelous. In the first weeks of Sinbad he sang the words of 'N Everything as they are printed. Gradually (I saw the show in many phases) he interpolated, improvised, always with his absolute sense of rhythmic effect; until at the end it was a series of amorous cries and shouts of triumph to Eros. I have heard him sing also the absurd song about "It isn't raining rain, It's raining violets" and remarked him modulating that from sentimentality into a conscious bathos, with his gloved fingers flittering together and his voice rising to absurd fortissimi and the general air of kidding the piece.
He does not generally kid his Mammy songs-as why should he who sings them better than anyone else? He cannot underplay anything, he lacks restraint, and he leans on the second-rate sentiment of these songs until they are forced to render up the little that is real in them. I dislike them and dislike his doing them-as I dislike Belle Baker singing Elie, Elie! But it is quite possible that my discomfort at these exhibitions is proof of their quality. They and a few very cheap jokes and a few sly remarks about sexual perversions are Jolson's only faults. They are few. For a man who has, year after year, established an intimate relation with no less than a million people, every twelvemonth, he is singularly uncorrupted. That relation is the thing which sets him so far above all the other one-manshow stars. Eddie Cantor gives at times the effect of being as energetic; Wynn is always and Tinney sometimes funnier. But no one else, except Miss Brice, so holds an audience in the hollow of the hand. The hand is steady; the audience never moves. And on the great nights when everything is right, Jolson is driven by a power beyond himself. One sees that he knows what he is doing, but one sees that he doesn't half realize the power and intensity with which he is doing it. In those moments I cannot help thinking of him as a genius.
Quite to that point Fanny Brice hasn't reached. She hasn't, to begin with, the physical vitality of Jolson. But she has a more delicate mind and a richer humour--qualities which generally destroy vitality altogether, and which only enrich hers. She is first a great farceur; and in her songs she is exactly in the tradition of Yvette Guilbert, without the range, so far as we know, which enabled Mme Guilbert to create the whole of mediaeval France for us in ten lines of a song. The quality, however, is the same, and Fanny's evocations are as vivid and as poignant as Yvette's-they require from us exactly the same tribute of admiration. She has grown in power since she sang and made immortal, I Should Worry. Hear her now creating the tragedy of SecondHand Rose or of the one Florodora baby who-- "five little dumbells got married for money, And I got married for love . . .." These things are done with two-thirds of Yvette Guilbert's material missing, for there are no accessories and, although the words (some of the best are by Blanche Merrill) are good, the music isn't always distinguished. And the effects are irreproachable. Give Fanny a song she can get her teeth into, Mon Homme, and the result is less certain, but not less interesting. This was one of a series of realistic songs for Mistinguett, who sang it very much as Yvonne George did when she appeared in America. Miss Brice took it lento affetuoso; since the precise character of the song had changed a bit from its rather more outspoken French original. Miss Brice suppressed Fanny altogether in this song-she was being, I fear, "a serious artist"; but she is of such an extraordinary talent that she can do even this. Yvonne . George sang it better simply because the figure she evoked as Mon Homme was exactly the fake apache about whom it was written, and not the "my feller" who lurked behind Miss Brice. It was amusing to learn that without a Yiddish accent and without those immense rushes of drollery, without the enormous gawkishness of her other impersonations, Miss Brice could put a song over. But I am for Fanny against Miss Brice and to Fanny I return.
Fanny is one of the few people who "Make fun." She creates that peculiar quality of entertainment which is wholly light-hearted and everything else is added unto her. Of this special quality nothing can be said; one either sees it or doesn't, savours it or not. Fanny arrives on the scene with an indescribable gesture--after seeing it twenty times I believe that it consists of a feminine salute, touching the forehead and then flinging out her arm to the topmost gallery. There is magic in it, establishing her character at once -the magic must reside in her incredible elbow. She hasn't so much to give as Jolson, but she gives it with the same generosity, there are no reserves, and it is all for fun. Her Yiddish Squow (how else can I spell that amazing effect?) and her Heiland Lassie are examples-there isn't an arriere-pensee in them.
"The Chiff is after me . . . he says I appil to him . . . he likes my type - - " It is the complete give away of herself and she doesn't care.
And this carelessness goes through her other exceptional qualities of caricature and satire. For the first there is the famous Vamp, in which she plays the crucial scene of all the vampire stories, preluding it with the first four lines of the poem Mr Kipling failed to throw into the wastepaper basket, and fatuously adding, "I can't get over it"--after which point everything is flung into another plane-the hollow laughter, the haughty gesture, the pretended compassion, that famous defense of the vampire which here, however, ends with the magnificent line, "I may be a bad woman, but I'm awful good company." In this brief episode she does three things at once: recites a parody, imitates the moving-picture vamp, and creates through these another, truly comic character. For satire it is Fanny's special quality that with the utmost economy of means she always creates the original in the very process of destroying it, as in two numbers which are exquisite, her present opening song in vaudeville with its reiterations of Victor Hebert's Kiss Me Again, and her Spring Dance. The first is pressed far into burlesque, but before she gets there it has fatally destroyed the whole tedious business of polite and sentimental concert-room vocalism; and the second (Fanny in ballet, with her amazingly angular parody of five-position dancing) puts an end forever to that great obsession of ours, classical interpretative dancing.
Fanny's refinement of technique is far beyond Jolson's; her effects are broad enough, but her methods are all delicate. The frenzy which takes hold of her is as real as his. With him she has the supreme pleasure of knowing that she can do no wrong-and her spirits mount and intensify with every moment on the stage. She creates rapidly and her characterizations have an exceptional roundness and fulness; when the daemon attends she is superb.
It is noteworthy that these two stars bring something to America which America lacks and lovesthey are, I suppose, two of our most popular entertainers--and that both are racially out of the dominant caste. Possibly this accounts for their fine carelessness about our superstitions of politeness and gentility. The medium in which they work requires more decency and less frankness than usually exist in our private lives; but within these bounds Jolson and Brice go farther, go with more contempt for artificial notions of propriety, than anyone else. Jolson has re-created an ancient type, the scalawag servant with his surface dulness and hidden cleverness, a creation as real as Sganarelle. And Fanny has torn through all the conventions and cried out that gaiety still exists. They are parallel lines surcharged with vital energy. I should like to see that fourth-dimensional show in which they will meet.
I mention the latter as the blurbs about that book have some of the best, clearest, most concise information on Gilbert Seldes himself.
From Publishers Weekly:
In his 1924 book The Seven Lively Arts, Seldes (1893-1970) made the then-controversial claim that popular entertainment and culture should be treated just as seriously, and as rigorously, as the so-called high arts. Krazy Kat and Irving Berlin were worthy of critical attention, he said; and arts criticism in America hasn't been the same since. Kammen, a historian, stresses the "hands-on" aspect of Seldes's long and versatile career. He was a historian, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, scriptwriter, journalism school dean, newspaper and magazine columnist and CBS's first director of television. Although at times Kammen seems curiously defensive, his balanced and insightful account of Seldes's professional life?from the early '20s at the Dial magazine (and the beginning of long-running feuds with both Hemingway and the Algonquin Round Table set) to the 1950s debates on the role of "mass culture"?is a story of a life as well as a history of pop culture on the rise. Seldes, Kammen says, thought of himself as "a highbrow populist" and was a "compulsively candid critic." Kammen weights Seldes's contributions fairly but can be equally candid.
Mary Carroll of Booklist:
Cornell University's Kammen is an astute student of U.S. cultural history; People of Paradox (1972), A Machine That Would Go of Itself (1986), and Mystic Chords of Memory (1991) suggest his scope. It's hardly surprising that he would find Seldes a fascinating biographical subject. Seldes was a major contributor to arts criticism and magazine journalism from the 1920s to the 1960s: edited The Dial when it published T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland; wrote a classic defense of popular art, The Seven Lively Arts (1924), hundreds of magazine articles, a successful Broadway treatment of Lysistrata, and programs for radio and TV; and was founding dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications. Seldes fought with Hemingway, George Jean Nathan, and Edward R. Murrow and wrestled with issues of current relevance, including "dumbing down" vs. "leveling up" in the mass media and government's role in supporting (or restraining) artistic expression. Seldes shed light rather than heat on significant artistic issues American society has faced.
Double The Fanny Brice Is Twice As Nice (Part One)
Recently at a sale I spotted this 78 with one side titled Second Hand Rose and eager to show it off to my pal Secondhand Rose, I didn't even notice it was by the Fanny Brice -- nor did I note the other side with My Man -- until I had it home.
But once I did, I knew I had sheet music about here... Somewhere...
Weeks (and boxes) later, I found it. (And of course, more than a dozen others to scan and post here later too.)
Anyway, here's the belated post.
To understand the context of both songs, here's a bit of Brice's bio:
Brice starred in the Ziegfield Follies in the 1920s and 1930s and became known for her beautiful voice and limber grace, which she always used in the service of humor. When she tried dramatic Broadway roles, her plays were unsuccessful.
As Brice's fame increased, so did her notoriety. In 1918, she married Jules "Nicky Arnstein, a handsome, urbane but somewhat inept con man and thief she had lived with for six years. Despite Arnstein's infidelity and a stretch in Sing Sing Prison for illegal wiretapping, the devoted Brice stayed with him, had two children and supported him by working on-stage almost constantly. Brice's tumultuous relationship with the ne'er-do-well Arnstein gave her material for a rare non-ethnic success: appearing in the Ziegfield Follies of 1921, the usually manic comedienne stood nearly motionless on the stage and, singing in a beautiful, unaccented voice, moved audiences to tears with her rendition of "My Man" with its now-classic lyrics, "But whatever my man is, I am his - forever."
In 1924, Arnstein was charged in a Wall Street bond theft. Brice insisted on his innocence and funded his legal defense, at great expense. Arnstein was convicted and sentenced to the Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth. Released in 1927, the ungrateful and unfaithful Arnstein disappeared from Brice's life and that of his two children. Reluctantly, Brice divorced him.
Brice had some of her greatest success during her years as Mrs. Arnstein, including her famous song "Second Hand Rose." Yet, in 1923, as biographer Grossman puts it, Brice "tired of being a sight gag" and had her nose surgically straightened. Still, acceptance eluded her when she tried her hand at "American" drama.
After a failed marriage to Broadway impresario Billy Rose and starring roles in Hollywood film, Brice found a niche -broadcast radio - that made her comfortable. In 1938, she launched her own weekly radio show. A wonderful mimic and impersonator with a great ear for dialect, Brice chose instead to limit herself to one character, Baby Snooks, a precocious, bratty toddler - who had no accent. Her enormously successful run on radio lasted until her death in 1951, just as television was beginning to capture the radio audience.
Barbra Streisand paid tribute to Brice in her loosely biographical film Funny Girl.
Now to the song lyrics.
Second Hand Rose By James Hanley and Grant Clarke -- listen along here. (Many thanks to Sex-Kitten.Net for hosting the file!)
Father has a business, Strictly second-hand, Everything from tooth-picks to a baby grand. Stuff in our apartment, Came from Father's store, Even things I'm wearing, someone wore before. It's no wonder that I feel abused; I never get a thing that ain't been used!
I'm wearing second-hand hats, Second-hand clothes, That's why the call me Second Hand Rose. Even our piano in the parlor, Father bought for ten cents on the dollar. Second-hand pearls, I'm wearing second-hand curls, I never get a single thing that's new! Even Jakie Cohen, he's the man I adore, Had the nerve to tell me he'd been married before! Everyone knows that I'm just Second Hand Rose, From Second Avenue.
I'm wearing second-hand shoes, Second-hand hose, All the girls hand me their second-hand beaus! Even my pajamas, when I don them, Have somebody else's 'nitials on them. Second-hand rings, I'm sick of second-hand things, I never get what other goilies do. Once while strolling through the Ritz, a woman got my goat, She nudged her friend and said, "Oh, look, there goes my last year's coat!" Everyone knows that I'm just Second Hand Rose, From Second Avenue.
My Man
Sung by Miss Fanny Brice in Zeigfield Follies of 1921 as Mon Homme (My Man). Written by Maurice Yvain, lyrics by Channing Pollack.
It's cost me alot, But there's one thing that I've got It's my man. Cold and wet, tired, you bet But all that I soon forget With my man.
He's not much for looks And no hero out of books Is my man... Two or three girls has he That he likes as well as me But I love him!
I don't know why I should He isn't any good He isn't true But I'll stick to him like glue What else can I do?
Oh my man, I love him so! He'll never know. All my life is just despair But I don't care! When he takes me in his arms The world is bright, All right!
What's the difference if I say I'll go away? When I know I'll come back On my knees some day; For whatever my man is I am his Forever more!
Sometimes I say If I just could get away With my man He'd go straight, sure as fate, For it never is too late For a man.
I just like to dream of a cottage by a stream With my man Where a few flowers grew and perhaps a kid or two Like my man.
And then my eyes get wet I 'most forget 'Til he gets hot And tells me not to talk such rot...
Oh my man, I love him so! He'll never know. All my life is just despair But I don't care! When he takes me in his arms The world is bright All right!
What's the difference if I say I'll go away When I know I'll come back On my knees some day For whatever my man is I am his Forever more!
These photos are of swimming sensation and film star Annette Kellerman in the waterfalls of Kingston, Jamaica, for the filming of A Daughter of the Gods -- the photoplay was released October 16, 1916 (reissued by Fox Film Corporation in December 1917, in August 1918, and in February 1920).
In 1907, Annette and her father left London to seek greater fame and fortune in America. New York theater operators, however, were not impressed and found her swimming costumes offensive to American moral sensibilities. In spite of the General Slocum disaster little progress had been made in teaching women to swim and Annette was appalled by the cumbersome dress and pantaloon combinations that prevented American women from swimming. "I can't swim wearing more stuff than you hang on a clothesline," she reportedly said before walking on to Revere Beach near Boston wearing a one piece bathing suit that exposed her shapely form and bare legs. It was an act of defiance that resulted in her arrest and imprisonment for “indecent exposure.”
When her case came to trial she admitted violating the law but asked the judge how many more women would have to die because they didn’t learn to swim? “What difference is there from these legal costumes than wearing led chains around our legs?” She brought to court a man’s suit onto which she had sown leggings, making a one piece suit that technically conformed to the law, which required women to be covered from neck to toe. The sympathetic judge agreed to drop the charges against her, in return for her promise to only wear this swimsuit. The resulting newspaper headlines and outpourings of public support tolled a death-knell for Victorian attitudes towards women's swimwear and fashion and gave young women and girls a role model and encouraged them to swim. It also made Annette Kellerman a star.
If this swimmer-turned-movie-star-with-scandals sounds at all familiar to you, you're probably thinking of Esther Williams and her role as Kellerman in the 1952 film Million Dollar Mermaid. Williams had such great respect for Kellerman that Williams titled her autobiography, The Million Dollar Mermaid, after the movie she made about Kellerman's life. Which includes the years of athletics, stage performance and vaudeville (see the Keith-albee New York Hippodrome program) prior to her movie career.
But Kellerman would make a splash in Hollywood. According to Bikini Science:
In vector momentum terms Kellerman begins in the movies fully clad in 1909, bares her legs in 1914 (AK1410) and is fully nude in 1916. Covered to not-covered in seven years--and that's not just the story of Kellerman, it is the story of the era.
Kellerman's nudity is not Hollywood's first, but she is the first big-name star to appear à natural on the big screen. And the first to display an active role as opposed to a static poser, a relative modesty difference.
In the 1911 film The Mermaid, Kellerman became the first actress to wear a swimmable mermaid costume on film -- and in 2006, MermaidFX is said to have created a line of costumes based on the designs worn by Annette Kellerman (and claims to have the rights to her name & copies of Kellerman films -- which I find no proof of, nor reasoning for).
In 1914, Kellerman wrote a script for a film called Neptune's Daughter, which cost a modest $35,000 to make but which was the first film to gross $1 million in ticket sales.
Then in 1916, she was nude in A Daughter of the Gods.
A Daughter of the Gods was the first Hollywood production to cost over $1 million, with it's lush 1/2 mile long sets and a cast of over 20,000 extras. And it was well received. Sort of.
In it, Kellerman plays a girl who, disconsolate after the death of her bird, hurls herself into the ocean only to be reborn as "Anita, a daughter of the Gods," also described as "a mysterious beauty." A convoluted plot involving characters with names like "Chief Eunuch," "Fairy of Goodness," "The Sultan," and "The Arab Sheik" results in Anita vanquishing the "Witch of Evil." Though the film, like Neptune's Daughter, had a complex narrative and bewitching visual effects, it was Kellerman's unclad figure that formed its centerpiece. "Beauty is the keynote of the film. Beauty and symmetry of the female form," noted Moving Picture World. Male spectators sought out this very quality. A West Virginia woman made "four deep gashes in her husband's head" with a potato masher following the release of A Daughter of the Gods. "That scoundrel went to see that Annette Kellerman movie three times in three days, and he'd tell me every night what a pretty form she had," complained the angry, masher-wielding wife. The lifting of Victorian sexual mores clearly presented new difficulties for many an American housewife, not to mention her vulnerable spouse.
While A Daughter of the Gods was a great success, the film lead to a formal banning of nude scenes in the US motion picture industry in 1917. (The rumor is, some enterprising Chicago guy took the nude scenes and inserted them into underground trade films called called Charles Chaplin comedies -- I'm searching, but so far no luck on finding any actual leads on either the films or the gentlemen who produced/distributed them.)
However the film & scandal thrust Kellerman into international stardom. And as a result she was the highest paid working woman in the world, earning as much as $5,000 a week, for almost ten years.
It is said that Kellerman wrote and published several books -- including How To Swim (1918), Physical Beauty: How to Keep It (1919), and a book of children's stories titled Fairy Tales of the South Seas (1926) -- and wrote her unpublished autobiography, My Story.
She also wrote numerous mail order booklets on health, beauty and fitness; and in 1924, according to this program, she had a fitness club in LA:
Annette Kellerman has formed a club for women who are interested in gaining health and physical beauty in addition to enjoying all the advantages by a high-class country club. All members of your family enjoy privileges under your membership. Her club-located near Los Angeles-is the only one of its kind in the world where physical education-diet-swimming-tennis-golf-indoor and outdoor sports and pastimes may be enjoyed year round. Write Miss Kellerman today! Her booklet tells the full story of this interesting development-Miss Kellerman's life work. Dear Miss Kellerman: Please send me the booklet about your club for women. Annette Kellerman Country Club 500 Metropolitan Theater Bldg., Los Angeles.
As A Collector, I Could Make A Lot Of Money Off Celebrities
As news of poor Heather Mills' 'more pornographic' photos hits the tabloids and the blogosphere, I am reminded of a few points. However, let's cover the story first...
Heather Mills, aka Lady Macca, was known to be a model and in 2006 the first photographic proof was put on display for all the world to see. These photos came from a 1988 German sex book, Die Freuden Der Liebe (The Joys Of Love), which featured naked images of her performing sex acts on/with a male porn model. Mills 'escaped' that time, claiming the book was a "sex educational manual".
Apparently this how-to was for the illiterate as well as the sexually ignorant as, "The filthy volume features 112 pages filled with pictures — and contains NO accompanying words." (No need to know German to enjoy the book!)
The newly-found photos, clearly from the same shoot as they feature the same lacy red corset and stockings -- and ill-conceived pink glossy lipstick, show more than naked boobies.
These photos are said to come from a magazine (so far unnamed & dated) and this time it's the use of text which is damning. The photo caption reads, "I'm gonna drive you crazy with my body..." which surely sounds less like a sex ed manual and more like an invitation to masturbation.
Or maybe that's just me.
The media feeding frenzy is all about the horrible lies -- how Mills denied & denounced that she's ever done porn, or been a prostitute. (Apparently she's also faking being blonde, but we can forgive that, I suppose.) I would say that it's more about pushing pulp (and digital ad sales). But in either case, the bottom line is that the public is fascinated. "We" must be; or the money wouldn't be made.
Which brings me to my points.
A) As a collector I could make a lot of money off celebrities. I could sit home all day digging through my boxes of porn, sex ed manuals, calendars, postcards, et all, looking for faces, names and identifying characteristics of celebrities, then phoning my info in to publications & reaping big financial rewards as I provide scanned evidence. But I don't.
It's not that I have more fun things to do, and providing scans means I don't even need to damage my stash; it's just that I don't like the idea.
In fact, I don't understand it.
(That's point B.)
Why are we so freaked out that people, especially beautiful people, powerful people, desirable people, have sex lives? That they were models, actors, & sex facilitators? Why, for that matter, are we surprised that they were some how compensated for this?
Sex isn't horrible. Being paid for it, especially in a performance (really equal to that of an actor playing any role, including some atrocious character), isn't either.
But lots of folks think it's bad. The shocking scandals couldn't push profits if it wasn't. So no wonder Mills denied such things.
However, even if I own enough proof to sink a thousand celebrity careers (and for the most part, I am not into celebs, gossip, and those which trade in such things), I have no desire to do so.
Another example of how taking the higher road and following your principals, leaves you with less financially? Perhaps. But in the end, sex will remain. (If it doesn't, we as a species die.)
And I, for one, am hoping the universe or gods of smut will honor me, not with 1,000 virgins, but with some sort of smutty afterlife. Maybe even let me keep my smut collection.
Der Blaue Engel (1930) was the first sound film ever made in Germany. It's also the movie that rocketed Dietrich, as the cabaret singer Lola Lola who headlines at "The Blue Angel," to international stardom.
It's also the first film in which she sings Falling in Love Again, which became a Dietrich trademark over the years.
Greta Garbo possessed some of the same qualities as Marlene Dietrich, but Garbo brought a more introspective quality to her performances. Dietrich's innate bitchiness was always part of the characters she played. Like Dietrich, Garbo had a seemingly cool exterior, but this coolness was balanced by a faint-but-discernible smoldering sense of warmth. Dietrich was rarely warm but her magnetism has become legendary.
She was once many things, including at the time she married Vincent Astor named Brooke Marshall, a widow of Buddy Marshall, and herself a very attractive 50-year-old magazine editor & writer, with a son, Anthony D. Marshall -- yes, the one now up on charges.
Brooke, the other Astor wives & the women in their lives have interesting stories to read about -- check here for starters.
Thinking of Brooke Astor and her ilk reminded me of my Dad's love of a local wealthy philanthropist and social doyenne -- we'll call her 'Jane'. When American Beauty came out, Dad used to imagine the withered & aged rail-thin body of Jane beneath not rose petals, but hundred dollar bills. Which reminds me, us, that money is a huge turn-on for many; more than youth, big breasts and firm skin.
Terri "Cup Cake" O'Mason: "She's back again, brighter, better, more daringly naughty than before."
Terri "Cup Cake" O'Mason was a burlesque performer who signed a contract in 1960 with Fax Records to record for their "Stag Party Special" series of LPs.
You may know Jaime Pressly from the sitcom My Name Is Earl, where she stars as Joy, but she's appeared in several Playboy publications, including nudes:
Playboy's Book of Lingerie Vol. 58 November 1997 - Michael Bisco, pages 56-59 Playboy's Book of Lingerie Vol. 62 July 1998 - pages 32-33 Playboy's Nudes December 1998 - pages 16-17 Playboy's Sexy 100 February 2003
She even made the cover of Playboy in February, 2004.
Her film debut was in 1997's cable-friendly erotic thriller "Poison Ivy: The New Seduction" and posing for Playboy that same year made Pressly's body far more famous than her body of work. Still, those who looked past the film's disproportionate amount of nudity would find that Pressly made the most of her role and brought an eerie coolness to the part of Violet that proved she had more to offer.
Unlike some girls, Presley was able to take nude photos and spread them into a career instead of ending one. A career that in 2001 even Playboy remarked upon -- without mentioning that she'd appeared nude in their publications. Which seems odd, but what do I know?
Recently Pressly had a baby and apparently she was clueless about the 'joys' of pregnancy. However, Jamie clearly isn't an idiot. Along with her celebrity status she's started a clothing line, J'aime, to continue to make her hay when that sunshine fades. It seems a bit ironic for a gal who turned taking her clothes off into a career to start whoring clothes, but well, if we could all buy a body like hers, then Playboy wouldn't be in business would it.
It takes a savvy woman to realize she can make a fortune off dressing those of us who wish we could look like her naked.
She may play white-trash on TV, play it in photos, but she's certainly anything but.
I Love Norma Shearer, and I will post a bio about her (she's completely fascinating and extremely under-appreciated), but here's a link to an auction with her photo. I already have two of these, but someone out there needs this, so I post it.
Must find other photos of Norma (and affordable ones too).
Thanks to Fabulon for this delightful video for Constance Bennett Cosmetics, featuring (who else?) but Constance Bennett in what can best be described as a kitschy pitch for faux glamour. (I'm not saying the stuff wasn't wonderful; but the vintage advertorial is hardly realistic -- which is just one reason I love it!)
Another reason to love this old promo clip is Constance herself.
Constance was the eldest of the three daughters born to stage matinee idol Richard Bennett and actress/literary agent Adrienne Morrison in 1904. The middle sister was the least known sister, Barbara; she had a brief bit of fame as a dancer but is most known as the mother of talk show host Morton Downey. The youngest sister was Joan, who also found great film success; both Constance and Joan were enormously popular in the 30's, featured on the covers and inside pages of the popular movie magazines.
While Constance was the oldest, sister Joan joked of her sister, "With all of Constance's juggling of dates over the years, I started out as the youngest, then became her twin and finally wound up as the oldest sister."
The Bennetts were every bit as distinguished and as spirited another theatrical family, the Barrymores, which they were friends with. Richard was famous for having battles with critics of the day, writing scathing letters not only when his his performances were panned but when they were praised too. In fact, the entire Bennett family was known for their arguments with the press and Constance and Joan were no exception.
Constance may have gotten her start in film in one of daddy's films, but it was clear that both her beauty and talent would allow her to shine in her own right. Constance would appear in 57 films, several of which are considered true film classics.
Standouts include George Cukor's What Price Hollywood? (a 1932 early version of A Star Is Born, with Bennett in the role later played by Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand), Topper (with Cary Grant in 1937) and the musical comedy Moulin Rouge (1934, in which Constance's singing voice is more than decent). Another fun film is Ladies in Love (1936), starring Janet Gaynor, Loretta Young, Don Ameche and Tyrone Power (in a small part which made him so popular that the studio groomed him for greater stardom). While this film doesn't exactly showcase Constance it is based on the play Three Girls by Ladislaus Bus-Fekete and the film's storyline would became studio standard, inspiring inspiring How to Marry a Millionaire (1953).
I urge you to watch whatever Constance Bennett films you can find -- just note that most of Contances' best work was done Pre-Code and that it looks like the icky code put the kibosh on her just as her star was rising. (Dammit!)
There are a number of sites which will list and review Bennett's films, so I'm going to dish on other matters, including, of course, her love life.
As mentioned, Constance Bennett, like the rest of her clan, feuded with the press and it is said that she 'enjoyed lawsuits'. Constance was never called "Connie" and was often described lovingly as "a steamroller" and a "headstrong girl" -- which might appear to be less than flattering, but it is quite apparent that Constance was intelligent, confident, determined and assertive. And all in a charming manner.
As her son, Peter Plant, said in an interview with Eve Golden (Films of the Golden Age, Issue No 11, Winter, 1997), "Today, a lot of people are horribly aggressive rather than pleasantly assertive." (Perhaps if you read the words "headstrong girl" and feel it is unattractive, you should ponder Plant's words.)
In the mid-1930s she developed her own line of cosmetics. As Plant says, "the cosmetics were a good, quality product, but at some point she gave someone a license or franchise for it, and he ended up putting nothing but lanoline in the jars, and it ruined the product." All that remains is a deliriously bizarre promotional short she made, which was released as Constance Bennett's Daily Beauty Rituals and shows up on TCM as filler once in a while. Constance also became involved in Fashion Frocks, "a dress line from the Midwest on which she put her name -- mail order dresses in women's magazines." That too failed. One of her drawbacks was that "she was very smart, but would not take advice -- she had a number of good advisors, but she had the idea that she was capable of doing things where she was in over her head."
Not taking advice, being headstrong, seems to have also had its up-side -- especially when dealing with studio heads.
While negotiating her contract with Warner Brothers, Constance insisted that Jack Warner pay both her agents fee and income tax along with a salary which would make her the highest-paid player up to that time ($300,000 for just two films).
Constance was also a highly skilled poker player -- one who was not just permitted to play in the "men only" games but most often won them too. It is said that when someone commented that Constance could not take her money with her, her father said, "If Constance can't take it with her, then she won't go."
You know the saying, 'lucky at cards, unlucky in love', well that might have been true for Constance. Or maybe she just loved to gamble; she was married five times.
First, in 1921, she eloped with Chester Hirst Moorehead (the son of a Chicago surgeon). Claiming that the marriage took place on a dare, she had the marriage annulled in 1923.
Next, in 1925 (the year her parents divorced), she eloped with millionaire socialite Philip Morgan Plant (son of Mrs. Mae Caldwell Manwaring Plant Hayward Rovensky and thus the adopted son of adopted son of steamship/railroad tycoon Morton F. Plant). When the couple divorced in 1929, Constance was awarded a $1 million settlement (consider this foreshadowing, folks).
In 1931 she made headlines when she married Henri le Bailly, the Marquis de La Coudraye de La Falaise (a French nobleman and film director who was one of Gloria Swanson's former husbands). About this time Constance brought back from Europe a three-year-old boy, Peter Bennett Plant, whom she said she'd adopted. Bennett and le Bailly founded Bennett Pictures Corp. and produced a couple of films. (Constance would also produce Paris Underground, released in 1945, for a total count of three films produced -- which is apparently how she makes it as a SIMPP member [Kindly disregard this info on the cosmetic & clothing companies; I'd believe the son over this info.]) Constance and the Marquis divorced in 1940.
In 1941, Constance married actor Gilbert Roland. Though Bennett and Roland would divorce in 1946, they would have two daughters: Lorinda (a sculptress) and Christina (aka Gyl Roland, an actress and image consultant). However when Philip Morgan Plant (husband number two) died in '41, a funny thing happened...
A large trust fund was established to benefit any descendants of Plant, and Constance went to battle saying that her adopted son, Peter Bennett Plant, actually was the natural child of both herself and the deceased Plant, born after the divorce and kept hidden in order to ensure that the child's biological father would not get custody. The story may sound a bit strange, but Constance won the claim for her son. According to Time in November of 1943:
Last week, when Plant's mother and his show-girl widow were fighting a court battle with Miss Bennett over the trust fund, she promised that if she got to the witness stand she would give a complete account of her life with Plant. The matter was settled out of court. Miss Bennett picked up her baggage and doll and returned to her theatrical mutton.
Later in 1946, the same year as her divorce from Roland, Constance married US Air Force Colonel John Theron Coulter (who would become later Brigadier General). They remained married until her death in 1965 and when Coulter passed in '95, he was buried beside her.
After her marriage to the colonel, Constance concentrated her efforts on the stage, radio and with providing relief entertainment to US troops (earning military honors for her services). She did return one last time to film in 1966's Madame X.
Playing Lana Turner's rich-bitch mother-in-law in the campy classic Constance looked frighteningly thin. This due to cancer, which no one but her immediate family knew about. Shortly after filming was completed, Bennett collapsed and died from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 60. Madame X was released after her death.
In that 1997 interview, Plant this to say about his mother's work and her death:
"It was a grueling production experience," recalls Plant. "But my mother, knowing she would soon be gone, but being true to her profession, got through it fine."
"I'm sure her cancer was caused by smoking too bloody many Chesterfield cigarettes for too many years," says Plant, "and also due to taking massive injections of hormones in the 1950s to preserve her figure and make her appear younger than she was. I could name several of her female star peers who met the same fate pursuing their youthfulness."
Constance died on July 24, 1965, in the Watson Army Hospital in Fort Dix, New Jersey and as Eve Golden wrote:
By that time, Joan had surpassed her in reputation as an actress; Constance was recalled in her obituaries as more of a "glamor girl." Not long before she died, she said of her professional longevity, "If there's a secret to it, it's working like a beaver to be happy. What I mean is, I've always been interested in everything I did. When you're that interested in anything, you're happy.
I'm still interested in you, Constance. And I hope that makes us both happy.
Vanessa Anne Hudgens, star of the Disney made-for-kids TV movie hit "High School Musical," is under fire because of a nude photo circulating on the Internet. The photo, shown below, was taken for a boyfriend. According to Reuters:
A representative for actress Vanessa Hudgens confirmed on Friday that the image is of the 18-year-old performer. The picture shows her smiling and standing naked directly in front of the camera in what appears to be a bathroom.
"This was a photo which was taken privately," Hudgens' representative said in a statement. "It is a personal matter and it is unfortunate that this has become public."
Kudos for admitting it -- even makes me think that Vanessa is a real person rather than one of those Disney-bots they churn out. (Though we all know there will be hell to pay from the corporate rat mouse.)
What strikes me about this, and is the reason for posting it, is that 'we' are all so freaked out by actions like this.
The photo isn't horrible -- isn't in my mind 'porn' in the nasty way even if it's clearly designed to turn someone on. It's a very natural thing to do. Those of us who have taken such photos raise your hands -- and the rest of you are liars (or have some intimacy or body issues).
Why do we become so upset when celebrities are discovered to have lives, including sexual ones? Why do we kid ourselves that they are not human beings with sex urges (among other things) -- even while we admire, covet and lust after them? People are people.
Why do we freak-the-hell-out when we hear a celeb is a sexual human being?
Yeah, sure she's a product of Disney, marketed for tween consumption, but even then these are people (made of marketing, not in some Disney lab) and so they have lives.
According the the press, "some parents" were outraged:
"She's damaged," Renee Rollins-Greenberg, a Los Angeles mother of two, told Reuters. "She's got this teeny-bop audience, young pre-teens and younger, who are admiring her and thinking she's this wonderful, pure innocent person. Eighteen is awfully young for this kind of display."
"I'm devastated because I have an 8-year-old for which I now have to have an explanation," said another Los Angeles-area mother, Rosie Konkel. "She's always looked at this character as a very smart and proper young lady."
Damaged? Wow. That's overly harsh.
This mom thinks 18 is awfully young for this kind of display? Hey, does she remember what she did at 18? And even if this mom had no sexuality of her own at that age, does she forget we send our 18 year old babies off to fight wars? Eighteen: Young enough to die, but not allowed to be nude.
To the other mom, the one who is devastated at having to give an explanation to her daughter, I have to wonder how her 8 year old would even know? Is she unsupervised on the Internet? If she's so precious, why don't you supervise and control the media she views? And why would this need an explanation anyway? Why don't "some parents" teach their kids the following:
1) An actor or actress is not the role they play. They are human beings who may have little or nothing in common with the characters they play.
2) Adults have the right to participate in and make their own decisions regarding sexuality.
3) Having sex or posing nude does not mean you are not "a smart and proper young lady" (or gentleman). or "damaged". (Heck, posing nude doesn't automatically mean you are having sex, for that matter.)
So, get over it, America. (And that includes you too, Disney.)
Research now shows the magazine's models have been getting thinner since Marilyn Monroe first stretched across its pages in 1953.
All but one of those selected as men's fantasy women since 1992 have been medically underweight, an analysis of the women's weight-for-height ratios found.
The fact the trend was continuing showed that men's idea of gorgeousness was not an immutable response, but was tied to fashion and culture, researcher Martin Voracek said.
Dr Voracek, a psychologist from the University of Vienna, went to the Playboy website for details of the height, weight, bust, waist and hip measurements of every centrefold model since the magazine began.
On crunching the numbers, he discovered the women were getting both thinner and straighter, with less difference between their waist and bust or hip sizes.
"The women are more tubular and skinny. Not really anorexic, but certainly very skinny," said Dr Voracek, who specialises in the psychology of mating and how it affects human evolution. "There are no simple formulas of what is maximally attractive to men in the female body. [Attractive features] are not constant. They change over time."
His study was published yesterday in the British Medical Journal.
An anthropologist, Maciej Henneberg, said the average Australian woman was becoming larger, and the divergence between real body shapes and those presented to men as ideal could have serious implications.
"Men remain adolescent for a lot of their lives and often prefer immature body shapes, this willowy, thin, adolescent look. This is, frankly, dangerous and may lead to pedophilia if men are pushed towards more and more immature bodies," said Professor Henneberg, the head of the department of anatomical sciences at Adelaide University.
In this final installment Tom opened a can of worms for using the words 'tragic' and 'aging' too close together. Reading Tom as I do, I didn't make the mistake some posters did assuming him to be anti older women. But I can't help but feel the elephant in the room...
It is tragic that humans age as they do. This is especially true for women. Beauty, for all its non-conformity as far as fashion, is tied to youth, health and the ability to conceive. That's basic biology. It's so tied to this that it's true for those who do not want children and, going out on a limb here, it's still a part of non-hetero mate(ing) selection. Youth, with its supple un-lined skin and full healthy hair, signals prime health conditions -- and that is what secures the species. Screw what leads the herd; eat the weak, maimed and unhealthy stragglers at the end of it.
Yes, we are more capable of emotional and intellectual attraction 'above' that of our 'true' animal relatives. We can fall in love with and remain (happily) in love with the infertile, the sick, those minus limbs, the dying; but forgetting we are animals too means trouble. Sperm meets egg, hormones race, penis and/or nipples erect, and much of that is biology and our very own damn animal parts. Much of it is affected by youth or the loss thereof, so don't kid yourself that we humans are free from all that. It's there. It's one of the many layers in our sex onions.
As a woman, I mourn the loss of youth and what it means. Not just the attraction, not just the 'pretty,' but the reminder that I am moving from the front of the herd to the back where there is real trouble. This is why we 'higher animals' nip, suck and tuck among other things. We want to hold onto the middle for as long as we can. It's not just vanity, it's linked to survival.
And I call it a tragedy. For no matter how the other layers of our sexual onions are telling us about and directing us via romance, companionship, a swell sense of humor, and other learned or imprinted attraction methods, none of these things slows down the wrinkling of skin, the greying of hair, the slacking of bellies, bottoms and breasts. So even if our giant, wise, clever brains and affectionate, caring, pretty souls continue to increase the value of our spirits, we age in body.
I don't mind admitting that I absolutely loved my young body -- I love my body now too, but I'll admit I notice what is and isn't as taunt and firm as it once was. I loved more how I looked at 20 than I do at 40. (Where the head was at is another tale entirely.) I felt as wonderful as I looked. Losing that sucks. Losing this blush of youth means we are devalued as sex partners. Again as a woman, one who likes sex, I mourn that loss.
Which brings us, in some fashion or other, to the other discussion Tom Paine's posts prompted.
On a personal level the main reason I remain the anonymous collector here is because I don't wish to invite trouble. As noted before, simply collecting this stuff puts you if not on the defense at least at the ready to defend yourself from folks who just don't understand.
My being a woman who likes nudes is 'bad' enough. As a female collector and admirer of female nudes (which I began with) means my sexuality is open to interpretation. I pretty much laugh it off but this affects others. If I am a lesbian, then what is my male husband? And while he laughs it off too (honestly, we both have a bi streak), this matter of people discussing our sexuality is a inappropriate. I don't spend half the time worrying about who is before me (and who they are or might be screwing) as those who spot my collections do. I do enjoy looking at images of nudity and sex, as well as reading about it, but pondering a person's sex life? I think it's presumptuous, rude and, like asking what another person earns in salary or wages a year, it's none of my damn business.
And then there is the matter of displaying such things in your home -- especially if you have children about. And currently this isn't a laughing matter because I know authors of erotic who have had child protective services evaluate them for such a thing. I don't want those sort of problems.
Fundamentally I am anonymous for the ease of things -- but it angers me too. Why should I have to do this? Why should I have to shield and 'protect' family and friends from such associations when nudity, sexuality, is completely natural and normal?
Being a child of the 60's (technically born in, however those first few years I was but an infant), I do believe that if you're not part of the solution you are part of the problem. So sitting back resting on my anonymity feels like I am wrong there too.
While I'd truly like the world to be free enough to sexuality as a whole, I do realize this is not so. And any battle I would pick on behalf of being part of the solution would mean I was selecting this battle as one for those I know and love as well. So I let the cool waters of unselfishness sooth the agitated heated waters of these unjust realities.
And while the above is 90% of my reasoning, there's a remaining 10%...
If y'all knew who I was in 'real life' you'd have expectations about what I should say, what I shouldn't say, and what I should have said better. Being anonymous allows me the freedom to guess and, yes, to just throw shit out here now and then. Which kinda goes back to the other 90% because then my reputation, lowered somehow say by a quick posting on my mourning beauty, would affect those I love.
And while it would suck to be considered 'sub par' on my (perceived) abilities, I could handle it -- even if it meant that on top of fading youth and beauty this loss in status means I'd really be moving from the front of the herd to the back but fast! -- but the loss of status would be much harder for my husband and kids. Who would want to be related to that dumb sex obsessed blogger?
I shouldn't stay up late at night. It's the best time to write and research uninterrupted, but I also watch TV now and then. And the other night I watched Bio's Dead Famous episode on Marilyn Monroe.
It's not that I was creeped out by the idea of ghosts, and in fact, nothing very spectacular was shown to indicate ghostly activity by Marilyn. However, at the 'communication circle' (aka seance), the spirit of Marilyn supposedly said that she wanted to move on, but that all the fans, all the love and adoration, tied her here.
I have to admit, that bit stuck.
As a collector, I often feel that the objects I own (as well as those I covet) are imbued with forces. Call them life forces, energies, or what have you, but these things are not merely things.
And even if it is in my own mind, this idea that these things carry more than their weight or mass which can be measured on standard scales -- even if it is my own romanticism that makes me hope for life to continue and for the possibility that souls or ghosts can inhabit our concrete world of rational thought and meat -- ideas are real if not tangible. Ideas are the bulk of human existence. They are our own realities, at least until proven otherwise &/or new ideas take their place.
So, what if the cultural love of Marilyn Monroe actually holds some power?
More books have been written about Monroe than any other entertainer, some guessing over 600 books ~ with new releases each year.
I'll admit I own more than a few books on Monroe -- what girl who collects pinups and other iconography of sex doesn't have a few Marilyn items in her collection? But in the past few years (perhaps 8 or so years) I've shied away from books on Marilyn. Not only does it seem glutinous, but no book has brought out anything new, despite the claims to the contrary. In the end you just feel like you're a part of the giant machine which feeds off of her -- dead or alive.
And what if that feeding includes some sort of psychic one which ties her here? What if she'd like to leave but our our ownership of her image, her objects, binds her to us?
More from DeeDee's review of Churchwell's book:
This is the ultimate cohesive look at most (if not all) that has been written about Marilyn, right down to reviewer comments at Amazon for these books, and what is shown is not only the legend of Marilyn and how she's been used, but our response and ability to perpetuate the myths as well.
...What's most impressive about this work is the transformation which occurs. As you read, you move Monroe from some 'thing' for our cultural and personal needs, to if not fully human at least considering the possibility that she was a complicated living human being which cannot not easily be understood from the fragments of her life which remain. Once we begin to see that she's not so easily characterized for our 'needs', to be made to symbolize our cultural or personal issues, we then need to look at why we -- readers and society at large -- do this.
We are not completely dehumanized (as we've done to Marilyn) but we certainly have to take a look at ourselves as a swarming mass of millions -- and as individuals. What is this compulsion to make Marilyn something? Why do we not see how dehumanizing our process is? Why is our quest &/or belief system more important than the person we profess to love?
We must now see ourselves moving from lover to stalker; our jealous perceptions of what others may know or say wounds us as if she had cheated on us in real life. She is our goddess, and we own her.
If the biographers have motives so do we the readers and fans who purchase nearly anything with her image on it. There's no denying that we have dehumanized Marilyn Monroe (yes, even little Norma Jeane too) even as we've placed her among our pop culture dieties and cultural icons.
If there is such a thing as ghosts or spirits, wouldn't, couldn't our collective obsession with her royally muck things up?
And if we knew it to be true, and the seance message was true, would we let her go?
Or would we continue our necrophilic lust because our need to own the icon was more important to us?
Maybe it's because it's late, and I'm up alone... But I'm tempted to burn all my Monroe items just on the chance...
According to this pinup site (in German, translated via Google), these are the measurements of "the dream woman" in art and pinups over the years -- statistics calculated from painted pictures -- specifically works from 1890, 1930 and 1970.
I tried to do other searches to find out who did this, but found nothing; so it's not super credible. However, I don't see anything outrageously wrong. I think we all know that the ideal woman has gotten taller, yet weighs less. Note how the body mass is redistributed, including smaller knees and ankles (though admittedly, the gals in 1890 had very slim ankles for their weight & body shape).
The best era for women on screen was not the forties, as has been commonly assumed. The best era had nothing to do with ladies with big shoulder pads and bad hairdos watching their boyfriends light two cigarettes at the same time. It had nothing to do with women apologizing for their strength in the lat ten minutes of every film. It had nothing to do with weeping and cons
, by Annie Sprinkle, and is in 
, edited by William Ewing.
