Collecting

Virginia Hill – a seriously bad good-time girl

Virginia Hill, queen of the mob, mixed it with the most powerful and ruthless gangsters of her day. Streetwise, sassy and shameless, she serviced her bosses every which way.

They in return let her in on their secrets and showered her with cash to fund the lifestyle of ostentatious luxury to which she aspired. She was an impostor who gatecrashed Hollywood and seduced (literally as well as metaphorically) its denizens. It was too good to last.

1941. Virginia Hill and friends celebrate Hallowe’en. Read more…

Virginia Hill’s Hollywood heyday

January 1942, and Virginia Hill is having the time of her life. She’s been in Hollywood for a couple of years and she’s the talk of the town. Now, according to Modern Screen, she’s about to marry actor John Carroll:

It’ll be a great day for Hollywood when John Carroll takes plumpish, black-eyed Virginia Hill to be his blushing bride. If the pair do bounce to the altar, John will bring into the great Movietown family the most fantastic personality it has known since Bogus Prince Romanoff was in his prime.
At 23, Virginia Hill is a woman of mystery. Her wealth is inestimable and untraceable, though it is surmised her three marriages (the first occurred when she was 14) might have had something to do with it. Her extravagances are notorious. A $1,000 evening gown, the gem of Designer Irene’s fall collection, draped her body only three or four times before she gave it to a friend. Other gowns for which she pays from $100 to $400 are often discarded without being worn at all.
Her parties are reminiscent of something that went out with the Romans. Starting with two or three couples, Virginia frequently finds herself winding up the night hosting a mob of fifty. One evening she rented the Mocambo and its entire staff for a private shindig. Conservative estimators say that little social cost her well over $3,000 [roughly equivalent to $50,000 in today’s money]!
It’s always cash on the line for Virginia Hill. She travels with gobs of it tied in a rubber band. She’s never used a checkbook even to pay bills for her Chicago apartment, her New York and Hollywood hotel suites, automobile upkeep, maid and secretary.
There’s no denying, Husband Number Four will have to step fast to keep pace with the mad, exciting Miss Hill. But if anyone can do it, John Carroll is the boy. He’s not exactly a rest cure, himself!

In the event, the marriage never materialises. It’s a lucky escape for John. Virginia’s days of blushing at anything are way behind her. With Miss Hill, John would have got more than he’d bargained for. A lot more. Her past is murky, her future fraught with danger. The truth is she’s entangled with the mob and she’s the girlfriend of notorious gangster, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.

November 1941. Virginia Hill, cash dispenser. Read more…

Virginia Hill’s back story

Virginia Hill grows up in Bessemer, Alabama, an industrial city dominated by steelmaking. One of ten brothers and sisters, she is something of a wild child, perhaps because she’s lonely and insecure. Her father remembers how she tried to buy friendship:

One time Tabby [his nickname for her] charged several alarm clocks to my account, and then gave them away to the playmates who looked up to her, just as her frequent guests of ‘The Nightclub World’ were to do later for Tabby’s generosity.

It’s a pattern that will persist throughout her life. Her parents divorce when she is 14, and she moves with her mother to Marietta, Georgia. She can’t get away soon enough. Age 17, she marries George Rodgers, four years her senior, and heads for Chicago, where she promptly dumps him.

She soon falls in with the city’s mafia, sleeping her way straight to the top. Key to her progress is Joe Epstein, Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik’s chief accountant (Guzik is the Chicago Outfit’s treasurer and financial wizard). Epstein takes Virginia under his wing and introduces her to various prominent members of the gang. She’s well able to take things on from there herself.

At a 1936 Christmas party thrown by Charlie Fischetti (Al Capone’s cousin), she gives blow jobs to her host and several other top mobsters right in front of the guests as well as Fischetti’s wife – classy. It’s around this time that she starts keeping a diary of all the financial shenanigans she’s in on.

The following year, she is dispatched to infiltrate the New York mafia and find out whether they’re paying their dues to their Chicago counterparts. She loses no time in embarking on an affair with Joe “Adonis” Doto, one of the New York mob’s two most powerful bosses (the other is Charles “Lucky” Luciano).

In 1938 she becomes a courier and dealmaker. It’s the start of years of zigzagging across the US between New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Mexico, often with her brother Chick, running cash and drugs and sleeping around. In Mexico, among others she sleeps with the son of a Mexican finance minister in order to milk him for information and get him on side. In Hollywood, Errol Flynn is just one of the visitors to her bedroom.

Mid-1940s. Portrait of Virginia Hill. Read more…

Bugsy Siegel

Passing through Alabama in January 1939, Virginia takes the opportunity to seduce, marry and divorce in short order Osgood Griffin, a naive 19-year-old football player and, crucially, a son of one of the state’s richest families. The divorce enables her not just to get her hands on some useful alimony but also to marry (but only briefly) Carlos “Miguelito” Valdez. The big deal here is that it gives Valdez, a Mexican national, the right to enter the US in order to consolidate the drug alliances he and Virginia have established.

While all this is going on, she hitches up with John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli, whom the Chicago outfit have sent out West to work under Jack Dragna, the boss of the of the Los Angeles crime family. Roselli becomes the conduit through which Virginia will report the goings-on she finds out about back to the bosses in Chicago, who in turn will relay the information to their New York counterparts.

Virginia also has a brief affair with Pasquale “Pat” DiCicco, an agent, movie producer, occasional actor and playboy, as well as an alleged mobster working for Luciano. His ex-wife, actress Thelma Todd, died in 1935 under suspicious circumstances.

DiCicco introduces Virginia to actor George Raft, known (like Frank Sinatra) for his mafia connections, who in turn puts her back in touch with Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel – his nickname a reference to his reputation as a thug with a short fuse who gets off on violence and killing. He has graduated from petty extortion to being an associate in the New York syndicate run by Adonis, Luciano and Meyer Lansky.

Virginia first met Bugsy in a Brooklyn bar in NYC in February 1937. They spent the next night fucking each other’s brains out. Even as an experienced practitioner, she will remember it as the best sex she ever had. Later that year, the lovers had to part when Siegel was dispatched by his New York partners to Los Angeles to look after their gambling, racetrack and bookmaking rackets on the West Coast.

Bugsy is regarded as a dangerously loose canon by the mobs in Chicago and New York and not to be trusted. So Dragna instructs Virginia to get into bed (literally as well as metaphorically) with him and report back about what he’s up to. She’s more than happy to oblige and it’s not long before she and her brother Chick move into a house with Bugsy.

It’s the start of probably the best five or so years of Virginia’s life. Not only is she hitched with her favourite (albeit violent and abusive but perhaps that’s part of the attraction) lover, but thanks to her underworld connections she has the spondoolies to fund the lavish parties and publicity on which she thrives. What’s more, Bugsy is a good looking guy who can turn on the charm and whose underworld associations give the Hollywood community a pleasurable frisson. It’s all fine and dandy.

1947. Virginia Hill in Paris with her mother. Read more…

The end of the affair

But all good things must come to an end, and so it proves for Virginia Hill and Bugsy Siegel.

He is a slick operator with delusions of grandeur and an eye to the main chance that will be his downfall. In 1944 he spots the potential to turn an unpromising plot on a dusty road on the edge of Las Vegas into a glamorous casino hotel financed by the mob. Back then the city was nothing like the gambling Mecca it would go on to become.

The plot is being developed by Billy Wilkerson, founder/owner of The Hollywood Reporter, Tinseltown’s first daily entertainment trade newspaper, and various nightclubs. But he’s run into financial problems, which gives Bugsy and his associates the chance to step in. In May 1946, Bugsy, increasingly obsessed with the project and arrogant to boot, engineers Wilkerson’s departure and his own appointment as president with total control.

But whereas Wilkerson has experience of construction projects, Bugsy doesn’t. He’s out of his depth. This combined with constant meddling and insistence on upping the specification at every turn means that costs start to spiral out of control. Meanwhile, in spite of multiple ongoing infidelities on both their parts, he’s still besotted with Virginia. His name for the hotel, Flamingo, is apparently inspired by his nickname for her.

She, though, prefers the razzmatazz of Hollywood to the rudimentariness of Las Vegas and knows which side her bread is buttered. Bottom line: she’s not prepared to move permanently to Las Vegas but she does make regular visits that combine passion (bonking and bust-ups) and business. The business in this case is espionage. The mob are worried about the overruns and suspect Bugsy of taking a cut without telling them. Virginia’s job is to record the costs in her diary and report back on how things are going and how the money is being spent.

Caving in to pressure from his backers, Bugsy opens the Flamingo in December 1946 before it’s finished. It’s a disaster. The hotel has to be closed again post haste and another round of funding agreed. The Flamingo reopens in March 1947 and this time it’s a very different story. The punters and the money pour in. But this brings with it another problem for Bugsy. The mob reckon it’s payback time and they’re not prepared to hang around.

When Bugsy stalls, they lose their patience. Virginia is summoned to Chicago and on 16 June put on a flight to Paris. She tells Bugsy she’s there to buy wine for the Flamingo. In practice, she’s out of the way for the final act of the drama.

Four days later at around 22:30, Bugsy enters 810 N Linden Drive, Rudolf Valentino’s old house in Beverly Hills, now rented by Virginia. He makes his way to the sitting room, turns on the lights and makes himself comfortable on the sofa to catch up on the day’s paper. Perfect for the assassin lurking in the shadows outside. The first shot explodes through the window and hits Bugsy in the head, blowing his eye 15 feet from his body. The subsequent bullets crash into his body, breaking his ribs and tearing up his lungs. It’s like something out of The Godfather.

1. Bugsy Siegel – American Mombster

A brief and entertaining biography of Virginia Hill’s favourite lover.

2. The Kefauver Committee

An overview of organized crime in the US and the Kefauver Committee’s attempts to tackle it.

3. The Kefauver hearings

Extracts from the television coverage of the Kefauver hearings including a clip of Virginia Hill.

Virginia Hill gets her comeuppance

From here on, it’s going to be mostly downhill (pun intended) for Virginia. Bugsy’s demise may have come as no surprise to her, but it still leaves her shaken and insecure. She’s still up to her old tricks, including an affair with wealthy 21-year-old heir Nicholas Fouilette. But within months she’s taken an overdose, the first of at least four suicide attempts that year. Rumour has it that she’s terrified that she’ll be next on the mob’s hit list because, with her diary and everything else she knows, she’s just too much of a risk.

Still, she returns to the US and meets her sponsor, Joe Epstein a couple of times. He wants her to hand over her diary; she won’t. The following year, she settles for a time in Mexico City but soon she’s inexorably drawn back to the US. In early 1950, she travels to Sun Valley, Idaho, where she meets and marries ski instructor Hans Hauser, a former world champion downhill skier from Austria. That November she gives birth to a son, Peter, and the family moves to a luxurious home in Spokane, Washington. It’s around this time that the IRS seems finally to have noticed that Virginia’s and her husband’s lavish lifestyle has no apparent means of support.

1951 is the year it all comes crashing down. In March, Virginia is summoned before the Kefauver Committee, which is investigating organized crime. The hearing is televised, and Virginia puts in a performance to fit the occasion. Her cheeky, evasive, sometimes vulgar answers to the prosecution make an entertaining change from the bland, stodgy, often bureaucratic language used by the other courtroom participants. Try this:

6 July 1951. Virginia Hill chatting at El Paso Airport. Read more…

Senator Tobey: “But why would Joe Epstein give you all that money, Miss Hill?”
Virginia Hill: “You really want to know?”
Senator Tobey: “Yes, I really want to know.”
Virginia Hill: “Then I’ll tell you why. Because I’m the best cocksucker in town.”
Senator Kefauver: “Order! I demand order!”

Writer and director Robert C Ruark reckoned that Virginia’s testimony “created a new art form” and observed that:

Virginia Hill seems to have been an Alice in a wonderland of illegality…. Any secrets she holds are safe, because this is a girl who don’t know nothin’ about nobody and is little loath to say so.

On her way out of the courtroom when her questioning was over, she slugs Marjorie Farnsworth, a reporter for the New York Journal-American and screams at the others “I hope the atom bomb falls on every one of you!”

She leaves as something of a celebrity but it’s a Pyrrhic victory. The IRS and the Immigration and Naturalization Service have Virginia Hill and Hans Hauser in their respective sights. He is not a US citizen and when he is ordered to leave the US voluntarily, the couple go into hiding. In July the IRS slaps a demand for $161,000 on Virginia for unpaid income taxes for the years 1942 through 1947. In August they seize and auction her personal belongings but the sale raises just $41,000.

By then, Virginia has fled to Europe, never to return to the US.

Curtains for Virginia Hill

Virginia spends the last 15 years of her life in Europe. She’d like to return to the US but she can’t do a deal to avoid prison. She also tries to go to Cuba and Mexico, but her attempts are barred. In the mid-1960s she separates from her husband and moves with Peter to a modest hotel in Salzburg. On 22 March 1966 she leaves her home and fails to return. Two days later, her body is found in the snow, alongside a tree-shaded brook just outside the city. Two days later, the Los Angeles Times reports:

Virginia Hill’s Death Ruled Poison Suicide SALZBURG, Austria (UPI)
Virginia Hill, onetime glamour girl of the American underworld, took her own life by poison, an Austrian court ruled Friday. A farewell note said the 49-year-old auburn-haired beauty was “fed up with life.”
A medical examiner who performed an autopsy ruled she died of poisoning, and a coroner’s court ruled her death was suicide. Her body was found Thursday in a mountain meadow outside the city near a night club. She had been missing two days. Miss Hill, estranged from Austrian ski instructor Hans Hauser, the last of four husbands spent her last years living in a rooming house on a small side street with her 15-year-old son who worked as an apprentice waiter. Friends said she had left a will with a lawyer in Switzerland. Miss Hill was born in Lipscomb, Ala. She rocketed into the headlines when Benjamin (Bugsie) Siegel was shot to death in her Beverly Hills home in 1947. She was in Paris at the time.

Given her previous seven suicide attempts, the pathologist’s verdict is probably correct. But rumours continue to circulate that shortly before her death she tried to blackmail Joe Adonis, then exiled in Italy. And that he subsequently sent his henchmen to force-feed her the drugs.

7 July 1951. Virginia Hill at Denver Airport. Read more…

The photos

You’ve probably noticed that the quality of most of the photos of Virginia Hill here is not up to aenigma’s usual standard. Most of the photos on aenigma are studio shots or the product of planned outdoor sessions, taken by great photographers using great equipment. They are posed, lit and enhanced in post-production (typically in the darkroom and/or by retouching the negatives). Their purpose is to promote a movie, a star or a look by creating an aspirational, even iconic, image.

That may have been the case with the head-and-shoulders portrait of Virginia Hill but the print looks like it has been made from a second- or third-generation negative. The print itself has also been heavily retouched and coarsened to make it suitable for reproduction in low-quality newsprint. The cropping marks further detract from the image.

With all the distracting detail in the background, the Hallowe’en party photo, while clearly posed, is an informal snapshot, which could have been taken by a studio or a press photographer. It’s a bit of fun. The photo of Virginia perched on a sideboard console hasn’t been so messed about but again it’s little more than a snapshop, likely taken at her home.

The photos of Virginia at Denver Airport and in Paris are clearly press shots, snapped on location in less-than-ideal conditions and using relatively cheap cameras. The photographers in these cases are the forerunners of the paparazzi.

The shot of Virginia at El Paso airport is a wirephoto. Wirephoto technology was introduced in 1935 and continued to be used by the newspaper industry until the mid-1970s. It involved scanning an original print and transmitting it over telegraph or telephone wires, a bit like a fax. Wirephotos typically suffer from poor contrast and lack sharpness. A wirephoto usually has an extended caption along one of its borders that is integrated into the image itself.

Want to know more about Virginia Hill?

There are lots of accounts of the life and exploits of Virginia Hill and a good many discrepancies between them. I’ve done my best to take a balanced view but who knows where the truth lies.

As part of my research, I read a couple of books:

Virginia Hill – Mafia Molls – Beautiful Broads With Brass Balls: Volume 3 by Joe Bruno and Lawrence Venturato
We Only Kill Each Other: The Life and Bad Times of Bugsy Siegel by Dean Jennings.

The former is wonderfully scurrilous and sensational and casts its two protagonists in pretty much the worst possible light. The latter, on which the 1991 movie, Bugsy, starring Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, is based, takes the opposite view. It gives Bugsy and Virginia the benefit of the doubt whenever possible and indeed suggests on the back cover that Bugsy was “The man who invented Las Vegas.”

The TV movie, The Virginia Hill Story (1974) starring Dyan Cannon, takes a similarly romantic view, characterising her as a naive girl eventually betrayed by her movie magazine fantasies of glamour and romance – courageous and vulnerable, sexy and tender.

Other sources include Newspapers, Wikipedia, Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen, The Mob Museum and Nevada Public Radio.

Brenda Mee by Thurston Hopkins – a glimpse into another world

Whoever’s heard of Brenda Mee? I hadn’t until I came across this image, which gave me waves of nostalgia. It’s such a time-capsule image – her demure look, the bowler-hatted, be-suited pedestrian, the vintage car. And she turns out to be Miss Great Britain 1953.

It’s a classic case of what, for me, makes collecting photos so compelling. You see an image and want to find out the story behind it. Before long, you’re pursuing all sorts of lines of inquiry and making all sorts of discoveries. In this case, the lady herself, the times in which she lived, the news media in which the photo appeared, the guy who snapped the photo, and the world of beauty contests and the holiday camps, which hosted many of them.

The subject – Brenda Mee

The image is published in Picture Post to illustrate an article about The Beauty Contest Business. But for the scoop on Brenda Mee, look no further than the Sunday 30 August 1953 edition of London’s Weekly Dispatch:

A LOVELY girl stepped off the train at Euston Station one day last week. In her handbag was a cheque for £1,000. In her luggage was a magnificent silver bowl. In her eyes was the sparkle and delight of a girl who had just won the Sunday Dispatch-Morecambe National Bathing Beauty Contest. Brenda Mee, a 20-year-old blonde who was born at Derby but lives at South Kensington, is a photographers’ model and mannequin. She was chosen as the 1953 winner from among 40 finalists from all over Britain at Morecambe last week.
“What am I going to do with the money?” said Brenda. “First I shall go on a mild shopping spree and buy some clothes. Then I shall bank the rest of the money and think about it.”
Television newsreel as well as Movietone, Gaumont-British, Universal, Pathé, and Paramount news reels recorded her success at Morecambe. “I hope my newsreel and television showing is good,” says Brenda. “I would like to have a film test. It is one of my ambitions to get into films.” … In October Brenda will be “Miss Great Britain” in the “Miss World” contest in London.

1948. Fashion shot at the Victoria & Albert Museum, close to Brenda Mee’s flat. Photo by John Deakin. Read more.

The Miss World title and film-star ambition will prove a step too far. Still, Brenda Mee is currently sharing a cosy little basement flat in Drayton Gardens, South Kensington with Marlene Dee, 1951’s Miss Great Britain. How many hopeful Romeos must be beating their way that front door?

Our Brenda has come a long way in a short time. She’s first mentioned in the Saturday 15 April 1950 edition of the Derby Daily Telegraph, which announces that she’s just won the Derby finals of the nationwide contest to find Britain’s “Neptune’s Daughter.” The pageant is named after the Esther Williams film of the same name that’s just been released in the UK:

Sponsored by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Ltd., and the Associated British Cinemas, Ltd., in conjunction with a firm of American soft-drink manufacturers, the prizes for the winner of the national contest include a two-week trip to Hollywood, with air transport, perfume, wardrobe and even luggage cases provided free of charge.

The article also reveals (can you believe it?) that she’s living with her parents at 11 Swinburne Street, Derby, a modest Victorian semi. During 1951 she gains more experience but limited success as a beauty contestant before making her breakthrough in 1952.

1953 will prove to be her glory year though she will continue as a beauty contestant and model for a while longer. She will even appear as a lovely on a TV quiz show. Then she disappears from view, except for a brief mention in the Thursday, 5 June 1958 edition of the Birmingham Daily Post, where we learn that she “has brought with her on a visit to England, from her home in Melbourne, her three-month-old son Lloyd Anthony, who will be christened in August at Derby, where Miss Mee formerly lived.” Her husband is Mr. Ludwig Berger, an Australian company director. And that’s that.

The times

So, what’s going on around Brenda Mee? Inspired by 1951’s Festival of Britain, the country is gradually rebuilding after the bombing raids, privations and misery heaped on it by World War II. Still, London is a very different city from now. There are gaping holes where bombs fell, shop windows are dark at night, luxury goods are in short supply, and traffic is a thing of the future. It’s a world that’s buttoned up literally and metaphorically. Except, that is, for the likes of Francis Bacon, Augustus John and John Deakin who frequent bohemian Soho’s notorious Colony Club.

1951. Picture Post prepares the nation for the Festival of Britain.

This year, 1953, the big event in London and the UK is the coronation of Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey. Also in the news are Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who become the first men to reach the summit of Mount Everest. And Ian Fleming publishes his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. For the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus, some of the most welcome news may be that the rationing of sugar and sweets are coming to an end (food rationing won’t end completely until next year) and the emergence of the pneumatic Sabrina.

The news media and photojournalism

Although 1953 is the year that the House of Lords votes in favour of commercial television, only about one in three households have a TV and there’s only the one TV channel. Forget daytime TV – that’s decades away (27 October 1986 to be precise). Children’s programmes begin late afternoon followed by “Toddler’s Truce,” a TV blackout from 18:00 to 19:00 so that parents can put their children to bed before prime-time television kicks in. It’s a classic case of Auntie’s (as the BBC is affectionately known) paternalism!

So the main sources of news are newspapers, magazines, radio (wireless in the lingo of the day) and newsreels. Newsreels are short documentary films, containing both news stories and items of topical interest. They are shown in cinemas before the film the audience has come to see. And in the fifties, people do flock to the cinema.

The leading British news magazine is Picture Post (LIFE magazine is its US equivalent). As well as providing insights into the big social and political issues of the time, it covers many aspects of day-to-day life – from Life in the Gorbals to The Beauty Contest Business.

At the peak of its popularity in the 1940s, Picture Post is read by almost half the UK population, making it the window on the world for “the man on the street.” But a combination of the left-leaning views of its editors and the growth of TV ownership will bring about the magazine’s decline and, in 1957, its ultimate demise.

One of the things that’s remarkable about Picture Post is its pioneering approach to photojournalism. It pairs its writers and photographers and sends them out to work together as colleagues rather than as competitors. The result more often than not is a combination of words and pictures that creates compelling, immersive stories. The contributing photographers include Bill Brandt, Bert Hardy and Thurston Hopkins. They are in certain respects the British equivalents of the French humanist photographers who roamed Paris after World War II.

**The Cats of London.** Photos by Thurston Hopkins published in the 24 February 1951 edition of Picture Post.

According to David Mitchell, writing in The Guardian:

Stefan Lorant, first editor of Picture Post and pioneer of photo-journalism, had an unusual interviewing technique: “A photographer would come to me and I would say, ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’. If he did not know of him, I would realise he had no intellectual background. If he was ignorant of Shakespeare or Mahler – out! Never mind what his pictures were like.” Thurston Hopkins would have passed such a cultural inquisition with flying colours.

The photographer

Thurston Hopkins is born in 1913 and grows up in Sussex, the son of middle-class parents (his father is a prolific author and enthusiastic ghost hunter). On leaving school he heads for Brighton College of Art to study graphic art. During his time there, he teaches himself photography.

This turns out to be a smart move because the career he envisaged – as a commercial illustrator – fails to take off. During the 1930s newspapers and magazines are switching from illustration to photography, and Thurston follows suit, joining the PhotoPress Agency.

After a stint in the RAF Photographic Unit during World War II, he takes a break, hitchhiking around Europe with his camera. On his return to England, he joins Camera Press (a new agency) but soon decides the place he’d really like to work is Picture Post.

So he creates a dummy issue of the magazine, composed entirely of his own features, and persuades the proprietors to take him on as a freelancer and then, in 1950, as a full-time employee. His most celebrated features include cats of London, children playing on city streets (making the case for dedicated playgrounds) and the Liverpool slums.

When Picture Post shuts its doors for the last time, Thurston will become a successful advertising photographer, working in his studio in Chiswick, west London, and will take up teaching at the Guildford School of Art. In retirement, he will return to painting and live to age 100, survived by his wife Grace, also a photographer, and their two children.

Dorothy Lamour promotional shot for Paramount Pictures — 1937. Dorothy Lamour – from beauty queen to movie star. Read more.

Beauty contests

Beauty contests have a long history – it’s possible to trace them back to the Middle Ages. But the birth of the version we recognize today dates from 1921, according to the Pageant Center’s The History of Pageants. That’s the year when Atlantic City hotel proprietors come up with a ruse to tempt tourists to stick around after Labor Day. They organize a “pageant” that includes a “National Beauty Tournament” to choose “the most beautiful bathing beauty in America.”

The branding is a masterstroke. Take a bow, Herb Test, a local newsman, who comes up with a killer name: “Let’s call her Miss America!” Eastern newspaper editors are invited to run photo contests to pick winners to represent their communities, and eight finalists compete for the honour to be the first Miss America.

After a promising start, the pageant goes offline for four years following the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. But by the mid-1930s it has come roaring back and, surprise, surprise, attracted the attention of Hollywood studio bosses such as Howard Hughes. Winners of the new, optional talent competition can now expect invitations for screen tests – but they’d better beware of the starlet’s dilemma. A few beauty pageant contestants, Dorothy Lamour a notable case in point, go on to become movie stars.

The Miss America pageant continues through World War II and in 1948, to the outrage of the photographers, Bebe Shopp becomes the first competition winner to be crowned in a gown rather than a swimsuit.

In 1951, we come full circle back to Great Britain. The first Miss World Pageant is held to promote none other than the Festival of Britain. It’s the brainchild of Eric Morley, who happens to be involved with the Mecca Dance Halls that host many of the country’s beauty contests. Sadly, Marlene Dee, Miss Great Britain that year, loses out to Miss Sweden, Kiki Haakonson.

Picture Post’s take on The Beauty Contest Business appears in the 7 November 1953 edition. It is written in a nicely trenchant style by Robert Muller with photos by Thurston Hopkins. Here’s an extract:

**The Ballyhoo Business.** Bare legs, fanfares and revolving stages, flags of all nations and gala press receptions … the sponsors pay out, the public gazes. Photo by Thurston Hopkins published in the 7 November 1953 edition of Picture Post.

Who, you may well ask, pays for these beauty feasts, what do they get out of it, and who wants them anyway? Catch-phrases from pseudo-psychological treatises on the subject (“sublimated virgin worship,” etc.) don’t tell the whole story, for the big beauty contests are run by hard-headed businessmen. It cost Mecca Dancing, Ltd., more than £3,000 to find ‘Miss World,’ and thereby harvest a bushel of publicity. Even if the newspapers ignore Mecca when printing news and pictures of the girls, Morley of Mecca assures us that he possesses “ways and means of telling the country that these wonderful girls everybody is reading about are here because Mecca put them there.”
But Mecca is only an incidental link in a world-wide network of beauty contest sponsors. In most countries the big national beauty competitions are organised by newspapers and magazines as a circulation stunt. The newspapers link up with commercial firms, who offer facilities and pay costs, in the hope of publicising their goods. Beauty winners have thus become a new travelling publicity medium. Travel agents, fashion houses, bathing-suit manufacturers, motion-picture firms adorn beauty queens with their goods, decorate them with their messages. …
The girls themselves, probably unaware that they are exploited as mobile billboards for commercial concerns, are flattered and lulled by the fuss and adoration in which the competitions bathe them, and the models among them – and most beauty queens are models – appreciate the value of a better-class title. An important beauty title is to a model what a university degree is to a young professional man. Even a Miss Liechtenstein would find her services in increased demand, her fees rising. And the girls with film aspirations know that the uphill road to stardom without talent is usually paved with beauty crowns. Finally, a contest as big as the election of ‘Miss World’ carries with it prizes up to £500, for the duration of the contest all expenses are paid, fashion houses occasionally supply dresses, and firms like Mecca pay each girl £1 a day pocket money during the week in which the contest takes place.
But few of the girls give a thought to the back-stage commercial activity that buzzes around their exploits. Some of them are shrewd business-women, but the majority ride a vanity-driven coach, which, they hope, will one day pull up at a film studio, where a Prince Charming producer will offer them stardom and happiness.

**The Beauty Contest Business.** A page from the feature in the 7 November 1953 edition of Picture Post. Photos by Thurston Hopkins.

Want to know more about Brenda Mee, her life and times?

Pretty much the only place to find out more about Brenda Mee is at The British Newspaper Archive, for which you’ll need a subscription.

If you’re wondering about Britain in the 1950s, there’s a brief and entertaining overview at Retrowow. For something a bit more substantial, check out the series of articles at Historic UK’s Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. And for a year-by-year listing of key events, go to Wikipedia, starting at 1950.

The John Deakin archive is held by bridgeman images, who also have a piece on 60s Soho and the London Art Scene.

Learning On Screen has a history of the British newsreels, while you can watch a selection of examples at British Pathé’s 1950s Britain page. Photoworks provides an introduction to The Picture Post Photographers, which also touches on the history of the publication itself. For more about Thurston Hopkins and Picture Post – see The Guardian obituary and Getty Images’ Picture Post Collection.

The place to find out more about beauty contests is Pageant Center. For the specialist and researcher, there’s also Records of Miss Great Britain at Archives Hub, where there may just be further photos or material about Brenda Mee herself.

Fashion and movie photos – why collect them?

Paris after World War II – fact, fashion and fantasy

Sabrina – Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe

Photo research – how to discover the stories behind photos

Certain images grab our attention and stick in our minds. And in almost every case, the more we know about a photo, the more fascinating and special it becomes. That’s where photo research comes in.

“Just a story” Part 1

This scene from Shooting the Past features two of the leading protagonists: Marilyn, the manager in charge of the archive; and Christopher, the president of the company that’s proposing to dispose of it. To prove the archive’s value, Marilyn shows Christopher a series of photos and tells him the story her archivist Oswald has pieced together.

“Just a story” Part 2

As the title suggests, this is a continuation of the previous scene.

Nowhere is that brought more powerfully to life than in Stephen Poliakoff’s riveting TV drama, Shooting the Past. It tells the story of a US property developer planning to renovate a London building containing a vast photographic archive, and how the archive’s employees’ try to thwart him.

Since my early days of collecting photos, one of my favourite pursuits has been playing the sleuth, trying to unearth the stories that would bring to life the images I’ve acquired. There’s a real kick to be got out of tracking down the date a photo was taken, the identity of the photographer, perhaps the magazine(s) in which it was published or the movie it promoted. In the case of fashion shots, the challenge might be to discover who the model is and who designed the clothes.

From there it’s a small step to watching movies, reading biographies and leafing through old magazines… And creating aenigma.

Hallowe'en in Hollywood — *1941. Hallowe’en in Hollywood.* *Read more*.

Photo research – the back of the print

The back of a photo may be less glamorous than the image itself but for the collector it can be just as interesting. It may help to validate the print’s authenticity as a vintage piece. And it may provide invaluable information – perhaps a photographer’s credit stamp, a caption, a newspaper clipping or all three. There may be archive or library filing annotations or handwritten notes about the subject, the sitting, the date.

The party photo here is a case in point. The label identifies the five people posing in the foreground and a couple of ink stamps indicate that the print was received/published/filed on November 16 1941 and December 16 1941. The witches’ hats and cats’ masks in the background reveal the occasion – we’re looking at a Hallowe’en party. All that’s needed are a few online searches to find out more about the five subjects (Alan Gordon was the most challenging) and what they were up to that year. And it’s fascinating!

Often it takes a bit more detective work to get to the bottom of things. Over the years, I’ve discovered a number of sources and techniques that have yielded results.

Photo research – reverse image searches

My first line of attack when it comes to photo research is usually to do a reverse image search. This involves uploading a photo to one of a number of search engines (Google, TinEye and ImageRaider are the leaders) and asking them to find similar images. They then use proprietary algorithms to try to find a match between your image and those in the databases they have built by crawling the Internet. AkshatBlog has an excellent overview of the Best Reverse Image Search Tools, Apps & Browser Addons.

The good news is that, at least in the case of movie stars (not in the case of fashion), there’s a reasonable chance you will get at least one or two matches. Then it’s a matter of going to the pages in which the matches are embedded to find out more.

The bad news is that more often than not the pages contain no useful information. The Internet is littered with images, often poor reproductions and copied from one website to another. The top “hit” is typically Pinterest, wading through which can be quite a task.

Always try to trace the image you’re presented with back to the original source. Evaluate the source before concluding that any identification/attribution is trustworthy. One of my aims with aenigma is to provide a reliable resource for researchers and collectors, which is why I always cite date stamps, photographers, etc when I’ve been able to identify them.

Lana Turner in The Sea Chase — 1955. Lana Turner, promotional portrait by Bert Six for The Sea Chase. This photo found at MPTV.

Photo research – photo libraries

Reverse image searches miss at least one potentially important source – photo libraries. Unfortunately there’s no way (at least none that I have yet come across) of searching multiple photo libraries simultaneously, so you have to search each one separately. To make things more time-consuming, in most cases you have to search manually, ie by subject, photographer, year, etc.

Much the biggest and most important online library when it comes to researching movie stars, celebrities and events of the past is Getty Images. It is an amalgam of many photo archives acquired, digitized and consolidated since 1995 when the business was set up. Acquisitions include, for example, the Hulton Deutsch/Picture Post Library (whose purchase, I believe, was an inspiration for Shooting the Past) and the Paris Match archive.

Other photo libraries I have found useful from time to time include:

Movie Stills Archive – a growing collection of movie stills, organized by star. To date there is no additional information (eg year, photographer).
Image Collect – a collection of over 7 million celebrity photos.
MPTV – an agency founded by photographer Sid Avery and specializing in entertainment photography.
Camera Press – a London-based agency founded in 1947 by photographer Tom Blau.
The Model Archives at Marlowe Press – 25 years of fashion by the best photographers in Europe and the USA between 1965 and 1990 (login required).
The Edward Quinn Archive – Ed Quinn lived and worked on the Côte d’Azur in the 1950s, photographing the movie stars and celebrities who congregated there.
Magnum Photos – a photographic agency formed after World War II by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour.
Publifoto – an Italian image library with a searchable database of photos dating back to 1952.

The great thing about photo libraries is that as well as the subject they often identify the photographer and the year the photo was taken. Having said that, don’t assume that this information is correct. In my searches through Getty Images I’ve come across lots of material dated January 1 1900 – which seems to be a code for “date unknown.” Similarly, a date of January 1 of any year in most cases seems to mean that the archivist believes they know the year but not the precise date.

*Vogue (UK), January 1955. I tracked down my photo of Marisa Pavan by Jean Howard to this article on “Rising stars on the screen.”*

Photo research – vintage magazines and newspapers

Vintage magazines are both fascinating and invaluable for photo research. Often photos have captions identifying the photographer, while the article they illustrate provides information about the subject. In the case of fashion magazines, you’re likely to learn the month as well as the year of the photograph, the photographer and the garments being modelled although more often than not the model isn’t named.

The archives of Vogue (US), Vogue Italia (from 1964) and Harper’s Bazaar (US) have been digitized by a company called Proquest. The archives are fully indexed and searchable. But to use them you’ll either need to have a personal subscription (deep pockets required) or to belong to an institution (such as a major library or university) with corporate membership.

I visit the British Library, which provides access to the Vogue (US) archive, and quickly discovered I could search by date, photographer, subject/model and designer (there are lots of other search options as well). For example, one of my searches was for photographs of Veruschka by Franco Rubartelli, with the results sorted by date. Clicking on a result takes me to the beginning of the article, with forward/backward arrows to navigate the pages. When I find a spread of interest, the system enables me to email the .jpgs to myself along with a transcript of the associated text. Awesome! It’s also possible to browse the magazines.

If the Proquest archives are out of your reach, then there’s a much smaller but still useful offering at My Vintage Vogue.

If it’s movie stars you’re interested in, the place to go is Fan Magazines Collection, which has scanned editions of vintage rags including Modern Screen, Photoplay and Screenland. The runs are incomplete but still extensive and available for free – a truly magnificent resource for photo research.

Less specific but no less fascinating is Google’s browsable Life magazine archive. Alternatively, if all you want to do is search for a photo, go to Google image search and type in your search word(s) followed by “source:life”. For example, to find photos of Hazel Brooks published in Life magazine, enter “hazel brooks source:life”.

Also worth a look, with subjects ranging from WWI and WWII to sports and music, fashion and the Titanic, is Old Magazine Articles, another free online resource.

Turning to newspapers, the resources available depend on two key factors: whether you are prepared to take out a subscription and what country’s papers you want to search. The three websites I’ve found most valuable are:

Chronicling America at the Library of Congress. It offers more than 12 million pages of digitized, full-text searchable US newspapers.
The Times Archive, which enables you to explore 200 years of history as it appeared in the pages of the leading UK newspaper from 1785 to 1985.
Trove at the National Library of Australia. It covers books, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives and more.

There are lots of other free resources but most of them are pretty limited. There’s a great introduction and copious links at The Ancestor Hunt.

If you’re prepared to take out a subscription, the biggest newspaper archive is Newspapers.com. Or, if you’re interest is primarily in the UK, head for The British Newspaper Archive.

Audrey Hepburn holding a gown. The production code number 382 reveals that the photo was taken during the filming of Love in the Afternoon (1957). 525 is the number assigned to the individual still.

Photo research – movie production codes

From the 1920s onwards, production, distribution and marketing stills were controlled by an accounting process known as “production codes.” Studios would assign a code to each of their films as a way of tracking its progress through production. This helped to avoid confusion if, for example, the name of the movie or its director changed. It also turns out to be a huge boon for anyone with an interest in photo research.

During a movie’s production, the stills team would take all sorts of photos: movie stills, behind-the-scenes shots, portraits, and so on. The studio’s publicity department would review the resulting contact sheets, choosing the best shots, from which they would create a “key set.” Images from the key set would be distributed to magazines and newspapers in order to promote the movie or the star.

Crucially for collectors, each of the images in the set would be marked with the assigned production number together with an individual still number. Individual stars might also be allocated their own “production codes” for portraits not associated with a specific film.

So if you have a mystery photo with a production code, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll be able to track it down. All you need is a list of production codes and the movies or stars with which they are associated. Fortunately, Ed and Susan Poole, the undisputed authorities on this topic and authors of Production Code Basics, have invested a huge amount of time and effort in producing just such a list (it is a work in progress). It is available in the two-volume Movie Still Identification Book Ultimate Edition available from their website store. Alternatively, you can subscribe to their research service.

In using production codes to identify photos you need to bear in mind a couple things.

First, each studio had its own numbering system and the systems weren’t always that systematic. So in many cases the same production code has been used for multiple movies. Fortunately, it’s usually pretty straightforward to identify which of the movies on the shortlist associated with the production number is relevant to your photo by studying the stars and figuring out a rough date.

And second, the production codes are sometimes just wrong. The guys who inscribed them on the negatives were human beings and prone to making mistakes – whether through carelessness or by misreading the code they were supposed to be transcribing. So watch out!

Photo research identified the subject as Virginia Walker. — The dedication reveals that the actress is Virginia but in spite of all my efforts that was all I knew about her. Then, a second reverse image search, months after the previous one, threw up a match on eBay. The copy for sale there had been used to promote A Royal Scandal (1945) in which Virginia Walker starred as a lady in waiting to Catherine the Great.

Photo research – specialist websites and blogs

Aenigma is just one of many websites and blogs created by enthusiasts to share their interests and provide an outlet for their research. Any attempt at compiling an exhaustive list is doomed to failure as the landscape is constantly changing and everyone will have their own specific areas of interest.

So here are a few places I find myself returning to (mainly for background information, stories and insights rather than to find specific images):

Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen – a website dedicated to the private lives of some of the most glamorous actresses of the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.
Those Obscure Objects of Desire – a blog about unknown actresses of old Hollywood.
Cult Sirens – a tribute to gorgeous and provocative actresses, primarily from the 1950s onwards.
Forgotten Hollywood – a blog about the unique relationship between Hollywood’s Golden Age and American history, and including useful links to related websites.
You Must Remember This – a series of storytelling podcasts about the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century.
Cinephilia & Beyond – a highly rated website for filmmakers and film lovers.
Vintage Movie Star Photos – a blog for discussing vintage photographers and celebrity subjects. It’s one of the best sources of information about Hollywood photographers of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.
The Red List – an online database of 100,000 images and 6,000 profiles covering the whole world of visual arts, with brief illustrated biographies of photographers in the fields of both fashion and cinema.
The Ned Scott Archive – a fascinating compilation of material from the estate of one of the great photographers of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Photo research – other resources

There’s an ever-changing wealth of material available on eBay, and particularly on ebay.com. Most of the photos are later prints and many sellers don’t provide much or even any information about what’s on the back of the print they’re selling. But some do; and if you find those sellers and watch their auctions, you will learn a lot over time and may even spot some images you want to bid on!

And then there’s Instagram. As with eBay, there are many pearls to be found among the mass of dross. And again, it’s a matter of finding photo-streams that specialize in the kinds of images that appeal to you and provide reliable information about them.

Photo research – what about you?

I’ll update this article as I discover new resources, and I’d love to hear from you if you have any suggestions I could add. So please do contact me with your ideas.

Fashion and movie photos – why collect them?

Why collect fashion and movie photos? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself since I started working on Aenigma.

In some ways it’s a tricky question for me to answer because I’m so in love with the subject that I struggle to understand how anyone could feel differently. So I’m going to make a big effort, do my best to be dispassionate and suggest why you might want to consider collecting in this area. Then I’ll talk a bit about how I came to do so.

Five reasons why you might want to collect fashion and movie photos

Easy to appreciate – You don’t have to be an art historian or a connoisseur to enjoy photographs of fashion models and movie stars. Most of the images look great, they make an instant impression and the best ones linger in the mind. Sometimes that’s because the image itself is startling. Sometimes it’s because of the story behind it – as turned out to be the case with a photo I bought a few years ago of Ava Gardner at a Halloween party.

anita ekberg front and back — Print with a history. This photo of Anita Ekberg surrounded by press photographers was taken around 1959. It’s clearly been cropped and on the reverse are a plethora of stamps, annotations and stickers.

Spirit of the age – What’s particularly great about film and fashion shots is that the subject matter is so ephemeral. So if you want to get a feel for a period (say the 1940s or the 1970s), looking at images from that era is one of the best ways of doing so. Think back to when you were in your teens, say, and what do you remember? It’s most likely ephemeral stuff like clothes, magazines, posters and music – things that change ever so quickly but that everyone just takes for granted at the time. Photos from the worlds of fashion and film capture so many of those things.

Art and commerce – To succeed in the world of fashion or film you have to have a strong commercial edge. But unless all you want to do is copy others, you also need creative flair. The same applies to the photography associated with the two worlds. Fashion and movie photos are where art and commerce meet, and that can lead to some really great images as well as a wonderful diversity. To get an impression of that diversity, take a look at a fashion magazine like Vogue or Harper’s and compare the advertising with the editorial photography. Or, in the case of Hollywood, contrast the iconic portraits by George Hurrell, Clarence Sinclair Bull and their contemporaries with the formulaic (but still rather fetching and undoubtedly accomplished) cheesecake pinups.

Spoilt for choice – I’ve covered some aspects of this under art and commerce. Film and fashion photos come in many different flavours, from paparazzi shots of celebrities at one end of the spectrum to fine-art prints by leading photographers such as Irving Penn and Nick Knight at the other. They also come in a range of sizes. In my collection, one of the smallest photos is a contact print (a print made by placing a negative directly onto photographic paper) that measures just 64mm square; the biggest is a display board well over two-and-a-half metres high. As to budgets… You can still pick up nice vintage prints on eBay for as little as US $10–20 (they’re getting increasingly scarce at such knock-down prices, though). Go to one of the major auction houses and you can invest well over US $100,000 in a single image.

A piece of history – This is up to you, but my main interest is in vintage prints, ie prints made within a few years of when the photo was originally taken. Usually that means in-house photos for editorial use or photos sent out by the film studios themselves or by press agencies for reproduction in magazines and newspapers. With their credits, copyright notices, captions and annotations, vintage prints are historical artefacts (albeit modest ones) in their own right with a story to tell.

Easy to enjoy

1954. Audrey Hepburn dances with movie director Billy Wilder on the set of Sabrina. It looks like they're in a world of their own while...

Spirit of the age

1992. Do you remember grunge? Like it or loathe it, it was a pretty unforgettable fashion experience. Here are supermodels Kristen McMenamy and Nadja Auermann...

Icon in the making

1939. Here's an object-lesson in how photography can transform an actress into an icon. The subject is Ann Sheridan. The lighting not only creates drama,...

Blatantly commercial

1967. Marisa Mell and John Philip Law embrace on a divan under a shower of banknotes from a recent heist. It's a scene from Diabolik,...

There are three other, more practical reasons to collect fashion and movie photos:

They are easy to post and store, which means you don’t have to spend a fortune on shipping, nor do you need a lot of space to keep them. You can fit a lot of photos in a single box or drawer!
They’re great to have around. They can enhance a room and provide a great talking point. But be careful to keep them out of direct sunlight and preferably behind UV glass to minimise the risk of your photos fading.
They can be a good investment, so if you buy wisely and have a bit of luck, you could end up with a collection worth a good deal more than you spent on it. But that’s a by-product, it’s certainly not guaranteed and absolutely should not be the main reason to start a collection.

How I came to collect fashion and movie photos

The truth is that in my case (and I’m sure I’m not unusual among collectors in this respect), collecting has been instinctive rather than rational. I didn’t sit down one day and make a conscious decision to start collecting.

I bought my first photo – a shot of Jean Shrimpton on Tower Bridge – at a charity auction back in 1979. I’d recently begun to collect UK Vogue, Paris Vogue (the latter in particular for its editorial shoots by Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton) and The Face (a British music, fashion and culture magazine). So acquiring an original photographic print was a natural progression.

Peggy Lloyd, promotional shot for Cover Girl — 1944. Peggy Lloyd at Columbia Studios during the filming of Cover Girl. This photo by George Hurrell was my first eBay purchase and my first Hollywood image. Read more.

In the years that followed, I kept an eye on photography sales at the London auction houses, visited exhibitions and made the occasional purchase. But acquisitions really were few and far between and tended to be relatively big-ticket items. Back in the ’80s and ’90s material was pretty thin on the ground in London.

All that changed in 2000 when I made my first eBay purchase – a photo of Peggy Lloyd by George Hurrell. With the discovery of eBay, I found myself spoilt for choice and with the opportunity to acquire lots of fascinating low-ticket items.

In those early days as people cleared out their attics there was a ridiculous amount of amazing material up for auction. The challenge was in sifting through it via a slow, dial-up modem and in putting in last-minute bids, which meant getting up in the middle of the night (I was living in London and most of the items I was interested in were in the US).

There’s another reason why that photo of Peggy Lloyd turned out to be pivotal. Peggy represented Mademoiselle magazine in Columbia Pictures’ Cover Girl (1944). It’s about a girl who wins a contest and becomes a celebrated cover girl. It bridges the worlds of fashion and film. And that photo marked the point at which I started to collect stills distributed by the movie studios to complement the fashion shots I’d been buying up to then.

My interests continued to evolve over time, broadening, deepening and changing focus as opportunities presented themselves. The rest, as they say, is history.

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