Betty Grable was famous for being The Girl With the Million Dollar Legs (20th Century Fox bought the insurance policy from Lloyds of London). The hosiery industry advertised that Grable's legs had the perfect proportions ( 18.5" thigh, 12" calf, 7.5" ankle). In fact, it was an attempt to show off Betty's best features that gave us one of the most iconic pinup photos of all time, and certainly the most popular pinup image of the WWII era. The image, shot by photographer Frank Powolny, was owned by as many as one in five American soldiers during the war. One of those doughboys was Hugh Hefner, who later stated that it was that particular Betty Grable image that inspired him to create Playboy. LIFE magazine included the image on their 100 Photos That Changed the World list. By today's standards, Grable's legs would be worth over 14 million dollars.
The infamous Ms. Grable
So, that got me thinking. What are other famous body parts worth? It turns out that Hollywood has a history of high-dollar anatomy.
1. Jimmy Durante: His nose was his trademark, and he had it insured for $50,000 in the 1940s. Adjusted for inflation, that's a $442,000 nose.
Ha chachacha
2. Bette Davis: Her eyes? Nope. She had her waist insured in the 1930s for $28,000--roughly $357,000 of anti-doughnut protection in today's money.
Bette Davis
3. Ben Turpin: A cross-eyed comic actor of the silent film era, he insured his eyes (again, with Lloyds of London), payable if they ever became uncrossed. Stories vary as to the amount, but most stick to it being a $25,000 policy ($500,000 peepers by today's standards).
Keep 'em crossed!
4. Marlene Dietrich: Insured her trademark husky voice for $1million. (She also demanded that a half ounce of gold dust be sprinkled on her hair during filming, to make it look shiny on the big screen. It's not an insurance policy, but it still makes for some expensive hair.)
Ms. Dietrich
5. Fred Astaire: Legs, of course--but only $75K each. Not so good as Betty's, but I suppose they didn't look nearly as nice in pantyhose....
Fred's $150K
6. Angie Dickinson: Universal bought a $1million policy for her legs (you guess it--Lloyds of London strikes again!), which she displayed beautifully in Rio Bravo. No wonder Sinatra kept coming back....
I had planned to write about Richard Avedon. I will, someday. But today is all about the man who inspired Avedon, Martin Munkasci.
"Woman on boulder with bicycle", 1936
Multiple sources cite him as "the father of fashion photography." I had never heard of him before today. It turns out that a lot of people have never heard of him. In fact, after his death in 1963, his archives were offered to multiple museums. Nobody wanted them.
1940s Harper's Bazaar
He was a Hungarian Jew (actually born in Transylvania) who got his start as a sports photographer in his native country for a newspaper called Az Est. He was an adventurer, often called "Crazy Angle" by his colleagues. Instead of standing behind the fence to photograph the races, he would be on his knees in a puddle on the side of the track. One source claims that he strapped himself to the side of a race car in order to photograph it in motion around the track.
Munkasci, on a car
European motorcyclist, 1920s
Martin moved to Berlin, where photography was booming, and ended up working for several German publications in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He even photographed Hitler (no small feat for an Eastern European Jew in Nazi days). When the atmosphere in Germany started to get a little rough for people of Munkasci's roots, he took an overseas assignment in America for Biz, one of his German magazines. While in New York, he agreed to do a photo shoot for Carmel Snow, budding editor for Harper's Bazaar, and that was the day he made history. Not only was it the first outdoor fashion shoot, it was the first motion fashion shoot. Until then, models were posed and primped on carefully regulated sets in carefully regulated studios. With Carmel Snow, Martin Munkasci shot his model on the beach. He didn't speak English, and his interpreter was having a difficult time of it, but the model, Lucile Brokaw, understood perfectly. He wanted her to run. To move around. To splash. Looking at the photographs, you would never know that the day was actually miserably cold and damp, the model shivering.
Lucile Brokaw, Harper's Bazaar 1933
The shoot was such a success that Carmel Snow offered him a job. The next year, he moved to America to become one of the most groundbreaking photographers of the time. He was one of the first photographers to put nudes in a mainstream magazine (tastefully, of course).
Harper's Bazaar, 1935
He continued to pioneer the art of motion photography for Harper's Bazaar, Life, and Ladies Home Journal before turning his eye to Hollywood. His work gave us one of the most well-known pictures of Fred Astaire in motion. At his peak in the mid-1930s, his annual salary was $100,000. He lived in a Long Island estate with art from the Masters on his walls.
Fred Astaire; Life, 1936
Katharine Hepburn
In 1939, his luck took a hike. His wife (the second of three) divorced him. He lost a lot of money. Then, his daughter died of cancer. While he was still in mourning, Ladies Home Journal gave him a cross-country series assignment called "How America Lives." The stress of driving from city to city, day after day, caught up with him, and his pictures weren't good anymore. They fired him. He had a heart attack. Another wife, and another divorce, led him to poverty. He was finally reduced to loitering in the hall outside Harper's Bazaar, hoping for some work. He finally had to pawn all of his camera equipment. His last published photograph was for that magazine, in July of 1962. A year later, he died of a heart attack. The only food in his refrigerator was an open can of spaghetti with a fork sticking out of it.
1936, "Peignoir in Soft Breeze"
New York World's Fair, Harper's Bazaar 1938
People finally came around, and several decades later, interest in his work renewed. Someone discovered a series of undeveloped negatives, and an exhibit of "lost" photos was born. A few books were written, with quotes from photographers that Munkasci inspired, including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Richard Avedon. I think my favorite is Avedon's remembrance of his 11-year old self discovering Munkasci magazine cover and gluing it to his bedroom ceiling: "His women [strode] parallel to the sea,
unconcerned with his camera, freed by his dream of them, leaping
straight-kneed across my bed."
The Puddle Jumper
Bathing Beauties
Information obtained from: http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG8597512/Martin-Munkacsi-father-of-fashion-photography.html; http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/04/decisive-munkacsi-moments
We are addicted to vintage games. We love the dice, the game pieces, the spinners, the boards--pretty much any part of a game that can be put into a bowl, used as jewelry, or propped up in a bookcase. But sometimes, instead of hinting at how wonderful its parts would be as decor, a game just begs to be played.
We both come from game-playing families. My childhood was spent in a rotation of Uno, Monopoly, Clue, Rummy, Life, and Checkers (both traditional and Chinese). I was an occasional player of Careers and Girl Talk (oh, those pimples!), an undefeated beast at the Sweet Valley High board game and Scrabble, and spent many nights with my grandparents learning the subtleties of Oh Heck (or variations on that name) and poker (which I then taught to my friends at school, much to the consternation of a particular administrator who shall remain nameless). My partner in crime grew up on a diet of Phase 10 and Payday, along with the other games listed above (we had very similar childhoods in some respects). And so, we have an enormous collection of board games. When we have time, we like to have a good, old-fashioned Game Night.
I suggest that it was the Blackbird girls, in the kitchen, having Game Night!
Game Night means no television. We clean off the kitchen table, each select a few games from the stack, gather a ridiculous amount of snack foods (often involving cheese) and cold Cheerwine, and play each game once until we've made it through the stack. We eat. We get silly. If we like a game, we keep it. If not, we put it up for sale and hope that it finds a more deserving home. Our most recent Game Night was a mixture of duds and gems, with the real highlight being a 1960s Barbie, Queen of the Prom board game that I found (complete!) at a thrift store. The box has seen better days, but the board is fabulous. After a hard battle, my compatriot earned the title of Prom Queen (I was Prom Princess, which is almost as good!). I demand a rematch. [It just proves that the wrong boyfriend really can keep you down.]
Get the boy, get the dress, get the crown!
We also played a round of Sorry! (another thrift store find). That one wasn't our favorite, but the box is so classic that it's hard to part with. Alas...you can't keep them all.
Not so fun...
Scavenger Hunt is a board game that involves going to houses to find items on your list (while avoiding dogs and angry neighbors). We just knew that this game was for us--a board game for junk-loving people. But, with 12 years of college between us, we eventually concluded that the game makes very little sense. It just has too many flaws. I think the rule-writers might have been hungover that day at Milton Bradley. That game--not a keeper.
You get to find things in other people's attics!
The Magnificent Race is a 1975 spin on Around the World in 80 Days. You have to travel by various methods (boat, hot air balloon, etc.) to make it around the world before the villain, Dastardly Dan. Beware! Dastardly Dan is automatically entered in every race, and with an advantage over you. This one was fun, but took a long time to get through. We might try it again when we haven't already been at it for 4 hours....The graphics are fun, though.
You have to beat Dastardly Dan!
Now we just have to find this one, The Great Wall Street Board Game, just because it looks so cool:
We love a holiday. Any holiday. As long as we get to celebrate by eating good food, and decorate with cool vintage finds, we are happy as can be. But Thanksgiving holds a special place in our hearts -- from family drama (um, please don't mention that thing to so-and-so...) to dessert smorgasbords (hello, I need carrot cake!) to turkey sandwiches the day after (must be white bread, with mayo and pepper), we love it all. At the heart of it, we're both of us very strongly rooted in our family traditions. We have large families, and though they have shifted and changed through the years, there are certain things that are steadfast and unchangeable. And for that -- we are thankful.
So, as we all get ready to gorge ourselves on our holiday feasts, we Blackbird girls thought we would share a few interesting facts about the holiday known for ginormous turkeys and pumpkin pies. You may be surprised about what you will learn...
Screen print by McCaffrey, 1954
The idea of Thanksgiving as we know it comes from a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale. Hale was editor of Godey's Lady's Book and penned the "Mary Had a Little Lamb" nursery rhyme. She spent
40 years writing letters to anyone who would listen, fighting for a national, once-yearly Thanksgiving holiday. Especially during the
years culminating in the Civil War, she saw the holiday as a way to unite the nation.
On October 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln finally listened to her and issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation
that declared the last Thursday in November to be a day of "thanksgiving and praise." For the first time,
Thanksgiving became a national, annual holiday with a specific date.
In 1939, Thanksgiving was going to fall on November 30.
Retailers complained to President Franklin Roosevelt that this date cramped their sales by only leaving 24 shopping days until Christmas. They pleaded with him to push Thanksgiving up a week earlier. When FDR declared his Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1939, as had become the tradition of presidents, he announced the date of Thanksgiving to be Thursday, November 23 -- the second-to-last Thursday of the month.
Whereas President Lincoln had started the Thanksgiving holiday as a way to unite our country, this date change tore us apart. Confusion and anger ensued, and sales didn't really change that much for the better. So, on December 26, 1941, Congress passed a law that stated that Thanksgiving
would forever be on the fourth Thursday of November.
In 1953, Swanson started creating T.V.
dinners because it needed to find something to do with the
leftover frozen Thanksgiving turkeys. Put it in a frozen meal package!
Green been casserole was created over 50 years ago by Campbell's soup for it's newest cookbook. Now, Campbell's sells around $20 million worth of cream of mushroom soup, most likely for people to make the casserole.
The first Macy's Thanksgiving Day
parade was in 1924, and included 400 employees marching off from Convent
Avenue and 145th Street in New York City. They borrowed live animals from the Central Park Zoo to walk in the parade with them.
We both love Dr. Seuss. Who doesn't? I have a hard time imagining any part of the world that hasn't heard of The Cat in the Hat, at least. The Grinch is one of my favorite literary characters. I actually had the temerity to call myself a Seuss book collector, until I recently encountered not one, but TWO, titles that I had never even heard of. So I decided it was time to learn a little bit more about the good doctor, who was so influential in my childhood.
Yeah, so he wasn't really a doctor. Most people know that already. Theodor Geisel, the soon-to-be Dr. Seuss, went to Dartmouth, where he edited their Jack-O-Lantern humor magazine until he got booted from the editorial staff for his role in a very illegal drinking party (it was during Prohibition, after all). He did continue to submit work to the magazine, though, and he signed it "Seuss" (his middle name). Afterward, he went to Oxford, dropped out, traveled a bit, got married, and finally settled into a career as a cartoonist for Judge and TheSaturday Evening Post.
Life Magazine:May 1934; from webdesignerdepot.com
One of his cartoons for Judge caught the right person's eye, and he spent seventeen years doing ad campaigns for Standard Oil (and a few other companies, including Ford, General Electric, and Schaefer). As it was the Great Depression, this steady work provided crucial financial support as he started to write and illustrate his own material.
http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dsads/#
http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dsads/#intro
Although he had made a career off of cartoons for various magazines (adding LIFE and Vanity Fair to the list), his first "literary" break came when Viking Press commissioned his illustrations for a book of funny sayings called The Pocket Book of Boners in 1931. I own a later hardback copy, but here's a picture of the earlier paperback version:
www.mentalfloss.com
In 1937, he published And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (after twenty-seven rejections). A first edition with dust jacket now ranges from $8,000 to $12,000, depending on condition. He followed this success with The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins in 1938 ($6,000-$9,000), and The Seven Lady Godivas in 1939 (they're naked!).
mirrormaskcamera.tumblr.com
Although he was too old to be drafted, he made his own WWII contribution by writing military training movies for Frank Capra's Signal Corps, featuring Private Snafu as a recurring character. You might notice some similarities between the Snafu films and some certain other very famous cartoons, and the reason is simple: they were a secret project done by Warner Brothers for the War Department. (Actually, the job was first offered to Disney, who wanted too much money.) This put Seuss together with some of the great Warner Directors, including Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng. And who provided the oh-so-familiar voice for Private Snafu and his fellow soldiers? Mel Blanc. I can't even get into how excited that makes me--Mel Blanc, Chuck Jones, and Dr. Seuss in the same room. Here's Private Snafu in the Aleutians (but there's also a great one called Booby Traps that runs about 5 minutes--check it out on YouTube if you get a chance):
His two most famous works, The Cat in the Hat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas both came out in 1957. But there are some lesser-known works that are just as fabulous: Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose (1948), On Beyond Zebra (1955), and Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? (1973) . Overall, more than sixty titles bear his name. I was shocked to learn that he had another pseudonym (Theo LeSieg), under which he published books that he wrote, but did not illustrate. Some of these were on my favorites list as a child, and I didn't even know they were his! The Tooth Book changed my life, people.
Dr. Seuss has always been in my world. My preschool class had a Green Eggs and Ham party, and I was so excited I nearly peed. I always loved the fact that my mother could recite Fox in Socks rhymes, fast, without getting tongue tied. Horton heard that Who at least once a week during a particular summer of my childhood.
And now we brag on the great Dr. Seuss:
Academy Awards........2
Pulitzer Prizes.............1
Emmy Awards............2
Peabody Awards.........1
Books sold..................200,000,000+
People who are more creative, smarter, wittier, kinder, and/or funnier because they read his books.......probably billions.
In our etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/listing/87913830/how-the-grinch-stole-christmas-drseuss?ga_search_query=grinch
* Information obtained from http://www.catinthehat.org/history.htm, http://1stedition.net/drseuss.html, www.wikipedia.com
