Innholdsfortegnelse for 2603 i The Australian Women's Weekly Icons

She came from Brooklyn, and she was hipper than any hipster. Clara Bow seized the Roaring Twenties and made them her own, leveraging her pixie face, doleful eyes and disciplined work ethic to become the darling of silent films and beyond. And then, just like that, she walked away. Her perkiness and sense of fun belied a hard upbringing. Clara was born into “brutal poverty” in 1905. Her childhood was one long struggle, not least because her mother, Sarah, suffered from psychotic episodes and seizures following a head injury in her teens. Clara would later state simply that her mother was mean to her, but couldn’t help it. There was much more to it, though, including a terrifying situation in which Sarah held a butcher’s knife to her daughter’s throat.…

IN JANE’S OWN WORDS“We made a hell of a team, and I wish we had done another picture together.” Betty Grable needed a hit movie. The 1940s pin-up girl with the million dollar legs was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood, but her star power was waning as the 1950s dawned. So in 1952, with the leading lady in mind, 20th Century Fox kingpin Darryl F. Zanuck bought the screenplay to the Broadway smash Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But when 35-year-old Betty went on strike after Fox turned down her demand for a pay rise, Darryl looked for another actress to play ditzy but adorable gold-digger Lorelei Lee. His eye fell on a contract player, Marilyn Monroe, who the year before had received her first top billing in Niagara. She…

DID YOU KNOW? Hitchcock used sadistic pranks to keep his cast on edge. After Rich and Strange (1931) star Elsie Randolph admitted to a fear of fire, he had a technician pump smoke into a telephone booth and locked her in. Beneath the black bowler hat that Sir Alfred Hitchcock favoured as a symbol of his essential respectability lay a strange and troubled mind. Its brilliance was not in doubt, but it took Hitchcock to places other Hollywood directors feared to visit. Even today, 45 years after his death, tales of scandal, cruelty and darkness continue to swirl around his legacy. In the process of making, between the mid-1920s and the early 1970s, a series of classic suspense movies, Hitchcock also created the continuing mystery of who he really was. Many…

The Louisiana Hayride show audience at the Shreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium had never seen or heard anything like it: An impossibly handsome 20-year-old man in a beautiful pink suit playing guitar and shaking his whole body like he was possessed, like a holy roller, like a hurricane. His hair was perfect. And if the old folks didn’t exactly know what was going on, the girls at the front definitely understood. Elvis Presley had only been at this for about six months, but word was out all around the South. “I came out on stage and I was scared stiff,” he recalled. “I was doing a fast-type tune, one of my first records, and everybody was hollering and screaming and everything. I came off stage and my manager told me everyone…

As Europe greeted the first war-free summer in seven years in 1946, joyous beachgoers were flocking back to the water. And one inspired French designer came up with a new swimsuit to match the mood – but Louis Réard’s ‘bikini’ (named after the nuclear testing site Bikini Atoll), scandalised the fashion set and public alike. Unveiled on July 5, 1946 in Paris, the bra top and two inverted triangles of cloth connected by string (for the bottom piece) was considered so risqué by French models that the only woman brave enough to model it was exotic dancer Micheline Bernardini. Made from just 30 inches of fabric (Micheline held up a small tin at the photo call, which the swimsuit could fit into), it was printed with newspaper type across the…

At its peak between 1951 and 1952, CBS network’s I Love Lucy was hailed the most popular TV show of all time. It starred husband and wife team, kooky comedienne Lucille Ball, and Cuban bandleader and musician Desi Arnaz. The series changed the Monday night habits of Americans: Between 9 and 9.30pm, taxis disappeared off the streets of New York and the Marshall Fields department store (owned by US president JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy Snr) in Chicago hung up a notice which informed: “We love Lucy, too, so from now on we will be open Thursday nights instead of Monday.” Telephone calls across the whole of the US dropped during the show’s half-hour screening, as did the water flush rate, as families sat glued to the hilarious antics of Lucille…

“To Sid,” scrawled Mickey Rooney alongside his handprint in a rapidly cooling slab of cement back in 1939. “Without you, I wouldn’t be here.” Mickey was one of many A-list Hollywood stars both past and present to earn a spot on the pavement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre at 6925 Hollywood Boulevard. And the Sid he and many others, including Gloria Swanson, Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper, gave credit to for helping their ascension to movie headliner was the establishment’s legendary owner, Sidney Patrick Grauman. Born in 1879, Sidney got his start in the entertainment business early, working as a paper boy in Yukon during the Gold Rush in the late 1890s. Not only was it there he saw his first motion picture, it was also the place he learned…

It was Friday evening on October 21, 1949, and Elizabeth Taylor was flustered. Sitting in the bedroom of the Beverly Hills mansion she and her family called home, the 17-year-old nervously smoothed her hands over the strapless gown that hugged her burgeoning curves as she looked at the clock. Her date had been due some time ago, and the minutes continued to tick by. Meanwhile, across town, Montgomery Clift was in a mood of his own. Having found glory on the New York stage – an environment he adored – he had been cajoled into trying his luck in Hollywood. Instantly his combination of masculine beauty and sheer talent had made him the hottest name in town, and one whose second film (1948’s The Search), had already earned him an…

“You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good … Joan Crawford is dead. Good!” It was with this cutting remark that Bette Davis addressed the news of fellow Hollywood heavyweight Joan’s death in 1977. This withering insult capped off an epic feud, born in the ’30s, when each was at the top of the call list of every producer in town and they were the darlings of the public’s affection. At its inception, Joan was MGM’s resident sex siren, notorious for flirting, sleeping and even marrying her way to the top. Bette, meanwhile, over at Warner Brothers, was considered a serious actor. Chalk and cheese, it’s clear this pair were never going to get on. But no one quite anticipated the heights to which…

In 1923, 25-year-old French teacher and art student Edith Head decided to apply for a role as a sketch artist for Paramount Pictures. There was just one small problem: Her work wasn’t great. Undeterred, she borrowed some sketches from her fellow students and submitted those to Howard Greer, then head designer at the studio. In his autobiography, Howard wrote of their fateful meeting: “A young girl with a face like a pussy cat crossed with a Fujita drawing appeared with a carpetbag full of sketches. There were architectural drawings, plans for interior decoration, magazine illustrations, and fashion design. Struck dumb with admiration for anyone possessed of such diverse talent, I hired the gal on the spot.” Edith confessed the next day that that she had misrepresented her talent, but a…

Stanley Dolan was in something of a pickle. The acclaimed director of classics such as Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), plus many more, had finally been handed the script he felt he’d been waiting his whole career for. But getting the two perfect leads on board? That was another matter … Based on a popular magazine serial, Charade was a comedic mystery thriller in the vein of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), a film Stanley had been dying to emulate in his own fashion. The plot follows the travails of young widow Regina “Reggie” Lampert, who has discovered her husband was murdered after stealing $250,000 in gold. A chance meeting with debonair stranger Peter Joshua sees the pair team up to find what…

Prohibition never stood in the way of a good party for Marion Davies, mistress of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. So, to celebrate hotshot Hollywood producer Thomas Ince’s upcoming birthday (and sign a contract with his Inceville studios into the bargain), Marion planned a weekend cruise on sugar daddy William’s luxury yacht. On November 16, 1924, the Oneida headed three miles off the California coast. There, beyond the reach of US lawmakers and away from prying eyes, the guests – including the biggest star of the time, Charlie Chaplin, and Hollywood gossip maven Louella Parsons – could cut loose at a wild glitzy party fuelled by jazz, sex and bootleg liquor. But two days into the cruise, an ailing Thomas was put ashore. Less than a week later, the 44-year-old…

The house in exclusive Bel Air was eerily quiet. But if one listened closely, there were murmurs and giggles, the kind of hush that descends when people are trying to stay silent. Primula ‘Primmie’ Rollo – the beautiful young wife of suave British movie star David Niven – was ‘it’ in a game of sardines, a form of hide-and-seek beloved by English aristocrats and adopted by the Hollywood elite. Her mission: To find her fellow partygoers, a who’s who of Hollywood that included host Tyrone Power and his wife Annabella, Gene Tierney and husband Oleg Cassini, Cesar Romero, Richard Greene and his wife, actress Patricia Medina, and British husband and wife Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, all of whom were packed into a small space together (hence the name sardines).…