Category: Sex Symbols
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The Beauty of Your Youth: Clara Bow Receives a Kindness.
A while back I wrote of one tragic sex zombie, and referred to Clara Bow as having written the script of that now all-too-familiar scenario: Girl from unsettled family with ambitious/crazy mother and absent/worse father ends up in Hollywood and ignites the screen. She becomes the hot ticket in town, going through the A-list men like […]
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Monroe: Some Kind of Mirror
In just over a decade, she worked with the greatest directors in Golden Age Hollywood: Huston, Wilder, Cukor, and Hawks. Moviegoers paid $200,000,000 to watch her project her trademark combination of atomic-age sexuality and childlike, vulnerable astuteness. She was born into an orphan’s chaos and lived the shadowy Los Angelean life of a Raymond Chandler […]
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The Life of a Sex Zombie
Veronica Lake was in my living room yesterday morning, poised and bored, with the lissome form of a young dancer and the dead eyes of. . .well, the eyes of someone who’s seen Veronica Lake’s future. Which wouldn’t be a cheery vision. In the watchful coolness of this siren’s gaze, you’d be right to sense […]
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Judy Garland: The Blue Bird Has Flown
As a kid I watched her early movies—the cheesy faux-America Andy Hardy ones—on an old TV I stole from the attic. I had a special routine for watching Judy Garland (June 10, 1922-June 22, 1969): lying on my bed, propped up on my elbows and peeling a McIntosh apple with the rusted bean peeler from […]
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To Hell with God Damned “L’Amour” (A Letter from Noel Coward)
By 1956, Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich had been friends for over two decades. One day, Coward received a letter from his old pal in which she lay out her broken heart and told a tale of humiliation. What should she do? How could she go on? Immediately, the playwright sat down to write an […]
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Mutti Dearest. Daughter Dullest.
Hollywood Books (Part Ein): Marlene Dietrich by Maria Riva Ahh, Veteran’s Day not long ago. The leap of Spring is now long gone, along with the smoked salmon celebrations and the psyche-graveling guilt of Mother’s Day. Back in olden times, when dinosaurs played canasta and ice cubes could speak, AMC aired Mommy Dearest on repeat […]
Dana Dunbaugh Burnell 