Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Religious Zionist. Republican. Movie fanatic. Gun owner. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I was a million-to-one shot, the least likely to succeed. I wasn’t low man on the totem pole, I was under the totem pole, in a sewer, tied to a sack.”
—Tony Curtis, (b. Bernard Schwartz) on his chances of making it in Hollywood.

 

Erwin Blumenfeld
Three Profiles, 1952

 

Director Max Ophüls (b. Maximillan Oppenheimer) on the set of Lola Montès, 1955, photo by Raymond Voinquel. Ophuls, a German Jew, feared the growing official anti-Semitism and fled to France in 1933. After the French surrendered to the Nazis, he fled to Italy, then Switzerland and finally the United States in 1941. His best American films are: Letter From an Unknown Woman, ’48, Caught, ’49, The Reckless Moment, ’49. He returned to France after the war and made several superb films: La Ronde, ’50, Le Plaisir, ’52,  The Earrings of Madame de… ’53, and Lola Montes, ’55. Ophuls favored extremely long and complicated tracking shots whose complexity of execution is legendary. His son Marcel Ophüls directed The Sorrow and the Pity, ’69, a masterpiece about France during the Nazi occupation.

 

Waltham World War I Military Watch

 

Joan Blondell in the pre-code comedy The Greeks Had A Word For Them, 1932

 

“Harmony in Yellow and Gold: The Gold Girl—Connie Gilchrist”
by James McNeill Whistler (American, Lowell, Massachusetts 1834–1903 London)
ca. 1876–77
Oil on canvas
85 3/4 x 43 1/8 in. (217.8 x 109.5 cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
Gift of George A. Hearn, 1911
“Constance Macdonald Gilchrist (1865-1946), popularly known as “the original Gaiety Girl,” had a successful career on the London stage in light comedy and vaudeville. Whistler posed her in his studio as she appeared on the stage of the Gaiety Theatre in the skipping-rope dance.” More here.

 

Clark Gable by George Hurrell, 1933
”No actor I ever performed with had such public appeal. He was as masculine as any man I’ve ever known and as much a little boy as a grown man could be. It was this combination that had such a devastating effect on women. But there was nothing of ‘the King’ about his personality. Just the opposite. Utter simplicity. Uncomplicated. A man who lived on a simple, down-to-earth scale.” —Doris Day

 

John French Sloan (1871–1951)
“Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair” 1912
oil on canvas
Height: 26.1 ″; Width: 32.1 ″
Addison Gallery of American, Andover, Massachusetts

 

Vera Miles, (b. Vera June Ralston, 1929) 1957, the year she signed a personal contract with Alfred Hitchcock. She had worked with Hitchcock on The Wrong Man and was cast to play the lead role in Vertigo, but filming was delayed and then Miles became pregnant. Hitchcock never forgave Miles for choosing family over career. The starring role in Vertigo went to Kim Novak. Miles co-starred in Psycho as Lila Crane, sister of Marion Crane. Her relationship with Hitchcock during production was, to say the least, strained.

 

Rick McGinnis
The Flatiron, NYC, 2018
Rick pays homage to…

 

Edward Steichen’s iconic 1904 photo of the Flatiron building.

 

The KJ Streamline Motorcycle, 1930. An Art Deco masterpiece.

 

David “Chim” Seymour (b. Dawid Szymin 1911, Warsaw Poland), was a fine photographer who is not as well known as he should be. He was killed on assignment, while covering the Suez crisis in 1956. This is one of his most striking pictures, a Jewish wedding under an improvised chuppah, wedding canopy, held aloft by rifles and pitchforks, Israel, 1952. Photo: © Chim (David Seymour)/Magnum.

 

“People are trying to connect with you through some character that they loved seeing you do. She [Wonder Woman] is such a powerful role, almost anything else I do pales in comparison.”
—Lynda Carter
Natalie Wood posing on a ’55 Ford T-Bird in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1957, photo by Charlotte Brooks. Thanks to Bill Brandt for identifying the car.

 

Clyfford Still (American, 1904–1980).
“PH-48”, 1957. Oil on canvas, 113 x 159 inches. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1959 (K1959:26). © 2016 City and County of Denver / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

 

Rembrandt (1606–1669)
“Jews in the Synagogue”
1648
Etching and drypoint on paper
Height: 76 mm (2.99 ″); Width: 130 mm (5.11 ″)
Collection: Jewish Museum, N.Y.

 

Pinchas Tzvi and Ariel Chaim wish all our friends and relatives a lovely and inspirational Shabbat.

 

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. Isn’t the Flatiron Building one of the most famous in NYC? Talk about making the best of a weird sized lot. If I could upload pictures I’d show you a strange house in my neighborhood, again making the best of a small and strange-shaped lot.

    Nice picture you made, Rick.

    On Gable – I never thought of him as Doris Day said, but seeing him in It Happened One Night – I can see both sides of him. Masculine, yet a boyish streak.

    I have always believed that after the death of Carole Lombard, he joined the 8th AAF as a waist gunner to die. Their life expectancy wasn’t good.

    I never thought of Alfred Hitchcock as a jackass but his attitude toward Miles lends him that description.

  4. Stunning photo of Vera Miles – I don’t think I remember seeing her look so good. And Doris Day could speak with some authority about Gable – the movie they did together (Teacher’s Pet) is one of her best. Have you noticed that no actor today talks about Gable? I can’t think of anyone who projects that sort of playful masculine authority. It’s almost like it’s been banned.

    • BTW, I photographed Max Ophuls’ son Marcel once, when he was in town for a retrospective of his films. He was still working on a documentary film about media coverage of conflict zones, and angered a lot of people for the very irreverent take he had on the subject, painting the media as day-trippers who didn’t understand the context of what they were covering. He went so far as to imply that their main contribution to local economies when covering conflicts like the ones in the former Yugoslavia (still going on at that point) was in luxury hotels and prostitution. He had a hard time finishing that film, and it never really got seen.

  5. Wasn’t the flatiron building also used in a scene in “Bell, Book and Candle?” That’s one of my favorite movies. I also watch “It Happened One Night” every few months. My college roommate, Rich Lang, had Gables’ Oscar on his desk in his little radio shack behind his parents’ house in Brentwood. We used to play poker in their pool house. Rich’s mother was “Fieldsie,” Carol Lombard’s personal rep.

  6. The Three Profiles photo is impressive.

    I love the Waltham Military Watch design, but I’m puzzled as to why it is set askew of the watchband.

    There are only a handful of Hollywood celebrities that I would care to connect with on a personal level (if given the opportunity) . Clark Gables would have been one of those people.

    Joan Blondell had such a wide and varied career. I remember a very risque photo of her when she was younger and I remember her as Vi the waitress in Grease.

    The motorcycle really looks like it could be in a futuristic movie.

    Vera Miles, Natalie Wood, and Lynda Carter are all stunningly beautiful. I will admit I was a teenager when Wonder Woman was popular and my reasons for watching were not always based on her heroics in the show…

    I’m curious what Pinchas’ shirt says “I’m the…?” Smart One? Cute One?

    • The watch isn’t askew when worn as intended. If you hold your left wrist as you might wear a watch on the top of your wrist, it would be askew. However, if you wear it on the bottom of your write, when you turn your wrist up to look at the watch you would naturally angle your arm up as you’re twisting it. That puts the band, perpendicular to your wrist, at an angle that orients the 12 up and the 6 down. Try it against the picture and you’ll see.

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