Page 124 – LIFE

Stars Playing Their Dream Roles: Photos by Bert Stern

January 18, 2022June 2, 2013 by

They don’t make them like they used to. That assertion, although often colored by a rose-tinted nostalgia, seems to hold some genuine truth nowadays, when celebrities are not only a dime a dozen, but are so often seemingly manufactured overnight. In fact, in most cases, it’s difficult to even remember what these people are famous for. But who would think that back in the 1960s, the stars of that defining era stars whom we continue to look back on with wonder would themselves entertain that very same thought?

The images shown here, taken by legendary photographer Bert Stern for a story that ran in the Dec. 20, 1963 issue of LIFE, depict some of the most prominent actors of the day as they take on the roles of their dream performers. The wonderfully playful (yet somehow near-reverent) series of portraits is testament to the fact that each and every generation grows up with its own heroes. Witness the debonair Cary Grant embodying an unlikely, yet totally convincing, impersonation of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, or Paul Newman’s gleeful transformation into the swashbuckling matinee idol, Douglas Fairbanks.

While the movie studios had created idols since the days of silent films, a cover of LIFE magazine could make all the difference. And a photographer with a strong relationship with a magazine wielded a lot of influence. In fact, the ’60s saw the birth of the photographer as hero, and Bert Stern was the archetype of this new figure. Alongside Penn and Avedon, he was one of the most respected and sought-after fashion, portrait and advertising photographers of the era.

Best known for his iconic “Last Sitting” photographs of Marilyn Monroe, taken six short weeks before her death, Stern photographed the world’s most beautiful women Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Liz Taylor, Bridget Bardot and some of Hollywood’s most charismatic leading men, like Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando and Richard Burton.

But long before he made those iconic images, he was an ideas man, a pioneer in the Golden Age of advertising. In the early 1950s, Stern conceived and executed photographic concepts that, for the first time, made advertising as compelling, refined and beautiful as any editorial page.

By the time the photographs in this gallery were made for LIFE, Stern was at the height of his fame a celebrity in his own right. He made commercials, shot covers for the world’s most prestigious magazines and more. Stern was seemingly capable of anything.

In a revealing 2013 documentary, Bert Stern: Original Mad Man, Stern tells his compelling and extraordinary story of his passions and obsessions, his successes and his failings, and the stories behind of some of the most remarkable and iconic images of the age.

Bert Stern is living proof, if ever proof was needed, that they really don’t make them like they used to.

—photo editor Phil Bicker wrote this tribute on the occasion of Stern’s death in 2013.

Paul Newman as Douglas Fairbanks

© Bert Stern

Cary Grant as Charlie Chaplin

© Bert Stern

Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis

© Bert Stern

Audrey Hepburn

© Bert Stern

Cary Grant as Charlie Chaplin

© Bert Stern

Jack Lemmon

© Bert Stern

Shirley MacLaine

© Bert Stern

Rock Hudson as Doctor Jekyll

© Bert Stern

Cary Grant as Charlie Chaplin

© Bert Stern

December 20,1963

LIFE Magazine

Fun With Marilyn and Jane: On the Set of ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’

November 3, 2020June 1, 2013 by

For sheer, undiluted resonance, few entertainment-industry tropes can match the singular image of Marilyn Monroe informing the world that “diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”

The scene in which she sings those words arrives midway through the classic 1953 comedy, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as Marilyn’s character, the refreshingly loot-happy Lorelei Lee, performing in a cabaret in a form-fitting pink satin sheath, rebuffs the attentions of a gaggle of eager (and unmistakably not rich) male admirers.

The song “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” is just one of many from a movie that, six decades later, still retains much of its carefree if largely camp appeal. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was not only a huge box office success but proved, once and for all, that Marilyn Monroe could truly anchor a movie as its star. (Her co-star in the film, Jane Russell, was wonderful in the role of showgirl Dorothy Shaw, Lorelei’s best friend, but through the years the film has increasingly and unduly been celebrated as Monroe’s triumph alone.)

However one remembers the film, however, it’s clear from the pictures in this gallery, made on-set by LIFE’s Ed Clark, that in 1953 Marilyn Monroe was already a bona fide movie star, and that the production itself was going to be a memorable, high-energy affair.

In May 1953, LIFE magazine summed up the spectacle this way:

Lorelei Lee is harvesting diamonds again. Veteran of a novel by Anita Loos (1925), a silent movie (1928), a musical comedy (1949), she is now in a stupendous Technicolor talkie of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She is played by Marilyn Monroe, who is the least ingenuous of the Lorelei line but yields to none in cheerful rapacity.

In the new 20th Century-Fox version Marilyn sing and dances with a surprising technical competence. Full-fleshed and fancy-free, she and her dark-haired girlfriends, played by Jane Russell, start the show off with a bang in tight red dresses for the song “The Little Girl From little Rock.” They go racing through a broad-comedy modern-dress version of the old plot as Lorelei stuffs her pocketbook with cash and bedecks her person with trinkets offered to her by gullible millionaires. In her biggest number she spurns a whole panel of penniless and prostate admirers and gives their fallen forms the benefit of her philosophy of life: “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell (left) on the set of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell on the set of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe on the set of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell on the set of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Gentleman Prefer Blondes

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell on the set of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe performed “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe in a publicity still for 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE With the Rat Pack: Rare Photos of Frank, Dino and Sammy

January 17, 2020June 1, 2013 by

“Forget the movie, let’s pull the job!”

That, legend has it, is what Frank Sinatra joked upon hearing the plot for Ocean’s 11, the 1960 Vegas heist flick that went on to become the Rat Pack’s signature big-screen adventure.

It’s no wonder Sinatra and his kindred crew of high-living, hard-drinking, skirt-chasing buddies, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., especially, were gassed to make such a movie: just like their characters, they loved a good caper. From the late ’50s until they began to splinter apart in the mid-’60s, they were showbiz’s unrivaled kings of swing, quick-with-a-quip cats who could swagger into any joint from the Sands to Sardi’s and make it the most.

[Buy the LIFE book, The Rat Pack: The Original Bad Boys.]

LIFE magazine’s photographers trailed the Pack through those smoky, magical years, coming away with priceless material for some of the best celebrity photo-essays the magazine ever ran. But of the thousands of shots taken, many were never published until now. Here, in celebration of sharkskin sits, Scotch on the rocks, smoke-filled rooms and fedoras tilted just so, LIFE presents a slew of rare photos of the Rat Pack, together and apart, during their boozy heyday.

Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin took a cigarette break during the recording of Sleep Warm in 1958.

Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dean Martin smoked a cigarette beside his dressing room door backstage before his performance in Las Vegas in 1958.

Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin shared a light moment in the recording studio, 1958.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra at the Sands Hotel and Casino, where he sang with the Count Basie Band in 1964. Out of that landmark collaboration came the great live album Sinatra at the Sands.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra and Joe E. Lewis walked through the kitchen to get to the stage at the Eden Roc Resort in Miami in 1958.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sammy Davis Jr. ate spaghetti in his backstage dressing room while watching The Huntley-Brinkley Report news show in 1964. “My only contact with reality,” he told LIFE. “Whatever I’m doing, I stop to watch these guys.” Reflected in the mirror: LIFE photographer Leonard McCombe.

Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sammy Davis Jr. visited Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin at MGM Studios, where the duo were making Some Came Running in 1958. The movie co-starred Rat Pack “mascot” Shirley MacLaine, who years later would affectionately describe her old friends as “primitive children who would put crackers in each other’s beds and dump spaghetti on new tuxedos.”

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dean Martin entertained on a narrow stage with couples dancing around him in 1958.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra offered a light in Sammy Davis Jr.’s Golden Boy dressing room in 1964. “It was six a.m. before the party got to Frank’s suite. But the evening was not over because Frank hadn’t said it was over. ‘Everybody have a little more gasoline,’ he ordered. Everybody did.” From “The Private World and Thoughts of Frank Sinatra,” LIFE’s classic photo-essay on the superstar, published in April 23, 1965

John Dominis/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sammy Davis Jr. onstage during rehearsals for the Broadway musical Golden Boy, 1964.

Leonard McCombe/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Though he often joked about his race, Sammy Davis Jr. (here fiddling with a trumpet in 1964) was a serious, high-profile civil rights activist, and his refusal to play segregated venues helped lead to the integration of Miami nightclubs and Vegas casinos.

Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sammy Davis Jr. clowned backstage during Golden Boy’s run in 1964. Davis once said, “As soon as I go out the front door of my house in the morning, I’m on, Daddy, I’m on! But when I’m with the group I can relax. We trust each other. We admire each other’s talent.”

Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sammy Davis Jr. rested on his side with a pillow on the floor of a New York City hotel room during the tour to preview Golden Boy in 1964.

Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sammy Davis Jr. counted money backstage in Golden Boy, 1964. At the time he was being paid more than any Broadway star in history.

Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dean Martin had a massage at The Sands in Las Vegas, 1958. Said Martin once, “I can’t stand an actor or actress who tells me acting is hard work. It’s easy work. Anyone who says it isn’t never had to stand on his feet all day dealing blackjack.”

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra shaved in a steam room in Miami.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin tooled around the Warner Bros. lot while making 1965’s Marriage on the Rocks for the studio.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra cracked up during the Sleep Warm sessions in 1958.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Frank Sinatra pretended to be drunk on stage for a charity event in 1960. After Martin fell, Sinatra put on a baseball cap and cried, “Safe!”

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE With Mike the Headless Chicken: Photos of a Famously Tough Fowl

August 11, 2021May 30, 2013 by

Beheaded Chicken Lives Normally After Freak Decapitation by Ax

No, it’s not the latest eye-popping item from the Weekly World News. Instead, it’s an actual headline from the October 22, 1945, issue of LIFE magazine, from an article about … well, a headless chicken.

“Ever since Sept. 10,” LIFE breezily informed its readers, “a rangy Wyandotte rooster named Mike has been living a normal chicken’s life though he has no head.”

Mike, LIFE went on to say, “lost his head in the usual rooster way. Mrs. L.A. Olson, wife of a farmer in Fruita, Colo., 200 miles west of Denver, decided to have chicken for dinner. Mrs. Olson took Mike to the chopping block and axed off his head. Thereupon Mike got up and soon began to strut around…. What Mrs. Olson’s ax had done was to clip off most of the skull but leave intact one ear, the jugular vein and the base of the brain, which controls motor function.”

The rest is poultry history. Mike lived for 18 months after losing his head, finally succumbing at a motel in the Arizona desert in 1946 during one of his many appearances as a sideshow attraction in the American southwest.

Here, LIFE.com presents Mike’s unlikely story, as well as the utterly unsettling pictures by Bob Landry that ran (and some that never ran) in LIFE. Brace yourself. . . .

Mike The Headless Chicken

Bob Landry—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mike the headless chicken “dances” in 1945.

Bob Landry—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mike the headless chicken stands atop a lawn mower in Fruita, Colorado, 1945.

Bob Landry—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mike the headless chicken in his Colorado barnyard, with fellow chickens, 1945.

Bob Landry—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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Bob Landry—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mike the headless chicken is fed through an eye dropper, directly into his esophagus, in 1945.

Bob Landry—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hope Wade, a promoter who took Mike on the road and charged money for folks to take a look, holds Mike the headless chicken, Fruita, Colorado, 1945.

Bob Landry—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mike the headless chicken rests in the grass in 1945.

Bob Landry—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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Bob Landry—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Fighting Teen Pregnancy: Portrait of a Radical High School Program, 1971

January 17, 2020May 24, 2013 by

A remarkable cover story in the April 2, 1971, issue of LIFE magazine titled, “Help for High School Mothers” chronicled the day-to-day lives of teen moms and moms-to-be in the otherwise typical southern California town of Azusa:

“In a public high school classroom [the article began], a 16-year-old student, eight months pregnant and unmarried, presents a book report. Her classmates and teacher are unruffled, for the quiet scene is an everyday event at Citrus High in Azusa, Calif. and elsewhere around the country where educators are taking radical new approach to an old and painful problem. Until a few years ago, the nation’s public schools dealt with teenage pregnancies by expelling the girls or by putting pressure on them to leave. Many humiliated families arranged secret and illegal abortions for their daughters. Others sent them away to “visit relatives” or, if they could afford it, hid them in private nursing homes.
“Today the attitude toward high school mothers is changing dramatically. While teenage pregnancy is just as unwanted and undesirable as ever, more and more parents and schools are trying to help the girls put their lives together again instead of ostracizing them. In nearly every major city programs now exist to meet the special educational, medical and psychological needs of teen-age mothers. In almost every case the programs have won strong community support. . . . Many communities provide medical clinics and counseling for the new mothers who will number an “estimated 200,000 this years.
“[That said], there are still not enough programs in the country. A recent study concludes that 75 percent of pregnant teen-agers drop out of school. But more and more girls are making the tough decisions to stay in school, for their own good and for the future of their babies.”

A few weeks after the story ran, the letters to the editor published in LIFE in response to the story were mostly negative, along the lines of one from a reader in Manitou Springs, Colo., who wrote that “the April 2 cover sets some sort of new dimension of achievement in crass, lurid, inelegant journalistic bad taste. To proffer a picture of this pathetic schoolchild with her grotesque maternity figure over the bold type ‘High School Pregnancy’ simply makes a bad, sad scene.”

The vice-president of a senior high school class in Redondo Beach, Calif., on the other hand, applauded the teen pregnancy program at Citrus Hill, but went to note that he felt “that the LIFE story was done in the epitome of poor taste. The entire tone of the article was such that one would think the greatest way of getting through high school is by having babies.”

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

At Citrus High School in California, honor student Judy Fay worked at the blackboard during an English class.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Linda Twardowski, a recent Citrus graduate, explained the basics of diaper-changing in a childcare class, using her son Charles. The girls also were taught prenatal care, cooking and budgeting.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Lupe Enriquez, 17, took notes on nutrition in homemaking class and received a playful pat from another expectant mother, Lynda Kump. Like several of the girls in the maternity program at Citrus, Lupe got married after learning she was pregnant.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Cheryl Gue, 17, quieted her son Michael with a bottle. Although the sound of crying babies was a normal disruption at Citrus, the more vocal ones were usually hustled out of class. The school was equipped with playpens, cribs and toys. The mothers were required to come to school for the morning child-care courses, but could study academic subjects at home.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pregnant high schoolers, Azusa, Calif., 1971.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

High school students with babies, Azusa, Calif., 1971.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Vicki Conger, 17, with her 13-month-old daughter, Shawn Michelle, Azusa, Calif. 1971.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sandy Winters, 13, who recently enrolled at Citrus, talked about her courses with principal James Georgeou, founder of the program for young mothers.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Expectant mothers were allowed to take naps in homemakeing class. Here Lori Cardin, 17 and six months pregnant, tried to catch 40 winks despite playful attention from young Shawn Conger.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In the courtyard outside the school, Vicki Conger, 17, took a stroll with her 13-month-old daughter, Shawn Michelle.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Judy Fay chatted with a group of students outside class. With pregnant girls at Citrus, the boys cleaned up their language and courteously held open doors and even pushed strollers.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Toward the end of her pregnancy, Judy Fay’s father, an aerospace worker, drove her to and from school each day.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Judy’s parents, Henry and Luella Fay, found to their relief that the neighbors were sympathetic to Judy’s plight. “We have had a lot of compliments because of the way we faced up to the problem,” said Mrs. Fay.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In the canopied bed where she had slept since childhood, Judy cuddled her son Dylan. “My son may have been unplanned,” Judy said, “but he is not unloved.”

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Inside Baseball Clubhouses with Some of the Greats

January 5, 2020May 20, 2013 by

,LIFE photographers have made memorable and intimate images from the clubhouses of America’s National past-time. The Mick, Jackie, Yaz, and many more: Here are some candid inside moments from some great players over the years.

New York’s Don Larsen spoke to the press after hurling a perfect game against the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series, Yankee Stadium, Oct. 8, 1956.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Milwaukee Braves’ Lew Burdette shared a moment with his son, Lewis, after a game. Lewis was excitedly reenacting one of his dad’s pitches, August 1956.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Willie Mays, October 1954

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New York Yankee Jerry Coleman took a drag from a cigarette in the locker room of Yankee Stadium, April 1952, after learning that he has been called to active duty for the Korean War. Coleman was a Marine pilot who previously served in World War II.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Robinson after a game, May 12, 1955.

Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Carl Yastrzemski, left, and Joe Foy horsed around in the Red Sox locker room, May 1968.

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sandy Amoros (with cap), Pee Wee Reese (on trunk), and Duke Snider (with beer) of the Brooklyn Dodgers joked around after a game, May 1955.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Boston’s Ted Williams, left, talked with teammate Gordon Windhorn about (what else?) the finer points of hitting in the clubhouse during spring training, Sarasota, Florida, 1956.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Yogi Berra (l.), who caught Don Larsen’s Oct. 8, 1956, perfect game and the Dodgers’ losing pitcher, Sal Maglie, chatted afterward in the Yankee Stadium clubhouse. Between Berra and Maglie, clutching a can of beer, is Yankees’ public relations man, Jack Farrell.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pittsburgh’s Dale Long ate a sandwich in the clubhouse at Forbes Field between games of a double-header against the New York Giants, May 1956.

Hank Walker/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Cincinnati Reds manager Birdie Tebbetts talked on the phone during a Labor Day doubleheader against the Milwaukee Braves in 1956.

Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Brooklyn’s Gil Hodges smoked and talked to the press after a World Series game, October 1956.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Cleveland’s Larry Doby— the first African-American player in the American League, and the second in the majors—received a rubdown in July 1955.

Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock