Page 145 – LIFE

Photographer Spotlight: Peter Stackpole

August 9, 2021February 21, 2012 by

A native Californian who maintained a lifelong connection with the Bay Area even as he traveled the globe for a quarter-century as a professional photographer Peter Stackpole was born in San Francisco in 1913 to artist parents, and developed an interest in photography in grammar school. Early in his career he was affiliated with the influential ensemble of like-minded, San Francisco-based photographers known as Group f/64 (which included greats such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams) and also photographed for the Oakland Tribune newspaper.

Stackpole was one of the “original four” the celebrated quartet of staff photographers (along with Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Thomas McAvoy) on LIFE magazine’s masthead at its launch in November 1936.

During his 24-year career at LIFE, Stackpole covered stories as varied in scope and tone as the construction of great bridges, from the Delaware River to the Golden Gate; dance marathons; film directors and movie starlets; and the struggle in the Pacific during World War II. (He worked side by side with a younger but soon-to-be-legendary photographer, W. Eugene Smith, during the Battle of Saipan in the summer of 1944; Stackpole’s name appeared above Smith’s when their graphic, chilling pictures from Saipan were published together in LIFE during the war.)

Jokingly nicknamed “Life Goes to a Party Stackpole” by his colleagues, because he so frequently covered parties and the Hollywood set for the magazine, he spent more than 10 years in LIFE’s Los Angeles bureau reporting on the mystifying universe known as California.

In 1941, Stackpole was assigned to photograph the notoriously hard-partying Errol Flynn, which later came back to haunt him when he was called to the stand as a witness in a 1943 statutory rape case against the movie star. (A nightclub dancer named Peggy Satterlee claimed that, when she was 15 years old, Flynn attacked her on his boat around the time Stackpole was shooting his feature for LIFE; Flynn was acquitted of that charge, and of a similar charge involving another underage girl.)

A technical master known for his underwater photography, Stackpole also worked on numerous “behind the scenes” features for LIFE, as when he creatively documented the making of the 1954 Jules Verne epic, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In 1953 he won one of the very earliest George Polk Awards in photojournalism for his eerie, final pictures of competitive free-diver Hope Root descending into the ocean depths off the coast of Florida while trying to set a world record in deep-water diving. Root vanished during the dive, and was never seen again.

After he left LIFE in 1960, Stackpole returned to the Bay Area and taught for years at the Academy of Arts College in San Francisco; he also wrote a column, “35mm Techniques,” for the popular magazine, U.S. Camera. In 1991, Stackpole’s Oakland, Calif., home burned down along with the negatives from much of his astonishing career. But because he was for so long a staff photographer with LIFE, most of his archives were housed with Time Inc., and survived a trove of pictures, like those selected for this gallery, that serve as testament to one photojournalist’s magnificent body of work.

Alfred Hitchcock looked out over the grounds of the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel in 1939.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American troops in the Pacific bathed during a lull in the fighting on the island of Saipan, 1944.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Glendale Junior College students danced on Balboa Beach, 1947 California

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Workers raised a truss 160 feet above the water during the construction of the Delaware Memorial Bridge in 1951.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Communications chief Frank Higgins napped in the water during production of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1952.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American soldiers drilled under camouflage netting, which screened a coastal defense position in California, in 1942, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An American held a wounded Japanese boy in an airplane on Saipan as they awaited a flight to the nearest field hospital in 1944.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A pilot of the U.S. Women’s Air Force Service at Avenger Field, Texas, in 1943.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Former burlesque star June St. Clair (right) showed a novice how to disrobe during a demonstration on “how wives should undress for their husbands” at the Allen Gilbert School of Undressing in 1937.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A model combed her hair as she showed off the latest WWII-era fashion in 1943: black cotton stockings with an extra pair of garters to help prevent bagging at the knees—a design created by hose manufacturers in response to the challenge of wartime rayon restrictions.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bridgeport, Connecticut, 1943

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Film legend Gary Cooper in Aspen, Colo., in 1949.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Elizabeth Taylor at a desk in a classroom at Hollywood’s University High School in 1950.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Errol Flynn on his yacht in 1941.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alec Guinness applied his make-up during a run at at the Stratford Shakespeare festival in 1958.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren sampled the thrills at Coney Island in 1958.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Actress Jeanne Crain balanced a soap bubble on her index finger as she luxuriated in a bath in a scene from the 1946 movie, Margie.

Peter Stackpole/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras: Rare Vintage Photos From America’s Most Famous Party

August 17, 2021February 20, 2012 by

Early on in its decades-long run as a weekly magazine, LIFE turned its eye toward always-enticing, ever-vivid New Orleans and that great city’s signature annual event: Mardia Gras. In February, 1938, editors sent photographer William Vandivert to the Big Easy to chronicle the carnival, and to show LIFE’s readers how one American city in so many ways a Caribbean, as opposed to a purely Southern, town maintained a centuries-old tradition of refined debauchery and unalloyed fun in the midst of the Great Depression.

The story that ran in the March 14, 1938, issue of LIFE, alongside some of Vandivert’s photographs, was interesting enough, in its own way. Titled “LIFE goes to America’s Most Famous Party,” the five-page feature focused almost exclusively on the aristocratic Comus Ball, and the pomp and ceremony that attends the crowning of the ball’s king and queen.

In fact, in 1938, LIFE was invited to the Comus Ball “to photograph it,” the magazine gently boasted to its readers, “for the press for the first and only time in its 81 years.”

But Bill Vandivert was in New Orleans for more than a few days and nights in the late winter of 1938, and he made hundreds of photographs far more interesting photographs, it turns out, than those that ran in the magazine on the crowded, chaotic streets and boulevards of that singular town.

Here, in tribute to the undying spirit of the Crescent City, and to celebrate the ancient festival of carnival (from Latin, carne vale, or “farewell to meat”) that traditionally marks the beginning of the Christian observance of Lent, LIFE.com offers a gallery of those previously unpublished Vandivert photos: pictures of men, women and children happily caught up in the whirlwind of Mardi Gras, in a vanished New Orleans that feels at once ghostly and somehow inimitably, intensely alive.

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

Mardi Gras 1938

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras 1938, New Orleans Louisiana

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras 1938

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras 1938, New Orleans Louisiana

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras, New Orleans, 1938.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras 1938, New Orleans Louisiana

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras 1938

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras 1938, New Orleans Louisiana

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam: Eve Arnold’s Quietly Powerful Images

January 20, 2020February 20, 2012 by

During her multiple-decade career, Eve Arnold photographed people, ranging from movie stars and era-defining politicians to the abjectly poor and destitute. Combining methodical reportage with a talent for fostering long-term relationships with her subjects, Arnold—the first woman photographer to join Magnum Photos—produced a body of work that offered a window into many of the cultural touchstones and most of the figures who helped shape the second half of the 20th century.

In 1960, LIFE magazine assigned Arnold, who died in January 2012 at the age of 99, to document the days and nights of Malcolm X, the controversial and intensely charismatic public face of the Nation of Islam. For nearly a year, she followed the thug-turned-devout Muslim and activist from Washington to New York to Chicago.

At the very first NOI rally she attended, at the Uline Arena in Washington, D.C., Arnold photographed George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, who had forged an alliance with the Nation of Islam (and who, like Malcolm X, would be assassinated before the decade was over). Arnold born into a Russian-Jewish family in Philadelphia in 1912 wrote later that, as she raised her camera to photograph Rockwell and his brownshirt-clad henchmen, he hissed at her, “I’ll make a bar of soap out of you.”

“I hissed back, ‘As long as it isn’t a lampshade,'” Arnold wrote of the moment, “and kept photographing,” She was often the only white face at the rallies she photographed, and once described the chilling experience of removing her sweater after a Nation of Islam rally in Harlem, only to see dozens of burn marks on the back of the garment, where men in the crowd had pushed their lit cigarettes against the fabric.

Arnold’s work from her year spent with the Nation of Islam comprises a powerful mosaic illustrating the strength and energy of a new force in America a force operating in tandem with the era’s young, increasingly mainstream Civil Rights movement, but with utterly divergent aims and tactics. At the very center of her portrait of the Black Muslim movement is Malcolm X, who Arnold described as kind, gracious and incredibly helpful to her in her work.

“I am always delighted by the manipulation that goes on between a subject and photographer when the subject knows about the camera and how it can best be used to his advantage,” Arnold wrote. “Malcolm was brilliant in this silent collaboration.” The unspoken teamwork, in a sense, that Arnold describes and celebrates went beyond simple access. Instead, she remembers Malcolm X finding her subjects to photograph, arranging shots and ensuring that she had interviews for the text.

“He was a really clever showman,” she wrote, “apparently knowledgeable about how he could use pictures and the press to tell his story.”

When Arnold submitted her photographs to LIFE, an editor initially rejected them on the grounds that the Black Muslims were not well known. When the editor consented to seeing the pictures in layout, the closing photograph of women at prayer was placed above an Oreo cookie advertisement, and the magazine ultimately pulled the material. The next year, Esquire published the images; Arnold observed that the Esquire piece was something of a launch pad to her later, landmark work. In summing up the experience of spending so much time in such close contact with Malcolm X at the height of his riveting career, Arnold wrote that she was “privileged to work with one of the most dynamic leaders of the century.”

Through her extraordinary pictures, the rest of us get to share in that rare privilege.

Malcolm X. Chicago, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Children lined up outside a Nation of Islam meeting at the Uline Arena, Washington, D.C., 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Malcolm X made a speech at a Nation of Islam rally, Washington D.C., 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Nation of Islam meeting, New York City, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, Chicago, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Nation of Islam meeting, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Malcolm X gave a speech at a Nation of Islam rally, Washington, D.C., 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Nation of Islam meeting, New York City, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Three sets of hands (left to right): American Nazi, Nation of Islam member and a Nation of Islam money collector at a rally, Washington, D.C., 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Malcolm X gives a speech at a Nation of Islam rally, Washington, D.C., 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Nation of Islam meeting, 1961

Eve Arnold Magnum

Malcolm X, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Daughter and wife of Elijah Muhammad with Malcolm X, Chicago, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Children of members of the Nation of Islam on their way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Audiences on a String: American Puppet Masters in India,1962

December 18, 2019February 20, 2012 by

In a 1963 LIFE profile of Bil Baird, a master puppeteer, and his wife Cora, Bil advised: “Don’t think of puppets as little instant people. They have to be more than people, or less, or sharper, somehow more exaggerated and then you just can’t beat them for kidding human pomposity and sham.”

The Bairds, who would later inspire Muppet maker Jim Henson, were accomplished enough in their craft that the U.S. State Department sponsored their tour of India in 1962.

(FYI, Bil Baird dropped the second “l” from his first name when, according to LIFE, “he joined a nutty club in Chicago that required all members to have three-letter names.”)

And while the photos from that tour of India provide a sense of Bil and Cora’s creatively intense and whimsical lives, writer David Scherman’s words, from the article, “Puppets Puncture Pomposity,” add flavor to the portrait of this charming Greenwich Village-based couple, their two kids and their family-run entertainment business.

If you suffer from creeping conformism, acute squareness or an overstuffed shirt, an evening with Bil and Cora Baird, if you’re lucky enough to fall into one (they’re never planned they happen) is a sure cure. If you play the one-string bass, the steam calliope or the sweet potato, it will help but it’s not mandatory. If you don’t dig music, don’t go. But if you do, you’re likely to hear a major American folksinger sing a bawdy folksong, either along or in harmony with the indefatigable Baird or a minor movie star, or eat a gourmet meal suddenly produced by Cora, or shake hands with a newly made puppet that looks suspiciously like a newly arrived guest, or get stuck in the elevator with a lovely dancer and a fat man playing calypsos on an accordion.

Like any good puppeteer, and he is the best, [Baird] is carpenter, electrician, artist, actor, athlete, poet, and plays most instruments, some very well, some awfully He is surprisingly dry-eyed about his wooden proteges, some of which may take him and his staff hundreds of hours to make: “People often ask if we love them, or feel like their parents. God, no. They don’t command love in their own right. They’re nothing if we don’t operate them. Besides,” he said, in a non sequitur that somehow made sense, “I always give them blue eyelids.”

One final note: You know the trippy “Lonely Goatherd” marionette sequence in The Sound of Music? Bil and Cora Baird made the puppets, and were pulling the strings in that scene—giving them, to this date, a bit of immortality.

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

American puppeteer Bil Baird in India, 1962

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

On a State Department tour of India, the Bairds [Bil, second from right; Cora at right] performed for a crowd in the village square of Nistoli.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Puppeteer Cora Baird in India, 1962. “Puppetry probably started in India, and it isn’t kid stuff with them,” Bil Baird told LIFE.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American puppeteers Bil and Cora Baird with colleagues in India, 1962.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Puppeteer Bil Baird in India, 1962.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bil and Cora Baird in India, 1962.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Puppeteer Bil Baird in India, 1962.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

One of American puppeteer Bil Baird’s creations delighted kids in India in 1962.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Puppeteer Bil Baird in India, 1962

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Puppeteer Bil Baird in India, 1962.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

In Praise of the ‘Powder Puff Derby’

August 11, 2021February 18, 2012 by

“Sweet little Alice Van is as daredevilish a rider as ever came out of the Wild West,” LIFE informed its readers in the August 18, 1940, issue of the magazine. “Aboard a savage steer or proudly flaying a bucking bronco she has been the darling of hundreds of U.S. rodeos.”

But in late July of that year, at Tijuana’s Agua Caliente racetrack, Van “achieved new fame. Wearing borrowed silks and a pair of borrowed jockey pants (two sizes too large), she mounted a cheap claiming horse named Drum Music and rode him to victory by a nose in a revival of Agua Caliente’s famous Powder Puff Derby. Behind her as also-rans struggled six other girl jockeys on six other old nags.”

Today, at least some of the language used in that brief little feature in LIFE would be utter gibberish to the ears of the vast majority of readers. Silks? What silks? And what on earth is a “cheap claiming horse,” anyway? But in 1940, when thoroughbred horse racing was still an incredibly popular sport in the U.S., it’s a safe bet that many, and perhaps even most, of the magazine’s readers would know exactly what those phrases meant.

Here, LIFE’s Peter Stackpole offers a lighthearted look at racing back in the day, through the lens of a single race, the “Powder Puff Derby,” and half-a-dozen women jockeys, on a scorching summer afternoon at a track in Baja California, Mexico.

Oh, and by the way: “Silks” are the racing outfits worn by jockeys, featuring colors and patterns associated with a horse’s stable or owners; a “claiming horse” is a horse that can be bought or “claimed” until shortly before a race.

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

Original caption: “Weighing in before the race the girls are understandably nervous. Alice Van (third from left) is wondering whether Drum Music, the horse she will ride is any good. Because the girls generally refuse to diet and because they average about 10 lbs. more than men jockeys, their races are usually scheduled at the high weight of 130 lbs.”

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Women jockeys in Baja California, Mexico, 1940.

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “From balcony of jockeys’ quarters the girls and two regular jockeys watch an early program race. Most of the girls are rodeo performers, enter for the fun of it.”

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Weighing in for the Powder Puff Derby, Agua Caliente Racetrack, Mexico, 1940.

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Scales read 119 as Alice steps on them as jockey Martin Fallon, smoking a big cigar, leers up at her. She is a former Cheyenne ‘Frontier Days’ champion rider.”

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alice Van and her husband/manager place bets at the track in Baja California, Mexico, 1940.

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Women jockeys in Baja California, Mexico, 1940.

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alice’s horse, Drum Music, won the race.

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “After race Alice poses for picture with Drum Music and Drum Music’s owner Tom Hunt, a horseman from San Ysidro, California. Hunt won $500. Alice won a wrist watch.”

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dior in 1948: Rare Photos From the Birth of the ‘New Look’

January 20, 2020February 16, 2012 by

In March 1948, LIFE introduced its readers to a pioneering French fashion designer and what the magazine called his “revolutionary” vision. The monsieur in question was none other than (in writer Jeanne Perkins marvelous characterization) “a timid, middle-aged, insignificant-looking little Frenchman named Christian Dior,” and the fashion earthquake he unleashed was something called, simply and unforgettably, the New Look.

Here, LIFE.com not only offers a glimpse back at a seminal moment in fashion history, but presents pictures—some that appeared in the magazine, many that were never published—by some of LIFE’s finest photographers, taken at a Dior show in Paris in 1948, when the New Look was all the rage and a timid, middle-aged, insignificant-looking little Frenchman astonished and thrilled the couture world.

Below is an abridged version of the article that ran in the March 1, 1948, issue of LIFE, beneath the one-word headline: DIOR.

Like all great revolutionists, Christian Dior is a creature of destiny. He did not create the New Look single-handed. But he appeared at the psychological moment as its man on plush horseback. As far back as the late 1930s Martha Graham's modern ballet troupe was wearing the knee-covering, bosom-exposing garments currently featured as the New Looks. In 1941 Harper's Bazaar solemnly warned its readers: 'Watch your skirt length. If this longer skirt length looks right to you, you're a woman of the future.' Dior senses this situation ('I know very well the women'). He also senses that the time was exactly ripe to convert these minority manifestations into a powerful mass movement. . . .

Although scarcely anyone had ever heard of him before last year, Christian Dior had been a minor league figure in Paris dress business, on and off, since 1936. About a year and a half ago, with backing from a French gambler and millionaire named Marcel Boussac, he left a job as one of Lucien Lelong's numerous assistants to open his own dress shop a fine old mansion on the Avenue Montaigne, a few steps away from the Champs Elysées. He plunged lavishly, staking everything on a single throw. For four months 85 decorators and painters labored to produce an atmosphere of discreet elegance unequaled in any existing Paris salon de couture. When the setting was ready, Dior retired to his little country house near Fontainbleau and meditated for a week. He returned from his lonely vigil, his pockets stuffed with 300 designs scrawled on odd bits of paper.

"I'm a mild man," Dior says, "but I have violent tastes." Violent tastes were precisely what the situation demanded. Dior went all-out for his new line. His narrow waists became as much as 2 inches narrower by means of specially installed corsets. His low necks were so low that they barely stopped at the waist. Other designers might sidle up to old-fashioned femininity and romance; Dior tackled it headlong.

“Three weeks ago,” LIFE concluded, “the new spring showing of Dior models opened in Paris. ‘Chalk up another fast one for Christian Dior,’ exhorted WNBC’s Peter Roberts. ‘Yesterday he let the world in on his ideas for 1948. And the folks who should know were betting dollars to doughnuts he was going to lengthen skirts a little more. But friend Dior shortened skirts! Not much but shortened. Just one inch. . . .'”

Christian Dior in his Paris salon, 1948

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Christian Dior dresses showed a marked Edwardian trend; this one had an old-fashioned corset cover top.

Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dior fashion show, Paris, 1948.

Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dior fashion show, Paris, 1948

Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dior fashion show, Paris, 1948.

Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Christian Dior with his seamstresses, 1948.

Tony Linck The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Paris seamstresses mobbed their boss, Dior, on St. Catherine’s Day (Nov 23), the traditional spinsters holiday. LIFE commented, “Dior is rich, kind and unmarried.”

Tony Linck The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dior decorated his home, a fourth floor walk-up in the heart of Paris, to resemble his parents’ home as it was in 1900.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Christian Dior dress, 1948.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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