Page 151 – LIFE

LIFE at the Oscars: Classic Photos From Hollywood’s Biggest Night

April 19, 2021February 23, 2012 by

Audrey Hepburn. Marlon Brando. Elizabeth Taylor. Kirk Douglas. Grace Kelly. Bogart and Bacall . . . you get the picture. And during the Golden Age of Hollywood, when it came to the Academy Awards, LIFE got the picture, too over and over again.

In fact, from the red carpet to the stage to the after-parties (where tuxedos and gowns were de rigueur) there were few noteworthy Oscar moments that LIFE missed. Here, in honor of Hollywood, actors, actresses and the magic of movies in general we’re fans, after all LIFE.com offers a selection of Oscar photos that capture not only the familiar glitz and glamor of the proceedings, but those far rarer moments when a superstar drops his or her guard and, for an instant, we see someone who seems remarkably like us albeit better-looking, richer, and with more charisma than most of us could summon in a lifetime of trying.

(Trivia note: There are various, competing stories around the origin of the name “Oscar” as a designation for the coveted statuette. Some historians believe that Bette Davis, of all people, coined the term because the statue resembled — so the story goes — her first husband, band leader Harmon Oscar Nelson. Another creation myth has it that a secretary to the great Golden Age studio head Louis B. Mayer saw the very first Academy Award statuette and pronounced it a dead ringer for Norway’s King Oscar II. No one, however, has ever definitively nailed down who first uttered the name Oscar in connection with the Academy Awards. And part of us hopes no one ever does.)

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

Elizabeth Taylor walked through a crowd of admirers at the Oscars in 1961 the year she won her first Academy Award, for her role in BUtterfield 8.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly and Clark Gable arrived at the 26th annual Academy Awards at the RKO Pantages Theatre in 1954.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Kirk Douglas at the Academy Awards in 1954

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Television actress Sandra White laughed while arriving late at the 1953 Academy Awards.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Humphrey Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall arrived at the 27th annual Academy Awards at the RKO Pantages Theater in 1955.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood, Best Actress nominee for her role as Deanie Loomis in Splendor in the Grass, had her hair done prior to the 1962 Academy Awards.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly waited backstage at the RKO Pantages Theatre during the 1956 Academy Awards.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne (whose image is being projected on the huge screen) accepted the Best Director Oscar from Olivia DeHavillan for an absent John Ford during the 25th annual Academy Awards in 1953 the first year the ceremony was televised.

J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Charlie Chaplin —who had been living in self-imposed exile in Switzerland for two decades —blew a kiss to the crowd while accepting an honorary Oscar in 1972 for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century.” When he was introduced to the audience, Chaplin received a 12-minute standing ovation.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty, co-stars in the Elia Kazan-directed romantic drama, Splendor in the Grass, attended the 1962 Academy Awards.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At the 1942 Academy Awards, Joan Fontaine gazed at the Best Actress Oscar she won for her role in Suspicion —an achievement that made her, incredibly, the only actor or actress to ever win an Oscar for a performance in an Alfred Hitchcock film.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Audrey Hepburn cradled the Oscar she won for her role in Roman Holiday.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne held Oscars for Gary Cooper and John Ford (Best Actor for High Noon) and Best Director for The Quiet Man, respectively) backstage at the Academy Awards, 1953.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Academy Award-winner Olivia de Havilland (The Heiress) and dapper presenter Jimmy Stewart at the Academy Awards, 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Photographers snapped their cameras Oscar winners Ingrid Bergman (Gaslight) and Bing Crosby (Going My Way) at the 1945 Academy Awards.

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Presenters Ginger Rogers and George Murphy danced together while holding an Oscar backstage at the RKO Pantages Theatre in 1950.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando (right, with French singer and actress Line Renaud) casually held his Best Actor Oscar for On The Waterfront at the 1955 Academy Awards at the RKO Pantages Theatre.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Joanne Woodward danced with her husband, Paul Newman, at the Governor’s Ball following the Academy Awards where she won the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Three Faces of Eve.

J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed held their Oscars as Best Supporting Actor and Actress in From Here to Eternity —a film that won eight statuettes in 1954, including Best Picture.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Producer Buddy Adler’s Academy Award for From Here to Eternity stood amid hats in the coat check room at Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills during an Oscars after-party in 1954.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Elizabeth Taylor: Photos From a Legendary Life

August 9, 2021February 23, 2012 by

Simply put, Elizabeth Taylor was the biggest star of the LIFE era. She appeared on the magazine’s cover a record 14 times, starting when she was just 15 years old, and over the following decades many of LIFE’s finest photographers Paul Schutzer, Peter Stackpole, Allan Grant and George Silk among them captured the quintessential movie star in love, at work and basking (with consummate grace) in the kind of international fame, comprised of equal parts respect and adulation, that most entertainers today can only dream about.

But a magazine only has so many pages and countless pictures by LIFE’s peripatetic photographers never made it into print. Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of the very best photographs of the Hollywood icon some that appeared in the magazine, and many that were never published in its pages including shots from her very first wedding, when she was just 18 years old; from the sets of Giant and Cleopatra; from studio backlots (with her dear friend and soul mate, Montgomery Clift); and from her tumultuous romance with two-time husband and bigger-than-life star in is own right, Richard Burton.

[Buy the LIFE book, Remembering Liz: 1932-2011]

What’s especially enlightening and, for film buffs, thrilling about digging through LIFE’s archives is not only the astonishing photography that so often comes to light, but the supporting materials that accompany the photos, negatives, contact sheets and prints.

For example, a March 30, 1962, memo sent by LIFE reporter George Caturani in Rome to the LIFE offices in New York reads, in part:

Herewith seven rolls of undeveloped black and white shot by [Paul] Schutzer . . . on the set of “Cleopatra” and inside Burton’s dressing room. . . . Liz on set looks absolutely relaxed. Whatever relationship there is between Liz and Burton [their affair while filming “Cleopatra” is now the stuff of Hollywood legend], they’ve decided to make the fact they enjoy each other as obvious as the famous nose on famous Cleopatra’s face.

With those sorts of insights and with that sort of access, it’s no surprise that, through the years, LIFE managed to so closely chronicle the public and private world of Liz Taylor as a teen, a young woman and later, at the very height of her career, as quite simply the biggest movie star in the world.

In 1945, at age 13 and already a veteran of five films, Elizabeth Taylor signs autographs during a charity cricket match at Los Angeles’ Gilmore Stadium.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Elizabeth Taylor in 1947, at age 15.

J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Liz Taylor gazes into the distance while wearing an “All America” sweatshirt, 1948; the pin she wears belonged to Glenn Davis, a 1946 Heisman Trophy-winner she was dating at the time.

Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Taylor and her mother, Sara, a former stage actress, in 1948.

Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Elizabeth Taylor at home in 1948

Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Elizabeth Taylor with West Point in the background, 1948

Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Elizabeth Taylor plays opposite Robert Taylor (no relation) in a scene from the 1949 movie, Conspirator.

Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

During a break in filming A Place in the Sun, Liz Taylor chats with her costar Montgomery Clift on the Paramount lot in 1950.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, 1950.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Just 18 years old, Elizabeth Taylor arrives to marry hotel heir Conrad “Nicky” Hilton at the Bel-Air Country Club in 1950.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Liz Taylor on her (first) wedding day, May 6, 1950. The marriage to Nicky Hlton would last less than one year.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In Marfa, Texas, on the set of the film, Giant, Liz Taylor lassos director George Stevens as her costars Rock Hudson and James Dean look on.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in 1962 on the set of Cleopatra. At the time, Taylor was married to Eddie Fisher, but had begun a tempestuous (and highly public) affair with Burton.Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton 1962

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

During a break in the filming of Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor ruffles the hair of Liza Todd, her daughter with her third husband, Mike Todd.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In costume, Richard Burton and Liz Taylor share a look on the set of Cleopatra.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Cleopatra director Joseph L. Mankiewicz chats with Liz Taylor on set.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In February 1964, on the set of a Broadway production of Hamlet, a surprised Elizabeth Taylor cuts her birthday cake, as Richard Burton (starring in the show) leans in for a kiss.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hume Cronyn, who won a Tony for his performance as Polonius in the 1964 production of Hamlet, gently holds Liz Taylor’s famous face in his hands.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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