Page 89 – LIFE

LIFE Rides With Hells Angels, 1965

December 7, 2019November 8, 2014 by

From Jesse James and Butch Cassidy to Scarface and Tony Soprano, outlaws have held an ambiguous place in America’s popular imagination: we fear and loathe the gangster’s appetite for violence; we envy and covet his radical freedom. In early 1965, LIFE photographer Bill Ray and writer Joe Bride spent several weeks with a gang that, to this day, serves as a living, brawling embodiment of our ambivalent relationship with the rebel: Hells Angels.

Here, along with a gallery of remarkable photographs that were shot for LIFE but never ran in the magazine, Ray and Bride recall their days and nights spent with Buzzard, Hambone, Big D and other Angels (as well as their equally tough “old ladies”) at a time when the roar of Harleys and the sight of long-haired bikers was still new and for the average, law-abiding citizen almost unfathomable. The day-to-day existence of these leather-clad hellions was as foreign to most of LIFE magazine’s millions of readers as the lives of, say, Borneo’s headhunters, or nomads of the Gobi Desert.

“This was a new breed of rebel,” Ray told LIFE.com, recalling his time with the Angels. “They didn’t have jobs. They absolutely despised everything that most Americans value and strive for stability, security. They rode their bikes, hung out in bars for days at a time, fought with anyone who messed with them. They were self-contained, with their own set of rules, their own code of behavior. It was extraordinary to be around.”

Ray spent some of the time with the Angels on a ride from San Bernardino (about 40 miles east of Los Angeles) to Bakersfield, Calif., for a major motorcycle rally. The Berdoo-Bakersfield run is a trip of only about 130 miles but in 1965, it would offer enough moments (both placid and violent) for Ray to paint a rare, revelatory portrait of the world’s most legendary motorcycle club in its early days. The way in which the story came about, meanwhile, was as dramatic and unexpected as Bill Ray’s pictures.

“I’d done a story on Big Daddy Roth,” writer Joe Bride recalled, “a genuine L.A. phenomenon and legend in the Southern California car culture. He had a lucrative business designing hot rod-themed decals and cartoon figures. While I was wrapping up the story with Big Daddy, the Angels were in the news. They were accused of terrorizing a small central California town and being major growers and distributors of pot. Big Daddy said he knew a lot of Angels, did business with them and that they were more lost nomads than real criminals. After meeting them, by the way, my take on them was a little bit closer to the prevailing opinion than to Big Daddy’s. . . .”

“I told Big Daddy Roth I’d like to meet the Angels, talk to them about doing a story,” Bride said. “It would be a chance for them to get some recognition, and explain why they did what they did. Not long after the story on Big Daddy ran, in late 1964, Roth called and said, ‘They’ll meet you with conditions.'” Bride met two Angels at Big Daddy’s store. They blindfolded him, put him in a car and drove into the mountains. At a bar “with what looked like 100 bikes parked outside,” no longer blindfolded, Bride met a stocky, long-haired Angel who asked if he shot pool. They played some nine-ball, and Bride beat the guy two out of three games. Bride then negotiated, there in the bar, a relationship where the Hells Angels agreed to allow him and Bill Ray to shadow them. Bride sat back, had a few beers, and then they drove him back to L.A. Not long after that, Ray and Bride began reporting the story.

Ray and Bride spent more than a month with the Angels in the spring of ’65, “mostly on weekends,” Ray remembers, “but the Bakersfield run was around the clock, three days and nights. In Bakersfield, I slept on the floor of the Blackboard Cafe the bar that the Angels basically lived in while they were there.”

“I got along with the Angels,” Ray says today. “I got to like some of them very much, and I think they liked me. I accepted them as they were, and they accepted me. You know, by their standards, I looked pretty funny.”

Ray vividly remembers the moment he truly felt accepted, or as accepted as he was ever going to be, by the Angels. In a confrontation reminiscent of a famous scene in Hunter S. Thompson’s classic 1966 book, Hell’s Angels, when Thompson was almost stomped to death by bikers, Ray says that “he got in a bit of trouble one day, in a bar. Some bikers guys who weren’t Angels saw me taking pictures. They didn’t like it, but they didn’t realize that I was a sort of mascot of the real tough guys. I’d been shooting the Angels for maybe a week at this point. I was about to be attacked by one of these guys when a Hells Angel standing next to me made it clear that if a hair on my head was touched, the other guy was a dead man. From that point on, I felt . . . well, not safe, because I never felt safe with those guys, but as if I’d passed a test, somehow.”

Ray stresses that while the Angels he spent time with smoked pot, and he once saw them “beat the holy hell” out of some other bikers behind a bar, he “never saw these guys involved in anything deeply illegal. Then again, they always had plenty of money for gas and beer. They lived on their bikes that is, when they weren’t hanging out in bars. Their money had to come from somewhere, but none of them ever worked.”

The FBI has contended that the Angels and other motorcycle gangs are involved in extortion, drug dealing, trafficking stolen goods and other criminal activities.

“There’s a romance to the idea of the biker on the open road,” Ray says. “It’s similar to the romance that people attach to cowboys and the West which, of course, is totally out of proportion to the reality of riding fences and punching cows. But there’s something impressive about these Harley-Davidsons and bikers heading down the highway. You see the myth played out in movies, like Easy Rider, which came out a few years after I photographed the Angels. You know, the trail never ends for the cowboy, and the open road never ends for the Angels. They just ride. Where they’re going hardly matters. It’s not an easy life, but it’s what they choose. It’s theirs. And everyone else can get out of the way or go to hell.”

—gallery by Liz Ronk

Hells Angels, California, 1965.

Bill Ray Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hells Angels, California, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Big D, a member of the San Bernardino, a.k.a, “Berdoo” Hells Angels, during a ride from San Bernardino to Bakersfield, California, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Inside the Hells Angels’ San Bernardino clubhouse, 1965.

Bill Ray— Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Little Jim” drinks beer from a waste basket at the Angels’ clubhouse in San Bernardino, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hells Angels’ “old ladies,” California, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Two “Berdoo” Hells Angels clown for Bill Ray behind a bar during a stop on their run from San Bernardino to Bakersfield, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hells Angel “Hambone” posed during a ride from San Bernardino to Bakersfield, Calif., 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hells Angels and locals outside the Blackboard Cafe in Bakersfield, Calif., 1965.

Bill Ray— Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hells Angels, their “old ladies” and hangers-on outside the Blackboard in Bakersfield, California, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hells Angels cruise north from San Bernardino to Bakersfield, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A man in Bakersfield, Calif., cast what appeared to be an appraising eye over the Hells Angels’ Harley-Davidsons, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hells Angels

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sonny, the leader of the San Bernardino Hells Angels, needed stitches in his head after crashing his bike, California, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Women—including one with a bandaged nose—in a bar while male bikers gathered in a separate room, California, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A sheriff’s officer kept an eye on the proceedings outside a bar that the Hells Angels had made their headquarters-away-from-home during their San Bernardino-to-Bakersfield run, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Two women who were riding with the Hells Angels at a bar in 1965. “This is one of my favorites from the whole shoot,” Bill Ray says. “There’s something kind of sad and at the same time defiant about the atmosphere.”

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hells Angels

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Outside the Blackboard Cafe at night, Bakersfield, Calif., 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hells Angels

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A teenager seems drawn by the Angels and their machines, California, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Two “reputable” motorcyclists photographing the Hells Angels, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

During their ’65 run to Bakersfield, the Angels pushed their way into a motorcycle hillclimb, in which bikers race up an often insanely steep incline. The Angels wanted to take part; organizers said no (but finally relented).

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A biker named Roseberry sported a “one percenter” patch—a badge of honor for the Angels and other motorcycle clubs whose members revel in and celebrate their outlaw status, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A biker named Roseberry getting fingerprinted, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An Angel getting frisked.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Hells Angel—with his “old lady” holding on tight—pulled a wheelie in downtown Bakersfield, Calif., 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bikers (including Sonny, left, with a bandaged head) and their “old ladies,” California, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hells Angels

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Buzzard” and an “old lady,” California, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Hells Angel salute, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Buzzard” prepared to leave Bakersfield as cops and townspeople watched, 1965.

Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Squirrel’s Guide to Fashion

November 13, 2019November 6, 2014 by

In the early 1940s, LIFE magazine reported that a Mrs. Mark Bullis of Washington, D.C., had adopted a squirrel “before his eyes were open, when his mother died and left him in a tree” in the Bullis’s back yard. Here, in a series of photos by Nina Leen, LIFE.com chronicles the quiet, rodential adventures and sartorial splendor of Tommy Tucker, the orphaned and, in 1940s America, the celebrated squirrel.

“Most squirrels,” LIFE noted (with a striking lack of evidence), “are lively and inquisitive animals who like to do tricks when they have an audience.” They do?

LIFE then went on to observe that the squirrel, dubbed Tommy Tucker by the Bullis family, “is a very subdued little animal who has never had a chance to jump around in a big tree.”

“Mrs. Bullis’ main interest in Tommy,” LIFE continued, “is in dressing him up in 30 specially made costumes. Tommy has a coat and hat for going to market, a silk pleated dress for company, a Red Cross uniform for visiting the hospital.”

“Tommy never seems to complain,” the LIFE article concluded, “although sometimes he bites Mrs. Bullis. Mrs. Bullis never complains about being bitten.”

A Squirrel’s Guide to Fashion

Nina Leen—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

JFK Assassination: How LIFE Brought the Zapruder Film to Light

January 16, 2020November 6, 2014 by

It’s unlikely that any 26 seconds of celluloid have ever been discussed and dissected as thoroughly as those captured by a 58-year-old amateur-film buff named Abraham Zapruder on the day John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas—in a movie known ever after as “the Zapruder film.” The jittery color sequence showing JFK’s motorcade moving through the sunlit Dallas streets, leading up to the shocking instant when a rifle bullet slams into the president’s head, remains one of the 20th century’s indispensable historical records.

It was LIFE magazine editor Richard Stolley who tracked down Zapruder. Stolley’s purchasing of Zapruder’s home movie for LIFE had a profound impact on the magazine, on Zapruder, on Stolley himself, and most lastingly on the nation. Having flown in from Los Angeles within hours of the murder, Stolley was in his hotel in Dallas that afternoon, just hours after the president was shot. “I got a phone call from a LIFE freelancer in Dallas named Patsy Swank,” Stolley told TIME producer Vaughn Wallace several years ago, “and the news she had was absolutely electrifying. She said that a businessman had taken an eight-millimeter camera out to Dealey Plaza and photographed the assassination. I said, ‘What’s his name?’ She said, ‘[The reporter who told her the news] didn’t spell it out, but I’ll tell you how he pronounced it. It was Zapruder.’

“I picked up the Dallas phone book and literally ran my finger down the Z’s, and it jumped out at me the name spelled exactly the way Patsy had pronounced it. Zapruder, comma, Abraham.”

The rest is history: fraught, complex, riveting, unsettled history

Film still from Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of JFK’s assassination in Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963.

Zapruder Film © 1967 (renewed 1995) The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

Before and After D-Day: Color Photos From England and France

December 8, 2019November 6, 2014 by

Hearing the term “D-Day” might bring to mind images of violence. In photos, movies snd old news reels, and usually all in grim black-and-white, we have seen what happened on the beaches of Normandy (codenamed Omaha, Utah, Juno, Gold and Sword) as the Allies unleashed their historic assault against German defenses on June 6, 1944.

But in color photos taken before and after the invasion, LIFE magazine’s Frank Scherschel captured countless other, lesser-known scenes from the run-up to the D-Day and the heady weeks after: American troops training in small English towns; the French countryside, startingly lush after the spectral landscape of the beachheads; the reception GIs enjoyed en route to the capital; the jubilant liberation of Paris itself.

Scherschel’s pictures most of which were never published in LIFE are resented here in masterfully restored color and feel at-once familiar and somehow vividly new.

Scherschel, who died in 1981, was an award-winning photographer for LIFE well into the 1950s. (His younger brother Joe was a LIFE photographer, as well.) In addition to the Normandy invasion, Frank photographed the war in the Pacific, the 1947 wedding of Princess Elizabeth, the 1956 Democratic National Convention, collective farming in Czechoslovakia, Sir Winston Churchill (many times), art collector Peggy Guggenheim, road racing at Le Mans, baseball, football, boxing, a beard-growing contest in Michigan and countless other people and events, both epic and forgotten.

Information on the specific locations or people who appear in these photographs is not always available; Scherschel and his colleagues did not have the means to provide that data for each of the countless photographs they made throughout the war. When the locale or person depicted in an image in this gallery is known, it is noted in the caption.

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

American troops in England before D-Day, May 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American combat engineers ate a meal atop boxes of ammunition stockpiled for the impending D-Day invasion, May 1944.

Frank Scherschel;Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Troops and civilians passed the time on Henley Bridge, Henley-on-Thames, in the spring of 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An American corporal stacked cans of gasoline in preparation for the upcoming invasion of France, Stratford-upon-Avon, England, May 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A small town in England in the spring of 1944, shortly before D-Day.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An American Army chaplain knelt next to a wounded soldier, to administer the Eucharist and Last Rites, France, 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An abandoned German machine gun, France, June 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Magazines scattered among the rubble of the heavily bombed town of Saint-LÂ™, Normandy, France, summer 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An American tank crew took a breather on the way through the town of Avranches, Normandy, summer 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“We thought it was going to be murder but it wasn’t. To show you how easy it was, I ate my bar of chocolate. In every other operational trip, I sweated so much the chocolate they gave us melted in my breast pocket.” – Frank Scherschel describing his experiences photographing the Normandy invasion from the air, before he joined Allied troops heading inland. Above: GIs searched ruined homes in western France after D-Day.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

View of the ruins of the Palais de Justice in the town of St. Lo, France, summer 1944. The red metal frame in the foreground is what’s left of an obliterated fire engine.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“All the civilized world loves France and Paris. Americans share this love with a special intimacy born in the kinship of our revolutions, our ideas and our alliances in two great wars.” – LIFE on the relationship between the U.S. and its longtime European ally

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Along the coast of France, June 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

From D-Day until Christmas 1944, German prisoners of war were shipped off to American detention facilities at a rate of 30,000 per month. Above: Captured German troops, June 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Maintenance work on an American P-47 Thunderbolt in a makeshift airfield in the French countryside, summer 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A French couple shared cognac with an American tank crew, northern France, summer 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A P-38 fighter plane sat in the background as the pilot arrived in a captured German vehicle, France, 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Church services in dappled sunlight, France, 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

DAmerican Army trucks (note cyclist hitching a ride) paraded down the Champs-Elysees the day after the liberation of Paris by French and Allied troops, August 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Frenchmen transported painted British and American flags for use in a parade, summer 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Tanks under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris during liberation celebrations, August 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Paris is like a magic sword in a fairy tale – a shining power in those hands to which it rightly belongs, in other hands tinsel and lead. Whenever the City of Light changes hands, Western Civilization shifts its political balance. So it has been for seven centuries; so it was in 1940; so it was last week.” – LIFE after the French capital was liberated in August 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Free French General and military governor of the French capital Pierre Koenig, left, during ceremonies held the day after the liberation of Paris, August 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Celebrations in Paris after the liberation of the city, August 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American troops stood beside a World War 1 monument bedecked with French flags after the town (exact location unknown) was liberated from German occupying forces, summer 1944.

Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE With Billy Graham: Rare Photos From the Early Years of His Career

January 16, 2020November 5, 2014 by

Over a career spanning more than 70 years, the Rev. Billy Graham preached the Gospel, in person, to an estimated 200 million people around the world and another two billion via radio, television and the Internet, and he ministered to a dozen U.S. presidents. Throughout many of those decades, Graham enjoyed a special relationship with LIFE magazine, which published his essays and followed him on more than a few of his travels around the country and across the world.

In fact, Graham owes much of his fame to two media moguls: newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, co-founder of Time Inc. and creator of TIME, LIFE, Fortune, and other influential American publications. Both Hearst and Luce were impressed by Graham’s first major crusade, a marathon revival in a tent in Los Angeles in 1949. They were also impressed by the combination of his message of spiritual renewal and his strong anti-communist politics. Hearst sent his editors a telegram with the two-word order, “Puff Graham.” For his part, Luce had the L.A. crusade covered favorably in both TIME and LIFE.

Long a spiritual adviser to people in power, Graham’s first visit to Washington to counsel a president didn’t go very well. After blabbing to the press about what he and Harry Truman had discussed, Truman blasted him as a “counterfeit” and a publicity hound. Thereafter, he kept the topics of his Oval Office meetings to himself. He also held considerable sway over other Washington politicians. In 1952, during a crusade in D.C., Graham persuaded Congress to pass a law allowing him to conduct a service on the Capitol steps. Unlike other Evangelical preachers who rose to political prominence, Graham seldom advocated policy; sometimes, he was just a sympathetic shoulder, as when he spent the night in the White House praying with the Bushes in 1991 on the eve of the Gulf War.

He is one of the most famous ministers who ever lived, but Billy Graham had no formal theological training. Born in 1918 and raised on a dairy farm outside Charlotte, N.C., he received undergraduate degrees from the Florida Bible Institute and Wheaton College. Still, in 1947, when he was just 30 years old, he was named president of Northwestern Bible College in Minnesota. He served from 1948 to 1952, the years that also marked the beginning of his international celebrity as a traveling evangelist.

Graham’s road as a preacher has not always been an easy one. For example, at the height of tension over integration in Little Rock, Ark., in 1959, Billy Graham held one of his crusades there and stipulated, as he always did, that the seating be desegregated. Graham’s refusal to knuckle under to the threats of segregationists and white supremacists made a big impression on a 13-year-old in attendance with his Sunday school class, a teenager named William Jefferson Clinton. “I was just a little boy,” Clinton recalled nearly 50 years later, after he’d served as president and received Graham at the White House, “and I never forgot it, and I’ve loved him ever since.”

Controversy has occasionally tarnished, if only temporarily, Graham’s reputation as a man of God, as in 2002 when declassified White House audio tapes from 1972 revealed him uttering to then-President Richard Nixon blatantly anti-Semitic remarks about, among other things, Jews controlling the American media. In the midst of the subsequent uproar, Graham abjectly apologized, saying that “if it wasn’t on tape, I would not have believed it [was me speaking]. I guess I was trying to please [Nixon]. I felt so badly about myself I couldn’t believe it. I went to a meeting with Jewish leaders and I told them I would crawl to them to ask their forgiveness.”

Many of the photographs of Graham that LIFE published over the years captured the public man, but the private Billy Graham seen in these rare pictures relaxing with his family, preaching one-on-one to the world’s most powerful people and to the poorest of the poor, wrestling with God on the golf course may prove something of a minor revelation even to those who thought they knew all there was to know about the the man.

The Rev. Billy Graham in 1952.

Mark Kauffman/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham, Washington, D.C., 1952.

Mark Kauffman/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham and his daughter, Ruth, in 1956.

Ed Clark/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy and Ruth Graham and their four children in North Carolina in 1956: Franklin (who would become the pastor’s designated successor as head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association), Virginia, Anne and Ruth.

Ed Clark/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham and family in North Carolina in 1956.

Ed Clark/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham preached in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1959.

Francis Miller/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham in Africa on a six-week crusade in 1960. He traveled 14,000 miles and preached to a third of a million people, some 20,000 of whom raised their hands as a sign of their born-again experience.

James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

While in Africa in 1960, Graham preached in stadiums, on banana plantations and in mud huts. One place he did not preach was South Africa. He was a vocal opponent of apartheid and insisted on desegregated seating at his rallies in Africa, as he did in the American South and everywhere else he preached.

James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham during his 1960 crusade through Africa.

James Burke TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham in Africa, 1960. When he first began to preach, as a student at the Florida Bible Institute, he would paddle a canoe across the Hillsborough River to a little island where, as he wrote in his autobiography, “I could address all creatures great and small, from alligators to birds. If they would not stop to listen, there was always a congregation of cypress stumps that could neither slither nor fly away.” Today, the area is the site of Rev. Billy Graham Memorial Park.

James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

During his 1960 African crusade, Graham explained the Bible to a group of Waarusha warriors living in a village at the base of Mount Meru, not far from Kilimanjaro, in Tanganyika (now Tanzania).

James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham, 1960.

James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

As the 1960 presidential campaign heated up, LIFE asked several leaders and thinkers to address the topic of “The National Purpose” in a series of essays. Graham wrote that, despite America’s postwar prosperity, there was a nationwide sense of unfulfillment, a “moral and spiritual cancer” that could only be cured by a return to God.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham, 1960. Golf played a key role in Graham’s life; he wrote in his autobiography that he received his calling to preach the gospel on the 18th green of the Temple Terrace Golf and Country Club.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham in 1960

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham read from the book of Isaiah, Chapter 33, Verse 2: “O Lord, be gracious unto us; we have waited for thee: be thou their arm every morning, our salvation also in the time of trouble.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt/ LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham joined newly inaugurated president John F. Kennedy at a national prayer breakfast at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel in February 1961.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Brando: Early Photos of a Legend in the Making

January 16, 2020November 5, 2014 by

The year was 1949, and 25-year-old Marlon Brando “the brilliant brat,” as LIFE magazine called him following his astonishing work on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire had finally answered the call of Hollywood. He was preparing for his movie debut in The Men, the wrenching story of a paralyzed World War II vet coping with rage and insecurity. And while it’s true that Los Angeles was familiar with “Next Big Thing” newcomers, it was exceedingly rare to document the earliest days in the career of an actor of Brando’s intensity, quirkiness and electrifying talent.

Photographer Ed Clark captured Brando’s explosive arrival in California, chronicling the actor as he submerged himself in “The Method” e.g., taking to a wheelchair and struggling with leg braces while living among paraplegics at a VA hospital in Van Nuys. But Clark also came away with surprising glimpses into the more personal, private Brando.

Here, LIFE.com presents a number of Clark’s photos most of which were never published in LIFE at a time when the actor was just beginning to forge his own Hollywood legend.

Accompanying Ed Clark’s images in LIFE’s archives were meticulous notes about Brando written by Theodore Strauss, who would ultimately write the magazine’s 1950 profile that coincided with the release of The Men. Strauss details the actor’s every eccentricity: what he wore, how he ate, what he read, how he shunned any sort of red carpet that might have been laid out for him when he came to town.

“Stanley Kramer, producer of The Men, had intended on putting Brando in a good hotel, but Brando would have none of it,” Strauss wrote. “First of all he insisted on living with the paraplegics in Birmingham Veterans Hospital during the four weeks before production began. This, he felt, was necessary to giving a completely knowledgeable and valid performance in his role. He was given a bed in a 32-bed ward, where he was treated almost like any other patient.”

The actor’s reputation as a bad boy had preceded him, stories of his nose-picking, shabby dress, foul language and grumbling interviews having traveled all the way from New York to Los Angeles. But, LIFE wrote, “however infantile or irresponsible Brando may be in his personal life, he is a totally conscientious artist in his work. Unlike some of Hollywood’s pretty people, he was never late on the set, never indulged in a tantrum, never required endless retakes.”

He was also far more of an introvert, in some ways, than his reputation suggested. Brando, wrote Strauss, “reads everything, absolutely omnivorous from Krishnamurti to recent novels.” For the actor, it was all about the craft nothing else, even life’s essentials, seemed to matter. From LIFE’s profile: “His salary, for the soundest of reasons, has been sent to his father, Marlon Brando Sr., who invests the money in cattle on a Midwestern ranch called Penny Poke. Each week Brando receives a living allowance of $150. Because he rarely looks at money and sometimes pays for a package of cigarets with a $20 bill, he usually is penniless by the second day.”

Of his relationship with the real paraplegics and quadriplegics from whom he was learning for his role, Strauss noted that “Brando’s orientation and adjustment as a paraplegic was so complete that he participated in their sometimes gruesome horseplay with complete freedom one of the reasons why he was so completely accepted. [Pranks] include pillow fights and using hypodermic syringes for water pistols.”

From Strauss’ notes about Hollywood’s reaction to Brando: “Thus far no one has accused him of posing; everyone to whom we’ve spoken has a sort of confused respect for a man who, up to now, has managed to live as he feels, without caring a hoot what anyone thinks.”

In his personal style, meanwhile, the actor was unfussy and unpretentious, almost to a fault: “When Brando first arrived in Hollywood his only luggage was a battered, imitation-leather suitcase the size of a woman’s overnight bag,” Strauss observed. “He was wearing a blue worsted suit which had seen much wear and weather there were holes and tears in the jacket, and a part of Brando was visible through the seat of the pants.”

Once official production on The Men began, Brando moved out of the veterans hospital and into a small bungalow owned by his aunt, Betty Lindemeyer, in Eagle Rock, Calif. During this period Brando’s maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Myers, was also a house guest.

“She [his grandmother] was quite abashed because Ed Clark took pictures of Marlon in a bathrobe, which happens to be hers,” reported a production assistant in notes found in LIFE’s archives. Grandma Myers was also apologetic about the barbaric way her grandson ate: “Bud doesn’t bring the food to his face,” she told LIFE, using Brando’s nickname. “He brings his face to the food.”

“I do hope that Bud comes through all this without too much scandal,” she confided to LIFE at one point. “I love him more than anything on this earth, but I never know when I’m going to hear from him in San Quentin.”

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

Marlon Brando took a break while training for his role in The Men, 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando chatted with a production manager for ‘The Men,’ 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando trained for his role in The Men, at the Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital, Van Nuys, Calif., 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando rehearsed his role in The Men, Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital, Van Nuys, Calif., 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

As his real-life inspirations played cards in the background, Marlon Brando took a break from rehearsing for The Men, Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital, Van Nuys, Calif., 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital, Van Nuys, Calif., 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando took a spill while training for his role in The Men, on the grounds of the Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital, Van Nuys, Calif., 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando while training for his role in The Men, 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando attempted to tip and balance his wheelchair on the set of The Men, 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando kissed his grandmother as he headed to the studio for a day of filming The Men, 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando and his grandmother, 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando at his aunt’s house in California during filming of The Men, 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando went for a stroll with his grandmother and her dog, 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1949.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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