Page 90 – LIFE

Sinatra at His Home Bar, and More: Intimate Photos Of a Legend

March 14, 2025December 8, 2014 by

Of all the superstars who helped shape and define popular culture in the 20th century, few lasted as long in the spotlight and even fewer were as enigmatic as Francis Albert Sinatra.

Across seven decades, the skinny, big-eared kid from Jersey who grew up to be the Chairman of the Board influenced generations of singers, musicians and fedora-topped hepcats; triumphed on stage, in the movies (winning an Oscar for his performance in From Here to Eternity) and on TV; and crafted a public persona so indelible that, even today, the image of a figure in a tux, alone on stage, drink in one hand, mic in the other, smoke swirling in the spotlight that image likely evokes for millions of fans the man known, simply, as The Voice.

In 1965, the year Sinatra turned 50, LIFE photographer John Dominis and editor Thomas Thompson were, as the magazine put it, “permitted” to spend time with the singer and his crew friends, family, cohorts, fellow performers for a cover story the magazine hoped to run. The result was a remarkable window into the man’s closely and famously guarded private world, as well as Sinatra’s own take on his celebrity and his music. Here, LIFE.com presents photos by Dominis that ran in that cover story, as well as many others that were not published in LIFE. One such unpublished photo, of Sinatra at his home mixing himself a drink at his home bar, has become one of the best-sellers in the LIFE print store.

In the introduction to the huge, 16-page feature in its April 23, 1965 issue, “The Private World and Thoughts of Frank Sinatra,” LIFE took pains to make clear that the man, 25 years into his career as a performer, was as volatile and as deeply, weirdly inscrutable as he’d ever been:

The kid with the high-pitched voice that came out of the throat wrapped in the floppy bow tie is going to be 50 this year and Frank Sinatra remains the most controversial, powerful and surprising entertainer around. He is a man who will angrily throw an over-cooked hamburger at his valet or an ashtray at an inept assistant and yet never fires anyone from his huge staff of aides and hangers-on. He will spend 10 minutes of his nightclub act attacking a woman columnist so venomously that the audience gasps and will send $100,000 to a Los Angeles college with the strict instructions that the gift not be made public. He sneers “Charley brown shoes” at people he thinks are squares and always says “thank you” when someone asks for his autograph. He is the legendary ladies’ man and he says he has flunked out with women. He cannot read music, yet he has taken popular singing and made of it an art. He is the finest living singer of popular songs, an astonishingly good actor, an ambitious director, a shrewd businessman. . . .

Sinatra contributed memorable insights about his singing technique, the peers he loves (and those he doesn’t like so much) and more to the centerpiece of the feature a long article, titled “Me and My Music” that, LIFE told its readers, “Sinatra himself wrote.” Among the gems in the piece:

It was my idea [in my mid-20s] to make my voice work in the same way as a trombone or a violin not sounding like them, but “playing” like those instruments. The first thing I needed was extraordinary breath control, which I didn’t have. I began swimming every chance I got in public pools taking laps under water and thinking song lyrics to myself as I swam, holding my breath.

One thing that was tremendously important was learning the use of a microphone. Many singers never learned to use one. They never understood, and still don’t, that a microphone is their instrument…. [Instead] of playing a saxophone, they’re playing a microphone.

I don’t read a note of music. I learn songs by having them played for me a couple of times while I read the lyrics. I can pick up the melody very quickly. I learn the lyrics by writing them out in long hand. When I get a new song, I look for continuity of melody that in itself will tell a musical story. It must go somewhere. I don’t like it to ramble. And then, by the same token, I like almost the same thing more, as a matter of fact in the lyrics. They must tell you a complete story, from “once upon a time” to “the end.”

For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business, the best exponent of a song. He excites me when I watch him he moves me. Vic Damone has better pipes than anybody, but he lacks the know-how or whatever you want to call it. Take Lena Horne, for example, a beautiful lady but really a mechanical singer. She gimmicks up a song, makes it too pat. . . .

And on he goes, following his thoughts to conclusions that feel right, allowing him to say all he wanted to say just as, countless times in his career, he found new, unexpected ways to phrase utterly familiar lyrics from the Great American Songbook.

Sinatra died in May 1998, but music critic David Hadju spoke for untold numbers of fans when he wrote, “To hell with the calendar. The day Frank Sinatra dies, the 20th century is over.” Strong words. But in some elemental ways, the further we get from the Chairman’s death, the more apt and prophetic they feel.

The most controversial, powerful and surprising entertainer around.

All these years later, that still sounds about right.

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

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, was the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Frank Sinatra mixed drinks at the bar in his home, Palm Springs, California, 1965.

John Dominis/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra and his dog, Ringo, at Sinatra’s home in Palm Springs, California, in 1965.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra and his parents in Las Vegas in 1965

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra shaving, 1965.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra and an associate leave Sinatra’s offices on the grounds of Warner Bros. Studios, 1965.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra, 1965

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra watches his son on television, 1965

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra and Count Basie, 1965

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra rehearsing, 1965.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra and Count Basie, 1965.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In Miami, where he appeared with Joe E. Lewis for two weeks this year, Frank Sinatra tells his bodyguard, Ed Pucci, that he will clear the table by yanking the cloth off without disturbing the china.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In Miami in 1965, Frank Sinatra tosses a tablecloth after yanking it from a cluttered tabletop.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In a Miami hotel room Frank Sinatra fell off his chair howling at a joke told by his opening act and longtime friend, comedian Joe E. Lewis, 1965.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra backstage with Sammy Davis Jr. and Natalie Wood during Davis’ run on Broadway in the play, Golden Boy, New York, 1965.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra backstage, 1965.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra in rehearsal, 1965.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra LIFE cover, April 23, 1965

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE Magazine April 23, 1965

LIFE Magazine

Gorgeous Early Polaroids: A LIFE Photographer Plays With the SX-70

January 15, 2020December 7, 2014 by

Instant photography is now, with smartphones, the law of the land and a defining aspect of our digital age. But the phenomenon has pre-digital roots. Polaroid co-founder Edwin H. Land introduced his first “Land Camera” way back in 1947.

His real advance came in 1972, when Polaroid unveiled a marvelous (in every sense of the word) device called the SX-70. That version of the instant camera fully captured the imagination and the attention of photography buffs, industrial design aficionados and pop culture commentators alike. Far from a mere consumer product, the SX-70 quickly became associated with, and in a sense helped to define, the early Seventies.

Self-described gadget-nerd Harry McCracken put the camera’s significance in perspective in a tremendous piece on Land and the SX-70 a few years back. Citing the writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke’s “law” that advanced technology is, at its best, indistinguishable from magic, McCracken wrote that he could not think “of a greater gadget than the SX-70 Land Camera. . . . The sheer magnitude of its ambition and innovation dwarfs the Walkman, iPod, and nearly every other consumer-electronics product you can name.”

Here, LIFE.com pays tribute to Land’s vision and his determination to, as he once put it, “provide an opportunity for creativity that other photography doesn’t allow.”

In the gallery above are pictures made with the first-generation SX-70 by LIFE photographer Co Rentmeester, who experimented with the camera—before it went on sale to the general public—while shooting the cover story on Land for the October 27, 1972, issue of the magazine.

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

A study in motion featuring two dancers from the Joffrey Ballet, made with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, 1972.

Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Portrait of a fashion model, made with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, 1972.

Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Nude photographed with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, 1972.

Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Wood and flower, photographed with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, 1972.

Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A farm in Pennsylvania photographed with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, 1972.

Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dancers photographed from above with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, 1972.

Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Children at a school in Lancaster County, Penn., photographed with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, 1972.

Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dancers photographed from above with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, 1972.

Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Portrait of a child, made with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, 1972.

Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Edwin H. Land used one of his own creations, a Polaroid Land Camera, in 1972.

Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The October 27, 1972 cover of LIFE magazine, featuring Edwin Land.

Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hipsterless Brooklyn: Photos From a Vanished World

February 24, 2020December 7, 2014 by

Brooklyn is big. If it were its own city, and not part of Gotham, its 2.5 million residents would make up the fourth largest metropolis in the United States. Brooklyn covers almost a hundred square miles of intensely varied terrain, from the beaches of Coney Island and Sea Gate to the brownstones of Park Slope and the thronging sidewalks of Williamsburg—a neighborhood filled with stoop-shouldered young men who, evidently, can afford fedoras but have difficulty finding socks, or pants that fit.

There’s cobblestoned Dumbo; the mean streets of East New York; the mansions of Brooklyn Heights; the tree-lined avenues (and, miracle of miracles, driveways) of Ditmas Park; the glories of Prospect Park; the soaring container cranes of Red Hook; the unnameable, party-colored, aromatic ooze of the Gowanus Canal.

The borough boasts countless ethnicities, creeds and religions. It’s somehow wildly bustling and unselfconsciously low-key at the same time. It has given the world memorable phrases (fuhgeddaboudit) and immortal delicacies (the egg cream with no egg and no cream). Brooklyn is cool.

These photos of Brooklyn, made by LIFE’s Ed Clark right after World War II, show something that’s long been elemental to the borough’s enduring appeal: a free-wheeling and unpretentious self-confidence.

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

View of the Manhattan Bridge, connecting Brooklyn with that island across the East River, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Trolley tracks on the corner of Flushing Ave., Graham and Broadway. The last trolleys in Brooklyn stopped running in 1956.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn, New York 1946

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Corner of Middagh and Hicks, Brooklyn Heights, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jumping rope on Siegel Street near Humboldt, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

City veterans housing project, Canarsie, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn, New York 1946

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Listening to a Dodgers-Giants ballgame on the radio, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ebbets Field, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dodgers ballgame, Ebbets Field, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dodgers fans, Ebbets Field, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jack Kaufman outside his barber shop on Rogers Avenue in Brooklyn in 1946, holding a signed baseball that once beaned future Hall of Famer Joe Medwick.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Subway entrance, Eastern Parkway at Utica Avenue, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn, New York 1946

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grand Army Plaza, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Prospect Park, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

On the waterfront, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Moore Street near Graham Avenue, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sumner Avenue (now Marcus Garvey Boulevard) near Myrtle Avenue in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grocery shopping, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn, New York 1946

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Under the elevated tracks, Broadway at Lynch, Brooklyn, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn Bridge, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Holiday Jeer: Good-for-Nothing Gifts From Back in the Day

December 10, 2020December 5, 2014 by

In 1953 LIFE featured a number of gifts that, the magazine assured its readers, were far “better to give than to receive.” For our part, after spending a little time with these photos by Yale Joel, we’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that, with one or two exceptions (those velvet glasses acting as a hairnet are kind of cool), these items are preposterous whether one is giving or receiving.

As LIFE noted in its December 7, 1953 issue:

When a sequined $7.50 fly swatter turned out to be one of the best-selling gifts last Christmas (a time of year when flies are rare), department stores were quick to turn its success into a trend. This year the country’s gift counters abound in homely household objects which have been gilded, bedecked with pearls and rhinestones and upped in price. Holiday shoppers whose main object is to pamper the recipient may now choose jeweled back-scratchers which are almost too pretty to use, velvet eyeglasses which are designed to be worn instead of a hat, time-pieces for pets who can not tell time. Here is a selection of this year’s silly Christmas gifts.

Thank goodness we’ve evolved as a society and as individuals to the point where ridiculous and overpriced presents are no longer on anyone’s wish list. Right?

Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953

Caption from LIFE: “Sleep mask for light sleepers is satin-edged in gold braid, has gold eyelashes, brows and twinkling rhinestone stars.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)

Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953

Caption from LIFE: “A back-scratcher encrusted with gilt, pearls and sea shells is an expensive adaptation of a standard 39-cent model.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)

Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953

Caption from LIFE: “Work gloves with red felt fingernails and a big ring on the wedding finger.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)

Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953

Caption from LIFE: “Velvet glasses with net lenses, based on the theory that there are women who wear spectacles to hold their hair back.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)

Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953

Caption from LIFE: “Spray gun is coated with gilt and trimmed with bee and flowers, might be used on household pests when company is around.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)

Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953

Caption from LIFE: “Swiss watch adorning gold collar, maker says, prompts wearer to bark to go out. Compass in place of watch costs $22.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)

Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953

Caption from LIFE: “Leopard print gives a frivolous look to knitted nylon pants and bra. This is a useful notion of the season, being an economical substitute for the expensive fancy lingerie many men like to give as presents. The spots, which make fabric opaque, do not change with washing.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)

Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953

Caption from LIFE: “Glasses have no lenses, but feature what looks to be a costume jewelry tear-drop dangling from the frame.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)

Powerful Portraits of Vietnam: Larry Burrows’ ‘Reaching Out,’ 1966

February 26, 2020December 2, 2014 by

In October 1966, on a mud-splattered hill just south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Vietnam, LIFE’s Larry Burrows made a photograph that, for generations, has served as the most indelible, searing illustration of the horrors inherent in that long, divisive war and, by implication, in all wars.

In Burrows’ photo, commonly known as Reaching Out, an injured Marine Gunnery Sgt. Jeremiah Purdie, a blood-stained bandage on his head appears to be inexorably drawn to a stricken comrade. Here, in one astonishing frame, we witness tenderness and terror, desolation and fellowship and, above all, the power of a simple human gesture to transform, if only for a moment, an utterly inhuman landscape.

The longer we consider that scarred landscape, however, the more sinister and unfathomable it grows. The deep, ubiquitous mud slathered, it seems, on everything; trees ripped to jagged stumps by artillery shells and rifle fire; human figures distorted by wounds, bandages, helmets, flak jackets; and, perhaps most unbearably, the evident normalcy of it all for the young Americans gathered there in the aftermath of a firefight on a godforsaken hilltop thousands of miles from home.

The scene, which might have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch if Bosch had lived in an age of machine guns, helicopters and enormous, mechanized military interventions on the far side of the globe possesses a riveting, nightmare quality that’s rarely been equaled in war photography.

All the more extraordinary, then, that LIFE did not even publish the picture until several years after Burrows shot it. The magazine did publish a number of other pictures Burrows made during that same assignment, in October 1966. (Some of those photos, along with others never published, appear in this story).

It was five years later, in February 1971, that LIFE ran Reaching Out for the first time. The occasion of its first publication was somber: an article commemorating Burrows, who was killed that month in a helicopter crash in Laos.

“There is little hope,” Graves asserted, “that any survived.” He then wrote:

I do not think it is demeaning to any other photographer in the world for me to say that Larry Burrows was the single bravest and most dedicated war photographer I know of. He spent nine years covering the Vietnam War under conditions of incredible danger, not just at odd times but over and over again. We kept thinking up other, safer stories for him to do, but he would do them and go back to the war. As he said, the war was his story, and he would see it through. His dream was to stay until he could photograph a Vietnam at peace.

Larry was English, a polite man, self-effacing, warm with his friends but totally cool in combat. He had deep passions, and the deepest was to make people confront the reality of the war, not look away from it. He was more concerned with people than with issues, and he had great sympathy for those who suffered …

He had been through so much, always coming out magically unscathed, that a myth of invulnerability grew up about him. Friends came to believe he was protected by some invisible armor. But I don’t think he believed that himself. Whenever he went in harm’s way he knew, precisely, what the dangers were and how vulnerable he was.

John Saar, LIFE’s Far East Bureau Chief . . . often worked with Larry, and today he sent this cable:

“The depth of his commitment and concentration was frightening. He could have been a surgeon or soldier or almost anything else, but he chose photography and was so dedicated that he saw the whole world in 35-mm exposures. Work was his life, eventually his death, and Burrows I think wouldn’t have bitched.”

All these years later, it’s still worth recounting one small example of the way that the wry Briton endeared himself to his peers, as well as his subjects. In typed notes that accompanied Burrows’ film when it was flown from Vietnam to LIFE’s offices in New York, the photographer apologized — apologized — for what he feared might be substandard descriptions of the scenes he shot, and how he shot them: “Sorry if my captioning is not up to standard,” Burrows wrote to his editors, “but with all that sniper fire around, I didn’t dare wave a white notebook.”

In April 2008, after 37 years of rumors, false hopes and tireless effort by their families, colleagues and news organizations to find the remains of the four photographers killed in Laos in ’71, their partial remains were finally located and shipped to the United States. Today, those remains reside in a stainless-steel box beneath the floor of the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Above them, in the museum’s memorial gallery, is a glass wall that bears the names of almost 2,000 journalists who, since 1837, have died while doing their jobs.

Kent Potter was just 23 years old when he lost his life doing what he loved. Keisaburo Shimamoto was 34. Henri Huet was 43. Larry Burrows, the oldest of the bunch, was 44.

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

In a defining image of the Vietnam war, the wounded Marine Gunnery Sgt. Jeremiah Purdie (center, with bandaged head) reached toward a stricken comrade after a fierce firefight south of the DMZ, October 1966.

Larry Burrows/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

U.S. Marine in Vietnam, October 1966.

Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Escorted by tanks and supported by air strikes that sear the jungle just ahead, troops of the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines, begin a sweep.” Vietnam, October 1966.

Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Four Marines recover the body of a fifth as their company comes under fire near Hill 484.” Vietnam, October 1966. NOTE: At right is the French-born photojournalist Catherine Leroy (1945-2006); she was cropped out of the version of this photo that originally ran in LIFE.

Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

U.S. Marines carried their wounded during a firefight near the southern edge of the DMZ, Vietnam, October 1966. Photographer Larry Burrows, whose images brought home to LIFE readers in full color the horrors taking place in Vietnam’s lush countryside, was killed along with three other photographers when their helicopter was shot down over Laos in 1971.

Larry Burrows/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American Marines aid wounded comrades during Operation Prairie near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.

Larry Burrows—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American Marines aid wounded comrades during Operation Prairie near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.

Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American Marines aid a wounded comrade during Operation Prairie near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.

Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American Marines near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.

Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An American Marine looks at the body of a North Vietnamese killed during Operation Prairie near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.

Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A dazed, wounded American Marine gets bandaged during Operation Prairie near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.

Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American Marines, Operation Prairie, near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.

Larry Burrows— Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A wounded American Marine, Operation Prairie, near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.

Larry Burrows— Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American Marines eat rations during a lull in the fighting near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.

Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American Marines receive the sacrament of Communion during a lull in the fighting near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.

Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE magazine, Oct. 28, 1966.

Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE magazine, Oct. 28, 1966.

Larry Burrows—LIFE Magazine

Adolf Eichmann in Israel: Portraits of a Nazi War Criminal

January 15, 2020December 1, 2014 by

In 1963, the political theorist Hannah Arendt added a chilling (and, ultimately, controversial because it is so often misunderstood) phrase to the international lexicon: “the banality of evil.” Arendt coined the provocative expression in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, which in turn grew out of her reporting for the New Yorker on the trial of one of the principal Nazi officials behind the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann.

In Arendt’s view, Eichmann was an at-once monstrous and pathetic creature who represented the apotheosis of the Third Reich’s unique obsession with mass slaughter on one hand, and rote, business-like documentation and organization on the other. Here was a man, after all, who entirely relied at trial on the now-infamous defense that he had merely “been following orders” when he organized the transport of Jews and other “undesirables” to Nazi death camps.

For Arendt, such reasoning was not evidence of pure, unmitigated evil, but instead showed that subsuming one’s humanity and decency in a system as murderous as the Third Reich’s was nothing more (or less) than an abandonment of morality in the face of something bigger. (Not, Arendt insisted, in the face of something better, or something more worthy of admiration but something bigger. Eichmann, after all, admitted that his ruthless efficiency in carrying out the “final solution” derived as much from a desire to further his career as from any profound ideological sympathy with the Reich’s stated aims of genocide-driven empire.)

Critics of Arendt’s “banality of evil” formulation, meanwhile, argue that her theory argued to its extreme could actually absolve war criminals of any crimes at all. “If someone like Eichmann is, in the end, just like everyone else,” the reasoning goes, “and we’re all potential Nazis, then how can we judge his innocence or his guilt?” The only problem with that proposition is that Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, preemptively scuttles it by pointing out that, while we might all be capable of Nazi-like savagery, the entire point of free will and living a moral life is that we choose whether or not to act savagely.

The potential for criminality is not the same as acting in a criminal way. Arendt’s critics often ignore or willfully blur that distinction.

Here, more than five decades after his May 1962 execution by hanging in Israel after a 14-week war-crimes trial, LIFE.com presents pictures of Eichmann in prison: raw, strangely intimate photographs by Gjon Mili chronicling the “arch war criminal” (as LIFE put it) engaged in the most quotidian of pursuits reading, writing, washing, eating all the while fully aware, as most of the world was fully aware, that what awaited him at the end of the trial was a noose.

But before Eichmann’s trial even began, the controversy around his capture and arrival in Israel was intense. He was snatched in May 1960 by “Israeli nationals” (translation: Mossad agents) from Argentina, where he’d been living as a fugitive for 16 years, and carted to Israel to answer for his role in the Holocaust before and during the Second World War. Eichmann’s kidnapping was criticized and is still criticized, by some, to this day as a violation of the sovereign rights of a member state of the United Nations. But when, after frenzied back-room negotiations, Israel and Argentina issued a joint statement in August 1960 laying the matter to rest, Eichmann’s fate was effectively sealed.

As LIFE reported to its readers in its April 14, 1961, issue, in which some of the pictures in this gallery first appeared:

Once in a while some great man becomes the symbol of the era in which he lived. Less often one man becomes the symbol of a quality of his era of its good or evil, its reason or madness. Such a man is Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi, a symbol of the hatred and unspeakable hideousness of Hitler’s Germany.

Here he is in this dramatic study the world’s first intimate look at a man who vanished 16 years ago and who for all those years was the hunted, almost faceless arch war criminal. As head of the Gestapo office for Jewish affairs, Eichmann had organized with ruthless efficiency transport systems which carried six million Jews to extermination centers. After the war the survivors of his “final solution” of “the Jewish question” sought him all over the world. They had little to go on but memories of the arrogant gaze, the polished Nazi boots. But they found him last May, in Argentina, where Israeli agents dramatically (and illegally) kidnapped him.

Unveiled, he had the tense look of a jackal at bay. Says Webster of jackals: “They are smaller, usually more yellowish, and much more cowardly than wolves, and sometimes hunt in packs at night.” Hunt with the pack is what Eichmann says he did, in his memoirs previously published in LIFE that is, he only “obeyed orders.” Now trapped, he appeared smaller and yellower than his legend. Stripped of the trappings of the brutal system he served, he had no strut.

This week he would go into a Jerusalem court with the eyes of the world on him to stand trial for crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity. The trial, which has been attacked on legal grounds both in and out of Israel, was partly for the benefit of young Israelis to whom his crimes are so many lines in a history book. But more was on trial than Eichmann the man. It was the whole Nazi generation which condoned, participated in or didn’t want to know about it.

Adolf Eichmann awaited trial in Israel, 1961.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Barbed wire his victims once knew confined Eichmann’s walks.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Eichmann ate alone, but watched from outside. Most of the guards did not speak any German, and all were forbidden to talk with him.

Gjon Mili/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

His daily bath was a make-do affair but part of the prison’s strict routine.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A medical check after breakfast, watched by a guard, was part of Eichmann’s daily routine.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Doing chores, Eichmann mopped the bathroom floor in his jail near Haifa.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Eichmann draped shirts and underwear he had washed himself over bars of a window.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Reading and writing were both permitted, and Eichmann concentrated on books about Nazi regime.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Served by a guard, Eichmann cut breakfast margarine as matzo was put on his tray during Passover week, shortly before trial.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Trying to talk during the daily outdoor exercise period, prisoner Eichmann met unshakeable silence from prison guards. He was allowed to walk outside for a half hour a day, when the weather was good.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Adolf Eichmann awaited trial in Israel, 1961.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sitting around outdoors afforded plenty of time for Eichmann to think and to wonder.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Adolf Eichmann in prison, 1961.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

For almost a year while he awaited trial, he spoke to no one except Israeli police interrogators and his lawyers.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

While Eichmann slept, an observer watched and the single electric bulb overhead burned all night.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Adolf Eichmann awaited trial in Israel, 1961.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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