by Greg Proops
Second Base: RITA HAYWORTH (1918–1987)
The ’40s were full of bombshells, but you should think twice before trying it with Rita. The problem is when you see her, you can’t think. Starring the dazzling Latina girl they made over by plucking her hairline and dying her mane red, Gilda is not a movie, it is a love letter to her heat. She can sing and dance just as good as she wants, so sit down and gaze, little man. Miss Hayworth is Dresden to their campfire. Her allure is so strong she has gravitational pull. The second sack is hers to defend. She can pivot like no one.
Shortstop: HEDY LAMARR (1914–2000)
Hedy Lamarr was a bombshell by day and scientific wizard by night. “The Most Beautiful Woman in Films” was her nickname in Hollywood, following her earlier nickname “The Most Beautiful Woman in Europe.” She was a bewitching Viennese Jewish girl who married a fascist arms dealer. How were your teenage years? Hedy scandalized pictures by cavorting nude and having an onscreen close-up orgasm in a Czech film called Ecstasy. She made her way to Hollywood and was ravishing all through the ’40s. Along the way she teamed up with her neighbor, the avant-garde composer George Antheil, and they decided to invent and patent a frequency-hopping spread-spectrum device to keep enemies from jamming torpedoes. It is the basis for what we now call Bluetooth and loads of cell phone communications. Her exotic looks made men jelly; her brain made men jam. She starts the double play and finishes you. And then invents instant replay.
Third Base: BRIGITTE BARDOT (1934–)
Bardot’s body deserves a monument in the town square. Her body is a monument in the town square. BB’s face, lips, and hair are devastating. Her intelligence and sense of humor on screen propel her to the top of the bombshell bay. There is no ocean large enough to deter men from trying, and she don’t care. Like Everest, when you are that much of a physical presence, you just are. The goddesses cry in anguished plaintive tones, the gods plan to transform themselves into mortals and try to fool her. She stays inviolate in the center of the universe. Glowing golden eternally. Don’t even think of bunting on her. The hot corner is melted and stuck to the grass.
Left Field: CLAUDIA CARDINALE (1938–)
Cute as a nymph, Claudia Cardinale has a résumé full of art films with Fellini and Visconti. She hated Hollywood and is a feminist and gay rights advocate. Speaks several languages. La Cardinale lies on a tiger rug in The Pink Panther. A sight you will never forget. She is brutally manhandled by Henry Fonda and digs it in Once Upon a Time in the West, then turns around and fronts a group of would-be rapists. Italy claims her, but we all need her bad. She has it all. Claudia makes the blind sighted. She will be an able keeper of the field.
Center Field: URSULA ANDRESS (1936–)
There have been seven thousand Bond films and twice as many Bond Girls. Lots of foxes, a few bombshells, the remarkably named Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, played by Honor Blackman, who leads an all-girl flying circus, but Ursula Andress did everything before the theme song even got written. Her empire was built as the first BG in Dr. No. Wearing a white bikini and a giant knife, she strode from the sea like an armed and dangerous Venus and blew our minds. Blond, deadly, totally glamorous. She could make the pope rob a convenience store to buy her a trinket. The big area in center is too small a stage for what she is dealing.
Right Field: PAM GRIER (1949–)
She’s the meanest chick in town!
—poster for Foxy Brown
The baddest One-Chick Hit Squad that ever hit town!
—poster for Coffy
Pam Grier was the Queen of Blaxploitation and the first great black Woman action lead. Grier was cool as a popsicle and vicious as an underfed wildcat. She was badassery served piping hot. She always gets violent man-style revenge on ratty boyfriends, pimps, and drug kingpins. Her sexy ’fro and hot pants make all kinds of music. A dude cries out she’s “a whole lotta Woman.” Pam Grier is so magnifique that she has been brought back many times to reprise and venerate her own groundbreaking smashtasticness. In Jackie Brown she is sexy as hell and still outwitting appallingly evil gangsters. You need a candle and some slow jams and an iron will. In real life she was with the tempestuous Richard Pryor, so stand well back. Bonus bombshell points for being in Scream Blacula Scream. Right field needs the best arm. Ms. Grier has it.
Starting Pitcher: RAQUEL WELCH (1940–)
Mount Rushmore is not as rock solid as Raquel Welch. One Million Years B.C. has lizards dressed as dinosaurs, a primitive form of cave English is spoken, and in the midst of all this camp, Miss Welch stormed the troglodytes with a wildly stuffed prehistoric bikini and sexy pampooties. The ’60s and ’70s play Shakespeare off her balcony. Boomsnackulous enduring sex symbol, she gives symbolic sex a good name. Because there is nothing symbolic about it. You are lucky she doesn’t start every game with that heat.
Starting Pitcher: SOPHIA LOREN (1934–)
Mother, actress, Oscar winner, neofascist, Sophia Loren is a glistening megastar of loads of pictures. Married to icky hobbity producer Carlo Ponti, but available to Cary Grant. Her waist is waspy, her top voluminous, her hips definitive. You would sell your mother into servitude if she batted her eyelashes at you. Mother would understand. Mad curveball. Extreme right-hander.
Starting Pitcher: ELIZABETH TAYLOR (1932–2011)
Forget the Percodan decades, Liz has magic violet eyes and all the cookies in the shop. In A Place in the Sun with Montgomery Clift, she is so hot she sets him straight. A child star and millionaire entrepreneur, she took all the drugs, owned all the diamonds, married all the guys, went to all the rehabs, had all the operations, and then took names. She requires buckets of jewels and a small dog. She ate junk food and wore cashmere into the pool. Toward the end, she showed up on the patio at the Abbey Bar in West Hollywood and day-drank in her wheelchair. We all live in her wake. Just try to hit her. She has too much stuff.
Starting Pitcher: AVA GARDNER (1922–1990)
Gardner grew up barefoot in North Carolina; lucky North Carolina. Scouted from a photo as a teen, she had the verve to marry licentious elf Mickey Rooney, revive manic-depressive Frank Sinatra’s career, and tangle with contentious bandleader and snide intellectual Artie Shaw. She was carried up the steps by the male bombshell bullfighter known as Numero Uno, who also dated Bardot and Rita Hayworth. In The Killers, Ava makes you want to sell your soul to Satan for a chance to pick up her stockings. Satan makes a sale. She needs a drink. Our own Shoeless Joe. Say it is so, Ava.
Starting Pitcher: TAMARA DOBSON (1947–2006)
The most elegant of bombshells, Tamara Dobson follows after Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge for poise and class. What gives her the bombshell nod is that she was a six-foot-two fashion model who played Cleopatra Jones, a special agent to the president, who fights lesbian drug lord Shelley Winters in the ghetto. Dobson wears the hippest threads and the biggest ’fro known to humanity. She also never gets bested by a man no matter how punk-assed, sexist, or racist, and she has a superbad Corvette with automatic weapons. She is in fact the bad mamma jamma. Unhittable.
Relief Pitcher: JANE RUSSELL (1921–2011)
Jane Russell was one tough cookie and, along with Marilyn Monroe, they anti-personnel-bombshelled in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the Citizen Kane of bombshell movies. They dance and sing and get what they want. Our Jane is the perfect match to male bombshell Robert Mitchum. She and Mitch are paired a few times with incendiary results. In Macao, he is riding the ferry to Macao and looks upstairs as she is changing her stockings. Jane says, “You like the view?” Mitch says, “It’s not the Taj Mahal, but it’ll do.” It is the Taj Mahal. It’s you who won’t do. She shuts down everyone in the late innings.
Utility Player: JAYNE MANSFIELD (1921–1967)
“The girl can’t help it, she was born to please.” Mansfield’s figure anticipates the Big Bang; she was buxom, booming, and hilarious for the win. She took Marilyn to the limit. When she walks down the street at the top of The Girl Can’t Help It, the great ’50s rock ’n�
�� roll movie, Little Richard chants the phrase. As she wiggles down the street, men’s glasses crack, and if you weren’t getting the picture, the milkman’s milk bottle explodes. She is also most charming and lovable. You would leave your family on an ice floe and walk over the glacier just to drown near her. She comes off the bench with a vengeance.
Designated Hitter: MARILYN MONROE (1926–1962)
The voice, the look, the delivery, the humor, the acting, the magic, the franchise. Could only be brought down by a dynasty. A huge threat to go long every time.
Team Security: TURA SATANA (1938–2011)
Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi was born in Japan, interred in America during WWII. Gang-raped as a child, she hunted down each man who did it to exact her revenge. Moved to L.A. as a burlesque dancer, was photographed by the silent-film screen legend Harold Lloyd, dated Elvis and turned down his proposal, was an expert at martial arts, and kills a man by snapping him in two in the Russ Meyer danger-girl classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! No scalping allowed. She will kung fu your lame ass.
Owner: ANGELINA JOLIE (1975–)
Angelina is a real-world bombshell. Married to male bombshell Brad Pitt, whom we imagine and hope she leads around on a string. She flies herself around the globe doing good, giving massively to charity, and forcing world leaders to acknowledge the poor. That is bombshell sexy. Superfox and unfeasibly thin, she is a superhero for being a mensch in a world of shallow blambinas. Her tattoos will confuse you unless you read Cambodian. Hollywood is far too tiny a playground for her interests. She needs a world to change the village. As Gilbert and Sullivan might have said, she is the very model of a modern major bombshell. She owns the club and you.
POETRY I
Ovid (43 BC–c. AD 17)
Super hot. Ovid wrote of love and Metamorphoses, as well as the lament of famous heroines of history, written in couplets as letters to their men. He was famous and popular and somehow pissed off the emperor Augustus enough to get himself banished to a dump on the Black Sea for what he described as a “poem and a mistake.” Could the prim Augustus have not dug his love poems? Or was he too close with Augustus’s granddaughter Julia, whom he also had exiled and whose husband he had had waxed? We will never know for sure. Ovid wrote plays and books and is held with Virgil, another of Augustus’s favorites, and Horace as the greatest of the Latin poets. He knew from longing, as he spent years in exile writing poems addressed to the wife he would never see and the emperor who would not bend. This poem is a straight-up poem of desire, with jokes. By way of explanation, a wen is a boil or mark. Take this one to the pasture and lie down with it and a bowl of grapes. Jove is Jupiter is Zeus, the chief god. We all want more days like this.
In Summer’s Heat
In summer’s heat and mid-time of the day,
To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay,
One window shut, the other open stood,
Which gave such light as twinkles in a wood
Like twilight glimpse at setting of the sun,
Or night being past and yet not day begun.
Such light to shamefaced maidens must be shown,
Where they may sport, and seem to be unknown.
Then came Corinna in a long, loose gown,
Her white neck hid with tresses hanging down,
Resembling fair Semiramis going to bed,
Or Lais of a thousand wooers sped.
I snatched her gown, being thin the harm was small,
Yet strived she to be covered therewithal,
And, striving thus as one that would be chaste,
Betrayed herself, and yielded at the last.
Stark naked as she stood before mine eye,
Not one wen in her body could I spy.
What arms and shoulders did I touch and see?
How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me?
How smooth a belly under her waist saw I?
How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh?
To leave the rest, all liked me passing well;
I clinged her naked body, down she fell.
Judge you the rest. Being tired, she bade me kiss.
Jove send me more such afternoons as this.
THE WAY BACK I
Alexander the Great
(356 BC–323 BC)
Why was Alex so Great? Well, kids, he was young and good-looking with cool hair, a fearless, brilliant tactician, and leader of men, and oh, he conquered the world. Alexander persists through the ages, and that takes more than hot locks and bisexuality. It takes charisma and madness.
His dad was King Philip II of Macedon, a one-eyed drunk, philanderer, and military genius; his mom was Olympias, an exotic princess, witch, and devotee of mystery cults.
Aristotle (yes, that Aristotle) brought to school Alexander and all the other local princelings who made up his young posse. He read, rode, and had sex with his cohorts. Which was not unusual for then or—let’s be honest—any time in rich-kid history. They remained his lifelong inner circle on his mad trip of conquest.
The golden age of Greece was finished and Macedonia, the drunken, backward, now suddenly organized, forceful cousin to the north, was taking over. Philip dumped Olympias, because he could, and planned to take up with a teen bride. But it wasn’t to be. King Phil was stabbed at the order of Olympias, Alexander, or both, and then the assassin was conveniently run down and killed. CIA-style. No further inquiry. Case closed. Alexander was proclaimed king on the spot by his followers. He wanted to rule the world. Not many teens in any era have this kind of ambition, but after all—he was the son of a god, and he knew best.
Astride his beloved horse Bucephalas, leading Philip’s army, and floating a huge loan, Alexander set out in ships on an expedition to Turkey. He is sexy and unfulfilled. He needed fame like a drug. His favorite book was The Iliad, and he kept it by his bedside. He was obsessed with being the new Achilles, that brave warrior of the storied Trojan War who, when given the choice between a long life and glory, chose glory. Alexander threw a spear and claimed Asia as his own. Then he visited Troy, where he obtained Achilles’s armor at the gift shop and danced naked around his tomb with his best friend and part-time lover, Hephaestion. We just don’t dance naked around the tombs of lost heroes the way we used to. At least not with as much enthusiasm.
Hollywood is afraid to show how cruel and bisexual and wise he could be all at once. Which would be ironic if that type of expression was allowed in Hollywood. He is the funhouse mirror image of every tyrannical studio exec. Even more, irony comes from ancient Greece, as does male wrestling and tyranny.
Young Alexander was spoiling to fight the biggest army on legs and fought Darius’s army at the riverbank at Granicus. Parmenio, his chief general, suggested caution. Alexander ignored him and shot across the river at the head of his cavalry. The strike was so fast that the Persians were taken off guard. A sword came down aimed right for Alexander when Cleitus, one of his boys, chopped the guy’s arm off. They rode up into the huge force, and the Persians panicked and fled the field. Game over. To prove he wasn’t a sissy, he decided to execute the Greek mercenaries in the Persian army who had fought against him. They begged for mercy and offered to join his team. Hard feta. He had them all put to the sword. Gods don’t read petitions.
Alexander next met Darius at Issus in southern Turkey. Riding through the Persian flank, he personally drove Darius from the pitch. He captured Darius’s wife, daughters, and booty train. Darius sent a letter offering his daughter and half the empire if Alexander would stop. Parmenio, his main general, advised, “I would take it, if I were Alexander.” The Great replied, “So indeed would I, if I were Parmenio.” Later, he did marry Darius’s daughter, Stateira II, and her cousin just for kicks. The fun really never stopped in the ancient times. Gods know how to party. Alex eventually bested Darius on the battlefield but didn’t get the satisfaction of deciding his fate as Bessus, Darius’s cousin, trusted general, and ratty friend, had the emperor killed, thinking it would appease Alex. When
Alexander found Darius dying, he wept with frustration.
Egypt played right into Alexander’s vanity and made him pharaoh, son of the gods. He loved the adulation and the wardrobe. Taking a small party to the oracle at Siwa, Alexander set out to see who and what he really was. They were lost and dying of thirst when two crows appeared and flew in the direction they needed to head, a decided omen. When they got to the temple, the priest addressed him as a god. He went in alone and mythically asked the question he had longed to ask: “Am I the son of Zeus?” When he came out, his officers asked him what the oracle had told him, and he cagily said he had the answer he wanted. It was official—he was Zeus-Amon, the Egyptian horned deity. Part Greek god, part Egyptian god, a pragmatic combo platter for ruling a new mixed world. He was depicted on coins in that guise throughout Asia. A horned king. Gods wear many guises.