On Blondes

by Joanna Pitman

  By the time America entered the Second World War, Hollywood was teeming with racially superior and socially well-behaved blondes. Shirley Temple had already brought the newly tamed blonde down to baby level; and in 1941, a new grown-up clean-cut blonde appeared on the scene. Life magazine pinned down the precise moment of her arrival. ‘The 49th minute of the movie I Wanted Wings is already marked as one of the historic moments of the cinema. It was the moment when an unknown young actress named Veronica Lake walked into camera range and waggled a head of long blonde hair at a suddenly enchanted public . . . Veronica Lake’s hair has been acclaimed by men, copied by girls, cursed by mothers, and viewed with alarm by moralists. It is called the “strip-tease style”, the “sheep-dog style” and the “bad-girl style” (though few except nice girls wear it), but to most movie-goers it is simply the Veronica Lake style.’ Life went on to inform its readers that ‘Miss Lake has some 150,000 hairs on her head, each measuring about .0024 inches in cross-section. The hair varies in length from 17 inches in front to 24 inches in back and falls about 8 inches below the shoulders. For several inches it falls straight from the scalp and then begins to wave slowly.’ The magazine completed its list of essential Lake data with the gem that ‘her hair catches fire fairly often when she is smoking’.

  The unrivalled pin-up girl of the war period was another clean-cut blonde, Betty Grable, who ruled the film lot at Twentieth Century-Fox and became the number-one box-office attraction in the country. The Grable of Pin-Up Girl, Coney Island and Song of the Islands attracted filmgoers in their largest-ever numbers. Grable grossed $100 million at the box office during her peak years and was in many ways a perfect propaganda vehicle. She was blonde and banal, tall, well-scrubbed and ever ready with a chirpy song-and-dance routine. Far from the luxury-loving vamp charged with high-voltage eroticism, Grable was warm and safe, nostalgic and virtuous, a girl with a heart of gold who was prepared to roll up her sleeves and do her bit for the war effort.

  In her most famous incarnation, her pin-up shot looking back over her shoulder above a pair of legs insured for $1 million, she became a symbol of everything that American boys longed for. Twenty thousand copies were sold every week to GIs and her trite smiling image accompanied them everywhere they went, tacked up over barrack beds in thousands of Quonset huts. For the the American fighting man, the pillowy blonde Grable, clean, loyal, beautiful and unthreatening, became the antithesis of war, an idealised dream just out of reach. The power of her appeal was sufficient to raise $40,000 in war donations in 1943 in exchange for a single pair of her nylons.

  Racial attitudes go a long way in explaining the American desire for this new generation of wholesome wartime Hollywood blondes. Black American populations had long provided the most visible racial fears in America; and in the run-up to the Second World War their civil rights demands were aggravated by the blatantly discriminatory employment policies of the military establishment. But black American racial problems were considered a home-grown issue. In the years before America entered the war, public opinion studies found that, despite the usual excess of xenophobia and jingoism, there was little public antipathy felt towards German-Americans who were well-assimilated. It was found, however, that Americans distrusted Jews more than any other Europeans except Italians. Prejudice was rampant. Jews and Italians were considered inferior stock, dark and swarthy elements which threatened the Nordic purity that was taken to be America’s strength.l

  After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the key target of racism shifted and the most poisonous expressions of prejudice were directed at the Japanese-Americans. The Governor of Idaho, who announced that ‘they live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats’,104 suggested that they should all be deported back to Japan and that American power should then sink the archipelago. In the end more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were rounded up from three West Coast states and packed off far inland, their civil and material rights withdrawn. J. Earl Warren, the Attorney General of California, explained the rationale: ‘We believe that when we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them . . . But when we deal with the Japanese we are in an entirely different field and we cannot form an opinion that we believe to be sound.’ It was an interesting manifestation of the colouring divide: the fair and light-skinned we can deal with, the dark we do not trust.105

  Jingoism and prejudice did much to reinforce the American belief in blonde superiority; and Hollywood did its best to make it manifest. In spreading its pervasive aura of whiteness, its pin-up girls had to cleanse their bodies and their behaviour of indications that whites traditionally associated with minorities. The most startling example of this transformation occurred in the career of Rita Hayworth, a wartime pin-up of such bombshell potency that her image was painted on an atomic bomb used in a test to obliterate Bikini atoll in the South Pacific. Rita was Spanish, born Margarita Cansino. Until her epiphany, she had starred as a seethingly passionate Latin-dark heroine in the Charlie Chan films. But in 1937 she married a former used-car salesman named Edward Judson who realised that, like the cars in his showroom, his wife needed a ‘new front’. He shamelessly set about remodelling her as the essence of perfect white beauty for wartime consumption. First he changed her name to Hayworth, redolent of the agrarian dreams of homesick GIs. Then he dyed her hair strawberry blonde and had her hairline altered with electrolysis. Finally he arranged elocution lessons to eradicate all traces of her Spanish accent. Hayworth was photographed against idyllic American rural backdrops, wearing patriotic star-spangled red white and blue. She went on to become one of America’s top box office stars.m

  While domestic glamour accounted for the majority of Hollywood’s wartime output, the studios also managed to portray the all-American girl participating directly in the war. One of the most enthusiastic vehicles was Paramount’s 1943 film So Proudly We Hail in which three de luxe stars – Veronica Lake, Paulette Goddard and Claudette Colbert - replicated, not entirely convincingly, the lives of a group of nurses dug in against Japanese attack on the island of Corregidor in Manila Bay. Putting aside the dehumanised, battle-hardened reality of nurses living in tunnels 400 feet beneath the surface of the bombed island, Paramount retained the soft lighting reserved for its most sumptuous female stars, but filmed them with a severe minimum of make-up. The climax of the story centres on Olivia, played by Veronica Lake, a Jap-hating fury whose fiance has been killed at Pearl Harbor. The women are trapped in their quarters by the Japanese, cut off from their escape vehicle and with a single grenade to repel the advancing enemy. Olivia steps forward and grabs the grenade with the words ‘So long, Davie, thanks for everything . . . it’s our only chance . . . it’s one of us or all of us . . . good-bye.’ A long close-up of her face focuses on the sacrificial resolution in her eyes. She lets down her blonde hair, pulls out the pin and then walks slowly towards the enemy. With her back to the camera, the aroused Japanese move in around her like ants lured to a honeypot. Moments later the grenade destroys them all. Her blonde hair has become the ultimate femme fatale attraction, one might say the biggest blonde bombshell of the war.

  k Racial stereotyping of Jews was so common that one Jewish professor of medicine, in an attempt to refute it, classified the noses of 2,836 New York Jewish men and found that only 14 percent of them had the stereotypical ‘Jewish’ hooked nose.

  l In 1921 the first Miss America had been Margaret Gorman, a fifteen-year-old blue-eyed high-school girl with blonde hair. Roughly one in three of all the Miss America contestants over the years has been blonde, few of them natural. The first Jewish Miss America was Bess Myerson, crowned in 1945.

  m Goebbels tried to lure Dietrich back to make films in Germany but she refused all offers unless, she said, she could get close enough to the Fiihrer to shoot him.

  14

  Dirty Pillow Slip

  The big chief of all blondes was of course Marilyn Monroe. She was the wiggling embodim
ent of every adolescent male fantasy. All glossy blonde curls, ripe hips, cartoonishly ballooning bosoms and that moistly receptive deep red mouth, she was a fabulous bodily projection which invited the slavering gaze and became the ultimate object of illicit sexual desire.

  Monroe was a construct, a carefully moulded vehicle for male voyeurism, whose job was to light up the 1950s and make herself available to the world. This modern professional dumb blonde first took shape under the insidious influence of the Californian sunshine when the head of the Blue Book modelling agency, a woman by the unlikely name of Emiline Snively, persuaded Norma Jean Mortenson to dye her mousy hair blonde. The story goes that she also advised her to cut a quarter of an inch off one heel to create the wiggle. Groucho Marx immediately spotted her luminescent magic and devised a cameo role for her in his film Love Happy. ‘She’s Mae West, Theda Bara and Bo Peep all rolled into one,’ he raved. The male star-making machinery of Hollywood rapidly took over and transformed a promising model into a devastating angel of sex called Marilyn Monroe. By the time she had signed her first contract as a starlet with Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio publicists were sending out pin-up photos and arranging magazine features. Every statistic of her shapely body and every detail of her unhappy background was enlisted for the campaign, highlighting all the themes that were to become central to her popular image.106

  The type was established early and it stuck. Monroe’s exquisite package of curves and blonde hair (she chose a shade called ‘Dirty Pillow Slip’), her half-closed eyes and her innocently whispered sexual innuendos turned her into the world’s first international bulb-popping Movie Star. She was a natural and entirely self-possessed exhibitionist, and she nestled happily into her assigned playmate role. She won starring parts, married Joe DiMaggio and learned how to make love to the camera. With popular culture in 1950s America still characterised by a near-Victorian prudery which equated sex with depravity, Monroe’s open, innocent and unqualified sexual abandon was simply sensational.

  But her status and pay were increasingly at odds with her popularity. Locked into a ‘slave’ contract with Twentieth Century-Fox, she was virtually powerless to determine her own career. The dumb blonde routine had brought her fame, but she needed to convince people that there was a serious actress under the fluffy curls. In spite of setting up her own production company and turning out several subtly nuanced comic performances, she never did throw off the winsome dumb baby act. Daryl Zanuck, the production chief of Twentieth Century-Fox, always referred to her as the ‘strawhead’. And judgments of her as the hottest piece of sex on earth ran hand in hand with judgments of her as the ultimate dumb blonde. When George Axelrod’s comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? opened on Broadway in 1957 it became a reminder that many people saw Monroe as a joke. Attending the premier of the play, Monroe sat through the story of a dumb self-obsessed sex symbol ‘whose golden curls and fantastic behind have endeared her to moviegoers the world over’.

  The concept of the dumb blonde that emerged in 1950s America in the unforgettable shape of Marilyn Monroe was – consciously or not – a creation of men and for men. It was made at least partly in response to the growing assertiveness of America’s women. In 1945 American men had returned from the war to find their women more confident and more independent than ever before. Hundreds of thousands of women, already eager to work outside the home, had come forward and taken up job vacancies left by men who had been drafted. They had worked competently, many of them on production lines in the auto and electrical plants central to the war effort. They had earned their money (albeit less than men) and proven themselves capable of doing men’s jobs. They had gained power, status and a new assertiveness. When returning veterans realised this, they saw the props of a crucial social support system being kicked away. At stake was the myth that women are made only for marriage and motherhood.

  Polls taken at the end of the war revealed that between 60 and 85 per cent of American women in non-traditional jobs did not want to relinquish them. Two months after the war ended, two hundred women picketed a Ford plant in Detroit with placards reading ‘Stop Discrimination Because of Sex’. A small and heavily embattled group, these women were determined to maintain their sense of empowerment and to spread an awareness of gender inequality. Even if levels of pay and representation still lagged far behind those of men, a legacy of expectation had been established.

  The political climate was deeply inhospitable to ideas of social change. The men who ran Hollywood – and they were all men, many of them Jewish - whose job it was to anticipate and reflect the social (male) desires of the day, reacted by creating a film star in a completely new mould whose job was subconsciously to subvert this growing female independence. They banished all those sensibly shod career woman role models from wartime movies, strong self-confident women who rolled up their sleeves, did without make-up, and got things done. In their place they put Monroe. She was the perfect backlash. She was vulnerable, dreamily soft and dependent, a colossal baby-doll whose lack of self confidence meant that she needed the approval of men for everything she did. She was feminine and adored. Her generous sexuality made her the subject of women’s imitation and of men’s dreams. And, given that Hollywood’s men seem to have been among the most slavish adorers of blondes, she was blonde.

  It was Monroe’s luminescent hair that generated the extraordinarily powerful erotic charge of her sexual persona. Billy Wilder recalls that she was entirely aware of this. ‘She knew it. There was another girl in the band [in Some Like It Hot] who had blonde hair. And she said to me: “No other blonde. I’m the only blonde”.’ When a brunette played a scene with Monroe, she might as well have been painted on the backdrop. Again several years later, during filming of Let’s Make Love with Yves Montand, Monroe complained to the director that a minor actress had put blonde streaks in her hair. She refused to report to the studio until the hair colour was changed or the actress dismissed. Monroe herself invested more time and more money on her hair than on any other aspect of her appearance. Details of her peroxide habit can be found in Simone Signoret’s autobiography:107

  Every Saturday morning the hair colorist of the late Jean Harlow would board her plane in San Diego and arrive in Los Angeles, where Marilyn’s car would be waiting for her at the airport and would bring her to our kitchen, or rather the kitchenette of Bungalow No. 21. Before allowing her to remove the bottles from her old carrying bag, Marilyn would ply her with food from a buffet – a combination of brunch and cocktail party ingredients – she had carefully prepared. The old lady would indulge with gusto. Marilyn would knock on my door, telling me to bring my towels, and then the hair-dyeing party would begin . . . When she left the two of us would be impeccably blonde – Marilyn platinum and I on the auburn side.108

  Blonde was the colour of the Hollywood sex goddess. She was already a well-established fantasy figure in magazines, in fiction and on the stage. She was a favourite subject of the illustrator Varga, whose improbably shaped blondes became the most popular calendar pin-ups of the 1930s and ’40s. P.G. Wodehouse wove her appeal into his novels: ‘Like so many substantial Americans, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag . . .’ And Raymond Chandler created a rich archive of dangerously alluring blondes such as this one from Farewell, my Lovely: ‘It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.’ By the mid-1950s, there were dozens of actresses lining up to mould themselves in the curvaceous image of its most pungent archetype, Monroe. The Swedish-born Anita Ekberg succeeded in building her fourth place in the 1951 Miss Universe contest into a tentative film career, bolstered by a leonine mane of platinum-blonde hair, a 102cm bust and a lucky break taking Monroe’s place on Bob Hope’s 1954 tour of US bases. Four years later she arrived in Rome with her husband, Anthony Steel, and their flirting, all-night drinking, barefoot dancing and public skirmishes gave the city’s paparazzi their best subject-matter fo
r years. Ekberg’s hair and her Minervan proportions immediately endeared her to Federico Fellini, who cast her as Sylvia in La dolce vita. No one who has watched the film will ever see the Trevi Fountain in the same light again.

  Diana Dors was Britain’s contribution to the buxom blonde species. She caused a sensation at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, arriving in an open pink Cadillac, displaying much of her ample body and trailing voluminous dyed blonde hair and a fine line in hot chat. Promoted initially as a sex symbol, she refused to accept the connotations of dumb sexuality. Instead she skilfully manipulated her career, strewn in the best Hollywood tradition with personal scandal and professional disputes, towards an enduring television personality. The French fielded Brigitte Bardot as their leading example of the breed, a glamorous and generously proportioned ex-model who dyed her long brown hair blonde and became known as ‘the Sex Kitten’.n

  She went on, after several disastrous marriages, to live with a large number of cats. One more Monroe acolyte frequently dismissed as a dumb blonde was Jayne Mansfield, whose hair, breasts and general vulgarity won her a flimsy film career for a few years. As Bette Davis said of her, ‘Dramatic art, in her opinion, is knowing how to fill a sweater’.

  Increasingly the subject of joyous ribaldry, the numerous blonde mammary women engineered and sent out on to the screen in the 1950s and 1960s were nevertheless highly professional sex symbols who fulfilled Hollywood’s requirements as popular saleable commodities. Hollywood moguls, most of them vain, exploitative, megalomaniac pocket dictators, tended to equate good movies with big profits – and that usually meant a big, bosomy blonde star. When Monroe died in 1962, it is said that a frantic Harry Cohn, the lecherous head of Columbia Studios, yelled, ‘Get me another blonde!’ For years his line-up of blondes continued to reduce grown men to a state of wobbly pubescent longing.