The New York City of most peoples’ imaginations usually looks and sounds like the New York of a few very distinct decades. There’s today’s post-Bloomberg New York City, of course — the bright, weirdly clean (well, it’s clean in parts of Manhattan, at least) largely smoke-free metropolis of complicated bike lanes, pedestrian malls and other “improvements” that, to most people, feel about as New Yark as a wine spritzer at a football game.
Then there’s the Big Apple of the 1970s: the New York of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver; of “Ford to City: Drop Dead” and Blondie, Television, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, the New York Dolls and the Ramones at Max’s Kansas City; of “the Bronx Is Burning” and Son of Sam. The New York, in other words, of the old, scary, late, semi-lamented Times Square of sordid lore.
Finally, there’s New York in what many consider its Golden Age: the New York City of the 1940s and 1950s, when men wore hats, women wore gloves, a dime got you a cup of coffee and — in the popular imagination, anyway — there were doormen standing on every curb, flagging down taxi cabs for dames who looked like Veronica Lake.
Here, in honor of that last vision of Gotham as a noir film set where absolutely everything is seen in deep-shadowed black-and-white, LIFE.com recalls those big, burly taxi cabs of the 1940s, and the rough-looking, distinctive characters who drove them.
Taxi Cabs 1944
William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Taxi Cabs 1944
William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Taxi Cabs 1944
William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Taxi Cabs 1944
William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Taxi Cabs 1944
William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Taxi Cabs 1944
William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Taxi Cabs 1944
William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Taxi Cabs 1944
William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Taxi Cabs 1944
William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Taxi Cabs 1944
William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Taxi Cabs 1944
William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Taxi Cabs 1944
William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A New Jersey auto-parts store manager named Richard Hollingshead Jr. came up with the idea for a drive-in theater. He received a patent for it on May 16, 1933 and, along with three other investors, cut the ribbon on the world’s first drive-in movie theater in Camden, New Jersey, on June 6, 1933. At the height of their popularity in the 1950s and ’60s, there were roughly 4,000 drive-in theaters across the U.S., but in recent times, the number dropped to a tenth of that.
During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, drive-ins began to see a resurgence. Walmart has converted 160 of its parking lots into drive-ins, and many other locations have being improvised in open spaces around the country. The phenomenon is tailor-made for this difficult summer. At drive-ins, moviegoers can be socially distant in their cars while having a communal experience and enjoying the action on the big screen.
Here, LIFE.com presents images of drive-ins in their original heyday.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Drive-In Theater
Cars filling lot at new Rancho Drive-In Theater at dusk before the start of the feature movie, 1948 (Allan Grant/LIFE Picture Collection)
Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon starred in Beach Blanket Bingo, shown at a drive-in movie theater in Florida, 1965.
Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Drive-in theater, Chicago, 1951.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fly-In-Drive-In Theater, New Jersey, 1949
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A plane settled in the parking lot of this drive-in that also accommodated fly-ins, 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An usher guided a guest at a San Francisco drive-in, 1948.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Drive-in theater, Chicago, 1951.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Drive-in theater, Los Angeles, 1949.
J. R. Eyerman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Drive-in theater, San Francisco, 1948.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Drive-in theater, San Francisco, 1948.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Drive-in theater, Chicago, 1951.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gilmore Island, Los Angeles, 1949.
Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Drive-in theater, Los Angeles, 1949.
J. R. Eyerman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Drive-in theater, Connecticut, 1955.
Yale Joel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
As a publicity stunt Les Davis (on top of the screen) lived in a tent on top of a drive-in movie screen in Connecticut, 1955.
Yale Joel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rancho Drive-in Theater, San Francisco, 1948.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Joel McCrea movie at the Rancho Drive-in Theater, San Francisco, 1948.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Drive-in theater, San Francisco, 1948.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Drive-in theater, San Francisco, 1948.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Drive-in theater, San Francisco, 1948.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Kids enjoyed one of the four double-seated glider swings in the mini-playground at the Rancho Drive-In Theater, San Francisco, 1948.
That Ernest Hemingway was, for years, the most celebrated writer in America is hardly surprising. After all, if he had written nothing besides, say, The Sun Also Rises, the early collection, In Our Time, and the superlative “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” he would still be an indispensable American writer. The preposterous literary myth that Hemingway himself created and nurtured, meanwhile—that of the brawling, hard-drinking, thrill-seeking sportsman who is also an uncompromising, soulful artist—ensured that generations of writers would not merely revere him, but (often to their abiding detriment) would also try to emulate him.
Incredibly, one of Hemingway’s most highly regarded novels, the short masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea, was first published, in its entirety, in a single issue of LIFE magazine in September 1952.
At the time, Hemingway was—if we might employ an apt metaphor for a man who fairly worshiped machismo—the heavyweight champ of American letters. Even if his productivity had waned, and even if the searing brilliance of his early years had, by 1952, been reduced to an occasional flare of the old genius, “Papa” was still a cultural force to be reckoned with.
(A mere two years before, John O’Hara, in a New York Times review of the novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, had gone a bit overboard, calling Hemingway “the most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare.” But such was the shadow he cast.)
The issue of LIFE featuring Old Man and the Sea was an enormous success, selling millions of newsstand copies in a matter of days. The novel itself earned Hemingway his first and only Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and remains among his most widely read works.
And yet, by the early 1950s Hemingway’s private world was one increasingly defined not by protean artistic achievements, but by rivers of booze; bewilderment at his own diminishing powers as a writer; depression and even rage at his failing, once-indomitable health. The larger-than-life figure who prized “grace under pressure” above all other attributes was besieged; in less than a decade, his demons would drive him to suicide by shotgun.
All of this helps explain why, when LIFE’s Alfred Eisenstaedt went to Cuba to photograph Hemingway for the September 1952 issue, he encountered not a gracious, if perhaps prickly, fellow artist and man of letters, but a thoroughly disagreeable, paranoid, booze-sodden lunatic.
Eisenstaedt was able, eventually, to capture a few usable images of the middle-aged man who was soon be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His cover photo of Hemingway, in fact, is something of a classic: a riveting portrait of a no-longer-young, still-formidable literary lion.
But the experience of trying to photograph the 52-year-old writer, as Eisenstaedt recalled years later in an interview with historian Alex Groner, was a stressful and at times even frightening misadventure.
Hemingway, Eisenstaedt wonderingly noted, drank from the moment he awoke until the time he went to bed, with a lackey constantly plying him with booze; obsessed over his virility (sometimes literally pounding his chest, “like King Kong,” to illustrate that, while perhaps diminished, he was still a man to whom attention must be paid); erupted into violent rages over minor slights, both real and imagined; rarely spoke a sentence, to anyone, that wasn’t peppered with obscenities; and generally behaved like a buffoon.
Words and phrases that crop up repeatedly in Eisenstaedt’s reminiscences include “crazy,” “berserk,” “wild,” “insulting,” “drunk,” and “blue in the face.” Eisenstaedt found very few moments when he could take or when Hemingway would allow him to take usable photos. More than once, the gregarious, easy-going Eisie, who by all accounts got along famously with virtually everyone he met, went off by himself to photograph quieter scenes on the island, hoping the writer might calm down enough so that he might make a few worthwhile pictures.
“He was,” Eisenstaedt once said of Hemingway, “the most difficult man I ever photographed.” Coming from a man who was a professional photographer across seven decades—someone who photographed presidents, emperors, socially awkward scientists, testy athletes, egomaniac actors, insecure actresses and once, famously, a scowling and goblin-like Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels— that bald assertion about Hemingway is striking, and sadly revealing. And it’s especially sad in light of the effort that Eisenstaedt evidently put into trying to like Hemingway.
Ernest Hemingway was a major writer. Not everything he wrote was great; but some of what he wrote was as good as anything ever written by an American, and a handful of his works are, by common assent, vital and groundbreaking landmarks in world literature.
This gallery serves as both a tribute to Hemingway’s achievements, and a reminder of the haunting truth that when they fall, great men fall very, very far indeed.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A contact sheet of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s pictures of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ernest Hemingway chatted with fellow patrons at a cafe he enjoyed frequenting in Cuba, 1952.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A contact sheet of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s pictures of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ernest Hemingway at home in Cuba, August 1952.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
An image from a contact sheet of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s pictures of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
An image from a contact sheet of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s pictures of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Cojimar, in Cuba, provided the inspiration for the fishing village in Hemingway’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea, August 1952.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
An image from a contact sheet of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s pictures of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
LIFE Magazine cover, September 1, 1952
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
They don’t make them like they used to. That assertion, although often colored by a rose-tinted nostalgia, seems to hold some genuine truth nowadays, when celebrities are not only a dime a dozen, but are so often seemingly manufactured overnight. In fact, in most cases, it’s difficult to even remember what these people are famous for. But who would think that back in the 1960s, the stars of that defining era stars whom we continue to look back on with wonder would themselves entertain that very same thought?
The images shown here, taken by legendary photographer Bert Stern for a story that ran in the Dec. 20, 1963 issue of LIFE, depict some of the most prominent actors of the day as they take on the roles of their dream performers. The wonderfully playful (yet somehow near-reverent) series of portraits is testament to the fact that each and every generation grows up with its own heroes. Witness the debonair Cary Grant embodying an unlikely, yet totally convincing, impersonation of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, or Paul Newman’s gleeful transformation into the swashbuckling matinee idol, Douglas Fairbanks.
While the movie studios had created idols since the days of silent films, a cover of LIFE magazine could make all the difference. And a photographer with a strong relationship with a magazine wielded a lot of influence. In fact, the ’60s saw the birth of the photographer as hero, and Bert Stern was the archetype of this new figure. Alongside Penn and Avedon, he was one of the most respected and sought-after fashion, portrait and advertising photographers of the era.
Best known for his iconic “Last Sitting” photographs of Marilyn Monroe, taken six short weeks before her death, Stern photographed the world’s most beautiful women Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Liz Taylor, Bridget Bardot and some of Hollywood’s most charismatic leading men, like Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando and Richard Burton.
But long before he made those iconic images, he was an ideas man, a pioneer in the Golden Age of advertising. In the early 1950s, Stern conceived and executed photographic concepts that, for the first time, made advertising as compelling, refined and beautiful as any editorial page.
By the time the photographs in this gallery were made for LIFE, Stern was at the height of his fame a celebrity in his own right. He made commercials, shot covers for the world’s most prestigious magazines and more. Stern was seemingly capable of anything.
In a revealing 2013 documentary, Bert Stern: Original Mad Man, Stern tells his compelling and extraordinary story of his passions and obsessions, his successes and his failings, and the stories behind of some of the most remarkable and iconic images of the age.
Bert Stern is living proof, if ever proof was needed, that they really don’t make them like they used to.
—photo editor Phil Bicker wrote this tribute on the occasion of Stern’s death in 2013.
For sheer, undiluted resonance, few entertainment-industry tropes can match the singular image of Marilyn Monroe informing the world that “diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”
The scene in which she sings those words arrives midway through the classic 1953 comedy, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as Marilyn’s character, the refreshingly loot-happy Lorelei Lee, performing in a cabaret in a form-fitting pink satin sheath, rebuffs the attentions of a gaggle of eager (and unmistakably not rich) male admirers.
The song “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” is just one of many from a movie that, six decades later, still retains much of its carefree if largely camp appeal. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was not only a huge box office success but proved, once and for all, that Marilyn Monroe could truly anchor a movie as its star. (Her co-star in the film, Jane Russell, was wonderful in the role of showgirl Dorothy Shaw, Lorelei’s best friend, but through the years the film has increasingly and unduly been celebrated as Monroe’s triumph alone.)
However one remembers the film, however, it’s clear from the pictures in this gallery, made on-set by LIFE’s Ed Clark, that in 1953 Marilyn Monroe was already a bona fide movie star, and that the production itself was going to be a memorable, high-energy affair.
In May 1953, LIFE magazine summed up the spectacle this way:
Lorelei Lee is harvesting diamonds again. Veteran of a novel by Anita Loos (1925), a silent movie (1928), a musical comedy (1949), she is now in a stupendous Technicolor talkie of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She is played by Marilyn Monroe, who is the least ingenuous of the Lorelei line but yields to none in cheerful rapacity.
In the new 20th Century-Fox version Marilyn sing and dances with a surprising technical competence. Full-fleshed and fancy-free, she and her dark-haired girlfriends, played by Jane Russell, start the show off with a bang in tight red dresses for the song “The Little Girl From little Rock.” They go racing through a broad-comedy modern-dress version of the old plot as Lorelei stuffs her pocketbook with cash and bedecks her person with trinkets offered to her by gullible millionaires. In her biggest number she spurns a whole panel of penniless and prostate admirers and gives their fallen forms the benefit of her philosophy of life: “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell (left) on the set of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell (left) on the set of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell on the set of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell on the set of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe on the set of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell on the set of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Gentleman Prefer Blondes
Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell on the set of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe performed “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe performed “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe performed “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe performed “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marilyn Monroe in a publicity still for 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
That, legend has it, is what Frank Sinatra joked upon hearing the plot for Ocean’s 11, the 1960 Vegas heist flick that went on to become the Rat Pack’s signature big-screen adventure.
It’s no wonder Sinatra and his kindred crew of high-living, hard-drinking, skirt-chasing buddies, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., especially, were gassed to make such a movie: just like their characters, they loved a good caper. From the late ’50s until they began to splinter apart in the mid-’60s, they were showbiz’s unrivaled kings of swing, quick-with-a-quip cats who could swagger into any joint from the Sands to Sardi’s and make it the most.
LIFE magazine’s photographers trailed the Pack through those smoky, magical years, coming away with priceless material for some of the best celebrity photo-essays the magazine ever ran. But of the thousands of shots taken, many were never published until now. Here, in celebration of sharkskin sits, Scotch on the rocks, smoke-filled rooms and fedoras tilted just so, LIFE presents a slew of rare photos of the Rat Pack, together and apart, during their boozy heyday.
Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin took a cigarette break during the recording of Sleep Warm in 1958.
Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dean Martin smoked a cigarette beside his dressing room door backstage before his performance in Las Vegas in 1958.
Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin shared a light moment in the recording studio, 1958.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frank Sinatra at the Sands Hotel and Casino, where he sang with the Count Basie Band in 1964. Out of that landmark collaboration came the great live album Sinatra at the Sands.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frank Sinatra and Joe E. Lewis walked through the kitchen to get to the stage at the Eden Roc Resort in Miami in 1958.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sammy Davis Jr. ate spaghetti in his backstage dressing room while watching The Huntley-Brinkley Report news show in 1964. “My only contact with reality,” he told LIFE. “Whatever I’m doing, I stop to watch these guys.” Reflected in the mirror: LIFE photographer Leonard McCombe.
Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sammy Davis Jr. visited Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin at MGM Studios, where the duo were making Some Came Running in 1958. The movie co-starred Rat Pack “mascot” Shirley MacLaine, who years later would affectionately describe her old friends as “primitive children who would put crackers in each other’s beds and dump spaghetti on new tuxedos.”
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dean Martin entertained on a narrow stage with couples dancing around him in 1958.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frank Sinatra offered a light in Sammy Davis Jr.’s Golden Boy dressing room in 1964. “It was six a.m. before the party got to Frank’s suite. But the evening was not over because Frank hadn’t said it was over. ‘Everybody have a little more gasoline,’ he ordered. Everybody did.” From “The Private World and Thoughts of Frank Sinatra,” LIFE’s classic photo-essay on the superstar, published in April 23, 1965
John Dominis/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sammy Davis Jr. onstage during rehearsals for the Broadway musical Golden Boy, 1964.
Leonard McCombe/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Though he often joked about his race, Sammy Davis Jr. (here fiddling with a trumpet in 1964) was a serious, high-profile civil rights activist, and his refusal to play segregated venues helped lead to the integration of Miami nightclubs and Vegas casinos.
Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sammy Davis Jr. clowned backstage during Golden Boy’s run in 1964. Davis once said, “As soon as I go out the front door of my house in the morning, I’m on, Daddy, I’m on! But when I’m with the group I can relax. We trust each other. We admire each other’s talent.”
Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sammy Davis Jr. rested on his side with a pillow on the floor of a New York City hotel room during the tour to preview Golden Boy in 1964.
Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sammy Davis Jr. counted money backstage in Golden Boy, 1964. At the time he was being paid more than any Broadway star in history.
Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dean Martin had a massage at The Sands in Las Vegas, 1958. Said Martin once, “I can’t stand an actor or actress who tells me acting is hard work. It’s easy work. Anyone who says it isn’t never had to stand on his feet all day dealing blackjack.”
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frank Sinatra shaved in a steam room in Miami.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin tooled around the Warner Bros. lot while making 1965’s Marriage on the Rocks for the studio.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra cracked up during the Sleep Warm sessions in 1958.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Frank Sinatra pretended to be drunk on stage for a charity event in 1960. After Martin fell, Sinatra put on a baseball cap and cried, “Safe!”
