Page 125 – LIFE

It All Falls Apart: Stalingrad, and a Photographer’s Film, in Ruins

January 30, 2022January 12, 2013 by

In a digital age, so much of what we see, hear and act upon is comprised wholly of incorporeal ones and zeroes. But the film on which LIFE photographers completed their assignments was a physical thing and thus, like all other tangible objects, subject to damage, corrosion, decay and dissolution.

Consider the images in this gallery photographs made by LIFE’s Thomas D. McAvoy in Stalingrad in 1947. Strong, accurate representations of a city struggling to rebuild and to regain some sense of normality after suffering unspeakable destruction during the Second World War, the images are, in fact, far removed from the film that McAvoy must have pulled from his camera after shooting the roll (or rather, the photos from many rolls) depicted here.

But it is the damage to the images the spots created, perhaps, by mold eating away at the film’s emulsion that not only gives many of these pictures an eerie, discordant beauty, but provides yet another way to consider the nexus of the real and what we might call the seemingly real.

We came across these images while we were looking for pictures of the cataclysmic and pivotal Battle of Stalingrad. As we looked through mold-pocked image after mold-pocked image, we gradually hit on the notion of a gallery devoted to pictures that might otherwise never again see the light of day precisely because they’re so glaringly imperfect.

But the scenes that McAvoy captured, after all, did happen. Stalingrad was reduced to rubble. Years after war’s end, the only things one could find in abundance there were hunger, cold and a rough pride in their Pyrrhic victory over the Reich. And then, by some accident or mischance or plain old human ineptitude, McAvoy’s physical, photographic record of Stalingrad in 1947 suffered damage itself. The images were, in turn, transformed into near-abstract, ghostly works, within which one can still see remnants of the robust photojournalism that McAvoy consciously, intentionally created.

Postwar Stalingrad, 1947.

Thomas D. McAvoy Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Postwar Stalingrad, 1947. The white dots are a result of the film’s unintentional degradation.

Thomas D. McAvoy Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Postwar Stalingrad, 1947.

Thomas D. McAvoy Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The World’s Worst Weather: Photos From Mt. Washington

January 20, 2020January 10, 2013 by

For much of the 20th century, the summit of New Hampshire’s 6,200-foot Mt. Washington was the site of the highest wind speed ever measured at the Earth’s surface—a 231 mph gust recorded in April 1934. (That record was surpassed in 1996 by a confirmed 253 mph gust on Barrow Island, Australia, during Tropical Cyclone Olivia.) That a peak just over a mile high in the relatively cozy confines of New England should be home to some of the planet’s most erratic and violent weather strikes many people as astonishing.

For meteorologists, meanwhile—and hikers and campers who have suffered its extreme mood swings— Mt. Washington’s weather is a source of wonderment.

The unofficial motto of the Mt. Washington Observatory weather station? “Home of the World’s Worst Weather,” and whether or not the claim is quantifiable, it’s nevertheless unlikely that any other place on earth with comparably forbidding conditions is as readily accessible, or sees as many people each year, as the fabled peak.

In March 1953, LIFE magazine published a feature, with pictures by the intrepid Peter Stackpole, chronicling the work of a military and civilian team atop the “windiest spot in the U.S.” a team that, in winter, turned “the 6,288-foot mountain into a gigantic laboratory for defense department experiments into jet age techniques of warfare and survival. Standing at the focal point of a natural wind tunnel, Mt. Washington is continuously ripped by shrieking winds, [while] the 1934 blow of 231 mph makes the average 75-mile gale seem mild.”

The brutal weather, meanwhile, “can cause a jet engine to ice up in 20 seconds” and “builds up rime ice so quickly the process can almost be seen by the naked eye.”

Here, LIFE.com heads to the White Mountains, and the deceptively small peak with the huge reputation as a place where very, very bad weather is born.

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

Brutal weather atop New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A guide on foot led the way down New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A technician clambered around Summertime Hotel which, in dead of winter, stood castle-like and forbidding, its doors and windows sealed with foot of ice.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Eerie formations in rime ice, Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A hooded weather-study team member, New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A hooded weather-study team member, New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This snowcat driver, his vehicle tipping, could see only 25 feet ahead through wind-whipped snow.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Snug civilians doing technical work and enjoying a poker break were warm and comfortable behind the double plate-glass window. Civilians were subject to same rules as military personnel: no liquor allowed.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This jet test, carried on in an open-front steel hangar, was run day and night to measure and photograph the ice which formed at the intake on the inside of a mounted engine. The depression in the snowbank was created by the engine’s fiery blast. When the engine was turned off, water quickly refroze.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Military test, New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An air rescue team successfully outsmarted the weather in an improvised para-tepee made of an old parachute.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Military survival test, New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Military test, New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This wet test by Army men at the bottom of the mountain proved the efficiency of the Quartermaster Corps’ new gear, which though not waterproof utilized two layers of rubber and an insulating barrier between to conserve body heat.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Military test, New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A hooded weather-study team member, New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, 1953.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Down, Not Out, in London: LIFE in the Underground, 1940

March 8, 2022January 9, 2013 by

London’s monumental Metropolitan Railway opened on January 9, 1863, and the very next day the general public was permitted to ride the trains for the first time. The dauntless and, for Victorian England, remarkably democratic nature of the undertaking ensured that a great city’s restless, striving population would be able to move about the metropolis in an utterly new, bracing fashion—and nothing about London, or about urban transportation anywhere, has ever been quite the same since.

The Underground runs on 250 miles of track, almost half of which is, in fact, underground, and carries more than 3 million passengers every single day. For decades, it has played a central role not only in the daily lives of Londoners, but—like Big Ben, Tower Bridge and other landmarks and architectural marvels—has shaped non-Britons’ ideas of what London is. What it looks and feels like. The Tube has starred in books, movies and song. It is a cultural as well as an engineering touchstone, and was the model for virtually all the great subways that came after it.

In 1940, however, during the eight months of German bombing raids known ever after as the Blitz, the Tube witnessed what was (to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill) its finest hour. As Luftwaffe bomber planes pummeled London and other British cities, often sparking urban fire storms that raged for days and, by the time the raids stopped, killed tens of thousands of civilian men, women and children, countless Londoners and people from the outskirts of the city sheltered every night far below, on the platforms of Underground stations.

The Hans Wild photograph here—which ran in the Dec. 30, 1940 issue of LIFE above the caption, “In cold and discomfort far below the hell above, London tries to sleep in its deep subways”—this Wild photo is a testament to what Churchill, in his inimitable way, called “the courage, the unconquerable grit and stamina” of the English. But there is nothing terribly romantic, high-minded or even noble about shivering a night away while an enemy tries to kill you, or lays waste to your city, or both.

There might be romance and nobility in that sort of scenario in retrospect, but even the most unconquerable and grittiest of Londoners would likely admit, by the fall and winter of 1940, that the core emotion most of them endured day and night was an anxiety that often veered into deep, chilling fear. But again, we’re all aware that true courage is not the absence of fear, but doing what needs to be done in the face of one’s fear. And by that definition, Churchill’s refrain — courage, grit, stamina — does, in fact, seem to neatly characterize the actions and the attitude of the English throughout the Blitz, and throughout the entire war. England was, after all, virtually on its own by December 1940, holding off a “Thousand-Year Reich” that had swept through western Europe with appalling ease. Britons were the last of the unconquered — until America entered the war almost a full year later, after Pearl Harbor, and the Axis tide truly began to roll back.

Finally, it’s worth noting that one of the single deadliest and most destructive Luftwaffe strikes against London happened on the night of December 29, 1940—one day before the date of the issue of LIFE in which Wild’s photo appeared. That night, German planes dropped thousands and thousands of incendiary and high explosive bombs on the English capital, destroying the center of London and setting off a firestorm so intense and terrifying it came to be known as the Second Great Fire of London.

As the fires raged, men, women and children huddled in multitudes down below the surface of the city, in the tunnels carved out a century before by a civilization that could not have imagined a bomber plane, much less the destructive power that one such plane could unleash in a single night. In a sense—a very real sense—the Tube saved London during the Blitz. For that alone, we should celebrate the Underground, as well as the vision that brought it to loud, tumultuous—and yet somehow very organized, very orderly, very English—life.

Londoners slept in the city’s Underground for protection during German bombing raids, 1940.

Hans Wild/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Dawn of Camelot: JFK’s Inauguration

December 19, 2019January 5, 2013 by

January 20, 1961, was a bitterly cold day in Washington. And yet, as John and Jackie Kennedy set out on foot from the White House to the Capitol for JFK’s inauguration as president, the sense of cheer and confidence was palpable.

This was the dawn of “Camelot”—the evocative label associated with Kennedy’s administration, born of the young president’s fondness for the musical of the same name. LIFE magazine sent several of its best photographers to D.C. to chronicle the inauguration (and its slew of star-studded parties). A week later, the magazine ran nearly 20 pictures from the event. Many, many more photos were not published in LIFE. Here, LIFE.com presents the best of those pictures that ran, and many that did not.

In his inaugural address one of the most memorable in history Kennedy did not skirt the very real, very present danger posed by mutual mistrust and enmity between East and West at the height of the Cold War, nor did he accept that danger as a fixed, immutable state of affairs.

“If a beachhead of cooperation,” he said, “may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides [America and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its satellites] join in creating a new endeavor not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved. This will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”

“To those nations who would make themselves our adversary,” Kennedy said, “we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.”

Perhaps the most heartfelt words uttered that day, meanwhile, came not from JFK, but from the 87-year-old poet Robert Frost. A four-time Pulitzer Prize winner and the quintessential New England bard (albeit born in California), Frost penned a new poem for the inauguration, but the intense glare of the January sun made it impossible for him to read his own manuscript. After struggling for a bit, and after Lyndon Johnson stood and tried to help (using his own top hat to shield the page), Frost abandoned the effort and instead recited, from memory, a famous, earlier poem: “The Gift Outright,” written nearly 20 years before, which reads in part, “we gave ourselves outright … To the land vaguely realizing westward.”

It seemed then, and still feels, an appropriately optimistic sentiment in the early days of the 1960s.

John and Jackie Kennedy walked to JFK’s inauguration ceremony from the White House, January 1961.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

From left: Jackie Kennedy, turned to someone behind her; President Dwight Eisenhower; President-Elect Kennedy; and on the right, Vice-President-Elect Lyndon Johnson and outgoing VP Richard Nixon, January 1961.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John and Jackie Kennedy dressed in formal wear on the evening before the inauguration.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

People bundled up as they lined Pennsylvania Avenue for the Inauguration.

Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A smiling President Kennedy and the First Lady Jackie Kennedy rode through cheering crowds in the Inaugural Parade, January 1961.

Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A freak overnight storm dumped inches of snow on to Washington on the eve of JFK’s inauguration.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Eisenhower’s secretary, Ann Whitman, helped the president don a borrowed tie on the morning of the inauguration, January 1961.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s Inaugural Gala.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

On the night before the inauguration, many of the biggest names in show business came together for a gala produced by Kennedy’s friend and supporter, Frank Sinatra, and Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Peter Lawford.

Leonard McCombe/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier read a statement at the Inaugural Gala.

Leonard McCombe/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John Kennedy spoke to the crowd during the evening of the Inaugural Gala.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John Kennedy among well-wishers at the inaugural gala.

Joseph Scherschel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gene Kelly performed at John Kennedy’s Inaugural Gala

Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A woman in a gown and a man in a suit with a top hat danced at one of the ball’s celebrating John Kennedy’s inauguration.

Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John and Jackie Kennedy in the Presidential Box overlooked the crowd during JFK’s Inaugural Ball, January 1961.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John Connally (left), John and Jackie Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower and others prepared at the White House for the inauguration, January 1961.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lady Bird Johnson, Jackie Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon during JFK’s inauguration.

Joe Scherschel/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A man bundled against the cold during John Kennedy’s inauguration, January 1961.

Leonard McComb/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Robert Frost, 87, read a poem at John Kennedy’s inauguration.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John Kennedy spoke to the press during a snowstorm the day before his inauguration.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Army’s Pershing medium-range ballistic missile made its first appearance before the general public in Kennedy’s Inaugural Parade, January 1961.

Al Fenn/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Buffalo Bill character performed at the inaugural parade, January 1961.

Al Fenn/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Kennedy at the D.C. Armory during the Frank Sinatra- and Peter Lawford-produced gala.

Paul Schutzer/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John Kennedy at his inauguration, January 1961.

Joe Scherschel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Four past, present, and future First Ladies side-by-side during John Kennedy’s inauguration, January 1961 (from left): Pat Nixon, Mamie Eisenhower, Lady Bird Johnson, and Jacqueline Kennedy.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Richard Nixon and Jack Kennedy spoke during a reception after JFK was sworn in as president, January 1961.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F Kennedy watched former president Harry Truman, 77, sign his autograph on a program during the inaugural luncheon, January 1961.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s driver tok the snow chains off the tires of his limo before driving the former president and his wife Mamie home, January 1961.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John Kennedy delivering his Inaugural Address.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Photographer Spotlight: Michael Rougier

January 6, 2021January 3, 2013 by

Born in England on June 16, 1925, Michael Rougier began his career as a photographer for the Montreal Standard newspaper. His big break came when he was assigned to photograph cattle being shipped to Argentina from Canada. While in Argentina, he made photos of the then-camera shy Eva Perón, eventually smuggling the pictures out of the country and back north. Those images ran in both the Standard and in LIFE, where he was hired as a staff photographer in November 1947, remaining with the magazine for more than two decades. (He eventually left at the end of 1971, a year before LIFE ceased publishing as a weekly.)

During his 24 years with the magazine, Rougier displayed the sort of versatility for which so many of LIFE’s photographers were known. He covered the Korean War with his greatest work focusing on children orphaned by that conflict. He covered the Hungarian revolution of 1956, weddings in North Dakota, Boy Scouts, horse racing, drug-addled Japanese teens and countless other stories, in countless other locations. He exemplified the ideal of the staff photographer, for whom no assignment was too small (or too big).

Early in his career at LIFE, he accepted a handful of assignments that illuminated his compassion for the powerless. The first was a story about a blind poodle named Midget. The story goes that he almost passed out in the operation room while Midget was being operated on to restore her sight. He also photographed a story in Texas in 1948 about a cat that got around via wheelchair. He even adopted a goat after covering a “goat round-up” in Virginia in 1950.

The one story that most perfectly captures Rougier’s remarkable empathy for his subjects, however, involved a Korean orphan named Kang (see slide #4 in this gallery). In 1951, he was sent to southeast Asia to cover the Korean War (replacing his LIFE colleague, John Dominis). While there, Rougier came across the Taegu orphanage and met Kang, a boy who would eventually be introduced to the LIFE’s readers as “the boy who wouldn’t smile.”

At one point, Rougier sent a remarkable open letter to his colleagues back at Time Inc. in New York asking—in fact, almost begging—for assistance to help Kang and the orphanage. (“You might be a helluva long way from war in a bar in New York but these kids can’t remember anything but war few of them remember anything of their life before their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters were killed right before their eyes. Get the contacts of my first take and look at them look at Kang and then please send some stuff.”)

The letter got results. The orphanage received money, books, vitamins, clothing. Kang did, eventually, smile and was adopted by an American family.

From the first, Rougier was recognized as a stellar photojournalist by his peers, and won Magazine Photographer of the Year honors from the National Press Photographers Association in 1954.

In 1964, meanwhile, on assignment in Antarctica, Rougier almost met his death when he was seriously injured after tumbling more than 600 feet down a mountainside while covering scientists who were working at the bottom of the world studying glaciers. Today, the peak is called “Rougier Hill,” in honor of the intrepid photographer who nearly died on its slopes.

Michael Rougier, who was an accomplished sculptor in addition to being a masterful photojournalist, died in Canada on January 5, 2012.

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

A father sits on the floor of Grand Central in New York while waiting for train with his sons during a snowstorm, 1948.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Korean War, 1951.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An wounded Indian ambulance driver clenches his hands indicating the intense pain he’s enduring after having his leg almost completely blown off, Korea, 1951.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Korean orphan Kang Koo Ri eats a meal in an orphanage after American soldiers found him next to dead mother, 1951.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Communist students jubilantly snake dance through the street during an anti-American May Day rally in Tokyo, 1952.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Korea, 1952.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Ploch, an imprisoned American who had not been reported as a POW by the North Koreans during the Korean War, sits in dazed disbelief as he is processed during a prisoner exchange, 1953.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The last American to die before the Korean War truce was signed — a 22-year-old Marine Corporal killed by a Chinese mortar.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Chinese soldier on a battlefield with a burial detail, searching for bodies, after the Korean War cease-fire, objecting to being photographed, 1953.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hall of Fame jockeys Willie Shoemaker and Eddie Arcaro, 1954.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A draftee relaxes on his bunk during basic training, Fort Carson, Colorado, 1955.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Immigrants arrive in the U.S., 1955.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Hungarian man sings a patriotic song as Soviet tanks move into Budapest during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hungarian resistance fighters fire toward a Russian observation plane shortly before the Soviet annexation of Hungarian territory, 1956.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hungarian resistance fighters, 1956.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A disabled tank near coffins being used for the bodies of Russian soldiers killed during the popular uprising against the Communist-backed Hungarian government, Budapest, 1956.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Women march in honor of countrymen who died fighting the Soviets during the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mexican field workers examined before being put to work, 1959.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Harry S. Truman at Speaker of the House (D-TX) Sam Rayburn’s funeral, 1961.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actor Mickey Hargitay kisses his wife, Jayne Mansfield, after their rescue from an overturned boat in the Bahamas in 1962.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Anti-American riots, Panama City, Panama, 1964.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Seventeen-year-old Yoko, with arms outstretched, Japan, 1964.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Yoko (left) ends a long night of clubbing by sleeping on a futon in a friend’s room, Japan, 1964.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Kako, languid from sleeping pills, is lost in a world of her own in a jazz club in Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Robert F. Kennedy lends moral support to striking grape pickers and their leader, Cesar Chavez (on hunger strike), 1968.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra sits quietly a few minutes before what he said, at the time, was his final concert, Hollywood, 1971. He came out of retirement two years layer, and would record and perform for many more years.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE photographer Michael Rougier, kneeling on ground with a Korean orphan.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen: Gangster in the Sun

August 10, 2021January 1, 2013 by

It might seem strange, at first, that a city as closely associated with sun and fun would also be the city that helped spawn, and has been the location for, so many classics in the great American literary and film genre known as noir. But the fact remains that acknowledged heavyweights like Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and James Ellroy as well as countless lesser writers set their sordid, riveting crime stories firmly in Los Angeles, while Hollywood’s greatest noir thrillers, from Double Indemnity to L.A. Confidential, have reveled in casting a cold, hard light on the shadowy underbelly of the City of Angels.

In 2013 the star-studded but not especially successful movie Gangster Squad added to the ranks of L.A. noir. The movie starred Ryan Gosling, Josh Brolin, Emma Stone and, most intriguingly, Sean Penn as a legendary Brooklyn-born Jewish mobster. As it so happens, Penn’s character—in real life a portly, dangerous and weirdly charismatic thug, Meyer Harris “Mickey” Cohen—was exactly the sort of mid-20th-century figure whose exploits and demeanor were catnip to the editors of LIFE magazine. It’s not that the men (and, very occasionally, women) calling the shots at LIFE were enamored of bookies and racketeers. But Mickey Cohen was one of those rare gangsters—Crazy Joe Gallo, another Brooklyn boy with his connections to show biz, also comes to mind—who were more than just mindless mob enforcers. Street-smart, disarmingly blunt and true to their own insular, twisted ethical code, criminals like Cohen and Gallo exuded a kind of rough, lethal charm. And like Gallo, Cohen was a bona fide celebrity in his lifetime even a kind of anti-establishment pop-culture hero.

In its January 16, 1950, issue, LIFE published a feature titled, simply, “Trouble in Los Angeles,” focusing on a wave of organized crime and political corruption so widespread it made supposedly crooked places like Chicago look like models of probity. Front and center in the piece was none other than Cohen himself, the fleshy, self-satisfied face of Southern California sociopathy an “exhibitionist hoodlum,” as LIFE characterized him. In fact, Cohen and his wife LaVonne appeared in several photos in the article, for all the world just another happily married couple who had settled in California for no other reason than the forgiving climate and who remained in L.A. because Mickey’s commercial concerns—nightclubs, flower shops, gas stations, Michael’s Exclusive Haberdashery on Sunset Boulevard, etc.—needed his constant attention.

Here, LIFE.com offers a series of photographs by Ed Clark from 1949 featuring Mickey and LaVonne Cohen in their natural environment, as they hoped the world might see them: quiet, sober, eminently respectable members of the community, without a care in the world, enjoying life beneath the kind and lidless California sun.

Original caption: “Gangster Mickey Cohen sits amid the front pages of newspapers that helped make him the city’s’ most infamous citizen, Los Angeles, 1949.”

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen at home in Los Angeles, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Angry and hungry, Mickey eats sandwich as he leaves home with cop who arrested him for cursing other officers. Mickey called arrest persecution.”

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen with his wife, LaVonne, at home, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen at home in Los Angeles, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen’s wife, LaVonne, at home in Los Angeles, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gangster Mickey Cohen smells flowers at home in Los Angeles, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen plays with dogs at home in Los Angeles, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen’s wife, LaVonne, at home in Los Angeles, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen’s wife, LaVonne, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen’s wife, LaVonne, at home in Los Angeles, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gangster Mickey Cohen at home with a book given to him by the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation, Los Angeles, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen’s enforcer, “Johnny Stomp” Stompanato (famously stabbed and killed by Lana Turner’s 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane, in 1958), business manager Mike Howard and Cohen pose in Cohen’s office in Los Angeles, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gangster Mickey Cohen at home in Los Angeles with his business manager, Mike Howard, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gangster Mickey Cohen at home in Los Angeles, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen signs an autograph for a young fan, Los Angeles, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen hauled in by the cops, Los Angeles, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Cohen, 1949.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

More Like This

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It All Falls Apart: Stalingrad, and a Photographer’s Film, in Ruins

The World’s Worst Weather: Photos From Mt. Washington

Down, Not Out, in London: LIFE in the Underground, 1940

The Dawn of Camelot: JFK’s Inauguration

Photographer Spotlight: Michael Rougier

Mickey Cohen: Gangster in the Sun

The Logging Life: Gone Down the River

“Degrading to Minority and Majority Alike”: The Fight to Vote, 1960

Seeking Warmth During an Iceland Deployment

Majesty in Tokyo: The 1964 Olympics

Eisenstaedt in Postwar Italy (and Yes, That’s Pasta)

A Young Actress Restarts Her Life in Postwar Paris

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