Page 127 – LIFE

Elizabeth and Philip: Photos From the Royal Wedding, 1947

January 5, 2021November 19, 2012 by

Queen Elizabeth II has been on the throne for so long that it can be a bit disconcerting to encounter photographs of her as a bride, or a newlywed. And Elizabeth has always appeared more distant and more removed from the sort of everyday pleasures and pains that define the lives of mere commoners.

But in November 1947, when she wed Prince Philip (born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark), Elizabeth allowed the world to glimpse, briefly, another side a less severe and less purely ornamental side of her life. In photographs made that day, Elizabeth looks like brides all over the world have looked, from time immemorial: a bit nervous, a bit self-conscious, a bit overwhelmed … and happy.

Here, LIFE.com offers a series of photographs—including some that did not originally run in LIFE—made by magazine staffers like Nat Farbman and Frank Scherschel. In an article that ran in the Dec. 1, 1947, issue of LIFE, meanwhile, the magazine’s editors took pains to remind readers that, two years after the end of the Second World War, England and Europe while on the mend from war’s ravages were still, in some regards, reeling from the aftereffects of the conflict.

What’s also so clearly evident in the language of the piece (below) is the enduring respect the magazine’s editors had for what England had achieved when, for a good part of World War II, the island nation had, in essence, stood alone. The verbiage might be over-the-top but the sentiment is straight from the heart.

In the ninth winter of Britain’s austerity the skies cleared for a brief moment last week. Shining through came a fleeting, nostalgic glimpse of an ancient glory and a little pang of hope for better days to come. The Princess the heir to the British throne was taking a husband, and some of the old pomp and pageantry sang out in the land.

[Almost] all of Europe’s vanishing royalty crowded into Westminster Abbey, wearing finery and jewelery which somehow had survived all disaster. It seemed that all of London turned out to see a drama which, if somewhat anachronistic, was nonetheless inspiring. The people crowded along Whitehall to see the procession…. At the Abbey they cheered the arrival of six kings, seven queens and numerous princes and princesses. Over loudspeakers they heard Princess Elizabeth say her vows. For hours they milled around the Palace hoping to see the newlyweds make an appearance on the balcony. Then, feeling somehow as happy as if it had been their own wedding day, they went home, with the quiet reassurance of goodness, tranquility and survival that the British throne means to Britain’s people.

Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after their wedding, Nov. 20, 1947.

William Sumits / LIFE Picture Collection

Original caption: “Traditional British reserve is cast aside by these revelers who dance in streets while others stake out claims for vantage points.”

Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection

Original caption: “Choir boys who came by bus form a line outside Westminster Abbey.”

Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection

Original caption: “Beefeaters adjust their uniforms.”

Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection

Original caption: “Immaculate gentlemen-at-arms carry their brightly plumed headgear.”

Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection

Original caption: “Premiere Jan Christian Smuts represents the Dominion of South Africa.”

Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection

Original caption: “Queen and King of Denmark arrive.”

Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection

Original caption: “The Countess Edwina, wife of Earl Mountbatten, is helped from her car.”

Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection

Original caption: “Servants from the King’s household don gloves before entering the abbey.”

Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection

Original caption: “An Ethiopian representative pauses before starting into the Abbey.”

Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection

Crowds try to get a glimpse of the royal wedding, London, Nov. 20, 1947.

Nat Farbman / LIFE Picture Collection

Exterior of Buckingham Palace on the night of royal wedding, Nov. 20, 1947.

Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection

Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip leave Westminster Abbey after their wedding, Nov. 20, 1947.

Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection

The marraige of Elizabeth and Philip. Royals on the balcony of Buckingham Palace: (l. to r.) King George VI, Princess Margaret Rose, unidentified, Princess Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mother Mary after the wedding of Elizabeth and Philip, Nov. 20, 1947.

William Sumits / LIFE Picture Collection

Photographer Spotlight: Nina Leen

January 20, 2020November 18, 2012 by

Nina Leen’s life, from early on, was one in which travel played a key role a life that, in retrospect, had something of a purposefully nomadic quality. Born in Russia (the date of her birth is unknown, as she adamantly refused to reveal or even discuss her age), Leen grew up in Europe. She studied painting in Berlin before emigrating to the United States in 1939. With her first camera, a Rolleiflex, she honed her photography skills, teaching herself how to take pictures and developing what would become her signature style by creating at-once intimate and stylized portraits of animals at New York’s Bronx Zoo.

In fact, the first pictures she published in LIFE were a series of photos of ancient, combative tortoises (included in this gallery) that she made at the Bronx Zoo and subsequently, at the urging of friends, submitted to the magazine. LIFE published the pictures in its April 1, 1940 issue, launching Leen’s relationship with the preeminent photography magazine of the age. (Interestingly, while she is often described as “one of the first women staff photographers at LIFE,” Nina Leen was never, in fact, officially on the staff of the magazine. Instead, she was a contract photographer who enjoyed an astonishingly long working affiliation with LIFE, one that lasted from the 1940s until the magazine ceased publishing as a weekly at the end of 1972.)

Leen produced a vast and varied body of work during the three decades she shot for LIFE, including more than 50 covers and countless reports and photo essays from around the world. But perhaps the single assignment that had the most lasting effect on her own life and work was actually one on which her colleague Leonard McCombe was the photographer. In 1949, McCombe was covering a story in Texas when he came across a dead dog and its cowering, flea-ridden and filthy but still very much alive puppy.

McCombe, unable to simply abandon the creature, shipped it off to the LIFE offices in New York, where Leen who was well-known for liking animals far more than she liked most humans adopted it. In very short order the dog, dubbed “Lucky,” became America’s pet. Nina brought Lucky with her everywhere, documenting the dog’s post-rescue adventures in follow-up articles, a book (and book tour) and even a short film.

A great animal lover whose pictures of dogs, cats, bats (she had a special affinity for and obsession with the furry flying mammals) and other creatures could, and eventually would, fill entire books, Nina Leen also had a way with those other wild things: teenagers. Her numerous essays on the fads, etiquette and attitudes of the American teen captured the younger generations of the ’40s and ’50s with a winning mix of bemusement and empathy. She was also one of the most prolific and accomplished fashion photographers LIFE ever had, covering Paris shows in the 1940s, for example, with a cool, discerning eye.

That she was not limited to photographing animals and hormonally addled youngsters, however, is evidenced by two of her most famous group portraits: one, a picture featuring four generations of an Ozark family (selected by Carl Sagan to fly aboard the Voyager space probe as part of a message, of sorts, to any extraterrestrial civilization who might intercept the spacecraft); the other a photo of “The Irascibles” a now-legendary group of artists including de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko and others who protested the Metropolitan Museum’s refusal to include Abstract Expressionist works in a major 1950 retrospective of American painting.

After LIFE folded (for the first time) in 1972, Nina Leen’s career hardly slowed. Throughout the 1970s she produced an average of two books a year, and published 15 in her lifetime, including a groundbreaking work on her beloved bats. Nina Leen died on January 1, 1995, at her home in New York City. A spokesperson for LIFE said that she was in her late 70s or early 80s but no one really knows for sure.

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

Lucky from the movie, “The Lost Dog,” 1955.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Tommy Tucker, a squirrel, was dried after a bath. He seemed to like being rubbed briskly. Although Tommy was neat about his own person, Mrs. Bullis, the woman who dressed him in clothes that she herself designed and made, had never been able to housebreak him, 1944.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This photo, which appeared in a 1940 Letters to the Editor section of LIFE, was captioned, “She is dripping wet—and wiser.”

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The ‘monkey terrier’ came from Germany, where it was bred as a rat catcher. Bushy-faced with an underslung chin, the toy-sized dog had a fiery, excitable disposition, 1959.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

From the April 1, 1940, issue of LIFE: “Fighting turtles open their bills wide, lunge and dodge for minutes at a time. They do not snap their jaws until they clamp them tight in the final grip on other’s head.”

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

As agile as frogs, vampire bats in the Cincinnati zoo hopped and leapt about their cage, 1968.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Four generations of the Russells gathered for a portrait, 1948. The grandmother was 90 but still active. The portraits on wall at left were of old Mrs. Russell’s parents, at right those at her late husband.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The group of artists that led the 1951 fight against the exclusion of abstract expressionism from a New York show included, from left, rear: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne; (next row) Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst (with bow tie), Jackson Pollock (in striped jacket), James Brooks, Clyfford Still (leaning on knee), Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin; (in foreground) Theordoros Stamos (on bench), Barnett Newman (on stool), Mark Rothko (with glasses).”

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The famous “O’Neil sisters” (all 10 of them) with their mother, Boston, 1952.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

One of a series of pictures from the Dec. 11, 1944, issue of LIFE depicting a teenage girl on the phone.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Teenagers listened to records in 1944.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Teenagers at a party in 1947 in Tulsa, Oklahoma; LIFE reported that these kids “munch doughnuts and sip cokes whenever they are not dancing with serious faces to sentimental music.”

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Students dance at a Carlsbad, Calif., high school in 1954.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A teenager sang on a street corner as part of a sub-deb social club initiation in 1945.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lauren Bacall at Gotham Hotel, New York, 1945.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Tina Myers (later known as Tina Louise, of Gilligan’s Island fame) came out at a New York cotillion in 1953.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

French actress Barbara [Laage] wore this two-piece in 1946 with no fear of disaster, except in a rough surf, because it has been tied on with good strong knots.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

From a 1948 story about Eileen Ford’s modeling agency, this deodorant ad pose was presented as being beneath the talents of the agency’s models.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

From a 1945 story on “good grooming,” the original caption to this picture asserted that a “rosebud mouth is especially bad on round faces.”

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The cover shot of the Feb. 25, 1952, issue of LIFE. The coverline of the issue: “News in Gloves.”

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

From a story in the August 23, 1943, issue of LIFE about “amateur vs. professional ways of achieving a summer coiffure.”

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

From an April 20, 1942, LIFE story about proper skirt-hem lengths.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

In 1949, these two children of circus performers watched Miss Lola practice on a tightrope while an acrobat (on his back) balanced a contraption on his feet..

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE’s First Cover Story: Building the Fort Peck Dam, 1936

November 19, 2020November 16, 2012 by

“If any Charter Subscriber is surprised by what turned out to be the first story in this first issue of LIFE,” the magazine’s editors wrote in the Nov. 23, 1936 issue, “he is not nearly so surprised as [we] were. Photographer Margaret Bourke-White had been dispatched to the Northwest to photograph the multimillion dollar projects of the Columbia River Basin. What the editors expected were construction pictures as only Bourke-White can take them. What the editors got was a human document of American frontier life which, to them at least, was a revelation.”

Thus the men and women behind what would become one of the longest-lived experiments—and one of the greatest success stories of 20th-century American publishing—introduced themselves, and their inaugural effort, to the world.

In her riveting 1963 autobiography, Portrait of Myself, Bourke-White recalls the heady experience working for LIFE on the debut issue, and on countless subsequent assignments for what would become one of the indispensable weeklies of the past 100 years:

A few weeks before the beginning, Harry Luce called me up to his office and assigned me to a wonderful story out in the Northwest. Luce was very active editorially in the early days of the magazine, and there was always that extra spark in the air. Harry’s idea was to photograph the enormous chain of dams in the Columbia River basin that was part of the New Deal program. I was to stop off at New Deal, a settlement near Billings, Montana, where I would photograph the construction of Fort Peck, the world’s largest earth-filled dam. Harry told me to watch out for something on a grand scale that might make a cover.

“Hurry back, Maggie,” he said, and off I went. I had never seen a place quite like the town of New Deal, the construction site of Fort Peck Dam. It was a pinpoint in the long, lonely stretches of northern Montana so primitive and so wild that the whole ramshackle town seemed to carry the flavor of the boisterous Gold Rush days. It was stuffed to the seams with construction men, engineers, welders, quack doctors, barmaids, fancy ladies and, as one of my photographs illustrated, the only idle bedsprings in New Deal were the broken ones. People lived in trailers, huts, coops anything they could find and at night they hung over the Bar X bar.

These were the days of LIFE’s youth, and things were very informal. I woke up each morning ready for any surprise the day might bring. I loved the swift pace of the LIFE assignments, the exhilaration of stepping over the threshold into a new land. Everything could be conquered. Nothing was too difficult. And if you had a stiff deadline to meet, all the better. You said yes to the challenge and shaped up the story accordingly, and found joy and a sense of accomplishment in so doing. The world was full of discoveries waiting to be made. I felt very fortunate that I had an outlet, such an exceptional outlet, perhaps the only one of this kind in the world at that time, through which I could share the things I saw and learned.

Long after Margaret Bourke-White’s remarkable photos from the Depression-era wilds of Montana graced the pages of that first issue of LIFE—one of her characteristically monumental “construction pictures” (as the editors put it) served as the cover image for that issue—LIFE.com presents the Fort Peck Dam feature in its entirety, along with a number of Bourke-White photos that did not appear in the original cover story.

Here is a portrait of a community brought together by circumstance, i.e., by FDR’s New Deal, in a barren place, in an unimaginably hard time, for the express purpose of building one of the chief engineering marvels of the age. (Fort Peck Dam is still, today, the highest of all the major dams along the great Missouri River.) Bourke-White’s photos, meanwhile, capture the vast scale of the audacious project and the far more intimate scope of the human capacity for finding joy or, at the very least, a kind of rough pleasure and fellowship wherever one can, whatever the odds.

So, while LIFE’s “charter subscribers” and its editors might have been surprised “by what turned out to be the first story” in the magazine’s history, in retrospect Bourke-White’s tale seems, with its heroic overtones, its astonishing photography and its focus on the human aspect of a superhuman effort, an apt introduction to LIFE’s mission and its method.

Workers on Montana’s Fort Peck Dam blew off steam at night, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

In Wheeler, near Fort Peck, Montana, Frank Breznik (left) was the law. He had previously been a traveling salesman in Atlantic City.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Wheeler, Montana, was one of the six frontier towns around Fort Peck.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

The area’s latest hotspot was a town called New Deal.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

LIFE’s first issue declared, “The only idle bedsprings in New Deal are the broken ones.”

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Beneath a “No Beer Sold to Indians” sign, a woman tossed back a drink.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Life in the cowless cow towns was not cheap for its day.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Lt. Col. T. B. Larkin was the head of the dam project.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Bar X, Montana, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

The only alcohol that could be sold legally was beer by the glass, but at Ruby’s Place and others like it, liquor was also sold at a back bar.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

One-fourth of the Missouri River would run through this steel “liner.”

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Major Clark Kittrell was the No. 2 man on the Fort Peck Dam project.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Ed’s Place, Montana, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Ruby, second from the left, was the founder of the town of Wheeler—and its richest woman. She had come to Montana with experience in the Klondike.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Drinking at the bar Finis, Montana, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Mrs. Nelson washed New Deal, Montana, without the aid of running water.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

One of the several frontier towns near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Men and women in one of the several frontier towns near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

A bar in a town near the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

A bar in one of the several frontier towns near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Workers in one of the several frontier towns near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Wood was for sale in one of the several frontier towns near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

A beauty shop near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

One of the several frontier towns near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Men worked on the construction of Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

Construction of Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

First LIFE cover November 23, 1936.

Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection

LIFE Magazine Nov. 23, 1936

Margaret Bourke-White LIFE Magazine

Penn Station, 1963: Walker Evans’ Portraits of a Lost Treasure

January 30, 2022November 15, 2012 by

One of the enduring cultural battles fought in the Unites States and in countless other countries, as well over the years involves the forces of “progress” arrayed against proponents of “tradition.” In this conflict, advocates of progress are generally seen as forward-thinking optimists or greed-driven destroyers of all that is good and noble in the culture, while traditionalists are characterized as either bastions of reason and good taste or hopelessly outdated relics who really ought to get out of the way and let the rest of us move ahead.

However one views the opposing sides, it’s unlikely that many people alive today would come down on the side of “progress” in respect to at least one particular American beauty that fell victim to modernization five long decades ago: New York’s original, magnificent Pennsylvania Station.

The splendid Beaux-Arts style terminus, which took up two city blocks in midtown Manhattan and featured a 15-story ceiling and a waiting room almost as long as a football field, was inspired by some of the greatest architecture of the ancient world. Designed by the celebrated firm of McKim, Mead & White (the folks responsible for countless landmark buildings around the country), Penn Station was conceived and constructed on a scale that felt and looked at-once heroic and deeply, comfortingly human.

But in the late-1950 and early 1960s, places like the pink-granite and marble Penn Station were under assault by an attitude that judged anything more than a few decades old to be utterly suspect, while anything new, modern or contemporary was seen as good, better, best. Here, LIFE.com offers a number photos many of which never ran in LIFE shot by Walker Evans for a 1963 feature decrying the national mania for “progress.”

In the July 5, 1963, issue of the magazine, in an article titled, forthrightly, “America’s Heritage of Great Architecture Is Doomed,” LIFE sounded the alarm to its readers:

Above the scurry and tumult of travelers, clocks tick away the final hours of a grand and historic monument. New York’s Pennsylvania Station is doomed. Its herculean columns, its vast canopies of concrete and steel will soon be blasted into rubble to make way for a monstrous complex sports arena [today’s Madison Square Garden — Ed.], bowling alley, hotel and office building. The disaster that has befallen Penn Station threatens thousands of other prized American buildings. From east to west, the wrecker’s ball and bulldozer are lords of the land. In the ruthless, if often well-intentioned, cause of progress, the nation’s heritage from colonial days onward is being ravaged indiscriminately for highways, parking lots, new structures of modernized mediocrity.

The fact that LIFE’s dire forecast has not entirely come to pass Grand Central Terminal, for example, won reprieve from destruction just a few years after the LIFE article appeared, in large part because of outraged resistance from the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis just goes to show that, every once in a while, reason and good taste can carry the day.

Graced by goddesses and eagles and crowned by a balustrade, Pennsylvania Station presents a serene and seemingly timeless facade to New York’s Seventh Avenue, 1963.

Walker Evans Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Massive bases of the facade are shadowy retreats for pigeons.” (The granite columns were 70 feet high.)

Walker Evans Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pennsylvania Station, New York, 1963.

Walker Evans Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

In Praise of Unusual Flying Objects

January 20, 2020November 15, 2012 by

The original of these strange objects in the sky is not in question. They all came from Earth. They are not the stuff of science fictionza-well, except for one image of a craft built for sci-fi movie. Beyond that, the science here is all real, even if it appears a little strange at times.

This gallery celebrates aircraft—including jet packs; flying platforms, collapsible one-man helicopters and more– that show how badly people have wanted to fly, and the sorts of ingenuity we have unleashed in pursuit of that goal.

A slinky-like light pattern was produced by light-tipped rotor blades of a helicopter as it took off into the dark sky, 1949.

Andreas Feininger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An ascending gondola trailed a disk-shaped radio antenna during lift-off for high-altitude flight to observe the planet Venus, 1959.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Amphibious U.S. Navy plane, 1940.

Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A helicopter attempted a three-point landing atop the heads of three women holding plywood squares as landing “pads,” 1948.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A man dropped a briefcase into the basket on the nose of a helicopter, 1942.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A parachute jumper who was testing equipment for the Irving Air Chute Co. received some help while struggling to reel in his billowing chute, 1937.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Children tried to catch toys that were released by a kite, 1949.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stunt man Jack Wylie soared over the Chicago River, 1958.

Al Fenn/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

A test flight of the “strap-on” helicopter, 1957.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Flying platforms were tested at an Air Force base, 1956.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bell engineer Harold Graham demonstrated the “Rocket Belt” at Fort Bragg in 1961.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A balloon was inflated in preparation for a high-altitude ascent, 1959.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

American paratroopers landed in Korea, with one ripped chute still holding enough air to drop safely, 1950.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A blimp above New York, 1961.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A plane swerved toward LIFE photographer Allan Grant as one rocket motor failed to start, 1949.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The “Pulsa,” a collapsible one-man helicopter, 1952.

J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Men anchored a huge balloon, 1941.

John Phillips The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An observation balloon spotting for a 155mm gun at Fort Bragg, 1940.

David E. Scherman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A blimp landed at a Naval air station in 1942.

William C. Shrout The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The model of the “Space Ark” rocket ship from the sci-fi classic, “When Worlds Collide” 1951

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The War is Over, and Cocktails are Being Served: St. Moritz, 1947

January 21, 2022November 12, 2012 by

Maybe it’s because LIFE magazine covered the Second World War so extensively, with dozens of photographers and correspondents logging tens of thousands of miles, reporting from places like Iwo Jima, the Ardennes and Berlin in the final days of the Reich—maybe that’s why the tone of its March 1947 report on the Swiss resort of St. Moritz feels at-once amused, and slightly annoyed.

Of course, LIFE had always paid attention to the idle rich, and when it felt like it, the magazine could be as fulsome and as frothy in its coverage of that fascinating breed as any other publication of the era. The magazine’s editors were well aware, especially in the post-war years, that a steady diet of garcinia cambogia extract, austerity, disaster and other hard-news staples might earn LIFE accolades, but the only sure way to sell copies (and ads) was to make sure there were stories on celebrities, royalty and other “beautiful people” in the mix.

In its March 10, 1947, issue, LIFE took a look at those beautiful people, in one of their more beautiful playgrounds, and while the photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt convey the sheer luxury of the life they led, it’s hard not to detect just the slightest hint of a sneer in the way the piece was introduced. There’s no real animosity here; but nor is there much hand-wringing over the fact that for at least some of St. Moritz’s more absurd, and absurdly rich, habitues the world was changing beneath their feet.

The exiled royalty, minor princes, beauties, near beauties, sportsmen and bankers of the International Set consider St Moritz the place to spend a winter holiday. It is not just because this village, tucked high in the Alps of southeast Switzerland, is world-renowned as a winter sports center, with a famous Olympic bobsled run, unparalleled ski slopes and miles of beautiful mountain trails. It is mostly because St. Moritz is the most fashionable village in Europe. For more than half a century royalty has assembled on its Alpine slopes, at its outdoor cocktail bars and in its luxurious dining rooms. St. Moritz has always been the place to see the world’s great. It has also been the place for the not-so-great to be seen.

Somehow St. Moritz got through the war without closing. This winter, despite currency restrictions, the resort has all the sybaritic elegance of prewar years…. Only nowadays, as one native observed, “The princes are not princes any more.”

Original caption: “Midday cocktails at St. Moritz are served on the private ice rink of the Palace Hotel at a bar made of snow.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Egyptian Princess Nasli Shah (left), wife of Prince Abdel Moneim, goes for a stroll through the snow with young Peter Zervudachi and Princess Sixte de Bourbon-Parme, sister-in-law of Austria’s last empress.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Sunday sleigh rides are an ancient custom among natives of Engadine. With menfolk seated behind, they set out for a round of visits in neighboring villages, making a picturesque spectacle for the town’s guests.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

St. Moritz ,1947.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “A chihuahua gets more attention on street than the conglomerate costume of his mistress. St. Moritz was crowded with many fashionable dogs, including one with leg splints as a result of a curling accident.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Fashionable center is Palace Hotel where many of Europe’s crowned heads have been guests. The hotel has 200 rooms. Rates start at $80 per week for good room and meals but bills somehow add up to much more.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

St. Moritz, 1947.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Thick coats, like those of Isabelle Nicole and her dogs, protect them from the 17-degree cold.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

St. Moritz, 1947.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Snow-covered winter-resort village. Hotel Chantarella in background. St. Moritz, 1947.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

St. Moritz, 1947.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Privileged dog gets thorough whisking when he returns to hotel from snowy streets.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Self-portrait of photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt standing in snow and holding his Leica camera while on assignment for LIFE in St. Moritz, Switzerland, 1947.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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Photographer Spotlight: Nina Leen

LIFE’s First Cover Story: Building the Fort Peck Dam, 1936

Penn Station, 1963: Walker Evans’ Portraits of a Lost Treasure

In Praise of Unusual Flying Objects

The War is Over, and Cocktails are Being Served: St. Moritz, 1947

Seeking Warmth During an Iceland Deployment

Diving For Abalone: A Vanishing Tradition

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