Page 139 – LIFE

Liza Minnelli at 19: Rare Photos of a Legend on the Cusp of Stardom

December 19, 2019March 9, 2012 by

In March 1965, when LIFE photographer Bill Eppridge spent time on assignment with Judy Garland’s enormously talented daughter, Liza Minnelli, Liza was just turning 19 and launching what would prove to be a monumental career of her own. She was about to debut on Broadway in Flora the Red Menace, in a role that would make her, at the time, the youngest woman to win a Tony Award for lead actress. Also on the show’s creative team was composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb. They would team up on such Broadway classics as Cabaret—later made into a movie starring Minnelli in her Oscar-winning role as Sally Bowles—and Chicago.

Liza allowed Eppridge into her spirited Flora rehearsals, and even invited him to her 19th birthday party in New York City, but in the end LIFE published just one of Eppridge’s photos. Here LIFE.com presents a series of pictures most of which never ran in LIFE of a legend in the making.

Liza, of course, was no stranger to show business: her mom was Judy Garland, her dad was the director Vincente Minnelli. She had performed with her mother at the London Palladium and had done a little work Off-Broadway but Flora the Red Menace would be her highest profile role to date, the gig that would nudge her out of the shadow of her famous parents and into another spotlight entirely.

Of Minnelli’s opening-night performance in Flora, LIFE wrote: “She acted and danced with an awkward, captivating charm, threw out ‘What-am-I-doing-here?’ looks, sang in a voice that boomed and belted, quivered sweetly, and occasionally got out of control which only added to her likability. . . . She certainly did look like her mother several rainbows ago. When she sang, there were echoes of Judy, too the old catches and wavers and throbs that made a song sound as if it were going through a nervous breakdown. But soon Judy’s image faded and Liza’s came into focus.”

In the decades since Eppridge made these intimate shots of the budding star, Liza has performed at the world’s most famous concert halls, racked up countless awards for her singing and acting and delighted new generations of fans with scene-stealing appearances in contemporary pop-culture touchstones like Arrested Development. But her early years truly were something special. As Liza told LIFE in 1965: “Eighteen is great, but 19 is best of all. That’s when you’re opening in your first Broadway show.”

Surrounded by friends, and in the embrace of fiancé Peter Allen—she’d marry the Australian entertainer two years later—19-year-old Liza Minnelli cut her birthday cake in 1965.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Liza Minnelli studied sheet music in rehearsals for Flora the Red Menace in 1965, a new musical in which she’d play a bohemian fashion designer during the Great Depression.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Liza Minnelli ran lines with her Flora the Red Menace costar Bob Dishy. In the show, Liza’s Flora falls for his character, a fellow designer who pulls her toward Communism.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Liza Minnelli and Bob Dishy were put through their paces by Flora the Red Menace choreographer Lee Theodore.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Liza Minnelli, 1965.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Flora the Red Menace rehearsals, 1965.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Liza Minnelli huddled with Flora the Red Menace choreographer Lee Theodore (right) and an unidentified man (possibly Fred Ebb).

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Liza Minnelli burned up the floor at her 19th birthday party at Il Mio, a disco inside Delmonico’s Hotel in New York, March 1965.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Liza Minnelli, 1965.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Liza Minnelli busted out the hottest dance of the day, “the Frug,” at her birthday party in 1965.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Shoes kicked off, head thrown back, 19-year-old Liza Minnelli belted out a song for birthday party guests in 1965. From LIFE’s report: “When a friend scolded her for singing for free she said, ‘I don’t care, I sing for me.'”

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Liza Minnelli reacted as an unidentified well-wisher at her 19th birthday party presented her with a swan-shaped balloon. Seated beside her was Peter Allen.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Liza Minnelli, 1965.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Birthday girl Liza Minnelli got down on the floor with her guests, March 1965.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The First Girl Scout: Portraits of Daisy Gordon Lawrence

January 20, 2020March 9, 2012 by

How often is a preteen celebrated as a genuine pioneer? In 1912, in Savannah, Ga., an 11-year-old girl named Daisy Gordon earned that lofty, evocative appellation when she became the first-ever Girl Scout in the United States.

Daisy’s aunt, Juliette Gordon Low—also known as “Daisy” to family and friends—was the founder of the Girl Scouts of America. Juliette was inspired to start the organization during a trip to the United Kingdom in early 1912. When she returned to Savannah in March of that year, she resolved to create a new type of sorority for girls modeled on the Boy Scout movement she’d witnessed and so admired in England. On March 12, 1912, at a “Girl Scout” party at Juliette’s Savannah home, her niece Daisy was the first to sign the new organization’s membership register. The rest, as they say, is history.

Here, more than a century after the founding of the Girl Scouts of America, LIFE.com pays tribute to the GSA with a gallery of pictures featuring none other than “the first Girl Scout,” Daisy Gordon herself.

In its November 22, 1948 issue, LIFE ran a feature titled, like this gallery, “The First Girl Scout.” The subtitle of the article, meanwhile, was even more enticing—”She shows off a new uniform and some old tricks”—and indicated what was to come: namely, pictures of Daisy Gordon Lawrence (47 years old and married when the article appeared) wearing new Girl Scout duds while also showing contemporary Girl Scouts how to tie knots, start a fire with a “firebow” and work semaphore flags.

“Girl Scouts,” LIFE wrote, “have proved an important force in the nation’s youth. Today they can get proficiency badges in anything from journalism to international affairs. When Daisy was a Scout, the program was more violent. Her guidebook taught how to stop runaway horses (‘run as fast as the horse and throw your full weight on the reins’), how to shoot guns, and fly airplanes (‘it is best not to go out in a hurricane.’) ‘Rubber,’ it warned, ’causes paralysis.’ To make First Class Scout a girl had to ‘show a list of 12 satisfactory good turns’ or ‘swim 50 yards in her clothes.’ Daisy stayed Second Class.'”

Daisy remained active in the GSA for years; in 1958 she co-authored a book on her aunt, titled Lady of Savannah: The Life of Juliette Low. Daisy Gordon Lawrence died in Seattle in 1982.

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

Daisy Gordon Lawrence with a young scout in 1948.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The first uniform officially approved was severe, military and khaki-colored. The new uniform for leaders (right), designed by Mainbocher, was green but still severe.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Daisy Gordon Lawrence addressed a crowd in Savannah, Georgia, during a celebration honoring her aunt, Juliette Low, founder of the Girl Scouts of America.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Signaling, Mrs. Lawrence waved semaphore flags. She could remember most letters up to M, and also W (above). She had three children; all were boy scouts.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Daisy Gordon Lawrence with young scouts in 1948.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Lighting a fire with a firebow, Lawrence demonstrated the friction method used in her day. The tinder failed to light. In 1948 the Girl Scouts were using matches.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tying a knot, she made a clove hitch on a tree. In 1948 scouts did less knotting and woodcraft, concentrating more on homemaking and hospital work.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Daisy Gordon Lawrence with young scouts in 1948.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Daisy Gordon Lawrence schooled young Scouts on first aid in 1948.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Girl Scout Office and Juilette Low Museum in Savannah, Georgia.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Daisy Gordon Lawrence in 1948.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Daisy Gordon Lawrence walked with young scouts near the Girl Scout office and Juilette Low Museum in Savannah, Georgia.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Daisy Gordon Lawrence with a young scout in 1948.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Classic Photos of Stars in Stop Motion

August 11, 2021March 8, 2012 by

Ask 20 random people, “What is the nature of time?” and chances are pretty good that you’ll get 20 different answers. Time is an arrow, says one. Time is a circle, suggests another. Time is relative. Time is an illusion.

But no matter how assured or unhesitating their answers might be, most people would be hard-pressed to offer a single, definitive method for illustrating time. Here, LIFE.com offers a selection of marvelous photographs, stroboscopic and otherwise, by the great Gjon Mili. These technically brilliant pictures fiddle with moments, junctures, sequences, and in the process offer a playful commentary on time.

“To see a world in a grain of sand,” William Blake once wrote, “and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.” At their best, Gjon Mili’s stroboscopic photographs not only serve as a kind of modern adjunct to Blake’s vision; they also celebrate with an unsentimental, clear-eyed wonder the reality of sentient beings moving through both time and space.

Stroboscopic image of a trick shot by billiards champion Willie Hoppe in 1941.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stroboscopic image of ballerina Nora Kaye performing a pas de bourrée in 1947.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Choreographer Martha Graham performs her own work at Gjon Mili’s studio, 1941.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Drummer Gene Krupa at Gjon Mili’s studio, 1941.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

United States pentathlon champion John Borican leaps a hurdle in 1941.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A nude descends a staircase, 1942

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New York Giants pitcher Carl Hubbell throws a curve ball, 1940.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dancer and actor Gene Kelly in a multiple-exposure dance sequence from the movie Cover Girl, 1944.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

FBI agent Del Bryce draws his gun, 1945.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rope-skipping champion Gordon Hathaway in action, 1947.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Multiple exposure photograph of Pablo Picasso using a small flashlight to “draw” a figure in the air in 1949.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stroboscopic image of Martha Graham dancer Ethel Butler in 1941.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sammy Davis Jr. as “Sportin’ Life” in the MGM production of Porgy and Bess, 1958.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stan Cavenaugh juggles tenpins, 1941.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stroboscopic image of the head and shoulders of a model wearing an elaborate hat and jewelry, 1946.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stroboscopic image of New York University fencing champion Arthur Tauber (left) parrying with Sol Gorlin, 1942.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stroboscopic image showing a repetitive closeup of Isaac Stern playing violin at photographer Gjon Mili’s studio in 1959.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stroboscopic image of choreographer George Balanchine watching New York City Ballet dancers rehearse in 1965.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

College Basketball’s Golden Days

December 19, 2019March 7, 2012 by

These days college basketball careers go by in a flash—no sooner does a player make an impression on fans than he has left school to play professionally. It used to be different. Athletes stayed in college for four years. Fans could see stars mature and develop before they moved on to the NBA.

Here, LIFE.com presents a gallery of photographs from a golden era of college hoops, featuring all-time greats (Lew Alcindor, a.k.a, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; Oscar Robertson; Pete Maravich; Wilt Chamberlain; Bob Cousy; Jerry Lucas) as well as other players who made brief splashes in their time and then like so many athletes, quietly faded from the public’s view.

A prime example: Yale’s Tony Lavelli, a terrific 6′ 3″ forward in the late 1940s who scored close to 2,000 points and graduated as the fourth highest-scorer in college history. (Today, he is no longer in the all-time top 250.) Lavelli was selected as the Boston Celtics’ first pick in the 1949 draft. But as music was his true passion and he had hoped to study at Julliard in New York, Lavelli agreed to sign with Boston on one unusual condition: that the Celtics pay him an extra $125 per game to play his beloved accordion at half-time at the old Boston Garden.

Lavelli played two years of pro ball, but ultimately returned to his first love, going on to a long career as a performer and songwriter.

Pete Maravich (LSU) fired off a fade-away jumper against Alabama in 1969.

Art Rickerby The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Wilt Chamberlain (Kansas) soared in 1957.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Burke Scott (above, with ball) was a starter on Indiana’s 1953 NCAA championship team.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Seven-foot, two-inch Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, here being fitted for trousers with a 51-inch inseam in 1967) left his native New York for UCLA, where he helped the Bruins win a record 88 games in a row and three national titles.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Long Island University Blackbirds practiced in 1940. Under Hall of Fame coach Clair Bee, the Blackbirds were a powerhouse in the 1930s and ’40s, winning two NIT titles.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Oregon State Beavers travelled by train, 1953.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Yale basketball star Tony Lavelli played his accordion, circa 1948.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The 6′ 8″ Jerry Lucas (above, in 1960) is still regarded as one of the best big men in the history of the game. In three college seasons with Ohio State he averaged 24.3 points and 17.2 rebounds and led the Buckeyes to three NCAA title games. They won it all in 1960.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bradley vs. St. John’s, Madison Square Garden, New York, in 1951.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New York’s Madison Square Garden (the old Garden, built in 1925 and razed in ’68) was the mecca of college basketball, hosting every round of the NIT for 40 years and home to the Final Four for much of the 1940s. Above: Bradley vs. St. John’s (in white, the ninth-winningest program in NCAA history), 1951.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The great Kansas coach Forrest Allen, nicknamed “Phog,” is often referred to as the “Father of Basketball Coaching.” Allen (here demonstrating some sort of funky move in 1957) coached Dean Smith; he recruited Wilt Chamberlain to Kansas; the Jayhawks’ Allen Fieldhouse is named for him, and a banner hanging in the fieldhouse reads, “Pay heed all who enter, beware of the Phog.”

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

MIT’s Dimitry Vergun (above, in 1956, the year he graduated) became an expert on designing buildings to withstand earthquakes.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

One of the first big guards in basketball, 6′ 5″, 220-pound Oscar Robertson (shown in 1959) led the nation in scoring in each of his three seasons at Cincinnati and left school as the top scorer in college history. The Big O was inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame in 1980.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

La Salle’s Tom Gola (driving to the hoop in 1954) was one of the college game’s earliest superstars, a do-it-all forward. The four-time All-American also scored 2,462 points, for career averages of 20.9 points and 18.7 rebounds.

Hank Walker The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In the eight-team 1958 Dixie Classic, the Michigan State Spartans (in the dark uniforms) made it all the way to the final before falling to host North Carolina State (in white)..

Hank Walker The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bob Cousy (above, at right, in 1950 when he was with Holy Cross) brought a showman’s flair to the sport before it was an accepted part of the game, regularly dribbling behind his back and throwing no-look passes.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The great North Carolina State Wolfpack coach Everett “The Gray Fox” Case cut down the net after winning the Dixie Classic title in 1959.

Hank Walker The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Nobel Prize in Literature: Portraits of Legendary Laureates

August 9, 2021March 5, 2012 by

The Swedish Academy, which began bestowing the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1901, has missed some opportunities to honor deserving authors (Tolstoy, Joyce, Borges, Nabokov, Proust, Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene are but a few of the giants without Nobel laurels). But this is a failing that, to most, pales beside the excellence and striking variety in style and subject matter, if not race and gender, among those who have won.

Among literary prizes, the Nobel carries unique weight. Unlike the Pulitzer, the Man Booker, the Goncourt, et al. which each year honor discrete fiction and nonfiction titles, the Nobel celebrates and solemnizes a writer’s life work.

Here, LIFE.com looks back at how LIFE magazine portrayed some Nobel winners through the years.

NOTE: Only two honorees have ever declined the Nobel for literature, one voluntarily, the other under threat. In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre sent his regrets, stating at-once graciously and forcefully, “A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form.”

In 1958, the great Russian poet and author of Dr. Zhivago, Boris Paternak, accepted the Nobel, but was later forced by the Soviet authorities, to the enduring shame of the USSR, to decline the prize. In 1989 Pasternak’s son, Evgenii, accepted the Nobel medal on his father’s behalf at a ceremony in Stockholm.

German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann in Tulsa, OK, in 1939.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

1947 Nobel laureate Andre Gide, at work (left) and in a portrait by LIFE’s Yale Joel.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

French writer Albert Camus smokes a cigarette on the balcony outside his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard’s office in Paris, 1955. Camus won the Nobel in 1957; in 1960, when he was 46 years old, he was killed in a car crash along with Gallimard, who was driving.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ernest Hemingway in Cuba in 1952. He was awarded the Nobel in 1954. When LIFE magazine published Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, in its entirety, in its September 1, 1952, issue, five million copies of the magazine were sold . . . in two days.

ALFRED EISENSTAEDT

Pearl Buck at her desk in 1942 (left), and in 1956 (right). She was awarded the Nobel for Literature in 1938.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sinclair Lewis in New York in 1937. He won his Nobel for Literature in 1930.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Irish-born playwright George Bernard Shaw, 90 years old, stands in the yard of his home in the Hertfordshire village of Ayot St. Lawrence, England, in 1946. He was awarded the Nobel for Literature in 1925.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The 1949 Nobel laureate William Faulkner, photographed in Hollywood in 1940.

PIX Inc. The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The 1962 Nobel laureate John Steinbeck in New York City in 1937.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jean-Paul Sartre at his home in Paris in 1946. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, but famously declined to accept it.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

PhilosopherBertrand Russell at his desk at UCLA in 1940 (left), and in England in 1951 (right). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.

Playwright Eugene O’Neill in New York in 1950. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936.

PIX Inc. The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Wallis and Edward: Reassessing the Windsors’ “Romance of the Century”

January 30, 2022March 3, 2012 by

Wallis and Edward, the Romance of the Century. The evocative phrase so often attached to the marriage of the esrtwhile King of England and the twice-divorced American socialite, Wallis Simpson, has a wonderful ring to it. After all, what sort of cold-hearted wretch wouldn’t thrill, even a little bit, to the story of a ruler of an ancient realm abdicating his throne so that he might marry his true love? What kind of flinty-souled Scrooge would even question motives, or reasons, in the narrative of a former monarch finding happiness with a “commoner” from across the sea?

And yet … there’s just one little catch. History (as well as authorized and unauthorized biographies, magazine articles, movies, newspaper stories and more) suggest that the “romance of the century” was, in fact, more or less like any other marriage: there were good times, and bad times, and little evidence that the former outnumbered or outweighed the latter.

For example, the balance of power in the relationship was, for long stretches of the marriage, completely out of whack. (Most men and women, if they’re honest with themselves and with each other, will admit that even when a marriage is founded on genuine love and respect, it’s impossible to ignore the central role that the wielding of power with a lower-case “p” can play in ensuring or wreaking havoc with a relationship.) The Duchess was, by almost all accounts, the protagonist in the marriage. She was the more outspoken, the more driven of the pair, while the Duke frequently seemed content to play the doting husband to his glamorous, intelligent and unapologetically ambitious wife.

But even if the romance between the Duke and Duchess was, as millions of people around the globe so earnestly wished it to be, a marvelous union made stronger by the remarkable sacrifice that paved its way even if the romance, in others words, really was the Romance of the Century there would still be those nagging little details that, over the years, have cast an enduring pall on the Windsors’ tale. (See photos from the Duke and the Duchess’ apparently jaunty journey through Nazi Germany in 1937.)

The trouble with the image that so many people still evidently harbor of the 20th century’s gleaming, flawless romance is that, in short, the gleaming, flawless romance never really existed. That the Duke and the Duchess loved one another, in their way, is something that even their most vocal detractors especially the Duchess’ vocal detractors, and there are legions of them readily admit. But beyond their powerful attraction to one another, the Windsors also shared some of the less-savory sensibilities common to so many of their upper-crust peers in the late 1930s and even into the war years of the 1940s. Namely, they displayed a comfort with far right-wing movements and ideologies grounded, in large part, in an abhorrence of far left-wing ideologies that at times was difficult to distinguish from infatuation.

The two, after all, gladly met with Hitler during their highly publicized tour of Germany in 1937, and neither of them displayed much compunction about associating with figures suspected of being pro-German, if not outright fascist. Even in the midst of the Second World War, when England was fighting for its life against the Reich and the Windsors were passing the time in the Bahamas where the Duke was made Governor neither of them worked overtime to dispel the notion that, in the end, it didn’t much matter to them whether or not Germany won the war.

That the Duchess hated England was an open secret; that many in England, and especially many in the royal family and the higher reaches of government, despised and distrusted her in return was equally well-known. Such a toxic dynamic between the former Wallis Simpson and so many in England hardly excuses the laissez-faire attitude that both the Windsors seemed to adopt toward the fate of what, after all, was the Duke’s ancestral home. It does, however, help explain it. How many of us, after all, can maintain even the appearance of goodwill toward those who publicly and privately deride us?

But in the end, maybe it’s about time that the “Romance of the Century” tag is retired, and we try to see the Windsors for what, in an elemental way, they were: a married couple who lived much of their private lives in public, and upon whose marriage countless people projected (and still project) their own hopes, fears, passions and fantasies. There’s really no need to despise them; there’s no need to admire, or celebrate, or try to emulate them, either. We’ll just leave them to history.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, 1940

Thomas D. McAvoy Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

May 22, 1950, cover of Life magazine featuring the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Philippe Halsman Life Magazine

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