Page 141 – LIFE

Mardi Gras: Rare Vintage Photos From America’s Most Famous Party

August 17, 2021February 20, 2012 by

Early on in its decades-long run as a weekly magazine, LIFE turned its eye toward always-enticing, ever-vivid New Orleans and that great city’s signature annual event: Mardia Gras. In February, 1938, editors sent photographer William Vandivert to the Big Easy to chronicle the carnival, and to show LIFE’s readers how one American city in so many ways a Caribbean, as opposed to a purely Southern, town maintained a centuries-old tradition of refined debauchery and unalloyed fun in the midst of the Great Depression.

The story that ran in the March 14, 1938, issue of LIFE, alongside some of Vandivert’s photographs, was interesting enough, in its own way. Titled “LIFE goes to America’s Most Famous Party,” the five-page feature focused almost exclusively on the aristocratic Comus Ball, and the pomp and ceremony that attends the crowning of the ball’s king and queen.

In fact, in 1938, LIFE was invited to the Comus Ball “to photograph it,” the magazine gently boasted to its readers, “for the press for the first and only time in its 81 years.”

But Bill Vandivert was in New Orleans for more than a few days and nights in the late winter of 1938, and he made hundreds of photographs far more interesting photographs, it turns out, than those that ran in the magazine on the crowded, chaotic streets and boulevards of that singular town.

Here, in tribute to the undying spirit of the Crescent City, and to celebrate the ancient festival of carnival (from Latin, carne vale, or “farewell to meat”) that traditionally marks the beginning of the Christian observance of Lent, LIFE.com offers a gallery of those previously unpublished Vandivert photos: pictures of men, women and children happily caught up in the whirlwind of Mardi Gras, in a vanished New Orleans that feels at once ghostly and somehow inimitably, intensely alive.

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

Mardi Gras 1938

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras 1938, New Orleans Louisiana

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras 1938

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras 1938, New Orleans Louisiana

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras, New Orleans, 1938.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras 1938, New Orleans Louisiana

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras 1938

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mardi Gras 1938, New Orleans Louisiana

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam: Eve Arnold’s Quietly Powerful Images

January 20, 2020February 20, 2012 by

During her multiple-decade career, Eve Arnold photographed people, ranging from movie stars and era-defining politicians to the abjectly poor and destitute. Combining methodical reportage with a talent for fostering long-term relationships with her subjects, Arnold—the first woman photographer to join Magnum Photos—produced a body of work that offered a window into many of the cultural touchstones and most of the figures who helped shape the second half of the 20th century.

In 1960, LIFE magazine assigned Arnold, who died in January 2012 at the age of 99, to document the days and nights of Malcolm X, the controversial and intensely charismatic public face of the Nation of Islam. For nearly a year, she followed the thug-turned-devout Muslim and activist from Washington to New York to Chicago.

At the very first NOI rally she attended, at the Uline Arena in Washington, D.C., Arnold photographed George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, who had forged an alliance with the Nation of Islam (and who, like Malcolm X, would be assassinated before the decade was over). Arnold born into a Russian-Jewish family in Philadelphia in 1912 wrote later that, as she raised her camera to photograph Rockwell and his brownshirt-clad henchmen, he hissed at her, “I’ll make a bar of soap out of you.”

“I hissed back, ‘As long as it isn’t a lampshade,'” Arnold wrote of the moment, “and kept photographing,” She was often the only white face at the rallies she photographed, and once described the chilling experience of removing her sweater after a Nation of Islam rally in Harlem, only to see dozens of burn marks on the back of the garment, where men in the crowd had pushed their lit cigarettes against the fabric.

Arnold’s work from her year spent with the Nation of Islam comprises a powerful mosaic illustrating the strength and energy of a new force in America a force operating in tandem with the era’s young, increasingly mainstream Civil Rights movement, but with utterly divergent aims and tactics. At the very center of her portrait of the Black Muslim movement is Malcolm X, who Arnold described as kind, gracious and incredibly helpful to her in her work.

“I am always delighted by the manipulation that goes on between a subject and photographer when the subject knows about the camera and how it can best be used to his advantage,” Arnold wrote. “Malcolm was brilliant in this silent collaboration.” The unspoken teamwork, in a sense, that Arnold describes and celebrates went beyond simple access. Instead, she remembers Malcolm X finding her subjects to photograph, arranging shots and ensuring that she had interviews for the text.

“He was a really clever showman,” she wrote, “apparently knowledgeable about how he could use pictures and the press to tell his story.”

When Arnold submitted her photographs to LIFE, an editor initially rejected them on the grounds that the Black Muslims were not well known. When the editor consented to seeing the pictures in layout, the closing photograph of women at prayer was placed above an Oreo cookie advertisement, and the magazine ultimately pulled the material. The next year, Esquire published the images; Arnold observed that the Esquire piece was something of a launch pad to her later, landmark work. In summing up the experience of spending so much time in such close contact with Malcolm X at the height of his riveting career, Arnold wrote that she was “privileged to work with one of the most dynamic leaders of the century.”

Through her extraordinary pictures, the rest of us get to share in that rare privilege.

Malcolm X. Chicago, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Children lined up outside a Nation of Islam meeting at the Uline Arena, Washington, D.C., 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Malcolm X made a speech at a Nation of Islam rally, Washington D.C., 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Nation of Islam meeting, New York City, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, Chicago, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Nation of Islam meeting, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Malcolm X gave a speech at a Nation of Islam rally, Washington, D.C., 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Nation of Islam meeting, New York City, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Three sets of hands (left to right): American Nazi, Nation of Islam member and a Nation of Islam money collector at a rally, Washington, D.C., 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Malcolm X gives a speech at a Nation of Islam rally, Washington, D.C., 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Nation of Islam meeting, 1961

Eve Arnold Magnum

Malcolm X, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Daughter and wife of Elijah Muhammad with Malcolm X, Chicago, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Children of members of the Nation of Islam on their way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, 1961.

Eve Arnold Magnum

Audiences on a String: American Puppet Masters in India,1962

December 18, 2019February 20, 2012 by

In a 1963 LIFE profile of Bil Baird, a master puppeteer, and his wife Cora, Bil advised: “Don’t think of puppets as little instant people. They have to be more than people, or less, or sharper, somehow more exaggerated and then you just can’t beat them for kidding human pomposity and sham.”

The Bairds, who would later inspire Muppet maker Jim Henson, were accomplished enough in their craft that the U.S. State Department sponsored their tour of India in 1962.

(FYI, Bil Baird dropped the second “l” from his first name when, according to LIFE, “he joined a nutty club in Chicago that required all members to have three-letter names.”)

And while the photos from that tour of India provide a sense of Bil and Cora’s creatively intense and whimsical lives, writer David Scherman’s words, from the article, “Puppets Puncture Pomposity,” add flavor to the portrait of this charming Greenwich Village-based couple, their two kids and their family-run entertainment business.

If you suffer from creeping conformism, acute squareness or an overstuffed shirt, an evening with Bil and Cora Baird, if you’re lucky enough to fall into one (they’re never planned they happen) is a sure cure. If you play the one-string bass, the steam calliope or the sweet potato, it will help but it’s not mandatory. If you don’t dig music, don’t go. But if you do, you’re likely to hear a major American folksinger sing a bawdy folksong, either along or in harmony with the indefatigable Baird or a minor movie star, or eat a gourmet meal suddenly produced by Cora, or shake hands with a newly made puppet that looks suspiciously like a newly arrived guest, or get stuck in the elevator with a lovely dancer and a fat man playing calypsos on an accordion.

Like any good puppeteer, and he is the best, [Baird] is carpenter, electrician, artist, actor, athlete, poet, and plays most instruments, some very well, some awfully He is surprisingly dry-eyed about his wooden proteges, some of which may take him and his staff hundreds of hours to make: “People often ask if we love them, or feel like their parents. God, no. They don’t command love in their own right. They’re nothing if we don’t operate them. Besides,” he said, in a non sequitur that somehow made sense, “I always give them blue eyelids.”

One final note: You know the trippy “Lonely Goatherd” marionette sequence in The Sound of Music? Bil and Cora Baird made the puppets, and were pulling the strings in that scene—giving them, to this date, a bit of immortality.

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

American puppeteer Bil Baird in India, 1962

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

On a State Department tour of India, the Bairds [Bil, second from right; Cora at right] performed for a crowd in the village square of Nistoli.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Puppeteer Cora Baird in India, 1962. “Puppetry probably started in India, and it isn’t kid stuff with them,” Bil Baird told LIFE.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American puppeteers Bil and Cora Baird with colleagues in India, 1962.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Puppeteer Bil Baird in India, 1962.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bil and Cora Baird in India, 1962.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Puppeteer Bil Baird in India, 1962.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

One of American puppeteer Bil Baird’s creations delighted kids in India in 1962.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Puppeteer Bil Baird in India, 1962

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Puppeteer Bil Baird in India, 1962.

James Burke/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

In Praise of the ‘Powder Puff Derby’

August 11, 2021February 18, 2012 by

“Sweet little Alice Van is as daredevilish a rider as ever came out of the Wild West,” LIFE informed its readers in the August 18, 1940, issue of the magazine. “Aboard a savage steer or proudly flaying a bucking bronco she has been the darling of hundreds of U.S. rodeos.”

But in late July of that year, at Tijuana’s Agua Caliente racetrack, Van “achieved new fame. Wearing borrowed silks and a pair of borrowed jockey pants (two sizes too large), she mounted a cheap claiming horse named Drum Music and rode him to victory by a nose in a revival of Agua Caliente’s famous Powder Puff Derby. Behind her as also-rans struggled six other girl jockeys on six other old nags.”

Today, at least some of the language used in that brief little feature in LIFE would be utter gibberish to the ears of the vast majority of readers. Silks? What silks? And what on earth is a “cheap claiming horse,” anyway? But in 1940, when thoroughbred horse racing was still an incredibly popular sport in the U.S., it’s a safe bet that many, and perhaps even most, of the magazine’s readers would know exactly what those phrases meant.

Here, LIFE’s Peter Stackpole offers a lighthearted look at racing back in the day, through the lens of a single race, the “Powder Puff Derby,” and half-a-dozen women jockeys, on a scorching summer afternoon at a track in Baja California, Mexico.

Oh, and by the way: “Silks” are the racing outfits worn by jockeys, featuring colors and patterns associated with a horse’s stable or owners; a “claiming horse” is a horse that can be bought or “claimed” until shortly before a race.

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

Original caption: “Weighing in before the race the girls are understandably nervous. Alice Van (third from left) is wondering whether Drum Music, the horse she will ride is any good. Because the girls generally refuse to diet and because they average about 10 lbs. more than men jockeys, their races are usually scheduled at the high weight of 130 lbs.”

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Women jockeys in Baja California, Mexico, 1940.

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “From balcony of jockeys’ quarters the girls and two regular jockeys watch an early program race. Most of the girls are rodeo performers, enter for the fun of it.”

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Weighing in for the Powder Puff Derby, Agua Caliente Racetrack, Mexico, 1940.

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Scales read 119 as Alice steps on them as jockey Martin Fallon, smoking a big cigar, leers up at her. She is a former Cheyenne ‘Frontier Days’ champion rider.”

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alice Van and her husband/manager place bets at the track in Baja California, Mexico, 1940.

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Women jockeys in Baja California, Mexico, 1940.

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alice’s horse, Drum Music, won the race.

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “After race Alice poses for picture with Drum Music and Drum Music’s owner Tom Hunt, a horseman from San Ysidro, California. Hunt won $500. Alice won a wrist watch.”

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dior in 1948: Rare Photos From the Birth of the ‘New Look’

January 20, 2020February 16, 2012 by

In March 1948, LIFE introduced its readers to a pioneering French fashion designer and what the magazine called his “revolutionary” vision. The monsieur in question was none other than (in writer Jeanne Perkins marvelous characterization) “a timid, middle-aged, insignificant-looking little Frenchman named Christian Dior,” and the fashion earthquake he unleashed was something called, simply and unforgettably, the New Look.

Here, LIFE.com not only offers a glimpse back at a seminal moment in fashion history, but presents pictures—some that appeared in the magazine, many that were never published—by some of LIFE’s finest photographers, taken at a Dior show in Paris in 1948, when the New Look was all the rage and a timid, middle-aged, insignificant-looking little Frenchman astonished and thrilled the couture world.

Below is an abridged version of the article that ran in the March 1, 1948, issue of LIFE, beneath the one-word headline: DIOR.

Like all great revolutionists, Christian Dior is a creature of destiny. He did not create the New Look single-handed. But he appeared at the psychological moment as its man on plush horseback. As far back as the late 1930s Martha Graham's modern ballet troupe was wearing the knee-covering, bosom-exposing garments currently featured as the New Looks. In 1941 Harper's Bazaar solemnly warned its readers: 'Watch your skirt length. If this longer skirt length looks right to you, you're a woman of the future.' Dior senses this situation ('I know very well the women'). He also senses that the time was exactly ripe to convert these minority manifestations into a powerful mass movement. . . .

Although scarcely anyone had ever heard of him before last year, Christian Dior had been a minor league figure in Paris dress business, on and off, since 1936. About a year and a half ago, with backing from a French gambler and millionaire named Marcel Boussac, he left a job as one of Lucien Lelong's numerous assistants to open his own dress shop a fine old mansion on the Avenue Montaigne, a few steps away from the Champs Elysées. He plunged lavishly, staking everything on a single throw. For four months 85 decorators and painters labored to produce an atmosphere of discreet elegance unequaled in any existing Paris salon de couture. When the setting was ready, Dior retired to his little country house near Fontainbleau and meditated for a week. He returned from his lonely vigil, his pockets stuffed with 300 designs scrawled on odd bits of paper.

"I'm a mild man," Dior says, "but I have violent tastes." Violent tastes were precisely what the situation demanded. Dior went all-out for his new line. His narrow waists became as much as 2 inches narrower by means of specially installed corsets. His low necks were so low that they barely stopped at the waist. Other designers might sidle up to old-fashioned femininity and romance; Dior tackled it headlong.

“Three weeks ago,” LIFE concluded, “the new spring showing of Dior models opened in Paris. ‘Chalk up another fast one for Christian Dior,’ exhorted WNBC’s Peter Roberts. ‘Yesterday he let the world in on his ideas for 1948. And the folks who should know were betting dollars to doughnuts he was going to lengthen skirts a little more. But friend Dior shortened skirts! Not much but shortened. Just one inch. . . .'”

Christian Dior in his Paris salon, 1948

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Christian Dior dresses showed a marked Edwardian trend; this one had an old-fashioned corset cover top.

Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dior fashion show, Paris, 1948.

Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dior fashion show, Paris, 1948

Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dior fashion show, Paris, 1948.

Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Christian Dior with his seamstresses, 1948.

Tony Linck The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Paris seamstresses mobbed their boss, Dior, on St. Catherine’s Day (Nov 23), the traditional spinsters holiday. LIFE commented, “Dior is rich, kind and unmarried.”

Tony Linck The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dior decorated his home, a fourth floor walk-up in the heart of Paris, to resemble his parents’ home as it was in 1900.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Christian Dior dress, 1948.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

1967: Pictures From a Pivotal Year

August 9, 2021February 15, 2012 by

That the 1960s still hold remarkable sway over the American psyche is hardly a matter of debate. How people respond to the decade’s grip on the national imagination, on the other hand well, that’s a bit more problematic.

Some find it heartening that the Sixties still resonate at all, with men and women who lived through those years and millions more who were born long after the decade ended; others decry the fact (or what they see as the fact) that the ideals of the era have been irretrievably co-opted by the triumph of turbocharged consumerism; still others find the entire mythology of the Age of Aquarius utterly obnoxious and tiresome, and can not wait for the Woodstock Generation to, quite frankly, die off.

But even the most ardent Sixties-bashers can sometimes find themselves inexorably drawn to the era or, as the case may be, to one specific, pivotal year.

Take 1967. There was an awful lot going on in the U.S. and around the world at the time. The war in Vietnam was only getting bloodier. Race riots rocked American cities. Baseball fans reveled in one of the most exciting pennant races in history. A young comedian named Woody Allen was killing in Vegas. Iran crowned a new Shah. The “counterculture,” in all its protean forms, was in full bloom. Hippies were flooding to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury soon to be followed by far more toxic forces (meth and heroin, for example, and the casualties that customarily follow in their wake) that would effectively bring an ugly end to the “Summer of Love” almost before it began.

The photos in this gallery are not meant to represent the “best” pictures made by LIFE’s photographers in 1967. Instead, in their variety of style and theme, they illustrate the fluid, volatile new world that millions were struggling to come to grips with, and to somehow safely navigate, throughout the charged weeks and months of that long, strange year.

An American machine gunner on patrol by helicopter over Vietnam’s Mekong Delta in 1967.

Larry Burrows Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Woody Allen (then better known as a stand-up comedian than a filmmaker) plays his clarinet in a Las Vegas hotel room, 1967.

Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A store owner guards his property in Detroit during the 1967 riots, behind a sign he made that, he hoped, might help spare his shop from attack by roving mobs.

Lee Balterman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An astronaut descends the ladder of a life-sized, model lunar module during a simulation of a moon landing, 1967.

Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Contact sheet with the last strips of film found in LIFE photographer Paul Schutzer’s camera after he was killed while traveling with Israeli soldiers during the Six-Day War in 1967. Schutzer was killed by a 57mm Egyptian shell that hit the vehicle he was riding in on June 5, 1967. He was 37 years old.

Paul Schutzer Time & Life Pictures

Grinning Israeli soldiers give the thumbs up in one of the very last pictures taken by photographer Paul Schutzer before he was killed during the Six-Day War in 1967.

Paul Schutzer Time & Life Pictures

Eastern Orthodox Church Patriarch Athenagoras I, Archbishop of Constantinople (Istanbul), visits a sick member of the church, 1967.

Carlo Bavagnoli Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Novelist Harold Robbins (“the man who turns sex and adventure into cash,” according to LIFE) and his family, wife Grace and daughter Adrianna, at their villa in the hills above Cannes, France, in 1967.

Loomis Dean Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Carl and Shirley Stokes walk through the snow on their way to vote in the Cleveland mayoral race in November 1967. Stokes, 40 years old at the time, defeated Seth Taft (grandson of the former president) to become the first-ever African American mayor of a major U.S. city.

Lee Balterman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American soldiers of 2nd Battalion, 503rd Airborne Infantry, 173rd Airborne Division gear up for a long range patrol during Operation Junction City, a massive 1967 search and destroy operation in Vietnam conducted in hopes of clearing People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam units from the area northeast of the capital of Saigon.

Co Rentmeester Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Actress Mia Farrow, a.k.a., Mrs. Frank Sinatra, ready for a night out in New York in 1967.

Bill Eppridge Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Vietnam protesters at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco during one of many rallies around the country in April 1967.

Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Carl Yastrzemski, 1967

Jerry Brimacombe Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Novelist James Jones (From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, Go to the Widow-Maker) in his art-filled Paris home in 1967.

Loomis Dean Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Shah of Iran, Mohammad Shah Pahlavi, poses with his son, Prince Reza, and wife, Farah, following his coronation in 1967.

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jerry Orbach gestures toward co-stars Rudy Challenger and Jennifer Warren during rehearsals for the 1967 Off-Broadway hit, Scuba Duba.

Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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Mardi Gras: Rare Vintage Photos From America’s Most Famous Party

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Dior in 1948: Rare Photos From the Birth of the ‘New Look’

1967: Pictures From a Pivotal Year

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