Earnest discussions of great American pop-music lyricists—a grouping that might run from Willie Dixon to Bob Dylan to Taylor Swift, with dozens of worthy stops along the way—rarely include Jimmy Buffett. And yet, the second verse of “Margaritaville.” You’ve got it by heart, “Don’t know the reason” through “How it got here I haven’t a clue.” The 33-word verse packs in character and narrative along with suggestions of a layered backstory and an uncertain tomorrow, all delivered with a final twist.
“Margaritaville” is a brand, a business empire, a point of view. It’s perhaps the most profitable song in pop history, and the merchandising that surrounds it—T-shirts, tequilas, taprooms—has obscured its magic. First, and most important, “Margaritaville” is a gorgeous song, life-loving and elegiac, finely crafted and cheeky, a nuanced nugget of genius.
There was more where that came from. Critics weren’t often kind to Buffett—although in 1976, before the blinding presence of “Margaritaville,” a New York Times review suggested, “Mr. Buffett is a clever man, both in his words and his music. The lyrics generally hint at deeper meaning without getting portentous about it.” Dylan once named Buffett among the songwriters he most admired.
Buffett died at age 76 on September 1, 2023, the Friday of Labor Day weekend. That called to mind the opening lines of “Come Monday,” Buffett’s first Top 40 hit, a song he said rescued him from depression and helped to set his course toward the open sea. “Come Monday” is about the privilege and pain of missing someone, the promise of rediscovery, and the fact of having, in that someone, a North Star. “You’re that much a part of me now,” Buffett sings.
Upon Buffett’s death, many in the music world saluted his songwriting, his lyrics, his place in the firmament. Paul McCartney weighed in, as did Elton John and Brian Wilson. So did a cohort of country music stars Buffett influenced, among them Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith, and, of course, Buffett’s friend and collaborator Alan Jackson. “Shores distant shores, There’s where I’m headed for, I got the stars to guide my way, Sail into the light of day,” Jackson posted on X, excerpting the 2004 Buffett song “Boats to Build,” which Jackson also sang on.
Buffett’s vibe was fed continuously by the shores and waters of the American South. Of performing live, he liked to say, “I only play where it’s warm.” In fact, he played Greenwich Village folk clubs along with Texas roadhouses. He headlined at Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. He opened for the Eagles on their Hotel California tour. He shared the stage with Willie Nelson at Nelson’s annual Fourth of July festival. Buffett crossed the Atlantic—he had planned to play Paris again this year. He traversed the equator, he sailed through rain and snow, and he cut records in the shade of a volcano. Sometimes he got where he was going by piloting one of his planes or captaining one of his boats. He was a kind of missionary—with margaritas. The crowds, devoted Parrotheads at their core, followed everywhere.
Come Monday of Labor Day weekend 2023, the DJs on Sirius XM’s Radio Margaritaville were weeping less openly than they had been on the days before. Laughter and remembrances rang over the airwaves between some songs. A few listeners requested “Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On” as support. “How you doin’?” a caller asked JD Spradlin, a DJ who has worked from his Parrot Perch studio in Universal Orlando’s Margaritaville Café since 2007. “Doin’,” Spradlin replied.
Gone are the live concerts—healthy, Buffett played three dozen a year—with the folksy storytelling, the tall tales, the audience singing along. But the radio station isn’t going anywhere. Neither is Margaritaville, as a place or as a state of mind. New tribute bands will form; country stars will pay homage at their own shows. We’ll be listening to Jimmy Buffett’s words and melodies, feeling him, for many years to come. He’s that much a part of us now. •
Everett Collection; Ron Jenkins/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT/Alamy Live News (inset)
Jimmy Buffett, circa 1970.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
Jimmy Buffett, circa 1970.
Gems/Redferns/Gett
Jimmy Buffett performed at the Calavaras County Fair on June 10, 1978 in Angels Camp, California; the broken leg was from a pickup game of softball.
Ed Perlstein/Redferns/Getty
Jimmy Buffett watched the launch of the Space Shuttle from a VIP area at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, 1981.
AP/Shutterstock
From left to right: Clint Black, Kenny Chesney, Alan Jackson, Jimmy Buffett, George Strait and Toby Keith performed at the 38th Annual CMA Awards at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, Nov. 9, 2004.
Frank Micelotta/Getty
Jimmy Buffett performed during a press conference for the renaming of Dolphin Stadium to LandShark Stadium on May 8, 2009 in Miami Gardens, Florida.
Alexander Tamargo/Getty
Jimmy Buffett performed at Jimmy Buffett & Friends: Live from the Gulf Coast, a concert presented by CMT, on July 11, 2010 in Gulf Shores, Alabama.
Rick Diamond/CMT/Getty
Jimmy Buffett raised the margarita that set the Guinness World Record for the largest ever in celebration of the Margaritaville Casino grand opening in Las Vegas, Oct. 14, 2011.
Shutterstock
Jimmy Buffett, with wife and family, arrived at a “Men In Black II” screening after-party to benefit Hayground School at Nick & Toni’s in East Hampton, N.Y.. June 30, 2002.
Evan Agostini/Getty
Parrotheads Joe and Vicki Manning of Maryland traveled up to tailgate and attend the Jimmy Buffett concert at Jones Beach in New York,on August 10, 2021.
“They wait hours to be shocked,” read the headline in the January 27, 1974, edition of the New York Times. “People stood like sheep in the rain, cold and sleet for up to four hours to see the chilling film about a 12-year-old girl going to the Devil,” Judy Klemesrud wrote of the crowds outside Manhattan’s Cinema 1, where The Exorcist had been showing since its release a month earlier. “It’s been reported that once inside the theater, a number of moviegoers vomited at the very graphic goings-on on the screen. Others fainted, or left the theater, nauseous and trembling, before the film was half over. Several people had heart attacks, a guard told me. One woman even had a miscarriage, he said.”
Surely some of those rumored reactions were apocryphal, but there’s no doubt that The Exorcist struck a powerful chord in audiences who had never before witnessed anything like it—quite simply because there had never been anything like it.
Rosemary’s Baby had frightened moviegoers in 1968 with the story of a woman who unwittingly gives birth to the son of the Devil, but that film was relatively restrained in its depiction of the horrors unfolding around Mia Farrow’s Rosemary Woodhouse. The Exorcist, by contrast, held nothing back. Employing expert craftsmanship and groundbreaking special effects, director William Friedkin chronicled young Regan MacNeil’s terrifying transformation from an angel-faced tween into a projectile-vomiting, foul-mouthed monster in unflinching, explicit detail.
“If that film hadn’t been put out by a major studio, there’s no way it would have gotten [only] an R rating—that was, I think, a lot of what made it an immediate sensation,” says Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips. “People knew they were seeing something they probably shouldn’t have been seeing under that rating. It was crafty in the way that it wrapped itself in the dogma of the Catholic church, and giving you a happy-enough ending but also giving you pure hell along the way.”
Notably, Friedkin, as he set out to adapt William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel for the big screen, never intended to make a horror film. The director, who died in 2023 at age 87, said many times that for him, The Exorcist was not simply the story of a little girl who becomes possessed by a demon but rather a compelling character piece that offered a profound exploration of the mysteries of faith. Yes, Regan endures unimaginable suffering, but ultimately she is a means for the evil entity to torment Father Karras, a priest grappling with his relationship to God in the wake of his mother’s death.
Blatty’s intentions, too, had nothing to do with monster-movie influences. “When I was writing the novel, I thought I was writing a supernatural detective story that was filled with suspense, with theological overtones,” the author—who was raised by a devoutly Catholic mother—told the Los Angeles Times in 2013. “To this day, I have zero recollection of even a moment when I was writing that I was trying to frighten anyone.”
Initially, Blatty’s novel, which was inspired by a supposed real-life case of demonic possession, appeared on track to be a flop. Despite a serious publicity push from publisher Harper & Row, the book debuted to sluggish sales, which didn’t entirely surprise the author. “I never got the impression that he was convinced this was going to be a big hit, a big novel,” says Blatty’s son, Michael. “In fact, I think he was a little worried he could pull it off.” It was only after the elder Blatty’s fortuitous appearance on The Dick Cavett Show that interest in The Exorcist spiked. And then it took off. Before long, millions of people had picked up the compulsively readable thriller.
The first time Friedkin read Blatty’s story was in an early draft of a screenplay the author had penned after selling his film rights to Warner Bros. The director was hooked, seizing on The Exorcist as his ideal follow-up to The French Connection, a crime thriller that had netted five Academy Awards, including best director and best picture. “You don’t just do any picture next,” Friedkin said in 1973. “You try to make a film as good or better than the last one, to uphold the tradition of the Academy Award.”
Friedkin and his artistic collaborators sought to make The Exorcist hew as closely to Blatty’s source material as possible. And acclaimed though he was, Friedkin also had a well-deserved reputation for exacting perfectionism. He was an uncompromising taskmaster who wanted every aspect of a film to rise to a certain level of excellence, and conditions on his set would often be punishing, especially for Linda Blair, who famously won the role of Regan after a meeting with Friedkin in the Warner Bros. offices at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
“What everybody went through is their own path and journey with Billy,” Blair said in 2013. “He is difficult because he wants to deliver . . . the best of everything in the art form. That’s why the audience can still believe and relate to it. I know we’re all very proud to have been part of it. Yes, it was hard. There’s no doubt. It was no walk in the park.”
After The Exorcist opened on December 26, 1973, it didn’t take long for the film to dominate the cultural conversation. Some critics praised it as a work of genius; others decried it as a well-appointed exercise in child exploitation. But any poor notices did little to sway public opinion. The Exorcist raked in more than $10 million in its first five weeks as moviegoers, like the ones the New York Times had found, lined up outside theaters across the country, eager to see what had so many people talking—or fainting in the aisles.
Friedkin’s straightforward, documentary-inspired style grounded the outré events unfolding on-screen, and the movie’s superb acting further sold the illusion that Regan really was in the Devil’s grasp. “It was the first horror film I remember that had all the trappings of an A picture,” says veteran Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan. “Horror had been around for a while, but it had mostly been the domain of the [B-movies]. The Exorcist was really well cast. Also: Friedkin at the top of his game as an audience manipulator. He was really skilled at knowing how to make people jump.”
Ellen Burstyn, who played Regan’s distraught-actress mother, Chris, echoed those sentiments in 2016. “It’s very real—the story, the people,” she said. “The level of reality in the performances, I think, draws the audience in so that they’re hooked into the characters before it starts getting what could be hard to believe if you weren’t already engaged. I think that the audience gets taken on a trip, and then that combination of religion and sex and evil is a very potent combination.”
The Exorcist unquestionably tapped into deeply rooted anxieties about female adolescence, notes Julia Elliott, a professor of English and of women’s and gender studies at the University of South Carolina. “Regan, as a monster, is definitely embedded into fears of femininity, sexuality, and puberty,” Elliott says. “Her skin is oozing. She’s using foul language. She’s talking back to her mom. She’s explicitly sexual. The priests are just struggling to expel this demon of female sexuality from this adolescent body. At this time, society is particularly freaked out about female sexual freedom, because it’s 1973 and second-wave feminism, revolutionary energies, all that stuff is happening.”
Whatever the explanation, there’s no question that the film profoundly affected some viewers. Burstyn herself has said that she witnessed one woman lose consciousness during a screening in Tucson. “During the film, the part where Linda undergoes this test where they put the needle in her neck and all this blood squirts out—which is where people always fainted in the movie—I saw a lady going up the aisle and kind of wobbling,” Burstyn said in 1984 on Good Morning America. “She got to the top of the ramp of the aisle, and she fainted. I went over to help her. I loosened her collar, and I was talking to her. Her eyes were fluttering, and they started to open. I thought: My God, if she wakes up and sees me, she’ll think she’s in The Twilight Zone or something. So I jumped up and said, ‘Quick, somebody else come help her.’”
There was also a reported increase in the number of people who—many after viewing The Exorcist—came to believe that they, too, were host to some evil force. In 1974, Rev. Richard Woods, a Dominican at Loyola University in Chicago who authored a book about the Devil, told the New York Times: “I’ve received dozens of calls from people who are horribly frightened or so confused that they have begun to lose their grip on reality. . . . I also know of two kids who came out of the movie thinking that they were possessed, and they have now been hospitalized.”
Predictably, larger cultural voices weighed in, too. Televangelist Billy Graham famously noted of The Exorcist that “the Devil is in every frame of this film,” and both Time and Newsweek ran stories about the surrounding frenzy. The satirists at Mad magazine even got in on the act with a spoof 1974 cover featuring the grinning mascot Alfred E. Neuman depicted on an “Exorcist barf bag” alongside the slogan “If the Devil makes you do it.” The following year, Saturday Night Live did its own riff, with Richard Pryor playing a reluctant priest ministering to Laraine Newman’s Regan-inspired character.
By that point, The Exorcist had already earned a place in the annals of cinema with 10 Academy Award nominations, including for best director and best picture, though it won only in the adapted screenplay and sound categories. That fact rankled Blatty, who, despite having won a statuette himself, for writing, said the other snubs were a “disgrace” and that The Exorcist was “head and shoulders the finest film made this year and in many other years.”
Ultimately, other films might be more highly decorated, but few can boast the same widespread cultural and artistic reach as this harrowing tale of demonic possession. Five decades on, The Exorcist has lost none of its potency—if anything, the passage of time has more deeply etched the movie’s most terrifying scenes into the collective consciousness of cinephiles around the globe. It ranks No. 3 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 most thrilling films of all time, behind only Psycho and Jaws, and Regan, indelibly portrayed by Blair in her feature- film debut, ranks No. 9 on the AFI’s list of the 50 best movie villains.
“The Exorcist—both the book and the film—retain their hold on the public because they scare the hell into people,” says Nat Segaloff, author of the new book Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear. “The Exorcist is so skillfully made on every level that it has neither dated nor diminished in power. William Friedkin’s use of documentary style keeps it in time-present, the acting is consummate and takes every scene seriously, and [the movie] exploits centuries of religious indoctrination. There are people who, even today, are afraid to watch it, so great is its cumulative reputation.”
The Exorcist’s success spawned a wave of imitators around the world, unleashing an entire subgenre of horror in which young women come to host demons, transforming into monstrous and abhorrent creatures. “There’s an almost shot-for-shot remake made in Turkey called Satan; it’s not about Catholic priests . . . it’s just, like, a wise old man and a psychiatrist, but otherwise it’s almost identical,” explains David Wilt, a lecturer in film studies at the George Washington University who for the last several years has lectured on The Exorcist as part of a Profs and Pints series in Washington, D.C.
The 21st century, too, has seen yet more fictional stories about victims plagued by demons or by the Devil himself: The Exorcism of Emily Rose in 2005; The Last Exorcism in 2010 (ironically, a sequel followed three years later); The Rite in 2011; Deliver Us from Evil in 2014; The Possession of Hannah Grace in 2018; and, in April 2023, the Russell Crowe–led The Pope’s Exorcist.
And then there are the many sequels and prequels—and TV series and stage productions—spun off from Friedkin’s original film, which itself was re-released in theaters in 2000 with 11 minutes of additional footage, with the subtitle The Version You’ve Never Seen. The latest: Filmmaker David Gordon Green will unveil another follow-up, The Exorcist: Believer, in 2023, with Burstyn reprising her role as Chris MacNeil for the first time.
Yet no project to date has attained the same level of cultural cachet as did Friedkin’s standard-bearer. A true classic, The Exorcist retains its raw power. “Friedkin’s and Blatty’s original has stood the test of time because of its originality, its integrity, its skill, its lack of cynicism, and its morality,” says Segaloff. “It’s not a horror film—it’s a detective story about the mystery of faith. In a world where faith is exploited by televangelists and politicians, a movie that takes it seriously deserves its apotheosis.”
Linda Blair in a scene from The Exorcist that shocked audiences in 1973.
TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy
Fines lined up in the cold to see the horror movie sensation The Excorcist.
Bettmann/Getty
Richard Pryor (right), Thalmus Lasulala (center) and Laraine Newman (left) in a Saturday Night Like sketch inspired by The Exorcist, 1975.
NBCU Photo Bank/Getty
The 2023 film The Exorcist: Believer, starring Lidya Jewett (left) and Olivia Marcum (right), picked up the story of the orignal film from 50 years before.
There’s a Yiddish proverb which says, “God gives burdens, also shoulders.” For Rabbi Harold Freedman of North Carolina, he found a solution to his particular burden—Jews spread out across the state with no local place of worship—by keeping his shoulder to the wheel. He drove a bus that had been retrofitted as a synagogue, allowing to him to meet his flock in the communities where they lived.
In many of the small communities and rural areas of North Carolina, Jewish families have been remote from synagogues and grown remote from their faith. Now the synagogue comes to them in the form of a specially designed bus which is equipped with everything from a lending library of 60 volumes on Judiasm to a battery-powered eternal light.
The rolling synagogue is driven by Rabbi Harold Friedman, who tours a 1,200-mile circuit each fortnight and stops in 10 different communities to lead religious instruction and conduct services for some 300 families.
The photos by George Skadding show that Freedman’s mobile synagogue, though cozy, was well-appointed, and even contained a small ark. Friedman’s work was underwritten by a group called the North Carolina Association of Jewish Men.
And the good news is that the investment in money and miles paid off. The Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities credits Friedman’s traveling services with inspiring the formation of congregations in three of the communities he visited and reviving flagging congregations in three more.
Rabbi Harold Friedman drove a bus on a circuit around North Carolina to bring religious services to far-flung communities, 1955.
George Skadding/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rabbi Harold Freedman conducted a service in his mobile synagogue that traveled around North Carolina, 1955.
George Skadding/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A young student held the torah as Rabbi Harold Freedman conducted a children’s class in his mobile synagogue that traveled through North Carolina, serving many communities, 1955.
George Skadding/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rabbi Harold Freedman distributed yarmulkes to be worn in his mobile synagogue that traveled around North Carolina, 1955.
George Skadding/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rabbi Harold Friedman drove a bus on a circuit around North Carolina to bring religious services to far-flung communities, 1955.
George Skadding/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rabbi Harold Friedman, posing at the wheel, drove a bus on a circuit around North Carolina to bring religious services to far-flung communities, 1955.
George Skadding/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rabbi Harold Friedman drove a bus on a circuit around North Carolina to bring religious services to far-flung communities, 1955.
George Skadding/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Children waited to be admitted to the mobile synagogue that traveled around North Carolina, 1955.
George Skadding/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rabbi Harold Friedman drove a bus on a circuit around North Carolina to bring religious services to far-flung communities, 1955.
George Skadding/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rabbi Harold Friedman drove a bus on a circuit around North Carolina to bring religious services to far-flung communities, 1955.
George Skadding/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rabbi Harold Friedman drove a bus on a circuit around North Carolina to bring religious services to far-flung communities, 1955.
George Skadding/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rabbi Harold Friedman drove a bus on a circuit around North Carolina to bring religious services to far-flung communities, 1955.
George Skadding/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rabbi Harold Friedman drove a bus on a circuit around North Carolina to bring religious services to far-flung communities, 1955.
George Skadding/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
College is said to be more stressful than ever, but even way back in 1954, Barnard College, the all-female sister school of Columbia University, picked up on the anxiousness in its student body and tried to do something about it. The school mandated relaxation classes for its new students.
Having found that too many students are too tense, Barnard has inaugurated a session in relaxation in its Physical Education Department which every student must attend….Every student gets a chart with relaxing exercises to practice alone and is taught to recognize such symptoms of tension as lip-biting, nail-biting, insomnia, headache and eye-batting (if not premeditated). Barnard considers relaxation so important that other gym courses such as posture correction and rhythmics often end up in a 10-minute relaxing session.
What were the exercises taught to these first-year students? While the word “yoga” does not appear anywhere in the coverage, the photographs by LIFE’s Walter Sanders of Barnard’s relaxation instruction includes poses that will look familiar to anyone who has ever done cat and cow or savasana.
The line in LIFE’s coverage about “posture class” set up a sidebar story on another Barnard ritual. According to the story, Barnard held a posture contest every January for first-year students. In the contest, students walked around the school gym in a circle for a half hour and were pulled out when they started to slump or show other postural flaws.
It’s perhaps not a mystery why the students were a little tense.
The seven stages of the “dropping daisy’ exercise that was part of the relaxation instruction at Barnard College, 1954.
Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The mandatory relaxation class at Barnard College, 1954.
Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The relaxation class at Barnard College, 1954.
Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Relaxation class at Barnard College, 1954.
Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Relaxation instruction at Barnard College, 1954.
Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Relaxation class at Barnard College, 1954.
Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A scene from a posture class at Barnard College, where students doing leg lowering exercises to strengthen their abdomens, 1954.
Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scene from a posture class at Barnard College, 1954.
Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The posture class at Barnard College included students hanging on bars to correct uneven shoulders, 1954.
Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gym instructor Patty Smyth (pointing) of Sarah Lawrence College helped judge the January posture competition at Barnard College, 1954.
Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
During a posture competition at Barnard College, contestants walking in a circle for half an hour, and were eliminated when their posture faltered, 1954.
Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The best thing about college football is anything having to do with the game itself. People who follow the game will endure endless news items about players changing teams and teams changing conferences and the playoff format being tweaked because what happens on the field on Saturday afternoons and evenings makes it all worth it. This set of photos by Francis Miller from the practice fields of the Michigan football team in 1949 is a reminder of what makes the game such a delight for so many.
The Wolverine football program was a big deal then as it is now—in 1949 they were defending national champions—and the team was already using its signature winged helmet design. But otherwise, these pictures look like they could come from a high school practice, given how refreshingly small in scale the Michigan football operation was then. The players themselves are also relatively small in scale, as this was the days before dietary and training methods turned players into behemoths.
Miller’s most fun image was a composite photograph that illustrated Michigan’s signature play at the time, which LIFE called the “Michigan spinner.” The photo combined six different images of fullback Don Dufek in an attempt to show all the options the ballhandler had for either running, handling off to a teammate or throwing a jump pass.
LIFE wrote of the signature play in its Oct. 3, 1949 issue, “There is no great mystery about how the spinner works—the mystery for the opposing team is in trying to locate the ball, which is handed around from back to back. This has led to a favorite Ann Arbor epigram: “Everybody handles the ball at Michigan except the Dean of Agriculture, and he’s at Michigan State.”
Eventually opposing defenses did figure out how to unspin the spinner. In the first game after that issue came out, Michigan had its 25-game winning streak broken as the Wolverines lost to Army 21-7. They would end the season 6-2-1 and 7th in the AP poll.
This composite of six images of fullback Donald Dufek was meant to demonstrate the options available in the “Michigan Spinner,” the signature play of Michigan football in 1949.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Michigan football practice, 1949.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Michigan football practice, 1949.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Michigan football practice, 1949.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Michigan football practice, 1949; the heart of the Wolverine offense was a multi-option play called the Michigan Spinner.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Michigan football practice, 1949.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Michigan football practice, 1949; the heart of the Michigan offense was a play called the “Michigan Spinner” which was loaded with options for running and passing the ball.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Michigan football practice, 1949.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Michigan football practice, 1949.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Michigan football practice, 1949.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Michigan football practice, 1949; the team was coached by Wolverines legend Bennie Oosterbaan.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Michigan football practice, 1949; the team was coached by Wolverines legend Bennie Oosterbaan.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Michigan football backfield stars (left to right) Richard Kempthorn, Leo Koceski, and Charles Ortmann in 1949.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Walter Teninga, running back and kicker for Michigan football, 1949.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Wally Teninga at a Michigan practice, 1949; that season he would boot a 69-yard punt, throw a touchdown pass, and force and recover a fumble on defense.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Michigan football practice, 1949.
Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gene Tierney is best remembered for her performance in the title role of the 1994 film noir classic Laura, which in 2008 was named one of the ten greatest mystery movies by the American FIlm Institute. She also merits recognition for talking publicly about her mental health struggles long before it came common to do so.
Tierney made her film debut at age 20 in the Fritz Lang western The Return of Frank James, and her star ascended rapidly with the success of Laura and also the 1945 film Leave Her To Heaven, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. She married for the first time in 1941, eloping with future fashion star Oleg Cassini, who was then working in Paramount’s costume department. (The couple had two children, the first of whom was born with severe disability that would require lifelong institutionalization. The couple would separate in 1946 and finally divorce in 1952). After separating from Cassini, Tierney had a romance with John F. Kennedy in 1947, though she said he eventually broke it off because she would not fit in with his political ambitions (and in one of history’s odder triangulations, when JFK became president, it was Tierney’s ex-husband, Cassini, who famously designed dresses for Jackie Kennedy).
Tierney’s mental health issues began to interfere with her work in the 1950s, when had to drop out of the production of John Ford’s 1953 film Mogambo, being replaced by Grace Kelly. After finishing production of the 1955 film The Left Hand of God, Tierney took off from acting entirely to seek inpatient treatment that included stays at multiple institutions, shock therapy treatments and days wrapped in icy sheets to control her mood swings. This story includes images by LIFE photographer Francis Miller from when Tierney was discovered to be working anonymously as a sales clerk at a dress shop near Topeka, Kansas, reportedly as part of her therapy.
In 1958 Tierney declared herself ready to act again. Photographer Allan Grant chronicled her return to Hollywood in LIFE’s Sept. 29, 1958 issue. In that story she talked openly about her mental health treatment:
Looking happy, relaxed, and as exotically lovely as ever, Gene Tierney came back to Hollywood last week after four long absent years. Starting at her old studio, 20th Century Fox, which had continued her salary all through her absence, she toured movie lots on which for 18 years and 25 major films she had been one of the brightest stars. She was, she said, “letting people know I am back in town and available for work.” And everywhere she went top executives, actors, carpenters, came hurrying to shake her hand or hug and kiss her and welcome her home.
To those who asked, Gene, who is now 37, spoke with easygoing directness about where she had been—burdened with personal troubles, she had broken down. She had spent one and a half years in the Institute of Living in Hartford, Conn., a mental sanitarium, then gone into seclusion, then had been for eight months at the Karl Messinger mental clinic in Topeka, Kan. “It was a time,” she said, “for rest and quiet and there were many wonderful things—doctors, other patients. And I found a new pleasure in reading. The words began to mean more than ever before,” and she recited Shakespeare’s sonnet, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes/I alone beweep my outcast state/and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries/and look upon myself and curse my fate….” Then she said, “But I was most fortunate. My illness was curable.”
In the photos she was all smiles. But while Tierney did get back to moviemaking, her career over the next few years was marked by stops and starts. By 1964 she had largely retired from acting, returning only on rare occasions. She wrote an autobiography, Self-Portrait, that came out in 1979 and detailed her battles with mental illness. Her final acting role was in the 1980 TV miniseries Scruples.
She married for a second time, to Texas oilman W. Howard Lee in 1960, and they were together in Houston until his death in 1981. Tierney died on Nov. 6, 1991 at age 70.
Gene Tierney during the filming of the 1946 movie Dragonwick.
Walter Sanders/LIfe Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gene Tierney during the filming of the 1946 movie Dragonwick.
Walter Sanders/LIfe Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gene Tierney during the filming of the 1946 movie Dragonwick.
Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Actress Gene Tierney was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 1945 film Leave Her to Heaven.