Page 61 – LIFE

Celebrating Friendship: Famous (And Not So Famous) Pals

January 17, 2020July 28, 2017 by

Friends are the best. In good times, in bad times… in these times. Here’s a survey of some of the best friendship photos from LIFE Magazine’s archive of iconic 20th-century photography. Along with some ordinary folks on a fence and some improbable inter-species bonds, you’ll find evidence of friendship among some of the greats of film, stage and song.

For Rita Hayworth in 1940, friendship meant packing up jelly sandwiches for a bicycle picnic. For Lauren Bacall, it meant being gabbing with girlfriends in her hotel suite at the Gotham in Manhattan—a meaningful location, as LIFE explained in 1945, because she and her friends had gone there as teens to gawk at celebrities. They had once followed Bette Davis into an elevator and had also been thrown out for trying to sneak into a party, which drove Bacall to announced that when she was famous, she would stay there. (“She not only did that when she and Bogart came to New York in February,” the article noted, “but brought along her dog Droopy, an elderly spaniel, despite a house rule prohibiting dogs in the hotel.”)

For Jimmy Stewart, friendship meant returning to his roots, bass fishing with a friend in for a 1945 series on the entertainer coming home to Indiana, Pa., after four years as an Army bomber pilot during World War II. Jimmy “did not catch any fish but enjoyed himself anyway,” LIFE reported.

And for renowned jazz musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Carter, recognizing their friendship was even easier, thanks to a signature handshake that, as LIFE noted in 1948, was often imitated by the devotees of their music. It’s no wonder: the rituals of friendship give you the reassuring feeling that you’re all in this together.

Actress Rita Hayworth (2R) rode bikes with her friends Minerva Griswold, Jane Hopkins and Virginia Hovey, 1940.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Friends sat on a fence and sang along to the guitar, 1941.

Hansel Mieth The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A stallion tried to make friends with a barn cat, 1943.

Hansel Mieth The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart (right) went bass fishing with his friend Clyde “Woodie” Woodward, upon his return from World War II, 1945.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Kindergarten children played in Hawaii, 1945.

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Lauren Bacall with friends at the Gotham Hotel, 1945.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A boy and his dog, Oskallsa, LA, 1945.

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actress Joan Caulfield and friends enjoyed the sun while a reporter interviewed her, 1946.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Suzy Creech and a friend played “Red Riding Hood,” 1946.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Teenagers danced at a party, 1947.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

War veteran Donald Sonius (R), an Iowa Univ. student, held the hand of his daughter Karen, along with his friend and fellow veteran student Charles Smayda.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

“Bebop” jazzman Dizzy Gillespie showed his friend Benny Carter how to do a special handshake, 1947.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Donald, the dog-loving duck, rode on the back of his swimming pal Rusty, a cocker spaniel, 1949.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Good friends Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift had fun on a studio lot, 1950.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Young Richard Dale, left, began to adjust to his new environment when he found a friend, Ernest, during chapel services at a boy’s ranch.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Friends from the Children’s School of Modern Dancing played at the beach, 1953.

Lisa Larsen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Former Confederate soldier John Salling, estimated to be 106 years old, sat with friends in Scott County, 1953.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A baby chimpanzee held a kitten at Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s hospital, 1954.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Archery provided entertainment for a group of friends at a teenage party, 1956.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Two young girls washed their doll clothes, 1957.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hempstead High School seniors roared with laughter as they looked over pictures in their newly published yearbook, 1958.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Judge John D. Voelker relaxed with friends in a tavern, 1958.

Al Fenn The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren with her pal, LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1961.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Friends walked on a summer day, 1962.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE’s Loving Look at the Vanishing Cowboy, 1949

December 16, 2019July 21, 2017 by

When LIFE profiled a cowboy for the Aug. 22, 1949, issue, with photographs by Leonard McCombe, it was presented with the idea that he and people like him were getting ready to ride off into the cultural sunset. The land on which the cowboy once slept was already dotted with new ranch houses, and office jobs were looking more and more attractive as the post-war economy boomed. “Like the frontiersman and the forty-niner, the traditional cowboy is a peculiarly American type, now following them into an honorable extinction,” the story noted. “He is being replaced by feebler men, who refuse to work grueling hours, to go wifeless and broke to the end of their days.”

The story was billed as a “last look” at the “old-time cowboy.”

The man at the center of that tale was Clarence Hailey “C.H.” Long, a 20-year Texas veteran of the profession who found freedom in a life of solitude and physical hardship. He personally trained all 13 of the horses he used to do his job, and his home on the range looked “exactly as a moviegover would expect.”

But in that fact, LIFE acknowledged, lay one of the more subtle truths about the past and future of the cowboy lifestyle.

Even as C.H. Long was a living embodiment of a beloved, but endangered culture, he was already part of a myth forged by Hollywood and dime-store novels, not reality. He knew that the cowboy image that the world celebrated was sometimes more appealing than even the most rewarding liberties of life on the cattle trail.

And on his rare trips into town, he picked up magazines full of Western stories, which he dismissed as “claptrap”, but loved nonetheless, “forgetting his adventurous life to search for adventure in lurid accounts of wild affairs that never happened.”

Clarence H. Long was said to look more youthful than his age of 39.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

At sunset after a day’s work, Long collected his string of horses and considered which of the young ones to pick for a training session.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Clarence H. Long, cowboy, 1949.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Bringing in a herd, Long rode slowly at its head. He and his outriders kept a careful pace so that animals would not stampede or trot fast enough to lose valuable weight.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Clarence H. Long, cowboy, 1949.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Clarence H. Long with his father, Clarence Long (right).

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Clarence H. Long rolled a cigarette.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A calf ran off after having been branded, inoculated, and castrated.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Clarence H. Long, cowboy, 1949.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Playing with kittens at a rancher’s house, C.H. happily let them crawl all over him.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

The only spot of shade on the empty prairie was the shadow of C.H.’s horse, in which he sat to rest his eyes from the glare and to smoke a hand-rolled cigarette. He only smoked “tailor-made” cigarettes in winter, when he would have had to take off his gloves to roll his own.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Beside his chuck wagon, cowboy Clarence Long read a western magazine, 1949. When he was through with the magazine he passed it to another cowboy. Such magazines were read and reread until the pages fell apart.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Long mended a broken fence post, one of the many tasks that filled his day.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

The Aug. 22, 1949 issue of LIFE magazine.

LIFE’s Most Memorable Kisses

February 12, 2025July 6, 2017 by

Sometimes you need a reason to give another person a kiss. And, as was the case in probably the most famous kissing photo of all time—the controversial sailor kiss at the moment of victory in World War II—that reason can be a big one. Other times, a kiss is its own reason to celebrate.

How people started kissing is a mystery and why we do it is complicated, but it has been around for many centuries and shows no signs of letting up. From a child’s sweet peck to a lover’s smooch to a walrus’s whiskery wet one, the act is a language of its own. And as time goes by, in each of our lives, it is easy to see that a kiss is not always just a kiss.

Shadows on the ground of kissing figures with camera on tripod between, 1930.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Two walruses kissing as they eat from a hand between them at the Brookfield zoo, 1938.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A man and woman kissing while geared to a lie detector machine to measure the emotional reaction, 1939.

Herbert Gehr The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Couple kissing in front of the Delta Tau Delta mummy at the University of the South, 1940.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actress Marilyn Hare being kissed by soldiers, 1942.

John Florea The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Multiple exposure of Deanna Durbin and Edmond O’Brien walking toward each other and kissing; from the motion picture “Tonight and Forever.” 1942.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Couple in Penn Station sharing farewell kiss before he ships off to war during WWII. 1943.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mrs. Martini, wife of the Bronx Zoo lion keeper, kissing a tiger cub. 1944.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Eisenstaedt’s iconic photo: A jubilant American sailor clutched a dental assistant in a back-bending kiss at a moment of spontaneous joy about the long awaited WWII victory over Japan. Taken on V-J Day, 1945, as thousands jammed Times Square. In recent decades this iconic photograph has engendered condemnation, after Greta Zimmer Friedman, the woman being kissed by the sailor (believed to have been George Mendonsa) said that the kiss was nonconsensual. In 2019, shortly after Mendonsa died at age 95, a statue of the kiss in Florida was tagged with #metoo graffiti.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A little boy dressed as Uncle Sam, kissing a little girl on the cheek, 1945.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Newlyweds Marshall Jacobs and wife Yolanda kiss after being married atop a flagpole. 1946.

Allan Grant The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Peggy Lee getting a goodnight kiss on the nose from her 4-year-old daughter Nicki at home. 1948.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Baseball player Yogi Berra getting a kiss from his wife, Carmen, before leaving for the clubhouse. 1949.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gallant tiger bowing to kiss the hand of flapper Barbara Pettit, 1949.

Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Christina Goldsmith tenderly kissing a Weimaraner puppy, which she took from a litter of her father’s stock (he was a top breeder of Weimaraner hunting dogs). 1950.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Josephine Baker receiving a congratulatory kiss on the nose from her husband, orchestra leader Jo Bouillon, after Baker’s show at the Strand theater during her US tour, 1951.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jill Corey giving her grandmother, “Mamouch”, a kiss on the forehead, 1953.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Irish McCalla as “Sheena Queen of the Jungle” kissing her chimpanzee costar, 1955.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Elvis Presley tenderly kissing the cheek of a female admirer backstage before his concert, 1956.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A University of Michigan student couple engaged in an impromptu kiss in the Union Building on campus. 1957. This was forbidden conduct because rules required couples to have both feet on the floor.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Richard Ramsey, a worker in cosmetic company, was covered with relics of lipstick kisses to prove that dyes in lipsticks are harmless. 1960.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Steve McQueen kissed Natalie Wood’s hand as the actors met to discuss their new big-screen project, 1963’s “Love With the Proper Stranger.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Astronaut Gus “Virgil” Grissom kissed his mother after his successful Gemini 3 mission, 1965.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dustin Hoffman kissed his wife, 1969.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Oberlin College students kissed in a co-ed dorm, 1970.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rugged Rock Robertson, ‘Strong Man of the North’

December 16, 2019June 30, 2017 by

In 1953, photographer Wallace Kirkland explored the archetype of the Northern woodsman for LIFE Magazine, with a photo profile of the perfectly named Rock Robertson—”Strong Man of the North,” per the article’s headline.

Rock, at 31, six feet tall and 205 pounds, got his name from a grandfather who, predictably perhaps, had acquired the nickname due to his great strength. As a professional hunting and fishing guide, Rock Robertson regularly carried 300 pounds for miles and could pull off a moose mating call good enough to draw in the bulls that hunters wanted most. He once went more than a week without food, because of a storm, before walking 48 miles in snowshoes to get out of the woods. He faced the forest with a smile and a shrug, embracing the outdoors lifestyle that his ancestors—French-Canadian, First Nations and Scottish—had likewise lived.

“He has been known, when the mood takes him, to pick up a stove and heave it through a cook-shack wall,” the article noted. “But generally Rock’s moods are sunny and his broad shoulders are put to practical and picturesque uses as a woodsman and as a guide.”

Out camping deep in the Canadian north woods, Rock Robertson grinned through the doorway of trapper’s birchbark tepee.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Robertson smoked some fish in the wild country between Hudson Bay and the St. Lawrence.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rock (right) and brother Harry arm-wrestled. After winning, Rock said, `He’s good, and I’m good.'”

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

On a portage Rock packed 300 pounds.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rock’s moosecall got answering grunts from an amorous bull who came up from half a mile away.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rock carrying a moose haunch. North woodsmen preferred moose to beef or venison.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A battered canoe leaked furiously but was still afloat, patched up with spruce gum and boughs.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A snared partridge flapped futilely after Rock pulled it from a tree.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The fire broiled the partridge and also dried out a pair of wet socks dangling from the box.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Seeing a black bear in the water, Rock paused to determine the size of quarry and to which shore he would try to herd it.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

As the bear neared the shore, Rock raised his rifle. When the bear reached water’s edge he brought it down.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rock approached the bear warily.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bringing back the bear, Rock easily balanced the canoe on his head. Rock said he could walk for hours with this kind of load. `I sweat like hell,’ he said. `Man who don’t sweat get tired.'”

`Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rock Robertson with his wife and child.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

How John Dominis Photographed Wild Antelope Without a Telephoto Lens

February 24, 2020June 27, 2017 by

The photographers on LIFE Magazine’s staff did it all, taking on assignments wide and varied without a blink of the eye. John Dominis was no exception. He joined LIFE as a staff photographer in 1950 and would go on to shoot some of the biggest stars of the era Steve McQueen, Frank Sinatra and Robert Redford to name a few. He also shot one of the most iconic images of the 20th century: Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the black power salute at the Olympics in Mexico.

Here, LIFE looks back at one of his lesser known shoots—the African Antelope, which was a cover story and a follow up to The Great Cats of Africa, which would earn him Magazine Photographer of the year in 1966 and later become a book. In the Editor’s Note that accompanies the story, Dominis described how he was able to get the dramatic photo of the “bizarre wildebeest” (the last slide in the gallery above) without a telephoto lens.

“I wanted to get low-angle shots that gave a dramatic sense of their speed. I built boxes out of plywood and mounted cameras inside of them,” Dominis explained. “John [Mbuthi, a local whom Dominis worked with on the story] and I worked for three weeks with them. We’d go a mile ahead of a herd and put down the boxes and camouflage them. Then we’d hide a quarter of a mile away and wait maybe for several hours. Meanwhile the light might change and there was no way I could alter the exposure on the cameras. If the animal reached the boxes, I pushed the button that triggered the motorized cameras by a radio signal and ran off a whole roll of film. I must have exposed 40 rolls, but ended up with only one really good frame.”

Featured in this gallery are images provided by the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin of these contraptions that John Dominis set up. These rarely seen images show a photographer at work and just how resourceful Dominis was in getting the shot.

The Briscoe Center recently acquired the John Dominis archive after his daughter, Dori Beer, reached out to the center. His longtime friend and photo editor M.C. Marden organized the collection, which contains a comprehensive look at his professional and personal work and life. While his archive won’t be open to the public until later in 2017, the Briscoe Center the photojournalism collection of which also includes the work of Diana Walker, Eddie Adams, Dirck Halstead and others is open for research and focuses on a behind-the-scenes look at how Americans experience the world, from politics to war to wildlife, via the media.

“Pictures like [Dominis” animal series] have something to say about how Americans (though magazines like LIFE) perceive the outside world,” said Ben Wright of the Briscoe Center, in a statement to LIFE. “These pictures and collections are not only beautiful and interesting: they’re historical evidence that help historians to understand the past with accuracy and integrity.”

John Dominis on assignment in Africa, 1969.

John Dominis Photographic Archive/UT Austin’s Briscoe Center

There are few more spectacular sights than a herd of oryx striding across the grasslands, with scores of saberlike horns glistening in the sun.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Soaring above the thick brush of East Africa, two impala moved with a flowing grace unsurpassed in the animal kingdom.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The gazelle is one of the fleetest of the antelope. Among it’s natural enemies, only the cheetah has a chance of running it down.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Dominis on assignment in Africa, 1969.

John Dominis Photographic Archive/UT Austin’s Briscoe Center

The wildebeest (South African Dutch for “wild beast”) are the oddest and fiercest-looking antelope of all.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The ‘Peril and Ecstasy’ of Surfing,1963

December 13, 2019June 16, 2017 by

In May of 1963, as the surf craze swept the U.S. and popular images of surfers tempted newcomers into the water in the days before wetsuits were common, LIFE magazine had a message its readers: Surfing was fun but it wasn’t all fun and games. It was also dangerous, especially when it came to the waves off the North Shore of Oahu.

The magazine explained to unfamiliar readers how the sport worked there: “The men who ride the big ones in Hawaii actually ski down the shoulder of a wave away from the curl… They call the first breathtaking schuss ‘taking the drop.’ Their boards accelerate up to 35 mph so rapidly that they kick up waves like speedboats. And a merciless mauling awaits the unfortunate who doesn’t complete his ride. He is driven downward by the appalling maelstrom, tossed around, sucked back down and frequently, after fighting up for a desperate gulp of air, hammered down again by the next wave.”

And yet a brave group of surfers sought out the big waves anyway, for what LIFE called the “peril and ecstasy” of the sport’s toughest waves. Enabled by new innovations in balsa wood surfboards that had opened new vistas to surfers in the 1940s, the surfers returned again and again, despite the risks.

Looking at these photos by George Silk, it’s not hard to see what drew the surfers back to the water. Some experienced, what surfer Fred Van Dyke described to Silk as, “the greatest feeling the world.”

Nick Beck of Honolulu caught a wave on his light board.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A pair of riders, cutting frothy furrows in the wall of a wild 18-footer, seemed headed on a collision course at Sunset Beach.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Surfer Rick Grigg caught a ride at Banzai Beach, Oahu, Hawaii, 1963.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A teenage girl rode the surf, 1963.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hawaii, 1963.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

$Preston Leavey, paddling frantically to get on a wave and begin his ride. A camera, was bolted to the front of the board and recorded the glitter of refracted light from the spray.$

Preston Leavey, paddling frantically to get on a wave and begin his ride. A camera, was bolted to the front of the board and recorded the glitter of refracted light from the spray.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Before riding in on great waves surfers had to fight their way out past foaming barriers.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At Sunset Beach, a surfer rode a thundering 15-footer.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hawaii surfers, 1963.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Joe Kaohi maneuvered desperately to cling to his board as he tried to ride into the tunnel of a wave at Banzai Beach.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hawaii surfer, 1963.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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