Page 64 – LIFE

This Is What It Was Like to Break Into Modeling as a Woman of Color in 1969

February 1, 2022March 24, 2017 by

In October of 1969, a LIFE Magazine cover story explored a noteworthy change underway in the fashion business: women of color were not only more visible than ever as models, but they were also taking charge behind the scenes. In one of the first salvos of a conversation that is still very much ongoing about how to bring diversity to the fashion world, and why that matters the women featured in the story were working toward a future where, as the director of one agency put it, “a model agency gets a call for a brunette and can just send over a Black girl.”

At the time, though progress was still being made, Black models still made less than white models simply because they got less work, and per LIFE in 1968 less than 10% of all TV commercials in the U.S. involved any Black people at all. And yet, for those on the front lines of change, it was an exciting time at least that was the experience for Charlene Dash, then 20, one of the models featured in the story.

Dash, who went back to school after quitting the modeling world and ended up getting her master’s degree, went on to work for the Department of Education. In 2017, she told LIFE what it was like to live through that time:

In 1969, I was a kid.

I’d had a job with Shell Oil Company and I went to school at night, at Hunter College. And one of the women who worked in keypunch one day came to work in pants. She had a pantsuit on. This was shocking. How could you come to work in pants? She said, “Well, I handed in my resignation. I’m going to be a model.” One Sunday not long after that, in the Times, in the Sunday section, I opened it up and there was her picture. I was like, “If she can do it, I can do it.”

I did a little research, and I heard there was a new agency called Wilhelmina, so I went to her, and she told me, “Oh no, we have Naomi [Sims] and everybody wants Naomi.” I had no idea who Naomi was. I hadn’t seen her. But while I was sitting there waiting to speak with Wilhelmina, a woman came in and she just sort of floated in, and she looked so beautiful, and everybody said, “How was Paris?” And I thought, this is a dream world.

So I went to [Ford Models]. I had two or three fuzzy pictures and they looked at the pictures, put them to the side, looked at me, and they sent me over to a woman named Dee Edwards. She was in charge of the new girls. She said, ‘Call me tomorrow and I’m going to send you out and we’ll get you some pictures.’ That’s how I started. I remember distinctly that they said, ‘Would you work for $250 [a week]? There’s a designer in town at the Plaza and she doesn’t have a lot of money but for $250 you would [spend your days there] and show the clothes.’ Now, $250 a week in those days I had been making $175 for two-weeks” work! It was such fun, and making $50 a day!? I was rich. Rich! One of the people who came in was the Baron de Gunzburg, from Vogue. We went out, we did what we had to do, and that evening I got a call from the agency apparently he went back to Vogue and told Mrs. Vreeland that he saw me, and I got an interview with Mrs. Vreeland. Now we’re really in dream world.

I went to see her, and she was just like everything you’d read about. She was very dramatic. She had two pairs of glasses. “Come closer,” she’d say, and she’d put on one pair, and then “go back” and she’d put on another. She wrote down an address and said to be at that address next week. That turned into six pages in Vogue.

Now the agency had something to sell. They could say I’d already done XYZ. But there were still no pictures. So they said, go see Gideon at [Richard] Avedon’s studio. So I went over with my little fuzzy pictures to see Gideon. Cybill Shepherd was also there she’d just won Model of the Year and we’re sitting on the sofa. Avedon came out and I thought it was Gideon, because that was who I told the receptionist I was there to see. He looked at my little fuzzy pictures and he said, O.K., and then I left. When I left I ran into another model and said that I’d gone to see Gideon and she said, “Oh, he’s nice,” and she described him I said, “That’s not who I saw! She said, “You saw Avedon!” And he booked me.

It wasn’t that I was doing anything special, but it was the right time at the right place and I didn’t even know what I was wandering into. It was wonderful. I have good memories.

They were actively looking for models of color. We did something that was in the Times and the art director said that they’d even checked the whole concept with the Black Panther Party, which I thought was funny, but they wanted to make sure that they didn’t say anything wrong. Everybody was very nervous and very cognizant that they were doing this and they were going to do it right.

I did an ad for Neiman Marcus, and they told me I’d be the first person of color to do an ad for them, and they made a big deal out of it. I worked with a photographer I’d worked with at Vogue and in the end you couldn’t even tell I was Black, the way it was lit, but they were happy they had stepped over this threshold. And I was honored.

[When I was growing up] I used to read Ebony magazine, and everybody was Black. I thought that was great, that you read Ebony magazine you see Black models doing everything. [But] for anyone to see someone who’s looking beautifully dressed isn’t it every little girl’s fantasy? You want to look good no matter what color you are. I watch commercials and everybody’s represented in commercials today, and that wasn’t the way it was. We had Julia and that was a big deal, but now you see everybody. Grandparents with children of color. Gay couples having dinner and doing regular things. It’s just people. It’s wonderful. And I know when I get my Neiman Marcus catalog it’s not just one person of color in there. It’s lots of people Asian, Hispanic, Black. It’s wonderful.

I remember once I complained to the art director at Avon. I said, “I’m booked for maybe one day, and everybody else here is booked for a week. Why can’t I be?” And he said, “You know, Charlene, I have a logistics problem. We have 12 pages and we can’t put you on every page.”

But the blonde could be. I thought, well, a logistics problem. I didn’t like it. I wanted to work.

Obviously they don’t have a logistics problem anymore. That’s progress.

October 17, 1969 cover of LIFE magazine with Naomi Sims featured.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Naomi Sims got her big break when she appeared in a TV commercial with two other girls.”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Outtake from “Black Models Take Center Stage” cover story.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Elizabeth of Toro is the daughter of a king the late king of Toro, one of the four kingdoms of Uganda.”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “In the busy offices of Black Beauty, Director Betty Foray talks to ad agency account executive about models for a layout.”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Charlene Dash, 20, was signed a year ago by the Ford Model Agency, one of the most prestigious, and is already the top money-maker among black models. She has done six TV commercials, the most recent for Clairol cosmetics (above).”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Charlene Dash, 20, is shown making up for an assignment.”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Professional model Gloria Smith wears the crown in which she was acclaimed winner of the 1969 Miss Black America contest in Madison Square Garden.”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Tamara Dobson, 21 and six feet tall, was signed by an agency her first day in New York and in two weeks had her first big job, a TV commercial.”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “You see before you what may well be the most persuasive demonstration of successful black power ever assembled. If these 39 models, employed by a new agency called Black Beauty were to all work an eight-hour day, their combined bill would be $16,000.”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Star at Ease: Bette Davis Before the “Feud” Years

February 10, 2020March 17, 2017 by

“There are not many actresses who will come right out with the truth,” wrote LIFE’s Los Angeles correspondent Alice Crocker in notes accompanying a 1947 photoshoot, “when that means admitting a birthdate of April 5, 1908.” Bette Davis, frank and relatively unaffected throughout her career, was one of the few. Her freewheelingness and seeming lack of concern for her image shows through in this photoshoot, taken months after the birth of her daughter and three years before the first of her comebacks, as (ironically enough) a vain actress in the film All About Eve.

Davis in 1947 was not yet the hardened warrior of FX’s 2017 miniseries Feud (in which Susan Sarandon portrays the early-1960s Davis as a star fueled by nicotine and resentments, aware both of the status she’s earned and how little it’s respected). These photos show someone fully in control of herself, but far more at ease than the Davis who made What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? such a lurid hit. The setups are startlingly intimate: Davis seems not at all to be playing to the camera even when obviously posing with her husband, William Grant Sherry. She’s lost in reverie, or selling us on the idea that she is.

The notes make clear just how difficult living in the public eye could be, even in a far less media-saturated age than our own. “There are not many people (much less actresses) with figures to worry about who at 39 would be willing to go thru [sic] the effort of having a baby,” wrote Crocker. “However, the common rumor is that she has wanted a baby for some time and husband number three was acquired for that specific purpose.” (She notes, without apparent irony, that this has “a malicious note which can probably be discredited.”) Davis seems unconcerned with such speculation, even as she is opening her life to magazine cameras. Sitting on the wheel of a plane, she smokes in a pantsuit and loafers and looks away from us, as though something enticing were happening just out of frame.

These pictures depict her at a time when age, she freely admitted, was catching up with her, limiting the roles she could agree on with her studio, Warner Brothers. But she was at the beginning of something, too, having only just become a mother and putting the pieces together for an unlikely second act, one that capitalized on her skill at framing herself inthe right light. The year after these photos were taken, Davis’s June Bride would stanch some of the wounds her career had sustained after successive flops; then, in 1950, All About Eve relaunched her as a grande dame of the screen.

The Eve role used what was best of Davis’ star persona but refracted it through the cinematic style of the time, putting hauteur and intellect in an Edith Head gown. Later on, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a “vanity-free” performance whose ghoulishness only emphasized the still-radiant beauty of the off-screen Davis, and got her plenty of accolades for her bravery.

Davis would divorce Sherry—who in these photos seems unmoved by the camera’s gaze even as he shows off his well-developed physique—in 1950, the year of Baby Jane’s release, and marry Gary Merrill, her All About Eve costar. The spuriousness Crocker put forward in her notes was fair (if sharply worded). But Sherry barely registers in the photos—it’s all, always, about Bette, who manages to make you feel as though you’re intruding on private moments even with all the stage-management of a photoshoot around her. It’s another brilliant performance.

Bette Davis in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis with her dog in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and her third husband, artist William Grant Sherry.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and her third husband William Grant Sherry at the beach in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and her third husband William Grant Sherry boating in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis, her husband William Grant Sherry, and their boxer, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and her third husband, William Grant Sherry, at the beach in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis worked at her desk at home in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and William Grant Sherry played billiards at home in California, 1947

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and her third husband, William Grant Sherry, at home in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis at home in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis in front of a plane with her third husband, William Grant Sherry, who was studying to become a pilot under the G.I. Bill.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This Adorable Panda Was at the Center of a Cold War Conflict

December 28, 2020March 15, 2017 by

If anything could bring the gap between nations and ideologies, even at a time of tension and war, it just might be an adorable baby panda. But, even for a panda, such a task is far from easy.

Just look at Chi Chi.

As LIFE explained in its June 16, 1958, edition, which featured photos of 130-lb., 1.5-year-old Chi Chi, she had been acquired in Beijing by animal dealer Heini Demmer. From her cage in Frankfurt, Germany, she was then in the middle of what the magazine called “a small international trade crisis.” Zoos across the U.S. put in bids to acquire the rare creature, but a “U.S. embargo forbids all trade with China, and the Treasury Department refused to make Chi Chi an exception.” And on top of all of that, her keepers had run low on bamboo and had to try feeding her wheat and rice with sugar.

She ended up settling down halfway at the London Zoo, when the British bought her for $28,000. Because she’d been deemed “enemy goods” by the U.S., “British children can thank the Cold War that they are privileged to visit her,” LIFE joked in 1964.

But she continued to cause panda-monium throughout the 1960s. The London Zoo had been trying to set her up on a blind date with the only other captive panda living outside China at the time, An-An, who had been sent to the USSR as a token of Sino-Soviet friendship in 1959. (Both pandas were variably identified with and without their hyphens throughout the years, and An-An occasionally appeared as Ang-Ang.) But the Russians “frowned on any East-West fraternizing,” LIFE reported in the July 15, 1966, issue, so it took years to make the meeting happen. Eventually, the knowledge that panda rarity and the continuing Cold War would make it nearly impossible to acquire another panda from China, both sides agreed to temporarily put their differences aside for the sake of panda breeding.

However, despite living through the historic period of sexual revolution and women’s liberation that was the 1960s, it seemed as though Chi Chi could not care less about sex. The Nov. 11, 1966, issue of LIFE detailed the “honeymoon” in Moscow that was finally arranged for the 9½-year-old “spoiled” “spinster” and the 9-year-old “bachelor” panda who loved bubble baths. The attempt at inspiring a courtship was a disaster. “Unaware of the purpose of her visit, he flew at her in anger ‘like an arrow,’ as the Russians put it and bit her on the right side,” LIFE reported. “Though he behaved impeccably thereafter, Chi-Chi never forgave him.”

Though some humans at the time were making a conscious effort not to reproduce too much, in order to address fears about overpopulation, Chi Chi’s problem was a different one. And, in a strange twist, it turned out she was more interested in human males than male pandas. As her keeper at the London Zoo, Dr. Desmond Morris, told LIFE, “One night [during her trip to Moscow], Chi-Chi started bleating, a sure sign of interest. Imagine my surprise when we discovered she was bleating not at An-An, but at me. From that moment on, I knew it was all over. Chi-Chi was humanized.”

Or maybe Chi Chi was just more comfortable in her own digs. Two years later, An-An was allowed to pay a visit to Chi Chi in London. A photo spread in the Dec. 6, 1968, edition captured the two cavorting at one point in front of a crowd of up to 40,000 people, as the magazine reported. When she wasn’t chewing An-An’s ear, he could be seen climbing up and down poles in her enclosure. Their fling was only supposed to be just a little over two months long, but the Russians let their panda stay a while longer.

As LIFE put it, “Love might yet conquer all.”

Though the attempt to mate Chi Chi and An-An was ultimately unsuccessful, the international cooperation fostered by the animals did not pass unnoticed.

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

Chi Chi munched on wheat, which she held in her unique six-clawed paws.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Heini Demmer, Chi Chi’s owner, lifted her from a packing box.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi enjoyed attention from her owner.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi, at a year and a half old and 130 pounds, was expected to become a full-grown 200 pounds by age three.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi climbed in her cage.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi from China, 1958.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi from China walked on a stone wall, 1958.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi, 1958.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Giant panda Chi Chi looked out of her cage, 1958.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Heini Demmer with his giant panda Chi Chi.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi, 1958.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Giant panda Chi Chi looked in her cage.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Giant panda Chi Chi took a nap.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Vintage Blizzard Photos: New York City, 1956

August 11, 2021March 14, 2017 by

On March 18, 1956, a storm hit the East Coast, blanketing the northeast corridor with snow. LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured these images of New Yorkers coping with the onslaught of winter weather. Though the images did not run in the magazine, the storm did make news with the tale of one New Yorker who had more trouble than most with the snow.

Al Asnis of LIFE’s photo lab happened to be waiting for the train on an El platform when he saw a man “writhing on the sidewalk below,” the magazine reported.

As LIFE described in the April 2, 1956 issue:

While preoccupied passers-by went their way, Asnis took a picture then rushed to offer his assistance just as other help arrived. The man was a 48-year-old letter carrier named Max Urkowitz who, on the way home after his rounds, had fallen, twisting his leg. He said he had heard a sharp-snap and thought the leg was broken. One man, doing a job that no novice should attempt, expertly fashioned a makeshift splint for a broken leg. Arriving after a 90 minute delay caused by the snow, an ambulance attendant admired the splint but had to remove it en route to the hospital so the patient could be examined. Instead of a fracture, it turned out, Urkowitz suffered only a bad sprain.

Blizzard in New York City, Mar. 18-19, 1956.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

King Kong: When the Awesome One Showed His Might

January 14, 2020March 10, 2017 by

When King Kong was introduced the world in 1933, TIME described the creature as a “gigantic whatnot resembling an ape, 50 feet tall, equipped with large teeth and a thunderous snarl.” (His fur, the story noted, was made of 30 bearskins.) The whole concept of the film could have produced something entirely ridiculous, the magazine observed back then as well as in future stories about the franchise, but somehow it worked thanks to some Hollywood alchemy that filmmakers are hoping to recapture once again.

That means there have been plenty of chances for audiences to be reintroduced to Kong.

Case in point: In 1952, LIFE dispatched Alfred Eisenstaedt to photograph a screening of that original 1933 film, images from which can be seen here. The story did not run in the magazine at the time—in fact, no record could be found of why the magazine sent the photographer to that particular event or what editors intended to do with the images. It seems likely, however, that what Eisenstaedt was capturing was a screening from the theatrical reissue of the film that year, which was a prime example of the character’s proven staying power in action.

It was, as TIME described, a hit:

Hollywood, frantically casting about for a movie formula which will bring customers back into the theaters, last week agreed that one studio at least had struck pay dirt. After thriftily digging into its storehouse of possible reissues, RKO dusted off the 19-year-old King Kong, the adventures of a snarling, 50-ft. prehistoric monster who saved RKO from bankruptcy in the thirties and seems destined to gross at least $2,500,000 for his masters in 1952.

As most of Hollywood’s producers watched with envious amazement, crowds in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Indianapolis flocked to see Kong brought back alive from a Pacific island to Manhattan, where he climbs the Empire State Building clutching the beauteous and screaming Fay Wray (now fortyish and retired). There, raging defiantly at his puny pursuers, the monster finally gets shot down by a squadron of ancient biplanes.

That 1952 take was significant (about $22.9 million in 2017 dollars), so it was perhaps no wonder that when the concept got yet another go in 1976, the images Eisenstaedt created in 1952, of a 1933 movie, were used to illustrate TIME’s cover story about the movie.

“[The original] achieved the legendary status of classic kitsch, the charm of which remained undimmed by innumerable el cheapo rip-offs and overexposure on TV. The great monkey has become a pop culture staple in everything from cartoons to ad campaigns,” the story observed.

As that place in pop culture endures, LIFE presents this look back at the staying power of the King Kong iteration that remains the monster’s milestone achievement.

Photo from a 1952 screening of the 1933 film King Kong

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock.

Photo from a 1952 screening of the 1933 film King Kong.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock.

Remembering Harry Belafonte

April 25, 2023March 7, 2017 by

Harry Belafonte, entertainer and activist, died on April 25, 2023 of congestive heart failure at age 96.

He appeared many times in the pages of LIFE magazine, both as a performer and as a champion of civil rights. Pictures show him in a variety of settings that give testament to the breadth of his life. He was photographed on stage at the Coconut Grove nightclub, making his acting debut in the film Bright Road, and attending the 1963 March on Washington with Sidney Poitier. And the list goes on of moments in which he shared his joy and his wisdom with American audiences.

LIFE’s feature story on Belafontee from May 1957 gives a sense of how big he was as an entertainer. That story talked about how he had pulled ahead of Elvis Presley in record sales, and the first movie of his three-picture deal with Fox, Island in the Sun, was going to come out the following month. Belftonte achieved his massive success by introducing audiences to calypso music, which he did despite encountering resistance in the music business:

When I started singing the kind of folk music I do now I was told it was too special to get across. But I’d given up the idea of reaching a lot of people. I was trying to express my strong social feelings in terms of folk music, the way people of all nations have historically done. Part of my heritage is West Indian so my interest in their music—calypso—was natural.

That music propelled an amazing journey. Please enjoy this photographic tribute to Harry Belafonte.

Harry Belafonte laughed during Bop City nightclub’s opening night, 1949.

Martha Holmes/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte in his film debut as a principal in Bright Road, 1952.

John Swope The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte singing at a recording session, 1957.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte performed at the Coconut Grove nightclub, 1957.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte and wife Julie at Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte singing, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Singer Harry Belafonte singing in his apartment, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte playing guitar, 1958.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte playing with son David as wife Julie watches.

Martha Holmes The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Singer Harry Belafonte at a night club in 1960.

Joseph Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte and actor Sidney Poitier and folk singer Odetta at a civil rights rally at the Statue of Liberty in 1960.

Al Fenn The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte sightseeing in Israel, 1960.

David Rubinger The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Anthony Quinn with singers Ethel Merman and Harry Belafonte at President-elect John F. Kennedy’s inaugural ball, 1961.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Burt Lancaster, Harry Belafonte and Charlton Heston at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. for a civil rights march, 1963.

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte with Julie Andrews at a party following the Broadway premiere of ‘Sound of Music’. 1965.

Bob Gomel The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

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King Kong: When the Awesome One Showed His Might

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