“Of all the pageantry of the atmosphere,” LIFE noted in a June 1953 issue, “the most awesome and, as man has often thought, most fearful, are the auroras the ghostly streamers of colored light that appear on certain nights, usually in spring and fall, and spread upward from the horizon to the zenith, sometimes projected in shifting rays like searchlight beams, sometimes diffused in shimmering veils and curtains, sometimes dancing and pulsating like the flames of some unutterable cosmic fire.”
Here, decades later, LIFE.com pays homage to those “ghostly streamers” with a series of pictures made by J.R. Eyerman (called “Jay Eyerman” in that long-ago issue of the magazine) in northern Canada. In fact, Eyerman, who entered the University of Washington when he was 15 to study engineering, made these photos using a technique he himself devised.
In the 1957 book, LIFE Photographers: Their Careers and Favorite Pictures, author Stanley Rayfield notes that “Eyerman’s technical innovations have helped push back the frontiers of photography. He perfected an electric eye mechanism to trip the shutters of nine cameras to make pictures of an atomic blast; devised a special camera for taking pictures 3600 feet beneath the surface of the ocean; successfully ‘speeded up’ color film to make previously impossible color pictures of the shimmering, changing forms and patterns of the aurora borealis.”
The results, both technically and aesthetically, are glorious.
(Note: We’ve included a few of Eyerman’s black and white shots of the northern lights in this gallery, as we feel there’s something starkly beautiful about those pictures, too.)
—Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
The aurora borealis, a.k.a., the northern lights, northern Canada, 1953.
J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The aurora borealis, a.k.a., the northern lights, northern Canada, 1953.
J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The aurora borealis, a.k.a., the northern lights, northern Canada, 1953.
J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The aurora borealis, a.k.a., the northern lights, northern Canada, 1953.
J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The aurora borealis, a.k.a., the northern lights, northern Canada, 1953.
J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The aurora borealis, a.k.a., the northern lights, northern Canada, 1953.
J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The aurora borealis, a.k.a., the northern lights, northern Canada, 1953.
J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The aurora borealis, a.k.a., the northern lights, northern Canada, 1953.
J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The aurora borealis, a.k.a., the northern lights, northern Canada, 1953.
J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The aurora borealis, a.k.a., the northern lights, northern Canada, 1953.
J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The aurora borealis, a.k.a., the northern lights, northern Canada, 1953.
J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The aurora borealis, a.k.a., the northern lights, northern Canada, 1953.
J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
J.R. Eyerman on assignment in Canada, kept his camera operable in the freezing cold while photographing the northern lights in 1953.
J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Born Natalia Nikolaevna Zacharenko in San Francisco at the height of the Great Depression, Natalie Wood (“Natasha” to close friends) was one of those rare stars who combined old-school glamor, powerhouse talent and smoldering sex appeal. Her death by drowning off the California coast when she was just 43 remains one of Hollywood’s enduring mysteries, and the source of unending rumors, investigations and speculation.
Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of photographs made by Bill Ray in 1963 a time in the 25-year-old Wood’s career when she had made the leap from actress to genuine movie star and, more importantly, to formidable Hollywood player. Many of the photos in this gallery were not originally published in LIFE, but appear in Ray’s book, My Life in Photography.
For Ray, the most striking memory of the several weeks that he spent with Wood and her showbiz cohorts is, unsurprisingly, Wood herself or, more specifically, her singular beauty.
“She was divine,” Ray told LIFE.com. “Really. She was divine to look at, and to photograph. She had that wonderful face, a great body, those amazing eyes just a beautiful young woman, and a lot of fun to be around.”
For the Dec. 20, 1963, issue of LIFE that focused wholly on the movies, Ray scored the choice, high-profile feature on Wood, which was the only piece in the issue that was devoted to a single actor or actress. “This was big stuff,” he says today of the assignment. “You know, back then photographers were never part of the meetings where these sort of assignment decisions were made, so to get the call for something of this magnitude I was thrilled.”
Thrilled, but hardly cowed or overawed. After all, by the time the Natalie Wood shoot came his way, Ray was a seasoned professional, having covered JFK, Elvis Presley, John Wayne and other huge names and famous faces. What comes through in many of his photographs is the sense that here was a photographer who genuinely enjoyed his work, while his subject was a strong young woman who had been in the public eye for so long that having her every move documented was hardly anything new.
As LIFE reminded its readers in that special year-end double issue back in 1963, Natalie Wood was about as self-aware and self-confident an actress as one was likely to meet:
Natalie Wood was in a crowd watching a movie being filmed 21 years ago when the director asked her do a bit: drop an ice cream cone and cry. Then and there, 4-year-old Natalie showed she was born to be a star: she wept so convincingly that the movies hired her and ever since they have been thankful for the foresight. . . . [Movies] still cannot get along without the glamor that stars bring. And Natalie, the biggest young star around, now holds Hollywood in her hand. Her latest performance in her 35th film, ‘Love With a Proper Stranger,’ may win her an Oscar. [She did earn an Academy Award nomination for the role, but Patricia Neal took home the Oscar for her work in ‘Hud.’] Natalie has talent which she uses brilliantly, temperament which she can control, and a dark fresh loveliness that glows from the screen. All this earns her a million dollars a year, along with something that means even more to her the power and the glory that stardom brings.
“Natalie Wood,” observed a prominent Hollywood director, … “has a stranglehold on every young leading-lady part in town. If a role calls for a woman between 15 and 30, you automatically think of her.”
This is exactly what Natalie has worked 21 years to get. She has battled producers and top studio heads with unyielding ferocity to win the roles she wants. Today, before she will do a picture, she demands and gets total approval of script, director, leading man, all actors, everybody clear down to make-up and wardrobe people.
One last detail that Bill Ray recalls about his time with Natalie Wood, however, casts something of a pall across his otherwise sunny memories. At some point during those several weeks, he joined Wood and a number of other people on a boat ride to Catalina Island (see slide 16 in the gallery) the same island off the California coast near which Wood would drown in the fall of 1981. When Ray heard about her death, he was stunned: not only because he had always liked her and remembered the time he spent with her with such fondness, but because he had been struck during that boat ride in 1963 by how uncharacteristically out of sorts she seemed.
“It was obvious to me,” Ray told LIFE.com, “that Natalie did not like being out on the water at all. When I heard that she’d drowned, in basically the same place where we’d been all those years before, I wasn’t just sad although that was part of it. I was also very, very surprised.”
Five decades later, the mystery of Natalie Wood’s death endures. Bill Ray’s pictures, meanwhile, shed a clear, poignant light on a time when the star’s already impressive career felt boundless, and her life charmed. The future, it seemed then, was hers for the taking.
The woman who guided Natalie to stardom was her mother, the Russian-born Mrs. Maria Gurdin (center). Stern and shrewd, she scrutinized scripts, haggled over fees, snd dressed her child in prim clothes when competitors wore sexy ones.
David Bowie probably came closest to summing up Tina Turner’s fiery, un-sum-up-able persona when he famously said, after joining her onstage in Birmingham, England, during the final concert of her 1985 British tour: “Standing up there next to her was the hottest place in the universe.”
Turner died Wednesday, May 24, 2023 at age 83 at her home near Zurich, Switzerland. Here LIFE.com presents a handful of rare photos taken in 1970 by Gjon Mili. The exact date of the shoot? Unknown. The location? Probably Las Vegas. The show’s set list? Unknown. The identity of the guy gazing back at Mili’s camera in the last picture in this gallery? A mystery.
But one thing these pictures do manage to impart is confirmation that, when Tina Turner took the stage—no matter where that stage was, and no matter how large or how small the crowd might be—there was no simply no restraining her talent and soulfulness.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com.
Tina Turner, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tina Turner and band, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tina Turner, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tina Turner, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tina Turner, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tina Turner, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tina Turner, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
“Now in the sunny freshness of a Texas morning,” LIFE magazine wrote in its Nov. 29, 1963, issue, alongside the first photo in this gallery, “with roses in her arms and a luminous smile on her lips, Jacqueline Kennedy still had one hour to share the buoyant surge of life with the man at her side.”
It was a wonderful hour [LIFE wrote, just a week after JFK’s assassination]. Vibrant with confidence, crinkle-eyed with an all-embracing smile, John F. Kennedy swept his wife with him into the exuberance of the throng at Dallas’ Love Field. This was an act in which Jack Kennedy was superbly human. Responding to the warmth his own genuine warmth evoked in others, he met his welcomers joyously, hand to hand and heart to heart. For him this was all fun as well as politics. For his shy wife, surmounting the grief of her infant son’s recent death, this mingling demanded a grace and gallantry she would soon need again.
Then the cavalcade, fragrantly laden with roses for everyone, started into town. Eight miles on the way, in a sixth-floor window, the assassin waited. All the roses, like those abandoned in Vice President Johnson’ car [last slide in this gallery], were left to wilt. They would be long faded before a stunned nation would fully comprehend its sorrow.
Here, LIFE.com presents photos by Art Rickerby most of which never ran in LIFE made in the hours before, as well as the moments immediately after, the killing that shocked the world.
John and Jackie Kennedy at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
John and Jackie Kennedy at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
John and Jackie Kennedy at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
John and Jackie Kennedy at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
John and Jackie Kennedy at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Lyndon Johnson with Jackie and John Kennedy in Forth Worth on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, just hours before JFK’s assassination.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
JFK in Fort Worth, Nov. 22, 1963
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
President John Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson and others at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Fort Worth, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
President John Kennedy in Fort Worth, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963, shortly before flying to Dallas.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
President John Kennedy delivers a brief speech outside the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, Nov. 22, 1963, shortly before flying to Dallas.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
President John Kennedy greeted admirers in Fort Worth, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963, shortly before flying to Dallas.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The scene at Dealey Plaza in Dallas in the moments after John Kennedy was shot, Nov. 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Outside Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dallas, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963, where JFK was pronounced dead at 1 p.m. in the afternoon, half an hour after being shot.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s car at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963.
From Jesse James and Butch Cassidy to Scarface and Tony Soprano, outlaws have held an ambiguous place in America’s popular imagination: we fear and loathe the gangster’s appetite for violence; we envy and covet his radical freedom. In early 1965, LIFE photographer Bill Ray and writer Joe Bride spent several weeks with a gang that, to this day, serves as a living, brawling embodiment of our ambivalent relationship with the rebel: Hells Angels.
Here, along with a gallery of remarkable photographs that were shot for LIFE but never ran in the magazine, Ray and Bride recall their days and nights spent with Buzzard, Hambone, Big D and other Angels (as well as their equally tough “old ladies”) at a time when the roar of Harleys and the sight of long-haired bikers was still new and for the average, law-abiding citizen almost unfathomable. The day-to-day existence of these leather-clad hellions was as foreign to most of LIFE magazine’s millions of readers as the lives of, say, Borneo’s headhunters, or nomads of the Gobi Desert.
“This was a new breed of rebel,” Ray told LIFE.com, recalling his time with the Angels. “They didn’t have jobs. They absolutely despised everything that most Americans value and strive for stability, security. They rode their bikes, hung out in bars for days at a time, fought with anyone who messed with them. They were self-contained, with their own set of rules, their own code of behavior. It was extraordinary to be around.”
Ray spent some of the time with the Angels on a ride from San Bernardino (about 40 miles east of Los Angeles) to Bakersfield, Calif., for a major motorcycle rally. The Berdoo-Bakersfield run is a trip of only about 130 miles but in 1965, it would offer enough moments (both placid and violent) for Ray to paint a rare, revelatory portrait of the world’s most legendary motorcycle club in its early days. The way in which the story came about, meanwhile, was as dramatic and unexpected as Bill Ray’s pictures.
“I’d done a story on Big Daddy Roth,” writer Joe Bride recalled, “a genuine L.A. phenomenon and legend in the Southern California car culture. He had a lucrative business designing hot rod-themed decals and cartoon figures. While I was wrapping up the story with Big Daddy, the Angels were in the news. They were accused of terrorizing a small central California town and being major growers and distributors of pot. Big Daddy said he knew a lot of Angels, did business with them and that they were more lost nomads than real criminals. After meeting them, by the way, my take on them was a little bit closer to the prevailing opinion than to Big Daddy’s. . . .”
“I told Big Daddy Roth I’d like to meet the Angels, talk to them about doing a story,” Bride said. “It would be a chance for them to get some recognition, and explain why they did what they did. Not long after the story on Big Daddy ran, in late 1964, Roth called and said, ‘They’ll meet you with conditions.'” Bride met two Angels at Big Daddy’s store. They blindfolded him, put him in a car and drove into the mountains. At a bar “with what looked like 100 bikes parked outside,” no longer blindfolded, Bride met a stocky, long-haired Angel who asked if he shot pool. They played some nine-ball, and Bride beat the guy two out of three games. Bride then negotiated, there in the bar, a relationship where the Hells Angels agreed to allow him and Bill Ray to shadow them. Bride sat back, had a few beers, and then they drove him back to L.A. Not long after that, Ray and Bride began reporting the story.
Ray and Bride spent more than a month with the Angels in the spring of ’65, “mostly on weekends,” Ray remembers, “but the Bakersfield run was around the clock, three days and nights. In Bakersfield, I slept on the floor of the Blackboard Cafe the bar that the Angels basically lived in while they were there.”
“I got along with the Angels,” Ray says today. “I got to like some of them very much, and I think they liked me. I accepted them as they were, and they accepted me. You know, by their standards, I looked pretty funny.”
Ray vividly remembers the moment he truly felt accepted, or as accepted as he was ever going to be, by the Angels. In a confrontation reminiscent of a famous scene in Hunter S. Thompson’s classic 1966 book, Hell’s Angels, when Thompson was almost stomped to death by bikers, Ray says that “he got in a bit of trouble one day, in a bar. Some bikers guys who weren’t Angels saw me taking pictures. They didn’t like it, but they didn’t realize that I was a sort of mascot of the real tough guys. I’d been shooting the Angels for maybe a week at this point. I was about to be attacked by one of these guys when a Hells Angel standing next to me made it clear that if a hair on my head was touched, the other guy was a dead man. From that point on, I felt . . . well, not safe, because I never felt safe with those guys, but as if I’d passed a test, somehow.”
Ray stresses that while the Angels he spent time with smoked pot, and he once saw them “beat the holy hell” out of some other bikers behind a bar, he “never saw these guys involved in anything deeply illegal. Then again, they always had plenty of money for gas and beer. They lived on their bikes that is, when they weren’t hanging out in bars. Their money had to come from somewhere, but none of them ever worked.”
The FBI has contended that the Angels and other motorcycle gangs are involved in extortion, drug dealing, trafficking stolen goods and other criminal activities.
“There’s a romance to the idea of the biker on the open road,” Ray says. “It’s similar to the romance that people attach to cowboys and the West which, of course, is totally out of proportion to the reality of riding fences and punching cows. But there’s something impressive about these Harley-Davidsons and bikers heading down the highway. You see the myth played out in movies, like Easy Rider, which came out a few years after I photographed the Angels. You know, the trail never ends for the cowboy, and the open road never ends for the Angels. They just ride. Where they’re going hardly matters. It’s not an easy life, but it’s what they choose. It’s theirs. And everyone else can get out of the way or go to hell.”
—gallery by Liz Ronk
Hells Angels, California, 1965.
Bill Ray Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels, California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Big D, a member of the San Bernardino, a.k.a, “Berdoo” Hells Angels, during a ride from San Bernardino to Bakersfield, California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Inside the Hells Angels’ San Bernardino clubhouse, 1965.
Bill Ray— Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Little Jim” drinks beer from a waste basket at the Angels’ clubhouse in San Bernardino, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels’ “old ladies,” California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Two “Berdoo” Hells Angels clown for Bill Ray behind a bar during a stop on their run from San Bernardino to Bakersfield, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angel “Hambone” posed during a ride from San Bernardino to Bakersfield, Calif., 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels and locals outside the Blackboard Cafe in Bakersfield, Calif., 1965.
Bill Ray— Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels, their “old ladies” and hangers-on outside the Blackboard in Bakersfield, California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels cruise north from San Bernardino to Bakersfield, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A man in Bakersfield, Calif., cast what appeared to be an appraising eye over the Hells Angels’ Harley-Davidsons, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sonny, the leader of the San Bernardino Hells Angels, needed stitches in his head after crashing his bike, California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women—including one with a bandaged nose—in a bar while male bikers gathered in a separate room, California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A sheriff’s officer kept an eye on the proceedings outside a bar that the Hells Angels had made their headquarters-away-from-home during their San Bernardino-to-Bakersfield run, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Two women who were riding with the Hells Angels at a bar in 1965. “This is one of my favorites from the whole shoot,” Bill Ray says. “There’s something kind of sad and at the same time defiant about the atmosphere.”
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Outside the Blackboard Cafe at night, Bakersfield, Calif., 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A teenager seems drawn by the Angels and their machines, California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Two “reputable” motorcyclists photographing the Hells Angels, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
During their ’65 run to Bakersfield, the Angels pushed their way into a motorcycle hillclimb, in which bikers race up an often insanely steep incline. The Angels wanted to take part; organizers said no (but finally relented).
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A biker named Roseberry sported a “one percenter” patch—a badge of honor for the Angels and other motorcycle clubs whose members revel in and celebrate their outlaw status, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A biker named Roseberry getting fingerprinted, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An Angel getting frisked.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Hells Angel—with his “old lady” holding on tight—pulled a wheelie in downtown Bakersfield, Calif., 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Bikers (including Sonny, left, with a bandaged head) and their “old ladies,” California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Buzzard” and an “old lady,” California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Hells Angel salute, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Buzzard” prepared to leave Bakersfield as cops and townspeople watched, 1965.
In the early 1940s, LIFE magazine reported that a Mrs. Mark Bullis of Washington, D.C., had adopted a squirrel “before his eyes were open, when his mother died and left him in a tree” in the Bullis’s back yard. Here, in a series of photos by Nina Leen, LIFE.com chronicles the quiet, rodential adventures and sartorial splendor of Tommy Tucker, the orphaned and, in 1940s America, the celebrated squirrel.
“Most squirrels,” LIFE noted (with a striking lack of evidence), “are lively and inquisitive animals who like to do tricks when they have an audience.” They do?
LIFE then went on to observe that the squirrel, dubbed Tommy Tucker by the Bullis family, “is a very subdued little animal who has never had a chance to jump around in a big tree.”
“Mrs. Bullis’ main interest in Tommy,” LIFE continued, “is in dressing him up in 30 specially made costumes. Tommy has a coat and hat for going to market, a silk pleated dress for company, a Red Cross uniform for visiting the hospital.”
“Tommy never seems to complain,” the LIFE article concluded, “although sometimes he bites Mrs. Bullis. Mrs. Bullis never complains about being bitten.”
