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LIFE With Dizzy Gillespie: Rare and Classic Portraits of a Playful Genius

December 3, 2020October 5, 2014 by

John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, who would have celebrated his 103rd birthday on Oct. 21, was the very model of the modern American musical genius: a brilliant instrumentalist and stylistic innovator, he was also an extroverted performer with a wicked sense of humor.

One of the primary creators of bebop in the mid-1940s and an unparalleled trumpeter, Dizzy was a populist who wanted his music to be understood, appreciated and enjoyed. Audiences may have associated him with signature visual clues the beret and goatee he sported in the 1940s, and the trumpet with the upturned bell he began playing in the 1950s and adored his onstage clowning and dancing, but anyone with ears could tell how seriously he always took the music. An international star until his death on January 6, 1993 (the same day as Rudolph Nureyev), Gillespie was as fervently respected by fellow musicians, as he was beloved by generations of listeners.

A spread by LIFE photographer Allan Grant in our October 11, 1948 issue, during bebop’s glory days. Conspicuous in his absence is Charlie Parker, the avatar of bebop, and the man whom Dizzy called “the other side of my heartbeat,” but Gillespie’s vivacious personality was far more palatable to the mainstream. To see this magnificent musician in his youth, ready to convince the world that the music he and his not-yet-understood peers were making was the sound of the future, is still a glorious thing to behold.

Steve Futterman is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer.

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie greeting fellow musician Benny Carter, 1948.

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie. 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Crooner Mel (Velvet Fog) Torme happily bites on his finger while he and a model, June Bright, watch Dizzy Gillespie (reflected in mirror), 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Drummer Chano Pozo, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Actress Ava Gardner dons beret and specs and pretends to wear goatee at Billy Berg’s Hollywood nightclub as Dizzy (left) grins.

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie signing autographs, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Rita Hayworth: Hollywood Legend, Pinup Icon

August 25, 2023October 1, 2014 by

With the possible exception of Betty Grable and her fabled legs no single Hollywood star was more popular with American troops during World War II than the actress and dancer Rita Hayworth. Thanks to a photo made by Bob Landry that ran in LIFE magazine in August 1941, months before the U.S. officially entered the war, Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn on Oct. 17, 1918) was the face and the lingerie-clad body of arguably the single most famous and most frequently reproduced American pinup image ever.

LIFE.com remembers the star of films as varied as Pal Joey, Strawberry Blonde, Orson Welles’s Lady From Shanghai and the 1946 noir classic, Gilda in which she played one of moviedom’s most devastatingly sexy femmes fatale. Hayworth could play comedy, was stellar in dramatic roles and danced well enough that none other than Fred Astaire, with whom she starred in two hits for Columbia Pictures in the early 1940s, asserted that she was as talented a partner as any he’d ever had.

Hayworth’s offscreen life, meanwhile, was frequently tough. She married five times; she struggled with alcoholism; and for the last years of her life she suffered from a disease that was only diagnosed (and given a name) a few years before she died: Alzheimer’s.

For countless Americans of a certain age, however, and for movie fans around the world, Rita Hayworth remains one of those rarest of creatures: a bona fide movie star from a classic era the Hollywood of the 1940s and ’50s that will never come again.

Rita Hayworth on August 11, 1941 LIFE Cover

Bob Landry (LIFE Picture Collection)

Rita Hayworth 1941

Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rita Hayworth, 1945.

Bob Landry (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Rita Hayworth in Gilda, 1946

Columbia Pictures

Rita Hayworth 1941

Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rita Hayworth 1941

Bob Landry (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Rita Hayworth with husband Orson Wells and daughter Rebecca, 1946

Peter Stackpole (LIFE Picture Collection)

LIFE at the Circus: Behind the Scenes With Ringling Brothers, 1949

January 25, 2024October 1, 2014 by

LIFE.com celebrates the legendary entertainment juggernaut that Charles Edward Ringling (Dec. 2, 1863 – Dec. 3, 1926) and several other Ringlings owned and operated through the years: the Ringling Brothers Circus (later the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the “Greatest Show on Earth”). Here are photographs by LIFE’s Nina Leen, chronicling the lives lived behind the scenes by the huge extended family that made up the traveling extravaganza in the late 1940s.

In fact, Charles Edward’s nephew, John Ringling North, was the larger-than-life focus of the LIFE feature for which these photos were originally made. (Very few of the photographs ran in the magazine.)

Of all the marvels, human and animal, which populate the Ringling Bros.’ circus [LIFE wrote], none can match John Ringling North, the man who runs it, in sheer, brassy flamboyance. It is the considered judgment of a large following of friends and enemies that the sustained private performance given by North, a former stock-and-bond salesman who hacked his way through a financial jungle to become president and majority stockholder of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, Inc., is easily as spectacular as any that takes place under the Big Top of The Greatest Show on Earth.

The 1949 article goes on to portray a man of outsize appetites, remarkable talents (“He tap dances, plays the saxophone and cornet, juggles lighted torches and sings songs of his own composition. . .”) and boundless, near-manic energy who somehow was able to put his stamp on a massive pop-culture phenomenon while, if the article is to believed, he rarely slept, constantly boozed it up in his private Pullman train car and galloped around on a stallion named Stonewall’s Pride.

Under the Big Top or outside of it, they just don’t make ’em like that any more.

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Ringling Brothers Circus 1949

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ringling Brothers Circus 1949

NINA LEEN

Ringling Brothers Circus 1949

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The 1918 Flu Pandemic: Scenes From a Cataclysm

November 2, 2020October 1, 2014 by

The COVID-19 outbreak has already caused more than 1 million deaths in 2020 and put much of the world into quarantine. The race now is to keep COVID-19 from becoming as devastating as the 1918 flu pandemic (the “Spanish Flu”) that infected an estimated half a billion people around the globe and, by most estimates, killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people—at the time, three to five percent of the world’s population.

In America, in one year the average life expectancy in the United States dropped by 12 years, according to the United States’ National Archives. All told, more than 675,000 men, women and children in the U.S. died of the virus.

Here, we remember what the world looked like as the post-World War I pandemic ran its lethal course before ending, almost as rapidly as it began, in the early summer of 1919.

These Red Cross volunteers fought the flu pandemic, 1918.

Apic

The St. Louis Red Cross Motor Corps was on duty during the influenza pandemic, 1918.

Universal History Archive/UIG via Shutterstock

Influenza victims crowded into an emergency hospital near Fort Riley, Kans., 1918.

AP Photo National Museum of Health

A patient wore a “flu mask” during the influenza pandemic which followed the First World War.

Topical Press Agency—

Unidentified baseball players wore masks that they thought would keep them from getting the flu, 1918.

Underwood And Underwood/The LIFE Images Collection

A doctor inoculated Mayor Andrew Peters of Boston against the Influenza virus during the pandemic, 1918.

Hulton Archive—

Inspecting Chicago street cleaners for influenza, 1918.

Bettmann/Corbis

Court was held outdoors in a park due to the influenza pandemic, San Francisco, 1918.

Hulton Archive—

Strangers to Reason: LIFE Inside a Psychiatric Hospital, 1938

January 16, 2020September 30, 2014 by

For all of the lighthearted and often downright frivolous material that appeared in LIFE through the years, the magazine could also address, head-on, the thorniest, most resonant issues of the day. Less than two years after its debut, LIFE confronted its readers with a devastating photo essay on an issue that has long bedeviled humanity: namely, how to treat those among us who suffer from debilitating, and often frightening, mental disorders.

Even today, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photographs from the grounds of Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island are remarkable for the way they blend clear-eyed reporting with compassion. But what is perhaps most unsettling about the images is how terribly familiar they look.

The treatment of mental illness in all its confounding varieties and degrees has come a long, long way since the 1930s, and in most countries is now immeasurably more humane, comprehensive and discerning than the brutal approaches of even a few decades ago. Advancements in psychiatric medications alone have helped countless people lead fuller lives than they might have without drugs. And yet . . . the grim, desolate tone of the pictures in this gallery can feel eerily familiar.

The tone struck by LIFE, meanwhile, in its introduction to the Pilgrim State article—while employing language that might seem overly simplified to our ears—is at-once earnest and searching:

The day of birth for every human being is the start of a lifelong battle to adapt himself to an ever-changing environment. He is usually victorious and adjusts himself without pain. However, in one case out of 20 he does not adjust himself. In U.S. hospitals, behind walls like [those] shown here, are currently 500,000 men, women and children whose minds have broken in the conflict of life. About the same number, or more, who have lost their equilibrium, are at large. Their doctors say they have mental diseases. Their lawyers call them insane.
Mentally balanced people shun and fear the insane. The general public refuses to face the terrific problem of what should be done for them. Today, though their condition has been much improved, they are still the most neglected, unfortunate group in the world. [This photo essay features] pictures showing the dark world of the insane and what scientists are doing to lead them back to the light of reason.

—This photo gallery edited by Liz Ronk for LIFE.com.

Pilgrim State Hospital, Brentwood, N.Y., 1938.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A female patient became violent.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pilgrim State Hospital, Brentwood, N.Y., 1938.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pilgrim State Hospital, Brentwood, N.Y., 1938.

Alfred Eisenstaed/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pilgrim State Hospital, Brentwood, N.Y., 1938.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A continuous-flow bath was seen as the best method for calming psychiatric patients. With their bodies greased, the patients could remain in the baths for hours, and gradually fall asleep.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pilgrim State Hospital, Brentwood, N.Y., 1938.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A manic-depressive gazed continuously through a barred window.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pilgrim State Hospital, Brentwood, N.Y., 1938.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

‘Career Girl’: A Famed Portrait of a Young Woman’s Life in 1948 New York

December 2, 2022September 28, 2014 by

Of all the photo essays that LIFE magazine published over the decades, a 12-page 1948 feature known simply as “Career Girl” remains among the most moving and, in many ways, one of the most surprising. Chronicling the life and struggles in New York City of a 23-year-old Missourian named Gwyned Filling, the article and especially the essay’s photographs by Leonard McCombe struck a nerve with LIFE’s readers. Seven decades later, McCombe’s pictures have lost none of their startling intimacy, or their empathy.

A 1947 graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Gwyned Filling moved to New York with a friend a week after commencement. Less than a year later, LIFE selected her, from more than a thousand other candidates, to serve as an emblem of the modern “career girl” the smart, driven young woman who viewed post-World War II America, and especially its big cities, as a place where opportunities seemed limitless. After all, the nation’s workforce during the critical war years had been transformed by a massive influx of skilled female workers; when the war ended, it was only natural that educated, ambitious women would view the labor landscape as utterly changed for the better.

The article that appeared in the May 3, 1948, issue of LIFE titled “The Private Life of Gwyned Filling” follows Gwyned as she negotiates the frenetic universe of New York City while trying to keep her own personal hopes and career expectations in perspective. She works; she dines out; she stays abreast of the doings of friends and family back home; she dates; she dreams.

The reaction of LIFE’s readers, meanwhile, ranged (perhaps predictably) from outrage and moral indignation at Gwyned’s “unladylike” pursuits to a kind of celebratory relief that LIFE chose to show on its cover “a young woman with a serious, purposeful, intelligent face” rather than “some vacuous-faced female with the molar grin that has come to be regarded in America as a smile.”

A reader from Detroit, on the other hand, opined that if the story “can keep only a few girls in their small-town homes it will have done at least some small service to humanity. Big cities are a menace to the progress of civilization. The people who fling themselves against them to be battered to pieces like moths against a lamp are fools.”

In the end, the enduring value of “The Private Life of Gwyned Filling,” and of McCombe’s quiet, masterful portrait of Gwyned at her happiest, her most determined and her most despairing, is that it serves as an honest record of a certain moment (the late 1940s) in a certain place (New York City) as experienced, to one degree or another, by countless women striving for something beyond what might have been expected of them a mere generation before. The article continued to fascinate years after its publication.

Finally, it’s worth noting that in November 1948 Gwyned married the man, Charles B. Straus, Jr., she is seen dating (and, at times, weeping over) in some of these pictures. They remained married for 54 years they had two kids and several grandkids until Straus died in 2002. Gwyned died in 2005, in Rhode Island. She was 80 years old.

Here are images from the story shot by McCombe, and also some images of her with new husband Charles Straus Jr. shot by LIFE photographer George Silk as they departed on a honeymoon cruise.

Gwyned Filling, alone in a crowd that has gathered to watch a fire in the city, stands on tiptoe and tilts back her head to get a better view, New York City, 1948.

Leonard McCombe/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE magazine, May 3, 1948.

Leonard McCombe—LIFE Magazine

LIFE magazine, May 3, 1948.

Photos by Leonard McCombe/LIfe Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Charles Straus Jr. and “career girl” Gwyned Filling aboard ship as they leave for honeymoon cruise, Nov. 1948.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gwyned Filling and husband Charles Straus Jr. standing by rail as Statue of Liberty fades past, November 1948.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Charles Straus Jr. and “career girl” Gwyned Filling aboard ship as they leave for honeymoon cruise, November 1948.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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