Turkey Glamour Shots!
A Hollywood tradition
Here’s a fun bit of Hollywood history, just in time for Thanksgiving.
Back in the golden age of Hollywood – 1930s-mid 1950s – when Hollywood was mainly the big studios like MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, etc., actors and actresses were put under basic contracts, usually for 7 years but with the studio having the right to drop them every few months if they wanted to. It wasn’t exactly an equitable contract. The studios had scouts all over the country signing up promising talent right and left. It was like having a huge back inventory of potential movie stars, and the majority of these starlets, of course, never made it.
But when they were first signed up they were put to work learning how to be a movie star, just in case they did catch on with the vast movie-going audience. So these young women, for instance, were completely made over, the color of their hair changed or even their hairlines altered, as in the famous case of Rita Hayworth, born Margarita Cansino. Her father was Spanish so Margarita had dark hair and a low forehead. Columbia pictures signed her up and turned her into a redhead and made her undergo electrolysis to raise her hairline. Ow!
Ginger Rogers – a natural redhead – wrote of being bleached blond, and how painful it was in those early days of hair dye, sitting there with a stinging scalp and watering eyes. Jean Harlow lost a lot of her hair from that primitive bleach, and some speculate that the chemicals in it led to her premature death.
After these starlets were finished being made over, learning how to walk with books balanced on their heads, put on a diet, given a whole new set of teeth in many cases, plucked and polished to within an inch of their lives, they were put to work. And mainly, that meant they spent hours and hours with an inhouse photographer learning how to pose for the camera. And some of these photographs were, shall we say—insane? I’m talking about the annual holiday photos that featured these starlets in the hopes that newspapers or magazines would run them. That was one way the studios would gauge the potential appeal of a young woman, and maybe then she’d get a bit part in a film to see if she had the stuff.
Lots of these starlets in these ridiculous photos never made it, of course. Some did. And we are left with a treasure trove of turkey glamour shots, so let’s look at some of them!
And finally, I leave you with this. May you all have as joyous a Thanksgiving as a patriotic, yet also murderous, Vera Ellen in her toe shoes.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Oh my! … 😂😅
So much, fun, Melanie. Happy Thanksgiving!
PS, when I was a child, we had one of these old knife sharpeners out by our barn. I grew up in a place that belonged to my mother's family, and it was old. So interesting to see one...