My Pretty Baby Cried She Was a Bird: Slim Aarons

What you would see if you were in Slim Aaron's shoes! Photographer of celebrities and royal blood alike. I like the ones of celebrities best.

Notes:

If Katharine Hepburn pulled up in a roadster on a dirt road in some tropical locale I happened to inhabit, asking for directions, I sure hope I would have the luck of the man in the yellow shirt (center) and be able to snap a photo on my camera. Odds are, I would not have my camera. Odds are, I would not be in a tropical locale. The fortuitous stars that aligned in order to put both Katharine Hepburn and Yellow Shirt in the same breath of air!

I love the look of "Oh this? This is just what my life normally looks like. Really. No, I wasn't posing, seriously, but thank you, it's a great shot, isn't it?" that Lana Turner has on her face. I assume this is Lana Turner? (Hos often do you get to say that, unless you were a receptionist at MGM studios in the forties and fifties? Gosh.)

I always notice how tiny Marilyn Monroe's head and shoulders are. It's hard when you have voluptous, bombshell kind of girls to think of them as less than fifty feet tall and Amazons. The idea that if I met MM, she would have to look up to see me is just weird. Sometimes her "Give 'em 'sexy', Marilyn" look ends up making her look slightly drunk, I think this is one of those cases. Still, I love the fan mail and again, the unintentionally implied casual of the set up. "Yes, this is how I answer my fan mail. Staring seductively into space, with it all just spreeeead out around me. I just tell that silly old mailman to just fling 'em wherever. Do you like me? This couch is a pull out, you know."

Joan Collins! What did you do to that poodle! Why is that poodle pink! Is there no humanity left in you! Kudos on the Beethoven lamp, though. Also, you look great. This is the one photo other than the KH one that looks like it might take place in reality, I like that about publicity photos sometimes.

Can't decide if I like Truman Capote or Lana Turner's setting better. Note the obscene number of cat tchotchkes lying around TC's apartment. "Reading and smoking eccentrically. HOW ELSE." What is missing in this photo is Babe Paley and the nine stoli martinis he's had before lunch. Read about auctioning of his private goods (and TC in general) here. I hate that there were two movies made about his life and neither (while each decent in its own way) got to that sometimes impish, sometimes childish perceived sense of his own greatness and importance that made Gerald Clarke's bio of him such a good read back when I was in high school. I love his writing, but more than that I like his irrepressible sense of self.

I thought this was Kim Novak before I saw a larger version. I still wish it was Kim Novak. What a lovely shade of hair this girl has, nonetheless. And I like how she's posed with a tiger skin rug and somehow makes it look DEMURE. Lovely.