Wednesday, April 10, 2013

My (Movie Star!!) Scrapbook (Circa 1950)

Good morning!

I went over to my mom's house on Sunday to show her some of the vintage dresses I was considering for the wedding (again, there's one shining star of gown, but we're still looking next week), and on the way home,  I rewarded myself for having taken a sackful of items to Music City Thrift by heading across the street on Due West to Robinson's Flea Market. I know I've mentioned it before, but I lo-o-o-ove the hidden treasure in that store. Sure, there might be bundles of socks or factory re-fitted vacuums in some booths, but I'm telling you, if you dig, there's gold in them thar hills. Lots of it! And boy, do I ever love looking for it.

Example: for the low, low price of $4.99, I found this 1950 movie star scrapbook, complete with oh-my-goodness-it's-adorable cover. I took some photos of the pages (I was afraid to scan them, as the pieces are delicate!), so come on and take a look at what's inside!


Honestly, they kind of had me at this terrifying looking nurse doll. But many scrapbooks are completely empty when you open them-- have you ever cracked one of their aged spines and been disappointed to see page after page of some 1950's child or mother or teenager's broken resolution to "keep up with that scrapbook"?


Well, not to worry! This young gal's sense of responsibility towards filling up these pages was great! I opened the very first page to see this:


The baton twirler on the left hand side of the page is a very young Janet Leigh! You can tell because the little girl has written her name in looping pencil over Leigh's white shorts. And on the right? Fresh-scrubbed and gorgeous Doris Day, as she appeared in the year of our Lord 1949. Look at those sparkling blue eyes on the former Miss Kappelhoff of Ohio:


Inside, every living page of the fifty or so leaves inside is meticulously filled out with clippings from movie star magazines. Sometimes advertisements are included, but mostly, the compiler seems to favor full-color spreads and publicity photos. Here's a jewelery counter at an unnamed department store (look at the mural!) and the every-dashing, future Kennedy intimate and Rat Packer Peter Lawford with a pencil mustache, no less!

As is often the case in pre-teen and teen star fandom, you can notice a particular interest the little girl has in one star, and that star is the up-and-coming-at-the-time Elizabeth Taylor. After her juvenile success in movies like Little Women, Jane Eyre, and National Velvet, the preternaturally beautiful actress moved on to more mature roles in her teens. Here are three full color pages of the seventeen or eighteen year old screen queen. Can you imagine looking like this (and possessed of that 36-21-36 figure that any living human would die for) as a junior in high school? Man, I seriously needed the MGM makeup and wardrobe team when I was clunking around Hume-Fogg in the early 2000's. Look what magic they can do, especially given such goods to work with!





Here's La Liz in a 1950 film that paired her with cute-i-tude Van Johnson, The Big Hangover. So young! So raven haired! So batwing-browed!




Other favorites of the album-maker include swimming sensation Esther Williams. The main thing I remember off the top of my head about EW was that her memoir, The Hollywood Mermaid, is practically too hot to handle...! But these photos focus on her role as a doting mother rather than a backlot firecracker. The "babby" (as he is adorably referred to in our album-maker's handwriting on the second photo below) is first-born son "Benjy".




I'm about halfway through Yvonne DeCarlo's self-titled memoir, and she mentions one of her early dancing gigs, post-obscurity but pre-major stardom, as having been at Los Angeles location of Earl Carroll's famous night club. Here's a photo of some of the dancing girls there. Look at what the neon sign outside the building looked like! What glamour, what glamour.



Look at Frank Sinatra when he was young and handsome and s-k-i-n-n-y! Still growing into those ears. I love his two tone jacket and bowtie, too sharp.


This clip caught my eye as it's promoting two young starlets, Jean Hagen (in the foreground) and MARILYN MONROE (in the background). This is a terrible shot of either of the glamorous girls...MM isn't even in focus! In 1950, Monroe was still a few years off from reaching for-real fame, though she did appear as George Sander's lovely, empty-headed date in All About Eve. It's kind of exciting to see stars on their way up in these old fan magazines, and the would-be actresses who, in spite of the publicity machine, never really made it too far along. There are some strips in the front of the album with whole half dozens of actresses I don't recognize from Adam (and that's saying something, if you know about me and movies!).


Lana Turner is another star that appears again and again throughout these pages. Here she is in ADORABLE western wear with the third of her seven (!!) husbands and daughter Cheryl Crane. While Lana, Turner's autobiography, is boring, boring, boring (and how, with such an exciting and glamorous life!), daughter Cheryl's memoir, Detour, is edge-of-your-seat, complete with a first hand account of the events that led up to the daughter's shooting of Lana's Goodfella boyfriend Johnny Stompanato.




Bette Davis in a terrible wig and terribly miscast in 1949's noir clunker Beyond the Forest. Joseph Cotten looks comatose and he has every right to be. At least this movie gave us the classic "What a dump" line that Elizabeth Taylor would revist in the opening scene of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?


There are so many pictures of movie stars at home and with children that it really made me think about how publicists specifically sell their clients to two major movie-going audiences-- housewives and young people, both of which would be prone to daydreaming about how good a father James Mason would be (see the first photo) or what it would be like to live in Alan Ladd's home (answer: colorful! See the second photo) or what Gene Kelly's wife looks like (as you can see in the third photo, pretty! And, as I realize I've read every movie star memoir ever, I can recommend her book as well...I think I read it all in a day, the early romance of Kelly as a New York choreographer and she as teenage dancer is just mesmerizing).






Kirk Douglas, looking determined:


Betty Grable, looking leggy:


Tony Curtis, looking exotic:


And there were even more photos loose in the back, waiting for the day when a new album got started! I have to say, for $4.99, I really got an afternoon's worth of entertainment looking at all the little cutouts of this teen's screen likes and loves.



But soft! Our author is revealed! This (sadly empty) envelope postmarked Detroit, in Dec of 1950, is addressed to "Miss Linda Sue Kirby, Gainesboro, Tenn, City". That's right! No street address, no zip code...isn't that neat to think about? How anybody in Gainesboro would know where to deliver mail to the Kirby residence, without the benefit of an exact address? Love it. And thanks, Linda Sue Kirby, for all the neat clips!



Anyway, have you found any unexpected treasures in your thrift store trawlings lately? Did you keep a movie star or musicians scrapbook when you were a kid? I have to say, I had a ridiculously exhaustive David Bowie paper archive, meticulously kept in a 3 ring binder with page protectors and the date of publication throughout high school, following his new album releases as well as any mention of him in the news (pre-internet nerd alert!). Isn't it amazing to think of all the time you had as a kid to follow that kind of thing? Which vintage movie star would you have kept a scrapbook of in 1950? You know I was secretly disappointed not to find any clippings of my beloved Joan Crawford, but well. We can't always ask for the moon!

Have a great Wednesday, we're almost to the end of this week! I'll see you tomorrow.

17 comments:

  1. What a treasure you've found! I could spend hours flipping through it.

    I'm glad you mentioned the David Bowie scrapbook. It was all I could think about when I started reading this today. :D

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    1. Thanks, man! Next time you come over to my house, you can! :)

      DAVID BOWIE SCRAPBOOK FOR LIFE. I found it the other day when I was going through papers in the attic and I got tickled over how there will be little things-that-fell-out-of-albums and 80's Rolling Stone mentions and 2000-era Tennesseean clippings all taped in there together. My life at the time!

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  2. Love it! I've always dreamed of finding one of these! My mom's teen scrapbook is mostly things from places she went. The only 'movie stars' are Elvis, Hayley Mills, and some guy from some show I'd never heard of (and I know old TV!).
    I'll have to say that that lovely little lady had good taste. Liz is certainly one of my favourites! I watched Who's Afraid Of Virginia Wolfe' yesterday for the millionth time. God, she was such a harpy in that!!

    Oh, and that doll is actually an original Ideal Shirley Temple dressed like a nurse! The nurse outfit actually makes her terrifying. I don't know why, but I'm probably going to have nightmares about my own Ideal Shirley coming after me with a scalpel now.

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    1. LOVE Elvis, LOVE Hayley Mills, so I bet your ma's scrapbook is AWESOME. I'm a huge Elizabeth Taylor fan, so those clips alone would have sold it for me, but all the other ones! The sheer VOLUME of clippings. I was lucky to find it!

      I am so jealous of your Shirley Temple doll. Maybe someday I'll find one of my own to terrify me in the night (not even being sarcastic, I seriously want one).

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  3. Oh my goodness, what a find!!! I LOVE these Hollywood scrapbooks; they're just so fascinatingly of-their-time. (Not to knock modern Hollywood, but I could not imagine making such a thing with today's "People"!) About a year ago I passed up a super cool 1920s scrapbook and I'm still kicking myself!

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    1. Oh, I hate non-buyer's remorse so much more than I even dislike buyer's remorse. The things that slip through our fingers! And I thought the same thing as I was reading this, how glamorous and WHOLESOME everything in the clippings was. Can you imagine a 12 year old making a Brangelina scrapbook? Not so much.

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  4. so perfect that something like this found its way to you! glad you shared it with us <3

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    1. I know! I was so happy to find it and get to pore over it of an afternoon. :)

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  5. SO AWESOME!!!! Im not sure if I've mentioned it before, haha, but I LOVE Doris!!! She has always been one of my favorite stars. I have so many old magazines but none with her on the cover (or even just the cover itself). I think it's Collier's where she appeared on the cover with all of the dyed poodles; somehow I have the issue immediately before and the issue immediately after. I'm on the hunt!!!

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    1. I'm such a Doris Day fan, too. My sister and I are going to try to make it to the Belcourt (the revival movie house in town) to see "Pillow Talk" this weekend. She's such an angel, and how great is the clipping from the front of the book?

      I'll keep an eye out for the Collier's you mentioned...with a net spread as wide as Tennessee, we're bound to find at least one copy of that particular issue for your collection, right?

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  6. What a great find! I love these kinds of finds. I found a scrapbook of cakes once. Like a whole book of polaroids of cakes that someone had made in the 1960s for all kinds of occasions. I gave it to a kid I knew that liked to make cakes. But I still think about it and wonder if it is happy.

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    1. Thanks! And I love hearing about your cake scrapbook. Little mementos and paper collections like this are so personal! At the same booth, there was a photo album (the sticky kind with plastic sheets over it) of recipes, which I thought was clever-- instead of pasting them to cards, you could just stick them in the book and look at them later. I love how that album of yours must have been the cake maker's "trophy" book of all the ones they did a great job on. I bet it did make that kid happy!

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  7. That is a fantastic scrapbook, I've never come across anything like that but my mum used to have old books full of Hollywood pictures like that and as a kid I loved looking through them, especially at all the glamorous ladies.
    I did indeed keep scrapbooks throughout my teens. I'm so glad you confessed to being a David Bowie nerd because I was a Smiths nerd and put every cutting I could find about them into scrapbooks. I'd love to look through them again but they're down in my mum's house, probably in my brother's room, and once things go in there you never see them again. xx

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    1. I bet your mom's movie scrapbooks were so cool! I see these things on ebay every once and awhile but never in my price range, so when this one was 5 bucks, I was e-l-a-t-e-d, lemme tell you! SO glamorous.

      I LOVE THAT YOU HAD A SMITHS SCRAPBOOK! Glad to know I'm not the only weird high school scrapbook collector out there. I bet it'd be a hoot to read over all Morrissey's brooding little press snippets again, if it ever resurfaces. LOVED the Smiths in high school. We almost got to see Morrissey this year but he cancelled the leg of his tour that went through our neck of the woods because of his ongoing throat problems. Maybe next time!

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  8. This is pretty much the greatest thing I have ever seen. I used to get Bop magazine when I was a kid, solely for pullouts of NKOTB...but that is just not nearly as glamorous!! I love those full color Liz Taylor pics. Did you see Liz and Dick? It was terrible...but now everytime I see young Liz- I see Lohan's ugly mug!

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  9. wonderful! i LOVE old scrapbooks so much! i had a CRAZY backstreet boys book, where i would even cut out the words "backstreet boys" from order forms and stuff and put them on one big page in my book. not nearly as glamorous!

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