Loomis Dean Photo Archives - LIFE

The Dawn of Rock: America Finds Its Thrill

Bill Syken — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 14:34:12 +0000

In its April 18, 1955 issue LIFE magazine reported on—with a fair amount of concern—the onset of the defining evolution of popular music in the 20th century. The story was titled “Rock ‘N Roll: A Frenzied Teenage Music Craze Kicks Up a Big Fuss.“

Here’s how LIFE described what the “big fuss” was all about:

The nation’s teenagers are dancing their way into an enlarging controversy over rock ‘n roll. In New Haven, Connecticut the police chief has put a damper on rock ‘n roll parties and other towns are following suit. Radio networks are worried over questionable lyrics in rock ‘n roll. And some American parents, without quite knowing what it is their kids are up to, are worried that it’s something they shouldn’t be.

But like it or not, rock and roll was here to stay. Standing in the heart of the moment, LIFE saw dancing as a big part of the new music’s appeal. The magazine, grasping to connect this revolutionary moment to the recent past, described rock and roll dancing as “a combination of “the Lindy and the Charleston, and almost anything else.” The story, shot by staff photographers Walter Sanders and Loomis Dean, had more pictures of kids dancing than of musicians performing. One of the shoots took place at the dance studio of Arthur Murray, where kids demonstrated their new moves.

LIFE acknowledged the roots of this new music, saying “The heavy-beat and honking-melody tunes of today’s rock ‘n roll have a clearly defined ancestry in U.S. jazz going back to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith of 30 years ago.” The broader market was now turning to a style of music that first became popular in the Black community because record companies had been focussing on “mambos and ballads,” and as a result “the country’s teenagers found themselves without snappy dance tunes to their taste.”

Some adults fretted over lyrics that seemed to be laden with innuendo and double meanings. But even as the LIFE article adopted the tone of a worried parent, the pictures in the magazine told another story. The photos showed exuberance and joy. And by today’s standards, everything looks extremely proper. The main concert photos feature the great Fats Domino, who is wearing a suit and playing a grand piano. The young fans are dressed as if they were going to a formal occasion, without any jeans or T-shirts in sight.

It’s mind-boggling to think that a mere 14 years from when this story ran, rock fans would be mucking around in the mud at Woodstock. But there was no stopping it at this point. The revolution was on, and it was coming fast.

Teenagers demonstrated their rock music dance moves for Arthur Murray and his wife, in background, at Murray’s dance studio.

Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Arthur Murray and wife (in the background to the left) enjoyed a demonstration by teen-agers of rock`n roll dancing, 1955..

Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Young dancers from a 1955 story on rock music.

Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple dancing from a story on rock music, 1955.

Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A young couple danced to rock music, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life PIcture Collection/Shutterstock

Pioneering rock DJ Allen Freed did a show from a studio in Boston, 1955.

Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A sign for an early rock show presented by pioneering DJ Allan Freed, 1955.

Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Teenagers danced to rock music being spun by DJ Al Jarvis in the parking lot of a Los Angeles supermarket, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Audience members enjoying Alan Freed’s Easter show at Brooklyn Paramount Theater, 1955.

Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Saxophonist Herbert Hardesty (center), a member of Fats Domino’s band, let loose at 54 Ballroom in Los Angeles, 1955.

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Fats Domino’s band performed in Los Angeles, 1955.

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Fats Domino’s band rocked out in Los Angeles, 1955.

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Fats Domino in concert in Los Angeles, 1955.

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Fats Domino and his band performed in Los Angeles, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Young dancers from a 1955 story on rock music.

Walter Sanders/LIfe Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A show from the early days of rock and roll, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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Catherine Deneuve: The Eyes Have It

Bill Syken — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 19:38:05 +0000

Catherine Deneuve was one of the leading ladies of the new wave of European cinema. She made her first big mark when she starred in Jacque Demy’s 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival. She went on to perform in several other Demy films and also the works of directors such as Luis Bunuel, Roman Polanski, and Francois Truffaut.

But those heady days were in front of her when LIFE’s Loomis Dean photographed Deneuve in 1961. At that point, even though this child of stage actors had been appearing in movies since she was 12, she was identified in the LIFE archival captions as “fashion model Catherine Deveuve.” (Though to be fair, Deneuve is known as a style icon as well as an actress).

Deneuve, who was born in Paris on October 22, 1943, would have been around 18 years old when she posed for Dean. Her hair was dark then, and when she appeared in LIFE’s April 3, 1962 issue, in a story headlined ‘Windfall of New Beauties,” about a new crop of young European actresses. (The photo of Deneuve which ran in that story was not from the Dean shoot but by noted glamour photographer Peter Basch). Deneuve was one of five young actresses featured in that story, along with another future star, Claudia Cardinale.

LIFE’s terse write-up about the young actress was: “France’s Catherine Deneuve, 18, is the fawnlake protege of director Roger Vadim, who made a star of Bardot. Direct in manner, haughty offstage but appealing in her roles, she excels in portraying adolescents emerging into womanhood.”

It was at the urging of Vadim, who also fathered a child with Deneuve, that she later dyed her hair blonde. She was blonde in her most memorable films, including Bunuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), in which Deneuve played a bored housewife who filled her afternoons by working as a prostitute.

Deneuve is often written about as appearing cool and aloof, which is not something she appreciated. In a lengthy interview in 2008 in Film Comment, she said, “I am shocked when people talk about me and sum me up as: blonde, cold, and solemn,” she said. “People will cling on to whatever reinforces their own assumptions about a person.”

In Loomis Dean’s photos, Deneuve’s eyes suggest a woman who knew much, even at age 18. In 2023, at age 80, Deneuve is still acting, appearing in the 2023 French film Bernadette, in which she played the widow for former French president Jacques Chirac.

Whatever it is behind those eyes, they still have plenty to say.

Catherine Deneuve, 1961.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Catherine Deneuve (center) prepared for a photo shoot, 1961.

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Catherine Deneuve, 1961.

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Catherine Deneuve and her father, actor Maurice Docleac, 1961.

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Catherine Deneuve with fashion designer Louis Feraud, 1961.

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Catherine Deneuve with French TV director Marcel Cravenne, 1961.

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Catherine Deneuve talking with French actor Christian Marquand (left) and actor-director Francois Moreuil (right), 1961.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Catherine Deneuve with French actor Christian Marquand, 1961.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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Stones on the Run: A Death Valley Spectacle

Bill Syken — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 14:05:30 +0000

In its March 10, 1952 issue LIFE magazine served its readers photos of the “sailing rocks” of the Racetrack Playa, a dry lake bed near Death Valley, California. The stones don’t do anything really wild like zip around in front of people, but they have moved at some point, and we know it by the tracks they have left behind at the Racetrack and also at a few similar locations around the globe. LIFE’s photos by Loomis Dean captured the phenomenon that keeps the Playa Racetrack a tourist destination all these years later.

Here was the setup offered in LIFE, in an article titled “The Case of the Skating Stones”:

On a dry lake bed high in the Panamint Mountains near Death Valley sit several dozen boulders whose peculiar behavior has long been a nightmare to geologists. The boulders, which weigh up to a quarter ton, stand at the ends of long, gouged-out paths which show that they periodically respond to unknown forces and skate about on the flat earthen floor.

LIFE painted the situation as a complete mystery, mentioning disproved theories from everyday folks that attributed the stones’ movement to the lake bed tilting back and forth, or perhaps to “Russians tampering with the magnetic pole.” (This was the early days of the Cold War, mind you). LIFE ended its writeup by saying “The mystery may never be completely solved. When humans observers are about, the stones refuse to budge an inch.”

But since 1952 scientists, when not busy exploring space and inventing cell phones and so forth, did come up with a leading hypothesis, which is that the stones’ skating is likely caused by the movement of thin sheets of ice that can form there in wintertime, with high winds perhaps helping to push stones along.

Though sometimes the stones have moved for reasons that are all too explicable—such as in 2013, when some stones were stolen. A park spokesman expressed both disappointment and confusion at the theft, saying “They don’t seem to understand that outside the Racetrack, these stones have no value.” Other visitors have damaged the site by taking the “Racetrack” name literally and driving their cars on it.

Sometimes human behavior is a mystery all its own.

The “sailing stones” of the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, California, 1952.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE’s 1952 story on the sailing stones of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley included this photo of stone-like objects described as “burro droppings” that had likely been moved by the same forces as the stones.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The sailing stones of the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, California, 1952.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This three-quarter-ton stone left its mark after moving across a dry lake bed in Death Valley, 1952.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

“Sailing stones” left tracks as they drifted across Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, California, 1952.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A small stone left these intricate tracks on the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, California, 1952.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE’s 1952 story on the Racetrack Playa described this photo as being from a “ghost experiment,” guessing that an amateur scientist had tied up the rock to keep it from moving, but over time the rope had eventually rotted away.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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Seeds of Inspiration: Wonderful Watermelon Moments

Bill Syken — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 13:46:02 +0000

The watermelon is a big red signal of summer. And as the photo at the top of the story suggests, there is something inherently fun about this juicy and oversized fruit. In that photo from the old game show Play Your Hunch, the couple had to guess the weight of the watermelon, and you would be hard pressed to name anything else in the grocery aisle that would make the challenge as zany as that hefty—we’ll guess 19 pounds—piece of produce.

The wonderful watermelon popped up many times over the years in the pages of LIFE, and in all kinds of settings. It was once even the centerpiece of a boozy beach blowout.

A 1948 story in LIFE carried the oh-so-tantalizing title Fun on the Beach: Summer Finds Americans Shedding Clothing and Inhibitions at Seaside. The watermelon was the star of the party, as revelers turned it into a vehicle for alcohol. One caption spoke enviously of the young people “stretching out and sipping spiked watermelon punch.” The photos here give rich documentation of the party people arriving at the San Diego beach with watermelons in tow, infusing the watermelons with alcohol, and then drinking from the watermelons as day turned to night.

LIFE has on more than one occasion gone to the farms to show where these mighty melons are harvested. LIFE staff photographers Wallace Kirkland, chronicler of so many scenes of American agriculture, took photos of a watermelon harvest in Illinois in the 1940s, and the legendary Loomis Dean documented workers in the fields of Imperial Valley in Califlornia, showing in one beautiful picture how the laborers formed a human conveyer belt to help get the melons into the back of a truck.

In 1960 LIFE applied a deliriously dramatic headline, “Major Melon Massace in Metuchen” to the story of a watermelon eating contest in New Jersey. A local real estate agency had sponsored the contest in an example of old-school brand building. The photos, in addition to showing cute kids chomping away, show how watermelons have evolved between then and now, because all those melons had the black mature seeds that have all but been eliminated from the product on sale in today’s grocery stores. (Seedless watermelons, a testimony to the power fo plant breeding, began to take over the market in the 1990s, ). At the New Jersey contest those black seeds inspired gamesmanship among contests who picked them out before the contest’s official start. The story closed with a quote from one boy who hadn’t. He complained, “I swallowed so many seeds I’m going to grow a watermelon patch in my stomach.”

A spiked watermelon beach party in San Diego, 1948.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Migrant workers harvesting watermelons in the Imperial Valley, California, 1947.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Workers harvesting watermelons in the Imperial Valley, California, 1947.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An Illinois watermelon harvest, 1946.

Wallace Kirkland/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A little boy eating watermelon by the handful while sitting on a pile of melons, 1946.

Wallace Kirkland/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Watermelon harvesting, 1943.

Wallace Kirkland/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Watermelon harvest, 1943.

Wallace Kirkland/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene from a watermelon harvest, 1943.

Wallace Kirkland/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Watermelon-eating contest, New Jersey, 1960

Joe Scherschel/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

After the watermelon-eating contest, New Jersey, 1960.

Joe Scherschel/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Watermelon eating contest in New Jersey, 1960.

Joe Scherschel/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Watermelon contest, 1960.

Joe Scherschel/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Watermelon-eating contest, New Jersey, 1960.

Joe Scherschel/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Watermelon-eating contest winners Barbara Walp, 10, and Willy Jones, 13, were crowned king and queen of the watermelon festival by Miss New Jersey, Susan Barber, 1960.

Joe Scherschel/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Seeds of Inspiration: Wonderful Watermelon Moments appeared first on LIFE.

A Star at Ease: Bette Davis Before the “Feud” Years

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 12:00:08 +0000

“There are not many actresses who will come right out with the truth,” wrote LIFE’s Los Angeles correspondent Alice Crocker in notes accompanying a 1947 photoshoot, “when that means admitting a birthdate of April 5, 1908.” Bette Davis, frank and relatively unaffected throughout her career, was one of the few. Her freewheelingness and seeming lack of concern for her image shows through in this photoshoot, taken months after the birth of her daughter and three years before the first of her comebacks, as (ironically enough) a vain actress in the film All About Eve.

Davis in 1947 was not yet the hardened warrior of FX’s 2017 miniseries Feud (in which Susan Sarandon portrays the early-1960s Davis as a star fueled by nicotine and resentments, aware both of the status she’s earned and how little it’s respected). These photos show someone fully in control of herself, but far more at ease than the Davis who made What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? such a lurid hit. The setups are startlingly intimate: Davis seems not at all to be playing to the camera even when obviously posing with her husband, William Grant Sherry. She’s lost in reverie, or selling us on the idea that she is.

The notes make clear just how difficult living in the public eye could be, even in a far less media-saturated age than our own. “There are not many people (much less actresses) with figures to worry about who at 39 would be willing to go thru [sic] the effort of having a baby,” wrote Crocker. “However, the common rumor is that she has wanted a baby for some time and husband number three was acquired for that specific purpose.” (She notes, without apparent irony, that this has “a malicious note which can probably be discredited.”) Davis seems unconcerned with such speculation, even as she is opening her life to magazine cameras. Sitting on the wheel of a plane, she smokes in a pantsuit and loafers and looks away from us, as though something enticing were happening just out of frame.

These pictures depict her at a time when age, she freely admitted, was catching up with her, limiting the roles she could agree on with her studio, Warner Brothers. But she was at the beginning of something, too, having only just become a mother and putting the pieces together for an unlikely second act, one that capitalized on her skill at framing herself inthe right light. The year after these photos were taken, Davis’s June Bride would stanch some of the wounds her career had sustained after successive flops; then, in 1950, All About Eve relaunched her as a grande dame of the screen.

The Eve role used what was best of Davis’ star persona but refracted it through the cinematic style of the time, putting hauteur and intellect in an Edith Head gown. Later on, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a “vanity-free” performance whose ghoulishness only emphasized the still-radiant beauty of the off-screen Davis, and got her plenty of accolades for her bravery.

Davis would divorce Sherry—who in these photos seems unmoved by the camera’s gaze even as he shows off his well-developed physique—in 1950, the year of Baby Jane’s release, and marry Gary Merrill, her All About Eve costar. The spuriousness Crocker put forward in her notes was fair (if sharply worded). But Sherry barely registers in the photos—it’s all, always, about Bette, who manages to make you feel as though you’re intruding on private moments even with all the stage-management of a photoshoot around her. It’s another brilliant performance.

Bette Davis in California, 1947.

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Bette Davis with her dog in California, 1947.

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Bette Davis in California, 1947.

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Bette Davis and her third husband, artist William Grant Sherry.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and her third husband William Grant Sherry at the beach in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and her third husband William Grant Sherry boating in California, 1947.

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Bette Davis, her husband William Grant Sherry, and their boxer, 1947.

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Bette Davis and her third husband, William Grant Sherry, at the beach in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis worked at her desk at home in California, 1947.

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Bette Davis and William Grant Sherry played billiards at home in California, 1947

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Bette Davis and her third husband, William Grant Sherry, at home in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis at home in California, 1947.

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Bette Davis in front of a plane with her third husband, William Grant Sherry, who was studying to become a pilot under the G.I. Bill.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post A Star at Ease: Bette Davis Before the “Feud” Years appeared first on LIFE.

See Photos of Disneyland When It Opened in 1955

Fri, 17 Jul 2015 08:00:33 +0000

If a dream is a wish your heart makes, then Disneyland was, as LIFE declared one month after it opened on July 17, 1955, “the stuff children’s dreams are made on.” The brand new park featured a Frontierland complete with Davy Crockett museum, an Adventureland with hydraulically operated jungle animals and, of course, Sleeping Beauty’s castle, which would soon include a model torture chamber.

The $17 million park, built on a 160-acre site, was “the most lavish amusement park on earth,” but its opening day was a disaster. Traffic was backed up for hours, delaying celebrity guests. The temperature crept above 100 degrees, causing heels to sink into soft asphalt, while a plumbers” strike decommissioned all water fountains. Oh, and there was a gas leak, too. Practically everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

Some parents also expressed dismay at the prices. “Disney had expected that $2 would see a child through enough of his $17 million wonderland, but mothers said twice that was needed to keep any enterprising small boy pacified,” LIFE wrote. Today, admission for a child under 10 is $93 not including the Mickey ears, Frozen wand or Goofyroni & Cheese.

But, said those mothers back in 1955, “as they emerged spent and spinning… it was probably well worth it.”

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

Correction, Aug. 10, 2018:
A caption in the original version of this gallery misstated the name of a train ridden by Mickey Mouse. The photo shows the Disneyland Railroad, not the Dumbo-inspired Casey Jr. Circus Train.

Disneyland 1955

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Disneyland 1955

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Disneyland 1955

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Disneyland 1955

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Disneyland 1955

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