Icons of the 20th Century - LIFE

LIFE Gushed That This Actress Was “Paulette, Hedy and Ava, All in One”

Bill Syken — Tue, 14 May 2024 14:46:44 +0000

LIFE was quite the fan of Austrian actress Senta Berger, at least judging by the coverage it offered when she began making movies in the United States. The magazine introduced her to the American public in a 1965 story headlined “She’s Paulette, Hedy and Ava, All in One.”

For those not on a first-name basis with those leading ladies of the early days of cinema, the article filled in the details:

“When people look at Senta Berger, they see more than just an astonishingly pretty young woman. They see images of other famous beauties—a hint of Paulette Godard, a flicker of Hedy Lamarr, quite a lot of Ava Gardner—or whomever they remember as being dark and altogether wonderful.”

LIFE magazine photographer Bill Ray caught up with Berger when she was down in Mexico filming Major Dundee, which was directed by the legendary Sam Peckinpah. The movie starred Charlton Heston as the title character, who leads a military expedition in Mexico during America’s Civil War. Berger played a Mexican woman who has a romance with the Heston character. Major Dundee flopped in its day but has gained respect over the years, thanks in part to the release of a restored version which was closer to Peckinpah’s vision. The film now has a 97 percent fresh score on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.

Ray captured Berger on the set of Major Dundee and also posing in a swimsuit and in the nude. It’s not difficult to see why the editors were gushing about Berger.

Even though Major Dundee wasn’t appreciated in its time, Berger’s career rolled on. In 1966 alone she appeared in six movies, and she would stayed busy for years, acting in film and television in productions on both sides of the Atlantic. The most recent of her 171 IMDB credits came in 2023, when she starred in the German romantic comedy Weisst du Nocht.

Austrian actress Senta Berger during the time she was shooting the 1965 film “Major Dundee” in Mexico.

Bill Ray/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Senta Berger and Charlton Heston relax between scenes during the filming of ‘Major Dundee,’ directed by Sam Peckinpah, Mexico, April 1964.

Bill Ray/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Austrian actress Senta Berger during the time she was shooting the 1965 film “Major Dundee” in Mexico.

Bill Ray/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Director Sam Peckinpah the filming of “Major Dundee” in Mexico, 1964.

Bill Ray/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Senta Berger and Charlton Heston during the filming of ‘Major Dundee,’ directed by Sam Peckinpah, Mexico, April 1964.

Bill Ray/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Charlton Heston and Senta Berger kiss by the water’s edge in a scene from the film ‘Major Dundee,’ directed by Sam Peckinpah, Mexico, April 1964.

Bill Ray/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Austrian actress Senta Berger during the shooting the 1965 film “Major Dundee” in Mexico.

Bill Ray/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Austrian actress Senta Berger during the time she was shooting the 1965 film “Major Dundee.”

Bill Ray/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Austrian actress Senta Berger during the time she was shooting the 1965 film “Major Dundee” in Mexico.

Bill Ray/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Austrian actress Senta Berger, 1965.

Bill Ray/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post LIFE Gushed That This Actress Was “Paulette, Hedy and Ava, All in One” appeared first on LIFE.

Benjamin Franklin: The Embodiment of the American Ideal

Bill Syken — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 14:01:12 +0000

The following is excerpted from the new LIFE special edition Benjamin Franklin: The Patriot Who Changed the World, available at newsstands and online:

On August 27, 1783, a week before he signed the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin and his grandson Temple stood with 50,000 Parisians on the Champ de Mars, a large field where the Eiffel Tower now looms. There they watched as the first hydrogen-filled balloon took flight. The rubberized silk sphere soared for 45 minutes and covered 13 miles. When one of the onlookers asked, “What good is it?” Franklin responded, “What purpose does a newborn child have?”

That late summer day, Franklin could not have dreamed of what would become of the newly conceived United States, which had just emerged from seven years of war with Great Britain. Nor could the man whom the early-20th-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner called “the first great American” have imagined as a youth how the trajectory of his life would bring him to the banks of the Seine. In his early years, Franklin was a fervent imperialist, who in 1751 was among the earliest to suggest a united confederation for the British colonies of North America so they could protect themselves from England’s enemies. Yet by 1776 he had renounced his love for king and country; wholly dedicated his life, fortune, and sacred honor to the nascent cause of liberty; and, with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others, crafted the Declaration of Independence. Then, needing help for their seemingly quixotic revolt against the world’s most powerful nation, Franklin headed to France, where he used his charm to convince the empire to financially and militarily nurse the infant anti-monarchical country. After negotiating the treaty with England, he accepted the call in 1787 to help redesign America’s federal government and became one of the fathers of the United States Constitution.

Very few Americans did as much as Franklin to make the United States possible. He could envision what others could not, and this made him one of the great minds of the Enlightenment. Even so, he is recalled as the most grandfatherly and folksy of America’s founders, not severe like George Washington, intimidating like Thomas Jefferson, nor prickly like Alexander Hamilton. According to Adams, Franklin “had wit at will. He had humor that when he pleased was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was good- natured or caustic . . . at his pleasure. He had talents for irony, allegory, and fable that he could adapt with great skill, to the promotion of moral and political truth. He was master of that infantine simplicity which the French call naivete, which never fails to charm.”

The son of an impoverished Boston tallow-candle maker, Franklin started out with minimal advantages. Yet early on he showed sparks of brilliance, clear signs that his was a life of potential. He rejected his parents’ fundamental Puritanism, read religiously, and worshipped what in the 20th century became known as the Protestant work ethic. This made him the proto-embodiment of the Horatio-Alger ethos of social mobility. With just two years of formal education, the teenage Franklin rebelled against the restrictions of his printer’s apprenticeship, fled for Philadelphia, and within a few years became a successful artisan, expertly crafting his hardworking public image so fellow citizens could not help but notice that he was a man worth watching.

But Franklin refused to hog the limelight. America in the early 18th century was a youthful place lacking much of the class restrictions of Europe. Franklin assisted others to get ahead. He not only started groups for Philadelphians like himself who aspired to more, but he imparted advice through his wildly popular Poor Richard’s Almanack, such as that the way to wealth “depends chiefly on two Words, INDUSTRY and FRUGALITY.”

While he packed his almanac with pithy sayings, he also believed in the importance of a free press and an informed public. His brother James had been imprisoned after leaders in Boston took offense at articles in his New-England Courant. So when Franklin bought the Pennsylvania Gazette, he wrote that “Printers are educated in the Belief that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick, and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”

Franklin deeply believed that it was good to do good, and his professional achievements became a means to greater ends. For him, a devotion to public service allowed him to work on the grand level, like the Treaty of Paris, as well as on local issues that impacted his neighbors, such as fire protection and passable city streets. And Franklin’s open mind made him constantly question things. It caused him to wonder about the nature of nature. His observations about lightning sent him out on what seemed the foolhardy hoisting of a kite during a storm and led to a profound understanding of the connection between electricity and lightning. As an inventor-cum-craftsman, he sought practical uses for his discoveries, creating things like lightning rods to protect homes, a better stove to heat frigid colonial houses, and an improved soup bowl for use on wave-tossed ships.

Ultimately, as someone keenly concerned about his own failings—“I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined,” he noted in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin—he sought to correct them. He had once supported enslavement, an institution he would fight against in his twilight years. Even in death, he continued his encouragement of his fellow citizens. The posthumous publication of his autobiography is the most popular accounting of a life, with historian Louis Wright noting how his “homely aphorisms and observations have influenced more Americans than the learned wisdom of all the formal philosophers put together.”

Benjamin Franklin is proof of the American dream, the ability of the common citizen to rise through by-your-bootstraps work, pragmatism, and levelheaded smarts. His example shows that all of us have the potential for greatness.

Here are a selection of images from Benjamin Franklin: The Patriot Who Changed the World:

Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Hulton/Getty

An undated illustration of Benjamin Franklin as a young boy, selling his own ballads.

Bettmann/Getty

An illustration of the structure and appearance of a waterspout, from an article by Benjamin Franklin.

SSPL/Getty

A portrait of Benjamin Franklin from 1767, when he was in London; he had come there ten years earlier to advocate for Pennsylvania, and continued to live there primarily through 1775.

History/Universal Images Group/Getty

Benjamin Franklin (left), with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson during the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, 1776.

Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty

Ben Franklin, left, at the signing of the U.S. Constitution, 1787.

Henry Hintermeister/Wikimedia

Ben Franklin went to France in 1776 to rally support for America during the Revolutionary War.

Buyenlarge/Archive Photos/Getty

A 1790 illustration of Benjamin Franklin on his deathbed; he died of pleurisy at age 84.

Bettmann/Getty

A portrait of Franklin circa 1770.

Stock Montage/Archive Photos/Getty

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Young Hillary Clinton Learned About Strong Women “By Reading LIFE”

Bill Syken — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 16:17:39 +0000

At an event at the New York Public Library on March 27, 2024, Hillary Clinton was asked about the women she admired when she was growing up. And she talked about how she had been reflecting with a friend recently that when she was going to school in the 1950s and ’60s, she wasn’t taught much about women in history, with figures such as Joan of Arc or Martha Washington being the rare exceptions.

Her primary source for learning about accomplished women, she said, was the pages of LIFE.

Here’s how the former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator and First Lady explained it to a packed house at the library (Ms. Clinton’s entire, wide-ranging conversation with author Jennifer Weiner can be viewed here, with Clinton’s comment about LIFE coming at the one-hour mark):

“I learned about women not in school but by reading LIFE magazine every week. And you have to be of a certain age. But that magazine would come to my house every week, and it was a big magazine with great photographs in it, and I’d come home from school and it would be sitting there on the table, and I would read it faithfully. And that’s where I learned about Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Margaret Chase-Smith, Margaret Bourke-White, I mean… Maria Tallchief. I had a lot of exposure to women who I read about and really admired by reading in the magazines.”

While Ms. Clinton talked about LIFE, she did not mention that the magazine was where she just so happened to make her first national splash, when she was an undergraduate at Wellesley and she included in a 1969 story about students’ college commencement speeches. (You can see young Hillary’s commencement speech here.)

This gallery includes images from when she appeared in the magazine herself, and also photos of the women that she learned about as a reader of LIFE.

Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, shown on the day she announced her 1964 candidacy for president at the Women’s National Press Club, was the first woman to have her name placed into nomination at the convention of a major party.

Francis Miller/Life Photo Collection/Shutterstock

Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress, spoke with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles during a Senate committee meeting, 1957.

Ed Clark/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt walks with children en route to a picnic, 1948.

Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Eleanor Roosevelt addressed delegates at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, where she supported Illinois’ Adlai Stevenson over the party’s eventual nominee, John F. Kennedy.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Eleanor Roosevelt talking to another UN delegate near a mural by artist Fernand Leger, 1952.

Lisa Larsen/The LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock© Meredith Corporation

Portrait of LIFE’s first hired and first female staff photographer, Margaret Bourke-White. She was on assignment in Algeria, standing in front of Flying Fortress bomber in which she made combat mission photographs of the U.S. attack on Tunis, 1943.

(Margaret Bourke-White/ LIFE Picture Collection /Shutterstock)

Margaret Bourke-White with her camera during her later years, when the LIFE staff photographer was struggling with Parkinson’s disease.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ballerina Maria Tallchief (right) performing the Nutcracker Ballet at New York’s City Center, 1954.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Maria Tallchief in rehearsal for ” Swan Lake,” 1963.

Ed Clark/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ballerina Maria Tallchief performing in Swan Lake, 1963.

Ed Clark/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Aviator Amelia Earhart in 1932, five years before her plane disappeared in the Pacific.

Life Photo Collection

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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Jane Greer: The Actress Whose Career Howard Hughes Tried to Quash

Bill Syken — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 19:48:18 +0000

In 1947 Jane Greer starred opposite Robert Mitchum in the film noir classic Out of the Past, and the success of that film helped earn her a place on the cover of LIFE. That movie was a crowning moments of a career that had elements of a film noir story on its own.

The actress, born Bettyjane Greer, had actually been in LIFE magazine twice before that ’47 cover. In 1942 she appeared, unnamed, as one of three women modeling the uniforms of the W.A.A.C.s, the new all-female military unit that came into being during World War II. She got the modeling job because her mother worked in the War Department. The very businesslike picture, included in this story, is not the sort of photograph that you would necessarily expect to draw attention to a young woman—but it hit the radar of singer Rudy Vallee. According to the magazine, Vallee “tried unsuccessfully to worm Miss Greer’s address out of LIFE.” He did connect with Greer eventually when she came to Hollywood, resulting in a brief marriage between the two. She and Vallee separated after three months. The uniform modeling job, which also made it to newsreels, had led to a screen test with David O. Selznick, reported LIFE. But “Miss Greer signed up elsewhere, however—with Howard Hughes.”

In its 1947 story LIFE described her audition for Hughes:

She prepared for her first interview with Mr. Hughes by carefully learning the script with which she had heard he tested all aspiring stars. It was a comedy, The Awful Truth, and, because Howard Hughes is a little deaf, Miss Greer read it at the top of her lungs.

Hughes was charmed. And this is when the noir aspects of Greer’s story really took hold. Greer not only signed with Hughes but for time was in a relationship with the eccentric billionaire. She eventually bought her way out of Hughes’ contract and caught on with RKO. LIFE wrote about Greer again for a story about starlets in training, and that studio soon gave Greer the female lead in Out of the Past. By that time she was also married to attorney Edward Lasker, and seemingly set up for superstardom.

But then who should come out of Greer’s past but Howard Hughes, now feeling jealous toward Greer. He bought RKO, which meant that Hughes now controlled her contract. “He said to me, while you are under contract to me, you will never work,” Greer recounted in an interview decades later. “And I said, `But that will be the end of my career.’ And he said, “I guess it will, won’t it?”

Hughes didn’t completely end her career, but he put a damper on it at a time she should have been reaching new heights. Eventually Greer got herself out of her RKO contract and returned to regular work, including multiple appearances in the 1950s on The Ford Television Theatre. And she enjoyed a late-career revival in the 1980s, including an appearance in Against All Odds, the 1984 remake of Out of the Past that starred Jeff Bridges and featured Greer as the mother of the movie’s female lead, played by Rachel Ward. Greer also had a six-episode run on the prime-time soap opera Falcon Crest, and appeared in three episodes of the David Lynch television show Twin Peaks.

She died in 2001 of complications from cancer, just shy of her 77th birthday.

Jane Greer modeled the uniforms for the new WAAC units in LIFE, 1942.

Charles Steinheimer/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This montage was the opening photo of a LIFE story on actress Jane Greer in a 1947 issue of LIFE; the caption said that she was “dreaming that she is pursued by the men she has been bumping off all day on the movie set.”

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actress Jane Greer, 1947.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actress Jane Greer (C) performing in scene from the 1947 movie Out of the Past with actors Steve Brodie (left) and Robert Mitchum.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actress Jane Greer, 1947.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actress Jane Greer acting like drunken type, 1947.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jane Greer on set of The Company She Keeps, 1950.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture CollectionShutterstock

Jane Greer (left), with Jeff Bridges and Swoosie Kurtz, costars in the 1984 film Against All Odds, which was a remake of Greer’s 1947 classic Out of the Past.

DMI

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A Tribute to Couplehood

Bill Syken — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 14:44:22 +0000

In America today nearly 40 percent of adults are living without a spouse or partner, a much higher rate than in the past. And while the general societal assumption has been that people are happier when they are paired off, recent research suggests the truth may be a little more complicated.

But with those meaningful caveats in mind, we offer up these photos of couples who seem be enjoying each other’s company, at least for the time being. The pictures range from those whose show an idyllic view of young romance, such as the one of a handsome couple on vacation at Lake George, to others of older couples that appear to demonstrate a well-earned comfort, such as the man and woman sitting on rocking chairs on their front porch, each caught up in their diversions while listening to a record player.

This photo set also includes some celebrity couples, for whom more of the romantic backstory is well-known. They range from the famously tempestuous pairing of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to the model of a long-lasting (77 years) public marriage, Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter.

The most forbidding couple in this photo set would be the Bergerons of the Quebec town of Saint-Fidele, who were photographed by John Phillips and featured in LIFE as part of a 1942 story on changes coming to French Canada. The story said that the Bergerons had “a true old-fashioned culture,” and described them as “thrifty but not stingy, carefree but conscientious” and, most importantly—and you can kind of tell this just by looking at them—”dead set against the manifestations of the 20th century.”

It’s possible the Bergerons gave Phillips a stern pose to let the readers of LIFE, know that they were not happy with the world. But they were united in their disdain, which can be one of the true joys of couplehood.

A young couple enjoyed a Lake George vacation in a Nina Leen photo entitled “Private Island,” 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Janet Leigh with actor husband Tony Curtis, who is holding daughters Kelly Lee (left) and Jamie Lee on his lap as they sit on the floor at home.

Allan Grant/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Miami Beach, Florida, 1940.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Paul Schutzer / (c) The LIFE Picture Collection

A couple on vacation in Cape Cod, 1946

Cornell Capa/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Leonard Bernstein and his wife on the opening night of the New York Philharmonic, 1958.

Gordon Parks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bicycle riders in Mansfield, Ohio, 1942

John Phillips/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The RKO studio lot was where Lucille Ball met Desi Arnaz, when they co-starred in the 1940 musical Too Many Girls. Here, in a rare color photo from his 1958 spread on the launch of Desilu Studios, LIFE’s Leonard McCombe catches the couple as they ponder their risky new venture.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple listened to the gramophone, 1940.

Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Steve McQueen and his wife, Neile Adams, embrace in the kitchen of their Hollywood home, 1963.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

French Canadian couple Mr. and Mme. Henri Bergeron, 1942.

John Phillips/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Josephine Baker receiving a congratulatory kiss on the nose from her husband, orchestra leader Jo Bouillon, after Baker’s show at the Strand theater during her US tour, 1951.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Winter in Maine, 1942.

Bernard Hoffman/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Lauren Bacall fed wedding cake to her groom, Humphrey Bogart, after their marriage ceremony in Ohio, 1945.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Couple kissing in front of the Delta Tau Delta mummy at the University of the South, 1940.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A floating party on the Apple River in Somerset, Wisconsin in 1941.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Senator John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline at their wedding reception, Newport, Rhode Island, 1953.

Lisa Larsen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

American soldiers in England, 1944.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jimmy Carter kissed his wife Rosalynn, 1971.

Stan Wayman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Drive-in movie, Chicago, September 1951.

Francis Miller/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An elderly Polish couple walked hand in hand in the city of Poznan, 1963.

Paul Schutzer/Life Picture Collection/Shuttetstock

Actress Sophia Loren and husband, producer Carlo Ponti, after moving into their 50-room villa outside Rome, 1964.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple danced at Rosie’s Cafe, 1937.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hippie couple Randy Brook and Laurie Thruelsen hitched a ride in the back of a truck, 1971.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple walked through Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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

Bob Smith and Mary Beth Sanger kiss after their underwater wedding in San Marcos, Texas, 1954.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A street scene in Yugoslavia, 1948.

Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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Why “Voluptua” Was Too Hot For TV

Bill Syken — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 14:40:52 +0000

Back in the 1950s, a woman wearing only a pajama top as she spoke seductively to her TV viewers was too much for people to handle.

In 1954 Gloria Pall, a former Las Vegas showgirl, originated a character called Voluptua. The so-called “Living Goddess of Love” hosted a late night show devoted to romance movies on KABC-TV in Los Angeles. The show was a counterpart to a similar late-night program built that station had built around horror movies and hosted by a character named Vampira.

LIFE’s story on Voluptua was headlined, “Love on a Late Night: Hostess Sheds Her Clothes to Hold Audience.” Here’s how the magazine described her act in its issue of Jan. 31, 1955:

Volupta starts by urging each man in her audience to get out of his shoes, loosen his tie and be her very good friend. Between segments of moist celluloid love Voluptua…does some disrobing of her own. By mid-program she is down to a negligee. Then after reading her sonnets and paying tribute to famed lovers, she slips into a nightgown, climbs into bed, throws a kiss at her men and calls it a night.

The images from LIFE staff photographer George Silk captured the come-hither quality of the program. including showing Voluptua changing her costume on camera, behind a screen. One photo shows the words on Voluptua’s teleprompter, seemingly from the beginning of the broadcast: “…dashed home because I knew you’d be here at nine-thirty. But now I feel all good and warm. You and I are together at last. And we will be always…”

This was racy stuff in a time when married couples on TV were shown as sleeping in separate beds. Certain outraged viewers called the character Corruptua and pushed for Voluptua to be banished from the airwaves. And they got their way. “Just seven weeks after it first aired, amid mounting pressure from religious and PTA groups and lackluster commercial sponsorship, the station abruptly canceled the show,” the Los Angeles Times recounted in an obituary of Pall after her death in 2013.

After Voluptua died, Pall carried on. The actress, born Gloria Pallatz, had grown up in Brooklyn and headed west after winning a Miss Flatbush contest. Her screen career consisted mostly of small, often uncredited roles in movies and television, though she did appear in nine episodes of the TV series Commando Cody: Sky Marshall of the Universe. Her brief and uncredited appearance as “Striptease Woman” in the movie Jailhouse Rock resulted in a memorable still in which her legs framed the face of the movie’s star, Elvis Presley.

In the early 1960s Pall moved on from acting and worked as a real estate agent. When she died she was remembered as a pioneer. “She was quite openly in touch with her sexuality, and that was an incredibly dangerous thing to do,” author R.H. Greene, who had recorded a radio piece on Pall, told the Los Angeles Times. “We don’t have too many stories for that time that illustrate that, and Gloria’s does.”

Gloria Pall, playing the character of Voluptua, welcomed viewers to her show, where she hosted romance movies on a Los Angeles TV station in 1955.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gloria Pall, playing the character of Voluptua, hosted romance movies on a Los Angeles TV station in 1955.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gloria Pall played Voluptua, a TV character who hosted late-night romance movies and would change costumes in mid-show, 1955.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gloria Pall played Voluptua, a TV character who hosted late-night romance movies and would change costumes in mid-show, 1954.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gloria Pall, playing the character of Voluptua, hosted romance movies on a Los Angeles TV station in 1955.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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