The Echo of a Distant Time

Wednesday, November 5, 2025

Elke Sommer and the art of living unapologetically

A black-and-white photograph of a young woman captured in a moment of quiet intensity. She stands before a brick wall and ladder, her gaze steady and faintly defiant as she looks directly into the camera. Her tousled blonde hair frames a face at once soft and self-possessed, the light catching the contours of her cheek and the reflective glint of her eyes. She wears a patterned button-down dress, slightly open at the collar, its fabric suggestive of post-war European chic rendered with unstudied sensuality. In her right hand she holds a bitten apple—an image layered with faint biblical or cinematic suggestion—its simplicity offset by her almost wary poise. The tonal richness of the print captures both the texture of the moment and the nascent aura of celebrity: poised between innocence and allure, between naturalism and performance.

Gerd Kreutschmann, c. 1959

“You don’t have to explain yourself to anyone. It’s your life, live it in whatever way is best for you.” —the German screen goddess, model, and chanteuse Elke Sommer, offering sound advice that the American people—officious, self-righteous, and addicted to moral surveillance whilst in self-inflicted bondage to an orange-stained god-king with the morals of a sewer rat—would be wise to heed. Dignity begins in privacy, and self-determination is the one luxury no civilisation can afford to lose.

Elke Sommer was born on 5 November 1940 in war-darkened Berlin, emerging from the ruins of post-war Europe to embody a new ideal of continental allure that holds up perfectly to this day: blonde, self-possessed, and definitively cosmopolitan. Though she has not been particularly active in public life for decades, she remains an indisputable icon. Of the films in which I have seen her, I must say she was particularly on point as Paul Newman’s cool yet warm, mysterious yet luminous love interest—the spy Inger Lisa Andersson—in 1963’s masterful espionage thriller The Prize. Sensuality and intellect entwined. Alles Gute zum Geburtstag to this esteemed daughter of Deutschland. —Arthur Newhook, 5 November 2025.

Tuesday, November 4, 2025

Will Rogers, born 4 November 1879, and apparently a prophet of sorts

A hand-tinted studio portrait of a middle-aged man with neatly combed brown hair, wearing a dark suit and white shirt with a tie, smiling directly at the viewer. His expression conveys genial confidence, with bright eyes and a mischievous warmth suggesting both wit and approachability. The subtle tinting of his lips and skin gives the photograph an early 20th-century charm, bridging the line between photographic realism and painterly artifice. Inscribed faintly in cursive at the bottom left are the words “Yours, Will Rogers,” identifying the sitter as the beloved American humourist and social commentator. The portrait embodies the genial populism and understated sophistication of its era—an image at once intimate, idealised, and emblematic of a figure who made comedy a form of moral conscience.

Wikimedia Commons

“The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.” One can but conjecture what the great Will Rogers—among the most incisive and quotable of all Americans—might utter were he confronted with Donald Trump and the maelstrom of incivility and wilful ignorance that now characterises the former United States. I strongly surmise that his judgment would be anything but kind. —Arthur Newhook, 4 November 2025.

Sunday, November 2, 2025

The great game lapses into silence, and a long, cold winter awaits

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Ann Rutherford, 2 November 1917 – 11 June 2012

A black-and-white publicity photograph of actress Ann Rutherford, taken circa 1942, capturing the vivacity and poise characteristic of wartime Hollywood glamour. She poses playfully aboard a yacht, one leg bent and lifted, the other extended with pointed toes, her hand braced against the rigging while the other rests lightly atop her head in a gesture of carefree confidence. Her short, puff-sleeved dress, cinched at the waist and trimmed with delicate lace, flares in the breeze, revealing the clean, sculptural lines of her figure against the luminous sweep of the sails behind her. The interplay of sunlight and shadow lends the image a sense of sculptural clarity and motion, its composition evoking both nautical adventure and the exuberant optimism of early-1940s American femininity.

source unknown, but likely an MGM publicity shot

The face of a doll coupled with the legs of Aphrodite herself—so might one aptly describe Ann Rutherford, Vancouver-born yet California-bred, whose luminous presence graced Hollywood’s aureate epoch. She commenced her cinematic career in the saddle, starring in westerns for Republic Pictures alongside such burgeoning luminaries as John Wayne and Gene Autry, before ascending to the illustrious ranks of MGM in 1937. There she achieved enduring fame as Polly Benedict in the Andy Hardy series and as the demure, ill-fated little sister of Scarlett O’Hara in the epic of all epics, Gone with the Wind. Brimming with warmth and ineffable girl-next-door charm, Ann Rutherford was also one of many beloved pin-up icons of the Second World War—an era when the beauty and grace of young women such as she performed a service of no small consequence, sustaining the spirits of those who bore the weight of history’s greatest conflict upon distant battlefields. Indeed, the genre of glamour photography—or ‘cheesecake’ in the vernacular of the time— achieved perhaps its most profound significance during this particular historical juncture, and the lady’s contributions to this morale-fortifying enterprise were nothing short of exemplary. Confectionery for the spirit. —Arthur Newhook, 2 November 2025.

Saturday, November 1, 2025

Dixie Lee, 4 November 1909 – 1 November 1952

Dixie Lee, actress and chanteuse of the early 1930s, stands immortalised in a studio portrait that epitomises the cultivated elegance of nascent Hollywood. She poses with her back turned in gentle contrapposto, her gaze cast over one shoulder—an expression suspended delicately between astonishment and seduction. Her sleeveless satin ensemble glistens beneath the studio lamps, tracing the supple contour of her figure, whilst a soft cap and a single strand of pearls lend a note of refined restraint. The chiaroscuro of light and shadow carves her silhouette with sculptural precision upon the wall behind, conjuring an image at once sophisticated and enigmatic—the very embodiment of Jazz Age glamour distilled into silvered stillness.

Fox Films promotional shot

Born Wilma Winifred Wyatt in the pastoral environs of Harriman, Tennessee, Dixie Lee is remembered—when she is remembered at all—chiefly as the ill-fated first wife of Bing Crosby, and, regrettably, not a particularly felicitous one. Yet before her light was dimmed beneath the vast shadow of his celebrity, she had, in her own right, been a captivating ingénue of early Hollywood. Having won a singing competition, she was promptly signed by Fox Film and, for one brief but incandescent interval at the dawn of the talkies, outshone even her future husband in renown—most notably 1929’s Why Leave Home? in a lead role, and where her charm, poise, and melodic grace marked her as something of a luminary of the shimmering, transitional age.

She first encountered Crosby whilst he was yet an aspiring crooner, and, as was the custom for so many women of her generation, she soon relinquished her own burgeoning career in deference to his. They were wed in 1930, yet the polished veneer of Hollywood domesticity began to fissure almost at once. The marriage was fraught from its inception; scarcely months after their nuptials, in 1931, she resolved to petition for divorce on grounds of ‘mental cruelty’—a grave charge for the time—though the document, in the end, was never formally submitted.

Between 1933 and 1938, four sons were born to the union, yet the household was ever shadowed by turmoil. Dixie’s protracted and ruinous struggle with alcoholism exacted a grievous toll, and tales of discord within the Crosby marriage were a recurrent feature of the gossip columns throughout the 1940s. Less than two years after her final professional appearances—a modest guest turn upon her husband’s radio programme—and at the cruelly premature age of forty-two, Dixie Lee succumbed to ovarian cancer. She departed this world upon this very day, the first of November, 1952, a mere three days shy of what would have been her forty-third birthday. —Arthur Newhook, 1 November 2025.

Friday, October 31, 2025

“When the black cat crosses your path and still you smile, you’re the lucky one.”

Actress and model Lillian Wells kneels amidst a rustic bed of straw in this playful Halloween-themed portrait from the late 1940s. Framed by towering corn stalks, she wears a red-and-white chequered blouse, fastened primly at the collar, and high-waisted black shorts that accentuate her poised silhouette. Upon the painted fence behind her, the shadowed arc of a cat curves with spectral elegance, its silhouette imparting a note of seasonal whimsy, whilst a carved pumpkin grins slyly from the corner of the frame. The controlled interplay of light and composition conjures an atmosphere at once beguiling and faintly suspenseful—transfiguring the studio tableau into a vision of small-town October enchantment.

source unknown

Actress and model Lillian Wells in a Halloween mood, sometime in the 1940s.

Four little witches, no broomsticks required—just charm enough to fly

Four young women, attired in sprightly Halloween finery, recline upon a bed of straw amid carved jack-o’-lanterns and towering sheaves of corn. Each dons a dark blouse or abbreviated frock, crowned by a festive hat—some sharply pointed in witchlike fashion, others wide-brimmed with rustic grace. They lounge in languid confidence, their smiles touched with playful provocation, legs extended towards the lens beneath the gleaming visages of the pumpkins. The monochrome tableau distils the light-hearted glamour of a 1940s studio conceit—an artful mingling of seasonal mischief and beguiling charm.

Paramount publicity shot

Halloween never looked so heavenly with these four Golden Age starlets—namely Barbara Britton, Eva Gabor, Ella Neal, and Katherine (Karin) Booth. Bewitched, bothered, and bewitching—all in a night’s fun, circa 1941. —Arthur Newhook, 31 October 2025.

“The only spell she’s casting is the one that makes you forget your good sense.” Halloween 2025

A glamorous woman of the 1940s reclines for a Halloween-themed photograph, poised within a great wooden tub encircled by glistening apples. Adorned in a pointed witch’s hat and a dark, flowing gown, she tilts her head with coquettish grace as her teeth meet the fruit’s polished skin, her legs elegantly crossed upon the tub’s rim. The monochrome composition fuses autumnal mischief with the opulent allure of Hollywood’s golden age, transmuting the humble sport of apple-bobbing into an image of refined, tantalising sophistication.

source unknown

It hath been many a year since All Hallows’ Eve hath borne any true significance for me; yet here’s to those still young in spirit, who this night shall make merry beneath the flicker of candle and the whisper of autumn’s breath. —Arthur Newhook, 31 October 2025.

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

A smile from a century ago, still bold enough to make the present blush

A young woman of the 1920s reclines upon a wooden swing, one slender leg lifted in a gesture of playful poise, the other extended just enough for her heeled shoe to graze the earth’s surface. She is attired in a loosely draped cardigan worn over a delicate frock or slip, her stockings meticulously rolled to the calf in the manner of the age, and a close-fitting cloche hat nestles over softly marcelled waves of hair. Her lips—darkened to that enigmatic cupid’s bow so favoured by the era’s ingénues—curve into the faintest, most knowing of smiles as her gaze inclines dreamily upward. Bathed in warm sepia hues, the faintly blurred garden beyond imparts an atmosphere at once wistful and beguiling—part coquette’s reverie, part modernist awakening—an image suspended between innocence and sophistication, and perfectly emblematic of a decade learning, with exquisite audacity, how to be modern.

photo: source unknown

Gliding into the modern age with an impossible smile—the kind that might make a bishop forget his sermon and a cynic believe, just for a moment, in beauty. A creature of the 1920s, she wears her rebellion not as armour, but as perfume: her stockings are rolled precisely to the knee, her cloche hat tipped in studied disregard for propriety. In her, one finds the distilled essence of the decade’s greatest contradiction: decorum utterly subverted by delight.

And though the decades may change, though hemlines shift and moral sermons rise only to inevitably fade, her spirit remains imperishably modern: Audacity conducted with grace; her true art is the ability to charm whilst defying, to smile whilst quietly dismantling the rules. —Arthur Newhook, 29 October 2025. {photo: source unknown}

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

Actress Constance Dowling, 24 July 1920 – 28 October 1969

Actress Constance Dowling reclines on a velvet chaise longue trimmed with gold fringe, her pose poised between languor and contemplation. Clad in a cream skirt patterned with oversized bows and a fitted dark top that accentuates her classical silhouette, she radiates an air of weary elegance—beauty not as ornament, but as quiet endurance. One arm supports her head, her expression thoughtful, almost remote, while her long legs, gracefully extended, lend the composition a sculptural equilibrium. The subdued palette—muted ochres, soft crimsons, and pale ivory—infuses the image with a painterly intimacy, as though caught between glamour and introspection. Dowling appears as a figure suspended in time: a relic of mid-century melancholy, embodying both the poise of Hollywood’s golden age and the private ache that often shadowed it.

source unknown

Constance Dowling (née Smith), a native of New York City whose life was indelibly shaped by the opposing forces of beauty and sorrow, departed this ungrateful world on this day in 1969, her existence curtailed prematurely at the age of forty-nine by catastrophic cardiac failure. Statuesque, preternaturally luminous, and possessed of an almost Roman composure, she epitomised a rare archetype: a woman whose sensibilities were anachronistically modern—a paradoxical synthesis of bohemian intellect and cinematic glamour. She moved through the gravitational field of 1940s Hollywood with a singular blend of languid insouciance and restrained defiance.

Her ingress into the cinematic realm occurred beneath the aegis of Samuel Goldwyn, debuting in Up in Arms (1944) alongside Danny Kaye, Dinah Shore, and Dana Andrews. Yet it was the crucible of post-war Italy that would ultimately define her—a brief but incandescent dominion between 1947 and 1950, when the moral and material detritus of Fascism engendered a cinema of unvarnished realism and startling sensuality. Within this milieu she found not only artistic emancipation but also a deeply personal liberation, as though the ruins of Europe offered her a canvas vast enough to accommodate the contradictions of her nature.

Her biography, however, is interwoven with shadowed threads: a conspicuous liaison with the formidable director Elia Kazan, and a tempestuous, ultimately ruinous entanglement with the tormented poet Cesare Pavese. Apocryphal accounts maintain that Pavese’s suicide was, at least in part, precipitated by her rejection—a supposition both melodramatic and, perhaps, not wholly unfounded. (Truth, as ever, resists the neatness of gossip, and no aspersion is cast here).

In 1955 she withdrew from the screen following her marriage to the Hungarian-born producer and director Ivan Tors, a man of visionary temperament whose interests spanned science and metaphysics, and who had produced her final picture, Gog (1954). Their union was marked by an almost utopian idealism: they adopted children from Kenya and surrounded themselves with a circle of avant-garde scientists and mystics. Indeed, it has been posited that Constance herself facilitated the neuroscientist John C. Lilly’s first encounter with the psychotropic revelations of LSD in 1964. Verily, a curiously esoteric trajectory for a mid-century Hollywood starlet.

Hers was a transient constellation within the cultural firmament, yet one that blazed with perilous vitality—a tripartite existence poised between intellect, sensuality, and sorrow in equal measure. Constance Dowling remains an enigmatic presence who traversed the borders of Hollywood and Rome, glamour and grief, leaving behind the indelible impression of a spirit whose brilliance was, perhaps, too intense to be sustained. —Arthur Newhook, 28 October 2025.

Sunday, October 26, 2025

Jacyln Smith: sunshine and satin. #BOTD 1945

Jaclyn Smith, photographed in the 1970s, sits poised outdoors among rows of sunlit chairs. She wears a white halter-style bikini top with a teardrop cut-out at the centre and a sheer cover-up that drapes lightly from her shoulders. Her chestnut hair, voluminous and softly waved, frames a face serene yet luminous, her blue eyes meeting the camera with quiet composure. The afternoon light lends her skin a warm radiance, turning the moment into an emblem of effortless 1970s elegance—part California sunshine, part timeless grace.

source unknown

Texan beauty Jaclyn Smith, circa 1976, looking every inch a lady born of grace, not of struggle. Possessing the classic beauty of a bygone era; had she come along in the 1930s or 1940s, she might have been a leading lady to Hollywood’s leading men. Cary Grant, or Spencer Tracy, prechance. Instead, she was destined to be a rare touch of class, elegance, and poise in the 1970s and 1980s and in trashy television programmes and B-movies typical of that tawdry era.

Born 26 October 1945 in Houston, we can only hope that life is treating her splendidly on her landmark day. —Arthur Newhook, 26 October 2025.

Saturday, October 25, 2025

Marilyn Monroe: remembrance over the din of decay

Marilyn Monroe, circa 1962, lies nestled among white sheets in soft natural light. Her blonde hair spills across the pillow, partly veiling one eye as she smiles faintly toward the camera. The scene feels intimate and serene, her expression radiant yet touched with melancholy. The pale tones of the bedding and background lend the image a sense of purity and calm, as though she has been captured in a moment between waking and dreaming.

At least until such time as Facebook again elects to harass me over absolutely NOTHING, both the Echo of a Distant Time page and the Broken Dolls and Fallen Angels group are returning to full operation—an utterly thankless enterprise on my part, yet one I persist in with no small measure of affection.

What better way to mark this return than with the goddess herself—Marilyn, from 1962—smiling for the camera so that no one might glimpse the ache beneath. Only a short while after this photo session with photographer Bert Stern, she departed an ungrateful world that had used and discarded her in equal measure. To this day, she is worshipped and desecrated in the same breath—her likeness endlessly commodified, her memory endlessly mutilated.

Sometimes I think that perhaps I, too, am complicit in that desecration, merely by being one among millions who places so flawed and fragile a woman upon a pedestal. Given her physical beauty, it is only natural that we indulge in her visage; yet my motives are pure. I have always found myself drawn to those rare and remarkable souls who gave everything to a world unworthy of them—and who, in return, received neither gratitude nor grace. I do not speak of money—though that, too, was often denied, stolen, or squandered—but of respect, of simple human decency: commodities increasingly rare in this late and languishing civilisation of ours.

Still, for those luminous spirits now gone—those who dared to burn brighter than the rest, to carve beauty out of indifference—we may yet offer thanks and draw inspiration from… if only we find the will to choose gratitude over apathy, and remembrance over the din of decay. —Arthur Newhook, 25 October 2025.

Monday, October 20, 2025

“Sometimes I think if I had the same body and the same natural ability and someone else's brain, who knows how good a player I might have been.”

A 1952 Topps baseball card featuring the young Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees, rendered in vivid lithographic colour. Mantle, bat poised upon his shoulder, gazes upward with the unguarded confidence of early promise—a portrait of athletic idealism at the dawn of America’s postwar age. The composition, clean and iconic, captures the sculptural geometry of baseball heroism: cap and uniform crisply defined against a cloudless sky of dreamlike blue. The Yankees’ emblem appears in the lower corner, flanked by Mantle’s printed and facsimile signatures, a subtle interplay between the mechanical and the personal. To later generations, this image would become not merely a collector’s relic but a totem of lost innocence—symbolising both the apotheosis and commodification of mid-century Americana.

Topps c. 1952

One of the rare few who stood among the elite of the elite—brilliant, flawed, immortal: Mickey Mantle, born 20 October 1931 in Oklahoma.

“A goddess sculpted in scandal”: Pauline Bonaparte, born 20 October 1780

An exquisite neoclassical portrait of Pauline Bonaparte, painted circa 1806 by Robert Lefèvre, Napoleon’s favoured court artist. The sitter reclines gracefully upon a green velvet couch, her posture at once languid and deliberate, conveying the self-assurance of a woman accustomed to command attention. Draped in a white empire-line gown of sheer muslin, fastened with a gilt sash that glimmers across her waist, she radiates a delicate sensuality softened by poise. Her head is crowned with a jewelled diadem and a gauze veil, the ensemble evoking both Roman antiquity and early nineteenth-century Parisian elegance. Pauline’s gaze, directed slightly away from the viewer, carries an air of introspective detachment—suggesting both intelligence and ennui, a woman aware of her myth and resigned to it. Lefèvre’s brushwork, of impeccable polish, renders every texture—skin, silk, and gem—with a restraint that exalts her beauty without descending into sentimentality.

Illustration: Robert Lefèvre, c. 1806

“I do not believe that any man in the world is more unfortunate in his family than I am.”—attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Born upon this day in 1780 was Pauline Bonaparte—Napoleon’s younger sister and, by the common testimony of her age, the most resplendently ungovernable spirit of that singular house. Beauty and scandal clung to her as fragrance to the rose; she was at once enchantress and provocation—adored and exasperating in the same breath.

From girlhood she displayed an audacity rare even amidst the licentious airs of post-revolutionary France: quick of wit, irreverent in laughter, her appetites untamed by convention or consequence. Marriage to General Leclerc did little to school her passions; widowhood, yet less. When she later became Princess Borghese, it was less an elevation than an improvisation—a courtesan’s art reborn beneath the veil of nobility.

In Rome she became as a living fable. Her snow-white steeds were shod with silver; her raiment so diaphanous that even the world-wearied salons of the Eternal City blushed for shame. Painters adored her; prelates despaired; and ambassadors, once masters of intrigue, found their composure scattered before her smile.

At last, rumour’s tide did reach Paris. Napoleon, ever the jealous sentinel of family decorum, addressed to her a missive befitting a patriarch grown weary—a letter of admonition couched in the language of exile and restraint. She obeyed in semblance, for a season; in spirit, never. No imperial edict could subdue a nature so gloriously insubordinate.

In Pauline the contradictions of the Bonapartes found their most glittering consummation—grace entwined with folly, splendour interlaced with ruin. She was, as one astonished contemporary styled her, ‘a goddess sculpted in scandal’. And perchance, in the vast theatre of human history, she grasped the meaning of fame with an instinct swifter and truer than that of her conquering brother himself. —Arthur Newhook, 20 October 2025.

Thursday, October 16, 2025

Remembering Ace Frehley: 27 April 1951 – 16 October 2025

A striking vision of retro-futurist glamour rendered with painterly precision. A woman with pale blonde hair cascading to her shoulders stands against a deep cosmic backdrop flecked with stars and a faintly glowing red planet. Her face is painted in theatrical blue-black makeup forming winged lightning-bolt motifs around her eyes—an echo of 1970s glam rock iconography—contrasted by her calm, intelligent gaze and crimson lips. She wears a form-fitting silver jumpsuit with sculpted shoulders, its metallic sheen mirroring the night sky’s luminosity, lending her the air of a celestial envoy or interstellar performer. Her poise—one hand on hip, the other resting lightly by her side—balances defiance and serenity, as if she were both muse and messenger of some cosmic art form. The image fuses rock mythology, science-fiction reverie, and portraiture into a single, vividly imagined emblem of beauty transcending both time and gravity.

image generated by ChatGPT

{AP 16 October} ‘Ace Frehley, Kiss’ original lead guitarist and founding member, dies at 74’

Rest in peace, Starman. At this point in my life, I would almost sooner endure Chinese water torture than listen to KISS and their hair-band ilk. Once upon a time—when youth dulled discernment—I lapped up that racket with the same appetite I brought to fast food and the ceaseless blare of televised idiocy. But age, misophonia, and the daily parade of performative imbecility—from the corridors of power down to the trailer park—have conspired to render me a broken-down, jaded 47-year-old, sick to death of all the noise that passes for culture.

Still, fairness demands its due: Ace Frehley was perchance the most competent musician in that crew during the ’70s, and ‘New York Groove’ is better than reason or lineage might allow; a melody whose vulgar birth cannot efface its strange vitality, and superior by a good margin to the rest of the KISS catalogue. The manner of his death—a fall last month leading to a brain bleed—is unsettling, particularly for those of us with parents north of seventy and maybe not always steady on their feet. Life is perilously fragile.

Fragility is the only constant. Godspeed. —Arthur Newhook, 16 October 2025.

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

Pretty in pink, velvet and silence her two most loyal companions: the enigmatic Jean Peters, 15 October 1926 – 13 October 2000

20th Century Fox publicity shot, c. 1950. Via Getty Images

Amidst the gilded constellation of 20th Century Fox in the late 1940s and throughout the following decade, Jean Peters held a curious sovereignty—half siren, half mystery. Her renown was fashioned in the portrayal of women whose merest glance might unmake the soul of man: flint beneath velvet, desire alloyed with peril. With a smouldering intensity on screen, she could convincingly embody that species of femme fatale, wherein beauty and destruction are but two syllables of the same breath.

Yet, away from the klieg lights, the actress was consistently described as soft of speech and tender of spirit—a creature whose private nature stood in clear contrariety to the wanton heroines she was bidden to enact. Mistress Peters did inwardly resist the very sexpot image the studio so assiduously cultivated, a quiet rebellion against her own commodification.

This nuanced tension, however, is wholly effaced by the photograph in question, circa 1950, wherein no hint of inward strife may be discerned. Instead, a vision of post-war splendour, wherein all private battle is transfigured into serenity beneath the alchemy of perfect light. —Arthur Newhook, 15 October 2025.

Tuesday, October 14, 2025

Lost in a sea of ice, a fragile sparrow in a blizzard of sorrow. The ultimate portrait of the tragic silent heroine, Lillian Gish. Born 14 October 1893 – 27 February 1993.

Lillian Gish drifts ghostlike across a frozen river, her dark gown stark against the blinding expanse of snow and ice. The year is 1920, Way Down East, and cinema itself seems to shiver with her. Every fold of fabric, every tremor in her posture conveys both fragility and moral endurance—the essence of silent-era storytelling distilled into a single image. Her expression, wide-eyed with terror and transcendence, catches the thin light of winter, as though grace itself had taken human form and wandered, lost, into a storm. Around her, the frozen world becomes both stage and crucible: nature as adversary, faith as her only warmth.

United Artists

“I've never been in style, so I can't go out of style.” —Lillian Gish. Seen here as the very embodiment of fragile defiance amid a frozen desolation, her anguish etched against eternity in the shattering finale of Way Down East (1920). The queen of silent sorrow, her face could summon tears where words dared not tread—a creature of such purity and pathos that she seemed less mortal than mythic, the cinema’s first true saint of suffering. —Arthur Newhook, 14 October 2025.

Monday, October 13, 2025

The enduring charm of Laraine Day, 13 October 1920 – 10 November 2007

Laraine Day stands in sunlight by the shore, the very picture of 1940s poise softened by seaside ease. Her floral swimsuit, modest yet flattering, gathers the brightness of the day around her like a halo. Bare feet press into sand still cool from morning tide, and the surfboard beside her becomes both prop and partner—symbol of youthful daring, the kind once immortalised by Hollywood’s golden lens. Her smile is unguarded yet perfectly framed, an expression of open joy caught midway between glamour and sincerity, as though the camera itself were a dear friend rather than an instrument of fame.

photo by Oliver Sigurdson, c. 1945

“Let someone else be the world's greatest actress. I'll be the world's greatest baseball fan.” —a pretty good actress, at least, Laraine Day, born 13 October 1920. Known to millions as the sweetheart of the screen, she won hearts as Nurse Mary Lamont in the beloved Dr Kildare films—her performance a study in luminous poise and wholesome sincerity. Yet to dismiss her as merely the ingénue next door would be to miss the steel within the silk: at only nineteen, she shone under the tutelage of director Alfred Hitchcock, and starring opposite the formidable Joel McCrea, in the excellent Foreign Correspondent (1940, United Artists), acquitting herself with grace and intelligence far beyond her years.

Off-screen, her story was scarcely less vivid. For more than a decade—from 1948 to 1960—she was celebrated as ‘the First Lady of Baseball’, as the wife of the fiery, mercurial manager Leo Durocher, whose temper and genius for the game were legendary. To that end, she hosted a pre-game broadcast for the New York Giants on WMGM 1050 AM (a modern-day ESPN radio affiliate with the call letters WEPN).

A divine and dependable leading lady in every sense, Laraine Day embodied the rare union of warmth and discipline, the professional polish of the studio era tempered by a very human charm. Whether clad in a nurse’s uniform or a designer gown, she embodied the confidence of a woman who knew precisely who she was, and how to remain so in an industry that seldom forgave identity. —Arthur Newhook, 13 October 2025.

“I never meant to fall, darling—but isn’t it delicious when the world catches you softly?” Remembering Barbara Kent, the Canadian-born starlet of Hollywood’s Golden Age, who departed this day in 2011

Barbara Kent tumbles into a snowdrift with a mix of grace and comic surprise, her snowshoes flaring outward like delicate wings caught mid-flutter. The flapper-era knit cap and short skirt evoke a time when youthful daring met new freedom—an age of laughter, lipstick, and cinematic innocence. Even as she slips, there’s poise in her motion: the unstudied art of a silent-film ingénue turning a fall into choreography. Around her, the snow gleams like powdered silver, the whole scene alive with mischief and charm.

Getty Images

Barbara Kent—brought forth amid the snowbound vastness of Alberta on 16 December 1907, and finally granted merciful freedom from this mortal coil on 13 October 2011, having attained the prodigious age of 103—was among the final embers of the first, incandescent epoch of Hollywood, an icon of an era when beauty seemed to respire rather than merely posture.

Having moved California at some point in childhood, Barbara Kent commenced her professional life, aged 17, by being anointed Miss Hollywood of 1925—the very quintessence of her generation’s ideal: soft of voice yet lambent of presence, her allure founded not upon contrivance but upon an exquisite equipoise—an innocence quickened by intelligence, a modesty irradiated by quiet certainty. The diadem secured her passage to the studios, where her cultivated stillness proved eloquent in a medium that conversed through silence alone.

Her big break arrived almost immediately. In Flesh and the Devil (1926), she was cast opposite Greta Garbo and John Gilbert—colossi of the silver screen—yet she did not vanish beneath their conflagration. Her performance served as counterpoint: tender, irreducibly human, the necessary cantus firmus beneath Garbo’s grand operatic blaze.

Over the next five or so years, she graced numerous productions—perhaps most memorably as the benignant Rose Maylie in the 1933 adaptation of Oliver Twist—negotiating the advent of the talkies with unblemished poise (a feat not universally achieved by many of contemporaries). She adapted, endured, and then, with characteristic reticence, withdrew almost entirely from acting following her marriage to the talent agent Harry Edington in late 1932.

To recall Barbara Kent—or those kindred souls who shared her brief effulgence—is to glimpse once more the dawn of cinema itself, when the alchemy of light and motion still shimmered with the shock of creation, and a young woman from the boundless Canadian prairies might step into that radiance and, for one breath of eternity, shine as bright as the sun. —Arthur Newhook, 13 October 2025.

Saturday, October 11, 2025

Bette Davis: satin, suggestion, and a single exposed truth

Bette Davis reclines against a striped sofa, poised between languor and challenge. The photograph, from around 1938, captures her in sculptural chiaroscuro—hair a cascade of marcelled curls, eyes half-lidded but alert, lips precise as punctuation. She wears a fitted white knit bodice with delicate straps and twisted cord detail, its simplicity countered by the bold opulence of her jewellery: a pendant of dark stones ringed in light, twin cuffs studded to match, a ring glinting like a withheld remark. The composition balances warmth and hauteur—one arm draped over the cushion, the other resting lightly near her lap—suggesting both repose and readiness. The lighting isolates her against a field of shadow, drawing the gaze to her shoulders and throat, where elegance becomes eroticism. She embodies her own credo: that the merest glimpse of satin or skin carries more charge than overt display.

“I often think that a slightly exposed shoulder emerging from a long satin nightgown packs more sex than two naked bodies in bed.” —Bette Davis, rather proving the point in this image, circa 1938 via the Everett Collection.

“A mirror keeps my secrets safer than any friend ever could. Before the jazz begins, I give myself a moment of grace — just one breath, one look, one quiet little dream that belongs only to me.”

A 1920s dressing-room tableau: a young woman, adult and assured, braces one foot upon a low bench while fastening her stocking. Her cloche hat—a dark bell with a pale ribbon—shadows waved bobbed hair. A fox-fur stole pours over one shoulder, its softness echoing the brushed nap of her short, dark dress. The lifted hem reveals the clean curve of hip and stocking-top; in the cheval mirror, her backside becomes a second, ghostly subject, framed by carved acanthus and pearls of gesso. Plaited Mary-Jane heels, a tasselled reticule in hand, and a scatter of studio paintings behind her place the scene between boudoir and atelier. The light is high and even—silver rather than sultry—so the mood reads intimate without tipping into salacious. Lines and ovals rhyme throughout: hat brim, mirror ellipse, rounded thigh, bowed bench legs—Art Deco geometry softened by fur and flesh.

source unknown

The 1920s stitched in fabric and rhythm: silk that murmurs of emancipation, stockings that stride to the tempo of the city. Fur whispers of luxury, tassels laugh at restraint. Listen closely—one can almost hear Ravel spinning on the gramophone, and the delicate click of a clasp completing the ritual A century on, the wisdom still glimmers: elegance is not the costume, but the restraint—reveal a breath, conceal a stanza, and let the mirror hum the melody.

A woman who could outshine artifice with a single, unguarded smile: Diane Keaton, photographed by Norman Seeff, c. 1975

A monochrome portrait of actress Diane Keaton, radiating unaffected poise and understated confidence. She poses with her arms raised, hands resting lightly behind her head, allowing her straight, shoulder-length hair to fall freely about her face. The composition is spare and unadorned, yet profoundly intimate—capturing the spontaneous warmth of a woman who has never needed artifice to command attention. Her faint, knowing smile and calm gaze convey a blend of wit and serenity, while the soft interplay of light and shadow accentuates the natural contours of her face and arms. Clad in a simple black tank top, Keaton embodies a timeless minimalism—her beauty emerging not from glamour but from authenticity, the camera recording a moment of quiet self-assurance and self-possession that would later define her screen persona.

“I build a wall around myself. I'm hard to get to know. Any trait you have, it gets worse as you go along.” —Diane Keaton, 1946–2025. She made honesty fashionable. We could use more of that in the world as it is now. She made honesty fashionable—and how rare that seems now. In a world stitched together with pretence, we could use a little more of her kind of truth. —Arthur Newhook, 11 October 2025.

She wore wit like perfume: Diane Keaton, 1946–2025

Diane Keaton sits with effortless bohemian grace upon a wooden chair, her posture caught between thought and laughter. Her auburn hair is tucked neatly beneath a soft beret, while her dress—a swirling tapestry of abstract pattern and late-sixties colour—clings to the lingering optimism of the era. Ribbed tights trace the lines of her crossed legs, and a bold ring catches the light upon her hand as though punctuating her musing. There is a sense of gentle defiance in her gaze, a play of intellect and charm that suggests she knows precisely how the world sees her—and will not let it be the last word.

Diane Keaton, circa 1974. Via Getty Images

{Reuters 11 October} ‘US actress Diane Keaton dies at 79, People reports’

Another day, another light extinguished. Diane Keaton, that singular creature of wit, vulnerability, and eccentric grace, hath been granted merciful release from this prison, aged 79. I do not claim to be an authority on her entire filmography, nor to have found unqualified pleasure in every one of her roles; yet to deny her magnetism would be to deny sunlight, and she did capture hearts with her unique blend of charming neuroticism and profound warmth. An unforgettable leading lady, indeed. —Arthur Newhook, 11 October 2025.

Friday, October 10, 2025

John Lodge, bassist and vocalist of the Moody Blues, 1943 – 2025. Another light gone out in the firmament

Getty Images

{BBC 10 October} ‘Moody Blues singer John Lodge dies, aged 82’

A fond and reverent farewell to John Lodge—not ‘just a singer in a rock and roll band’, as his own lyric once wryly insisted, but one of the true gentlemen and master craftsmen of progressive rock. A quietly noble Englishman who treated music not as commerce but as a vocation. Lodge, bassist, vocalist, songwriter, and spiritual ballast of The Moody Blues, hath departed this unworthy and ungrateful realm aged 82. Born 20 July 1943 in Erdington, Birmingham, he and Justin Hayward joined a reconfigured Moody Blues in 1966, and together they turned what had been a competent R&B outfit into something altogether grander: a vessel of symphonic splendour and celestial vision.

Their 1967 opus, Days of Future Passed, stands as the first proper flowering of what we came to call progressive rock, fusing symphonic orchestration with poetic lyricism and rock instrumentation, creating a sound that could swell the heart and paint pictures in the mind in a way no one had dared attempt before. To list one’s favourite albums is an act of futility—every decade renders one’s own past judgement embarrassing, and I am no whit exempt—yet that record shall always remain in my upper pantheon without any hesitation. It hath the stateliness of a cathedral and the soft grace of a lullaby.

Mr Lodge’s own contributions to the Moody Blues canon are numerous and indelible, and include ‘Ride My See-Saw’, ‘Isn’t Life Strange’, ‘Gemini Dream’, and that deathless confession, ‘I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)’, one of the most honest anthems ever wrought upon the absurdity of the touring life. By all accounts I have ever read or heard—and especially upon this day—he was a warm and generous man of sound judgement and sober mind, untainted by the usual vanities that so oft beset his calling.

A man who did embody the spirit of that golden age when rock music strove not merely to entertain but to elevate—to wed the mind unto the heart, and art unto melody—John Lodge shall be missed. I do pray that the noble legacy of English progressive rock, which he and his peers so bravely fashioned, shall never be cast into oblivion. For in this darkening technological and Orwellian age of ours, wherein history is daily mangled and made to vanish with fearful haste, it behoveth us all the more to hold dear, and remember truly, the pure and human artistry of such men as he.

Rest in Peace, good sir.

—Arthur Newhook, 10 October 2025

{alternate text for the above image} A colour studio portrait of John Lodge, bassist and vocalist of The Moody Blues, captured in the 1970s. His expression is introspective, almost pensive, as though caught mid-thought. Soft, diffused lighting highlights the contours of his face and the gentle sheen of his skin, while his long, wavy brown hair—styled in the characteristic fashion of the era—frames his features in a halo of texture. He wears a patterned shirt, its muted psychedelic design subtly evocative of the period’s aesthetic: colourful yet understated. The photograph embodies the introspective artistry that defined Lodge’s contribution to the band’s sound—lyrical, melodic, and quietly spiritual—while the restrained composition suggests a man more attuned to reflection than spectacle. It is a portrait of a musician at once ordinary and transcendent, poised at the intersection of English reserve and rock’s romantic idealism.

Monday, October 6, 2025

The incomparable Bette Davis—granted merciful release from this ungrateful world thirty-six years ago today (6 October 1989)

Bette Davis in In This Our Life, 1942 WB

Lately I find myself wondering whether the titans of Hollywood—Bette Davis and her contemporaries—would have bothered at all, had they foreseen how fleeting their immortality would prove. Would the great jazz musicians of the mid-twentieth century, or the ballplayers, or the novelists, have poured their souls into their craft if they had known how quickly posterity’s light would fade from them? More to the point, how little the generations to come would cherish their names, or even care to learn them.

In another few decades, even the brightest constellations of the twentieth century—Monroe, Ali, Ruth, The Beatles—will glimmer only faintly, their brilliance dimmed by forgetfulness as the last who remember them pass from the world. Worse still, in an age when artificial intelligence and digital manipulation have placed the machinery of history in the hands of the least scrupulous, what remains may not merely be forgotten but rewritten—or erased altogether.

It falls, then, to those of us who love these figures to keep their memories alive, however humbly. Yet few will trouble themselves, and those who do will never be appreciated. Such is the fate of those who remember in a world that no longer values remembrance, basic decency, and human dignity. —Arthur Newhook, 6 October 2025.

{alternate text for the above image} A black-and-white studio still of Bette Davis captures her seated languidly in an upholstered armchair, exuding both vulnerability and defiance. Dressed in a soft, ruffled blouse and a flowing skirt that reveals one bare leg, she leans back with an expression of distracted contemplation, her luminous eyes lifted slightly upward as if lost in thought or irony. Her hair, styled in loose 1940s waves, frames a face poised between weariness and will. The soft contrast and domestic setting evoke the mood of post-war disillusionment—Davis embodying the archetype of the complex woman: elegant, disenchanted, and indomitable, caught between repose and rebellion.

Saturday, October 4, 2025

Susan Sarandon in a classic showgirl pose, straight out of the Ziegfeld Follies. #BOTD 1946

photo by Timothy White

Plumes, fishnets, and legs aloft—an enduring alchemy of allure that never loses its lustre. She is radiant with delight, that mischievous glint in her eyes proclaiming not mere performance but the joy of a woman entirely alive within her own skin. A creature of fearless artistry and fierce conviction, Susan Sarandon—born 4 October 1946 in New York City—has long stood among cinema’s most versatile and incandescent figures. Never content simply to inhabit a role, she animates each with a formidable intellect and a pulse of raw humanity that renders pretence impossible.

I shall not rehearse her filmography, nor claim to have seen or enjoyed all her work. In one of her more notorious roles, as the sultry oracle of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), she manages to be the best thing in a film I consider an exercise in unmitigated kitsch—a riot of camp exuberance inexplicably adored by a certain subset of viewers. To put it bluntly, I cannot stand the f**king film. To each their own; yet such quibbles matter little. Susan Sarandon hath commanded the screen with an authority few of her contemporaries could ever match: not merely a performer, but a force of nature, an energy that refuses containment. —Arthur Newhook, 4 October 2025.

{alternate text for the above image} A glamorous portrait by Timothy White features Susan Sarandon reclining against a stark white backdrop, her pose both theatrical and self-assured. Draped in a deep burgundy feather boa that entwines her body with artful suggestion, she wears matching fishnet tights and high-heeled sandals adorned with gold embellishments. Her legs extend elegantly upward, creating a sculptural line that contrasts with the luxuriant cascade of auburn curls framing her face. With red lips and a steady, knowing gaze directed toward the viewer, Sarandon embodies a fusion of classic Hollywood allure and modern sensual intelligence—poised between provocation and poise, playfulness and command.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook. On X-TWITTER: @Sunking278 and @DollsFallen. REDDIT - https://www.reddit.com/user/SiberianKhatru278/. BLUESKY - @arthurnewhook.bsky.social. FULL LIST OF LINKS - linktr.ee/arthurnewhook. DONATIONS GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED on Cash App ($ANewhook), PayPal (paypal.me/Sunking278), and at https://tinyurl.com/ArthurNewhook.

Friday, October 3, 2025

Clad in nothing but charm: Janet Leigh in a towel scene far more blissful than the one for which she is most infamously remembered

“In order to dream, you need to have a springboard which is the facts... It gives it that touch of reality, and I think that's quite important... truth with fiction.” —Janet Leigh (6 July 1927 – 3 October 2004), glimpsed here in Jet Pilot (1957, RKO)—not as a femme fatale, but disarmingly radiant. She embodied that ineffable ‘girl-next-door’ allure—wholesome, all-American charm enlivened by intelligence and irrepressible spirit shining through her eyes. A true doll.

{alternate text for the image above} A monochromatic cinematic still captures the celebrated actress Janet Leigh in a moment of unguarded, coquettish allure. Depicted post-ablutions and clad simply in a terrycloth towel, she casts a puckish glance over her shoulder, her visage a captivating admixture of ingenuous charm and sophisticated seduction. The spartan, bucolic interior, dominated by a formidable cast-iron furnace, provides a striking counterpoint to her intrinsic glamour. The composition thus creates a delightful frisson, juxtaposing rustic simplicity with the ineffable, radiant magnetism of a Hollywood luminary.

Thursday, October 2, 2025

Meditations on the death of Rock Hudson, four decades on

Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson in Giant (Warner Bros., 1956)

1985: Forty years ago to this day, silver-screen idol Rock Hudson—long paraded as the consummate ladies’ man—succumbed at the age of fifty-nine to the then barely comprehended plague of AIDS. I was a child when the news broke, yet I recall with clarity the atmosphere of stunned disbelief among adults, confronted at last with what had long been whispered yet never publicly owned: that this paragon of masculine allure had in truth been homosexual. At that time, AIDS was regarded—even by many of the sympathetic—as an affliction confined to gay men. That illusion began to fracture when a young boy in Indiana contracted the virus through a transfusion, and the cruel refusal of his school district to admit him drew fierce public censure.

The scale of fear and ignorance is captured in one stark fact: after treatment in Paris only months before his death, Hudson was compelled to hire a private jet to return to Los Angeles, for no commercial airline would accept a passenger known to be carrying the virus. Not long thereafter, Elizabeth Taylor herself quietly purchased a bronze plaque for the Hollywood Walk of Fame in his honour—an act at once discreet, loyal, and enduring, sealing her friend’s memory in a gesture of fidelity where others faltered.

{alternate text for the above image} Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson in a publicity still for Giant (1956), captured in a moment of heightened intimacy that borders on theatrical rapture. Taylor, her head arched back and lips parted in anticipation, radiates sensuality and defiance, her dark hair cascading in waves against the pale shimmer of her gown. Hudson, towering and resolute, leans in with a steady, almost reverent intensity, his hand gripping her arm in a gesture that is both protective and possessive. The chiaroscuro of the black-and-white composition accentuates the drama of flesh, fabric, and expression, crystallising the film’s central themes of passion, power, and turbulent human desire within the mythic sweep of Texas.

Atom Heart Mother turns 55

PINK FLOYD – Atom Heart Mother, released 2 October 1970 in the UK. Hardly anyone’s notion of the quintessential Pink Floyd record—and I am no exception. The title suite, a twenty-three–minute tapestry of orchestral bliss, remains a triumph of ambition and atmosphere, and I do love it a great deal: luxuriant, strange, and utterly absorbing. Yet what follows on the second side largely descends into listless filler—inoffensive, faintly agreeable, but lacking any urgency. The closing piece, the thirteen-minute curio 'Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast', is little more than an indulgent sound collage, whimsical in conception but barren in substance: not a song so much as a half-hearted conceit that soon outstays its welcome.

The grandeur of its opening suite and Hipgnosis’s now-iconic cover design make Atom Heart Mother a must own for serious music fans and anyone who appreciates English progressive rock, but in the greater sweep of Floyd’s catalogue it must be placed firmly among their lesser works, though there are worse. —Arthur Newhook, 2 October 2025.

{alternate text for the above image} The cover of Pink Floyd’s 1970 album Atom Heart Mother presents an image of striking simplicity: a Friesian cow, its brown-and-white hide stark against the verdant expanse of an open field, turns its head to gaze back at the viewer with quiet indifference. The composition, devoid of title, lettering, or overt symbolism, rejects the baroque surrealism of contemporaneous rock imagery, embracing instead a blunt pastoral directness that is almost confrontational in its banality. The horizon stretches under a pale, cloudless sky, with only the faintest silhouettes of distant trees punctuating the emptiness, creating a sense of space that is at once serene and faintly absurd. In elevating the ordinary to the monumental, the image embodies both the anti-iconography of post-psychedelic art and the band’s wry refusal to be circumscribed by expectation.