The Echo of a Distant Time: November 2025

Thursday, November 20, 2025

Jean Harlow: caught mid-thought between sin and shampoo

A black-and-white photograph of Jean Harlow seated in a bathtub, captured in a moment of startling vulnerability and poise. Her pale hair is piled loosely atop her head, echoing the gleam of the porcelain around her. Turning toward the camera with wide, kohl-rimmed eyes, she embodies the uneasy glamour of pre-Code Hollywood — sensuality rendered with both frankness and restraint. The vertical wood panelling, modest lace curtain, and long-handled brush hanging on the wall suggest a setting of domestic privacy, yet the actress’s direct gaze breaks its intimacy, transforming it into theatre. The chiaroscuro lighting sculpts her shoulders and cheekbones, turning a simple bathing scene into a study in exposure — of body, of fame, and of the fragile boundary between artifice and authenticity.

Apologies, folks, for the lack of posts of late. Am physically unwell and have sunk into a quasi-catatonic state, devoid of will or inclination to do anything—not even to share images of the goddesses, as I so dearly love to do. It is a season of reflection and profound remorse, of revulsion and horror at the state of all things; yet perhaps, too, a season of spiritual purgation. What this world hath wrought upon us all is sickening beyond the reach of words.

Still, here is Jean Harlow, for this is what Lord Arthur does: he strives to preserve beauty, even as he and the world he inhabits have known almost nothing but ugliness. I long to return to this vocation in full once more, though I cannot at present say with any certainty what the coming days and weeks may bring. —Arthur Newhook, 20 November 2025.

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

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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.