Mary Pickford: dreams of Sunnybrook Farm

Canada Day: Toronto-born Mary Pickford, seen in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917, Aircraft Pictures). 

At the time of this photo still, she was the richest and most famous actress in the world, described by a contemporary writer as ‘the best known woman who has ever lived, the woman who was known to more people and loved by more people than any other woman that has been in all history’. 

Virtually forgotten today, partially due to having become a recluse later in life and partially due to the simple passage of time, which is sinful given that she was more than a mere actress, but a pioneer in the young film industry, co-founding United Artists in 1919 alongside (future husband) Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith. All household names of the time themselves, though — best I can tell — only Charlie Chaplin might be recognised by a majority of folks today, and even then maybe only a majority of older people, as very few younger ones would know or care. 

I sometimes wonder whether that contributed, among many other factors, to Miss Pickford's depression in later life: knowing that even the most beloved public figures are eventually forgotten by the audiences that once adored them.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Ann Blyth, 16 August 1927 to 24 June 2026

Universal publicity shot, 1948

Ann Blyth, teen star of ‘Mildred Pierce,’ dead at 98. {AP 26 June}

https://apnews.com/article/ann-blyth-dead-98-mildred-pierce-56ff27b6e5a8446bb239be6ce4a66311

Fare thee well, Ann Blyth: the Oscar-nominated actress, singer, and star of the 1940s and 50s hath died, aged 98. Forever remembered for her portrayal of the manipulative Veda Pierce in 1945's Mildred Pierce, yet equally capable of charm and warmth in a host of lighter musical roles. Such as in 1948’s Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (pictured above), in which she appeared opposite William Powell. One of the last living links to Hollywood's Golden Age departs the stage, and the world grows a little stranger — and a little colder — with each passing day.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Elke Sommer and the art of living unapologetically

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Ann Rutherford, 2 November 1917 – 11 June 2012

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Dixie Lee, 4 November 1909 – 1 November 1952

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

source unknown

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

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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}

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Jacyln Smith: sunshine and satin. #BOTD 1945

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

“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

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.

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“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.”

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook. FULL LIST OF LINKS - linktr.ee/arthurnewhook. DONATIONS GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED on Cash App ($ANewhook).

“The ocean isn’t the only thing that’s wet tonight…”

Cindy Margolis—once enshrined in the Guinness Book of Records as the most downloaded woman on the Internet—here immortalised in a portrait for Playboy.

{alternate text} Bathed in golden tropic light, model Cindy Margolis sits astride the bar with legs parted in playful provocation, the lace straps of her seafoam lingerie catching the glow as turquoise heels anchor her in decadent poise. A cocktail sweats on the counter below, orchids scatter their petals like whispers of temptation, and the fan hums between her thighs, sending shivers through her sun-kissed skin. Her gaze, half-mischief, half-command, fixes on you as if to ask—will you worship her here in the heat, or wait until the stars rise over the ocean?

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.