Happy families, Hollywood-style: The photographs that peddled a myth of domestic bliss
In May 1937, the editors of Life magazine made a spooky choice for their first ever Holly-wood cover. Jean Harlow appears in a full-length -portrait, walking away from the camera with her head turned back. She’s largely in shadow, and casts one behind her, in what looks like the glare of noonday Californian sun. A month later, Harlow would be dead, after collapsing from -kidney failure at just 26. What’s strange about Martin Munkácsi’s picture is how valedictory it feels: discreet and rather melancholy, not playing up to the bombshell image that Harlow tended to project for the movie cameras.
Life had been launched as a -general-interest weekly in 1883, but only after a pictorial makeover in 1936, masterminded by Time publisher Henry Luce, did it become America’s most popular magazine. Its golden age – a period covered by Taschen’s new book, Life. Hollywood – continued until 1972, when it ceased weekly publication.
These were days of extraordinary access to the stars, and Life’s readers expected an invitation into their “private lives”, heavily airbrushed though this notion was. Do we see a “realer” Marilyn Monroe because she allowed Life photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt into her home in 1953? In the most famous shots, she’s reading; a book, or a script. Such photographs only pretend to catch her in the act: it might be truer to say she’s acting reading. Yet the illusion still works, and reinforces a side of Monroe – studious, serious about her craft – that the public needed to see. Something similar could be said of Peter Stackpole’s 1946 portrait of the notoriously fiery Maureen O’Hara “sewing” in bed, swathed in virginal white fur.
Life presented a backstage vision of Hollywood that was often just as sculpted, with its smiling veneer, as a Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy. A 1959 shot of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, back-to-back, each -cradling a daughter, feels like an image of pure domestic bliss, purpose-built to combat rumours of their turbulent marriage (they divorced three years later). In 1945, Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth posed with their newborn daughter Rebecca for their own “happy family” shot (by 1947, the marriage was over).
The truth is, readers were happy to be sold a mirage. Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow, Steve McQueen, Grace Kelly: all were there to be idolised, and the glamour Life gave them was a cocoon – inside which fans, too, could shelter. Hollywood relied on Life to sell a dream, and maintain it as reality.
