Category Archives: People

The 10 Most Beautiful Women of the 40’s & 50’s

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What a generation of women that was! The 40’s & 50’s surprised the heck out of me. That was my parent’s generation, WWII, the fifties. I thought I would be hard pressed to find 10 women I knew of. I really thought my favorite would be the Grace Kelly or Rita Hayworth type. Who knew it would be the grownup version of the most famous child star of all, Shirley Temple (circa 1948 age 20)! Aside from the beauty she grew up to be, she also struck me as an unbelievably nice person. I ended up having so many great photos of the women of this era, I put the extras in this post. The photography back then was so much better. Lighting, background, composition, color, the use of B&W.

Another surprise was Janet Leigh, who as far as I could tell never took a bad photo! It was amazing, winner after winner after winner… I have this vision of Grace Kelly from Rear Window and I don’t think anyone ever photographed her as well before or since. Loretta Young had 1 exceptional photo and left me mystified as to what was going on the rest of the time. I couldn’t find 1 decent color Myrna Loy shot. I ended up taking Betty Grable out of the post. She strikes me as a really nice/down to earth person. Who had zero sex appeal. I don’t know what it was. I replaced her with someone I hadn’t known until recently, Dorothy Malone. Like Gene Tierney, I hadn’t known they existed until this past year.

Two others that were nearly devoid of good color photos were Julie Newmar and Ava Gardner (In fact the choices for them were so bad I ended up removing them). Photographers captured about 1/10th of the sultriness that was Gene Tierney. One thing I did notice that was different from the more modern decades was the classic style, beauty and grace that the photographers captured in this era. While the few candid photos stand in stark contrast to the formality of the day, there was definitely something to be said for the ‘old school’. It was never so clear as in the post mentioned above where I used the surplus 40s/50s photo, modern day photographers are such hacks. And it wasn’t because of the advent of digital photography, that didn’t start in earnest until the late 90s or 2000s. By the 1960’s photography was quickly becoming a wasteland. [Here is a great link, “Bullet Bra Ladies of the 40s & 50s”. Awe inspiring.]


Shirley Temple

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Grace Kelly

Rita Hayworth
Rita Hayworth – This picture is a good example. The first one I’d used was a simple indoor photo of Rita in a blue sweater next to yellow drapes. It worked really well with the  redhaired beauty. It was small and Rita was sporting a rather ‘canned’ smile. This photo is easily 4 times as big and Rita has a very natural contemplative expression, and mostly natural lighting. It also shows how simple a good photo can be. She’s standing in the yard leaning up against a telephone pole wearing a simple blue dress with a corsage on the belt as the secondary subject. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have the finest subject in the world either. There’s that.


Janet Leigh


Gene Tierney  (*great story below)


Loretta Young

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Dorothy Malone

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Fort Apache was on TCM this morning starring Shirley Temple. That 1 year later at the age of 21 she should make her last movie (A Kiss for Corliss) just seems criminal! Quite.

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Shirley has a wonderful interview on YouTube with Larry King from 1988 when she was 60 years old. Great stuff about the pervs at MGM and how when she asked for her money at age 22, the $3,000,000 plus she’d earned as a child was gone. Poof! (I took out some photos of Miss Temple so my crazed obsession would not be quite so obvious.)

*Gene Tierney had the most heartbreaking story that really is apropos in this time of pandemic. She was volunteering in 1943 at the Hollywood Canteen for soldiers on their way overseas. A high school girl who was a fan thought she’d show what a hero she was, and broke the rubella (German measles) quarantine she was under to visit Tierney at the canteen. The disease she gave the pregnant Tierney caused her daughter to be born deaf, blind and retarded and have to be institutionalized the rest of her life. Luckily her medical expenses were paid for by Howard Hughes and her ex-husband  Oleg Cassini. In a final bit of irony, years later she met the very same fan again that had destroyed her daughters life. She bragged to Tierney about breaking the quarantine to show how devoted a fan she was.

Women of the 2000’s                                Women of the 90’s

Women of the 70’s                        Women of the 60’s

Women of the 2010’s

Women of the 80’s

The 10 Most Beautiful Women of the 60’s

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That was fun! The “10” most beautiful women of the sixties. Its funny but you learn a lot doing this. Looking through thousands of photos clues you into a couple of things. The ‘models’, the Cheryl Tiegs, Candace Bergen, Cybill Shepherd, the Ali MacGraw,  they were models for a reason. If they could be photographed bad I didn’t see it. Whereas I wasn’t happy at all with the choices for Julie Christie, Stella Stevens, Connie Stevens, Dawn Wells or Angela Cartwright. Another irritant was how Getty Images invariably grabbed the really good ones. [Looking back on my lists, I believe the 60’s had the strongest decade 1-10. The 40’s, 50’s, 90’s, 00’s and 10’s I couldn’t even come up with 10 women.]

Another interesting finding was that I wasn’t able to get into the icons, Raquel Welch, Ann-Margaret, Joey Heatherton and the like. And although I personally loved the big hair and the bold colors of the 60’s, I toned it down for the faint of heart. I also could have gone with a 100% black and white gallery, nobody likes B&W more than I do. But then, no one lends herself to color like Cybill Shepherd. It would be a crime not to photograph her in color. I had assumed one of my youthful sex symbols would have been my favorite. Nope. Cybill Shepherd. In her modeling days where I nabbed her photos, she usually had such a delightfully smartass expression. Now that I’ve done the 60’s, 70’s & 80’s, I can’t wait to do the other decades!


Natalie Wood


Charmian Carr

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Hayley Mills (I almost forgot Hayley, I tend to think American. She’s also not what one thinks of with the phrase ‘stunning beauty’. Yet she is. I’m going to go into this further with a separate post on her. I’ll just say she has a following.)

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Ali MacGraw – whatever “it” is, she had it in spades


Jacqueline Bisset

Candice Bergen


Angela Cartwright (Interesting that 2 of the picks should be from Sound of Music) She was really coming into her own when she left Lost In Space. Absolutely stunning from my perspective. Why the TV career petered out is beyond me. She was on the show with a very beautiful woman named Marta Kristi, yet for me Angela had no equal. Sort of like Eve Plumb being the standout on Brady Bunch compared to Maureen McCormick.

Dawn Wells (there’s no debate by the way) Passed away December 30, 2020 at the age of 82. I can’t imagine a more smoldering picture of her.

Cheryl Tiegs  – I took out Cheryl’s photo. The more I listened to her in YouTube videos the less I liked her. I could overlook the enormous ego, she was a Big Deal back then. What I couldn’t over look was when the pilot of her 4-seater bush plane suffered a seizure while taxiing. She didn’t turn off the engine and aid the pilot, she bailed out of the plane.


Julie Christie – “All women are aware of that moment when suddenly the boys don’t look at you. It’s a fairly common thing, when suddenly you no longer attract that instant male attention because of the way you look. I never really knew how to enjoy beauty, but it took the form of a subconscious arrogance, expecting things, all muddled up with celebrity. Then you begin to deal with it. In the 1970s, I was amazed to be talked about as a 60s sex symbol. I wasn’t that person, as if I were a doll from the past. I had to learn to come to terms with that.” (just watched Shampoo, she was 35. I didn’t really know of her until about 10 years ago when I first saw Dr Zhivago. I thought sure I would think of her as sexy, but no, just beautiful.)

julie christie | Sixties hair, Julie christie, Hair icon

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Michelle Phillips (the Girl Scout earning her ‘Cigarette Badge’)

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Marlo Thomas (totally missed it back then, what a woman) She was the quintessential “sexy” woman, because she never tried to be sexy.

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Tuesday Weld – I had Tuesday in the wrong decade, the 50s. She was more of a 60s gal. Great line in her IMDB quotes page. When asked what drove her into seclusion she responded, “I think it was a Buick.”


Cybill Shepherd


Cybill Shepherd


Cybill Shepherd

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Cybill Shepherd

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That’s got to be tough though, going from about the most beautiful woman in the world 50 years ago… to being 68. TCM recently played The Last Picture Show starring Cybill. In it the fan got a see at least a topless scene with Cybill. Unless they were ‘stunt’ boobies. They did that back then.

Women of the 2000’s                                Women of the 90’s

Women of the 70’s                        Women of the 60’s

Women of the 40’s & 50’s

Women of the 80’s

Women of the 2010’s

(for the first comment: Lori Saunders)

Lori Saunders

The 10 Most Beautiful Women of the 70’s

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As a young man in the 70’s you become finely attuned to the wiles of women. And this is the wiliest bunch I know. How do you possibly narrow it down to 10? You can’t, but you can give it the old college try. What I discovered was that a man’s taste in women tends to run the gamut from young and innocent to dark and sultry. One of the most interesting (and sad) discoveries was the cynicism already evident in the eyes of likely the most beautiful woman in the 70’s, Farrah Fawcett. She was just in her mid 20’s when she shot the poster that rocketed her to stardom. And her eyes already showed a sort of ‘tiredness’ at having to be beautiful all the time. I’ll have to ask a beautiful woman sometime if that’s what it is.

This post originally started out as a “10 Most Beautiful Women of the 70s & 80s” (I’m up to 17 22 at last count). That of course was a ridiculous proposition. The seventies and eighties for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, had the most beautiful women ever! At least to my mind (big hair and Spandex really helped that perception). It was also a different time in a couple of ways that are hard to understand now. R-Rated “skin flicks” were big back then. “Exploitation” films. Sybil Danning was the Queen, Phyllis Davis made her share too. Looking through photos for Sybil, she had posed with about every weapon known to man and in about every swimsuit known to man! (And then some!) I’m so glad she embraced it and hope she profited greatly. Because I know the producers profited off of her.

Some of the actresses who were winning Oscars in the 70s were Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Glenda Jackson and Liza Minnelli. Nothing wrong with that. But while they were taking home hardware, these women were being asked to do some of the most embarrassing things. It was called “jiggle TV” for a reason. Lynda Carter for one as Wonder Woman experienced this a few times when she wore the tights! Camera angles that captured the cleavage, slow motion that immortalized the bounce. And we appreciated it too, don’t think we didn’t. Oh and the men guests on Charlie’s Angels! The slimey come-on’s! “Hey baby, maybe you’d like to come up to my place??” Makes you embarrassed to be a man!

Something just occurred to me. With the internet today, a boy sees his first naked woman before he would even care to! (What’s a 6 year old care about boobies?) Nudity and pornography are everywhere. I bet they become numb to it. Back then it was ooh la la! Boobies! If a well known star posed in Playboy you bought it! If somebody famous took their shirt off in a movie you went! Teen boys would discuss what they had seen off of whom! (Trust me, I know) I seriously can’t tell you one ‘star of the day’, let alone whether they had ever gotten naked. Though I have noticed young female actresses don’t have the pressure to get naked that they did in the old days.

But the other thing I’ve always noticed will sound the most strange. Really built women in the movies and television, have never reached the pinnacles of success. There is/was some sort of bias amongst the studios against really voluptuous women. Marilyn Monroe (the megastar) was a B-Cup, Jayne Mansfield the B-Queen, was a D-Cup. On and on it goes. Jane Fonda was the “serious actress”. Sybil Danning the built actress. John Travolta would attribute it to “homosexual Jews” who run the studios. Who really knows? One of the best examples is Linda Blair (in my 80s group). She was taken more seriously as a 12 year old child actress, then 10 years later when she had grown into a very curvaceous woman! [Here’s a great site 12th Blog for a vast array of beautiful women from all times and all places.]


Farrah Fawcett

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Cheryl Ladd

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Shelley Hack

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Teresa Graves (Get Christie Love!)

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Marie Osmond – the Mormonic Goddess

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Pam Grier (Foxy Brown)


Lynda Carter – when you watch reruns of Wonder Woman, Lynda seems like such a nice person, outside of her character.

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Marilyn McCoo

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Catherine Bach (when you hear the term ‘Daisy Dukes’, this is the original)

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Joanna Pettet – I  gave her 2 photos for a reason. Guys who like slender blondes with freckles will understand why. Very busy actress, who was incredibly underutilized if that makes any sense. Just stunning. Its this phenomena I’ve seen before. A contemporary of hers equal in every physical aspect is Meredith McRae. Yet Joanna brings the heat, there isn’t even a contest.

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Freda Payne (Band of Gold, 1970) The 70s were truly the decade of the beautiful singer: Freda Payne, Linda Ronstadt, Marie Osmond, Marilyn McCoo, Debbie Harry & Chaka Khan, Sheila Ferguson, Gloria Gaynor. That’s quite a Top 8.

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Eve Plumb – for some reason she’s sexy, Maureen McCormick not.


Judy Landers


Sybil Danning

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Phyllis Davis

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Jennifer O’Neill – in a league of her own. In the summer of 1972 there was not a more beautiful woman on this planet.

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Sheila Ferguson (center) Three Degrees. Never have I seen such a shortage of photos of such a knockout. Its bizarre. Luckily YouTube has a ton of video of her.

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Gloria Gaynor (this was truly the decade of the songstress goddess)


Susan Anton

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Linda Ronstadt – she was universally lusted after. A lot of sex symbols have men who love them and men who hate them. I would have to say men back in the 70s pretty much all had a thing for Linda.

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Judy Pace

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Chaka Khan (there is such a shortage of photos of her from the 70s)

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Debbie Harry

Women of the 2000’s                                Women of the 90’s

Women of the 70’s                        Women of the 60’s

Women of the 40’s & 50’s

Women of the 80’s

Women of the 2010’s

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The last 4 photos are of Shelley Hack, who kind of deserves a separate category unto herself. Truly scrumptious. Before she became an actress she appeared in a series of perfume commercials named ‘Charlie‘. When you notice a girl from perfume commercials, she’s memorable.

“Exchange-Traded Funds for Dummies” – Russell Wild

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This has been an interesting book. Wall Street has invented many ways to rip people off over the years, it’s my belief ETFs lesson those chances. Mutual funds have 2 inherent disadvantages. You buy them after the trading day not knowing at what price you are buying them. A lot can happen between noon and 3 pm. Their other downfall is their expense ratio. It averages around 1.6%. An ETF has an expense ratio around .06%. There’s no contest.

Wild’s book as per the title skips the mumbo jumbo of most financial books and cuts to the chase. He runs through all the ETFs that were available in 2007 and the most common investing styles. He covers diversification and portfolio mix of stocks versus bonds. He covers the domestic market as well as the international. Large cap versus small. Sector investing. All the basic need to knows.

The trouble is, the 10 plus years of hindsight we have since the book was written in 2007. In the same way the financial shows on TV do perfectly at predicting yesterday, I get to do the same with Wild’s book. A lot of his advice was based on the investor being forced to pay commissions for the trading he would do. That went out the window several years ago with Vanguard and their commission free trading. That changed everything.

Another glaring example was a sample portfolio he had on page 234 for ‘Richard and Maria’, age 65 and 58. Richard at age 65 is “at” retirement. And the portfolio Wild developed for Richard has him with a 42% exposure to the stock market. In the fall of 2007 the warning signs were there of the coming collapse of the market in 2008. Unless you were comatose then you’ll remember the equity market lost 45% of its value. If anyone saw that train wreck coming, they didn’t tell me.

That means Richard would have lost roughly 1/5th of his portfolio virtually overnight.

That’s a lot. Using the conventional ratio, the maximum market exposure for Richard at age 65 would have been 35%. The global financial crisis lesson of 2008 gives credence to a much more conservative stance going into retirement. The stock market doesn’t always go up! 20/80 isn’t unreasonable. Neither is 10/90 out of the question when approaching age 65. Some even go so far as 0% exposure to the stock market at that age, preferring to keep their money in bonds, CDs and Treasuries.

The important thing to remember is that in the end, no one is looking out for your interests. Their only interest in you is seeing how much money they can get out of you. No one was warning the small investor in 2007/2008 of the coming calamity. No one was warning that once the market hit bottom, that it was definitely not the time to get out. It was actually the time to plow every red cent you had into the market.

What we did learn from 2008 was that unless you were 100% into bonds, everyone got hosed. Small caps, large caps, value, growth, dividend funds, they all took a bath. International, domestic, they all tumbled. We found out from 2008 that with very, very few exceptions, the market moves in unison. You can take your grid, style and sector theories and toss them out the window. There are only 2 things that are going to help the small investor: Time (having 3 or 4 decades to let your money work for you). And buying low. Not buying the peaks. Scaling back when the markets are high, and plowing everything you have into them when they are low. Buy low – sell high.

That’s all it comes down to. You can take all your fancy business channel advice, magazine articles, books, experts and everything else and toss them out the window. Your portfolio isn’t going to go up unless the whole market is going up. And if the market is going down, everything is going down. Buy the dips and don’t get within 10 years of retirement without knowing exactly what you’re doing. Stay away from the dogs like American Century, and stay with the winners like Vanguard and T. Rowe Price.

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This graph illustrates the history of the stock market perfectly. In 1929 everyone was investing in the market (that should make you nervous). They were buying the peak. When it crashed and hit bottom in 1932/33, everyone got out! They had put in all their money at the top, and had nothing to put in at the bottom (when they should have been buying). ’32 and ’33 were buying opportunities! Not to be feared, but embraced! Just like 2008 and 2009. That’s the time to buy, not sell. Those opportunities only come once or twice in a lifetime. If you had listened to the experts, you missed it. In fact some people believe the sharks manipulated events then for the exact purpose of fleecing the flock.

 

This is what a cheerleader looks like

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I was making fun of the Philadelphia Eagles on Twitter (and their cheerleaders), when I posted a picture of a cheerleader from my team the Bengals. The more I looked at it the more it struck me how right I was. The mix of attitude, costume and looks makes for the quintessential cheerleader photograph. My hat is off to the photographer and the cheerleader, whoever she is. Truly stunning.