This photo of Elsie Connor looked to us as if it had been Photoshopped in a very interesting way but it wasn’t—we found a version on Getty Images and it was identical to what you see above. The image and the fact that she’s identified as an Irish boxing champion on various websites made us curious about her career, but after a bit of digging we discovered that she was actually a dancer and chorus girl, and appeared in the 1930 musical Earl Carroll's Sketch Book, the 1929 shows Fioretta and Earl Carroll’s Vanities, and the 1928 production Here’s Howe. That’s a pretty short career, and one that lacked any starring roles, but thanks to the internet she’s famous again, looking like a real world beater. The only thing is, we doubt she was ever a boxer. We can’t be 100% sure, but with no evidence that she ever stepped into a ring, as well as a very clear understanding of how often the world wide web is world wide wrong, we suspect this is just a very, er, striking publicity photo. It dates from 1931. 

A world-weary Sammy Davis, Jr. appears here in a photo shot by Peter Basch in the back of a Chicago limousine. Davis was about to go to New York to star on Broadway in Clifford Odets and William Gibson’s Golden Boy, a musical involving a boxer’s turbulent career, doomed interracial romance, and eventual suicide. Not exactly an uplifting night out, yet the show ran for 569 performances and the cast album cracked the Top 40. That’s called star power, and Davis, who was already huge in Hollywood and the music industry, had it to spare. The photo dates from 1964. 

Comedian W.C. Fields, née William Claude Dukenfield, jokes around with chorus girls Helen Ellsworth, Helene Sheldon, Cricket Wooten, and Margy Martyn during a rehearsal for Florenz Ziegfeld’s Ziegfeld Follies revues. Fields was a Follies cast member off and on from 1915 until 1925. He was known from the beginning of his career for having a large nose, and it reddened and grew over time due to rosacea and rhinophyma. This shot is from today, 1925. 

Above is the cover of a March 1932 issue of the French “esthétique, humoristique, théâtral” monthly Paris Plaisirs with cover star Marjorie King cheerfully wielding a field hockey stick from a position that suggests she’s been knocked on her ass. If you tilt your head you can see that she was really striking. When this issue appeared she seemed to be on the cusp of a cinema breakthrough, having appeared in four films in quick succession. But she only made two screen appearances after this cover—1933’s My Weakness and 1936’s J’ai gagné un million. However, she had some Broadway roles and appeared on and in many magazines, so when you add it all up she seems to have had a nice career. Regarding Paris Plaisirs, it launched in 1922 and ran until at least 1938. We’ve shared several of these before and you can see those by clicking here. And we also found another photo of King from the same field hockey session, as well as a nice shot of her by photography legend Alfred Cheney Johnston which we’ll share a bit later.

These two eye-catching shots feature American actress Barbara Nichols, née Barbara Marie Nickerauer, who did the usual round of pin-up modeling and beauty contests before earning a running part in the Broadway musical Pal Joey. She later appeared in the film version along with Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak and other notables, and during her show business career became known for playing strippers. Pretty easy to see why. We have no date for these photos, but if we had to guess we’d say 1955 or 1956.

When Michael Todd’s famed musical Mexican Hayride opened in New York City he decided to have the program art, which had been painted by the famed Peruvian arist Alberto Vargas, aka Varga, reproduced at giant scale on the billboard atop the Winter Garden Theater where the show was being staged. This photo shows Varga’s giant pin-up almost completed.

In person the matador-like figure, which is modeled after but isn’t quite a portrait of star June Havoc, was probably garbed in bright red with gold brocade, matching the colors of the program art. The reverse of the photo says: A gargantuan Varga girl, 157 feet wide and 30 feet high, has been completed atop the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway in New York. Sketches for the illustration were made by artist Varga in Chicago.

Of course, the horizontal image doesn’t look very impressive at a mere 433 pixels in width, so through the magic of Photoshop and for no other reason than we wanted to see what it looked like, we’ve reoriented the image below. There’s some egregious pixel stretching happening on the lower half of the figure, but all things considered, it looks pretty good. You can drag it to your desktop and rotate it for a better look. The photo was shot today in 1944.

We’re at the penultimate page of the Goodtime Weekly Calendar of 1963, and as promised last week here’s a great shot from Ron Vogel of an unidentified model getting her groove on. This just cries out to be repurposed as a 12-inch cover or some kind of concert poster, don’t you think? The image actually brings up lots of humorous possibilities, and we were contemplating something along these lines for a subhead: She’s not the only one who loves beating something between her legs. But then we decided that was just too much. We have some class here.

Above, a July 4 1965 issue of National Enquirer with Barbra Streisand on the cover and a lamentation inside on the hollowness of fame and fortune. Streisand was discovered singing in a Greenwich Village gay bar in 1960 and made her first appearance on television the next year on Jack Paar’s show. In 1964 she scored a Broadway hit playing Fanny Brice in the rags to riches musical Funny Girl, and her career took off from there. We don’t know if she ever actually claimed she was happier before her fame. If she did, all we can say is that into everyone’s life some rain must fall. And if that rain happens to be in the form of millions and millions of dollars, well, you just have to deal. 

Based on the poster, you’d think Kiss of the Spider Woman is about a femme fatale beguiling men in some romantic and faraway land. Close—it’s about two guys rotting away in a prison cell in some unnamed Latin American dictatorship. One of them—played by William Hurt in an Oscar-winning role—passes the time by telling his cellmate stories about an old Nazi propaganda film he once saw. And so in the form of his nostalgic narrative what we get is a film within a film and that’s where most of the romantic stuff comes in. Based on a novel by Manuel Puig, Spider Woman managed the rare showbiz trifecta of being produced as a play, a Hollywood film, and a Broadway musical. The movie is excellent, and quite dark, but we won’t recommend it because it isn’t really pulp. The poster on the other hand, with a lovely depiction of a character Sonia Braga plays in the film within a film, just kills. Kiss of the Spider Woman opened today in the U.S. in 1985.

June 1933 issue of Broadway Tattler, a sixteen page monthly tabloid published in New York City, with a reference to Walter Winchell’s long time live-in lover June Magee, and a promise of Lupe Velez's phone number.