This fun image stars French actress Danièle Gaubert, who we recently saw in La louve solitaire, aka The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl, and who also appeared in Snow Job, Camille 2000, and more than a dozen other films. This is from the French magazine Moi and was first published in 1969. Gaubert is another actress who hooked up with a dictator, or a dictator’s son. In 1963 she married Leonidas Trujillo Martínez, son of Dominican Republic strongman Rafael Trujillo, a guy who killed tens of thousands of his fellow citizens. Could you imagine an actress linking herself to a dictatorship in 2023? Back before the social media age such romances occurred often (which is why you have to especially respect those who refused to do it). There are, of course, women involved with dictators today—sadly authoritarians get to reproduce too—but those women aren’t global film stars. Gaubert was divorced from Trujillo Martinez by 1968, made several more movies, and was out of show business by 1972.
1937—Carothers Patents Nylon
Wallace H. Carothers, an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont Corporation, receives a patent for a silk substitute fabric called nylon. Carothers was a depressive who for years carried a cyanide capsule on a watch chain in case he wanted to commit suicide, but his genius helped produce other polymers such as neoprene and polyester. He eventually did take cyanide—not in pill form, but dissolved in lemon juice—resulting in his death in late 1937.