Hi, I heard there are some enormous veggies around here. We've been looking at this image for a few years, and while it's often said to feature U.S. actress Anita Page, there's an amazing amount of disagreement about that. Many sites say this is actually an actress named Marie Hopkins. The debate is a fascinating microcosm of internet behavior. We've seen people called stupid over their opinion. Well, we'll try to weigh in, and hopefully not in a stupid way, about whether this is Page or Hopkins.
Some sites, splitting the difference, essentially claim both, saying this is Marie Hopkins posed as Anita Page, or Marie Hopkins posing under the pseudonym Anita Page. Here's the problem with that: there's no Marie Hopkins listed in cinema or stage databases. There's a Miriam Hopkins, from the right period, but even so, this is probably not her. For clues toward an answer we're turning to the pros—i.e. professional brick and mortar galleries. Black & Whites Gallery is no longer around, but from its London locale during the 1980s and into the 1990s it staged shows by renowned photographers such as Richard Sawdon Smith and David Leslie Anthony. That gives it at least something resembling reputability, because when galleries with actual street addresses sell art with mistaken attributions or under false pretenses, it has a way of turning into a reputational problem that's hard to shake among the habitués of the gallery scene. This is not nearly as true of online sellers.
So for the record: Black & Whites Gallery, once located at 50-52 Monmouth Street, London, sold limited lithographs of this image and identified the subject as the actress Anita Page, shot by Clarence Sinclair Bull in 1929. Is that 100% definitive? Maybe not, but it's getting into the neighborhood. You can see a previous Page here.
What's happens next only she knows for sure.
Above: a cool 1928 MGM promo image of top tier U.S. actress Anita Page, who featured in such films as West of Zanzibar and The Broadway Melody. Her career straddled the silent and talkie eras, and she was a star in both. This is a great and sexy shot, a bit eyebrow raising at the time, we'd guess, thanks to that wandering left hand that could be up to anything. You can see more of her here, and we'll show you more of her soon.
What do they expect? It's called the City of Brotherly Love.
Above is a cover of the early tabloid Philadelphia Briefs published today in 1934, which caught our eye because it has a nice drawing of actress Anita Page, along with an Easter Bunny that seems to looking up her skirt. Bad, bad bunny. But it was added to the original shot, as you see below. Briefs was one of the purest early examples of the American tabloid form, with its reporting focused mainly on big city dangers faced by upstanding young white women, among those perils the predations of darker races—often referred to in the parlance of the Depression years as “sepias” or “ebonys.” To quote: “White, sepia, and ebony wrapped in erotic embrace. White girls in their teens abandoning their ivory bodies to ebony clutches as boy and girl friends cheer drunkenly.” Interesting, no? This style of reporting served a specific purpose. As James H. Adams put it in his book Urban Reform and Sexual Vice in Progressive Era Philadelphia, the goal was to, “demystify the city through the use of cultural archetypes and narratives that defined why the city was evil, the threat that the city posed to orderly society, and the measures that reformers needed to take to clean up the urban space.” In other words, Briefs created negative, often transparently ridiculous stories that had the effect of convincing readers that barriers maintaining the structure of contemporary society were under siege. These tales of white girls and brotherly love would distress many people even today, so you can imagine the outrage in 1934. See more Briefs here.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1939—Batman Debuts
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise starring Michael Keaton, then George Clooney, and finally Christian Bale. 1953—Crick and Watson Publish DNA Results
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves. 1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule's main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule's descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot.
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