Intl. Notebook

November 21 2024

GALA OCCASION

The dress code is decidedly informal.

Above: scans from an issue of Gala magazine published this month in 1959, with various models, burlesque dancers, and a few actresses. Familiar faces include Zahra Norbo, who’s also visible here, Barbara Thomason, who was married to Mickey Rooney, and Rosa Dolmai, who acted under the name Eve Eden and generated twenty-seven screen and television credits. The lovely cover star is Virginia De Lee, who we’ve featured half a dozen times. Click her keywords below and scroll to see everything we have on her. Go ahead. She’s worth it.

Gala Magazine, Virginia De Lee, Zahra Norbo, Rosa Dolmai, Eve Eden, Barbara Thomason, Mickey Rooney, burlesque

Hollywoodland

June 20 2019

FROM MUSCLE BEACH TO MURDER

Pageant winner fulfilled show business and personal ambitions. Then things went wrong.

Beauty pageants are a bit silly, perhaps, but the participants are generally ambitious people who see them as stepping stones to show business or modeling. And in mid-century Los Angeles in particular, even minor pageants occasionally led to stardom. In the above photos high school student Barbara Thomason wins the crown of Miss Muscle Beach 1954. Listed at 5 foot 3 inches and 110 pounds, she was a body-building enthusiast, and in the shot just below she celebrates her hard fought win by pumping a bit of iron while photographers click away and a crowd watches.

Did Thomason’s victory lead to bigger things? Maybe not directly, but it probably helped. She was a habitual pageant participant who also won Miss Huntington Beach, Miss Van Ness, Miss Bay Beach, Miss Southwest Los Angeles, Miss Pacific Coast, Queen of Southern California,

and ten other titles. All that winning finally got her noticed by Hollywood movers and shakers. In 1955, performing under the name Carolyn Mitchell, she made her acting debut on the television show Crossroads, and in 1958 co-starred in two Roger Corman b-movies, The Crybaby Killer and Dragstrip Riot.

But she put her career on hold when she met and married a star—Mickey Rooney, who was nearly seventeen years her senior and nearly two inches her junior. Their union had problems from the beginning. The couple married secretly in Mexico because Rooney was still awaiting a divorce from actress Elaine Mahnken. They would have to wait almost two years before the law allowed them to wed in the U.S. Legalities, though doubtless bothersome, were the least of their problems. During the next six years, during which Thomason bore four children, Rooney indulged in numerous affairs.

It should probably be noted here that Thomason was Rooney’s fifth wife. Among the predecessors were goddesses like Ava Gardner and Martha Vickers. We don’t know what Thomason’s expectations of marriage were, but clearly Rooney didn’t know the meaning of the phrase “for better or worse.” The affairs continued, and eventually Thomason did the same with a temperamental Yugoslavian actor named Milos Milosevic, who performed under the name Milos Milos. But what was good for goose was not

good for the gander—Rooney found out about these international relations, moved out of the Brentwood house he shared with Thomason, and filed for divorce, charging mental cruelty. The nerve, right?

On the morning of January 31, 1966, while Rooney was in St. John’s Hospital recovering from an intestinal infection he’d picked up in the Philippines, Thomason and Milosevic were found together on the bathroom floor of the Brentwood house, dead. Milosevic had shot Thomason under the chin and killed himself with a temple shot using a chrome-plated .38 Rooney had bought in 1964. The consensus is Thomason had decided to dump Milosevic and he flipped out.

The photos below show Thomason on Muscle Beach during her halcyon years there, a mere teenager, frolicking in the sun, filled with youthful hopes for a good life. She won beauty titles, acted in films, married an icon, and had four children. Any of those accomplishments would have been good legacies. Instead her death at twenty-nine overshadowed all the rest, and she’s remembered as another celebrity murder victim, Hollywood style, which is always somehow both sensational and banal.

Yugoslavia, Philippines, Los Angeles, Crossroads, The Crybaby Killer, Dragstrip Riot, Barbara Thomason, Carolyn Mitchell, Mickey Rooney, Elaine Mahnken, Milos Milosevic, Milos Milos, Ava Gardner, Martha Vickers, murder, suicide

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

July 11

1960—To Kill a Mockingbird Appears

Harper Lee’s racially charged novel To Kill a Mockingbird is published by J.B. Lippincott & Co. The book is hailed as a classic, becomes an international bestseller, and spawns a movie starring Gregory Peck, but is the only novel Lee would ever publish.

July 11

1962—Nuke Test on Xmas Island

As part of the nuclear tests codenamed Operation Dominic, the United States detonates a one megaton bomb on Australian controlled Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean. The island was a location for a series of American and British nuclear tests, and years later lawsuits claiming radiation damage to military personnel were filed, but none were settled in favor in the soldiers.

July 10

1940—The Battle of Britain Begins

The German Air Force, aka the Luftwaffe, attacks shipping convoys off the coast of England, touching off what Prime Minister Winston Churchill describes as The Battle of Britain.

July 9

1948—Paige Takes Mound in the Majors

Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.

July 8

1965—Biggs Escapes the Big House

Ronald Biggs, a member of the gang that carried out the Great Train Robbery in 1963, escapes from Wandsworth Prison by scaling a 30-foot wall with three other prisoners, using a ladder thrown in from the outside. Biggs remained at large, mostly living in Brazil, for more than forty-five years before returning to the UK—and arrest—in 2001.

DON’T RIDE THE WHITE HORSE

Rafael DeSoto painted this excellent cover for David Hulburd's 1954 drug scare novel H Is for Heroin. We also have the original art without text.

BARN GIRLS

Two Spanish language digest novels from Argentine publishers Malinca Debora and Malinca Nueva Pandora.

Argentine publishers Malinca Debora reprinted numerous English language crime thrillers in Spanish. This example uses George Gross art borrowed from U.S. imprint Rainbow Books.

LOVES OF A BLONDE