by Steven Rea
eva marie saint lounges with a copy of Charlotte Steiner’s picture book Kiki Is An Actress. Saint, of course, is an actress too: By the time this photo was taken in 1958, she had transitioned from roles in television in New York to making her big-screen debut opposite Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. The result— a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Key roles in A Hatful of Rain and Raintree County followed. And in 1959 she’d be scaling the presidential foreheads of Mount Rushmore with Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.
jack benny, vaudevillian-turned-radio-star-turned-film-funny-man (and soon-to-be TV icon) is captured at home in a candid shot with four-year-old daughter Joan. Paramount released the publicity photo to promote its 1939 romantic comedy Man About Town, in which Benny courts Dorothy Lamour, and liaises with Binnie Barnes and Betty Grable, too. The 1935 heavy linen Whitman edition of Walt Disney’s Donald Duck (“Story written and illustrated by the staff of the Walt Disney Studios.”), featuring the sailor-hatted mallard and a couple of rodents by the name of Mickey and Minnie, now goes for more than $300 on antiquarian book sites and eBay. The famous spendthrift Benny would have appreciated that.
Munro Leaf’s Fair Play—a primer about citizenship, selflessness, and getting along—is pored over by MGM star robert young and daughters Carol Ann and Barbara in the family’s San Fernando Valley home. A steady-as-he-goes screen star, Young segued to television in the late 1950s, applying his real-life parenting skills to the hit family sitcom Father Knows Best. A decade later, he applied his medical skills (Young had numerous physician roles, as far back as 1931) in the popular drama, Marcus Welby, M.D.
Husband and wife john cassavetes and gena rowlands, who were both working steadily in TV in the early 1960s, study Baby Animals, the Garth Williams picture book, with their baby— well, toddler—Nick Cassavetes. He would follow in his parents’ footsteps, acting and directing. And Cassavetes senior would direct Rowlands in nine independent, improvisational gems, including 1968’s Faces, 1974’s A Woman Under the Influence, and 1980’s Gloria.
Trading his character’s wheelchair for a piece of porch furniture, marlon brando—all of 25 years old—takes time with a book between scenes for his screen debut, the 1950 wounded vets drama, The Men. Fresh from the New York stage (and Stella Adler’s acting classes), Brando was cast as “Bud” Wilocek, an Army lieutenant paralyzed from the waist down in World War II. Fred Zinneman’s film tracks Bud’s struggles to shake off a killing depression and begin life anew with the woman who loves him (played by Teresa Wright). Brando spent the month leading up to production at the Veteran’s Administration hospital in Van Nuys, learning to maneuver a wheelchair, use leg braces and crutches, and befriending the paraplegics and quadriplegics in his thirty-two-bed ward. The actor’s sophomore effort: A Streetcar Named Desire, and a Best Actor nomination. Two consecutive Best Actor nominations followed, and then, in 1955, Brando won the Academy Award for his stormy portrayal of prizefighter-turned-dockworker Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.
On the set of the 1958 western The Bravados, the cowboy-hatted, cowboy-booted joan collins is deep into Thomas Wolfe’s delirious doorstop of a classic, You Can’t Go Home Again. (This Grosset Universal Library paperback edition clocks in at 743 pages.) Beginning with Past Imperfect, her 1978 autobiography, the English actress would join Wolfe on library shelves. Her eighteen titles include memoirs, novels, and beauty and health books. The actress’s sister, of course, was best-selling scribe Jackie Collins.
Outfitted in fashionable riding gear, Warner’s star bette davis keeps her reading material secret beneath a Guild Library dust jacket, the back of which features an ad for a modern-day (1930s, that is) brand of Rosicrucianism. “Explore Your Mind!” screams the invitation to try out the centuries-old spiritual business. “Discover your mental health and overcome your limitations,” the Rosicrucian Brotherhood copy goes on. Ms. Davis’s career spanned seven decades, with two Oscars and some of the most memorable screen performances of all time. In December 1938, the New York Times reported that Davis’s husband, Harman “Oscar” Nelson, wanted a divorce. His complaint? Davis read too much. He “usually just sat there while his wife read ‘to an unnecessary degree.’”
A flat tire on the way to work can wreck anyone’s day, but jean simmons seems to be taking the mishap in stride. The English actress, who would go on to garner accolades and awards in films including Hamlet, The Robe, Guys and Dolls, Elmer Gantry, and Spartacus, opens Dora Aydelotte’s family saga Run of the Stars. Simmons, who was shooting 1947’s The Woman in the Hall outside of London, waits for the SAG wagon immersed in the novel by the Oklahoman writer whose (slightly) better known prairie fictions include Full Harvest and Trumpets Calling.
With a book that provides its own photo caption, dennis hopper breaks between scenes of Nicholas Ray’s seminal teen angst drama, Rebel Without a Cause. The actor, in the early days of a career that would head well into the aughts, worked with James Dean in both 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause and the following year’s Giant. Perched atop a ledge at the Griffith Park Observatory, Hopper homes in on an exercise in Konstantin Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares. Both Hopper and Dean were diehard practitioners of the Method, a system of acting formulated by the early twentieth century acting guru.
Jazz giant Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong’s autobiography proves the perfect between-scenes reading material for grace kelly, who stars as heiress Tracy Lord in High Society, the 1956 musical remake of The Philadelphia Story. Armstrong appears as himself in the movie, doing a swinging number with Bing Crosby, “Now You Has Jazz” (written by Cole Porter). Both Crosby and Frank Sinatra are vying—and crooning—for Kelly’s affections, with Crosby winning the day, and getting to sing “True Love” in a duet with Kelly as they sail off into the sunset. And speaking of sailing off, High Society marked Oscar-winning Kelly’s final role before quitting the biz to become Princess of Monaco.
Signed to Columbia Pictures in 1947, Gloria Sui Chin of Detroit, Michigan, was given a new name—maylia, the Cantonese word for “beautiful”—and given the role of an orphaned Chinese teen in the Dick Powell thriller To the Ends of the Earth. Here she reads Doctors East Doctors West: An American Physician’s Life in China by Edward H. Hume during a coiffure fix off set. Other pics in Maylia’s CV: Boston Blackie’s Chinese Adventure, Chinatown at Midnight, Call Me Mister, and Return to Paradise, all made in the late 1940s and early 1950s. After leaving moviedom, the actress and her husband ran the popular chain of SoCal restaurants Ah Fong.
alfred hitchcock dropped into New York’s Rizzoli bookstore in early 1965, stifling a theatrical yawn as he perused the color plates of The World of Birds—James Fisher and Roger Tory Peterson’s “comprehensive guide to general ornithology.” But the magnificent coffee-table book seemed old hat for the master of suspense, whose mega-popular The Birds, a Technicolor scare-’em-up about menacing crows and sinister seagulls, had theatergoers screaming just two years earlier.
Nightclub singer dorothy dandridge enjoyed the biggest opening in the history of Hollywood’s Mocambo club when she opened there in May 1951. She also appears to enjoy a good read or two (or forty!), in this photo from later that same year. In 1954, Dandridge, who had worked steadily, albeit often uncredited, in black-themed films and musicals) became the first black woman to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress—in the title role of Carmen Jones.
“Know anything about rare books?” private eye Philip Marlowe asks. “You could try me,” the Acme Book Shop proprietress responds. And so begins one of Hollywood’s best-known bookstore scenes—three minutes of antiquarian-lit chitchat (a Ben-Hur 1860 third edition with a duplicated line on page 116), day-drinking (Marlowe’s got a flask of “pretty good rye” in his pocket), and outdated ideas about women and eyewear. Some of the sexual innuendo in 1946’s The Big Sleep feels creaky and embarrassing now, but humphrey bogart’s dogged cool carries the day, and dorothy malone is smart and steady opposite the Warner Bros. star. William Faulkner was one o
f three credited scriptwriters to try to make sense of Raymond Chandler’s serpentinely plotted novel. Howard Hawks directs.
“It’s all in the books,” Jim Thorpe’s dad tells the boy on the Sac and Fox Reservation after he’s run away from school, quite literally— it’s twelve miles back to the family home. Flash forward ten years in Jim Thorpe—All American to Carlisle Indian School, the Pennsylvania college where the Native American from Oklahoma ran track and played football, on his way to Olympic glory. burt lancaster, who was thirty-eight when he took on the title role of the legendary athlete, evokes Thorpe’s academic struggles with a furrowed brow, hunkering down over a massive dictionary. “Studying didn’t come easy to Jim,” goes the narration. “He often fell asleep over his books, his mind restless and troubled.” Cut to the dream sequence: a montage of volumes tumbling off the library shelves onto the future gold medalist’s head.
“You’re tormenting your eyes with that rubbish,” insists Paul McCartney’s cranky granddad (wilfrid brambell), doing his scheming utmost to get ringo starr to give up his copy of Robert Traver’s Anatomy of a Murder and go “parading” out in the real world. It’s a pivotal scene in the 1964 Beatles hit A Hard Day’s Night, as Ringo heads off on a moping wander, leaving his bandmates high and dry. The cover of Ringo’s Penguin paperback edition boasts the same iconic Saul Bass design as the key art for Otto Preminger’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation of Anatomy of a Murder.
harry belafonte displays some torso and more so, posing, puffing, and perusing literature in the somewhat controversial 1957 Caribbean-set melodrama Island in the Sun. Adapted from the novel by the prolific Alec Waugh, the film also stars Joan Fontaine, who whiles away the days and nights in Belafonte’s company, and James Mason, a plantation owner steeped in jealousy and paranoia over the assumed affair of his wife. Mason has a monologue about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the plot of which echoes here and there in the CinemaScope, calypso-themed pic.
Fred Astaire’s go-to dance partner, ginger rogers, in her Irene-designed nightgown, travels through Cathedrals and Museums of France. In Shall We Dance, the 1937 Astaire-Rogers lark (with songs by George and Ira Gershwin), Rogers is a tap-dancing comedy star while Astaire has been passing himself off as a Russian ballet master. (In fact, he’s from Philadelphia.) Lots of mix-ups about who’s married to whom, as the RKO musical journeys from Paris to New York, with scenes—and musical numbers—aboard a luxury ocean liner, too.
“Nothing is so lovely as a sweet, fat, dimpling baby in beautiful mother’s arms,” reads lana turner in 1944’s pulpy Marriage Is a Private Affair. Turner’s platinum-blonde playgirl finds herself hastily married (to John Hodiak, a U.S. Army pilot) and soon thereafter in the maternity ward, where she produces a son. In the glow of a hospital room lamp she studies So You Have a Baby by Lucille Nugent (a prop book), but Turner is ill-prepared for the responsibilities of parenthood. She’d rather be reading So You Have a Date with a Guy Who’s Not Your Spouse. The film, which marked the MGM sex symbol’s return to movies following her own daughter’s birth, was adapted from the Judith Kelly novel—a well-received tale of a modern marriage buffeted by the stresses of war and societal change.
gary cooper takes a crash course in parenting in Now and Forever, a globe-hopping Depression-era yarn about a con artist widower dad, his impossibly glamorous girlfriend (the impossibly glamorous Carole Lombard), and his impossibly cute little girl (the impossibly cute Shirley Temple). Coop’s newfound responsibilities of fatherhood are at odds with his character’s need to hustle marks and suckers, but the triumvirate of stars—Cooper! Lombard! Six-year-old Temple!—works everything out in Henry Hathaway’s 1933 hit. And What Every Young Mother Should Know was not a product of the Paramount Props Department: The title shows up in the bibliography of the 1910 child-rearing manual Simple Lessons on the Physical Care of the Baby.
greer garson, as the first female teacher at a small private school for boys in 1954’s Her Twelve Men, makes sure young rex thompson is up on the travels and travails of Odysseus, his escape from Calypso, and all that Greek gods business. Garson, the British actress who won an Oscar for Mrs. Miniver, has to deal not only with her dozen Oaks School lads but also with the amorous entreaties of Robert Ryan and Barry Sullivan, too. The film, marketed by MGM as a kind of distaff Goodbye, Mr. Chips, was based on a story from the Ladies’ Home Journal. (Its original title: Miss Baker’s Dozen—ouch!) The well-worn copy of Homer’s epic poem in Thompson’s hands is the reliable S. H. Butcher and A. Lang translation—book number 167 in the Modern Library collection.
joan fontaine poses with a towering spire of Great Works—Aristotle! Freud! Homer! Marx! Plato! Voltaire!—in an aptly nutty publicity still from the screwball romance The Affairs of Susan. Typically remembered for serious melodramas, classic adaptations, and psychological thrillers like Rebecca, Jane Eyre, and Suspicion, Fontaine shines as the unconventional Susan Darell, an innkeeper’s daughter who becomes a Broadway star. A trio of Susan’s still-love-struck exes meets with her new fiancé in the 1945 farce to share stories of the woman they knew—and each, it turns out, has a completely different take on Fontaine’s freewheeling character. Here the actress is in her bookish incarnation, sporting reading glasses and paraphrasing Hegel when she notes that “external appearance has no bearing on internal harmony.” Earlier in the film Fontaine can be spotted reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
In the 1946 rom-com Without Reservations, claudette colbert is a best-selling author—under the nom de plume Christopher Madden. On a Los Angeles-bound train she meets a Marine captain played by john wayne. He doesn’t think much of this writer guy Madden, but “Kit” tries to convince him otherwise, perched atop a sleeping car’s upper berth reading from the soon-to-be-Hollywoodized Here Is Tomorrow. Love and literary criticism ensue.
angie dickinson reclines with Illustrated Book of Love, a (prop) pictorial full of sexual positions, in a scene from Roger Vadim’s 1971 serial-killer sex comedy Pretty Maids All in a Row. Though Quentin Tarantino put the movie on his list of Top 12 all-time favorites, the MGM release is a pretty cheesy affair, with Rock Hudson as a lecherous and murderous high school coach and Dickinson—an actress with screen credits that include Ocean’s 11, Rio Bravo, Point Blank, and The Killers—playing a libidinous substitute teacher who seduces a shy and bumbling student. Vadim originally wanted Brigitte Bardot for the role. Dickinson holds her copy of Illustrated Book of Love every which way to better appreciate what the pages’ coupling couple is up to.
Literary references abound in Road to Morocco, the third of the hugely successful bob hope/Bing Crosby Road to . . . comedies. Even before the 1942 Paramount pic’s opening title song is sung, the collected works of Shakespeare, Persian poet Omar Khayyam, and Webster’s Dictionary have been cited. By the time Hope’s “Turkey” Jackson has cozied up to Princess Shalmar of Karameesh (Road to . . . muse Dorothy Lamour, of course), he’s in a state of shock and awe over a copy of How to Make Love—Six Lessons from Madame La Zonga. For the publicity still, however, the provocative prop tome was replaced with a real publication: Power of Will, the 1921 self-helper by Frank Channing Haddock, marketed as “a practical companion book for the unfoldment of the powers of mind.”
“I never realized I had so many books I never read,” says marsha mason in Neil Simon’s Chapter Two, surveying the shelves in her apartment. “Hey, Doctor Zhivago—we’ll try it one more time,” she adds, reaching for her hardcover of Boris Pasternak’s heavyweight Russian Revolution romance. Mason’s character, a divorcée and actress, runs into James Caan’s—a widower and writer—and their courtship begins with a series of snappy phone calls. Later, Mason can be seen reading Queen of Zanzibar, a spy novel by “Kenneth Blakey-Hill”—a Brit-sounding pseudonym for Caan’s George Schneider.
Luxuriating in an epic bubble bath with a copy of Grace Metalious’s suitably soapy Peyton Place, platinum-blonde jayne mansfield stars as platinum-blonde actress Rita Marlowe in the
1957 comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? She’s being courted by an ad agency to spokesmodel their “Stay-Put” lipstick, but between chapters of Metalious’s bestseller (published just a year earlier, and soon to be a movie and then a TV series) Rita is more concerned about the men in her life and the nature of true love. Tony Randall, as a mid-level Mad Men-esque exec, is the titular hero. joan blondell, tub-side, is Rita’s personal assistant. A standard poodle emerges from the bath along with Mansfield—the dog and the sex symbol wrapped in matching towels.
