Life in the 1940s

Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944)

Madeleine LeBeau in Casablanca (1942).

Vivien Leigh, mid-1940s.

Picture Post Vol. 54 No. 8 23 February, 1952

Photoplay, February 1949

Judy Garland Command Performance of Over the Rainbow, 1943

In the summer of 1941, just a few months before Pearl Harbor was attacked, LIFE magazine ran a black and white photograph of an up-and-coming movie actress named Rita Hayworth. In the photo, the redheaded beauty is kneeling on a bed made up with satin sheets. Her silky nightgown is white, with black lace trimming the low-cut top. She’s smiling slightly for photographer Bob Landry. The snapshot included in the lot would become one of the most popular pin-ups of World War II. Hayworth was one of the biggest stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Her biggest success on film was her lead role in Gilda and she made dozens of others in a career cut short by illness. It was during the filming of You’ll Never Get Rich that a press agent at Columbia Pictures, where Hayworth was under contract, lobbied LIFE to run the photographs. The nightgown was either made by the press agent’s mother or came from the Columbia Pictures prop department. The details surrounding the shoot are unclear. One story has it that the photo was taken in Hayworth’s own bedroom, but another suggests that she knelt on a bed on the movie set. A flashbulb may or may not have failed - sculpting the shadow on Hayworth’s chest. One rumor has it that someone told Hayworth to take a deep breath before the shot, making the image even more provocative. Four months after the photograph was published, America went to war and soldiers took the silk and lace picture along to remind them of home. By the end of the war, more than 5 million copies of the photograph were sold.

San Francisco

Rainy night in Times Square, NY c.1947 © Walter Berk

When The Lights Go On Again | Vaughn Monroe and his Orchestra

Dig Out