Florence Evelyn Nesbit was first discovered while staring longingly into a shop window. Daydreaming over the birthday dress she wished she could afford, she glimpsed a second face reflected in the glass. An old woman was gazing at her with fascination. Evelyn was dressed in an oversized cloth coat, rolled up at the sleeves, and her muffler was tatty. Her skin was alabaster pale, her brown eyes wide, and her dark hair spiralling in ringlets over her shoulders. She looked like a porcelain doll who’d sprung to life and dressed itself in hand-me-downs. It was an entrancing image. Finally, the old woman spoke: ‘Would you like to pose for a portrait?’ She was the first of many Americans to be captivated by an era-defining face.
The year was 1898 and Nesbit was barely fourteen years old. Her mother had dressed her in full-length skirts and sent her to work in a shop, hoping the disguise would dodge child labour laws and help bring money in after the death of Florence’s father. She was a girl masquerading as a woman, and that would also come to define her celebrity career. After posing for various artists in Philadelphia as the ‘rare young Pittsburgh beauty’ with the ‘strange and fascinating face’, Nesbit and her mother moved to New York in late 1900, where she was immediately hired as a professional muse to various artists and photographers, and then became a chorus girl on Broadway. Young Florence now confusingly adopted her mum’s name, becoming Evelyn Nesbit.
Mrs Nesbit was a fiercely cautious chaperone, yet the modern eye still detects hints of inappropriate exploitation at work. The elderly artist James Carroll Beckwith helped her career along when he recommended Evelyn to his fellow painters, but his 1901 half-length portrait is startling to modern eyes, because it depicts partial nudity as she removes her dress. It feels voyeuristic, a sexualised image of a teen slowly disrobing. She’s barely sixteen. It’s undoubtedly the most inappropriate image in her portfolio, but it’s not the only one to make us grimace.
Evelyn Nesbit’s straddling of pubescent naivety and womanhood was of great appeal to artists because it made her strangely protean. The young model could look much older or younger than her actual years. There’s a photo of her at fifteen, taken in Philadelphia, where she might pass for thirty. She has thick eyebrows and reddened lips; her hair is gathered up on her head, and she stares defiantly down the lens with steely arrogance, as if she’s the author of a radical feminist novel. And yet, the next year, in 1901, the very same girl posed side-on, with a huge flower held in place by a headband, staring away with sad, innocent eyes as if her beloved kitten had just died; it’s an image of such innocent power that it inspired the novelist Lucy Maud Montgomery to write Anne of Green Gables, about an eleven-year-old orphan girl mistakenly sent to live on a farm.1
Despite her Scots-Irish heritage and pale skin, her dark, slightly kinked curls also allowed Nesbit to be marketed as exotically foreign. Much like the Kardashians, she made her race an alluring question rather than a certainty. On Broadway she played ‘a Spanish maiden’ and Vashti the gypsy girl; one of her many newspaper nicknames was ‘The Little Sphinx’. She was frequently photographed in Turkish costume or representing the beauties of the ancient world: Nefertiti, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Sibyl, Psyche, a Homeric Siren, or the goddess Venus. Perhaps the most scandalously famous image was of Nesbit wrapped in a Japanese kimono, snoozing on a polar bear rug. It screamed oriental* eroticism and became key evidence in the so-called ‘Trial of the Century’, which we’ll get to shortly.
In most American states, the legal age of sexual consent ranged between ten and twelve years old, but the late-nineteenth-century ‘social purity movement’ argued for sixteen.2 It means that, even by the standards of the day, Evelyn Nesbit was considered a vulnerable child by many. And yet she became a living fantasy; many women desired her looks, while many men simply desired her. Irving S. Cobb described Nesbit as ‘the most exquisitely lovely human being I ever looked at … the slim quick grace of a fawn, a head that sat on her flawless throat as a lily on its stem, eyes that were the colour of blue-brown pansies and the size of half-dollars; a mouth made of rumpled rose petals’. It’s the language of artistic beauty, yes, but also of physical attraction. It’s unsettlingly creepy.
Here, I must warn you. The next stage in her story is marked by sexual violence, and it is truly upsetting. In 1901, Evelyn Nesbit was groomed by a wealthy architect three times her age. Stanford White was a married socialite with a plush penthouse, and he pursued Nesbit, and charmed her mother, over a number of dates. One night, he got Evelyn drunk then raped her while she was unconscious. Despite the traumatic assault, they continued sharing a bed for months thereafter. Eventually, Evelyn began to date other men, but was railroaded into an abusive relationship with a virginity-obsessed heir to a railroad fortune, Harry Kendall Thaw. He had a long history of violent instability, regularly injected cocaine, and drew sadistic sexual pleasure from savagely whipping women.
Thaw was also already locked in a feud with Stanford White – whom he accused of trying to freeze him out from high-society parties – before Evelyn disclosed the rape. Now aware of how she’d been assaulted, Thaw convinced Evelyn to join him on a European tour. The bizarre itinerary involved dragging her to historical sites associated with famous Catholic virgins, including Joan of Arc. Obsessed with the fact that Evelyn’s virginity had been stolen by the man he despised, Thaw took out his rage on his vulnerable young partner – he locked Evelyn in an Austrian castle and spent a fortnight torturing and sexually assaulting her. It was an utterly horrific experience, but Evelyn was terrified of falling back into poverty, and had lost touch with her newly remarried mother, so perhaps felt her only option was to marry her abuser.
Thaw wasn’t fully content. He still seethed, perceiving White’s rape of Evelyn as a despoilment of his wife, and thus an insult to him. In June 1906, while they all watched a show in the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden, Thaw pulled out a pistol, screamed: ‘You ruined my wife!’, and shot White three times in the head. The resulting ‘Trial of the Century’ was actually two trials, and saw the family spend a vast sum of money on lawyers and doctors to ensure Thaw got away with murder, citing temporary insanity as his defence. Evelyn Nesbit testified on his behalf, having been promised financial security by Thaw’s mother. Evelyn Nesbit’s celebrity had initially been based on her ambiguous beauty, but the trial shifted the public’s fascination with her to more melodramatic themes of sexuality, crime, and deviance.
But let’s leave the horror behind and return to what made her so famous in the first place – her beauty. Nesbit’s oval face was structurally gorgeous, with a soft chin and a sloping hint of cheekbones. If she’d walked into a Hollywood clinic today, a cosmetic surgeon might puff out their cheeks and scratch their head before suggesting a minor tweak to her slightly snubbed nose, although it was famously perfect in profile. Indeed, such was her beauty, she modelled as a ‘Gibson Girl’ – a series of hugely influential pen-and-ink drawings by Charles Dana Gibson depicting the ideal upper-middle-class woman – and she was dubbed the ‘modern Helen [of Troy]’ by a noted columnist. But rather than launching a thousand ships, her face propelled products into the marketplace. In the words of her biographer, Paula Uruburu,3 Evelyn’s ‘evocative and soon familiar face launched any number of advertising campaigns as canny entrepreneurs began to capitalize on her uncanny ability to appeal to both sexes and appear chaste and alluring at the same time’.
Nesbit wasn’t just a pretty face. Her delicate body also came to usurp the buxom, busty women of the ‘Gay Nineties’ from their fashion throne. As she later wrote in her memoirs: ‘I was smaller, slenderer; a type artists and, as I learned later, older, more experienced men admired. I had discovered in the studios that artists cared little for the big-breasted, heavy-hipped, corseted figure, preferring to paint the freer, more sinuous, uncorseted one with natural, unspoiled lines.’4 Once artists proposed that her slighter frame be the new paragon of loveliness, popular culture followed suit. Gorgeous glamour was no longer about voluptuousness, or the performative fertility of wide hips and narrow waists. By the early 1900s, when Evelyn ruled the fashion pages from her precarious roost, it was adolescent jeunesse that came to dominate. The ideal woman was barely a woman at all.
Every year, without fail, I stumble across an article about perfect human beauty, and I always end up reading it, if only in the desperate hope that skinny, weasel-faced men will finally come into vogue, and I can saunter through London with the confidence of a musclebound Adonis. Still waiting on that, sadly. These articles aren’t your standard profiles of shirtless Hollywood dreamboats, or sun-kissed supermodels. Instead, I’m referring to a genre of celebrity journalism that photoshops various body parts into a composite image of ultimate beauty. They’re usually the result of some PR agency having quizzed the public about which bits of famous people they really fancy, or are jealous of, and the result is the journo equivalent of that 1980s movie Weird Science, in which two horny teens design a perfect girlfriend on the computer, and then she magically comes to life in a sort of nerdy, hormonal Pygmalion tribute, but with bonus lingerie modelling.
Invariably, this stitching together of stunning bits of flesh gets annually updated as new beauties replace ageing stars. In a 2014 Marie Claire article,5 British women declared the ideal woman to be an amalgam of Cara Delevingne, Jennifer Aniston, Kate Middleton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Emma Watson, and Elle Macpherson, suggesting that aspirational beauty is apparently the preserve of thin, white, enabled people who shop at Whole Foods. While we might assume popular beauty is the privilege of twenty-something youth, the readers of Marie Claire selected three celebrities in their forties or fifties, presumably because they were drawn to women of their own age who might serve as role models. But if the same voters were polled again, some ten years later, would a sixty-something still play a part in the human Megazord of hotness?* Perhaps not.
Throughout history, celebrity bodies have been examined as public spectacles, and the ageing process has been part of that experience. Modern celebrities, however, refuse to age like the rest of us. The stunning beauties in Marie Claire’s Frankenstein look ten years younger than the age on their passports. The modern star can draw upon an arsenal of clock-stopping cheats, including special diets, detoxes, plastic surgery, Botox, plumpers, expensive moisturisers, personal trainers, and extreme yoga sessions. Defying gravity and resisting the ageing process is pretty much their full-time job; plus, they’re often ridiculously beautiful to begin with. Meanwhile, we ordinary people frantically scramble from one exhausting work or family obligation to another, just trying to avoid getting yoghurt stains on our crotch. Celebrities are our aspirational trendsetters, the people we are meant to emulate, and we spend a fortune on products, treatments, clothes, and faddy cookbooks in a doomed effort to look like them, forgetting that the game is rigged against us.
But these are modern times. The superstars of yesteryear were much more easily ravaged by Mother Nature’s prolonged campaign, and aged much like everyone else, though they weren’t above a cheeky bit of Victorian photoshop to hide it. Making her London debut already having birthed two sprogs, Sarah Siddons began her acting career as a beautiful, curvaceous woman, but gained weight after multiple pregnancies. Though much beloved as the nation’s theatrical matriarch, satirical cartoons ruthlessly rendered her with plump limbs and a triple chin.6 She was still greatly distinguished as an artist, but there’s no doubting some commenters lamented her changing body and spluttered in disgust when she played young characters. The same applied to Emma Hamilton, famed mistress of Lord Nelson, whose curvaceousness became increasingly exaggerated in satirical cartoons as she gained post-pregnancy weight. What once was bountifully sexy became laughably monstrous.7
By contrast, France’s Sarah Bernhardt was deemed to be much too thin. One joke went: ‘When she gets in the bath, the level of the water goes down!’8 Bernhardt’s body also stoked further interest in later life, when she elected to have her right leg amputated at the knee in 1915, following decades of terrible pain. Unable to wear a prosthetic or walk with crutches, she took to being carried in a litter, which suited her queenly image rather well, and she continued stage work from a wheelchair. Tellingly, the severed leg became a celebrity relic; a sort of secular equivalent to saintly bones, as if it were still imbued with her original talent. Dubious stories recount an American showman offering $100,000 to display it to the eager public, to which she’s alleged to have cheekily replied: ‘If it’s my right leg you want, see the doctors; if it’s the left leg, see my manager in New York.’*
Was her lopped-off limb really worth so much? Maybe, but it wasn’t the leg’s uniqueness that made it special. It was, after all, just a leg. A Bernhardt arm or foot might’ve been just as lucrative. The only reason people gave a hoot was because these body parts were attached to her, and she was a cultural phenomenon. Her physicality became interesting because she was famous, whereas Evelyn Nesbit became famous because of her physicality.
Regardless of why we care, celebrity bodies fascinate us, they allow us to not just ogle those we fancy but also hunt for clues about the private individual hidden behind the flashbulb persona. Celebrity bodies also dazzle us with their unique differences, the things that draw the eye or seem uncommonly alluring. Plus, sometimes there’s that equalising moment when biology betrays the glitzy megastar and the sneaky paparazzo shot captures their sweat patches and acne. Celebrity bodies are often soaring Himalayan peaks to gaze up at in staggered awe, but sometimes we love to attack them as embarrassing eyesores, if only to make ourselves feel better about our own wobbly bits.
Sarah Bernhardt’s Franco-Polish compatriot was the lavishly dressed Anna Held. She was all about winking innuendo, and her biggest song was called ‘Won’t You Come and Play With Me?’, which was delivered with faux innocence in an outrageous Gallic accent, while she cavorted suggestively across the stage. Held was also proud of her eighteen-inch waist and showed it off in photos (curiously, she didn’t get the same skinny jokes as Bernhardt), yet her biggest physical asset was her huge brown eyes.9 From early on, she’d noticed that people were particularly entranced by them; they were the wide, oval peepers you’d see on a Disney princess. Quickly she began to use them as gimmicks in her act, rolling them flirtatiously as a new weapon of comedic entrancement.
It soon became obvious that she needed to champion her best asset in song too. The classic ditty that lodged in the public consciousness was titled ‘I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave’. Here’s the chorus:
For I just can’t make my eyes behave
Two bad brown eyes I am their slave,
My lips may say run away from me
But my eyes say come and play with me,
And you won’t blame poor little me,
I’m sure, ’cuz I just can’t make my eyes behave.
Notice how the lyrics refer back to her earlier catchphrase, ‘Come and play with me’. That’s proper brand synergy, there. Classy stuff.
Meanwhile, another French stunner was gracing the stages of London, Paris, and New York, though this one didn’t sing. Cléo de Mérode was a classically trained ballerina whose elegant poses were often eclipsed by her photogenic face. Indeed, she wasn’t even the best dancer in her company, let alone France, but her beauty mesmerised audiences and saw her catapulted to celebrity status when eminent photographers, such as Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (who worked under the much cooler name of Nadar), came knocking. Mérode’s most distinctive physical trait was her hair; Nadar and other photographers captured her staring down the lens with a cascade of dark curls fanning out messily across her shoulders and then being pinned higher up by an elaborate Renaissance-looking hairband, or ‘bandeau’. She was part Lady Guinevere, part Mona Lisa, and 100 per cent enchanting.
As Mérode’s biographer, Michael D. Garval, recounts,10 she swiftly became a trendsetter. And not just for humans, either. One source innocently describes how, ‘A wife who catches the “fad” does her hair, her daughters’ [hair], and her poodle’s [fur] in this way.’11 Much more alarming was the doctor who reported: ‘the craze for wearing the hair à la Mérode … was the cause of [a] tragic mania, for the ladies who followed the prevailing mode were able to supplant others in the affections of their lovers, and this led to a wave of crime which horrified all Paris’.12 The result, apparently, was jealous women destroying their rivals’ beauty by throwing acid in their faces. It’s not often you see a paragraph that starts with poodle hairstyles and ends with such appalling violence. Such is the bizarre drama of celebrity.
Within a few months of Mérode’s ascent, in 1896, she courted scandal by allegedly appearing nude in a play, and then posing for Alexandre Falguière, whose nude sculpture of her, La Danseuse, caused quite a palaver by showing absolutely everything. Here was an instantly recognisable celebrity posing sans togs – not even a drape of fabric to cover her modesty – and it sexualised her brand with a jolt. Rumours circulated that Cléo de Mérode was the mistress of King Leopold II of Belgium – their celebrity couple name at the time was the truly excellent portmanteau, Cléopold – and it was a gossip story that refused to die. There had to be fire where there was smoke, no? Anyway, you’re probably thinking you know the Cléo de Mérode appeal: lovely hair, naked statue, sex scandal … But, the body part most associated with Mérode wasn’t her tumbling hair. It was what was hidden beneath.
For a short period, Mérode possessed the world’s most fascinating ears. People were obsessed by them; what did they look like? Did she not have any? Were they tiny? Were they massive? Were they deformed? Why did she always hide them under her hair? Was she saving them for a future husband? Or for her regal lover, Leopold?! In Garval’s words: ‘On both sides of the Atlantic, the press bandied about specious claims and deceiving pictures, in an orgy of misinformation, misrepresentation, and innuendo. Some prints and postcards sexualized her ears, transforming them into female genitalia … Contradictory depictions cast her as charming ingenue or frightful degenerate.’13 Her ears became the site of bizarre, eroticised, dangerous conspiracy theories.
How did a ballet dancer’s ears become such a strange obsession? As several scholars have noted, stardom’s arresting power often lurks in the tantalising gap between what’s made public and what’s kept private; fans feel intimately connected to celebs, so things that are deliberately withheld become all-consuming obsessions. Such gaps in the knowledge can deeply frustrate the admirer, it’s like reading a whodunnit only to discover the final chapter is missing. Hiding such information can be hugely powerful as a promotional tactic. It didn’t matter that literally every inch of her naked body was apparently visible, what mattered was the shape of Mérode’s ears … OH, HER EARS! WHY DID SHE TAUNT EVERYONE SO!
The more she hid them, the more people stared. And she noticed. Mérode began playing a cunning promotional game, maintaining her innocence and never confirming any of the sexy scandals. Perhaps it was another actress who’d posed nude for the sculpture? Perhaps she’d worn a flesh-coloured body stocking in that play? Perhaps she’d only once met Leopold in a theatre, and it was a mere passing greeting? She let the stories linger, allowing the flames of intrigue to crackle before occasionally damping them down to preserve her modesty. Despite allegations of harlotry and royal romps, her bestselling photos continued to advertise romanticised, Renaissance beauty; her image was pure while her reputation was salacious. There was a weird disconnect in her brand. And so people fixated on unlocking the mystery by examining what she chose to hide.
When Mérode arrived in New York in the autumn of 1897, the newspapers went potty. Several interviews were published, excitedly revealing dogged efforts to answer the vital question:
A World representative pleaded with her for a glimpse of her ear. She laughed and made two or three little passes of her hand as if to lift the bandeaux, then coquettishly said it was ridiculous, and the bandeaux remained in place. More pleading and then the bandeaux were raised just a trifle and a wee bit of rose-tinted flesh was seen nestling in the golden-brown tresses. It was a lobe at least, that much can be testified to. Further pleadings were useless. With a pretty frown, Cleo changed the subject.14
As if to ram home the power of their exclusive (n)ear-miss, the paper published an artist’s impression of the moment her tiny lobe made its brief appearance. They must have been delighted. Aha! A tangible sliver of intel on her most cloistered secret. Alas, they soon found themselves scooped by the New York Journal’s full-ear portrait (yes, really!), done by the paper’s resident artist, who’d seen it up close: ‘she shows one ear “white and pink, delicate as a shell, and close to the head” which the artist sketched, before she noted that “her ear is not concealed always for she has all sorts of headdresses on stage.” She then exposed her other ear saying “I have refused to show my ears to others who have made the same request, because it seems a very inconsequential request …”’
For whatever reason, Cléo de Mérode had at last surrendered her powerful secret. And it proved to be no great revelation at all – it was just an ear, like any other! Such a disappointing revelation was to her cost. Mérode’s innate appeal to American audiences was her paradoxical duality: she represented both European sophistication and French sexual liberalism. Thigh-rubbing New Yorkers flocked to watch her perform, hoping for the alluring charade of high art masking erotic kink. But Mérode’s dancing didn’t match her reputation. Audiences were visibly deflated to witness an elegant ballerina doing pliés when they’d presumably hoped for the can-can. Without her eroticised ears, and the mystery of her authentic self, she was just a pretty lady shuffling around a stage in soft shoes.
The newspapers weren’t kind: ‘Cléo de Mérode’s coming to New York was awaited by all the chappies anxiously. She came. The telegrams announced that her reception was a frost. The explanation comes now. Her style of dancing is pronounced chaste. The chappies look upon it as a swindle.’15 The Los Angeles Times was equally damning: ‘Poor little Cleo! … She was applauded … out of pure sympathy. As she stood on one side of the stage in a helpless attitude … she looked the martyr … a victim of her own notoriety. The spectacle was a pathetic one. It is difficult to understand why Cléo de Mérode was ever brought here, and why all this fuss was made.’16 Just as Vesta Tilley had worried she’d been overhyped on her debut US tour, Mérode had set the bar too high. A backlash was inevitable.
In Chapter 4 we saw that sometimes stars painted their own image, and sometimes the public grabbed its own canvas to produce something much more lurid. Mérode had offered her hair as the story, only for everyone to obsess over her ears instead. Oscar Wilde’s physical androgyny also provoked curiosity: his lofty height and broad chest corresponded to male archetypes, but his lisping speech, long dark hair, beguiling face, lips as ‘full and as bright as a girl’s’, ‘extremely beautiful’ eyes, and skin ‘so clear and beautiful that the maidens may well grow green with envy’ all hinted at scandalous effeminacy.17 His body emitted confusing signals. On the one hand, he seemed a hip-swivelling babe magnet, celebrated in a popular song, ‘Oscar Dear!’, that told of his forwardness with the ladies. Everywhere he went, flowers were sent to him by adoring female fans. And yet his beauty was a signpost to crowds of messenger boys who gathered around him too. His fandom was erotically charged at both the heterosexual and homosexual poles.18
Hair kickstarted Mérode’s career, and it played a vital role in the rise of the Hollywood goddess Veronica Lake too. The famous stunner with the husky voice and cold blue eyes was a natural beauty; her razor-sharp cheekbones sloped vertiginously down like alpine ski slopes. But it wasn’t enough just to be pretty, Hollywood PR gave a bit of a push too. The most obvious tweak was her name. She’d originally been Constance Ockelman – a name best suited to your grandma’s friend from the bridge club – and then she changed it to Constance Keane – your grandma’s hairdresser – until the producer Arthur Hornblow Jr (another great name!) stared into her magnetic eyes and noted they were ‘calm and clear like a blue lake’.19
And thus Veronica Lake was invented. But the gimmick with the most impact was her peek-a-boo hair, which arrived entirely by accident. During filming on her breakout 1941 movie, I Wanted Wings, her elbow slipped on the table while she was playing a sloppy drunk; the jerky motion caused her fine-stranded hair to tumble over the right side of her face, shading it like a softly billowing curtain. The camera instantly fell in love. Just as Cléo de Mérode posed a question by hiding her ears, Veronica Lake’s veiled eye suggested a seductive secret.
Lake spent much of her career partially hidden behind that famous blonde mane, with the hairstyle becoming so iconic it acquired multiple nicknames: the Peeping Pompadour, the Detour Coiffure, the Strip-Tease Hair-Do, and the Peek-a-boo Bang, all of which sound like brilliant titles for thrillers in which Lake seduces the private detective investigating her hubby’s suspicious death. The studio publicity gurus soon realised Lake’s hair was the focus of her erotic power, and they leaned in hard. In November 1941, just weeks before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Life magazine published a bizarrely detailed article declaring that her head boasted 150,000 hairs of 0.024 inches in cross-section; and her tresses were 17 inches long in the front, and 24 at the back, falling 8 inches below her shoulders. She shampooed twice each day, then again using hair oil, then rinsed in vinegar before setting and styling it into its famously pendulous waves.20
With such detailed instructions delivered into their laps, women scrambled to imitate the Lake look. Soon, however, many of her fans were called to do their patriotic duty in factories, as the American war machine clattered noisily into life, but it was something of a health and safety nightmare having ladies working with explosives and rivet-guns while hair dangled across their eyes. Presumably alerted to the risk, Lake did her bit for the war effort by putting her hair up, and appearing in public safety films, so her mimicking fans wouldn’t have their ears ripped off by chuntering machines.21 Nevertheless, for much of the 1940s Lake’s career was intimately tied to mesmerising coiffure. Though a talented actress – I love her performance in Sullivan’s Travels – she excelled at blonde vamp with an air of dangerous mystery; her peek-a-boo haircut was a cinematic threat that often delivered on its promise.
Lake had phenomenal tresses, but the silver screen’s greatest hair toss surely belonged to another. In the 1946 hit movie Gilda, there’s a scene where the casino boss, Ballin, walks his new business associate, Johnny, into a bedroom and asks: ‘Gilda, are you decent?’ The camera cuts to an empty frame; then, suddenly, it’s filled from below by an astonishing beauty, flipping her lustrous curls back over her head, before launching an atomic smile. Her eyes sparkle. She speaks only one word: ‘Me?’ Her voice is resonant, rich and deep. The camera cuts back to a dumbstruck Johnny. Gilda sees him and instinctually pulls a thin bra strap up over her shoulder. Her radiant smile hardens into a powerful, fierce expression; then she unleashes a deliciously saucy line: ‘Sure, I’m decent.’ The tension in that line is palpable. Turns out, Gilda and Johnny used to be lovers, but Ballin doesn’t know …
This is how the Hollywood goddess Rita Hayworth makes her entrance into the film, with four short words and a parabolic arc of gorgeous curls, and it’s one of the hottest moments in the entire history of cinema.* Seriously, google it. Rita Hayworth had the looks to stop both traffic and hearts. She was the pin-up on the walls of army barracks, and the literal bombshell beauty painted onto the atomic weapon dropped on Bikini Atoll in 1946. She defined glamour for a decade.
And yet that image was so carefully manufactured that she spent a lifetime lamenting the yawning chasm between her movie star persona and her private reality. She would frequently sigh: ‘Men go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me.’22 Rita was nothing like the sizzling seductress on the big screen: she was a ‘shy siren’, a quiet, kind, diligent professional with a tragic backstory. The journalist Leonard Michaels accidentally misquoted her pithy line about Gilda and instead made it about her: ‘A man goes to bed with Rita Hayworth and wakes up with me.’ It was a misfire that accidentally hit the bull’s-eye; as it turns out, Rita Hayworth was just as much a fiction as Gilda.
Until 1937, she’d been someone else: Margarita Carmen Cansino, daughter of a Spanish dancer named Eduardo Cansino and an Irish-American vaudeville showgirl, Volga Hayworth. With such parentage, it’s no surprise that Margarita possessed natural talent. She became her father’s dance partner very young, and troubling evidence suggests Eduardo made her perform as his ‘wife’ when she was only twelve.23 The ‘Dancing Cansinos’ performed with moderate success in LA and Mexico, and, barely out of her teens, Margarita quickstepped into the movies in 1935, but could only land background parts or dancing roles. She wanted to act, but studio executives saw no star potential. In Hollywood, Margarita was the wrong type of pretty. She was too curvy, too dusky. To be blunt, she looked too Mexican. So how did she end up as the red-headed pin-up girl?
In 1937, aged just eighteen, she married a much older businessman, Edward Judson, who hatched a plan to rebrand his new wife:
This modern Pygmalion took his Galatea in hand and transformed her … He used the same business principles to sell Rita that he employed to sell automobiles and oil contracts. He mapped out each step of his wife’s campaign just as he would map out a sales campaign … Step No. 1 will be self-improvement. Step No. 2 will be self-display. Step No. 3 will be making a name for yourself. Step No. 4 will be getting the right roles and keeping you smack before the public so that you’ll be ‘hot’ at the box office.24
Steps 1 and 2 in the stardom blueprint were radical. Margarita Cansino became Rita Hayworth – taking her mother’s maiden name – but it was no Superman transformation in a convenient phone booth; she didn’t just remove her spectacles like the hot nerd in a high-school romcom. Instead, Hayworth underwent a gruelling physical metamorphosis.
Hollywood was one of the earliest adopters of cosmetic surgery, and plenty of performers were coercively reshaped into more marketable beauties, either to launch a career or to halt the ageing process. Gloria Swanson was told to get a nose job (she refused, though she later had lots of work done), Marilyn Monroe had her nose and chin fixed, Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo had their teeth straightened, Marlene Dietrich had her wisdom teeth yanked out so her cheekbones sharpened and her mouth sunk into a pout, and an ageing Mary Pickford had a facelift that allegedly hampered her ability to smile. And it wasn’t just the women; Rudolph Valentino had his ears pinned to ensure his screen success, and Dean Martin had his nose reshaped.25
Margarita’s dark hair was dyed to Gilda’s famous copper, paying homage to her mother’s Irish heritage; she dieted hard so that her legs seemed to lengthen as her waist shrank; her voice was strengthened with frequent diction and singing lessons; and, most painful of all, she endured at least two years of painful electrolysis to lift her hairline, extending her forehead so that her Bambi-wide eyes had more real estate to dominate. Finally, she donned the mask of the glamour icon, including her trademark scarlet lips and nails. She didn’t bleach her skin, as is sometimes reported, but Hayworth did – in subtler ways – realign her ethnicity from Latina to white. It was an erasure of her Hispanic identity in search of a more widely accepted, North European beauty.
And yet none of this was a secret. In her surprising analysis, Adrienne L. McLean shows26 that Hayworth and Judson publicly discussed the rebrand, and continued to mention it years later: ‘I had to be sold to the public just like a breakfast cereal or a real estate development or something new in ladies’ wear.’ Hayworth not only failed to cover the tracks, she erected neon flashing signposts pointing to the cover-up. Yes, her name and body were dramatically whitewashed, but in February 1940 – in her first major appearance for a national magazine – she smiled out from the cover of Look with a garland of red flowers in her tousled black hair, accessorised with red lipstick and red strapless dress, and clutched in her hands, as if midway through an energetic rhumba, were two large red maracas. Yup, that’s right, big ol’ Spanish maracas! She might as well have been photographed drinking sangria with Picasso while riding a bull and eating paella.
That was the cover image. Yet the four-page photoset inside the magazine revealed the new, red-headed Rita. The cover girl and the interviewee were seemingly different people; when she landed dancing roles with Fred Astaire, the fan magazines were quick to point out that her father was a noted Latin dancer. This became the intriguing promotional strategy of ‘brand Rita Hayworth’. She would simultaneously be both Rita and Margarita; white and Latina; exotic and American; her father’s abused daughter and her husband’s project. Her ethnic identity would become contested territory, depending on the role she needed to play that week. And, throughout it all, she’d be projected on massive screens as the epitome of sexual confidence, and having her body transformed into the site of a million erotic fantasies, while the real woman struggled with romantic heartbreak and battered self-esteem.
As Hayworth sashayed towards the hair dye in a successful effort to code as white European, meanwhile, thousands of miles away, a white actress was playing popular Indian characters. Oh, and she wasn’t sashaying – she was somersaulting with a whip in her hand. Born in Australia to Scottish and Greek parents, but raised in Bombay (now Mumbai), Mary Ann Evans was a voluptuous stuntwoman with flowing blonde locks, sparkling blue eyes, and pale skin. She looked like a Valkyrie ready to swoop down on some mythological Viking battlefield, and yet this powerful beauty became a box office sensation in Indian nationalist cinema, where she thrived as the fantastically named Fearless Nadia.
While Rita Hayworth was totally convincing as a newly blossomed Celtic rose, Nadia’s race was much more detectable. In fact, she barely bothered with a makeover. She was clearly whiter than Donald Trump’s untanned buttocks, but that didn’t seem to be a problem. Though Neepa Majumdar’s research has shown her skin was sometimes darkened in early posters, on camera she refused to wear a dark wig, pointing out that nobody would be fooled. She was right. Her white, Western beauty was a draw, not a hindrance, even though she played proudly Asian characters.
India’s vibrant film industry had launched early in the century, importing technical staff from Germany to ensure high production standards, and it had developed its own roster of screen talent – the Jewish-Indian silent film actress Sulochana (real name Ruby Myers), Leela Chitnis (first to do a soap advert!), and the stunning Devika Rani, who married the big-shot producer Himanshu Rai – but none were true movie stars because it wasn’t until the mid-1940s that actors like Ashok Kumar reached a new height of film celebrity to match Hollywood’s studio system.
But that’s not to say Indian moviegoers didn’t know what cinematic celebrity was; they knew thanks to imported Hollywood films featuring superstars like Douglas Fairbanks, whose off-screen romances were of equal interest to his action-crammed stunt films. It was his success that inspired an Indian genre of inspirational stunt movies, and, in 1935, Fearless Nadia made her lead debut in Hunterwali as one such all-action heroine. It was a monster hit. She played a princess who becomes a masked vigilante, taking on the bad guys and fighting social oppression while jumping over carriages and cracking her whip; she was basically a cross between Wonder Woman and Indiana Jones, with the body of an Olympic hammer-thrower. It was quite the combo – and it worked.
Despite looking white European, she was immediately seized upon by audiences as a potent nationalist symbol in a time of resistance to British colonialism. Her catchphrase, ‘Hey-y-y-y!’, echoed through the streets, as proud Indians giddily responded to her feisty brand of justifiable rebellion, and branded merchandise was sold in shops. A white woman thus became an unexpected icon of Indian defiance against white colonialism. And the surprises don’t end there.
During her successful career, her gender identity was also playfully mixed; she wore traditional saris, donned makeup, and sported jewellery, and yet she also played roles normally reserved for men, spending her movies running around with weapon in hand, riding horses and punching bad guys atop moving trains, all the while showing off her sturdy thighs and toned arms in an array of high-cropped shorts and rolled-up sleeves. She was Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn combined; a kickass beefcake with a steely moral character, both Robin Hood and the feisty virangana heroines of traditional Indian folklore. Nadia was a fascinating blend of competing ideas: white, Indian, male, female, beautiful, rugged, strong, and sensitive. Plus, she kicked like a mule.27
Fearless Nadia and Rita Hayworth entered the movie biz in the same year, and became compelling visual symbols. But, for all their success, neither got to keep her true identity. Rita never really managed to be Margarita, despite her constant allusions to the makeover, and – in an Indian film industry that hadn’t yet adopted the star system – Mary Ann Evans’s personal backstory formed no part of Fearless Nadia’s brand, and nor did her private romances. Both women found fame as glamorous ciphers; for Hayworth it was a painful victory, for Evans it was a largely anonymous one. They became beauty icons, their bodies studied by millions of people who gazed up at massive projections and perhaps fantasised about what it would be like to kiss them, or be them; but their true selves remained hidden. Their bodies were elaborate fiction.
From celebrities heralded for their alluring bodies, we’ll move on to those whose physicality made them objects of cruel interrogation. As with Evelyn Nesbit, I’m afraid these stories are upsetting, and focus on racial exploitation and bodily trauma.
Born in the Dutch Cape of South Africa, sometime in the 1770s, Sara Baartman (also known as Saartjie, a Dutch nickname for a servant girl, and later baptised as Sarah) was a Khoikhoi woman, with light-brown skin, whose real birthname is lost to us.28 Indeed, so much of her identity is the product of colonial ideas imposed upon her. Her early life has proven very elusive, though Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully have had a valiant crack at unmasking it. Even with all the missing evidence, the story weighs heavy with sorrow. She lost both parents very young, mourned at least three infant children, and may have been coerced into sex work. We know that she moved to Cape Town after a failed romance, whereupon she entered into lowly domestic service and breastfed her master’s child. She wasn’t enslaved, but it was a life of undignified servility.
Baartman enters historical record with more certainty in 1810, when she apparently agreed – though did she understand the deal? – to travel to London with a free black master, Hendrik Cesars, and the ringleader of the operation, Dr Alexander Dunlop, a white British surgeon with pound signs flashing in his eyes. The plan was exploitatively lucrative. Baartman would be displayed as a scientific curiosity under the stage name of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, a label fusing the Roman love goddess with a racist term for the Khoikhoi people. There were already many thousands of black people walking Britain’s streets, including the celebrity boxer Bill Richmond, so her skin tone wasn’t rare enough to sustain a celebrity career on its own. Indeed, Britain had already met at least three ‘Hottentot women’ who’d earned notoriety for converting to Christianity. Dunlop and Cesars knew they needed a novel angle. And they found a nastily effective gimmick.
Scientists* of the time were just beginning to develop new ideas of race, and were particularly keen on affixing theories of bodily abnormality to women of Khoikhoi heritage; they were renowned for having buttocks and thighs that were enlarged with fatty deposits, causing the bottom to project outwards at a 90-degree angle. These men of science also claimed Khoikhoi women had elongated vulvas, known as a ‘Khoikhoi apron’, which hung down around four inches between the legs. It’s horrible, but Baartman’s promotional materials would describe this as being like the loose skin of a turkey’s neck. Baartman was an intelligent and charming woman who, to drum up business in a bustling metropolis, was to be exhibited as a living curiosity – an example of the Khoikhoi’s ‘otherness’.
Baartman arrived in London in 1810 and quickly became a celebrity, though certainly without the glamour we might usually associate with the term. Within eighteen months, people could watch a Christmas pantomime about her, or play card games with her image printed on the deck, or see her advertised in newspapers, or hear her name sung in ballads and poems, or read about her in magazines. She may even have inspired Jane Austen to write a West Indian character called Miss Lambe in her unfinished novel, Sanditon.29
Baartman performed in Piccadilly to inquisitive crowds which responded to adverts, in such papers as the Morning Herald, that promised: ‘Public will have an opportunity of judging how far she exceeds any description given by historians of that tribe of the human race. She is inhabited in the dress of her country, with all the rude ornaments usually worn by those people. She has been seen by the principal literati in this Metropolis, who were all greatly astonished, as well as highly gratified, with the sight of so wonderful a specimen of the human race.’
Baartman’s large buttocks made her an easy target for satire, though she wasn’t always the sole target of the joke. Coincidentally, the government at the time was nicknamed the ‘Broad-Bottom Ministry’, giving a perfect opportunity for satirists to show politicians like William Wyndham Grenville standing next to her, with his exaggerated metaphorical derriere mirroring her famed curves.30 Another cartoon showed her weighed down with gold trinkets, as a saucy Duke of Clarence – the future King William IV – begs her to marry him. At first glance, we might assume the rich prince has bestowed gold and jewels on her as part of his wooing strategy. Not so. He’d recently dumped the famous Irish actress Dorothy Jordan – after two decades of love had produced ten children – to find a rich wife who could clear his massive debts.* The image doesn’t show him chucking money at Baartman; it shows him begging for some of hers. It’s a surprise inversion of the ‘gold-digger’ trope.
Besides kicking unpopular royals while they were down, this joke reveals that celebrities were assumed to be as rich as princes. Celebrity and aristocracy jostled for the same space. The sad truth, of course, was Baartman wasn’t rich at all. Though they resided in a very fancy house in St James’s, and she performed in Piccadilly’s grand Egyptian Hall, what cash she earned during her four-year London residency was most likely going to her managers. The joke was unfounded. Indeed, it was doubly wrong because she had no sexual entanglement with the bankrupt duke either. Her appearance in this cartoon might simply have been a coded way to attack him for an alleged affair with another black woman called Wowski, with whom he’d supposedly bunked up on his ship home from Jamaica. Baartman was merely a new stick with which to beat an old target.
How did she feel about such associations? Was she ever an active participant, or was she a tragic victim of Cesars and Dunlop’s machinations? We know it was her name, not theirs, listed as the copyright owner on her most famous posters; was this her asserting creative control? Perhaps. But maybe it was just Dunlop creating the illusion of independence to avoid legal scrutiny. We do see some evidence of Sara’s agency: she steadfastly refused to be naked during her performances, and never allowed examination of her private parts; she retained what modesty she could by wearing a tight body stocking and jewellery. Though her performances involved audiences callously prodding her buttocks with sharp fingers and pointy parasols, she didn’t just stand there, inert and terrified, but performed music and dance, playing the harp and engaging with the crowds as best she could. She certainly tried to be judged as a skilled musician and dancer, even if the audience only cared about her physique.
Despite her best efforts, audiences were often cruel. In 1810, the famous actors John Kemble and Charles Mathews angrily disrupted a viewing of Baartman after the crowd rushed to grope her. She was greatly appreciative of their compassion; perhaps it took fellow celebrities to recognise the horror of an invasive crowd? More likely, they simply saw the grim reality of the situation.31 Mathews and Kemble certainly seem to have witnessed something seedier than the usual theatre mob hectoring a beautiful actress. Soon after, Baartman found even more determined champions leaping to her aid.
In 1807, the government in the United Kingdom had banned the slave trade, and it was anti-slavery campaigners, noticing her obvious discomfort, who tried to prove she was being held in enforced captivity by Hendrik Cesars and Dr Dunlop. But the legal inquiry, conducted partially in Dutch to help her give evidence, heard from Baartman’s own mouth that she wanted to be in England, was earning a salary, and had entered voluntarily into a six-year deal. The contract was produced as evidence. Historians understandably question this controversial testimony, with some warning that Dunlop may have loomed intimidatingly in the interview room, directing her answers. Frustratingly, these few words are literally all we have of her first-hand thoughts, and they may not have been her thoughts at all. Either way, the case collapsed. Sara Baartman was judged to be a celebrity, not an enslaved person being held illegally.
Eventually, after an underwhelming tour around Ireland and the UK, during which she was baptised as Sarah with an ‘h’, their business arrangement fell apart. In 1814, Baartman was brought to Paris by a new manager, Henry Taylor, where she repeated the act and finally agreed to be painted partially nude for medical scientists, but she remained determined to shield her genitals from these men. Paris initially welcomed their newly imported novelty, but they had their own stuff going on – most notably, the dramatic fall, exile, and sudden return of the egomaniacal Emperor Napoleon. ‘The Hottentot Venus’ couldn’t compete with the Battle of Waterloo. Taylor handed Sara on to a new master, Monsieur Réaux, but she soon fell ill. Death came fast, and robbed her of the ability to defend herself from scientific inspection. The vicious obsession with her body was about to enter a new chapter.
France’s leading anatomist, Georges Cuvier, had met Sara Baartman in person, finding her charming and intelligent company, but he now eagerly seized the chance to slice her open. Her brain was removed and weighed, her limbs were severed and defleshed, her organs were extracted, and her vulva – the focus of so much speculation – was cut off and sealed in a jar. Despite having chatted with a multi-lingual woman, who danced and sang and strummed the harp, Cuvier declared the ‘Hottentot Venus’ to be ‘ape-like’; he said she had a skull and ears more like that of an orang-utan than a woman.
Cuvier was one of the most influential scholars of the nineteenth century, and his imprinting of scientific racism onto Baartman’s celebrity body contributed to a legacy of white supremacy that lingered long into the twentieth century. She’d been brought to Europe as an example of a specific people, the Khoikhoi, but Cuvier used her body as supposed ‘proof’ of his racist theory that all people of African heritage were savage, oversexualised, abnormally shaped, and intellectually inferior. Her body had been objectified in life, but in death it was used as a weapon to objectify billions of others. Many years had to pass, and much had to change, before a campaign was launched to rebury Sara Baartman’s bones in her native South Africa. In 2002, she finally returned home and was laid to rest.
In 1883, London played host to a new attraction at the Westminster Aquarium. Krao Farini was a young girl from Laos, then in the Kingdom of Siam, whose face and body were quilted with thick, dark hair. Within eighteen months, Joseph Merrick, known as the ‘Elephant Man’, also went on display. There were many others on the performing circuit, living with a variety of medical conditions, and quite a few who were simply pretending to have unusual bodies. It’s often been argued that the former were victims exploited by hucksters. Indeed, the astonishing box office success of Hollywood’s The Greatest Showman was greeted in some quarters with baffled outrage at the romanticised portrayal of P. T. Barnum, who’s depicted as a tap-dancing, jazz-hands dreamer with woke credentials.
Historians of disability and race have long examined Barnum and his ilk, but not all scholars fully subscribe to the exploitation narrative. Both Robert Bogdan32 and Nadja Durbach have argued that some ‘freaks’ (the word meant ‘marvel’ in the nineteenth century; our modern understanding is more loaded) willingly chose to perform, figuring they’d earn what they could from their unavoidable situation, and asserting some creative control in their marketing, costuming, and performance styles. It’s a sensitive debate, and – as with Sara Baartman – we often lack personal testimony to reassure us that there wasn’t hidden coercion.33
So, how do we feel about Krao? Her story begins in rather extraordinary fashion. The Great Farini (real name William Leonard Hunt) had once been a Canadian tightrope walker, famed for crossing the Niagara Falls, but after moving to London he’d started managing his own acts, and often they were foreign people. In the hunt for more human novelties, he’d dispatched the explorer Carl Bock and the anthropologist Dr George Shelly to the jungles of Thailand, and – long story short, though it’s a particularly long, confusing story – they acquired Krao and her father. When her dad died of cholera, the Siamese king prevented the orphan girl from leaving the country unless Farini was willing to adopt her as his child. He was. She travelled to Britain as Krao Farini, where her life changed dramatically.
Krao wasn’t an ordinary child, but nor was she marketed as just another ‘freak’. Farini had a cunning plan: she was to be advertised as Darwin’s ‘Missing Link’, the mid-point in human evolution between primates and modern people. To convey this primitivist fantasy, Farini said Krao was of a species of ape-people who lived in trees, controlled fire, had an extra row of teeth, as well as pouches in their mouths for storing food, were covered in fur, had extra ribs and vertebrae, lacked nose and ear cartilage, and were hypermobile. Krao wasn’t a human ‘freak’, because ‘freaks’ were exceptions, and Krao was supposedly normal for her species. It was essentially a zoo exhibit. That was Farini’s puffed-up fiction, but of course she’d not been typical back home. Most Siamese kids didn’t have extensive body hair (hypertrichosis).
The ‘Missing Link’ wheeze wasn’t even original. Barnum had got there earlier in the 1860s promoting an African American man called Zip the Pinhead whom he’d dressed up in a monkey suit. Krao’s fur was real, but she was still a fraud. Darwin had just died the year before, and Farini was jumping on the evolution bandwagon, weaponising it for entertainment. Had Darwin lived, he would’ve surely pointed out the specious bullshit in the showman’s press releases; after all, Krao was evidently a bright young girl who was quickly learning to speak German and English, and thus very much not a tree-leaping, poo-flinging simian. With Darwin dead, other scientists and journalists battled to make this abundantly clear, but Farini’s promotional tap dance was just too nimble. That’s the thing about tightrope walkers – they’re hard to knock off balance.
As she reached her pre-teens, Krao Farini’s image was prematurely sexualised in illustrations long before it was appropriate. Her buttocks and thighs were drawn with exaggerated curves, and French posters showed her climbing a tree in just a pair of very tight shorts. As Nadja Durbach notes,34 sexologists at the time associated hairiness with sexual maturity, and so her hirsute body, plus her long flowing hair that grazed her ankles, emitted an erotic charge. This was boosted by Krao being depicted in promotional imagery reclining languorously on her side, like a courtesan in a boudoir. But Krao was barely twelve. She was an orphaned girl removed from her home, a human-trafficking victim who was eroticised and exoticised by her new father for profit. Farini may have thought himself as a loving and decent parent, and Krao was given nice clothes and a good education, but I don’t think I’m alone in finding this story really troubling.
In 1809, a man named Daniel Lambert succumbed to sudden heart failure while staying in an inn. Such a thing must have happened fairly regularly, but there was nothing regular about Lambert. So what was his thing – Acting? Writing? Interpretive dance? Dazzling bagpipe virtuosity? Alas not, his celebrity shtick was being the ‘heaviest man that ever lived’, or at least heaviest in Britain, because he weighed 739lb, or 335kg, or 53 stone, which is quite a lot. In fact, it’s more than the combined weight of the Spice Girls. Lambert’s extraordinary body required extraordinary tailoring, and it was said that his decision to exhibit himself for three years, first in London’s Piccadilly and then on tour, was largely to pay his clothing bill, with each suit costing him a princely £20.
Lambert became a familiar face, and body, in both paintings and satirical prints, his vast girth being used as cartoonish stand-in for John Bull – England’s stout icon of barrel-chested masculinity – to contrast with Napoleon Bonaparte, the hated foreign bogeyman often depicted as being cartoonishly thin.35 Stood side by side, or with the Englishman gorging on a massive plate of roast beef, Lambert represented an exaggerated, tub-thumping analogy for Britain’s huge military power next to the weedy Frenchman. He became a mascot for defying the threat of enemy invasion; his body was a metaphor not for gluttony and laziness but robust health and relentless appetite. His fatness was a political virtue. By comparison, Prince George – the hated, debauched Regent who’d also gained weight – was mocked as ‘the Prince of Whales’.
Lambert’s celebrity only arrived during the last three years of his life. For long before that he’d simply been a much-admired jailer in Leicester. Nevertheless, the brevity of his fame, which should’ve been extinguished upon his death in 1809, aged just thirty-nine, didn’t hamper the quality of the legends that arose after his coffin was lowered into the ground by twenty burly men. He was said to have been an averagely proportioned, agile, sporty teenager. Even in his thirties, when the weight had started to dramatically increase, it was claimed he could kick his leg seven feet in the air, a feat beyond most can-can dancers of the Moulin Rouge; he’d allegedly wrestled an escaped bear in order to protect a nearby dog; he’d also apparently saved some drowning kids by using his body as a buoyant life-raft; he’d run back into a burning inferno to save people from death.
Hardly any of this is believable, of course, but it gave him a mythic power counteracting the classic trope of lazy, immobile corpulence that was hurled at Prince George. It was claimed he apparently didn’t eat much, drank mostly water, and was believed to be in fine health, which was true until it very much wasn’t. More accurate, perhaps, are claims that he was amusing company, meaning that paying audiences got more than just an eyeful of bulging flesh in return for their shiny shilling. As Joyce L. Huff argues, part of the reason he appealed to the public was the reassurance that it was okay to objectify him because he was exceptional: Lambert was talented, professional, superhuman in strength, and totally fine with being gawped at because he was capable of meeting his interrogator as a social equal, and disarming their invasive gaze with a spot of witty banter.36 He was a cheerfully heroic celebrity whose body was fascinating but whose mind was just as pleasing to the public.
In death, his fame continued. The phrase ‘Daniel Lambert’ became a euphemism for something huge, as in, ‘This prizewinning turnip is a real Daniel Lambert!’ His body was cast in wax and the facsimiles shipped off as far as America; his clothes were auctioned, and copies created as tributes to be exhibited in pubs and meeting halls, and his almost square coffin and specially reinforced carriage were put on display. Later on, Victorians became increasingly fascinated with statistics, and weighing scales were fashionable from the early 1800s, so Lambert’s huge body retained its intrigue beyond his lifespan.
Like Clara the Rhino, Sara Baartman, and Krao Farini, his extreme difference helped to make sense of the average. When P. T. Barnum’s touring company arrived in London in 1846, he highlighted the tiny size of his child star, General Tom Thumb – a talented mimic born with dwarfism, at that point standing only 70cm (27½ inches) in height – by inviting him to walk through one of Lambert’s shirt-sleeves as if it were a fabric tunnel. The tiny boy navigating the massive man’s clothes provided a sort of Goldilocks logic to standard humanity. Tom Thumb was too small, Daniel Lambert was too big, and everyone else was just right.
In the early 2000s, personal trainers began noticing a common request from their male customers – they wanted to look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club: lean, toned, smooth, and with abs you could grate Cheddar on.37 In the years since, Hollywood has bemuscled its iconic screen heroes even further, with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine character having gone from dude-in-decent-shape (2000) to a rippling, chest-expanded beefcake with throbbing veins (2015). We might argue such body fetishism began in the 1980s, when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bulging torso launched him to superstardom as Conan the Barbarian, but Arnie wasn’t so original. In fact, he’d taken his inspiration from the previous century.
In the 1890s, Friedrich Wilhelm Müller, a Prussian immigrant to Britain, became the possessor of the perfect body. His magnificent physique had more ridges, bumps, and lumps than an Ordnance Survey map of the Yorkshire Dales, and he found tremendous fame as a strongman under the new name of Eugen Sandow (having changed it to dodge military service back home). In a career-making early performance, he challenged two famous strongmen, in front of an excited crowd, but did so by arriving at the venue dressed in a formal suit with a dainty monocle perched over one eye. He looked like a moustachioed Fred Astaire, if the twinkle-toed dancer had been injected with Captain America’s super-serum. The crowd jeered this upper-class twit, only for Sandow to respond by literally ripping off his clothes to reveal a Herculean torso of rippling definition. The mockery turned to gasps of awe. A star was born.
Over the next few years, Sandow’s act became increasingly sophisticated. His trademark speciality was supporting a board on his back onto which a literal tonne of assorted stuff was piled up, including having a horse and rider walk across him. But my personal favourite was Sandow strapping on a grand piano and then having eight musicians playing on top of it while he went for a saunter across the stage. You just don’t see that sort of thing on telly these days. His power was astonishing, but he was crucially different from other strongmen, such as ‘Goliath’, who were huge man-mountains of wobbly flesh.
Fatness in the twenty-first century is increasingly the site of proud reclamation by the ‘body confidence’ movement, but – despite such appeals to basic kindness – when celebs gain weight, the ritual shaming in glossy gossip mags and viral memes is still brutal.
But being fat in the late 1800s wasn’t always considered a bad thing. Indeed, it was commonly a sign of wealth and health. People could buy books like 1878’s How to Be Plump, or, Talks on Physiological Feeding that began with the question: ‘How shall I get fleshy?’38 The famous American railroad tycoon ‘Diamond’ Jim Brady was a notorious glutton, described by the restaurateur George Rector as ‘the best 25 customers I ever had!’39 I can’t even fathom the calorie count on his daily binges, but it’s safe to say he wasn’t on the 5:2 diet, unless it means eat five feasts per day, plus two more for luck. To be large like Diamond Jim was aspirational.
But Sandow changed that. He didn’t have an ounce of fat on him, and was much more compact than the trundling strongman Goliath. Instead, he was a master technician who could move with graceful agility and execute perfect somersaults while holding massive weights in each hand; an expert athlete obsessed with good technique and precise muscular control. An American anatomist at Harvard University was fascinated by Sandow’s ability to flex individual abs on command, as if they were piano keys being played by an invisible ghost. What’s more, Sandow’s skeletal structure was found to be totally average. He wasn’t a natural colossus in his bones: his beefcake bod was simply a product of the relentless pumping of iron; indeed, he’s now known as the father of the bodybuilding industry, hence Arnie Schwarzenegger’s fandom. Such dedication to bodily perfection transformed Sandow into something far beyond a simple circus entertainer. He became a prophet of physical purity, and the timing was fortuitous.
I’ve already mentioned racial ideas several times in this chapter, from the obvious scientific racism affixed to Sara Baartman and Krao Farini, to the ambiguous racial fluidity of Evelyn Nesbit, Fearless Nadia, and Rita Hayworth. But the 1890s were a strange time of cultural crisis in the Western world. New technology – most notably the whizztastic speed of the telegraph machine – had hugely increased the pace of modern life, and psychologists were busily diagnosing patients with a novel nervous disease called neurasthenia (nicknamed Americanitis) that supposedly made strong, virile men weak and depressed. There was apparently too much information, travelling too fast, and people’s brains couldn’t handle it.
But, it wasn’t just these clattering gadgets that had people harrumphing in outraged alarm. There was also the threatening arrival of dandy aesthetes behaving like women – most famously, Oscar Wilde was jailed in 1895 after a harsh amendment to the law, nicknamed the Blackmailer’s Charter, made it easier to prosecute homosexuals despite minimal evidence – while the so-called ‘New Woman’ was increasingly behaving like a fella, sporting ‘rational dress’ (trousers) and jumping onto newly invented bicycles to race around the town, sans chaperone. This was a crisis of masculinity, but it would also cause a crisis of race.
In 1893, a German doctor called Max Nordau wrote a bestselling eugenics book called Degeneration about how such cultural depravity was also leading to the erosion of white racial superiority. The British Empire’s forces had recently been humiliated in the First Boer War of 1880–81 in South Africa and his readers may well have sensed such defeat was proof of decay in the supposed master race.40 Leaping into this maelstrom of racist angst – propelled by powerful calves built like a quad bike’s shock absorbers – sprang Sandow, the Prussian hero offering his flawless body as an inspiring symbol to his adopted nation. He invited every man and woman to improve their physique, and, in so doing, improve the quality of British racial stock. Actually, it wasn’t just Britain. Sandow also toured India, Australia, New Zealand, and various other places to great success, and taught the All Blacks rugby team how to lift weights, meaning we can probably blame him for Jonah Lomu pulverising England’s defence in the 1995 World Cup semi-final.41
Sandow quickly began to market a variety of products and services to the general public, inspiring them to buy into his system of self-improvement. He was the ‘Body Coach’ of his day, the forerunner to celebrities doing fitness DVDs and the Instagram lifters selling their secrets to getting thighs like tree trunks. Ever the immigrant patriot, Sandow also offered to train British Army recruits during the Second Boer War, and again during the First World War – though by 1914 his fame was in freefall, not least because Prussians were now the hated Hun. But it was towards the general public that he targeted most of his products: fitness equipment, six how-to-get-buff books, a branded magazine, jewellery, nutritional supplements, a short-lived cocoa drink, and more. He began to be known simply by his surname. Sandow became a one-man brand.
One of his biographers, David Waller, sums it up rather nicely:
Kings and crowned princes beat a path to the door of his fitness salon in St James’s. Tens of thousands who could not afford his personalised attention subscribed to his mail-order fitness courses. Scientists and artists studied him, deeming him not merely strong, but the perfect specimen of male beauty. Before Sandow, nobody believed that a human body could copy the perfection of classical art. Artists clamoured to paint him, sculptors to model him. The Natural History Museum took a plaster cast of his body as representing the ideal form of Caucasian manhood, the remnants of which still lurk somewhere in their basement. On an early visit to the US, Thomas Edison filmed him* – it was one of the first ever moving pictures – and postcard images of his near-naked body were circulated by the thousand.42
Eugen Sandow was jaw-droppingly ripped, incredibly strong, and a massive hit with the ladies. On his American tour, under the watchful eye of his cunning promoter, Florenz Ziegfeld – the man responsible for Anna Held’s milk-bath myth – rich society ladies paid a $300 charitable donation to enter his dressing room and squeeze his biceps, while an earlier report in a British newspaper further reveals the sexual power of this Prussian titan: ‘semi-delirium seized the delighted damsels and dames. Those at the back of the room leapt on the chairs: parakeet-like ejaculations, irrepressible, resounded right and left; tiny palms beat till gloves burst at their wearer’s energy. And when Sandow, clad a little in black and white, made the mountainous muscles of his arm wobble! Oh ladies!’43 Part of his marketing genius was in relocating his fame away from live physical performance towards a sexualised photographic image that could be widely shared; how he looked in his tiny pants became part of the appeal, and his strength was complemented by the eye-catching aesthetics of his titanic frame.
So Sandow was as sexy as he was freakishly strong. But he wasn’t a freak of nature. He was literally a self-made man, and his huge popular appeal came from the promise that perfection was attainable by anyone, provided they did the right training. Rather than an essentialist celebrity – one held aloft as innately unique, as was the case with Krao or Daniel Lambert – Sandow’s body was a carefully promoted product; to the ladies as eroticised fantasy hunk, and to the blokes as model of macho self-improvement.
Daniel Lambert was a patriotic symbol, but ordinary people didn’t aspire towards his hugeness. He was a much-admired oddity, not a lifestyle guru. But by the early 1900s, ideal body image was moving away from plump curvaceousness: Evelyn Nesbit’s slender shape challenged the feminine silhouette of big breasts and bums, just as Sandow’s washboard stomach made inroads against wobbly tums. By the 1920s, the new superman of bodybuilding was the musclebound Charles Atlas, while fat celebrities, such as the silent-movie comedian Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, were harshly judged as greedy, gorging gluttons; no longer healthy, wealthy men of stout stature, but infantilised man-babies who couldn’t control their urges.
Indeed, despite his being a beloved entertainer, nobody leapt to Arbuckle’s defence when he was accused of raping and murdering the actress Virginia Rappe in 1921, perhaps because it seemed inevitable that a man of such obvious appetite would be unable to stop himself. Though he was acquitted, his career was destroyed. He’d hated being known as Fatty Arbuckle; he found it demeaning, but the studio PR had forced him to stick it out. As he was fond of saying, even in the glory days of his film stardom, ‘Nobody loves a fat man.’44 The celebrity body was changing with the times, and bodybuilding’s rise saw Arbuckle’s plumpness fall out of fashion.
With Eugen Sandow we have a celebrity who wasn’t just admired; he actually invited public emulation. He put the abs in abnormal, but he differed from other celebs by trying to redefine normal; his fame was built on the inherent contradiction of promoting uniqueness to the masses, which, if successful, would’ve rendered him boringly average. Here we find a constant tension in celebrity culture: the ideological war between effort versus talent, and training versus good genes. Celebs are supposed to be better than us, their bodies innately different, more beautiful, and more powerful. But, though his racialised ideas of body fascism are now deeply offensive – he literally put the Eugen in eugenics – Sandow’s urging that people should better themselves has become a key credo of our aspirational age. We live in a world in which celebrity endorsements promise us the chance to look, or dress, or smell as good as the stars, so long as we purchase their transformative miracle products. Celebrity has become a global marketing industry.
But how did that come about? Well, luckily, that’s what the next chapter’s all about …
* An outdated word we don’t use now, but such was the language of the time.
* That’s a Power Rangers reference, by the way – this chapter’s pop culture references are definitely coming from the bin marked ‘millennial nostalgia’.
* Personally, if I were a dodgy showman, I would’ve waited until she was dead, mummified her organs, bunged her heart in an ornamental jar, and then used the catchy slogan: ‘Come see Bernhardt’s Urn-Heart!’ I missed my calling in PR.
* This scene is also a key part of The Shawshank Redemption movie. A screening in the prison inspires Andy Dufresne to acquire a Rita Hayworth poster.
* Scientist wasn’t actually coined as a word until 1834, but ‘Natural Philosophers’ or ‘Cultivators of Science’ seem a bit clunky in a sentence. Please forgive my elegant anachronism.
* Jordan was devastated, in every sense. Though the royal family offered a pension, in return for her acting retirement, she had to return to the trade to clear her daughter’s debts, run up by an unruly husband. The pension was cancelled and Dorothy Jordan, the great Irish beauty, faded into obscure poverty. In a sad coincidence, she, Sara Baartman, and Emma Hamilton all died impoverished, in 1815, in French exile. Celebrity claimed many victims, particularly those famed for their bodies. But it was particularly dangerous for beautiful women to attach security to rich men, because beauty fades and men can be fickle.
* By the way, those Edison films are on the internet, if you want to watch Sandow flex (because of course you do …).