Sex appeal is fifty percent what you’ve got, and fifty percent what people think you’ve got.
—Sophia Loren
What makes a bombshell? The boom, boom, of course. These ladies raise the stakes. They aren’t bimbos; they are tsunamis. Notice amid the dazzling looks and bodacious frames the great acting, smoking intellect, and genuine heart. While men are a bowl of peanuts to be nibbled at with a drink and then forgotten, bombshells are the whole package and you can’t pay the freight. Bombshells are a force of nature that make you take the bad road. They are built for majesty like the Winged Victory or the Venus de Milo. Movies used to be chockers with them. They have been replaced by the sylphy Jennifers and Kates—nice girls, but that’s exactly the problem. Bombshells have feelings, feelings like you should weep gratefully to be in line to gaze upon them. But as Marlene Dietrich gerwant, “You better be careful, it might be too hot for you.” These babes will blast their way to a pennant. Suit up and let’s play pepper.
Virtue has its own reward, but no sale at the box office.
—Mae West
Mae West blazed the bombshell trail. From the primordial mass of Victorian sexuality, she stormed the bawdy Bastille. Actress, playwright, feminist, supporter of gay rights. She hit it big in a 1918 revue where she danced the shimmy. She was so hot, she was the cover girl on the sheet music. Mae wrote a play called Sex, which got her arrested, and she did a week in jail for corrupting the morals of youth. Since this was New York in the wild days, she must’ve done a good job. She signed a movie deal at forty, saved Paramount Pictures, and helped launch male bombshell Cary Grant. Always outspoken and harried by religious groups, she brought the noise and exploited our Puritan misery by being funny about sex. She even cut a few rock ’n’ roll records for good measure. She can lead this group of foxes to victory and beyond.
Stone is perhaps the last great bombshell. Wild in the brain, insane in the body. She eats men for breakfast, and then orders drinks, then conducts an AIDS raffle. Men are not the obstacle; she simply stomps over them in her heels. Males beg for the privilege of losing to her. Strides like a tigress on the red carpets of the world. If she never makes another movie, she has already shelled you with her bomb. You would ruin your life to wait in line to be abused by Ms. Stone. Blond, unrepentant, magnificent, she handles the pitchers and calls the shots. She can handle the squeeze play.
Tall, dark, and awesome, Miss Emma Peel from The Avengers regularly makes the polls as the hottest TV character of all time. She was in a total of fifty-one episodes. That is making an impression. A superb stage actress with loads of awards, she was the only Bond wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Nobody’s fool, never a bimbo as Emma Peel—get it, M-Appeal, Man Appeal?—she jujitsu’d bad guys, was a scientist, a crime fighter, drove a bitchin’ Lotus convertible, and wore groovy cat suits called Emmapeelers over her astounding form. A feminist icon in every way. She causes you to resign your post as head of the English department because she said she might meet you for a smoke in the rosebushes. The first bag is hers to defend. She calls this game rounders.
The ’40s were full of bombshells, but you should think twice before trying it with Rita. The problem is when you see her, you can’t think. Starring the dazzling Latina girl they made over by plucking her hairline and dying her mane red, Gilda is not a movie, it is a love letter to her heat. She can sing and dance just as good as she wants, so sit down and gaze, little man. Miss Hayworth is Dresden to their campfire. Her allure is so strong she has gravitational pull. The second sack is hers to defend. She can pivot like no one.
Hedy Lamarr was a bombshell by day and scientific wizard by night. “The Most Beautiful Woman in Films” was her nickname in Hollywood, following her earlier nickname “The Most Beautiful Woman in Europe.” She was a bewitching Viennese Jewish girl who married a fascist arms dealer. How were your teenage years? Hedy scandalized pictures by cavorting nude and having an onscreen close-up orgasm in a Czech film called Ecstasy. She made her way to Hollywood and was ravishing all through the ’40s. Along the way she teamed up with her neighbor, the avant-garde composer George Antheil, and they decided to invent and patent a frequency-hopping spread-spectrum device to keep enemies from jamming torpedoes. It is the basis for what we now call Bluetooth and loads of cell phone communications. Her exotic looks made men jelly; her brain made men jam. She starts the double play and finishes you. And then invents instant replay.
Bardot’s body deserves a monument in the town square. Her body is a monument in the town square. BB’s face, lips, and hair are devastating. Her intelligence and sense of humor on screen propel her to the top of the bombshell bay. There is no ocean large enough to deter men from trying, and she don’t care. Like Everest, when you are that much of a physical presence, you just are. The goddesses cry in anguished plaintive tones, the gods plan to transform themselves into mortals and try to fool her. She stays inviolate in the center of the universe. Glowing golden eternally. Don’t even think of bunting on her. The hot corner is melted and stuck to the grass.
Cute as a nymph, Claudia Cardinale has a résumé full of art films with Fellini and Visconti. She hated Hollywood and is a feminist and gay rights advocate. Speaks several languages. La Cardinale lies on a tiger rug in The Pink Panther. A sight you will never forget. She is brutally manhandled by Henry Fonda and digs it in Once Upon a Time in the West, then turns around and fronts a group of would-be rapists. Italy claims her, but we all need her bad. She has it all. Claudia makes the blind sighted. She will be an able keeper of the field.
There have been seven thousand Bond films and twice as many Bond Girls. Lots of foxes, a few bombshells, the remarkably named Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, played by Honor Blackman, who leads an all-girl flying circus, but Ursula Andress did everything before the theme song even got written. Her empire was built as the first BG in Dr. No. Wearing a white bikini and a giant knife, she strode from the sea like an armed and dangerous Venus and blew our minds. Blond, deadly, totally glamorous. She could make the pope rob a convenience store to buy her a trinket. The big area in center is too small a stage for what she is dealing.
She’s the meanest chick in town!
—poster for Foxy Brown
The baddest One-Chick Hit Squad that ever hit town!
—poster for Coffy
Pam Grier was the Queen of Blaxploitation and the first great black Woman action lead. Grier was cool as a popsicle and vicious as an underfed wildcat. She was badassery served piping hot. She always gets violent man-style revenge on ratty boyfriends, pimps, and drug kingpins. Her sexy ’fro and hot pants make all kinds of music. A dude cries out she’s “a whole lotta Woman.” Pam Grier is so magnifique that she has been brought back many times to reprise and venerate her own groundbreaking smashtasticness. In Jackie Brown she is sexy as hell and still outwitting appallingly evil gangsters. You need a candle and some slow jams and an iron will. In real life she was with the tempestuous Richard Pryor, so stand well back. Bonus bombshell points for being in Scream Blacula Scream. Right field needs the best arm. Ms. Grier has it.
Mount Rushmore is not as rock solid as Raquel Welch. One Million Years B.C. has lizards dressed as dinosaurs, a primitive form of cave English is spoken, and in the midst of all this camp, Miss Welch stormed the troglodytes with a wildly stuffed prehistoric bikini and sexy pampooties. The ’60s and ’70s play Shakespeare off her balcony. Boomsnackulous enduring sex symbol, she gives symbolic sex a good name. Because there is nothing symbolic about it. You are lucky she doesn’t start every game with that heat.
Mother, actress, Oscar winner, neofascist, Sophia Loren is a glistening megastar of loads of pictures. Married to icky hobbity producer Carlo Ponti, but available to Cary Grant. Her waist is waspy, her top voluminous, her hips definitive. You would sell your mother into servitude if she batted her eyelashes at you. Mother would understand. Mad curveball. Extreme right-hander.
Forget the Percodan decades, Liz has magic violet eyes and all the cookies in the shop. In A Place in the Sun with Montgomery Clift, she is so hot she sets him straight. A child star and millionaire entrepreneur, she took all the drugs, owned all the diamonds, married all the guys, went to all the rehabs, had all the operations, and then took names. She requires buckets of jewels and a small dog. She ate junk food and wore cashmere into the pool. Toward the end, she showed up on the patio at the Abbey Bar in West Hollywood and day-drank in her wheelchair. We all live in her wake. Just try to hit her. She has too much stuff.
Gardner grew up barefoot in North Carolina; lucky North Carolina. Scouted from a photo as a teen, she had the verve to marry licentious elf Mickey Rooney, revive manic-depressive Frank Sinatra’s career, and tangle with contentious bandleader and snide intellectual Artie Shaw. She was carried up the steps by the male bombshell bullfighter known as Numero Uno, who also dated Bardot and Rita Hayworth. In The Killers, Ava makes you want to sell your soul to Satan for a chance to pick up her stockings. Satan makes a sale. She needs a drink. Our own Shoeless Joe. Say it is so, Ava.
The most elegant of bombshells, Tamara Dobson follows after Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge for poise and class. What gives her the bombshell nod is that she was a six-foot-two fashion model who played Cleopatra Jones, a special agent to the president, who fights lesbian drug lord Shelley Winters in the ghetto. Dobson wears the hippest threads and the biggest ’fro known to humanity. She also never gets bested by a man no matter how punk-assed, sexist, or racist, and she has a superbad Corvette with automatic weapons. She is in fact the bad mamma jamma. Unhittable.
Jane Russell was one tough cookie and, along with Marilyn Monroe, they anti-personnel-bombshelled in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the Citizen Kane of bombshell movies. They dance and sing and get what they want. Our Jane is the perfect match to male bombshell Robert Mitchum. She and Mitch are paired a few times with incendiary results. In Macao, he is riding the ferry to Macao and looks upstairs as she is changing her stockings. Jane says, “You like the view?” Mitch says, “It’s not the Taj Mahal, but it’ll do.” It is the Taj Mahal. It’s you who won’t do. She shuts down everyone in the late innings.
“The girl can’t help it, she was born to please.” Mansfield’s figure anticipates the Big Bang; she was buxom, booming, and hilarious for the win. She took Marilyn to the limit. When she walks down the street at the top of The Girl Can’t Help It, the great ’50s rock ’n’ roll movie, Little Richard chants the phrase. As she wiggles down the street, men’s glasses crack, and if you weren’t getting the picture, the milkman’s milk bottle explodes. She is also most charming and lovable. You would leave your family on an ice floe and walk over the glacier just to drown near her. She comes off the bench with a vengeance.
The voice, the look, the delivery, the humor, the acting, the magic, the franchise. Could only be brought down by a dynasty. A huge threat to go long every time.
Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi was born in Japan, interred in America during WWII. Gang-raped as a child, she hunted down each man who did it to exact her revenge. Moved to L.A. as a burlesque dancer, was photographed by the silent-film screen legend Harold Lloyd, dated Elvis and turned down his proposal, was an expert at martial arts, and kills a man by snapping him in two in the Russ Meyer danger-girl classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! No scalping allowed. She will kung fu your lame ass.
Angelina is a real-world bombshell. Married to male bombshell Brad Pitt, whom we imagine and hope she leads around on a string. She flies herself around the globe doing good, giving massively to charity, and forcing world leaders to acknowledge the poor. That is bombshell sexy. Superfox and unfeasibly thin, she is a superhero for being a mensch in a world of shallow blambinas. Her tattoos will confuse you unless you read Cambodian. Hollywood is far too tiny a playground for her interests. She needs a world to change the village. As Gilbert and Sullivan might have said, she is the very model of a modern major bombshell. She owns the club and you.