By today’s standards, Theda Bara wasn’t especially beautiful, nor was she a good actress — all overblown, cheesy gestures and expressions — but never forget that for a while, she was the biggest sex symbol of them all.
I just wish that most of her movies hadn’t been lost in a fire.
If you’d picked up a magazine — almost any magazine except Playboy — during the 1950s, you’d probably have seen a cover photo of Suzy Parker. And that’s not surprising.
And moving from Atmospheric B&W to Glorious Technicolor:
Breathes there a man alive who would not want to kiss that mouth?
Here’s another thing about this so-called “Modern Lifestyle” that is a stone in my soul’s shoe:
A SUPERYACHT owned by a Russian tycoon boasting an eye-watering £61million price tag is set to be auctioned off after being seized.
The stunning 240ft vessel – named The Axioma – has a catalogue of bougie features including six decks, a pool with a swim-up bar and even a cinema.
What is it with having an in-home movie room these days? You can’t open a real estate listing without seeing a windowless room with a giant screen and a few overstuffed easy chairs in it, and if I ever bought a house with such a “feature”, all that crap would be tossed out and replaced with something of redeeming social value — like a tasteful, fully-stocked bar — before the ink was dry on the closing documents.
Here is where I could hang out with a few friends, enjoy good fellowship, conversation and companionable drunkenness, all in a friendly setting. Maybe a TV screen in the corner so we could catch a decent game or a Grand Prix maybe, but live sporting events are different from movies, as a moment’s thought will prove: they are definitely group entertainment.
Movie houses are, almost by definition, not a place for gathering and social interaction. Oh sure, you enjoy the movie “experience” together (not that too many modern movies actually provide much of an experience, don’t get me started), but that’s it.
“Oh, but Kim,” I hear the cry, “it’s really a place for your teenage kids to hang out with their friends.”
Yeah, I really want my teenage daughter hanging out in a dark room with her testosterone-laden boyfriend, with the sound turned up loud lest parents actually hear what’s really going on in there. Or if there’s a whole group of them, to be greeted by a sea of thrusting pimply adolescent backsides when I walk in the room.
Okay, enough of that. 
Or if not a bar, then a gun room. Yeah, a wall full of cabinets such as below, inside a securely-locked door and suitably-impregnable walls:
Add a decent cleaning station / workbench, and I think you can all see where I’m going with this one.
Of course, someone might say that this would not be a place where I could entertain my friends — but clearly, you don’t know my friends.
Whatever alternative use you can dream up for that room, you can be sure that you’d get more enjoyment out of it than can be had from a screening of Fast & Furious 207 or whatever other childish comic-book action comes out of Hollyweird.
She was a world-class mezzo-soprano singer who starred in fourteen hundred (1,400) performances of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate Broadway musical, starting with its very first opening; she was beautiful, with a deep, velvety speaking voice, and 5’10” tall.
So Hollywood had no idea what to do with Patricia Morison, and cast her mostly in B movies, usually playing the female villain. Harking back to the previous paragraph, she was once replaced on set by Veronica Lake, because Lake was a full foot shorter than her, and the male lead was the dwarfish Alan Ladd (let’s hear it for the casting director!). Playing noveliste George Sand in 1960’s Song Without End, her voice was overdubbed with another actress’s voice because her own voice was judged “too deep” by the studio. Couldn’t win for losing.
But enough of all that. Here she is.
You can’t see it in the above pics, but Morison also had startling blue eyes, a fabulous figure and 39″-long hair.
And as a perennial baddie, you just know she had to have a gun about her:
Patricia Morison died in 2018, aged 103.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album (I couldn’t be bothered to type out the whole title).
I’ve written about the influence of David Bowie before, so I’m not going to repeat it, other than to say that nobody — nobody — was playing any music quite like he was. And Aladdin Sane was pretty damn wonderful, too.
Anyway, all that was to show you this rather startling comparison:
So what do these two have in common?
Well, everything. They’re the same person: Brit TV personality Kate Garraway, who is also at the half-century mark or thereabouts.
The Bowie influence just reaches everywhere, dunnit?
