#lobotomy room
Kiki de Montparnasse by Man Ray
Farewell to brilliant Montreal-born photographer Marcus Leatherdale (18 September 1952 – 22 April 2022), who’s died aged 69. Arriving in New York in 1978, Leatherdale was initially the office manager, boyfriend and model for Robert Mapplethorpe before establishing his own identity as a photographer with vivid black-and-white portraits of 1980s NYC art and club culture scene-makers like Andy Warhol, Divine, Cookie Mueller, Leigh Bowery, Dianne Brill and a bratty unknown young urchin calling herself Madonna. Pictured: the caption on the original post is wrong. This is not Kiki of Montparnasse by Man Ray! It’s the Marcus Leatherdale photo entitled Larissa, Issey Miyake, New York City, 1983. (This image was also used as the cover of Leatherdale’s book Out of The Shadows (1980 - 92). Read more here.
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Born on this day 112 years ago: ineffably kitten-ish French actress Simone Simon (née Simone Thérèse Fernande Simon, 23 April 1910 – 22 February 2005). She’s a haunting, luminous presence in French films like La Bete Humaine (1938) opposite Jean Gabin – but English-speakers know Simon best for her appearances in two classic eerie Hollywood horror films: Cat People (1942) and The Curse of The Cat People (1944). Pictured: a 1938 portrait of Simon for the film Josette.
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Bettie Page
Born on this day 99 years ago: quintessential fifties pin-up queen (and perennial hairstyle role model for generations of female rockabillies) Bettie Page (22 April 1923 – 11 December 2008). Why not frolic in lingerie, teeter around in a pair of extreme fetish heels or at least do something naughty in Page’s memory?
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John Waters, 1983. Baltimore, Maryland. Nikkormat, 50mm. Kodachrome 200. NIK
Happy 76th birthday to cinema’s King of Sleaze, the People’s Pervert, the Queer Confucius and everyone’s favourite corrupting role model - John Waters (born 22 April 1946)! Waters’ evergreen cult classicks (sic) like Pink Flamingos(1972),Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977) have been warping the imaginations of malcontents for generations now. Years ago, the official Dreamland News Facebook page suggested the following festive tips to commemorate Waters’ birthday. I’ll reproduce them here: “Get a ludicrously large hair-do, tattoo your flesh with the name of your idol, smoke cigarettes in the girls room, give a stranger a rosary job, have an interracial love affair, return a gift for the money (you can do that, you know), stomp some honky lady’s foot, send your enemy a turd, declare it backwards day at the office, prank call your next door neighbour, teabag some old queen at the bar, dance lewdly for a quarter, mainline liquid eyeliner, drink the tears of your incarcerated lover, order a double egg-salad on white toast, do the hokey-pokey… EAT DOG SHIT.”
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Born on this day: happy 75th birthday to streetwalkin’ cheetah with a heartful of napalm / world’s forgotten boy / chairman of the bored / possessor of the world’s most sinewy torso, the artist formerly known as James Newell Osterberg Jr – feral godfather of punk Iggy Pop! (Born 21 April 1947).
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Andy Warhol
Edie Sedgwick
Photobooth 1966
Ciao, Edie! Born on this day: doomed, utterly magnetic Warhol Superstar, underground cinema actress and socialite Edie Sedgwick (Edith Minturn Sedgwick Post, 20 April 1943 – 16 November 1971). Imagine: had she lived, Edie would be turning 79.
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tempest storm
Died on this day: doyenne of burlesque, Rita Hayworth lookalike and undisputed Queen of Exotic Dancers Miss Tempest Storm (née Annie Blanche Banks, 29 February 1928 – 20 April 2021). The death of “the torrid tornado from out West” aged 93 conclusively ends a chapter in strip-tease history (Storm outlived all her contemporaries including Russ Meyer, Bettie Page and Blaze Starr). What a life! At her peak Storm earned $100,000 a year, making her the highest-paid striptease performer in history. Her last performance was in 2010. And she had a fling with young Elvis! I used to love catching glimpses of bouffant-haired eternal showgirl Storm at the annual Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekenders over the years, consistently looking immaculately groomed and fiercely glamorous. Tempest Storm was a woman and a half!
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Jayne Mansfield, circa 1955 - Ph. Bruno (Bernard of Hollywood)
“I always liked (Jayne Mansfield) more than Marilyn – I still do! Jayne Mansfield is the ultimate movie star. Even with Divine. Divine was my Jayne Mansfield, only put together with Godzilla. I still marvel at how she looks. She must have done the roots of her hair every day. She never had a (dark) root, not for one second! I firmly believe she touched-up her roots every day!”
“She sums up the fifties. Nobody’s more extreme than Jayne Mansfield in representing a 1950s girl gone berserk. More than berserk – nuts! Acid!”
“She looked to me like she was really happy being completely out of her mind – like an extreme glamour person.”
“Jayne Mansfield is an animated character. She’s not a real person. She’s from outer space, basically! I mean, look at her! She is a piece of work.”
John Waters reminiscing about his all-time favourite movie star – Jayne Mansfield! (Quotes taken from his bonus interview on the DVD for The Girl Can’t Help It). Today is a holy day! Lobotomy Room’s Patron Saint, berserk glamour girl par excellence and the punk Marilyn Monroe (or the drag queen’s Marilyn Monroe), Jayne Mansfield (19 April 1933 - 29 June 1967) was born 89 years ago on this day. (To put it in perspective, Mansfield is the same age as Joan Collins, would be just a bit older than Brigitte Bardot or Sophia Loren - and two years younger than Mamie Van Doren - if she were still alive). Revered by the likes of John Waters and Divine, for me sex kitten Mansfield is virtually a sacred figure, the eternal publicity hungry starlet, Hollywood Babylon made flesh, the cooing and squealing hourglass-contoured personification of atomic-era kitsch. Do something divoon today in her honour!
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Born on this day ninety years ago: earthy and defiant American singer-songwriter, Coal Miner’s Daughter made good, Crisco spokeswoman and one of the undisputed divas of Country & Western music, Miss Loretta Lynn (née Webb, 14 April 1932). My favourite songs of Lynn’s will always be “Fist City”, “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind)” and “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man).”
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“Liz Renay was my idea of total glamour.” John Waters
Born on this day 96 years ago: the fabulous Liz Renay (néePearl Elizabeth Dobbins, 14 April 1926 - 22 January 2007) – b-movie actress / burlesque queen / convicted felon / naive outsider painter / gangster Mickey Cohen’s moll / “Streaking Grandmother” / authoress of multiple volumes of memoirs (including My Face for the World to SeeandHow to Attract Men) and all-round kitsch icon. For John Waters fans, Renay is adored for her performance as murderess Muffy St Jacques in punk masterpiece Desperate Living (1977) - especially for her acidic delivery of lines like, “I was having an erotic dream!” and “I sleep in the room next door - naked!”
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“She Puts Everything in Writhing! Bouncy Blaze Starr Makes Every Curve a Wiggle When She Peels! Blaze Starr is tops in peelmanship! Every line and movement have a message all their own! This sultry stripper, headliner at Baltimore’s Two O’Clock Club, has the ringsiders shrieking when she puts on her take-it-off routine!”
Born on this day 90 years ago: sin-sational exotic dancer Blaze Starr(née Fannie Belle Fleming, 10 April 1932 – 15 June 2015). Billed as “The Hottest Blaze in Burlesque” and "Miss Spontaneous Combustion”, the flame-haired and buxom sex goddess was one of the top striptease headliners of the post-war era. Starr’s affair with Louisiana’s married governor Earl Long sparked a national scandal in the fifties and was later dramatized in the 1989 film Blaze starring Paul Newman. Later in life Starr became a fixture in Baltimore’s seedy red light district The Block when she bought the Two O'Clock Club. That’s where cult director John Waters discovered her. “Just from a showbiz point of view, I respected her deeply,” Waters has said. "I still think she was the best tourist attraction that Baltimore ever had.” I particularly treasure Starr for her gloriously terrible performance in the 1962 Doris Wishman sexploitation flick Blaze Starr Goes Nudist.
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“I saw the whole world in that face. All of the beauty and all of the misery.” From the documentary Billie(2020).
Born on this day: tormented but resilient jazz diva Billie Holiday(née Eleanora Fagan, 7 April 1915 – 17 July 1959). All these decades later Lady Day’s hauntingly soulful voice still incites goosebumps. My favourite songs of hers will always be “I’m a Fool to Want You” and “Don’t Explain.”
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“Bette Davis’ greatest creation was Bette Davis. She was - indeed - a fine actress but she made sure that the world knew it, knew how hard she worked and what opposition she had to overcome to get great acting roles. She wanted to be known as an “actress” and she gritted her teeth, bulged her eyes and succeeded, winning two Oscars, eight nominations and numerous other awards. She became the Queen of Hollywood as surely as Clark Gable became its King.”
/ From The Illustrated Encyclopedia of The World’s Great Movie Stars and Their Films by Ken Wlaschin, 1979 /
Born on this day: eternally fierce Miss Bette Davis (Ruth Elizabeth Davis, 5 April 1908 – 6 October 1989), concisely summarized by film historian John Kobal as “the most starry of actresses and the most actressy of stars.”
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Joan
“She was the perfect image of the movie star and as such largely the creation of her own indomitable will. She had of course very remarkable material to work with: a quick native intelligence, tremendous animal vitality, a lovely figure and above all her face, that extraordinary sculptural construction of line and planes, finely chiseled like the mask of some classical divinity from fifth century Greece. It caught the light superbly, so that you could photograph her from any angle, and her face moved beautifully … The nearer the camera, the more tender and yielding she became – her eyes glistening, her lips avid in ecstatic acceptance. The camera saw, I suspect, a side of her that no flesh-and-blood lover ever saw …”
Director George Cukor’s eulogy for Joan Crawford at her memorial service, 1977.
Died on this day forty-five years ago: mesmerizing fierce-eyed Golden Age Hollywood screen diva, Miss Joan Crawford (23 March 1904 – 10 May 1977).
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