Bosoms

“When talking with Jayne Mansfield you will discover that Jayne is standing closer to you than you are to her.” Columnist Sidney Skolsky’s joke (Photoplay, August 1964) is only one of myriad illustrations of Hollywood’s fascination with — and exploitation of — the female figure, particularly “the cult of the bosom,” as a Screen Stars (Dec 1961) feature characterized it. But how to account for the prominence of prominent bosoms in the fan magazines, whose major audience consisted not of priapic males but rather heterosexual teenage girls and women?

The magazines’ cover images skewed toward the wholesome and demure, but inside those covers low-cut dresses, sexy swimsuits and titillating puns mixed with the cozy at-home and baby-on-her-lap publicity shots. Articles highlighted starlets’ statistics. A feature titled “Bobbi Shaw 38-22-35” (Screenland, May 1965) described the beach movie up-and-comer as “voluptuous,” “tempestuous” and “maddeningly mysterious.” Mysterious might be fine, but precision also mattered: Diana Dors measured 37½ – 24 – 35 (Modern Screen, Feb 1957), while Gina Lollobrigida shaped up at 37 – 21 – 35½ (Movie Life, May 1956). That “King-size Swede,” Anita Ekberg (Movieland, Nov 1955) fluctuated over the years, from 39 – 23 – 36½ (Movie Life, May 1956) to 41 – 23 – 38 (Hollywood Romances No. 20, 1963).

Fan mag features profiled “Red Hot” starlets (Movieland), Nov 1955 and “The Sexiest Girls in the World” (Movie Life, May 1956), and asked readers to weigh in on the question, “Are the ‘Imports’ Spicier Than the ‘Domestic’?” (Screen Life, Jan 1958). Articles were replete with double entendres. Re Ekberg, for example, Movie Life noted, “Recently awarded star billing, male admirers agree that she’ll measure up to it [measurements inserted]. A year ago, she was getting $25 an hour as a model; now her outstanding assets have boosted her into big time — $75,000 per film.”

More “serious” features occasionally sought to counterbalance this top-heavy approach. In a feature titled “Sex Isn’t Everything” (Motion Picture, May 1956), Doris Day spoke directly to readers: “When I was a little girl, I had a burning desire for four things which I considered the indispensible trappings of an alluring female: a permanent wave, high heels, false teeth and a brassiere.” Neither the bra nor the other accoutrements proved satisfying, and Day eventually concluded that “one woman’s sex appeal can be another’s poison.” Sex, Day told readers, “isn’t anything if it’s divorced from the rest of a girl’s personality.” The author of “Is Sex Taking a Holiday from Hollywood?” (Joan Carewe, Hollywood Screen Parade, March 1959), similarly concluded, “People today, more than ever before, need the sex that is part of a woman’s whole make-up, not limited to her bust measurement.”

Impressionable readers almost certainly found such features confusing, given the obvious contradictions elsewhere in the magazines. Even more head-scratching was commentary from a TV doctor. In a feature called, “Peyton Place’s Dr. Rossi — Ed Nelson — Personally Answers Your Problems” (TV and Movie Screen, April 1966), a reader who labeled herself “My Gal Slalom” submitted this inquiry: “I’m built like a ski — long, thin, and flat. Especially flat. Would you mind telling me why boys and men make such a great thing of bosoms?” Even Freud might have laughed at Nelson’s observation: “Because the bosom has profound connotations of motherhood, it is noted with admiration by men.”

The gossip columns made no such attempts at serious. “Tattle Tales,” penned by an unnamed columnist, ran an item in Movie TV Tattler (December 1960), captioned “Bra Ha Ha”: “Tune played at a recent brassiere show in Cuckooland [a.k.a. Hollywood] was ‘Faraway Hills.’ The bra company claims their project lifts the ‘bustline to new heights.’ Lookout for Sputniks!” Sidney Skolsky rarely got through his monthly Photoplay column without at least one allusion, along the lines of: “Sophia [Loren] is a great construction job with a great front” (Aug 1967). Or “’Jane Russell to play a dual role,’ headlined a movie item. It wasn’t startling to me. I always think two of Jane Russell” (Dec 1960). Columnist Earl Leaf seemed equally obsessed, as in this description of a Hollywood party thrown by producer Al “Zuggy” Zugsmith to celebrate completion of his film, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve:

While the wolves howled their heads off, flower-eating starlets lounged on the green grass in Bikinis and skin-tight Capris. Half-clad dollings splashed in the swimming pool where a ton of Eve’s apples bobbed in the agitated water. Flamboyant Mamie van Doren bounced around with mucho bounce to the ounce. Zsa Zsa Gabor wore a gown cut so low she spoke with an echo. Israel’s buxom import, Ziva Rodan, floated around in a French gown transparent as a lover’s lie. Steve Cochran came to the party with his pet goat and left with Mamie van Doren (Hollywood Screen Parade, March 1960)

Even the female columnists got in on the act, with Jayne Mansfield a frequent target. Louella Parsons, covering the 1961 Golden Globes ceremony, reported some “unexpected entertainment”: “Jayne Mansfield, practically popping out of her skin-tight, low-cut gown made an award to Mickey Rooney, who had to look upward over pounds and pounds of Jayne to get a glimpse of her face!” (Modern Screen, June 1961).

And Hedda Hopper, one of the many cynical columnists who refused to believe the seriousness of Mansfield’s supposed 1962 boat accident in the Bahamas, wrote:

Jayne Mansfield sure got mileage out of her near-drowning off Nassau when she spent a night on a narrow strip of land with husband Mickey Hargitay and a press agent. When we heard their boat had capsized and she might have drowned, one comic said, “Impossible. She carries her life savers with her.” But Bob Hope had the topper of them all: “They threw Jayne Mansfield a Mae West* and she threw it right back.” (Photoplay, May 1962)

So why all the attention to breast size in publications that pursued a predominantly female audience? Answer: For the same reason most magazine covers featured female stars rather than beefcake. Fan magazines were all about their readers’ dreams and aspirations for themselves: who and what they wanted to become. In discussing “the cult of the bosom,” Screen Stars noted that, while Marilyn Monroe didn’t “originate” the cult, she “rode to fame on the crest of its wave. And the sale of padded brassieres soared as thousands of women all over the country sought to emulate her.”

Fan mags of the Fifties and early Sixties were full of ads for products to “round out… firm up… your natural bosom,” or to “give A or B cup figures exciting C cup cleaVage” (“Pro-Forma” and “curVees” ads, Movie Stars, Sep 1961). And bra ads featured prominently, particularly the famously brilliant and entertaining “I dreamed…” series from Maidenform, which ran in dozens of iterations for more than a decade. The Maidenform ads turned the double entendre on its head. They invested women with the power of action as well as beauty, often placing their models in traditionally male settings and roles — victorious in a boxing ring in “I dreamed I was a knockout in my Maidenform bra” (Modern Screen June 1961), driving a chariot in “I dreamed I drove them wild…” (Modern Screen, Nov 1961), brandishing pistols in a Western-style wanted poster in “I dreamed I was wanted…” (Photoplay, Dec 1960). With the “I dreamed…” template, Maidenform powerfully exploited the aspirational subtext of the magazines in which the ads appeared, even — in a $20,000 contest (Modern Screen, March 1957) — inviting their reader/customers to suggest their own dreams. After all, the contest headline proclaimed, “Your dreams are getting better all the time.”

*Mae West: An inflatable life jacket, nicknamed by World War II pilots in honor of the buxom actress.

Image credits, clockwise from upper left: (1)Modern Screen June 1961; (2) Motion Picture Dec 1956; (3) Modern Screen May 1962; (4) Modern Screen June 1961; (5) Screenland May 1965.