Pin-up that won the war

Eighty years ago, Betty Grable posed for a photo that one in 12 Allied servicemen took to the battlefield. By Christopher Moor

Eighty years ago, a quirk of fate saw a 1943 pin-up photo of film star Betty Grable smiling coyly over her right shoulder become a Second World War icon.

The picture went off to war in the survival kits of around one in 12 Allied servicemen.

Grable (1916-73) was proud to be a pin-up girl. She saw pin-ups as an inspiration for those without a woman in their lives back home.

Her own pin-up accentuated her famous legs, which had been insured for a million dollars as a publicity stunt. The self-effacing girl with the million-dollar legs believed they were the two reasons for her success in movies – not her singing and dancing talents.

She always credited the success of her pin-up to Frank Powolny, head photographer at 20th Century Fox studios. She said, ‘He’ll tell you it was nothing. That I just happened to stand in front of the camera. But it wasn’t easy, even if it was an accident.

‘We were making a picture called Sweet Rosie O’Grady at the time and, in one scene, an artist was to draw me for a cover on Police Gazette. He wanted the measurements and figure just right – so I climbed into the tight white bathing suit for a bunch of pictures.

‘Frank, as usual, wasn’t quite satisfied. Then he got the idea for a pose of me looking back over my shoulder. It was never really intended for publication, but when the publicity department saw it they had a few thousand prints made.

‘Thanks to the servicemen, it turned out be a pin-up sensation and it did a lot for me. But [behind] the picture was Mr Powolny and his camera genius.’

Betty Grable’s movie career peaked in 1943. The annual Quigley poll named her the year’s number-one box-office attraction. Her two Technicolor musicals that year, Coney Island and Sweet Rosie O’Grady, were among the year’s top-grossing pictures.

Her pin-up appeared in the opening and closing credits of her next movie, Pin-up Girl, released in 1944. The film did not perform as well as Coney Island and Sweet Rosie O’Grady. It seemed to have been rushed to take advantage of the pin-up’s appeal.

Born on 18th December 1916, in St Louis, Missouri, Grable died 50 years ago this year on 2nd July 1973, in Santa Monica. She was 56.

Her marriages to actor Jackie Coogan (1937-39) and trumpeter Harry James (1943-1965) both ended in divorce. She had two daughters by James, Victoria (1944-) and Jessica (1947-2016).

Grable had performed unspectacularly in movies for ten years before her breakthrough came, when she replaced Alice Faye in Down Argentine Way (1940). Audiences quickly took to Betty on seeing her in Technicolor for the first time. She retired from movies in 1955, to concentrate on stage, TV and nightclub work.

What Grable didn’t say about her famous photo was that there were only two exposures left on the film when Powolny said, ‘Look this way, Betty.’ The last shot was the one destined for fame, with more than three million copies distributed worldwide.

Both back-view poses have been published. The differences are subtle. In the servicemen’s favourite, Grable’s feet are wider apart and her head slightly lowered.

The 1995 television documentary Behind the Pin-Up claimed that the Hays Office – an American organisation of producers and directors formed to enforce the industry’s moral code –required the pin-up be censored.

In that more innocent era, a black garter on Betty’s left thigh had to be removed before the photo could be mailed to servicemen. The garter was seen as a corrupting influence.

Suitably retouched, the pin-up went off to servicemen in sizes convenient for wearing over the heart and dreaming –or as larger prints for pinning up in lockers or on barrack-room walls.

It has been said she turned her back to the camera to hide her advanced pregnancy. Frank Powolny disagreed. Frontal shots he took of her during the session support his opinion, showing the slim star high-kicking and lifting weights. A quip from Grable herself is where the pregnancy story perhaps began. When asked once too often why she’d posed with her back to the camera, she jested, ‘I was a bit flabby around the tummy at the time.’

The pin-up reportedly even went into Vietnam in the 1960s. Nudity was by then banned in American services’ publications. So, while the eligible pin-up girls heeded the message to put their clothes back on for photos for the boys in uniform, the soldiers survived on a diet of early Marilyn Monroe or mid Betty Grable images.

Her Civil War relic, as she affectionately called the pin-up, has survived her in forms she would never have dreamed of.

In 2003, it appeared in a book published by Life magazine, 100 Photographs That Changed the World. Quite right!