it comes in pints?

According to imdb.com, her measurements were
36 1/2C-25-36.... not bad ;-)
It's hard to imagine that in this day and age a star (or starlet) would give her measurements. And yet a quick Google search revealed that at least one did....
Angelina Jolie.
(who the fk cares about Brangelina, anyway?)

The sad thing is, probably 36-25-36 would be considered as 'too fat' by some of today's directors...At least that bottom 36 might.

I'm amazed Jolie could actually give measurements, since she barely looks like she has any. I seriously do not understand all that "most beautiful woman in the world" fuss about her. She has pretty eyes and hair, but the rest of her is so completely YUCK. That enormous mouth and emaciated frame that makes her look like she was just liberated from a concentration camp? Ew. And this isn't me being catty by far. Look at Catherine Zeta-Jones for brunette godessness, or Ava Gardner - now there's a contender for "most beautiful" if I've ever seen one.

Avaaaaaaa...

I'm sure others can express this far better than I, but it's not just physical beauty, which is ephemeral and whose "standards" are constantly changing. Glamor is not the right word, but there is something "bigger than life", so to speak, about the great stars of the past.

Zeta-Jones is pretty but I would drop her in the toilet in favor of the greats of the past, like Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, Maureen O'Hara, Sophia Loren, Ava Gardner, and many others.

I think it's that undefinable quality called "style." Though "grace" also probably plays a role, too.

I find that many of the big, well-known stars of the past were also distinctive-looking: Stanwyck and Loren were very different TYPES, for example, but they were both beautiful in their own way. It seems there was a greater flexibility in what was "beautiful."

I wonder if also the glamour was related to a sort of distance - I mean, O'Hara and the like were regarded as a sort of aristocratic class, with nicer clothes and better hair and more ladylike than the average woman. And now, so many of our celebs run around in horrible clothes, and do skanky stuff that would hardly be considered "ladylike" or "gentlemanly" - I wonder if it's that loss of the idea (the fantasy) that "movie stars" inhabited some rarefied universe where things were prettier and nicer and no one ever got zits or was constipated or any of those things...and now we see our celebs, warts and all (sometimes more warts than anything else), and that mystique is gone...

Ricki, quite so. I didn't really know how to express it but it relates to the loss of heroes too, and the way we tear them down nowadays. Not just in movies but in sports and other areas as well, women and men both. Just compare this list to the current crop of wannabees:

John Wayne
Babe Ruth
Hank Aaron
Cary Grant
Jimmy Stewart
Alan Ladd
Betty Grable
Clark Gable
Dorothy Lamour
Claudette Colbert
Judy Garland
Mae West
Spencer Tracy
Katherine Hepburn
Bogey and Bacall and Bergman
Robert Mitchum

It's not just having more money and owning better stuff. It's carriage and bearing. It's attitude. It's setting examples (yeah, I know, but it's the thought that counts). It's grandeur of a sort.

Something was lost along the way. I don't know how to put it other than to repeat "larger than life".

If we're giving out awards, I vote Ingrid Bergman as best girl-next-door, and best blush. When she tells Rick ten years ago she was having "a brace put on my teeth", I love how she blushes -- in black-and-white, yet.
She was one class act.

Yes, Ken, I think there is kind of a small-minded campaign out there to destroy heroes, to try to make off that NOBODY is a valid role model...

It distresses me. I guess I'm still idealistic enough that I want to believe that there are people out there who are "better," who represent something I could aspire to be and work towards.

It's almost as if some folks, instead of looking at the people who have class or style or whatever, and going, "Wow, that's terrific, I'd like to be like that...now what can I do to be like that?" go, "Pffft. No one can be THAT good. And even if they are, I can't, so I'm going to set out to prove that they really aren't that good."

It's almost like the same mentality that sees someone with a nice house or nice car or nice sports equipment, and decides to vandalize it because they're unhappy that they don't have something that nice.

Ken,
There are plenty in the "current crop" that are just as classy as the people you mention in your list - a list that includes alcoholics and adulterers, among other vices and bad virtues. There were plenty of scandal rags detailing the sordid dramas of these people's lives as well, time has just slipped them from our collective memories. If Ol' Blue Eyes was still around, you could ask him why he's missing two of his own teeth (thanks, Ava!). Just because the batshit, ill-behaved stars are the only ones who make the dramatic headlines doesn't mean the era of a classy celebrity is bygone and spent. For every Barry Bonds, there's ten pro athletes that would gladly punch him in the face. For every jackass like Sean Avery or Dennis Rodman that screws starlets and acts like the game is all about him, there are guys that would die for their teammates, retire before they even considered cheating, can't wait to get home to their families and prefer to have the extra-cirricular media headlines be about them visitng sick kids in hospitals.

I'm not being critical of anyone here, it's just that I read so many people getting depressed because celebrities and athletes today just aren't what they used to be. That's bullshit. If all the headlines we are offered are muckraking drama, all we going to see is dirt. People would rather read about Brittney Spears' emotional meltdown than to hear that Kurt Russell moved to his family Canada so his little kid could play more hockey. There are a lot of celebrities like that. You just don't hear about them because they're quiet, private, and they don't flash their privates outside of clubs on Sunset.

And yeah - Ricki - I think the public at large does have a strange, if not sick, interest in putting people on pedastals if only for the pleasure of knocking them off. I can't stand that. I think it's horrible. I caved into it when Skanky McHotel had her downfall with the prison sentence, but only because she's the kind of useless, vapid celebrity that DESERVES it.

I agree, Emily. You don't hear about it when someone acts decently. You just hear about it when they go to rehab for the third time.
My esteem for Will Smith went way up when he left the Academy Awards because one of his kids at home became ill. Now, that's a good role model, IMHO.

But didn't we used to hear about people acting "decently", even when it was just PR? All that newsreel footage of starlets handing out donuts at the USO and movie stars visiting wounded soldiers in the hospital?

(I KNOW that has to still go on. I think there are some sports stars and some country-music folks who've gone to veteran's hospitals to try to cheer up wounded troops. Sometimes it's trotted out as a "human interest" story on local news, but doesn't seem to go much farther than that).

I think we've reached a point where bad news, and people behaving badly, seems to sell better than "here's a person doing something nice," so that's what we get. But I wonder what it does to us, psychologically, when most of what we hear is rehab/ugly divorce/arrested for DUI/photographed showing privates/beat up reporter.

Emily, I know all that. And Cary Grant was an acid head.

I know celebrities had their scandals, but for some reason, the public didn't seem to define them by the scandals, which seems to happen now. None of those people lived up to the images we had of them. It's the idea of having those images of them that I think is lost. That and public dignity.

Well, back in those days, actors were also essentially the property of individual studios, so they were protected a lot more. That, and paparazzi weren't paid millions for photos. Plus, with 24-hour news networks and more gossip rags than one person can read in a lifetime, there's just more news time and space to fill, so we get excessive crap about people that are regarded as more important than they should be. I think part of the problem is that too many celebrities are rising to the occassion and believing their own press to the point where you have people like Madonna and Angelina Jolie suffering from an almost laughable delusion of self-importance and vainglory.

Ricki - I think it does have a bad psychological impact, which is why I ignore it and get upset when the media makes it hard for me to do that. I do not want to hear celebrity gossip during regular news. I do not want to see it in headlines. It is not important. If other people like it, fine. That's what US Magazine is for, not CNN.

I'd still rather share a bottle of chianti (or 3...) with Gina Lollobrigida than darn near any of those plastics dames of today.

Bingster, what's this I hear of you mixing with the rich and famous?

Ken, I saw this and thought of you.

Yeah, we had a very polite (and very thirsty) house guest over the weekend.

You don't hear about it when someone acts decently. You just hear about it when they go to rehab for the third time.

Don't forget the old newsrag adage, "If it bleeds, it leads". That's because many people don't buy good news.....they want to hear the bad news. Like gawkers at a car accident, they want to watch someone else in a bad way. I go out of my way to avoid that behavior.

grumble grumble stupid bingley grumble grumble