Glamour Girls

Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood : Seventy-five Profiles by Tom Lisanti (2008) is a title from McFarland Publishing's extensive film and television performing arts category (http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/about.html). Sometimes it's hard to believe any more can be written about Hollywood in the 1960's but new angles on the motion pictures and television shows of the era keep popping up. In this book author Lisanti profiles 75 actresses of the era, most of whom briefly (some in close to the blink of an eye) passed across the big and little screens. Each actress gets at least one nice photograph from her heyday, a short description of career highlights, a longer section on "groovy" roles of the 60's, background on their pre-Hollywood years, and a section - lengths vary - on their post-1960's life and career(s). 13 of the women are interviewed as well and these interviews are the most interesting part of the book, imo.

For me, the most amazing thing about this book was a fleeting appearance by actor Steven Rogers (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0734779/). Mr. Rogers is shown getting close to one of the lovely ladies who are under a beach umbrella in one of those mid-60's beach movies. Rogers portrayed Doc on the first season of a hugely popular tv series, Combat! (the actual title includes a stylized bayonet, but an exclamation point is as close as my keyboard will get) and I had a huge crush on him. He disappeared from the show at the start of its second season (a sob from my pre-teen self), opting for the cushier life of beach and ski movies for a few years before departing from show business. A quick check of the yahoo group, combatfan, failed to provide much information beyond the imdb info.

All in all this is a fun read for fans of American films and television shows of the 1960's aimed at the teenaged audience that was dominating the tv set at home, if not the box office of the local movie theatre. Unfortunately, library books with excellent photos of movie actresses (or actors) are apt to have been vandalized at some point during their shelf life. This copy of Glamour Girls was no exception. Happily, the high quality of the book production work, another McFarland seliing point, has prevented the excisions from becoming too noticeable unless the reader goes through from cover to cover. In this case it was only a few pages into the Introduction before I realized 4 pages were missing and missing pages continued through to the end, generally in 4-page blocks. A less well-constructed book would have likely fallen apart before it had circulated very many times.

I meant to stick a note in when I returned it to the library the other morning but forgot; I'll try to remember to look up the catalog record and see which library owns the copy I read and call about the condition. Perhaps they'll take it out of circulation and obtain photocopies of the missing pages or replace it entirely before it goes out-of-print. Once someone has removed pages or otherwise damaged a book, subsequent users tend to be less careful than normal.