Google in Marilyn Monroe, then click on ‘Images’ as I did one cruisy retirement day when I was discovering what the ether held for me at that particular point in time. Of course, all the usual suspects were present – the first Playboy centrefold, the effect of a subway updraught vent on a dress, Bert Stern’s last sessions with her nude body thinly covered in diaphanous gauze – captured just before her candle was snuffed out. But then I found one that I hadn’t sighted previously – the sex symbol of my youth adorned in a black peignoir. It was not so much the image that struck me, but the name of the photographer. I’d heard it before, but in a different context. Could it be the one and same person? It was.

Now days, if we recognise the name Harold Lloyd at all, it is as one of the pioneers of the early decades of the movie industry business. Following in the footsteps of Chaplin and Keaton, in non-talkies such as ‘Safety Last’ (1923) and Girl Shy (1924), he had the chops to make an audience stay riveted to their seats in the silent era. By the thirties he had retired from appearing in front of the camera to work on what went on behind it – mainly in production. He also wished to indulge his passions – one of these being, in fact, the camera itself. He was fascinated by the technology of all forms of the apparatus – and that is how he came to be photographing a sultry Marilyn Monroe later in life. Even that wasn’t so straight forward as I discovered. Harold Lloyd was handicapped – a story in itself.

In 1919, whilst doing some publicity for a movie he was appearing in, what was meant to have been a false bomb being used as a prop turned out to be not so false after all. The resulting explosion caused the actor to experience flight; the result of which being that he was unable to fully discern the full extent of his injuries He had been rendered blind. Thankfully, after first fearing the worse, his sight gradually improved and was fully restored after eight months. By then he had full awareness of the other injury – he was missing half a hand. For the rest of his life he wore a leather glove protecting his prosthetic digits.

Lloyd was fascinated with all forms of cameras – how they worked and the product wrought from them. What especially transfixed him were the twin lensed varieties producing 3-D slides. By the time he died in 1971, he had a collection of over three hundred thousand of these slides in his estate. An intriguing factor is their subjects. Quite a number were of young women, including many of the era’s starlets. Lloyd, though, was not alone in being enthused by the attractions of the twin image. In 1940 the Hollywood Stereoscopic Society was formed by the old silent movie icon. Its membership included such notables as Dick Powell and Ronald Colman. Was it just a front for ageing men intent on attaining access to nubile young women, such as Bettie Page, prepared to undress for the prospect of some future tinsel town fame? I have no idea – but it is recorded that Lloyd himself was quite anal about his craft. He wasn’t a point and hope merchant – he spent hours fiddling with various lenses, filters and lighting to achieve pre-determined results.

His home, Greenacres, was a popular hangout for the Hollywood glitterati. There he took images of such folk as Candice Bergen, Alan Ladd, Mary Pickford, and Jayne Mansfield, as well as a bevy of curvy women who weren’t adverse to shedding their clothing to reveal oft pneumatic nakedness. Still later in life – we’re talking sixties now – there came into being the ‘Happy Seven’. These gentlemen, including our snapper, took off on cross country jaunts, with a couple of models in tow each time. The latter’s task was to posed nude in the great American countryside. What a happy dotage our man must have had. He wasn’t mono-focused on the unclad body alone, though. Lloyd travelled the US and the world documenting, with his camera, what he saw. He has given us an irreplaceable look into the Mad Man period – even snapping the Beatles performing at the Hollywood Bowl.

But back to that original image I espied. In 1925 a director bought a very fresh-faced Marilyn to Greenacres to film some scenes for one of her early features – not the first time his home had appeared in a movie production. The two met and she posed for him by the pool. A short time later another photographer was hired to capture her for the cover of ‘Life’ and Lloyd tagged along with his stereoscopic camera. It was then he photographed her in the sexy night attire of that alluring image I encountered.

Lloyd’s second claim to fame is gaining some traction, with galleries now treating his oeuvre as of some import. Could it be that one day he’ll be more remembered for what he produced in later life, as opposed to the days when his comedic turns lit up the silent silver screen?

To view a gallery of his images (warning – some tasteful nudity) = http://www.photographersgallery.com/by_artist.asp?id=170

There is much that is ugly, salacious and downright obscene on the Net and therefore, as a result, it often receives a negative rap. Casting all that aside, there is also much about it worth celebrating; many sites that are worth rhapsodising about – as I’m commencing to do. Such a place, in the ether, is the sublime Musetouch (https://www.facebook.com/MusetouchVisualArtsMagazine). Here much of an exquisite nature can be found – such as sublime photographic mementoes of times long past. There are images of timeless beauty – the fashions, art and luxury items from the end of the Nineteenth Century and the opening decades of the next – as well as the more up to date, reflecting the values of the art/ists/isans of another era. An added attraction are bygone beauties captured for eternity, particularly those of the fin de siècle/Edwardian periods. It is a great source for enriching my own facebook page.

‘MUSETOUCH is a free magazine about visual arts. It has been
created by Maia Sylba out of love and passion for art with
the hope that people will be able to use the publication and
website as a platform to showcase their skills and gain recognition.’

So it was there that I discovered Cléo de Mérode. She had me in raptuous awe from the moment I first lay eyes on her as she stared back at me from the Musetouch timeline. Who was this beautiful young woman with her thick, flowing, pre-Raphaelite locks and visage of alabaster gorgeousness? The girl I had stumbled upon, thanks to the endless facility the internet provides for instant research, turned out to have much more of a story than merely being an unknown subject of a photographer’s camera. Living from 1875 till well into my lifetime (1966), Ms Cléopatra Diane de Mérode is now largely forgotten, but for a time there she was the most talked about woman in the world. It would be a big call to say that because of her our notion of celebrity was invented, but she sure gave it one sizeable kick in the butt. I wasn’t the only viewer to be entranced on first espying her!

I read of her provenance – and was truly amazed by it. As a result, during one of my bath-time ablutions, I tried to figure out who may be the equivalent to her today. Although not in her thrall as well, the name I came up with was Angelina Jolie. She is a woman who is celebrity because of her class and talent, as well as her looks – as opposed to those trashily tiresome, plastic Kardashians. But for a while there it looked as though our Cléo could have taken the latter route to fame. A nation became obsessed with her love-life and one scandal followed another. Interest in Jolie sells magazines by the squillions with, for our muse – well, she sold something else at around the same amount. For most of her pomp she remained the talk of the town – and that town was Paris. She is buried in Père Lachaise.

She first came to notice as a dancer of the classical, Opéra de Paris variety, before extending her repertoire until she could command the Folies Bergère stage as well. The city on the Seine was captivated. The ladies about ville would emulate how she wore her hair in her latest production – she was the trendsetter for the times. Fandom is no modern incarnation. But her fame went into the stratosphere when Alexandre Falguière sculpted and unveiled ‘The Dancer’, supposedly in her unclad image. It caused a shit storm, Both the creator and subject had to go into damage control, issuing denials in the local rags. Hot on the heels of that, these same presses started linking her to that ancient roué and pillager of the Congo, the sixty plus King of the Belgians, Leopold 11. She was just 22. This blew her now notoriety to fever pitch, even though it is now thought the wily old devil was using the dancing queen as a front for another affair – with a prostitute. It was not long before the great painters of the period came calling. Degas, Klee, Toulouse-Lautrec and especially Klimt, all of whom successfully pleaded with her to pose for their palettes. Nadar pointed his camera at her for stunning portraits.

And it was this latter art form, when superimposed on a card, that spread her fame even wider. For this was the golden era of the postcard. It is postulated that during the Belle Epoque de Mérode became the most photographed subject in the world. A new take on her, in the around six by four inch format, was a hot item in the news-stands and railway stations of the Continent. No images were more sort after, by discerning men and women, than postcards of Cléo.

They took a while to take flight as a means of communication, as well as for collectors to enthuse over, did postcards They had been around for a while – emerging from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to reach their peak at a world fair, the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in the French capital. Early ones were blank on both sides for writing, but then some canny illustrator or photographer had another idea and they took off. Of course there is a seedier side to the postcard story, but the dancer/celebrity refused to be tarnished with any further despoiling of her name. There was nothing tacky or titillating about her product – she maintained rigorous quality control and the masses adored her for that. She was the embodiment of the ethereal ideal of the modern woman at the time. A glance at any example is enough to convince that she was as pure as the driven snow, being her gender’s ultimate role model. She carried it off perfectly.

Google her, click on the images and perhaps you’ll see why I was so taken by my initial glance and had to dig deeper. She was mesmerising and still should be. I wonder if her time will come again, like an Isadora Duncan or Sarah Bernhardt, or will she remain in relative obscurity. She deserves to be up there with them.

To see more of this remarkable woman = http://thefrenchsampler.blogspot.com.au/2011/04/cleo-de-morode.html