Sometimes weird trends will pop up as one is watching a variety of movies or TV over the course of a few days. Sometimes an actor will appear in one, two or three projects all at once and it's startlingly coincidental. Or perhaps one set piece will mirror another one in an unrelated movie or show. For me, I suddenly ran headlong into three scenes featuring trips to the steam room! (There are worse places to end up...!) As a generous sort of person, I share these with you today in this abbreviated post. (Well, as abbreviated as I ever get!) The cover photo for today is one of several from a vintage magazine layout. Taken at the famed Finlandia Baths, a favorite Tinseltown hangout, it features Scott Brady,
Hugh O'Brian, Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis. One of these men figures into our first featured sequence today.
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By the time of 1963's A Gathering of Eagles, Hudson was a highly-established star, having enjoyed a decade of increasingly prominent movie roles. He plays an air force colonel who is called upon for toughness when getting his men ready for nuclear attack readiness during the Cold War. He faces inter-office conflict along with a certain amount of wife trouble along the way. Incidentally, this link is more pristine than the copy I am showing here... I discovered it too late.
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I like to pretend he had nothing on under his flight suit... Ha ha! And I just love this jaunty li'l green ballcap.
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| One of his sergeants is played by TV actor Robert Lansing, then fresh off a one-season run on 87th Precinct and soon to start 12 O'Clock High. |
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In one sequence, they take part in a spirited game of handball.
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Lansing sports some red short-shorts while Hudson is swathed in grey sweatshirt and sweatpants.
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Nevertheless, the fit actor manages to make the most out of what was once THE go-to look for any scene set in a gymnasium.
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Apparently not having sweat enough on the court, the two next show up in the base steam room.
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In an unintentionally (?) erotic scene, Hudson asks Lansing if he is getting the most out of his men and eventually asks for his help.
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Lansing could generate a pretty penetrating gaze when he wanted to.
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Hudson was at or near his peak of manly handsomeness.
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Lansing has work to do under his severe commander, so he gets up to leave. As he's exiting, another officer comes into the steam room.
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...and sadly it's not nice-looking Kevin McCarthy either.
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Instead we get Barry Sullivan! Egads.
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Rock looks disappointed. Now I know what his face would have been like had he been sitting alone in the Finlandia Baths steam room and saw me come padding in. HA HA!
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He just can't get Lansing off his mind...
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I'm kidding. The shot of contentment is in regards to his wife in the film, Mary Peach. When she gets up, in the shot shown here, his chest is exposed. But in the very next frame, he has the bedclothes pulled way up as seen earlier.
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| Along the way she had some pert clothing and nice hairstyles, but her story line (a triangle with Taylor) was clearly present to add female interest to the macho military plot. (Trivia tidbit: Well-regarded costumer Irene committed suicide after this final assignment, before the film was released.) Devoted to her as he is, Peach didn't light much of a fire with audiences in this, nor with me. |
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I really think he'd have been happier elsewhere.
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The steam room scene was used to promote the (really pretty obscure) movie. But seeing them in living color is much better.
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Our next offering didn't come with any such option, though. Frequent Hudson costar Robert Stack was ensconced in his hit series The Untouchables in 1962. The gritty, hard-nosed show was not one known for its beefcake qualities.
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Stack's FBI agent Elliot Ness was forever trying to bring down the mob, one gangster at a time.
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While not his primary target, Frank DeKova (as "Tough Tony" Lamberto) was part of Stack's plan to nab a troublemaker. (A troublemaker or five, as it were...! This is the episode which featured recent profilee Michael Witney as one of a quintet of criminal brothers. The ep was titled "A Fist of Five." No comments from the peanut gallery please...)
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Because of the privacy and the difficulty of bringing in hidden weapons, steam rooms could be good locations for sensitive conversations. As Stack enters the room, we see that this was still an era when an exposed belly button was generally a no-no on TV.
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More than anything, I was alarmed at the presence of a glass (!) water pitcher and tumblers in the room!
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We know they're talking about criminal activity, plans, set-ups and so on, but with no sound, the images can't help but take on a different sort of feel.
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Somehow, from the moment I first spied it, I figured Stack was going to tug on that pendulous chain sooner or later.
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He gets steamed at his fellow inhabitant and uses a douse of water to increase the temperature of the room. A gorgeous copy of the ep is available here.
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Moving on now to 1973 and the second-to-last episode of the TV series Ghost Story (aka - "Circle of Fear.") Pat Harrington, who you may know better for his later role of Schneider on One Day at a Time, is headed to the steam room.
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It may be a generational thing, but it would never occur to me to wear my towel this high. From multiple episodes of Tattletales and other programs, I've been given to understand that in real life Harrington was adventurous and also had few qualms about getting naked whenever he felt like it! But here, he is pretty demure.
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Entering the room, he discovers that he is not alone.
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Harrington realizes right away that it's a business/office associate of his. One he's had some disagreement with.
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It's Tab Hunter, looking dangerously sensual! I don't think this was a completely foreign environment for our Tab.
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These are not two people you expect to see in the same airspace. But this was at a time when Hunter was struggling to maintain his career and had begun appearing on lots of television to make ends meet. (John Waters helped in this regard by enlisting Hunter for 1981's Polyester, which lent him a whole new image and further movie opportunities.)
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Anyway, Harrington soon finds himself locked in the steam room, fighting for his life as a silent, menacing Hunter slips on a robe and slinks away!
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Turns out that it wasn't even Hunter's real character, but an evil doppelganger who comes around to menace anyone Hunter has a gripe with!
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Evil Tab has a devilishly sexy attitude (and later appears briefly in a swimsuit), but we take one point off for wearing those briefs underneath his pajama bottoms... Ha ha! This episode may be seen in all its glory here.
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That brings us ALMOST to The End. I wanted to point out something that I never knew until today...
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Those iconic Finlandia Bath photos of Rock, Hugh and friends were in fact almost shot-for-shot repeats of an earlier layout! The one on the left has folks like Gilbert Roland, Walter Pidgeon and Peter Lorre in it!
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Here on the left we have a naked (but for a towel) Humphrey Bogart playing cards with a similarly unclad Lorre. Then in the photo to the right, the moment has been recreated! One fun difference here is that, while the men in the foreground have more bath sheet coverage going on, Rock is naked in the background during his massage and is even giving some long-range butt cheek! And now that truly is The End!
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7 comments:
P! All I can say is you must have a photographic memory to find the similarities in the two sets of shots. Very cool! Makes me long for a steam room situation. It wouldn't be my first. :)
Suddenly, I'm a big fan of Tab Hunter. I guess I've never seen him with facial hair. And it's always nice to discover unseen (at least by me) pics of Rock.
BTW, I thought you were taking some time off? This was a nice surprise!
Happy New Year to you, Poseidon!
A.
Steamy! Having some experience with Saunas I can't say they're the most comfortable places to loiter, I mean linger, in. Tab looks so hot, I love him clean cut of course, but louche and hairy works too. This was an unexpected holiday gift as mentioned. I was surprised to read about Irene. Looked her up and she did the iconic costumes on Lana Turner in "Postman" and the fab frocks on Doris Day in my favorite "Midnight Lace" . I learn so much here
I remember seeing the '50s version of the Finlandia Baths photos featured in a book collecting articles from some old "movie magazine," but I can't recall which magazine it was. (The book was a library book that disappeared off the shelves not long after I checked it out and returned it, decades ago.)
I could've sworn I read somewhere-- not sure if it was in the text with those photos or somewhere else-- that the spread was the work of celeb photographer Jerome Zerbe.
But while Zerbe is said on his Wikipedia page to have "photographed numerous stars in Hollywood's Golden Age and *some of the hopefuls, before they became known, posed for him wearing few if any clothes*" the Wiki page marked this nugget as unsourced and needing citation.
OTOH, I recall having read *somewhere* that Zerbe was known for having photographed a number of male stars nude in the shower, a setup that he was fond of using resulting in a private collection of full-frontal shots-- so that claim is at least out there in print.
However, by the '50s Zerbe was in NYC and heavily involved with documenting the denizens of "cafe society" rather than Tinseltown. While it's entirely possible he did the Finlandia photos on a visit or on special assignment, that sort of setup-- showers and locker rooms-- was fairly common as a safe, "non-sexual" pretext to display male flesh.
But even if he didn't photograph the '50s Finlandia spread, could it be that Zerbe shot the earlier spread with Pidgeon, Roland, Bogart and Lorre that you show?
One other nugget to add: Irene jumped to her death from an 11th floor hotel room in 1962; she had left MGM around 1950 to open her own fashion house, but in 1960, Doris Day convinced her to come back and do her films MIDNIGHT LACE (which got Irene an Oscar nomination) and LOVER COME BACK (1961), her last two films before A GATHERING OF EAGLES.
In the months before she committed suicide, Day noticed that Irene had become unusually nervous and upset and reached out to her.
She said Irene confided in her that her "long-distance" marriage to Cedric Gibbons' writer brother Eliot had not been a happy one, though it helped her get the job replacing Adrian at MGM, where Cedric was the head art director. She further confessed that she had fallen in love with Gary Cooper decades earlier, and when he died in 1961, she lost the only man that she would ever be able to love.
And one final note: that high-waisted towel-wrapping on Robert Stack and Pat Harrington might not have been the result of the legendary "no exposed navels on TV" edict.
Wrapping the towel that high would've *also* enabled an actor to hide any sort of paunch-suppressing undergarment he might've been using under his clothes. This sort of belly-flattener was so widely used in the "pre-gymbot" days by both men on- and off-screen that you actually found ads for them turning up in *comic books* in the early '50s!
This was yet another fun read, Poseidon! Thanks for posting it and for all you do!
Happy New Year and love to all! Be safe and well, everyone!
Shawny, my trend towards photographic memorization depends a lot on what I'm looking at...! Ha ha ha!!! Glad you liked this. My sinuses could use a little steam, and eye candy doesn't exactly hurt either.
A, I knew I'd be off the blog till after Christmas, but when I got back on 12/27 it was SO SLOW in here that I found I had enough time to squeeze one more post out before 2023 came to a close. :-) Now that it's 2024, things are picking up (lots of holiday money out there for people to spend!) In recent weeks, I've tried to table any belly-aching about being to busy to post, etc... - because I know it becomes grating - and have tried to chug along as much as possible. I hope I will be able to keep pace this year. Thanks!
Gingerguy, I appreciate it, though I have to admit that "I" also learn as I'm researching various aspects of a post. Doris Day really liked Irene a lot and was very upset over her situation and death. Coop really had something that drove women WILD. Some attempted suicide over him, but lived to tell about it...! BTW, I've always found saunas/steam rooms to be a matter of timing. It's too uncomfortable to just park in there, at least for me! I'll stick it out (so to speak! LOL) if there's a reason, but, if not, a little goes a long way. ;-)
hsc, there were, as you're aware, a ton of those "star in the shower" photos taken for publicity and while the magazines ran cropped versions, you just know that the photographers held on to the original negatives! You probably know more than I do about it, but I recall a scandal in which Sal Mineo was followed for a photo shoot into the showers and all sorts of snaps were taken, but he was like 16 or 17 (!) so it raised a stink. Then there is Pat Boone who was hung out to (not) dry when Life Magazine opened its Pandora's Box of archived pics! Then a couple of years ago, some ASTONISHING shots of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in the shower together belatedly hit the market. More please...! Of anyone famous then! I was really surprised to see that, underneath his suits and round face, Lorre was quite athletic and in pretty good shape (hairy as an ape, too.) Thanks!
I'm old enough to remember the gym and steam room camaraderie between men of all stripes back in the day. It's too bad everything is so polarized today. Anyway, the steam room scenes were a staple of a lot of shows. Those and the cowpoke bathing scenes bring back special memories of a more innocent and quite enticing era.
I'm not one for change to start with, so the "evolution" of the gym/club culture in general has been hard for me to take anyway...! The old YMCA downtown, which was so wonderful and like a spa with HUGE tiled steam room, sauna, whirlpool and shower was gutted and replaced with two closet-sized steam (acrylic) & sauna, phone booth sized plastic showers (which began to fall apart after just weeks!) and no whirlpool at all. I go to that one maybe 3 times a year now instead of 3 times a week (!), but I guess that's "progress." I love finding old examples of the steam room, bathing, showering of yesteryear to plop onto this site. Thanks!
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