ephemeral lounge

life:

Happy 80th, Michael Caine!

LIFE celebrates the man’s career with a series of previously unpublished photos from 1966, made by LIFE’s Bill Ray. Ray remembers that Caine “seemed to be a magnet, without ever lifting a finger. And that was another part of the laid-back thing. He seemed to have perfected a way to make things look easy, and so things became easy. See the photos here.

Pictured: Michael Caine lifts girlfriend Natalie Wood off the ground, 1966.

(Bill Ray—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

That’s sprezzatura. I dig it.

I like to think about how TV shows were initially produced just to sell advertising. Okay, that’s glossing over the story a bit, but in general, it’s so. Well, it began with radio, of course. Advertisers wanted to sell Lux soap flakes or whatever, so they’d put on a 15 minute show for you, and in the middle of it, the star of the show would glorify suds. 

I mean, in case you never really got it, that’s why Fred Flintstone told your parents which cigarettes to buy. Winston was paying for a very big chunk of the show.

This is from the Dec. 4, 1964 edition of LIFE magazine. Isn’t it fun to think of Donna Reed giving out sewing machines and transistor radios and phonographs for Christmas? They’d all be wrapped in the same exact shiny, shiny paper, with big beautiful bows attached at the gift wrap department, of course. 
Do you remember the gift wrap department? But I assure you, there was such a thing. You’d bring the things you bought from various departments at Macy’s or other stores up to this room near customer service and the bathrooms, and they’d wrap em all there for you. You could come back later for them if you wanted to. All year round. I mean, sure, you can still have your purchases wrapped at many stores. But it isn’t at all the same thing. 

There are still Singer stores, here and about. But they’re not the same thing at all these days, either. Nothing is. Maybe that’s why every time someone produces a “new” Christmas song it’s such a lame or tortured failure. 

When this song was written in 1950, sure, it was idealistic. However. It was rooted in a very different reality than the one we now share. 

And now, boys and girls, you know why old people act a little bitter sometimes.  But we should all understand that statement, “There is nothing new under the sun,” was written 3,000 years ago. :-)

Here are a few things I’ve posted for Halloween over the past couple years; figured they were worth collecting in one spot. Likely I have some more around here if only I’d get to looking. 

Halloween used to be different.

LIFE magazine, Oct. 20, 1961

The candy was more interesting, for sure. Although, the 70s were the pinnacle of candy choices. Don’t even try to argue with me on that point. 

LIFE magazine, Oct. 20, 1961

This was even more before my time, but I’m old enough to remember popcorn balls and apples in my treat bag. I remember the ladies who handed out popcorn balls, and still think of them fondly. 

And now every year people trot out the same old stories about how all candy is dangerous and homemade treats are wicked because of that guy who tried to murder his son with poisoned Pixy Stix 35 years ago. You can hand out Christmas cookies but not Halloween ones. Muse on that. Also, why that boy is dressed in a pink bunny costume. They hadn’t invented irony back then or anything.

I was looking at the Frank Sinatra tag a short time ago and saw this photo. It struck me hard, how Italian it was. At least, Italian-American. Completely. But when I went back to look for it to reblog, I couldn’t find it. So I Googled “Frank Sinatra eating a sandwich” and found it at Life.com. My favorite website, really. Anyway. Molto Italiano. Hard to explain, maybe. But kind of awesome, to the aging 3rd generation.

Click on the pic for the source, and for more men eating sandwiches.

I’ve shared a number of ads from the October 8 issue of LIFE. It’s a pretty interesting issue otherwise, as well, because it teaches you how to make beans and cassoulet, and about Hawaii, and something or other about China that I forget, and there’s this very touching article about a guy searching for his brother in Vietnam.

I gotta get some new issues; I keep reading the same ones over and over again!

Anyway. Was belt-tightening on the minds of the people? 

This is a nice approach, though I question the model choice. They’re like, “We’ve got this, okay?” And they don’t really apologize for not playing to the single malt crowd.

These people were playing to their own choir; just keeping their hand in, to mix up some metaphors into one awkward cocktail. They want you to think of yourself as the guy holding the glass. He’s got class, but also sense. I, in fact, don’t want you to think of yourself as that guy, because he looks like he’d seduce you with gentle words, then tie you up with a plastic clothesline so he can spank you while complaining about his mother. 

Apparently you can mix up stuff from Minnesota, put the name of a different country on the label, and proudly proclaim you’ve nailed Kentucky tradition. Because of the water there. Dude, they got limestone in New York, too. (And that is actually partly why their drinking water is freaking delicious.) But anyway, it’s just ridiculous over-the-top ad copy, and if Orson Welles had read it, he’d have slapped these people down but good. Just say it’s as cheap as your tonic water and be done with it. Serving up a TV dinner on the good china fools nobody. Speaking of which…

Gosh, honey, how did you make each one look so perfectly identical?

To digress for a moment, have you ever looked into the history of why mass-produced American beer tastes like such utter crap?

Here’s why.

They tried desperately for years to get American women to drink more beer, so they watered it down, sometime after World War II, I forget the details. I think Budweiser was the first. They were all, man, people think we’re still German even though that was our great-grandparents who are all dead now. How do we sell more beer? And so. In the 50s & 60s, they tried to appeal to women. (If you’re old enough, you know who they turned their attention to in the 70s…)

It didn’t work fantastically at first, so they sort of repackaged the product to make it seem “special,” so women would want to drink it as something unique. All that really happened was alcoholics like my dad drank even more of it than before, because it took half a case to get the buzz going. Well done, Schlitz and company!

Back on the flipside of the economy coin, Remington laughed and said, “Plebeians.”

“Keep drinking your single malt and shave with this, Mr. Telephony Engineer. Chicks will want to touch you.”

Everyone else was a bit confused by the ad copy and started using disposables.

I love when I can find relevance in the recent past to something I’m interested in currently.

Before electronic banking and debiting:

Before digitally streaming audio/video:

Before Reed Hastings’ Monday morning email:

Note that Renault is still fairly passive-aggressive in their language and tone. It’s all, “You funny Americans.” But it’s still a real apology, with corporate accountability, and notation of steps taken and goals to be met.

I’ve touched on this before; the “new marketing” toward women, who were becoming major consumers of more than just groceries and diapers. Or, well, of course they always had been, but men who sold the stuff were finally beginning to notice…

I could crack up at the idea that vodka and gin are subtly lumped in with “lady drinks.” Sure, if you fill the glass with juice and/or soda first. And not for nothing is vodka often referred to as “training wheels.” It blends in and disappears inside a lady drink, after all. But more amusing is the series of messages about the whiskey itself; it tastes mild but packs a punch. It’s distilled in small dainty batches instead of big crude ones. They’re empowering woman to drink like a lady and a man at the same time. Be a tasteful drunk. 

Or a sexy one! This grabs the attention in a whole different way. Targeting the same crowd, but much more effectively, I think. It seems to me that the first ad appeasrs to be targeting women, but it’s really targeting men. “Give her this; she won’t realize how strong it is.” But the second one is selling to women while teasing their men. I think I’m for that.

From May 21, 1965 LIFE magazine, more to follow.

life:

In the spring of 1963, Steve McQueen was on the brink of superstardom, already popular from his big-screen breakout as one of The Magnificent Seven and just a couple months away from entering the Badass Hall of Fame with the release of The Great Escape— LIFE sent photographer John Dominis to California to hang out with the 33-year-old actor and see what he could get. Only a handful of those photos have ever been published… LIFE.com presents these never-before-seen gems from that legendary assignment, along with insights from Dominis about the time he spent with the man who would become known as the King of Cool.

Steve McQueen: 20 Never-Seen Photos

When our youngest son was small, we used to call him Steve McQueen. The resemblance has faded, though. :-)

At first glance, this makes no sense. Even in 1965, Johnny Hart’s average reader had to be rather older than the Dr Pepper target consumer. And I don’t see that they were just reaching for the young-at-heart…

But upon further examination, it makes even less sense. Hart had just a sick sense of humor. The more you think about the cartoon, the worse it gets, and what it has to do with “today’s light ‘n lively taste,” I don’t even.

And I’m annoyed with myself for being annoyed by the fact that I forget-his-name cheeky caveman has skates in the first panel but not the second. Of course, I forget-his-name slacker caveman wouldn’t be wearing any, anyway, ‘cause that’s how he rolled.

From March 26, 1965 LIFE magazine.

Groucho Marx probably wasn’t quite a has-been in 1965. He was just old. He was born in October 1890, so he was 74 in this ad. I mean, Smirnoff? Not trying to distance themselves from the Cold War or anything. Just let the charm of an old funny man sneaking around Vaudeville-style with booze in his jacket sell your product…

If that’s how you want us to interpret the thing.

The still-handsome Peter Lawford, on the other hand, was a drunk by this point. Or maybe in the middle of trying not to be while stepping out on Pat Kennedy, his wife, who later became a drunk herself. 

(Yes, it’s possible I know too much about these people.)

The point is, you probably haven’t seen any of his movie and TV work after Sinatra dumped him unless you remember this exciting episode of The Love Boat or you’re really completionist about the latter seasons of The Jeffersons. 

So to my way of thinking, this makes him not the best choice to shill pre-made cocktails. I guess they thought he’d class up the joint a little bit, even though I suspect he was more likely to hide bottles of Smirnoff in his overcoat…

Once Frank stopped freely pouring the champagne, anyway. 

Both these ads appeared in the April 2, 1965 LIFE magazine. 

I grew up seeing The Tonight Show in black and white, as my parents would watch it most every night and I managed to sidestep bedtime rather well during summer vacation. By the time we got color TV in 1981 when I was 16 and my parents had divorced, that show was off my mom’s radar. But the following year I discovered Late Night with David Letterman, and just kept loving him forever. I didn’t even think I liked Johnny Carson until shortly before he retired, so I probably saw him in color only a handful of times. And now, looking back, I realize it was just another situation in which I was growing up slightly off-era. Johnny was awesome.

When I was a child, I thought the people who had color TV either had no idea how to adjust it or just didn’t care, or their TVs were bad. The color was harsh and off-putting to me. When we got our color TV I was suspicious of it, but spent a great deal of time making minute adjustments until things looked just as I thought they should. That was 16 years after RCA Victor claimed they’d perfected the technology. 

Now I know it was largely just mid-60s-late 70s color I hated. Set it all back to a 1950s palette and I’d have been happy to indulge in color sooner.

Young sophisticates! But also, females! The “soft” blends were marketed toward couples and toward men who wanted to club-drink like their dads, but grew up in a world already becoming addicted to sparkling soft drinks (their children so fully accustomed to fruity fizz, they were sucking down Bartles and James 20 years later like it meant something) and the hard-bitten old world Scotches were harsh on their tongues. 

(And hi fi! All hip ads featured one of those.)

This is how I tell it, anyway. Same thing with bourbon; a smooth bourbon is easier on the palate and it’s gotta be sold that way. Something cool, but not too tough. 

It’s your dad’s drink, and you finally figured out ol’ Dad did know a few things after all, see?

Then a couple months later I was born and immediately embarked on a lifetime of making fun of your plebeian tastes, but that’s for a different blog.