Bernard of Hollywood Ultimate Pin-Up Book

Real Live Girls

Bernard of Hollywood, the first still photographer to win an Academy Award, the discoverer of Marilyn Monroe (he shot the subway grate picture), was the undisputed king of the post-war pin-up photo. Flipping through this glorious retrospective of his life's work is rather like entering an alternate, pure-female universe (a universe, it's worth mentioning, entirely devised by, and for, men). Check out this statistic: there are exactly two men pictured in this entire 358-page book -- Bernard and his mentor Alberto Vargas. The photographs are lush, delicious, and the women ("ripe" is the word that comes to mind) in them all appear ridiculously, deliriously happy (well, all of them except for Jayne Mansfield, who looks insane). There they are: strippers; Vegas showgirls; unknown, poignantly unnamed models; and all the starlets of the '50s and '60s. Bernard's women, it seems to even the armchair analyst, signified escape for Bernard, a.k.a. Bruno Bernard Sommerfeld, a Jew who escaped Nazi Germany. Read the lovely introduction by Bernard's daughter Susan, which hints that perhaps Bernard's most impressive creation was himself.

Adrienne Miller is Esquire's literary editor.

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