The bond between dogs and humans has taken many forms: hunting companions, workmates, helpers and saviors. Then there are show dogs, the kind that take center stage every year at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. These dogs are primped, pampered and trained with the same dedication and diligence that world-class coaches bring to the prepping of elite athletes.
When the Westminster show descends on New York’s Madison Square Garden, it seems that everybody—even cat people!—are, for a few days at least, dog devotees. Enjoy this selection of four-legged friends from the 1950s and ’60s by the great Nina Leen.
Courtenay Fleetfoot of Pennyworth (a.k.a. “Ricky”), a Whippet, was chosen Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, New York City, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Skye Terrier, Jacinthe de Ricelaine, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Skye Terrier, Jacinthe de Ricelaine, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Vincenzo Calveresi with his four Maltese, 1955.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Maltese, 1955.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Maltese, 1955.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ignoring a kick, a team of Maltese dogs stood motionless as owner Vincenzo Calversi tested their obedience, 1955.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Billy, a Miniature Poodle, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Dilettante, a Chow, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Doberman in training ran behind an automobile near Roslyn, N.Y. with handler Peter Knoop.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Painted Lady, a Boxer, 1964
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mighty Man, a Brussels Griffon, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Westminster Dog Show, 1955.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Wire Fox Terrier, Travella Superman of Harham, 1955.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Wire Fox Terrier, Travella Superman of Harham, 1955.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
This Whippet, Courtenay Fleetfoot of Pennyworth, won Best in Show in 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Courtenay Fleetfoot of Pennyworth won Best in Show, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Not too many musical classics have experienced the sort of polar-opposite reactions from audiences and critics that Porgy and Bess has elicited ever since it debuted on Broadway in 1935. The opera, which features some of the most recognizable songs in all of American music, has been praised as a bold attempt to exalt African-American vernacular in the operatic canon, and pilloried as a patronizing, if not outright racist, caricature of black life in the South in the early 20th century. Even some of the black performers who have most ably filled principal roles in the opera through the years have voiced their reservations about the work.
The great St. Louis-born mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry, for example, said of her own experience playing and singing the part of Bess: “I thought it beneath me. I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there.”
Bumbry’s attitude is, arguably, the same that most people have chosen to take to the work. The opera might be filled with racial stereotypes; the songs might glorify the basest (quasi-mythical) aspects of Black culture; the characters might be emblematic of African American “types” anchored not so much in history as in the dominant culture’s notion of that history all that might be true, but the opera also, all these decades later, somehow endures. It has seen several revivals on Broadway (most recently in 2011) and musicians and singers as diverse as Miles Davis, Jascha Heifetz and Christina Aguilera have performed or recorded their own variations on the opera’s famous tunes.
Here, LIFE.com presents photos made on the set of the earliest film version of the opera Otto Preminger’s 1959 Porgy and Bess, starring Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr. as the drug-dealing pimp, Sportin’ Life, and Pearl Bailey. LIFE magazine evidently loved it (see below), but the years have not been kind to the production, and one would be hard-pressed to find a critic today who doesn’t find the film an unsettling combination of strident and cartoonish.
It’s also worth noting of this production that Davis and Bailey recorded their singing parts; Poitier’s and Dandrdige’s songs were dubbed by two classical singers: Robert McFerrin (Bobby McFerrin’s dad) and Adele Addison.
This, meanwhile, is how LIFE introduced the movie to its readers in the June 15, 1959, issue of the magazine, in a multi-page spread featuring Gjon Mili’s vibrant color photos. (Only one of Mili’s pictures from that assignment is in this gallery; none of the other photos here ran in LIFE.)
The folk opera, Porgy and Bess, is a story of life, death and faithlessness in a Negro tenement called Catfish Row. It has come a long way since composer George Gershwin and author DuBose Heyward launched it hopefully on Broadway in 1935 and sadly closed it after 124 money-losing performances. Gershwin and Heyward were dead when success finally came through some fine U.S. revivals and a triumphant State Department-sponsored tour of Europe. Today Porgy and Bess is a national treasure and a beloved classic and comes finally to the movie screen.
Samuel Goldwyn had his troubles casting the film, but he wound up with some of the finest Negro actors and singers in the land — Sidney Poitier as Porgy, Dorothy Dandridge as Bess, Pearl Bailey as Maria, Sammy Davis Jr. as Sportin’ Life. The glory of the opera, its unforgettable songs, comes resplendently from the stereophonic soundtrack. All the favorites are there Summertime, I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’, It Ain’t necessarily So, Bess, Yo Is My Woman Now. The plot, taken from the play by Heyward and his wife Dorothy, is unchanged in the movie as are the brilliant lyrics, written by Heyward and Gershwin’s brother Ira.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dorothy Dandridge (Bess) and Brock Peters (Crown) on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sammy Davis Jr. in character as Sportin’ Life on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dorothy Dandridge and Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Pearl Bailey (Maria) in a scene from Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Porgy and Bess, 1959: At annual church picnic, the people of Catfish Row hear Sportin’ Life (Sammy Davis Jr.) sing his song of skeptical wickedness.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Scene from the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock.
Porgy and Bess
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dorothy Dandridge and Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Brock Peters (Crown) on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Porgy and Bess
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Brock Peters and Sidney Poitier act out violent scene from Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Anyone who has lived to be almost 100 likely has a few outlandish tales to tell. At least, one hopes they have tales to tell; it’s simply too awful to think of someone living through ten decades without one adventure, one great passion, one scandal worthy of relating over and over again. What’s the point of living a long life, after all, if one can’t look back with some complacency and pleasure at the glorious, memorable mistakes one made along the way?
With that in mind, we turn our attention to the one and only Zsa Zsa Gabor. Born Sári Gábor on Feb. 6, 1917, in Budapest, the middle sister of a middle-class Hungarian family between younger sister Eva (1919 – 1995) and older sister Magda (1915 – 1997) Zsa Zsa lived in the public eye for more than six decades, before her death at 99 in 2016.
Beautiful, glamorous and disarmingly funny; married nine times, divorced seven (one marriage was annulled); friend and lover to the famous; accused traffic cop-slapper (remember that weirdness back in 1989?); Bernie Madoff victim to the tune of something like $10 million; best-selling author; actress with scores of movies and TV appearances to her name one could argue that Zsa Zsa was, in fact, the very last of those outrageous, celebrated Hollywood figures (like her late friend, Liz Taylor) who routinely and unrepentantly provided scandal sheets and gossip columnists with fodder in the middle part of the last century.
Quotations attributed to her through the years, meanwhile, suggest a lively intelligence and a savvy, off-hand and charming worldliness behind her seemingly soft facade:
“A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.”
“Macho does not prove mucho.”
“I have never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back.”
“Husbands are like fires. They go out if unattended.”
“To a smart girl men are no problem. They’re the answer.”
Time, alas, was not kind to Gabor. Late in her life, she suffered strokes, was confined to a wheelchair and had her right leg amputated above the knee to combat an aggressive infection. Her obituary was written and prepped and then shelved several times in the past few years by media outlets, as she fought on against mounting odds, diminished but far from forgotten.
Here, LIFE.com recalls the younger Zsa Zsa with a series of photos by Ed Clark many of which never ran in LIFE from 1951, when she was barely known outside of California, but was quickly becoming as famous as her sister, Eva (who, incidentally, only married five times).
In its October 15, 1951, issue LIFE magazine introduced the 34-year-old Zsa Zsa to its millions of readers thus:
To television fans in most of the country, the only Gabor is blonde Eva, whose Hungarian beauty is a frequent, familiar and satisfying sight on their screens. But lately another Gabor, Eva’s sister Zsa Zsa, has begun to establish herself on the West Coast as a TV performer and wit of sorts. The show on which she appears is called Bachelor’s Haven and specializes in romantic counsel to men, a field in which Zsa Zsa feels herself highly qualified, from personal experience.
Her experience began about 15 years ago when, as a teenager in her native Budapest, she proposed to a Turkish diplomat over his teacups and became Mrs. Burhan Belge. But, says Zsa Zsa, “I was still a little girl playing with dolls,” and so in 1941 they were divorced. Zsa Zsa, whose given name is Sari, made her way to the U.S. and married hotel-man Conrad Hilton. After five hectic years of marriage, which were enlivened by a jewel robbery and Zsa Zsa’s tales of being mysteriously drugged and held captive in a Hollywood hotel, she and Mr. Hilton were divorced. In 1949 she married actor George Sanders. When he left for a movie role in England three months ago Zsa Zsa took a television job to fill her idle time. She now has signed a movie contract herself and is rated as the biggest new hit on West Coast TV, a rating she has earned by her beauty, ripe Continental accent and the Hungarian savoir-faire with which she tosses off her advice to the lovelorn.
“Men have always liked me and I have always liked men,” says Gabor, “but I like a mannish man, a man who knows how to talk to and treat a woman not just a man with muscles.” On Bachelor’s Haven, where she is a permanent panel member, Zsa Zsa is often peremptory. When she senses that a man does not meet her rigid standards, she dismisses the offender with a curt: “Him I would shoot.”
Back in the day, being a genuine Hollywood star entailed more than just acting (or looking good while sort of acting). Leading men and women had to sing, dance, play it straight, play the clown—in short, they had to know how to entertain.
Little wonder, then, that in 1958, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences planned its 30th Oscars ceremony—the fifth ever to be televised—it called upon the town’s multi-talented screen icons to put on a barn-burner of a show.
LIFE photographer Leonard McCombe was a fly on the wall that year as stars such as Paul Newman, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Kirk Douglas and Mae West rehearsed for the big event. Only a handful of McCombe’s marvelous photos were published. Here, decades later, are the pictures that ran in LIFE, and many more that didn’t.
Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster with choreographer Jack Cole, practicing a mock-bitter song-and-dance number called “It’s Great Not to Be Nominated”; the tune ribbed many of the year’s Oscar contenders.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Inside Los Angeles’ RKO Pantages theater, home of the Academy Awards from 1949 through 1959, Janet Leigh and Shirley MacLaine practiced a tune.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Zsa Zsa Gabor arrived at the 1958 Oscar rehearsals in pearls and a fur stole.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Paul Newman appeared to wait for a cue, as fellow Oscar presenter Doris Day consulted with a director (gesturing toward the audience). On the big night itself, Newman’s wife Joanne Woodward won Best Actress for The Three Faces of Eve .
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mae West and Rock Hudson rehearsed the flirty pop standard, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” as Academy president George Seaton looked on.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Clark Gable, 1958.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Shirley MacLaine, 1958.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Doris Day and Clark Gable prepared to present the winners of the writing awards, 1958.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bob Hope, who hosted (or co-hosted) the Academy Awards 19 times over his long career, appears to pick something off Betty Grable’s sweater; standing above them on the steps are Shirley Jones —then famous for the movie musicals Oklahoma! and Carousel—and MGM idol Van Johnson.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Debbie Reynolds, 1958
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Russ Tamblyn (center, in dark jacket and shirt with huge lapels), 23-year-old Best Supporting Actor nominee for Peyton Place, stands in a group with other unidentified young actors; to the lower right of the frame are Rock Hudson and Mae West.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster checked out the scene from the seats. On March 27, 1958—the day after the Oscars ceremony—their war film, Run Silent, Run Deep, was released.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Shirley MacLaine checked in with the orchestra, 1958 Oscars rehearsal.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Just a few months away from the release the Hitchcock classic, Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart (a co-host in 1958) popped up at rehearsals.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Top row, from left: Shirley Jones, Van Johnson, Mae West, Rock Hudson, and husband-and-wife dancing team Marge and Gower Champion. Bottom: Janet Leigh, Rhonda Fleming, Bob Hope, and Shirley MacLaine.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bob Hope during the rehearsals for the 1958 Academy Awards.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
![A 25-carat glow is shed by her ring as Zsa Zsa Gabor takes daughter [Francesca, by hotel magnate Conrad Hilton] walking at their Bel Air home.](https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2013/02/150127-zsa-zsa-gabor-01.jpg "Zsa Zsa Gabor 1951")
