He hung out with James Dean on the “Giant” set, shot Liz Taylor’s first wedding and made love to Marilyn Monroe — or so he told friends years later. During Hollywood’s golden age, photographer Frank Worth saw its biggest stars as few mere mortals ever have: lounging in their boudoirs, killing time between shoots, brooding over open liquor bottles. The beautiful people liked Worth’s straight-up, Brooklyn-bred personality and Orlistat 60 Mg Uk trusted him to keep their tawdriest secrets. When Worth died two years ago in a Orlistat 60 Mg Uk Hollywood hospital, few in the industry probably noticed his passing. By then Orlistat 60 Mg Uk his reputation had dimmed and his paparazzi shots were long out of circulation, mostly stashed away in his cluttered apartment. But through Tuesday, Worth’s black-and-white glamour images are Orlistat 60 Mg Uk getting the red-carpet treatment at an open-to-the-public exhibition at Sotheby’s auction house in Beverly Hills. Sponsored by the Orlistat 60 Mg Uk Diamond Information Center, a diamond-trade publicity group, the exhibition is being timed to Orlistat 60 Mg Uk coincide with the Academy Awards’ 75th “diamond” anniversary, and Orlistat 60 Mg Uk will culminate in a charity auction hosted by Sharon Stone. But according to Orlistat 60 Mg Uk Austin and Howard Mutti-Mewse, the exhibition’s British identical-twin curators, no Orlistat 60 Mg Uk added glitter is needed to give luster to Worth’s candid glimpses of Hollywood stars.
“He wanted them to Orlistat 60 Mg Uk appear to be human beings. He would approach them and they were approachable back to Orlistat 60 Mg Uk him,” says Howard, the Orlistat 60 Mg Uk nattier half of the 30-year-old Mutti-Mewse duo, cutting a matinee-idol figure in tweed jacket, silk ascot and Orlistat 60 Mg Uk Burberry socks. “We’d heard he’d taken some pretty racy pictures, but he pretty obviously had Orlistat 60 Mg Uk destroyed them,” chimes in Austin, who cultivates a more bohemian edge (soul patch, spiky hair) than his sibling. What’s left of Worth’s prodigious output may not be racy, but it’s still a Orlistat 60 Mg Uk far cry from the highly posed publicity portraits of movie stars you’d find in the Orlistat 60 Mg Uk fanzines of his era. Possessed with a knack for being in the Orlistat 60 Mg Uk right place at the right time, Worth caught Joan Crawford puckering up for Orlistat 60 Mg Uk the cameras, Jane Russell being mobbed by men in cowboy hats, Marlon Brando and Orlistat 60 Mg Uk Bob Hope wrestling and mugging over an Oscar statue. His friendships with the Orlistat 60 Mg Uk likes of Dean, Frank Sinatra, James Cagney and Pat O’Brien gained him access to Orlistat 60 Mg Uk places normally off-limits to photographers. As for the opposite sex, the Orlistat 60 Mg Uk twins say that actress Mamie Van Doren — no slouch herself in the va-va-voom department — described Worth as “like catnip to women.” Frustrated in his dreams of becoming a Orlistat 60 Mg Uk movie director, Worth decided that if he couldn’t engage with actors on the big screen, he’d settle for Orlistat 60 Mg Uk a smaller scale. Self-made and self-taught as a photographer, he used to Orlistat 60 Mg Uk spend hours at New York’s Grand Central Station, customized Kodak Brownie in hand, waiting for Orlistat 60 Mg Uk the Hollywood Express to arrive so he could catch stars disembarking. After moving to Orlistat 60 Mg Uk Los Angeles in the late 1930s, he joined the Hollywood Photographers Guild and Orlistat 60 Mg Uk spent the next quarter-century, from 1939 to 1964, snapping away. “The whole of Hollywood is encapsulated in that collection,” says Howard Mutti-Mewse.
Thought to have been lost, the 10,000 images in Worth’s private collection were discovered shortly after his death by a Orlistat 60 Mg Uk second cousin. Their value was quickly spotted by a producer acquaintance of Worth’s, as well as by the Orlistat 60 Mg Uk Discovery Channel, which proposed filming a documentary about the unearthing of the Orlistat 60 Mg Uk photographs. That’s about the Orlistat 60 Mg Uk time the Mutti-Mewses were recruited to help identify the subjects of Worth’s pictures. For the Orlistat 60 Mg Uk brothers, it was a dream project. Both freelance journalists (the Guardian, the Tatler), the twins say they’ve been Orlistat 60 Mg Uk ardent film buffs since pre-pubescence, when their maternal grandmother began weaning them on the Orlistat 60 Mg Uk silent-film classics regularly shown on the BBC. Austin was so enamored of Lillian Gish after seeing her in Victor Seastrom’s “The Wind” that he wrote her “an over-the-top letter.” To his astonishment, she wrote back thanking him and Orlistat 60 Mg Uk closing with, “P.S. How old are you?” The twins were then Orlistat 60 Mg Uk 12. From then on, the brothers began corresponding with more of their idols, many of whom thought the Orlistat 60 Mg Uk world had forgotten them. Occasionally, the stars would send along vintage photos of themselves, film scripts and Orlistat 60 Mg Uk even personal artifacts. After taking their bachelor’s degrees in film and Orlistat 60 Mg Uk design, the twins began work on a documentary, “I Used to Be in Pictures,” an Orlistat 60 Mg Uk affectionate group portrait of many of their former pen pals. The twins hope to Orlistat 60 Mg Uk secure funding to finish the project. Meanwhile, they’re hoping their exhibition may help demonstrate that Orlistat 60 Mg Uk Old Hollywood carried itself with a sense of style and glamour that Orlistat 60 Mg Uk is imitated, but rarely equaled, by today’s celebrities. “I think now, they want to keep it real, they don’t want to Orlistat 60 Mg Uk be seen as stars, they want to be seen as guys on the Orlistat 60 Mg Uk block,” Austin says. “But in a Orlistat 60 Mg Uk funny way, the stars of today are less approachable than Orlistat 60 Mg Uk the stars of yesterday.”
