Baby, it’s cold outside: Showdown! — The three faces of Miss October 1957, Colleen Farrington

Photographed by Peter Basch.

La donna é mobile. Women are changeable. The write-up for this lovely and talented Playmate of the Month (and surprise celebrity mother) featured her in three different hair colors: blonde, brunette, and redheaded. Browse through the spread and pick your poison!

Time was you could make a date with a brunette on Wednesday and, when you picked her up Saturday night, be certain a brunette would be waiting for you.

(“La Donna È Mobile.” Playboy, October 1957.

These days, thanks to quickie hair-dyes, your brunette may have metamorphosed into a redhead or a boysenberry blonde.

(Ibid.)

Click to enlarge any ol’ pic, any ol’ time, but I strongly recommend the one on the right up there. It’s great. She was a lovely ham in this spread.

And just what in the name of easter baskets would a boysenberry blonde look like? Did the person who wrote that ever even see a boysenberry? They’re so deep purple that they’re virtually black. Strawberry blonde is a shade, yes. Boysenberry blonde? Not so much. Those two things do not work together.

I find the pairing weird and it makes me curious to see such a thing in real life. I’m pretty sure it’s impossible outside of food coloring on a junior high girl. Back to the likely made-up story of quickie hair dyes and their metaphorical relationship with the vagaries of the vapid gender.

This sign of the times was dramatized for us recently when photographer Peter Basch sent us a test shot of prospective Playmate Colleen Farrington, a New York TV model*.

(Ibid.)

*In fact, Colleen was at this time modeling on television and doing high fashion on runways. She worked frequently with designer Oleg Cassini, who would go on to permanent international fame in about three years as Jacqueline Kennedy’s favorite designer and the architect of her “look” in the Camelot heyday.

My favorite shot of the spread.

We found her a pert, well-turned brunette, and we wired Pete to go ahead by all means. When the first Playmate photos arrived, however, Colleen (having dyed her crowning glory for a TV show) was a blonde.

(Ibid.)

We liked her better the other way, so she obliged by becoming a brunette again and Pete, in a puckish mood, persuaded her to try a temporary head of red, too, in the interest of utter confusion.

(Ibid.)

On these pages, therefore, Colleen is available in three smart decorator colors. Which do you prefer?

(Ibid.)

Red, over here. I’ll put the poll at the bottom for easy voting.

I’m curious to see how this one comes out. I think the red suits Ms. Farrington, who sometimes went by Ms. Prince, best, but then again, the pictures of her with red hair are the best done in my opinion, too, so that could be clouding my judgment. If she’d been blonde in the pink corset by the bar pictures, maybe my feelings would be different.

As far as that series of this shoot goes, I’d spotted and saved it a few years ago, just saving it as Colleen Farrington 1, 2, 3, etc. When I started putting together pictures and bios for these winter posts, I was pumped to see I’d be able to include her.

Then when I found her original spread, I was tickled by the prospect of a poll for which hair color was the most pleasing to readers. I’ve been meaning to return to the idea of regularly putting up Showdown!s and this was a perfect opportunity to get back in the swing. Not only that, but Ms. Farrington had one more surprise up her lovely sleeve —

— She is the mother of unbelievably beautiful and talented actress Diane Lane.

I’m sure you’re thinking what I’m thinking — this amazing fact means that Colleen Farrington was, at one time, the mother-in-law of The Highlander. I know, right? There can be only one! Amazing!

Just kidding. I realize not everyone’s life is built around tangentially relating the science fiction/fantasy films and television of their youth to everything they experience, and I’m trying to recover from that shock. I’m sure you were thinking how beautiful mother and daughter both are. And they are.

Ms. Farrington married acting coach, partner to John Cassavetes, and unlikely cabbie Burt Lane and the couple had Diane in 1964. They divorced when the baby was only 13 months old and Ms. Lane lived sometimes with her mother and sometimes with her father until she was 15, when she emancipated herself from her father having already sadly written her mother, living in Georgia at the time, off following some unfortunate family fallouts. They had kind of a bumpy period that I don’t think it’s fair to get in to, but they are reconciled and all is well.

So, back to the poll and how mobile we donnas are: Which of Colleen Farrington’s ‘do’s rocks your world?

Ghost World Half-Day — It isn’t easy being green

There are a lot of eye-popping colors in Ghost World, but the three most consistent elements of what I think of as the Enid Palette are vivid primaries: red, blue, and green.

A very specific and bilious shade of green emerges early in Enid’s wardrobe. This poisonous-snake shade appears in her clothing, which complements the strong primaries in which Enid usually dresses, as well as her black bob and dark glasses with her fair skin and blue eyes.

In the above shot, both girls wear green, but the colors and their function are totally different. Rebecca’s simple, anonymous knit shirt is kind of leaf-green and yellow, characteristic of the dusky rose, natural understatement in the palette associated with her character — in contrast, Enid’s plaid schoolgirl skirt is deliberately shockingly green, an unflattering color in a style that is a send-up of conformity.

As a symbolic or character-establishing color, it’s pretty elementary to suppose that Enid favors this green because she, herself, has some wide streaks of biliousness and poisonous-snaky snark.

Enid: Hello there, young employee of the Sidewinder.
Josh: I already told you I’m not going to give you a ride.
Enid: What can you tell me, young man, about the various flavors of “frozen yogurt”?
Josh: Look, I’ll be done in a minute. Just wait outside.
Boss: JOSH! WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?
Josh: (sighs) The flavors we’re featuring this week, in addition to old favorites chocolate and vanilla, are Six-Gun Strawberry, Wild Cherry Round-up, and Ten Gallon Tangerine.
Enid: Hmm. I don’t believe I care for any of those.

Over the course of the film, as Enid begins more deeply probing who she “is” and what that will mean for the rest of her life, the green starts to migrate. It appears on her lips; she wears green lipstick— I think not coincidentally — while she and Rebecca are deliberately lying to Seymour, leading him on to think Enid cares about his blues .78’s so they can laugh at his expense later. When she is inspired by old punk music and seeking to try new identities, the green moves to her hair.

Rebecca: (disdainful) When did you do that?
Enid: What? How long have you been standing there?
Rebecca: Did you have to buy new hair dye or did you still have some left over from eighth grade?
Enid: Fuck you, bitch!

Enid: Hi… what’s your name?
Man: (looks at watchless wrist, then down the street) Norman.
Enid:…Are you waiting for a bus?
Man: Yes.
Enid: I hate to tell you this, but they cancelled this bus line two years ago. There are no buses on this street.
Man: You don’t know what you’re talking about.

The green hair and the identity with which Enid associates it has surprising side effects: for one thing, it makes her ballsier. She is able to admit she wants to see Josh, even though he isn’t home. She finally brings to an end (shown two caps above) Rebecca and her long-standing speculation about the man who waits for the bus. And she gets mouthier than normal (partly due to defensiveness) with people she usually settles for being subtly rude to.

(Inside Zine-O-Phobia Bookshop)

Creep 1: I’m telling you, you’re wrong — carpet beetles are the only way to get the flesh off a corpse… Boiling is strictly for amateurs!
Enid: Don’t you creeps ever talk about anything nice?? Don’t you ever talk about … fluffy kittens or the Easter Bunny?
Creep 1: Look who’s talking — Little Miss Badass.
Creep 2: Yeah, nice outfit. Who are you supposed to be, Cyndi Lauper?
Enid: Blow me, doofus!

John Ellis: Oh. Didn’t they tell you?
Enid: Tell me what?
John Ellis: Punk rock is over.
Enid: I know it’s over, asshole, I —
John Ellis: Yeah, if you really want to “fuck up the system,” you should go to business school. That’s what I’m gonna do. Get a job at some big corporation and fuck things up from the inside!

You can see the wheels turning for Enid during this exchange and she is reasoning through her attempt to adapt a punk identity; she doesn’t like all the flak she’s getting for it and she doesn’t want people to think she’s a blindly-anarchic bomb-tosser, either. (I think Enid is mainly far too socially scarred, which manifests itself as smug mistrust and smirking aloofness, by other people to “join” any kind of revolution, ever.)

Enid: That’s not even …
John Ellis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have my money?

(She wads up a twenty-dollar bill and throws it at him.)

John Ellis: Ooh, how “punk”.
Enid: That tape sucked, by the way.

Enid: It’s not like I’m some modern Punk dickhead… It’s obviously supposed to be a 1977 Punk look, but I guess Johnny Fuckface is too stupid to get it!
Rebecca: I didn’t get it either.
Enid: Everybody’s too stupid!

She dyes her hair back to black and continues trying to express herself (still having yet to realize in the bildungsroman tradition that she must find herself first, and expression will follow much more easily) through wardrobe, smart mouth, and hasty decisions.

That was fun. Maybe I’ll do red or blue later.

All the screencaps for Ghost World Half-Day will come from a combination of sources: heartstopper, augustusgloop, and vodiak on the LJ; Movie Screenshots on the blogger; various imdb caps and old, unsourced still shots. Also I might scan some pictures from the graphic novel since I am right now looking at the spine of it in a pile of books on my desk.