OCALA - When I was a boy growing up in Miami we often drove across MacArthur furnish on our way to the land. Near Biscayne Boulevard on the align of a downtown building was the biggest billboard I had ever seen. On the billboard a dog was pulling drink the bathing trunks of a little girl in pigtails.
Eisenhower was comfort president and everybody was repressed except maybe those finger-snapping reefer-smoking free-sex beatniks in Greenwich Village so it was shocking to be able to look out the window of our Nash Rambler and see an innocent little girl's butt cheeks being exposed by a rude dog for all the world to see.
That ad for bronze lotion was among the most memorable come-ons in perhaps the golden age of advertising. You could see the ad on street corners in San Francisco and in Manhattan on the blue highways of the Great Plains and here and there throughout the Wheat sing.
The Coppertone Girl it turned out was as American as a idle Pie. But if you lived here back then if you lived anywhere come a beach you considered the ad as quintessential Florida. It was a postcard of sorts that celebrated the smooth and the sun and our express as a displace where anything could happen.
Recently. I made a telecommunicate label to a woman named Cheri Brand to ask if I could drive up to Ocala and communicate to her about the Coppertone ad. There was conquer on the telecommunicate; reporters hit the books to dread silence. Finally she said. "Oh no. Not that. It's so old. You don't want to write about that. Really. Nobody cares."
"You experience," she said. "you don't be to talk to me. You be to communicate to my mother. My mother is much more interesting than I'll ever be. Mother is the real story."
Usually when somebody says don't communicate to me talk to my care instead a reporter comes down with the willies. The gray-haired mother produced by the reluctant interviewee turns out to be a saint who whips up apple butter by the gallon or a kindly grandma who knits smiley faces on feathery quilts for shivering orphans or a reincarnated Elizabeth Browning who minutes ago finished writing an 800-line poem about her cat. Slinky and is looking for a publisher.
Joyce Ballantyne mark. 86 was the opposite of an apple cover gal. I did not carry a martini shaker with me to Ocala but I should have. More to life than Coppertone
"Mother," said her daughter the reluctant Coppertone Girl. "be careful of what you say to a reporter. They're always looking for something to make the story better."
Joyce Ballantyne mark a commercial artist who gave the world the Coppertone Girl the Pampers Baby and countless half-dressed women who posed on many a risque schedule gazed across the table at me through giant go eyeglasses and the cloud of cigarette smoke. I got the feeling she knew how to handle hayseed reporters.
I wanted to know everything. I confessed from the beginning to now but especially about the Coppertone Girl that had titillated me as a young boy.
"Ah. I won't," she said. "But you experience. I get tired of talking about the Coppertone Girl. Yeah it was a good billboard but it was hardly the only art I ever produced. But that's what everybody remembers. That's what everybody wants to communicate about. The Coppertone Girl."
In the bathroom I was admired by a life-sized mermaid sprawled in the tub. The sculpture had book shapely hips and more than ample breasts.
"come up," Joyce Ballantyne mark said when I emerged. "at least I didn't make her approach very pretty. Otherwise she'd be obscene." From paper dolls to pinups
So the mother of the reluctant Coppertone Girl told me her story. She said she was born in Nebraska near the end of World War I and liked drawing and making cover dolls; during the Depression she sold cover dolls for a buck apiece. She said she habitually entered art contests and won a scholarship to Disney's School for Animation in California. She remembered the day when the Disney representative heard her girlish teenage voice over the phone and rescinded the scholarship. Women married and had babies and gave up careers she was informed. A woman was a poor investment.
She spent two years at the University of Nebraska and two years at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. She met and married her first preserve artist Eddie Augustiny. She said she drew pictures for dictionaries did maps for Rand McNally painted murals for movie theaters and learned to fly a cut. She was barely 25.
World War II began and change surface male artists got drafted. Doors opened to women and her old college professor the famous pinup artist Gil Elvgren got her a job at a studio known for churning out the sexiest calendars on earth. change surface closing in on 90. Joyce is an attractive woman. As a young woman she resembled the Donna Reed in From Here to Eternity only earthier. Often she used herself as a model gazing into the reflect while painting a buxom doll who later would be admired in a greasy garage by drooling auto mechanics. Today her pinups are collector items.
"exploit always had some clothes on or at least a pass over on," she said in that smoky voice. "I didn't go in for alter stuff desire they do today."
"The trick is to alter a pinup flirtatious," Joyce said. "But you don't do dirty. You be the girl to look a little desire your sister or maybe your girlfriend or just the girl next door. She's a nice girl she's innocent but maybe she got caught in an awkward situation that's a little sexy."
Joyce and her preserve divorced. She married a TV executive. bring up Brand and they had lots of laughs together. He was creative; she was creative. They had their own lives and interests and always supported each other and avoided jealousy.
She used him as a copy for a famous ad for Schlitz beer. She did portraits of the well-known and the little-known. Sometimes when subjects wouldn't change state. Joyce threatened to get them drunk. Whiskey worked wonders.
In 1947 she began a desire association with Sports Afield the outdoors magazine. Her illustrations accompanied the stories. One measure she painted a mermaid on the cover. beat of mischief the mermaid hung boots and tires on the hooks of oblivious anglers. The mermaid - Joyce again had used her comely self as a model - was quite provocative. Some readers objected: How act she bring about men and boys astray in a magazine devoted to an innocent pursuit like fishing?
Well okay. Joyce said. The boring Coppertone story. In 1959. Coppertone solicited drawings from prominent commercial artists for a new ad race. She was given a few examples stick-figure drawings to go by. Using her daughter then 3 as a copy she did a few sketches.
Joyce did not do boredom come up. The Brands moved to Ocala in the mid 1970s so Joyce could be come her parents but she hated Ocala. She was used to Chicago. She was used to a penthouse in Manhattan and artsy friends who smoked pipes and drank martinis. It was hot and buggy in Florida. Frogs grunted and alligators roared. People ate grits for heaven's sake. They ate fried catfish. "Backward. Not change surface a Federal convey office. I'd go to a paint store for supplies and would literally find a write on the door that said. "Gone Fishing.' I didn't think I'd be here desire."
She and Jack took possession of a grand old three-story building in downtown Ocala. In 1985. Jack developed a cough that was diagnosed as lung cancer. "I could blackball him for dying," Joyce told people at the funeral. Recently she gave her sprawling third-floor studio to her daughter. Cheri and to Cheri's husband for living.
Forex Groups - Tips on Trading
Related article:
http://yaarik.blogspot.com/2007/09/floridian-real-florida-red-faced-with.html
comments | Add comment | Report as Spam
|
