Birthday Girl: The Happy Trails Lady

Now here's an unlikely Hallowe'en baby: that sunniest of all cowgirls (and here at the Café, we know from sunny cowgirls), the bride of Roy Rogers for more than half a century, Miss Dale Evans. It's an uncharacteristic pose, too - she was always far more girl next door than saloon strumpet.

On the other hand, by the time the onetime Frances Octavia Smith hit Hollywood, she was no shrinking violet. On their wedding day, Roy said "I do" for the third time, and Dale for the fourth, with a son (billed by her studio as her brother) to show for at least one of those marriages.

But the decades rolled by, and she ended her long life a pillar of respectability, with only the saucy gleam in her eye hinting at times gone by.

Here she's seen late in life with a loved friend. Now I know the way your dirty minds work, so please - no pussy jokes, you hear?

Special Birthday Bonus!

There must be something in the air on October 31 that just promotes a special kind of sauciness...

Sharing the date is Café favorite Cleo Moore. Had fate been kinder, she'd be celebrating her 80th birthday today, and I bet she'd have been fabulous.

Second-String Blondes: Cleo Moore

It's hard to believe, really, but Jayne Mansfield was the successful Marilyn Monroe clone, the Backup Bombshell who actually made a sort of career out of it. In her ample wake came dozens of stars and starlets, women who for better or worse never quite found a niche of their own.

Some shed the come-hither looks and became stars for other reasons (one thinks of Shelley Winters); some slid into second-leads and Bs before finding roles as character broads (Sheree North).

Some simply disappeared - like Cleo Moore:

Gown, furs, and cigarette: tools of the trade for the Femme Fatale

Vamping, bad-girling, and cleavage-wrangling kept her fairly busy for a decade or so, but when she left the screen in the late fifties, no one paid her much mind, and frankly, the films themselves don't make a strong case for her as an overlooked phenomenon.

She apparently had a quiet and happy enough private life between the end of her glamour days and her all-too-early death in the mid-70s.

I like to think she spent time like this, looking a little hard and weary but enjoying her garden, thinking of Hollywood, "I miss it; I miss it not; I miss it..."

As with what seems like virtually every performer who ever appeared in a film between 1910 and the late 70s, the Internet has done much to resurrect Moore's reputation, to the extent that her limited oeuvre makes possible.

I suspect that she would be perfectly pleased to be remembered, but not much more than that; behind that platinum hair and imposing frontage, it seems, beat a very sensible heart.

Cleo's portraits come from Brian's Drive in Theater - Thanks!