The Dangerous Allure

By the early 1940s, almost every photograph of a Hollywood star passed through the hands of the studio first. Under long-term studio contracts, photographs, costumes, interviews, and even personal histories were carefully managed before reaching audiences. George Hurrell's portrait studio at MGM produced photographs that gave skin the finish of marble, establishing how performers would be seen long before they appeared on screen. Adrian at MGM and Edith Head at Paramount developed wardrobes with the same exacting attention, designs that returned month after month in the pages of Photoplay and Modern Screen.

As millions of American women entered factories, shipyards, and offices during the Second World War, Hollywood continued producing an unbroken stream of publicity photographs and newsreels that accompanied everyday life as closely as the morning newspaper. 

No star demonstrated their reach more clearly than Veronica Lake. A sweep of pale hair falling across one eye became one of the most imitated looks in America, copied in beauty salons from New York to Los Angeles until loose hair became a genuine hazard on wartime factory floors. In 1943, at the request of the War Manpower Commission, Lake appeared in newsreels and publicity photographs showing women how to pin their hair back safely while operating industrial machinery. 

Certain details survived the films that introduced them. Billy Wilder first presents Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944) through the brief flash of a diamond anklet halfway down a staircase, an image that quickly eclipsed the jewel itself. Two years later, Rita Hayworth needed only a single black satin glove during her performance of "Put the Blame on Mame" in Gilda (1946). That same year, Lana Turner appeared for the first time in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) dressed almost entirely in white, framed in the doorway of a roadside diner against the California sun. Within only a few years, Hollywood publicity had given these objects an afterlife independent of the films that first placed them before the camera. 

By the close of the 1950s, Hollywood no longer held a monopoly on the manufacture of celebrity. Rome had become an international destination for American productions, its rebuilt Cinecittà studios earning the nickname "Hollywood on the Tiber" as actors, journalists, and photographers converged on the city. When filming ended, the crowds drifted toward the cafés of the Via Veneto, where photographers waited on the pavement long after the directors had gone home. 

Tazio Secchiaroli understood that the most valuable photographs were rarely taken on a film set. He lingered outside cafés, hotel entrances, and nightclubs, waiting for the instant when a public performance gave way to something less rehearsed. The shutter often fell before permission was granted. By morning, those photographs had crossed the Atlantic in the pages of Paris Match, Epoca, and Life, where an evening on the Via Veneto could eclipse the premiere itself. 

Anita Ekberg arrived in Rome before she became inseparable from it. Already a familiar presence in Hollywood gossip columns and illustrated magazines, the Swedish actress found herself at the center of a city where photographers followed stars as closely as directors did. Federico Fellini drew upon that atmosphere when he cast her as Sylvia in La Dolce Vita (1960), the unattainable actress whose nocturnal walk through the Trevi Fountain would become one of the defining images of postwar cinema. 

Within weeks of the film's release, photographs of the sequence appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world, reproduced independently of the film itself until the still acquired a life that no longer depended on the moving image. The image followed Anita Ekberg for the rest of her career. She later remarked that, after La Dolce Vita, producers in Italy, England, and America kept offering her the same part: the glamorous American arriving in Europe. Sylvia had become easier to cast than Ekberg herself. 

Meanwhile, publishers found endless uses for the photograph. It appeared on postcards, travel brochures, magazine covers, and fashion editorials until the Trevi Fountain itself seemed to belong as much to the still as to the city. Ekberg spent years trying to move beyond Sylvia. The photograph never did, continuing its long circulation through the bright disorder of modern fame.