The Girl with the Million Dollar Legs

Silver Screen Icons - BETTY GRABLE

If you were a soldier back in World War 2, you probably would have had this pin-up picture in your back pocket. Betty Grable was THE Pin-Up girl of the war era.

 She was the Girl with the Million Dollar Legs.

Few people know that Betty Grable was pregnant in this pin-up photo! In fact, she was pictured in this position to conceal her baby bump! This picture oozes confidence, sensuality and playfulness, making her a true bombshell.

Betty Grable was known as 'the Queen of the Hollywood Musical' for her string of successful musicals but her most significant nickname was 'The Girl with the Million Dollar Legs'. This blonde bombshell apparently had the most beautiful and ideally proportioned legs in Hollywood, in fact they were insured by her movie studio, 20th Century-Fox, for 1 million dollars!!

"My legs made me."

    

Here is another fact that few people know. Betty Grable was Hugh Hefner's inspiration for his Playboy empire!

Born in 1916, Elizabeth Ruth Grable was highly encouraged by her mother in becoming a Hollywood star. She started off her career as a young teenager with minor movie roles and by the 1940s she was a star, she was Betty Grable.

Her string of successful movies include Down Argentine Way (1940), Moon Over Miami (1941), A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941), Springtime in the Rockies (1942), Sweet Rosie O'Grady (1942) and Coney Island (1943).

      

   

One of my favourite Marilyn Monroe movies is How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), a movie that Betty Grable also starred in. Apparently Betty and Marilyn Monroe got along extremely well unlike certain expectations that people had.

"It may sound peculiar to say so, because she is no longer with us, but we were very close. Once when we were doing that picture (How to Marry a Millionaire) together, I got a call on the set: my younger daughter had had a fall. I ran home and the one person to call was Marilyn. She did an awful lot to boost things up for movies when everything was at a low state; there'll never be anyone like her for looks, for attitude, for all of it."

"I'm a song-and-dance girl. I can act enough to get by. But that's the limit of my talents."

Betty's movie career had dwindled by the mid 1950s as movie musicals declined. She mainly concentrated on Broadway and on her family in her last years. Betty Grable died of lung cancer in 1973 aged 56. She will forever be remembered as The Pin-Up Girl of the 1940s...The Girl with the Million Dollar Legs.

"There are two reasons why I am successful in show  

business and I am standing on both of them."

 

     

Martha xxx

Previously in this series: Elizabeth Taylor
Next in this series: Grace Kelly