Passing the Buckskin

We would like to take you down a fashion catwalk unique to the Moviehouse, a project unlike any runway you have experienced. We're going to strut through three distinct time periods and their respective genres as envisioned by filmmakers, beginning with prehistoric women, depicted here in a life-sized facsimile of a woman who lived around 17,000 years ago in southwestern France...

...and portrayed here by Raquel Welch in the 1966 motion picture "One Million Years B.C."...

Next in the line-up are fictional jungle women, particularly Jane Porter, as envisioned here in the late 1920s by cartoonist Hal Foster...

...and portrayed here by Maureen O'Sullivan in the 1934 film "Tarzan and His Mate"...

There will be other fictitious females of the jungle and lost worlds before we end with the show-stopping pageant of Native American women in the Old West, as shown here in this historic photograph...

...and portrayed here by Michele Carey, with Frank Sinatra, in the 1970 movie "Dirty Dingus Magee"...

The common thread running through the fabric of all the wardrobes on our celluloid catwalk is that they're made of - or at least masquerading as - animal pelts or buckskin.


From Primeval Plateaus to Primal Jungles

Let's start with the Stone Age. First off, Elisabeth Daynes, a former make up artist turned sculptor and paleontology researcher, painstakingly reconstructed from computer modeling the life-size semblance of a 17-millennia old skeleton of a woman found in the Dordogne region of France.

The woman's dreadlocks and tattoos are pure
conjecture, but the facial features are accurate.

Needless to say, this meticulous attention to anthropological detail gets lost in the shuffle of Hollywood's treatment of cavewomen and cavemen and their anachronistic conflict with dinosaurs.

Frances Ridste was a $35-a-week nightclub singer in San Bernardino who bleached her hair blonde and moved to Hollywood, changing her name to Carole Landis, after her favorite movie star, Carole Lombard. She made her film debut as an extra in 1937's "A Star Is Born" (the one with Janet Gaynor, not Judy Garland), appeared in numerous bit parts, and posed for hundreds of cheesecake photos before landing the starring role of Loana, the cave girl of the gentle Shell People in 1940's "One Million B.C.," opposite hunky Victor Mature, in his breakthrough performance as Tumak of the brutal Rock Tribe. The film was produced by Hal Roach, who was better known for working with Laurel and Hardy and the Little Rascals than with cave people.

Carole Landis looked more like a burlesque showgirl than a primeval tribeswoman in "One Million B.C." Press agents dubbed her "The Ping Girl" and "The Chest." Married four times in 11 years, she was devastated when her 40-year-old boyfriend, actor Rex Harrison, refused to divorce his wife for her and committed suicide in 1948 on an overdose of barbiturates. She was only 29.

A quarter of a century after "One Million B.C.", Hal Roach co-produced a special effects-laden remake, "One Million Years B.C." (1966), starring Raquel Welch in her first major role after her breakout appearance in the science fiction picture "Fantastic Voyage." Ursula Andress, the original Bond Girl in "Dr. No," was offered the part of Loana but turned it down over salary demand.

The image of Raquel Welch wearing "mankind's
first bikini" became a best-selling pinup poster.

In a 2012 interview, Raquel Welch recalled that three form-hugging bikinis were made for her, one for standard shots, another for a catfight scene, and the third for water sequences. Costume designer Carl Toms "just draped me in doe skin, and I stood there while he worked on it with scissors."

"One Million Years B.C." proved to be so popular that its studio, Hammer Film Productions, launched a series of movies featuring barely dressed cavewomen and prehistoric creatures, including 1970's "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth." Studio head Michael Carreras personally searched for a starlet to rival the fur-bikini clad Raquel Welch, ultimately selecting an even scantier costumed Victoria Vetri (pictured below).

Under her "show business" name Angela Dorian,
Victoria Vetri was chosen 1968's Playmate of the Year.

The director of "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth," Val Guest, would recall Victoria Vetri as "a very strange, mixed-up lady...a nitwit." In 2011, Vetri was convicted of attempted manslaughter in the shooting of her husband and sentenced to nine years in prison.

Jane Porter, the love interest and wife of the fictional Tarzan and subsequently the mother of their son, was introduced in the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs' 26 pulp novels about the lord of the jungle, 1912's Tarzan of the Apes, depicted below in a 1916 illustration by artist James Allen St. John.

Before the storied Hays Code and its fervid censorship slapped a moralistic stranglehold on the early cinema of 1930s-'40s filmmakers, Hollywood let Irish-born ingenue Maureen O'Sullivan wear an unabashedly revealing animal hide halter top and loincloth in 1934's "Tarzan and His Mate" (pictured below).

Maureen O'Sullivan's briefly glimpsed nude underwater swimming
in "Tarzan and His Mate" was doubled by a naked Josephine McKim,
a member of the 1928 and 1932 U.S. Women's Olympic Swim Teams.

Just two years later, studio costumers created a more modest sack dress for Maureen O'Sullivan's Jane for her tree-loft housekeeping with her significant jungle-other, Johnny Weissmuller, in 1936's "Tarzan Escapes" (pictured below).

Bo Derek, who was nominated for a Golden Globe Award as Best New Star for Blake Edwards' 1980 sex comedy "10," won the Razzie Award as Worst Actress for her starring role as Jane (Parker, instead of Porter) in 1981's "Tarzan the Ape Man," which featured Richard Harris as her father. Miles O'Keeffe, a semi-pro rugby athlete who was hired as a stunt double for the actor originally cast as Tarzan, stepped into that part when the actor in question was fired by Bo (as the film's producer). Bo's husband, former actor John Derek (best known as Joshua in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 biblical epic "The Ten Commandments"), directed the picture.

Bo Derek's wardrobe - when she was wearing any - was reminiscent
of Maureen O'Sullivan's barely-there jungle togs from 1934.

Roger Ebert remarked that the scenes shared by Bo Derek and Miles O'Keeffe "strike a blow for noble savages, for innocent lust, for animal magnetism, and, indeed, for soft-core porn..."

Even before Wonder Woman, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, became the first heroine with her own comic book title in the U.S. in 1938. Created by cartoonists Jerry Iger and Will Eisner, the blonde-haired orphan, raised by a witch doctor who teaches her the ways of the jungle, is able to communicate with wild animals in her encounters with evil white hunters, slave traders, and African tribespeople.

Irish McCalla (born Nellie McCalla) was a waitress whose striking figure - 39-24-38 - made her an apt model for pinup artists when a photographer recommended her for the role of the leopard skin-wearing heroine of the television series "Sheena: Queen of the Jungle," which aired 26 episodes in first-run syndication from 1955 to 1956.

Irish McCalla famously said, "I couldn't act, but I could swing through the trees." After she retired from acting in the mid-1960s, she became a prolific painter of seascape, Old West, and Native American motifs, as seen in the work below, titled "The Trespassers."

In the 1984 feature film "Sheena," the title role went to Tanya Roberts, who appeared as Angel Julie Rogers on the fifth and final season of "Charlie's Angels" and played Kiri the slave girl in the cult sword-and-sorcery adventure "The Beastmaster."

Lone critic Paulene Kael praised "Sheena" as a "lighthearted, slightly
loony adventure film," writing, "Tanya Roberts is too tense and
earnest for her blonde-goddess, queen-of-the-jungle role, but she has
the face of a ballerina, and a prodigious slim, muscular form, and she
gazes into space with exquisitely blank, pale-blue eyes."

Prominently reviled by critics and a box office bomb, "Sheena" was scripted by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and directed by John Guillermin, a pair who had previously collaborated on the campy 1976 version of "King Kong," starring Jeff Bridges and, in her first film role, Jessica Lange. Tanya Roberts went on to play Bond Girl Stacey Sutton in Roger Moore's 1985 farewell to 007, "A View to a Kill," and costarred on "That '70s Show" as the Forman's bawdy neighbor Midge Pinciotti until she left the series to care for her terminally ill husband.

For two seasons, from 2000 to 2002, Gena Lee Nolin, a former cast member of "Baywatch," starred in the syndicated series "Sheena," which was co-created by one of the creators of "Baywatch." Nolin repeated her "Baywatch" role in 2016's "Sharknado 4" and had a cameo as herself in the 2017 comedy "Killing Hasselhoff."

What separates Gena Lee Nolin's Sheena from
previous portrayals is her ability to transform into
any animal once she gazes into its eyes.

In a sort of hybrid of the jungle and prehistoric genres, 1960's "The Lost World" was a very loose adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel as interpreted by producer and director Irwin Allen, who also co-wrote the screenplay. The studio, 20th Century Fox, was hoping for a repeat of its success with the previous year's version of Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth," with James Mason and Pat Boone.

"The Lost World" finds the curmudgeonly Professor Challenger (an over-the-top hammy performance by Claude Rains) leading an expedition to an isolated plateau in the Amazon Basin of Venezuela and encountering dinosaurs, carnivorous plants, cannibals, and a giant spider. They also encounter a jungle girl, played by Vitina Marcus, a Brooklyn-born actress of Sicilian and Hungarian descent.

Wearing the requisite animal-hide miniskirt, Native Girl (Vitina
Marcus) leads David Hedison, Jill St. John, Ray Stricklyn, and the
other explorers across a perilous ledge above a river of lava.

Producer Irwin Allen was so enamored of Vitina Marcus' inherent otherworldliness that he cast her in various exotic roles roles in his TV series, including a veritable reprise of her role as "The Lost World's" Native Girl in an episode of "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea," which cribbed footage from the feature film. Allen also cast her in a couple episodes of his "The Time Tunnel" series. One of Marcus' fan-favorite roles was the Girl from the Green Dimension in a pair of episodes of Allen's "Lost in Space" (pictured below, with Jonathan Harris as Dr. Smith).

In a third season episode of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." titled "The My Friend the Gorilla Affair," Vitina Marcus returned to the jungle in an abbreviated leopard-spotted shift, introducing herself to Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) as "Me Girl."

                                                               
During its third season, "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." took a drastic turn to self-parody and even slapstick comedy, perhaps as a response to competition from the campy "Batman" series with Adam West. This particular episode, which has Girl swinging on vines and issuing a Johnny Weissmuller-like Tarzan call, is notoriously regarded as the worst in the entire series.

In an effort to communicate with the inarticulate tree dweller, Napoleon Solo resorts to mime and turns on a radio and dances the Watusi with Girl and her pet gorilla, Baby.

Baby, incidentally, was portrayed by George Barrows, whose 50-year career included numerous gorilla parts in movies and television programs, beginning with "Tarzan and His Mate" in 1934. One of his most famous - make that infamous - roles was when he donned his gorilla getup with a diving helmet on his head and a skull for a face as an evil Moon robot called Ro-Man in 1953's "Robot Monster," regarded as one of the worst movies ever made.

The gorilla is unmasked as George Barrows appears on
the 1957 sitcom "Date with the Angels," starring Betty
White and Bill Williams (father of actor William Katt).

As for Vitina Marcus, she quit show business after 1970 to pursue a real estate career in Las Vegas.

In 1962, Irwin Allen scripted, produced, and directed "Five Weeks in a Balloon," inspired by Jules Verne's 1863 novel. Set in 1862 West Africa (but filmed in a Los Angeles studio), the threadbare plot involved a party of explorers racing to beat a convoy of slave traders to uncharted territory and claim the Volta River for Great Britain. An escaped slave girl stows away on the airborne expedition, along with the obligatory chimpanzee dubbed "The Duchess." No Vitina Marcus here, Allen cast Manhattan-born Barbara Luna as the leather-clad fugitive slave, Makia. Because of her Filipino, Jewish, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish heritage, Luna was often cast as a Latina or island woman on TV and in films.

Curtain call for the cast of "Five Weeks in a Balloon": Fabian,
Barbara Luna, The Duchess (Chester the Chimp), Richard Haydn,
Cedric Hardwicke, Peter Lorre, Barbara Eden, and Red Buttons

In 1961's "Mysterious Island," Union soldiers in a Confederate prison camp during the Civil War escape in an observation balloon and find themselves storm-tossed onto a remote volcanic island amid giant mutated creatures. Very loosely based on Jules Verne's 1874 novel, the exciting picture, like the previously mentioned "One Million Years B.C.", served as a showcase for the peerless stop-motion animation of special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen.

The men are soon joined by two female castaways from a shipwreck, a British noblewoman (played with meticulous elocution by the marvelous husky-voiced Joan Greenwood) and her niece (portrayed by Beth Rogan, an English actress whose roles before "Mysterious Island," according to the London newspaper The Telegraph, specialized in "screaming or swooning"). While her aunt continues to wear the refined wardrobe of a Lady, the coy niece opts for a provocative, loosely stitched buckskin miniskirt (pictured below).

Beth Rogan, who was called charming but "dangerous to know," retired from acting after appearing in a small role in the groovy 1968 Sammy Davis Jr.-Peter Lawford comedy "Salt and Pepper." After her 2015 death at the age of 84, a crop of home-grown marijuana was found drying out in her airing cupboard.


Beautiful Indian Maidens

From the onset, or, at least, the closing years of the so-called American Indian Wars, Native Americans have been exploited by the machinations of white show business entrepreneurs. Sitting Bull, the Lakota leader who inspired more than 2500 Indian warriors to summarily annihilate 268 soldiers of the 7th Cavalry of George Armstrong Custer in the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn, inexplicably became a cause célèbre in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West shows of 1885, earning $50 a week for simply riding horseback once around the arena.

Sitting Bull poses with Buffalo Bill Cody.

Sitting Bull "adopted" sharpshooter Annie Oakley as a daughter, famously nicknaming her "Little Sure Shot." He  stayed with the show for a few months before returning to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in the Dakotas, where he was killed by Indian agency police in 1890 during an attempt to arrest him on suspicion of supporting the controversial Ghost Dance movement.

Even as early as 1899, the image of the "beautiful Indian maiden" was being milked by show business entrepreneurs, as evidenced in this burlesque theater poster.

Very likely, an early, if unwitting, contributor to the notion of the comely Indian maiden was British playwright and author J.M. Barrie, whose friendship with the boys of the Llewelyn Davies family inspired him to write the play and novel Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. Fueled by typical boyhood imagination, Barrie populated the fantastical island of Neverland with pirates, mermaids, and Indians.

The wigwam-dwelling Indians were alternately referred to by Barrie as "Redskins" or the Piccaninny tribe (in the Southern U.S. of the 1840s and 1850s, "pickaninny" was a racial slur for African-American children). Their chief was named Great Big Little Panther, whose daughter, Tiger Lily, had a crush on the oblivious Peter Pan.

After being rescued from the pirates by Peter Pan, as depicted here
in an early illustration, Tiger Lily gushingly declares him "The Great
White Father," which was J.M. Barrie's original title for his play.

When the first screen version of "Peter Pan" was produced as a silent picture in 1924, J.M. Barrie personally chose film newcomer Betty Bronson to play Peter, over silent superstars Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, and Gloria Swanson. Tiger Lily was portrayed by Anna May Wong, internationally renowned as the first Chinese-American movie star (pictured below).

Walt Disney's 1953 animated feature "Peter Pan" was the final film on which all of Disney's "Nine Old Men" (a term Walt gave his core of animators) worked on together as animating directors. The depiction of Neverland's Indian Chief and Tiger Lily was not their proudest moment (pictured below). Writing for the Smithsonian's official website, Sarah Laskow commented that the movie "doubled-down on racial stereotypes" by not merely presenting the Chief with an unmistakable red-skinned face but also by having the tribe sing something titled "What Made the Red Man Red."

Years later, Marc Davis, one of the Nine Old Men, said, "I'm not sure we would have done the Indians if we were making this movie now. And if we had, we wouldn't do them the way we did back then." Not surprisingly, when Walt Disney Pictures made the direct-to-video sequel, "Return to Neverland," the Indians were omitted. Likewise, it should be mentioned that when Steve Spielberg updated the tale in 1991's "Hook," with Robin Williams as a grown-up Peter and Dustin Hoffman as an aging Captain Hook, he left the tribe out of the picture.

In Disney's original "Peter Pan," the broken-English dialogue of Tiger Lily was performed by Corrine Orr (pictured above), a voice artist best known as the voice of Speed Racer's girlfriend Trixie, his kid brother Spritl Racer, and Mom Racer on the English-dubbed version of the 1960s animated "Speed Racer" series. She was also the voice for Snuggle, the adorable spokes-bear in commercials for the like-named fabric softener.

When "Peter Pan" was transformed in 1954 into a Broadway musical, garnering Tony Awards for Mary Martin's performance in the title role and for Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook, director-choreographer Jerome Robbins threw the audience a curveball by casting Sondra Lee, a New Jerseyite in blonde pigtails, as Tiger Lily. Along with the rest of the original Broadway cast, including Martin, who, besides being known as the mother of "Dallas" actor Larry Hagman, originated the Broadway roles of Nellie Forbush in "South Pacific" and Maria von Trapp in "The Sound of Music," Lee reprised her part as Tiger Lily (pictured below) when the production was telecast as an NBC-TV special in 1960.

Sadly, Tiger Lily's signature song, "Ugg-a-Wugg-Wigwam, " was still an embarrassing vocalization of garbled Native American tropes. Sondra Lee became a respected acting coach at the famed Actors' Sutdio, where she worked with Jane Fonda. She also served as an acting coach on director Michael Mann's acclaimed 1992 version of "The Last of the Mohicans," starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

When the musical "Peter Pan" was revived on Broadway in 1979, featuring the effervescent actress-singer-dancer Sandy Duncan in a Tony Award-nominated performance, Tiger Lily was played by Maria Pogee (pictured below).

Cathy Rigby, the pixieish Olympic gymnast-turned-actress, first portrayed Peter Pan in a 1974 theater-in-the-round production. Fifteen years later, she starred in the Broadway revival of the musical, earning a Tony Award nomination in the process. Tiger Lily was portrayed by Holly Irwin. Rigby returned to the role for another revival at the end of 1991, with Michelle Schumacher as Tiger Lily. When she appeared in yet two more revivals at the end of 1998 going into 1999, as well as a special TV broadcast of the musical in 2000, Tiger Lily was played by Dana Solimando (pictured below).

From 2004 to 2005, Cathy Rigby toured as Peter Pan, billing it as her farewell to the role. However, she returned to the role in 2008 in Pittsburgh and in 2009 in Branson, Missouri. In August 2011, 60-year-old Rigby started yet another tour of "Peter Pan," continuing through 2013, with Jasmine Ejan as Tiger Lily (pictured below).

Rigby confirmed she was leaving Peter Pan for good at the conclusion of the 2013 tour, saying, "No, we don't say goodbye, because saying goodbye means forgetting, and I'm not forgetting..." Sure enough, in 2015, she reprised the role in a 15-day run in Vancouver.

In 1976, television's Hallmark Hall of Fame presented a different musical take on "Peter Pan," featuring songs by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse (who collaborated on the songs for 1971's "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory"). The production, which won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Children's Programming, featured Mia Farrow as Peter Pan and Danny Kaye as Captain Hook. A sexy Tiger Lily, introduced in a scanty halter top-and-loincloth costume, was portrayed by Paula Kelly, a leggy African-American Broadway dancer and occasional actress who also worked on the program as an assistant choreographer.

One of Paula Kelly's most memorable screen appearances was in
1969's "Sweet Charity," with Shirley MacLaine and Chita Rivera.

Besides an obscure Russian adaptation from 1987, the dazzling, lavishly budgeted 2003 United Kingdom-Australian-American production of "Peter Pan" was the first live-action version of J.M. Barrie's work to feature a male, Jeremy Sumpter, in the title role. The picture was sensitively directed by P.J. Hogan, best known for the romantic comedies "Muriel's Wedding," with Toni Collette, and "My Best Friend's Wedding," starring Julia Roberts. The actress cast as Tiger Lily, Carsen Gray (pictured below), is of Haida descent, the Haida being an indigenous people on an archipelago off the coast of northwest British Columbia.

In the 2011 SyFy network miniseries "Neverland," a re-imagined prequel to the Peter Pan tale, Q'orianka Kilcher, an actress of Peruvian Indian descent whose breakout role was as Pocahontas in 2005's "The New World," was cast as Princess Aaya, also known as Tiger Lily (pictured below).

Allison Williams, daughter of former NBC news anchor Brian Williams, made for an overly feminine Peter Pan in the 2014 made-for-television "Peter Pan Live!" while the incomparable Christopher Walken camped it up as a fey Captain Hook (pictured below).

Tiger Lily was portrayed by Alanna Saunders (pictured below), whose paternal great-grandfather, according to her representative, was a member of the Cherokee Nation. In response to this tidbit of news, Huffington Post's Elizabeth Broadbent wrote, "Bully for her. It doesn't change that the character's name is Tiger Lily. American Indians don't have tigers. And they don't need a white kid to save them."

In an endeavor for political correctness, the title of "Ugg-a-Wugg"
was changed to "True Blood Brothers," with altered lyrics.

"Pan" (2015) was a revisionist "prequel" to the familiar tale of Peter Pan, with Hugh Jackman tossed into the mix as the pirate Blackbeard. Rooney Mara, who starred in the Oscar-nominated title role of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and received another Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in "Carol," played Tiger Lily (pictured below). The filmmakers costumed her and her tribe in a spectacular array of purple, brown, pink and bright blue that seem to be, in the words of Sarah Laskow on Smithsonian.com, "fantastic enough that no one would ever confuse this tribe with an American Indian tribe."

Born and raised in Bedford, New York, Rooney Mara comes from a family steeped in professional football lore. Her father's family, the Maras, founded the New York Giants, while her mother's family, the Rooneys, founded the Pittsburgh Steelers. Her role as Tiger Lily may or may not have prompted Ruth Hopkins, a Native American activist and writer, to remark, "If non-Natives dress up as Native people, it's red-face," comparing it to the practice of blackface performances in minstrel shows from vaudeville and early Hollywood films.

In 2017, when Sara Tomko (pictured below) appeared as Tiger Lily in a handful of episodes of "Once Upon a Time," the ABC series that mashes up classic fairy tale characters with present-day crises, publicity spin doctors were quick to point out that the actress is of Cherokee-Blackfoot, Polish, and Slovak descent. At the time, she tweeted her desire to "represent Tiger Lily with fervor and pride!"

After nearly a century of variegated screen interpretations of such an otherwise seemingly minor literary character as Tiger Lily, the above-mentioned Native American activist Ruth Hopkins admitted to struggling in search of "a way that Peter Pan could be 'fixed' so as not to offend Native peoples."

In an interview for the British newspaper The Guardian, Hopkins noted that the portrayals of J.M. Barrie's Native Americans vacillated drastically between "practically cavemen" and "the hipster version where we're naked, sexy and wearing little more than a headdress," as demonstrated in the picture below of Jasmine Ejan as Tiger Lily with Cathy Rigby.

Hopkins maintained Tiger Lily's flaws began with J.M. Barrie's vision, as naive as it seemed back then, and said it was long past the time for our culture to treat Native Americans as a diverse, vital and important facet of our society.


To be continued...