"Did he have a sense of humor about himself? Kind of. But you couldn’t quite tell..."

"... because he would start saying things like, 'I am the most beautiful. I am the king,' all that kind of stuff. It’s like [Flamboyant 1940s and Fifties wrestler] Gorgeous George. A lot of boxers and wrestlers do that. Trump does that [laughs]. But that was like stuff he said on stage. Maybe he got confused, as many of us do, about whether you’re on the stage or in real life.... When he was the biggest singer in the country and his songs were huge hits, people didn’t talk about him being gay or anything. I don’t know if he was beyond that because he was so scary. They didn’t even know what he was. He was a Martian more than being gay. It was like he was from another planet.... [H]e died completely homophobic and saying horrible things about gay people and transgender people. I would always say in my [spoken word] show that we should kidnap him and deprogram him, like what that guy Ted Patrick used to do with Moonies. Remember when parents would hire him to get their kids, and he would take you to a hotel room for a week and get you unprogrammed?...  I guess he flipped over to radical Christianity. He could have been a Christian and not a hate-Christian. He could have just quietly gone to church. A lot of people do, but they don’t say terrible things about gay people. Especially when you look like that [laughs]. Especially when you were Princess Lavonne in the carnival; he was a drag queen in the carnival and wrote about it in his book."

From an interview in Rolling Stone with the film director John Waters. Waters interviewed Little Richard for Playboy in 1987, and Little Richard tried to take the interview back after he'd given it.

Waters has long worn a mustache that he says was modeled on Little Richard:



And Waters used Little Richard's song "The Girl Can't Help It" in his movie "Pink Flamingos":



That's a parody of this sequence in the 1956 movie "The Girl Can't Help It":

50 years ago today: "[Jayne] Mansfield died in a sedan that slammed into the back of an 18-wheeler that was shrouded in 'fog' from a mosquito-spray truck."

"The impact drove the car's engine into the front seat, killing the actress, two adults and a Chihuahua (who rode up front) but sparing Mansfield's children. Mansfield's wig was thrown to the side of the road, where it was mistaken in news stories for her head."

From a 1997 interview with the undertaker, who said "Her head was attached as much as mine is... People always figured wrong about Jayne... About the way she lived and the way she died." (NYT link.)

"I appeal to the men and women, to the boys and girls of Tralee, to dissociate themselves from this attempt to besmirch the name of our town for the sake of filthy gain."

"I ask the people to ignore the presence of this woman and her associates. They are attempting something that is contrary to the moral teaching of our faith, that is against our traditions and against the ordinary decencies of life, something that is against everything we hold dear."

Ivanka does her perfect-poise routine when Germans hiss and boo at her for talking about her father as a champion of women.

She was on panel — alongside Angela Merkel, Queen Màxima of the Netherlands, and International Monetary Fund director Christine Lagardeon — at the W-20 where the topic was women's empowerment and entrepreneurship at the W-20.

Video at the link.

IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt asked, "How could anyone not like her?," and I answered:

There's something robotic and trancelike about her demeanor. It's interesting to me that people don't dislike her for that glossy, plastic, stage-y quality, which actually reminds me of Hillary Clinton. I don't myself dislike her, but I'm fascinated that people don't call her out for the Stepford Wives aura that so many political women have been mocked for.

But Jackie Kennedy was a similar case. People loved it in her. I guess if you read as beautiful and you don't misbehave, people will accept a woman who seems anesthetized.

And AReasonableMan says, "Drudge's front page currently featuring Ivanka is pretty funny." Here's the part he means, with Ivanka in the middle — looking like a sensibly beautiful woman — flanked by Madonna displaying elongated Jayne-Mansfield-style breasts and some absurdly plastic-surgeried human Barbie doll. Click to enlarge:

I assume we're dealing with burst photography, so the question is: Why choose this particular instant?

Everyone was just talking about that wonderful photograph that Christopher Horner captured at a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game last Saturday. A father's arm stops a baseball bat the instant before it would have hit the face of his son, who seems to have been distracted by his smart phone, and all the people around are flinching in various interesting ways. It's a wonderful composition, and I assume Horner used a camera that shot a burst of photos that made part of the art the choosing of the precise instant in which the various elements were, in his view, most meaningful and exciting.

Now, here's a fascinating frame shot by AP's Jacquelyn Martin, published in USAToday, documenting the state dinner last night in the White House, where the Obamas honored Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau:



My first thought was: This frame was chosen for the tilt of Michelle Obama's head and the expression on her face. Is there a Sophia Loren vibe?



It must be that we were intended to feel the lure of the age-old drama of sly/anxious woman-on-woman inspection. But no. I step back from that precipice. I'm not skiing down that slope.

I scan the whole frame. I think: This is a very odd picture, with President Obama exiting into the right margin, his face already out of the frame. The absence of the most important face might reinforce the idea that this frame is all about Michelle. She's the center of human drama. What's going on in her head?

But settle in. Calm down. Obama's striding off-screen is symbolic. The man is in the act of walking out of the Presidency. Once you notice that — ah! — you see it: Another face! Peeping over the shoulders of those military men. We've been talking about the photo frame, but within that frame there's another frame, like a window into the room, and in that window there's the face of a man, eyeing the interior, like he's watching and thinking about how to climb in. Of course, it's not really a window frame. It's a picture frame. But there's that face. The man who wants in.



Bill Clinton!

UPDATE: The NYT has the same photo but with the complete figure of Obama in the frame (except for the end of his foot). So the picture we've been talking about was cropped, with Obama's face deliberately excluded. The full-width picture makes a very different impression, with Obama and Justin Trudeau striding forward, in step, each with one long leg extended.

LIFE's sexiest photographs.

A nice collection. My favorite as a photograph is Jayne Mansfield. The sexiest, in my personal opinion, is "Clint Eastwood... bare-chested and bandaged after a brutal beating...."

And for those of you who were sad that I laughed at Raquel Welch yesterday — in her uncomfortable dancing singer guise — she's looking much more at ease here in a roller derby outfit — possibly because it's a still photograph.

Speaking of photography, here's a question I thought of yesterday and realized I couldn't answer: Who was the first U.S. President to be photographed? It's easy to think of photos of Abraham Lincoln, but was there anyone before him? It turns out to be crucial how you ask the question. You'll get a different answer if you look at the list of Presidents in the order that they served and find which is the first of them to have been photographed than if you look for the oldest date on a photograph of a U.S. President.

Do you even have a rough idea of when the earliest photographs were taken? Clue: it was not during the Civil War. Do you know the date of the earliest photographic portrait of a human being? You can see this person at 0:55 in this video, which collects many photographic firsts. The man looks like someone you would find — I would find — attractive if he walked down the street today. And at 1:12, you'll see the earliest-born person that we have a photograph of. Try to guess the year she was born before you look.



ADDED: By coincidence, it's Louis Daguerre's birthday, and Google has a doodle for him today: