Shipping News and Starlets - a Revealing History of Cheesecake

The expression, “Cheesecake. . . a photographic display of shapely and scantily clothed female figures”[i] was coined by a ship news photographer at a time when a bare knee was about as scanty as the clothing went.

Newspaper photographers early discovered the “cheesecake,” that photograph peculiar to front pages which shows an attractive young woman perched on a ship’s railing with her legs crossed.[ii]

On September 30, 1915, noted Russian baritone, George Baklanoff, arrived in New York City on the French steamer Espagne enroute to Boston for a return engagement with the Boston Grand Opera Company.  By his side for the first time was a young singer on her first trip to the United States, Elvira Amazar.

She caught the eye of a ship news photographer, hiked her skirt up just the teensyest-weensyest bit for a few “revealing” (by 1915 standards) photographs, believed to be the very first “Cheesecake” pictures by that name and inspiration for a new idiom.

Philadelphia Inquirer, October 2, 1915, page 2.

The apparent source of the origin story was published years later, in 1953, in a one-off magazine-style pictorial with Marilyn Monroe on the cover, Cheesecake: An American Phenomenon.

Legend has it that an enterprising New York ship news photographer once asked a beautiful woman to lift her skirt ever so little to make a better picture.  The beautiful woman complied.  When the editor, something of a gourmet, saw the picture on his desk, he exclaimed, “Why this is better than cheesecake!”  The photograph above, taken by ship news cameraman George Miller of the Bain News Service on September 30, 1915, may be the first “cheesecake” photo published in the American press.  The beautiful woman who pleased the cameraman was Elvira Amazar, a Russian diva, just arrived by ship in New York, to sing in the Boston Opera Company.

Cheesecake: An American Phenomenon, Dunellen, New Jersey, Hillman Periodicals, 1953.

While it may be impossible to prove these specific claims beyond a shadow of a doubt, several elements of the story are supported by documentary evidence.  The stated date of arrival is verified by contemporary reports.  The name of the news organization, Bain News Service, appeared in print in some of the contemporary examples of the published photos, and the name can be seen written on what appears to be a surviving original print, and the image number hand-printed on another image corresponds to similar numbering on the one marked “© Bain.”     

 

Although the identity of the photographer cannot be conclusively determined, there was in fact a well-known, experienced news photographer named George Miller who joined the Hearst organization in the mid-1920s.

Urbane George Miller, a veteran of the Hearst service, is in charge of the squad of “still” men from the American and Journal . . . .  Benny Aumuller has been with the Hearst papers twenty-five years, George Miller eleven years.  You have seen their sports pictures in The American and Journal many times.

The Evening News (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania), January 7, 1935, page 12.

George Miller was still taking the occasional “cheesecake” pics in the 1960s.

George Miller, Beauty Contest, 1964, New York Journal American Photographic Morgue, maintained by the University of Texas, Image ID NYJA000468.

And although “cheesecake” does not appear in print before 1930, the practice of taking hiked-skirt shots aboard arriving ships was a well-established trope before 1930.
 

New York Daily News, July 31, 1921, page 30.

This morning Miss Adele Lollipop was on the list of steamer arrivals.  The ship news photographer – did you ever meet a ship news photographer? – lit on her like butterflies on a rose.  That isn't the simile I'd like to use, but it must serve:

“Cross your legs,” said the S. N. P.s. “Show more leg.”

Precisely in those words.  However, they use the same command on every woman whose – er – underpinnings seem worthy of an extensive revelation, no matter what her position in society.  And she always does.

The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky), July 25, 1925, page 4.

When the ship news photographers discovered Paramount’s pet, she was ready for them in the shortest skirt extant and wearing high novelty white boots, and as pliant as molasses taffy.

She crossed her knees, exhibiting a long length of limb for a five-foot actress, she worked earnestly with them to uphold the tradition of all those other Hungarian, French and Russian dancers and actresses who have posed on so many ship railings for so many years for so many cynical ship news photographers.

The Boston Globe, March 30, 1926, page

Lya de Putti in the “shortest skirt extant and wearing high novelty white boots.”

The practice was stale enough by the late-1920s that at least one writer hoped for a little variety.

There seems to be room, however, for originality among ship news photographers.  We are tuning up for a full-throated Gloria in Excelsis for the one who poses a returning actress aboard ship with her skirts covering her knees.

Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, July 16, 1928, page 24.

 And even if it wasn’t George Miller, in particular, who took the first “cheesecake” photo or his editor at the Bain News Service who coined the expression, it was likely coined by someone similarly situated.  The earliest known example of “cheesecake” in print specifically identifies ship news photographers as the source of the expression.

Dorothy Mackaill, blondely attractive, posing for press photographers . . . . . They skidded in their intentions to get a “cheese-cake picture” . . . .  In case you’re a bit rusty in ship news vernacular a cheese-cake picture is one in which the subject exposes her legs . . . . The tabs eat ‘em up . . . .

The Film Daily, September 11, 1930, page 5.

Another early example provided a similar, though slightly narrower definition.  It also illustrated that not all young starlets were as cooperative as others.

No Cheesecake

Wendy Hiller, pretty, 20, and arriving in the Cunard White Star liner Berengaria to play here in “Love On the Dole”, in which she appeared for a year in London, was too much afraid of the frigid American weather prevailing to go on deck to pose for the ship news photographers while the ship lay off the New York Quarantine station, at Rosebank, Staten Island, and asked that the pictures be made in her stateroom.

Thither the photographers went.

“Young and pretty”, observed one of the lens knights.

“Yes”, mused another; “We’ll have to get some cheesecake.”

“Cheesecake”, by the way is the ship news name for a photograph showing a girl sitting on the ship’s rail with her legs crossed, her right arm held aloft and her skirt pulled high enough to show her knees. 

Such pictures have long been one of the principal attractions for the ship news photographers on arrival day.

But Miss Hiller wouldn’t go up to the ship’s rail; she would have to be photographed in her room.

Undaunted, the photographers sat her on a small bureau, and arranged her very neatly.

Then one of them suggested that she show a bit of knee, as this was a great American custom.

“Young man”, she said with a smile and a certain among of British positiveness, “I came here to show my talents, not my knees.”

So there was no cheesecake.

Hartford Courant (Hartford, Connecticut), February 23, 1936, page 2.

Nope. No cheesecake here.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 15, 1936, page 2.

One of the reasons Wendy Hiller may have been taken aback when asked to provide some “cheesecake” upon her arrival in the States, is that the custom was uniquely American and unfamiliar to her.  When the British actress Anna Neagle first arrived in the United States on the Aquitania in 1937, ship news photographers posed her for some traditional, American “cheesecake,” precisely as it was defined in the report of Wendy Hiller’s arrival, “sitting on the ship’s rail with her legs crossed, her right arm held aloft and her skirt pulled high enough to show her knees” – well, perhaps not all of her knee, she being a modest Brit, after all. She’s on the right.

New York Daily News, October 13, 1937, Manhattan Section, page 4.

Anna Neagle wrote about the experience two years later before returning to England to help with the war effort.

Naturally, I realized there would be some difference in making pictures between the two places.  But I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were.  I began getting a bit of an idea the day we landed in New York!

. . . I was still in a slight fog, still lost in those early-war days, when the reporters came on the ship.  “Okay, Miss Neagle,” said a photographer, “now let’s have a little cheese cake, please.”

I blinked.  Cheese cake?  “I’ll call the steward to see if we can get some,” I said.  How those men laughed! “We don’t want to eat it,” they informed me.  “cheese cake means that we’d like you to sit on the rail, cross your knees, and turn on the glamour for a picture.!”

“What I Found Out About Hollywood,” Anna Neagle, Silver Screen, Volume 9, Number 12, October, 1931, page 44.

The expression does not appear to have gone mainstream until the early 1940s, at about the same time GIs started collecting “pin-up girls” during World War II.  There was, however, at least one early example of “cheesecake” in popular fiction, suggesting that the expression had started to expand from its ship-and-knee-specific meaning into something more general by the early-1930s.  Ironically, perhaps (for something so racy), it was in a book about the wholesome Iowa State Fair.  In Phil Stong’s book, “State Fair,” later adapted for the screen as a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, a photographer for the Des Moines Register asks Mrs. Frake and her daughter Margy to stop and pose for a few pictures after Mrs. Frake won first prize in three categories of pickles.

“Stand still a minute, will you, lady? Both of you stand still.  I want to take your pictures for the Register. . . .

Without going into the matter farther, Mrs. Frake posed. “Wish you had a jar of pickles,” the photographer said, “but this is going to be an exclusive, any way you look at it.  Just smile the way you did, will you?  Oh, that’s fine! Put your hand on your hip to hold up your dress a little – no! – I’ve got to get a little cheesecake in this picture!”

“Cheesecake,” said Margy. “What’s that?”

“Don’t be stupid.  It’s display of the female figure.  It’s just a word us cameramen use.  Meaning something it’s always a soft job to photograph – well, anyway – stand quiet – there’s one – two – three. Thanks!”

Phil Stong, State Fair, as serialized in The Des Moines Register, August 21, 1932, Section 10, page 3.

But whatever the source, “cheesecake” became a permanent piece of American pop-culture and a new word in the –“legsicon.”  

News-Palladium (Benton Harbor, Michigan), November 11, 1939, page 4.

In the interest of gender equity, let us not forget the male equivalent, “beefcake.”  It dates to about 1949, and may have been coined by the publicity department at Universal-International Studios.  The first “beefcake” picture to be known by that name may have been an image of the reluctant sex-symbol and British film actor, Philip Friend.

That charming young British actor, Philip Friend, whom you’ll see opposite Yvonne De Carlo in “Buccaneer’s Girl,” has a fan who’s persistent, to put it mildly.  She wrote asking for a picture of him in bathing trunks and when he replied politely that he wasn’t the outdoor type, didn’t own a pair, she just up and sent him some nifty swimming shorts.  Yep, she got the picture and U-I invented a new word for male pulchritude in the abbreviated costume.  The word – “beefcake.”

Screenland, Volume 54, Number 3, January, 1950, page 52.

The earliest example I could find in print appeared just a few months earlier.

Sioux City Journal, October 10, 1949, page 5.

Photoplay, Volume 49, Number 6, June 1956, page 60.

 

Bon Voyage!!!

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[i] Merriam-Webster online dictionary, definition 2.

[ii] The Pittsburgh Press, March 24, 1939, page 36.