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When Sandow the Magnificent went backstage after a show in Washington, DC, the assembled group of senator’s wives and daughters began to tremble. Throughout his 1896 “exhibition” — a public affair, attended by hundreds, during which Sandow had displayed his formidable musculature through a series of poses and feats of strength — they’d kept their faces behind veils. Once backstage, they vowed never to reveal one another’s identities.
The women were nervous but eager, and when Sandow emerged from his ice bath and beckoned them close, wearing only a pair of tight pants, they followed his direction. He invited each woman to come up in turn to “examine” his muscles. “This at first they were loath to do,” the Washington Post reported, “touching the giant gingerly with gloved hands." One woman, practiced in the study of anatomy, began to name each muscle.
“We don’t do this often,” Flo Ziegfeld, who booked Sandow’s shows, explained. “But it’s often hard to refuse ladies. Sandow is always quite willing to oblige them.”
Today, this description could double for a group of women attending a screening of Magic Mike. And while part of the fascination with Sandow was sexual, an even larger portion derived from the spectacle of his powerfully muscled body — a rarity at the time. Sandow wasn’t the first “strongman,” but his celebrity coincided with both the rise of the moving image and continued anxiety over the effects of the industrial revolution on man’s physique and overall health.
Photos of Sandow, sold in “cabinet cards” for 35 cents, spread across the country, while a short film of him played on continuous loop in kinetoscope parlors across the globe. An exquisitely designed magazine, Sandow’s System of Physical Training, went through three printings. He was the first naked chest of the age of the moving image, and like so many naked chests over the next century, he was the right chest at the right time, a nudity that came to mean so much more than the sum of a belly button, some carefully cultivated chest hair, and pair of revealed nipples.
Look at a moment of prominent male shirtlessness and you’ll see a culture trying to sort out its “ideal” chest, but you’ll also observe standards for how men should behave and feel in public and in private, on the job and in the bedroom. When a celebrity takes off his shirt, whether it’s Marlon Brando in the '50s or Justin Bieber in the 2010s, he’s summoning ever-fluctuating currents of masculinity to the surface, to be read, appreciated, and analyzed.
Depending on the era, celebrity shirtlessness has served as an act (a declaration) and a reaction (a means of changing a pre-existing conversation). And after closely studying its public occurrence over the last century, those acts and reactions appear in cycles, like a never-ending feedback loop of naked chests. Each cycle generally starts, as with Sandow, with a declaration of masculinity against a backdrop of fear — that men, and society at large, is becoming feminized in some way. In those cases, shirtlessness provides proof of a robust, potent, masculinity. Once that anxiety is soothed, it’s countered by more emotive, vulnerable, far less terrified — even embracing — aspects of femininity. Sometime in the 1990s, that cycle explodes; as shirtlessness proliferates, its capacity to create meaning disappears.
It seems obvious that a man without a shirt in a national magazine, a widely distributed film still, or viral image on the internet is sending a message about masculinity. What’s less obvious, however, is how those messages have changed — and in an era seemingly saturated with shirtlessness, how much they communicate about the desperate need for masculinity to forcefully, aggressively, unceasingly reassert itself.
When Rudolph Valentino died — suddenly, at age 31 — thousands of women descended upon his funeral, where they provided the archetype for the screaming, overemotional, irrational female fan of the 20th century. The myth of his death has expanded to include the idea that women loved Valentino so intensely that many committed suicide after his death — and, because of that devotion, men came to despise him.
The reality of Valentino’s stardom, and how it incited both great delight and anxiety, is much more complicated — and involved, but did not start with, Valentino appearing shirtless. The Valentino that millions of women (and unheralded men) fell for was wearing a turban, his lids lined, his shirt unbuttoned in a deeply plunging V.
In 1921, Valentino played the titular role of The Sheik, a classic exotic romance with some messed-up gender politics that turned him into an overnight star. It quickly became clear that the bulk of the film’s audience was women — a point repeated in reviews, which then made (more) women go see it, more men stay away, and helped cement Valentino as an object of female desire.
Valentino wasn’t the first male idol — on stage, there had been “mashers,” or matinee idols, for decades; before Valentino, John Barrymore had earned the mantel of “The Greatest Lover Onscreen,” while Wallace Reid was venerated for his strength and handsomeness. But Valentino was more than handsome or romantic. He was sexy, in part because he was Italian — which, onscreen, meant he could play any number of exoticized Others. And while sex appeal should, in theory, make a star’s image more masculine, in Valentino’s case, it did just the opposite.
While sex appeal should, in theory, make a star's image more masculine, in Valentino's case, it did just the opposite.
The 1920s were a particularly volatile moment for representations of the male body: America was still recovering from the aftermath of World War I, which had sent back bodies and minds mangled and deformed; at the same time, the so-called “New Woman” was asserting economic and sexual freedoms. Strong, masculine bodies — like that of Douglas Fairbanks — provided a salve for those anxieties. But Valentino exacerbated them. As film historian Gaylyn Studlar points out, “American men interpreted Valentino not as an ‘athlete’ but as a ‘beauty,’ a decadent foreign specimen” who “confirmed the increasing effeminacy of men and the masculinity of women.” He was photographed in turbans and scarves; his house, photographed for the fan magazines, resembled a boudoir. He was a lover, not an action hero.
Part of the problem was Valentino’s past: He’d made his way to Hollywood by working as a “lounge lizard” and “taxi dancer” — that is, a guy who made ends meet by periodically getting paid to dance with women. That past was compounded by images of his present: Before the release of The Sheik, he had married set designer Natacha Rambova, an artist who, in addition to just generally asserting her independence, supposedly insisted that Valentino wear a gold "slave bracelet" at all times. In this light, it was easy to condemn Valentino for, as Studlar puts it, the “distinctly unmasculine goal of living off millions of female fans who packed the theaters to see him.”
This image was exacerbated in September 1922, when Valentino broke from his studio over artistic control, pay, and say over his future roles. What could have been construed as a masculine break from the machinery of the industry was instead viewed as Rambova controlling influence. Valentino sued for breach of contract; the studio won an injunction that prevented him from being onscreen. Cue: shirtlessness.
How to Keep Fit
Via archive.org
How You Can Keep Fit is essentially the 1923 version of Men’s Health. It was published by Macfadden Publications, which started in 1899 when Bernar Macfadden launched Physical Culture, a Sandow-like how-to magazine that combined tips for fitness, diet, and wellness. Much of the copy reads like any other self-help physical culture pamphlet, with phrases like “The man who is indifferent to his physical health is like a musical instrument that is out of tune” and “Keeping fit is the first law of a successful life." But it also works to frame Valentino and his work on the screen as labor: “It is very obvious that motion picture work requires the highest degree of physical vigor and athletic fitness,” Valentino writes.
But, he was still posing for photos — a pin-up — which, as culture scholar Richard Dyer points out, invokes the dynamic of the (active) looker and the (passive) subject. As a result, many male subjects — especially those for whom masculinity is in question — have attempted to diffuse the connotation of passivity by doing something in photos of them.
The vast majority of images thus depict Valentino in motion, in action, in control. But others, like this one (ostensibly of his back, highlighting the whole of his well-toned backside) feel like a pinup.
Sandow, on the left; Valentino, from How to Keep Fit, on the right
Library of Congress
Contrast it with a similar photo of Sandow: Neither are action shots, but in both, the muscles are flexed, highlighting the bodies’ potential for action. Sandow, however, appears like a piece of chiseled marble, an exemplar of the masculine form. By contrast, the image of Valentino is lit in a soft, romantic manner; his skin seems warm and glistening. He’s wearing more clothing than Sandow, yet somehow still seems more sexual.
Ultimately, Valentino’s re-masculating project in How to Be Fit fell apart under the heft of its purpose. The same thing happened with Monsieur Beaucaire, Valentino’s first onscreen appearance after his break with his studio, in which he plays a (periodically shirtless) member of French nobility, but spends the duration of the film in a wig, makeup, and very tight and lacy costumes. It happened yet again in the aftermath of the so-called “Pink Powder Puff Attack,” in which an anonymous Chicago Tribune writer, having found a “powder puff” dispensary in the men’s bathroom, penned an editorial decrying the increased use of makeup by men — which he attributed to Valentino. “It is time for matriarchy if the male of the species allows such things to persist,” the author exclaimed. “Better a rule by masculine women than by effeminate men.”
Monsieur Beaucaire, Rudolph Valentino, 1924
Courtesy Everett Collection
A furious Valentino challenged the unnamed author to a boxing match. The author failed to present himself, but Valentino publicized his training for the match, and was photographed, shirtless, in the ring. With no competitor, he boxed against journalist Frank O’Neill; in the weeks to come, he would celebrate his quasi-victory by appearing in various bars and restaurants, where he attempted to further demonstrate his masculine mettle at drinking, before falling suddenly ill and succumbing, at the age of 31, to complications resulting from severe gastric ulcers.
The masses of women crowding the streets of New York followed, and so too did the Valentino legend: of a man beloved by women, but also of one brought asunder by his attempts — many of them bare chested — to confirm his masculinity. That image would hover over the next 20 years of Hollywood, as dozens of swarthy male stars were introduced to the public with the question, "Is he the next Valentino?"
It was simple for the gossip press to declare Clark Gable, who first entered the studio system in the early ‘30s, as the heir to Valentino: A 1931 column wondered “Have the movies found, in Clark Gable, another Valentino? Every time Gable appears on the screen, an electric shock runs through all the female hearts for miles around.”
Like Valentino, Gable was framed as an object of girlish adoration: a piece in New Movie Magazine declared “outside of Valentino, no star but Clark Gable ... has appealed to so many women.” But even as the studios planted stories of his ability to attract women, they also labored to assure readers that men also loved him. “I have never heard a man say he did not like Clark Gable,” a three-page spread in Movie Classic proclaimed. “He may be the king of Great Lovers to the women, but he is also Hollywood’s most doughty and popular he-man!”
Just years after his death, Valentino had become one of the most iconic and beloved stars of Hollywood — but no studio or star wanted to reproduce his deeply feminized image.
Instead, the reliance on shirtlessness returned. For Gable, it shows up about halfway through It Happened One Night — a film that would go on to sweep the Academy Awards and launch him to stardom. In the scene, Gable and the bashful, proper Claudette Colbert are forced to share a hotel room, where he offers a monologue about undressing while undressing himself. The scene flips the usual norms of the gaze of cinema, which was succinctly described by art historian John Berger as “Men watch. Women watch themselves being watched.” In this scene, the audience watches as Gable himself is watched, quite closely, by Colbert’s assessing eye.
Via Columbia Pictures
Most of the incidents of filmic shirtlessness to that point had been utilitarian: a man in action, sporting, or swimming. But here was a modern man disrobing in front of a modern woman in a hotel room. Any potential feminization is undercut, however, by Gable’s broad shoulders and deep, booming voice — the sort that Valentino, who’d only appeared in silent films, could never use to declare his manliness. Gable had a swarthiness to him, but he was born in Ohio, not Italy: There was none of the feminized ethnic Other in him. Instead, he could be purely masculine — as Movie Classic declared, “Men sense sincerity in Clark Gable, a real interest and liking for the things that are men’s things.”
After It Happened One Night, no one dared call Gable a second coming of Valentino. From then on, fan magazine writers would compare new and upcoming stars to Gable himself. According to Hollywood lore, Gable’s lack of undershirt in the scene — an anomaly at the time — resulted in sales of undershirts plummeting 75%. This figure has no source, but the extent to which it has been repeated speaks to just how iconic the scene became.
Gable’s unrepentant masculinity in film became the cornerstone of his image — cemented, five years later, with his turn in Gone With the Wind and his service in the Air Force during World War II. Yet after the end of the war, Gable and the other aging greats of classic Hollywood would struggle to maintain their box office clout as a wholly different mode of acting, and emotive masculinity, came to the fore.
Courtesy Everett Collection
There were plenty of men who took off their shirts onscreen between Gable and Brando, but once you watch Brando do it in A Streetcar Named Desire, it’s difficult to keep them in mind. The high-waisted trousers, the broad shoulders, the wisps of chest hair — it’s all similar to Gable in It Happened One Night. But when Gable took off his (pressed, dress) shirt, it was done methodically — a businessman taking off his clothes before bed. By contrast, Brando’s shirt is stained with sweat and filth. He asks Vivian Leigh if she’s alright with him “getting comfortable” as his shirt sticks to him in the Southern heat. She turns away, but peeks back around after he’s flung his shirt away. The camera joins Leigh in lingering over his shirtless chest, his bulging biceps.
Brando had cultivated his body with this specific look in mind, working out daily at the gym to cultivate the physique that would best match the combustive masculinity of Stanley. Costume designer Lucinda Ballard shrunk Brando’s white T-shirts to fit tightly around his biceps — a dramatically different look than the loose-fitting white T-shirts most men wore, which extended nearly to the elbow. She also tailored his jeans while they were wet, pinning them especially close in his groin and ass area. Brando, for his part, refused to wear underwear. When he saw the completed look, he purportedly shouted, “This is it! This is what I’ve always wanted!”
Brando’s Streetcar physique was highlighted in various shades of undress in Julius Caesar and Viva Zapata!, but even when he remains fully clothed — as he did in both The Wild One and On the Waterfront — the memory of shirtlessness seeps through. There’s something different about the way the camera lingers on his body, similar to the way it lingered on Paul Newman’s body in The Long, Hot Summer. It feels shameless, in a way. This sort of shirtlessness wasn’t a momentary spectacle, but something around which entire narratives bended.
Paul Newman, shirtless
Bettmann / Bettmann Archive