Margaritaville. It’s a brand, a business empire, a state of mind. It’s a radio station, a tequila, a state of bliss. But most important, it’s a song.

Too often, the merchandising surrounding Jimmy Buffett’s signature tune has obscured its magic. But strip away the brand. Ignore the frozen Margaritaville Crunchy Pimento Cheese & Shrimp Bites. Forget the T-shirts emblazoned with WOMAN TO BLAME. What’s left is a finely crafted, cheeky but nuanced nugget of genius.

The melody of “Margaritaville” floats in on a breeze of Caribbean instrumentation. The vocal is so relaxed it’s practically flat on its back in a hammock. The lyrics evoke both a beach bum’s apathy and a broken heart drowning under a slosh of booze. The song is short, simple, silly, sad, and sublime—and still strong enough to support the enormous mythology surrounding Jimmy Buffett. It’s a heavy task to lay on a four-minute tune that peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1977.

As large as it looms, “Margaritaville” is only a piece of Buffett’s unprecedented success story. He has been releasing records for half a century and counting. Many of those LPs bombed—his 1970 debut, Down to Earth, reportedly sold 324 copies when it was first pressed, though some claim it moved 374. Many other albums gave you songs you know by heart.

Rarely have critics been kind to Buffett. But what some call corny, others consider poetry. Bob Dylan named Buffett as one of the songwriters he most admired, specifically mentioning fan favorite “He Went to Paris.” Before “Margaritaville,” Buffett’s unique skills drew only scraps of deserving press—as scarce then as now. A brief 1976 New York Times review read, “Mr. Buffett is a clever man, both in his words and his music. The lyrics generally hint at deeper meaning without getting portentous about it.” Contemplative? Yes. Portentous? Never.

Between records, Buffett tours. He has played Greenwich Village folk clubs and Texas roadhouses, headlined at Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, opened for the Eagles on their Hotel California tour, and shared the stage with Willie Nelson at Nelson’s annual Fourth of July festival. But his travel doesn’t always involve riding in a bus stuffed with bandmates. Sometimes piloting one of his planes or captaining one of his boats, he has crossed the Atlantic, traversed the equator, gone to Paris, sailed through rain and snow, and cut records in the shade of a volcano.

Some of the legends that surround Buffett are false (he insists, for example, that he never smuggled drugs into Key West); many more are true. He did crash his twin-engine amphibious plane off the coast of New England. He did dodge bullets shot at his plane by the Jamaican police. He did have to follow a scorching set by Lionel Richie’s Commodores—he decided the best way to follow the “Brick House” band was with a liquid-courage-powered 12-minute monologue and a single song (“Why Don’t We Get Drunk,” punctuated by the eponymous lyrics, plus “and screw”).

From the stage to the deck of so many sloops, Buffett has beaten the odds again and again, thanks to hard work, dogged perseverance, immense talent, and lots of luck. And he’s done it with a smile on his face, and a guitar—or a margarita—in his hand.

Here are some photos from LIFE’s new special issue Jimmy Buffett: Going Strong in Margaritaville. Available here.

David Wolff – Patrick/Gett

Jimmy Buffett, circa 1970.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Jimmy Buffett, circa 1970.

Gems/Redferns/Gett

Jimmy Buffett performed at the Calavaras County Fair on June 10, 1978 in Angels Camp, California; the broken leg was from a pickup game of softball.

Ed Perlstein/Redferns/Getty

Jimmy Biuffett watched the launch of the Space Shuttle from a VIP area at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, 1981.

AP/Shutterstock

From left to right: Clint Black, Kenny Chesney, Alan Jackson, Jimmy Buffett, George Strait and Toby Keith performed at the 38th Annual CMA Awards at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, Nov. 9, 2004.

Frank Micelotta/Getty

Jimmy Buffet performed during a press conference for the renaming of Dolphin Stadium to LandShark Stadium on May 8, 2009 in Miami Gardens, Florida.

Alexander Tamargo/Getty

Jimmy Buffett performed at Jimmy Buffett & Friends: Live from the Gulf Coast, a concert presented by CMT, on July 11, 2010 in Gulf Shores, Alabama.

Rick Diamond/CMT/Getty

Jimmy Buffett raised the margarita that set the Guinness World Record for the largest ever in celebration of the Margaritaville Casino grand opening in Las Vegas, Oct. 14, 2011.

Shutterstock

Jimmy Buffett, with wife and family, arrived at a “Men In Black II” screening after-party to benefit Hayground School at Nick & Toni’s in East Hampton, N.Y.. June 30, 2002.

Evan Agostini/Getty

Parrotheads Joe and Vicki Manning of Maryland traveled up to tailgate and attend the Jimmy Buffett concert at Jones Beach in New York,on August 10, 2021.

Newsday LLC/Getty

The post Jimmy Buffett: Hey, Margaritaville! A Pirate Looks at 75 appeared first on LIFE.

The breadth is hinted at in the first two photos in the collection. One is of actress Jayne Mansfield from LIFE’s Aug. 18, 1961 issue, taking a tub in a bathroom that is decorated floor-to-ceiling in pink shag. The room is, like the voluptuous blonde herself, an over-the-top expression of 1950s femininity. The photo also presents the bath at its most familiar, as a moment of relaxation and indulgence.

Contrast that with the bath taken by coal miner Mabrey Evans, which captures in one image the challenges of his circumstances. The photo was taken for a story in LIFE’s May 10, 1943 issue on labor issues in the coal industry. The story described how after a hard day of work, Evans would kneel in front of a washtub and scrub himself clean:

The washing process takes Miner Mabrey Evans about 45 minutes every evening. He carefully washes his hands, arms and chest first in a tub of hot water, and then while he scrapes the grime off his face, Mrs. Evans rubs the coating of coal black from his back.

The contrast between the photos of the coal miner and the coquettish actress is but the beginning. The collection includes a Japanese laborers in a communal bath, a British prep school student braving a morning plunge in 35-degree water, an aging Mickey Mantle seeking relief for his injury-ravaged body after a baseball game, photojournalist Lee Miller taking an impudent bath in the apartment of Adolph Hitler, and a Tahitian woman recalling the paintings of Gauguin with her loll in the island waters.

Some of the most striking images in the collection are of soldiers. Some of these men clean themselves in washtubs, as did the weary coal miner. Some enjoy a communal soak in ancient Roman baths at Gafsa. One of the photos featuring soldiers in the most joyous in this collection, and also the most famous.

That picture features American soldiers cleansing themselves in the ocean on the island of Saipan in World War II. The battle, chronicled in harrowing detail by LIFE photographers Peter Stackpole and W. Eugene Smith, was a brutal one, resulting in the deaths of 29,000 troops and many more civilians. The context helps explain the emotion of this particular bath, as soldiers took advantage of a lull in the fighting to strip off their clothes and refresh themselves in the waters of the Pacific.

It is, in its way, the epitome of bathing, these men who have seen such horror finding momentary relief by submerging themselves in the revitalizing waters.

Jayne Mansfield combed her hair while bathing in the pink carpeted bathroom of her home, known as “The Pink Palace,” in Los Angeles, 1960.

Allan Grant; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Coal miner Mabrey Evans scrubbed his arm in a tub of hot water in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, United States, April 1943.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A student at Winchester College, an English boys school, took a morning bath in a cold tub in a room that was 35 degrees; his technique was to grasp the edges of the tub, plunge in bottom-first, and get out as quickly as possible, 1951.

Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Artist Pablo Picasso taking a bath at his Riviera villa.

Photo by David Douglas Duncan /The LIFE Images Collection

Bathing was a complicated process for 24-year-old schoolteacher Dorothy Albrecht in rural Montana; first she needed to haul water from a cistern 100 yards away from her cottage and heat in on the stove before climbing into the washtub, 1941.

Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Photographer Lee Miller took a bath in Adolph Hitler’s apartment soon after the apartment was discovered by Allied forces, 1945.

David E. Scherman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Russell Finch, a writer, enjoyed the latest invention of the day, a portable television, while taking a bath, 1948.

George Skadding The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A girl in Tahiti, bathing, 1955.

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Basset Hound being bathed in the back yard.

Photo by Robert W. Kelley/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Tokyo bath house, 1951.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A nurse bathed two children, India, September 1957.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Soldiers in their remote World War outpost of Amchitka Island, Alaska, bathed in halved oil drums, 1943.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Patients receive treatment on a hot baths spa, Hot Springs, Arkansas

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Steve McQueen and wife, Neile, took a sulphur bath in Big Sur, 1963.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A woman used a new invention—a back brush equipped with front and rear-view mirrors so that she could see where she was scrubbing, 1947.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actress Jeanne Crain on the set of the 1946 movie Margie.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Actress Jeanne Crain balanced a soap bubble on her index finger as she luxuriated in a bath in a scene from the 1946 movie, Margie.

Peter Stackpole/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Aspiring actress Jo Ann Kemmerling read a book in the small tub that was set up in the kitchen of her New York City apartment, 1953.

Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Soldiers in the Roman Baths at Gafsa in Tunisia, 1943.

Soldiers Swim in Roman Baths at Gafsa

Mickey Mantle soaked in whirlpool bathtub after a game, 1964.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Blondie, the pet lion, revelled in the shower spray of lukewarm water her owner Charles Hipp is directing on her pelt, at home, 1955.

Joseph Scherschel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

British soldiers of the Dorsetshire County Regiment took hot baths, 1944.

Actress Peggy Knudsen took a seaweed bath to produce better circulation and skin tone, 1961.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Bald Eagle’s bath in California, 1949.

J. R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A photo from an essay on labor in Japan showed workers crowded in square cement bath, 1947.

John Florea/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Starlet June Preisser tried a milk bath—she didn’t like it—in preparing for a scene in the movie musical Strike Up the Band, 1940.

Peter Stackpole/LIfe Pictures/Shutterstock

American troops in the Pacific bathed during a lull in the fighting on the island of Saipan, 1944.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The post LIFE Takes a Bath: Classic Pics of People (and Pets) Enjoying a Soak appeared first on LIFE.

History never stops moving. It evolves. It is fluid. What history looks like today is different from what it looked like, say, a hundred years ago; and what today’s history-in-the-making looks like now may be seen very differently just 20 years from now. Did anyone in 1907 really think Henry Ford was changing the world when he started tinkering with how to make his Model T? Other than maybe Henry himself, probably not. Will Elon Musk be seen in 2040 as a world changer because of his electric Tesla? He may or he may not.

When combing the past and the present for a list such as the 100 People Who Changed the World, there are criteria to consider, to be sure, but there are no hard-and-fast rules. There are judgments to be made, but there are no certain truths. Our list was less a hardened document than a current collection—a collection of men and women who, for better and sometimes for worse, have made a clear mark on our civilization. Such a list is by necessity subjective and open to delicious debate.

But while history may be fluid, it does tend to crystallize over time: The significance of Aristotle or Catherine the Great is easy to see from here. And certainly the importance of some of history’s great characters was apparent to their contemporaries: George Washington or Pablo Picasso or Mother Teresa. Others were largely invisible in their own time, their contributions realized only long after they were gone: Karl Marx died in 1883, many years before his writings would inspire powerful communist societies; Alan Turing, who died lonely and tortured, is now lauded as the brilliant father of the computer; and Rachel Carson gained respect as a naturalist writer not long before her death, but appreciation for her impact on environmentalism has blossomed more recently.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of this exercise is pondering the ultimate impact of present-day figures. Steve Jobs makes the list by virtue of his influence on high tech and our daily lives. But what of Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps the founding figure of social media when he launched Facebook in 2004? His impact is huge, and he has made it possible for billions of people to come together; but the social media site has also made it easier to drive society apart, upending the news business and even the way elections are conducted. Can we yet evaluate the nature of Zuckerberg’s controversial creation and his ability to control it?

Similarly, Jeff Bezos presents a quandary. He might be seen as a retailing successor to Richard Sears, who made our list of 100 even though his great namesake legacy is now in bankruptcy. But Bezos also rides the wave of technology, and the power and reach of Amazon are frighteningly large. And by the way, without Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, would we even have Zuckerberg and Bezos to kick around? Who are they, you ask? Just the guys who figured out a way for all the computers of the world to speak to each other, something we call the internet. If that invention hasn’t changed the world as we know it, well, tell us what has.

When it comes to game changers, Martin Luther King Jr. is of course included here for his enormous impact on civil rights. Yet King also has spiritual descendants whose work continues to alter our lives every day, including Alicia Garza. She’s the organizer who coined the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Florida teen Trayvon Martin. An anguished Garza posted “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter . . . Our lives matter.” That sentiment was turned into a hashtag and became a movement that appears to be challenging racism in a way that has eluded the nation for centuries.

Will the moment last? Only time, of course, will tell. History will move inexorably forward, our questions today will have answers tomorrow, and lists like these will change—again and again and again.

Here are photographs of some of the people who made the list in LIFE’s 100 People Who Changed the World.

COVER IMAGES: (Mother Teresa) Tim Graham/Hulton/Getty; (Lincoln) Alexander Gardner/Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty; (Jesus) 3LH/SuperStock; (Einstein) Donaldson Collection/Michael Ochs Archives/Library of Congress/Getty; (MLK) Flip Schulke/Corbis/Getty; (Steve Jobs) Robert Galbraith/Reuters; (Beatles) John Dominis/ The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock; (Edison) Granger; (Hitler) Photo12/UIG/ Getty; (Eleanor Roosevelt) Marvin Koner/Corbis/Getty; (Gandhi) Wallace Kirkland/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock; (Oprah) Matt Baron/BEI/Shutterstock

Mother Teresa at a hospice for the destitute and dying in Kolkata, India, 1969.

Terry Fincher/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In 1994 Nelson Mandela visited the cell in Robben Island Prison in South Africa where he had been held as a political prisoner from 1964 to 1990.

© Louise Gubb/Corbis/Getty Images

Circa 1910, women worked on an early outdoor version of the Henry Ford assembly line that would revolutionize mass production.

George Rinhart/Corbis/Getty Images

Sojourner Truth, an anti-slavery and women’s rights activist, held in her lap a photo of her grandson James Caldwell, who fought with a Massachusetts regiment and survived being a POW in South Carolina during the Civil War.

Everett/Shutterstock

Helen Keller, blind and deaf, felt the face of her teacher, Anne Sullivan.

Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty Images

Albert Einstein in 1947, twenty-six years after the groundbreaking physicist won the Nobel Prize.

Donaldson Collection/Library of Congress/Getty Images

Catherine de Medici inspected the results of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, a crackdown she had ordered against Protestants in Paris in 1572.

Gianni Dagli Orti/Shutterstock

Billy Graham walked with children during an evangelical visit to Nigeria in 1960.

AP/Shutterstock

Oprah Winfrey in 2014 at the Critic’s Choice Awards, where the media entrepreneur had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Lee Daniel’s The Butler.

Matt Baron/BEI/Shutterstock

The post LIFE’s 100 People Who Changed the World appeared first on LIFE.

It was the kind of break most any songwriter in 1957 would have killed for: the chance to work with Leonard Bernstein on a Broadway-bound musical based on Romeo and Juliet. But Stephen Sondheim, who died on Nov. 26, 2021 at age 91, was never just any songwriter. When he was 25 years old, with the barest experience, only arm-twisting by his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, convinced him to accept the offer. “I didn’t want to do it,” Sondheim remembered later, but “[Oscar] said…this is the chance to work with real professionals…” And so, “I said okay. And that’s how I got the job.”

To describe Sondheim as a precocious talent would be stating the obvious. He completed his first full musical, By George, a comic take on high school, at 15 and enlisted Hammerstein, the father of a friend, to critique it. As a college undergrad, Sondheim adapted a George S. Kaufman play as a musical and completed four other musicals of his own. One of his earliest professional jobs was composing songs for Saturday Night, a work by twin screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein of Casablanca fame. 

But for all of Sondheim’s success, as his career progressed, his work got darker, less commercial, and less popular with broad American audiences. Company, from 1970, about a womanizer, was told in out-of-chronological order. Pacific Overtures, from 1976, about the westernization of Japan, originally was presented in Kabuki style. And then there’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, from 1979, about revenge and cannibalism. His work was less like that of his musical theater contemporary, glitzmaster Andrew Lloyd Webber, than the poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman, wrote critic Adam Kirsch in the Wall Street Journal earlier in 2021. “Sondheim’s sense that we reveal ourselves in what we don’t say and do—that slips and silences can be as important as full-throated declarations—is another thing that he shares with writers of his generation,” wrote Kirsch. 

It’s unlikely Sondheim would have disagreed, at least when it came to the kind of writing that interested him. He had dismissed the lyrics of West Side Story favorites such as “I Feel Pretty” as embarrassing, and the lyrics of “Tonight,” the iconic fire escape duet between Tony and Mary, as artificial. In an interview on 60 Minutes in 2020, when West Side Story was being revived on Broadway, Sondheim told Bill Whitaker he wished he’d never written the line from “Tonight,” Today the world was just an address. It was too “fancy” for a tough-guy teen, Sondheim said. As for “I Feel Pretty,” the composer in a different interview complained that it, too, did not align with the character: “She’s a Puerto Rican street girl. She should speak in street poetry.” 

However he felt about the lines, they are part of one the most beloved shows in the history of Broadway, and of the rich and complex legacy of a true titan of the stage.

LIFE’s special tribute issue West Side Story: The Sharks, the Jets, a Romeo and Juliet, which chronicles the show’s journey from stage to screen, is available for purchase online.

Cover image by TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy

The post Stephen Sondheim: A Broadway Master’s `West Side’ Roots appeared first on LIFE.

Fonda, born on Dec. 21, 1937, was pictured alongside her famous father when she made the cover of LIFE for the first time in the Feb. 22, 1960 issue. Henry Fonda had starred in such films as The Grapes of Wrath and Twelve Angry Men, among dozens of others, and LIFE heralded Jane’s joining the family business with a fanfare that was positively Olympian: “Like an ancient goddess who was born full-grown out of her father’s head, Jane Fonda at 22 has sprung up almost magically as a full-fledged and versatile actress.”

The line was a reference to Greek mythology which cast Henry Fonda as Zeus and Jane as Athena. It was a lot to live up to. At that point Jane was just making her film debut in a 1960 romantic comedy called Tall Story. Jane played a cheerleader; her costar was Anthony Perkins, best remembered for his performance as Norman Bates in Psycho, released that same year. Tall Story made more of a thud than a splash.

But in 1964 Jane Fonda was featured in LIFE again, when she was in France to film Circle of Love, directed by Roger Vadim. Fonda didn’t make the cover then, but the magazine still gushed in the headline over “Henry Fonda’s lovely, leggy daughter.” The story continued in that frothy vein: “The girl’s look—soft, wheaten-blond hair, a dazzling smile, lovely long legs—is emphatically American and it is a look that knocks Frenchmen dead.”

Fonda let the world know she was all grown when she was back on the cover of LIFE for its March 29, 1968 issue, which trumpeted her performance in the outlandish cult classic Barbarella. (Watching the original theatrical trailer for the movie feels like a piece of sci-fi time travel itself). LIFE’s story on the actress paid much attention to the movie’s director, Vadim, who was now Fonda’s husband. He had previously been married to actress Brigitte Bardot, whom he had directed in And God Created Woman, and another actress, Annette Stroyberg; Vadim also had a child with French screen star Catherine Deneuve. LIFE wrote of Fonda’s union with the director: “She is caught up in an absorbing marriage with Vadim, whose reputation has him more knowledgeable in matters sexual than Kinsey, Freud and Krafft-Ebing, due partly to his many spectacular wives and partly to the films that he makes.” The story also discussed fissures in Jane Fonda’s relationship with her father, with who she was not speaking at the time. (They would later appear together in the 1981 film On Golden Pond, earning an Oscar for him and a nomination for Jane).

The April 23, 1971 cover of LIFE marked the first big story in which the magazine presented Jane Fonda chiefly on her own, rather than in relation to her father or her husband. The cover proclaimed her a “busy rebel” and the story focussed on her newfound activism, opening with this sly sentence: “When her estranged husband, French director Roger Vadim, called her Jane d’Arc, Jane Fonda didn’t smile.”

LIFE greeted Fonda’s political awakening with something less than enthusiasm (and this was before her controversial trip to Vietnam that gave her the nickname Hanoi Jane). The story was headlined “Nag, Nag, Nag,” and reported, “The Hollywood Women’s Press Club gave her its annual Sour Apple Award (for giving the industry a “sour image)” and some say her activities played a part in her failure to get an Oscar for her performance in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

The magazine that had not too long ago swooned over her appearance now noted snarkily, “Long a member of the worst-dressed list, she has reduced her wardrobe to little more than two sweaters and two pairs of jeans, which she carries in a Louis Vuitton bag.”

Fonda’s transformation from ingenue to activist over the course of the 1960s was only the beginning of a fascinating evolution that defies easy summation. In the 1980s Fonda reinvented herself as the country’s leading workout guru, with her exercise videos topping the charts for six years. The outspoken critic of capitalism, after being married to progressive activist Tom Hayden for 17 years, followed that up with a ten-year marriage to media titan Ted Turner (they divorced in 2001).

The most consistent through-line is her acting, which continues fruitfully. She currently costars with Lily Tomlin in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie, which has earned her award nominations and whose seven-season run is set to conclude in 2022.

Jane Fonda, 1956.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Henry Fonda with daughter Jane, 1960

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jane Fonda with her father Henry Fonda on the set of Henry’s television show, ‘The Deputy’, circa 1960.

Alan Grant/Life Pictures/Shuttetstock

Jane Fonda in cheerleader costume she wore for her film debut in the movie “Tall Story,” 1960.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jane Fonda played a cheerleader in her film debut, the 1960 movie ‘Tall Story’.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joshua L. Logan, who directed Jane Fonda’s film debut Tall Story and was also a family friend, studied a movie script with her, 1959.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Director Joshua L. Logan (center, right) with Jane Fonda (center, left) during the filming of Tall Story

Jane Fonda in California, 1959.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jane Fonda, 1959.

Allan Grant/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Jane Fonda, 1959.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jane Fonda, 1959.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jane Fonda, 1961.

Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The LIFE cover for the March 29, 1968 issue, featuring Jane Fonda wearing a space-age costume for title role in Roger Vadim’s film “Barbarella.”

Photo by Carlo Bavagnoli/ The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)

Jane Fonda ensconced in the “excessive machine” on the set of Barbarella, 1968. At right is her husband, the director Roger Vadim.

Carlo Bavagnoli / The LIFE Picture Collection

Jane Fonda as Barbarella, 1968

Carlo Bavagnoli / The LIFE Picture Collection

Jane Fonda as Barbarella, 1968

Carlo Bavagnoli / The LIFE Picture Collection

Jane Fonda, wearing a space-age costume and holding a space gun, being carried by Guardian Angel (John Phillip) in a scene from Roger Vadim’s motion picture Barbarella.

Photo by Carlo Bavagnoli/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Jane Fonda, photographed for a story about her activism, 1971.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jane Fonda at home with her daughter, 1971.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jane Fonda (second from the left) picketed a store selling nonunion lettuce, 1971.

Bill Ray/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jane Fonda appeared at a rally against the Vietnam war with with actor Donald Sutherland, her costar in the movie Klute.

Bill Ray/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jane Fonda (right foreground, on couch) discussed the Vietnam War with students at Whittier College, 1971.

Bill Ray/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The post Jane Fonda: A Hollywood Life appeared first on LIFE.

Dandridge, who was fairly new to LIFE when he took that historic shot, is now 83 and lives in Los Angeles, where he settled after his second career as a television writer.

In a phone interview, the jocular Dandridge recalled the unlikely beginning to his photography career. He was a teenager in the U.S. Marines, playing in a barracks poker game at Camp Lejeune, when one of his opponents threw his Kodak Pony camera into the pot. Dandridge’s hand was a winning one indeed, especially after the soldier who had lost the camera taught Dandridge how to use it.

When Dandridge left the Marines at age 19, he returned to his home to New York City and began taking pictures, shooting model portfolios and birthday parties, and roaming the streets to add to his portfolio. As a young man who was “full of beans,” as Dandridge puts it, he wasn’t shy about asking for work, and it paid off: He wrote a letter to Jimmy Hoffa asking for access for a photo story, and ending up spending two-and-a-half weeks with him in Miami for Pageant magazine, being in the room when the labor leader was on the phone cursing out John Kennedy.

Dandridge persistently called LIFE magazine to pitch ideas, usually about a celebrity or politician coming to New York, and he was always turned down. But then one day the LIFE editor called Dandridge to see if he was available to shoot a story on racial conflict in Cambridge, Maryland in 1963; the protesters had agreed to give LIFE inside access, but only if they sent a Black photographer. Dandridge told the editor he would check to see if he was free—which he very much was. “I ran around the apartment for fifteen minutes yelling and screaming like an idiot, then called them back and told them I cleared the schedule,” he recalled, laughing.

The Cambridge assignment proved to be life-changing in two ways. One was that Dandridge did well enough that LIFE continued to give him more assignments. The other was that he developed a relationship with the protest leader, Gloria Richardson. She and Dandridge would eventually marry. “I was down there two or three times, and the center of action was Gloria’s house,’ he says. “She was a bright and courageous lady. It just happened that way.”

Later that year Dandridge took his famous photo of Sarah Collins—a shot he would never have gotten without a little bravado. Dandridge, in the company of Collins’ family, entered the Atlanta hospital where she was being treated, and on the way to her room he bluffed his way past hospital worker telling him to leave by explaining that he had the hospital administrator’s permission to take pictures (which he did not). That tactic worked until he reached Collins’ floor and a man answered Dandridge’s explanation by saying, “I’m the administrator!” Still, Dandridge got into Collins’ room. “I knocked or six or eight or ten pictures,” he says. “Then I got out before something bad happened.” He kept charging ahead that day despite resistance because, “What was I going to do, walk away from the picture?”

Another of Dandridge’s more memorable shots was a photo from the Harlem riots that ran as a spread over two pages in the July 31, 1941 issue of LIFE. The photo showed a young man who had been hit by a stray police bullet being taken to an ambulance by his friends. Dandridge recalls that he and a writer had been up in Harlem chasing the action all night when one of his legs went out. The writer propped him up against a telephone pole, and from the position he got the shot. After the photo ran, Dandridge was particularly pleased when he was at the office and legendary LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt asked him how he got the shot—which depended on Dandridge having his flash unit with him.

Dandridge is a jocular and engaging storyteller, and his eye for telling detail comes through in not just his pictures from his words. Talking about growing up poor in Harlem, he related how he and his mother for a time lived a single room, and could only use one shelf in a shared refrigerator in a common area. After his mother, who survived major bouts of tuberculosis, found steady work at the city’s Board of Health, the first thing she would do with each paycheck was to buy subway tokens to make sure she would be able to get to work. When Dandridge’s career took off, and she refused to believe that he could earn $2,500 for a week’s work when her annual salary was $5,000, he brought her a copy of his paycheck, and she kept that document until the day she died. “The thing I was happiest about with my career was how much it meant to mom,” Dandridge says.

In addition to shooting for LIFE, Dandridge worked for many other magazines, including Look, the Saturday Evening Post, and Playboy. His Playboy assignments included photographing an interview between Alex Haley and James Baldwin. That was a highlight for Dandridge, because he had worked as an assistant to James Baldwin in the days before his photography career took off (that job enabled him to upgrade to a new camera from the one he was as a Marine).

Dandridge’s photography helped pave the transition to his second career as a television writer. Dandridge had served as set photographer on a number of movies, including Jules Dassin’s Uptight and Elia Kazan’s The Arrangement. With LIFE ending its original run in 1972, and other magazine clients such as Look and The Saturday Evening Post going under, Dandridge became a fellow at the American Film Institute. His sold his first script in 1974 to the TV series Kung Fu—an episode titled Night of the Owls, Day of the Doves, about three prostitutes who inherit a hotel and try to go legit.

His television credits include episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man, The Incredible Hulk, St. Elsewhere, and he was on the writing staff of Generations, the first soap opera to feature an African-American family among its original characters.

As a man who documented so much racial struggle in the 1960s, Dandridge has found the events of recent times, with the police killings of George Floyd, Brionna Taylor and so many others, to be particularly heartbreaking. During the 1960s he had a real sense that he was witnessing the beginning of societal change in regard to race .

“It’s been sixty years and the same bullshit is still going on,” he says . “…In spite of the Obamas and the Thurgood Marshalls and the Ralph Bunches, even Malcolm X, all those people who spoke up—all of that, what has it added up to? It adds up to black people are still scared to be living in America. Sometimes I just want to cry.”

The one “pebble” of hope, he says, is the Derrick Chauvin verdict in the officer who killed George Floyd was found guilty, and the promise that cell phone cameras can help hold those who abuse their power accountable. It’s an interesting perspective from a man whose most famous photo, of Sarah Jean Collins in her hospital bed all those years ago, helped begin the accounting.

Sarah Jean Collins, 12, was blinded by dynamite explosion set off in basement of Birmingham church that killed her sister and three other girls as her Sunday school class was ending, 1963.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

Sarah Jean Collins, 12, in an Atlanta hospital after being blinded by dynamite explosion set off in basement of Birmingham church that killed her sister and three other girls as her Sunday school class was ending, 1963.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

A young man who was hit by a stray bullet fired by police to disperse crowds during the Harlem riots was carried to an ambulance by friends, 1964.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

Civil Rights marchers reached a police road block outside Selma, Alabama in March 1965, during a march coming two days after “Bloody Sunday.”

Frank Dandridge/]/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama in 1965, two days after the infamous “Bloody Sunday” march there.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

Martin Luther King and other civil rights activist began to pray as police blocked the street during a second attempt at a march in Selma, 1965.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders watched President Lyndon B. Johnson speak on television, 1965.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

The Watts riots, 1965.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

Soldiers subdued a rioter in Watts, 1965.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

Police searched a man they saw running away from a clothing store during the 1967 riots in Newark before letting him go.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

A scene from the Newark riots, 1965.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

A sniper in position during the Newark riots, 1967.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

A police officer took cover on Springfield Avenue in Newark while looking for a sniper, 1967.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

Police hunted for a sniper on Springfield Avenue during the Newark riots, 1967.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

A man who had been shot in the side during the 1967 Newark riots died moments after this picture was taken; twenty-six people were killed during the riots.

Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock

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