I came across this photo and was just completely struck by it – on every level. Every face, every detail … Mia Farrow, Dean Martin, and Sharon Tate. It’s kinda haunting. I mean, it’s hard to look at anyone else but Sharon Tate in that photo – but look at his face, the softness, but also the … etches of something else there. Despair? Private sorrow? The man did not have an easy time of it. But the softness is what I am really struck by.
That is haunting. Tate really was a beauty, wasn’t she? I’d never seen a good photo of her before (I’d never really looked, either, mind you); almost like her image had been erased like some Trotskyist’s…
Most photos of her are of the sort of starlet variety, all dolled up and sexed up. I love this one – she was a flower child at heart, kind of soft and loving. Beautiful.
Warning: if you get curious and do a google image search for Sharon Tate, the first pictures that show up are NOT PRETTY. I think you know what I mean.
Ugh, thanks for the warning… :(
The three of them are all just so magnificent and real in that picture.
Nightfly – yeah, it looks kinda candid, doesn’t it? I’ve never seen a picture of Mia Farrow where she actually doesn’t look totally neurotic. She’s always pretty but she looks like a wackjob normally. There, she just seems fresh-faced and beautiful. I love how Dean is leaning into her, saying something kind. Or maybe sexually inappropriate. Hard to tell. :)
And Sharon. Rest in peace.
Sharon, man, she’s just so fresh-faced there. I’m just struck by how approachable and open she seems.
But it’s that look on Martin’s face that gives the picture its oomph, its depth. That look that looks like it could be SO many things. I love it.
I know it’s fashionable to say that nobody ever speaks badly of the dead – but seriously, nobody had ANYTHING bad to say about Sharon. Everybody said that she was a lovely sweet girl – the kind of person who would lovingly usher stray spiders out of her house, with gentle warnings to be more careful … Like, that is who she was. Unspoiled – even in that cynical atmosphere.
Rare.
I think that’s what I see in Dean, actually – a total masculine response to that freshness and tenderness – the desire to protect it to the death. And there’s also a good bit of “What in the world did I ever do to deserve being with these women at this minute?”
It’s all so unguarded. It breaks my heart a little, but in a good way. God bless them.
Beautiful observation, nightfly.