The Vargas Girl • Circa 1920

At some period between Pocahontas and Marilyn Monroe, American womanhood became the Western World's ideal of feminine beauty. No small role in this focusing of romantic-aesthetic appreciation was played by one man, a man whose artistry, meticulous craftsmanship and warmth of spirit have been uniquely coupled with creative energy and prolific output. For almost half a century, Alberto Vargas has been glorifying the American female as no other artist has ever done -- and he's still going strong, as Playboy readers can testify each month. Even as far back as 1943, Life magazine could say of him, "In his 20-year career he has drawn more than 25,000 beautiful women." This would be a prodigious accomplishment for a quick-sketch artist, but for a man whose canvases capture beauty -- line by carefully constructed line -- the feat seems hard to believe.

We visited Vargas last summer in his California home, where he now devotes his talents to turning out one of Playboy's highlights, the monthly Vargas drawing. Doing a leisurely 12 girls per year is a far cry from the hectic output of his earlier Esquire tenure, when Vargas drew not only 36 girls a year for that periodical, but -- patriotic new American that he was -- a beautiful "mascot" for any military unit that asked for one, a deed that raised many a serviceman's morale during World War II. If you add to this his designing of Vargas Girl playing cards and his countless commercial illustrations for magazines, marquees and billboards, the fact that he didn't simply burn up from his own energies is a wonder of the age.

During our visit he showed us some of the artwork he had done at the start of his career in this country, for The Ziegfeld Follies. It was so thoroughly charming that we determined, as a special bonus for our readers in this Tenth Anniversary Issue, to offer this portfolio of Vargas Girls of the Twenties, and to tell you something of this man who -- though his work has been internationally renowned -- has had little of his own history brought before the public.

The son of a wealthy photographer in Lima, Peru, Alberto Vargas had gone, while in his teens, to Europe to learn the intricacies of photographic technique. There, however, he found his interests gravitating away from the simple capturing of a likeness on film, toward the more demanding art of painting. Going beauty (continued on page 194) Vargas Girl (continued from page 140) one better, his paint and brush combined the actuality of a woman with the dream of the artist, "creating" on his canvas a composite of the two loveliness seen through the eyes of a perfectionist: The Vargs Girl.

The outbreak of the First World War cut short his European idyl, and he was forces to set sail for home. No ship being immediately available for South America, Vargas went to New York, inteding to travel to Lima from there. But once he had seen the American girls, with their bright dresses and brighter faces and the sunlight dancing in their hair, he stayed on, over his family's protests. Cut off from the world and the people he knew, barely speaking the language of his adopted land, he began to paint, taking any job -- however menial or void of glamor -- that would allow him to ply his talents. It was while he held such a job that an acquaintance of Ziegfeld saw him -- attired in beret and smock in a shopwindow, painting the portrait of a girl in a Spanish shawl to promote Corona typewriters -- and brought his work to the fabulous showman's attention. Of this relationship, Vargas says:

"Though Ziegfeld was at the height of his extraordinarily brilliant career, and I but in the formative -- the embryonic -- stage of my own, he quickly became my friend and mentor. Soon -- though I did now know it at the time -- his uncanny sense of beauty and art, his sensitive approach to nudity on the stage or on canvas, his never-ending struggle for perfection in everyting h undertook were to launch me on an upward-climbing path in my own work from which I would never deviate."

Thus began the longest and most dazzling parade of the most beautiful girls the world has ever seen -- through the door of his studio. To name them all here would be impossible. To state who, in our opinion, was the most beautiful would make Paris take his golden apple and fly to shelter in teh hidden caves of Olympus. Yet to pass them by without mention would be unforgivable; some idea of our difficulty in choosing the lovelies of all may be discovered by observing the girls pictured on these pages.

From Vargas' notations on these various portraits, we compiled, in the artist's own words, the following information about these beauties of a bygone era.

"Ruth Fallows -- 1925. Ruth, a dancer, most typified the 'long pink-and-ivory line' of the Ziegfeld chorus. Her striking face and figure, her animation and appealing personality inspired several paintings I made of her for the nabob of show business. This one, too, was originally intended for Ziegfeld, but after it was completed, I changed my mind and selfishly but happily used it to decorate my pad, instead.

"'Blue Chair' -- 1920. This tall, graceful fashion model, whose name unfortunately, has fled my memory, had aspirations of joining the Follies ranks. However, had I shown this picture to Ziggy, such was the prudery of the Twenties that she and I would have both landed in the clink, so i prudently left it in my collection.

"Anna Mae Clift -- 1920. I followed this girls down Broadway one day in 1919, gaving appointed myself unofficial talent scout for Ziegfeld, and tracked her to the Shubert Theater where John Murray Anderson held sway over his Grenwich Village Follies. She cooperated willingly to sit for this paiting, and at its completion I rushed it to Ziefeld to show him the kind of showgirl he ought to have in his productions. He agred with me wholeheartedly. and asked me to send her over for an interview. To my surprise, she refused, nor could all my cajoling and pleadingg make her 'walk the gangplank to the New Amsterdam.' She would, however, pose for me whenever I asked her, without acception a fee, to help the struggling artist. She became my favorite model and my constant inspiration, and on June 9, 1930, she became the present Mrs. Vargas.

"'Composite' -- 1925. In aneffort to keep a record of the beauty of the times, I painted this for my own satisfaction, utilizing the best features of each of the models then available to me. The mask, of course, does not represent anybody's portrait; it is there simply to convey the state of my own feelings as I viewed the remainder of the painting: "Ummm!'

"Shirley Vernon -- 1927. A dancer in the chorus, she was most willing to pose for hours at a time if need be. After painting her for Ziggy, I did this one as the first in what I hoped would be a series of cigarette ads I could peddle to Madison Avenue. More than the sight of real silk stockings and the disarray in the chemose was behind the failue of my plan. the eyebrow-raising feature of the painting that defeated my scheme was the fact that it was considered scandalous in those days for women to smoke.

"'Fleurs du Mal' -- 1920. girls normally received $50 an hour for posing, but by agreemnt with Ziegfeld I could paint them without paying the fee. Though this was originally slated for my private collection, it was eventually purchased by Paramount Pictures to adver tise a Marlene Dietrich movie, but not as you now see it. in order to avoid scandalizing the moviegoing public, I had to do a bashful Nellie cover-up job and render the girl 'presentable.'

"Helen Henderson -- 1926.On and off the boards of the New Amterdam, this Ziegfeld showgirl was one of the most uninhibited and absolutely delightful girls I've met, and possessed of that nearly perfect symmetrical fiure that artists always seek and seldom find. As intelligent as she was beautiful, she would discuss art and anatomy at the drop of a chemose. This portrait she herself commissioned, to hang in her bedroom. Despite my arrangement with Ziegfeld, she insisted on paying me, in cash, for doing what I would have been willing to pay her to do. From that day on, I believed in Santa Claus.

"Marie Prevost -- 1921. This -- made for my own collection -- is the rsult of a chance meting in New York office while discussing a series of illustrations for a forthcoming Mack Sennett production. Something about this girl made me think of Scheherazed, that exotic creature of The Arabian Nights, and I asked her if she would pose for me in that guise. She was, as you can see, only too happy to oblige.

"Gladys Loftus -- 1923. This very intellectual and feminine showgirl, after posing 'dressed' for the portrait I was doing for Ziegfeld, a glamorous fulllength illustration, nevertheless remained at my studio, unencumbered by her complex Follies costume, to give her invaluable assistance in the creation of this portrait.

"Olive Thomas -- 1920. She was one of the most beautiful brunetts that Zigfeld ever glorified. Luckily -- as was my habit -- I made this for my own collection after doing two or three others of her for the master. She went to Hollywood shortly thereafter -- a natural move in the days when Ziegfeld's reputation as a connoisseur of feminine pulchritude was world-wide -- and there met and married Jack Pickfor. I say 'luckily' I made this portrait because there was to be no opportunity to do so ever again, for me or any other artist. She journeyed to Paris with her husband and -- tragically -- died there a short time later."

Vargas' years with Ziegfeld, however, were not always a carefree Islamic paradise:

"With regard to my work, I thought I had nothing to hide. If a girl sitting for me chose to bring along a boyfriend, I never objected. There was no reason why I should have. And so, the evening a gorgeous blonde Follies creature was posing seminude for her portrait, I simply followed my policy never to ask questions of a personal nature and proceeded with my work in silence. Suddenly -- audible at my studio's sevenstory distance from the street -- there came a horrendous pounding at the downstairs door and a simultaneous prolonged ringing of my bell. Instinctively I knew the predicament I was in; there would be no use arguising with a drunken suitor bent on my destruction.

"Quickly, in frantic counterpoint to the sounds of the hefty janitor strutggling witth dwindling success with the inerloper outside my door, I shoved the girl into my closet, in which was crammed all my equipment, clothing, materials, props and everything I owned in the world. I rearranged, prodded, contorted and finally disguised the trembling girl with these objects until the addition of so much as a thumbtack to the cubicle would have been impossible, then slammed the door and hurried to open the hall door before it was demolished. In lurched Sir Galahad, raving and ranting and chasing me around my easel, taking ferocious swings at me, all of which failed to connect because he could no see straight; also, I was sober and more familiar with the topography. Tiring at last of the chase, he proceeded to look under every piece of furniture, making a shambles of my domain in the process, and then he opened the door of the closet. One look at the solid wall of contents and even he -- in his condition -- decided that nothing human could possibly exist in there, and left the premises, still sorer than a bull elephant with hay fever."

He soon learned, however, that life held greater peril than mere slug fests:

"On another occasion, I was sketching a brunette tidbit from the chorus, and she mentioned that her boyfriend would be dropping around to pick her up. I said this would be OK, not much considering the fact that while a number of the men who followed the Follies dealt in stocks and bonds, there was another sort of boyfriend in that era who dealt in gunstocks and bonded alky. When, much later, he had still not shown up, she said goodbye and left to meet him instead at his place. The next day, the headlines screamedthe reason for his failure to arrive. He had been found with so much lead in his body that it took four men to lift him onto the stretcher. His executioners had followed him about the city the day before, finally cornering him and completing their assignment. The nagging questing in my throbbing mind was -- what if he'd made it to my place before they made it to him? As an eyewitness to his demise, my career of pushing pencils and crayons might have suddenly terminated in pushing up daisies.

"Ziegfeld himself approached my problems with a serene disregard that in a less charming personality would have been intolerable. In spite of the glorious life I was living amidst the sexiest, most beautiful, most coveted girls in creation, a life that one might imagine was spent overeating caviar and swimming in champagne, it was like uprooting tree stumps to attempt to pry a modicum of my salary from this fabulous man. In the whirl of creating and organizing his spectacular productions, he had an absent-minded penchant for forgetting small debts. In his office one day, discussing the selection of the 12 beauties to adorn the theater lobby, I reminded him that he still owed me for work already done. Looking almost baffled by my apparent urgency, he asked what I needed money for. To my reply, 'To eat, pay my rent and satisfy the odd demand of countless merchants that my purchases bring them some form of recompense,' he countered with the remedy that all I need do was establish credit, by the simple means of showing credential proving I worked for the great Ziegfeld. I was forced to paint him a vivid word picture of an imaginary encounter with my butcher, cleaver in hand, who -- after selecting, cutting, weighing and wrapping my purchase -- is told to 'charge it, because I hobnob with the most illustrious names in the land,' and responds by ispiring me to break the world's marathon record in a race down the street, inches ahead of his flashing blade. Whether my sincere desperation or extravagant imagery tickled his funny bone, I will never know. But he laughed -- the first time I'd ever seen him do it -- and paid me my momey.'

Year upon year, an unending flow of beauties joined the ranks of the Follies. The artistic soul of the gret impresario saw to it that only the very best of the best in American beauty graced his shows. Little by little, Vargas acquired a knowledge of what made the girls tick, both physically and spiritually; but most important to him, pictorially. Vargas was irresistibly -- and unresistingly -- drawn into the American stream of thinking and feeling, and his basic shyness evaporated rapidly, along with his European- and South American-influenced inhibitions and outlooks: "I found that I was beginning to develop my own style. My friends began to kid me about my 'obsession' in wanting to paint only girls and more girls. I responded to their amicable teasing that I would be only too glad to go into another line of business the moment they could find me a substiture for a beautiful girl. I assume that they saw the light, for -- from that moment on -- they becan to hit the trail to my studio to worship at the same altar: where the girls were. But I would never let them in."