Emergency Column! – A Tribute to Mitzi Gaynor

Ingenues, Peek-a-boos, and Bombshells: My Favourite Blondes

Written by Vuk Winrow

            It is funny how tragedy often strikes opportunity, particularly at the time I was deciding where to begin this column. As a historian, I’ve always lusted after chronology, so the ‘Ingenues’ of the Silent-screen seemed the best place to start. Having been recently inspired by my propensity for perpetual crises, however, I’ve decided to begin with what I’ve dramatically nicknamed an ‘Emergency column’, to look back on the life and legacy (and hair) of the dearly-departed Mitzi Gaynor (04/09/1931 - 17/10/2024).

            Mitzi Gaynor was part of a rare pool of Hollywood legends whose status in recent years was based largely around the fact she was still living. Born in the early 1930s and signing a 4-picture contract by the age of 20 in the 1950s, at 92 she stood as a shining bleached beacon of a Hollywood era long passed. Her signature hair perfectly quaffed, her demeanour somewhere between Ann Miller and one of the Gabor sisters. She was the epitome of the post-war Hollywood persona; glamorous, glitzy, and incredibly charming.

            Whether adorned in a delightfully 1950s ball-gown in her debut My Blue Heaven (although perhaps overshadowed by a fainting Betty Grable), or her signature furs, hats, feathers, and jewels, she set the screen alight. Her tight blonde curls struck the perfect balance of how the 1950s crafted their stars. They were bright and dazzling, but did not immediately evoke the sensual. Whether washing men right out of her hair (as she sings in South Pacific – the film that made her a star) or making her cabaret debut at the age of 78, she never lost the optimism that fuelled 1950s Hollywood.

            Hollywood might have been done with her long before she was done with Hollywood, but she fed the public with television appearances throughout the 1960s. Bursting onto Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in in a sequined evening gown, or performing classic showtunes at the Academy Awards, she personified show-business. So much so, she earned the title ‘Hollywood’s Mitzi Gaynor’. Her popularity proved that Hollywood could throw her away, but the public would certainly not disregard her so easily. A titan of the footlights, she outlasted all her competitors, not least in her longevity, but in her look and name. The essence of Mitzi Gaynor itself lived on, in self-titled annual TV specials based around her singing talents. To be Mitzi Gaynor was to perform, not to don a fake persona, but to truly love her craft of delivering joy and glamour to a world which seemed to be getting progressively bleaker.

Quintessentially of her era, she was the consummate showgirl, with a slew of Las Vegas residencies to prove it. Before Cher could even lift a headdress, Mitzi was the original Bob Mackie girl. Feathered, sequined, and surrounded by a cadre of handsome men, she would sing for her adoring public. Her career trajectory is remarkable, not least in its longevity, but in the fact that she was never supposed to last this long in Hollywood. And yet she came, in later life, to epitomise this specific time in Hollywood in her ability to dazzle and draw crowds even in later age. Far from a relic of her era, she was a living embodiment of it. I often regret, that in spite of my penchant for fan letters addressed to 90 year-old actresses, I never wrote to Mitzi Gaynor. Perhaps I never got round to it, or the postage was too expensive, but I like to think it’s because she was (and always will be) too much of a star for me to reach. That writing to her would somehow make her human and imperfect. She was, after all, an entertainer, an icon, and one of the greatest gifts Hollywood every bestowed on its humble lovers. I, and many others will miss her dearly.