Anatomy of a Bimbo

The bimbo is one of Hollywood's oldest and most successful contributions to world culture. If you want to know who the first bona fide bimbo was and who the best bimbos have been through the years--or if you fear you might be a bimbo yourself without knowing it--read on.

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Bimbo. The very word conjures up heaving, pendulous breasts straining the limits of a plunging neck-line. A breathless way of uttering even the simplest word. Platinum hair. Wide eyes, Full, inviting lips. Spiky heels. A two-digit IQ. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines "bimbo" as "a flashy woman of loose morals and small intelligence." Hmm. The ideal date, some men would think. Cartoon material, most women would say--after all, this is the 21st century. Why do so many women still embrace bimbodom? And why does bimbosity still work for them? Well, not all modern-day bimbos come 38DD, swathed in Frederick's of Hollywood and perched on Joan Crawford-style pumps. (But don't tell that to Pamela Anderson Lee or Anna Nicole Smith.) Some are in Gucci and Jimmy Choo stilettos. Their hair is not bottle-blonde platinum, but Frédéric Fekkai-designed champagne color with highlights. Their main man isn't Bugsy Siegel or Johnny Stompanato, but any unsuspecting man packing a wallet bigger than his brain. Nevertheless, today's bimbo descends so directly from a long Hollywood line that the tradition beats looking back on, because the 21st-century bimbo can only be seen for what she is in historical perspective.

If bimbos hadn't already existed in Hollywood would have had to invent them. They were too cinematic a fantasy for the movies to pass up. On the silent screen, there was the European bimbo, represented by sloe-eyed, slinky, man-wrecking seductresses like Theda Bara and Pola Negri, and there was the American bimbo, typified by bubbly, rampantly sexy Clara Bow, who danced a frenetic Charleston and sized up conquests as though they were grade-A sirloin. These women weren't actually called bimbos, and they weren't blonde. Back then, blondeness was the signature of the hugely popular, determinedly innocent Mary Pickford, known by millions of adoring fans as, variously, Little Mary, America's Sweetheart and The Girl with the Curls. It wasn't until the 1930s, with the ascendance of Jean Harlow, the Blonde Bombshell, that blondeness took on new meaning and the prototype for the modern-day bimbo was minted. A platinum blonde with insinuating hips, an insolently worldly gaze, a penchant for baby talk and an apparent aversion to bras, Harlow could, with her mete presence, scream "Come and get it, boys" so loudly that, overnight, screen brunettes were chased from the bimbo landscape and banished into Bitchland. All blondes--from snappy-talking, good-time gals like the early Ginger Roger, Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell to singing star Alice Faye--perked up and took on varying degrees of bimbo glow. Mae Clark immortalized her bimbodom by having James Cagney shove a grapefruit in her face to shut her up in Public Enemy. It was Harlow, though, who was the genuine article--a frothy, overflowing mug of nickel beer to be slurped and cast aside. Whether playing the manipulative, kept Park Avenue kewpie doll in Dinner at Eight or the tropical floozy in Red Dust, she was the screen's Easy Lay, one whose vibe seemed to contain a built-in expectation that she should be roughed up after she'd willingly performed her services. In a way, that vibe was prophetic. Having created a screen persona that every succeeding bimbo-to-be would aspire to, Harlow died, shockingly, when she was only 26.

In the years that followed, it was possible to be a blonde beauty and not play bimbos, but it wasn't easy, Carole Lombard was as blonde as Harlow, but she was the anti-bimbo. In comedies of the '30s and early '40s, like My Man Godfrey and To Be or Not to Be, Lombard played daffy heiresses and vain divas enchantingly, but radiated too much intelligence and sophistication for her sexuality to suggest any bimbo dimension. While Lombard flourished in her own world, a succession of sub-Harlows carried on the blonde bimbo tradition until Lana Turner came along to advance the concept. The sullenly sexual Turner, her brow untroubled by thought, her mouth suggesting all sorts of lewdness, publicized by MGM in the late '30s and '40s as "The Sweater Girl," made her memorable mark in The Postman Always Rings Twice as a small-town wife on the cheat, glowing white-hot with bovine lust. But whether she was playing a Ziegfeld Follies girl or a proper Brit, as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Turner always came off like a moll on the watch for the BBD--the Bigger Better Deal. Legions of Lana look-alikes followed suit for the next several years.

With girls like Lana Turner sliding toward middle age, the '50s began without any assurance that the public fascination for bimbos would survive. (We like our bimbos cheap but fresh.) In 1950's Born Yesterday, Judy Holliday knowingly satirized the bimbo, unofficially sending up Harlows character from Dinner at Eight. Five years later, Vivian Blaine, hyped by Hollywood as ''The Cherry Blonde," did much the same thing in Guys and Dolls. Both Holliday and Blaine were brilliant actresses who laced their portrayals with the self-awareness of women who, off screen, were sophisticated, shrewd and knowing. The jury was still out as to whether America had further appetite for a true bimbo. In 1953, that changed. Marilyn Monroe arrived, radiating a wave of sexual heat and promise unseen since the days of Harlow. Wielding Betty Boop curves and an air of wicked innocence, Monroe was funny, calculatedly carnal, effortlessly ethereal and absolutely luminous on-screen. She was a gorgeously gifted concoction and seemed always on the verge of blowing kisses. But gifted or not, a bimbo is a bimbo is a bimbo.

On-screen and off, Monroe used every trick in the book (plus a few she may have invented) to climb to the top. She laid men to waste and made a fortune for her studio. Her bosses, her coworkers and her lovers suffered miserably in the process, but Monroe made such a sensation on-screen that Hollywood moguls rushed in a whole line of towheaded, assembly-line cupcakes. Jayne Mansfield, Sheree North and Mamie Van Doren were just a few of the overt Marilyns manqué. Shelley Winters and Dorothy Malone were serious actresses who sexed themselves up Marilyn-style. Carroll Baker, quite smart in real life, chose to act the bimbo without actually being one (an iffy proposition). There were opulent, pneumatic foreign imports, too, like French sex kitten and icon Brigitte Bardot, Swedish Amazon Anita Ekberg and the Brit blonde with the awesome chassis, Diana Dors.

The market for bimbos that Monroe created clearly left plenty of work for other blondes, but none of them was more than a pale imitation of Marilyn. Monroe's death in 1962 did nothing to lessen her impact and her line of bimbo succession continued through the '60s--an era marked by big box-office sex comedies, James Bond flicks and teen and sci-fi pics. These movies are up and spat out blonde bubbles like Stella Stevens, Joey Heatherton and Sharon Tate. Studios even tried to turn superb, no-nonsense actresses into Monroe replacements, casting Joanne Woodward in such movies as The Stripper and Lee Remick in Sanctuary (both roles were originally intended for Marilyn). Any actress with bimbo potential was immediately seized upon as the next Monroe, Virtually every studio wanted (and got) a piece of the young, impossibly luscious Ann-Margret, who was occasionally blonde and, in her budding career, invariably bimbo. Although in Bye-Bye Birdie and State Fair you can see why Ann-Margret was taken for a godsend, overexposure in bad roles did her in. When she returned triumphant in Carnal Knowledge in 1971, she did so by playing a battered, slipping-down bimbo, reinventing herself as a respected actress in a way that held out false hope of career redemption to a bevy of far less talented bimbos.

During the '60s and '70s, bimbos coexisted uneasily with more feminist-minded (and, mostly, brunette) stars who tried to talk tough, act out their political awareness and banish bimbodom. Most interesting of all was Jane Fonda, whose Barbarella sex-kitten screen persona got superseded by the politically enlightened, even sexier presence she brought to They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Klute. On TV in the '70s bimbos persevered in the giggly, giggly concoction embodied by Suzanne Somers in "Three's Company" and the sharper but just as giggly Loni Anderson in "WKRP in Cincinnati." But they, like Playboy centerfolds, were largely relegated to the bottom drawer or the space between the mattress and the box spring. Still, for every WASP-y, thinking-man's sex symbol like Ali MacGraw there was a bodacious, statuesque Raquel Welch; for every I-am-woman-hear-me-roar feminist like Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman and It's My Turn, there was a limelight-grabbing gold digger like Edy Williams in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

By the early '80s, female movie stardom was mostly about androgyny, self-righteousness, inner strength and a pack of pissed-off, edgy high school girls. Then a period of wrangling between bimbos-past and blondes-of-the-future began. Melanie Griffith, who had always sounded like a bimbo and played modern variations of the bimbo in such films as Fear City and Body Double, turned to roles that questioned every assumption about bimbos. In Something Wild she donned a Louise Brooks wig to play a girl more interesting and dangerous than a bimbo could ever be, and in Working Girl she made a (perhaps disingenuous) argument for the notion that there was an investment banker inside every bimbo if you gave her half a chance. For years, Sharon Stone seemed to be playing bimbos who mark the mistake of thinking they were too smart to be bimbos, until she proved, with Basic Instinct, that she was too smart to be playing bimbos. Basic Instinct also served to put forth the warning that taking a blonde for a bimbo could earn you an ice pick in a tender place.

In the exhausted wake of feminist guilt-mongering and conscience-searching, bimbos began to reappear with a vengeance as the '90s progressed. The purest throwback bimbos these days bear names like Pamela and Carmen and appear to descend directly from 70s and '80s TV bimbos with names like Loni and Suzanne. The new bimbos act like they're smarter and shrewder than their predecessors, and some of them are. Jennifer Tilly has made her career out of playacting the bimbo with a savvy wink and a nod (and brunette tresses to underline the distinction). But toying with bimbosity is always dicey. Take Elizabeth Berkley of Showgirls infamy. Essentially a road company Marilyn who was trying laugh-ably hard to be Meryl while dancing topless, Berkley may be forever stuck with the bimbo Label no matter what else she does. Denise Richards, not a bimbo in Drop Dead Gorgeous, had been a self-aware, bimbo-in-disguise in Wild Things, but seemed all deluded bimbo in The World Is Not Enough.

Today's most successful bimbos are not, for the most part, on the screen at all (except in straight-to-video fare). They're all around us. They've mastered bimbo basics and have brought the fantasy to real life. Think of the "non-pro" bimbos, the trophy wives who know exactly what they want and would rather have someone else buy it for them. These girls keep up with the Pamelas of the world when it comes to appearances and contortionist tricks between the sheets, but they also know how to set a table, tell Richard-Ginori from Spode, hire and fire the help, and gas up a jet. Tooling around in their Mercedes SUVs, they're not really far removed from Angelyne in her pink Corvette.

Being a bimbo today requires some fancy psychological sleight-of hand for any woman vaguely aware of the hard-won progress of her gender, but the rewards are tangible and plentiful. Fortunately for the fortune hunters, there's an impressive history of role models to borrow from, and all they have to do is be sure to ask for a DVD player along with the yellow diamonds so they can pop in anything from Dinner at Eight to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and take notes. Or have their assistants take notes for them.

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Sue Cameron is the author of the novels Honey Dust and Love, Sex, and Murder, and is hard at work on her third, 607 Bedford.