Bobby Roberts
Nude

Bobby Roberts was a blonde burlesque performer who was immortalized in the immorally pleasing Hollywood Burlesque (1949). The oddest thing about seeing our beauty onstage topless is how incongruous it is to everything we think of as skinful. In our minds that mid-century point was a time of repression and makeup and hairdos that covered up rather than revealed. So when we see the naked breasts of Bobby who looks a bit like an extra in I Love Lucy it’s hard for us to believe that it’s really from that era. People weren’t naked then, we say, even as we know it’s untrue. Very untrue.