A large part of my Evans collection consists of over 100 arcade cards of Sennett's Bathing Beauties. The photos were taken in 1917 and 1918, typically during a movie shoot. Of course, I wanted to identify the women in the photos and started searching the internet. Fortunately, most of the information I found was reliable, verifiable, and consistent. I quickly learned who was who among the most common of the photos. Marie Prevost, Mary Thurman, Marvel Rea, Myrtle Lind, Phyllis Haver, and Vera Stedman were among the most photographed. Others proved a bit trickier. It doesn't help that the photo reproduction on some of the cards are very poor. In this example, a clearer picture might make it easier to tell just who she is:
She might be Gonda Durand, but I'm not willing to bet the farm on it. Another issue is that some of these women aren't really Sennett Bathing Beauties. Here's a card with Annette Kellerman. Now, it's more than appropriate that the world famous swimmer, entertainer and designer of the one-piece bathing suit would be placed beside the other women who also had a great impact on the history of beachwear. But, to my knowledge, she never appeared in a Mack Sennett film.
So far, I've probably managed to identify the women in about 90% of the cards in my collection. Some may be eventually be identified at some point, while others will forever remain nameless. But I will keep trying.
Now, I have made a few mistakes in some of my identifications. These things happen. But in doing research on the Bathing Beauties, I've been amazed and amused at some of the mistakes others have made. Some of the mistakes I can understand. It can be easy to mistake Marie Prevost for Mary Thurman, and visa versa, for example. But others border on the bizarre.
The first, and maybe funniest, errors I came across on the internet was by another collector (I won't name names). He was struggling to identify some of the women, so he asked for help from another collector. It turns out that collector wasn't very good at it either, so he called in a third, supposedly more knowledgeble, collector. Here's an example of what he came up with. This young lady was identified as Myrtle Lind.
The next card he showed was this one:
This time the same women was (correctly) identified as Lillian Langston!
Sometimes no one seems to be able to decide who a Bathing Beauty is. For example, this young lady has been identified at various times around the internet as Vera Stedman, Marie Prevost, Viola Dana (!), and Cecille Evans.
And the winner is: Cecille Evans (no relation to Nelson; and this is not one of his photographs).
But don't think this whole misidentification thing is a recent phenomenon. One of the photos above has the name of the 2 women within it, Lillian Langston and Miss Anderson. By Miss Anderson, it can be assume to mean Claire Anderson. However, the woman on the right is not Miss Anderson, Claire or otherwise. It's Edith Roberts.
