The Night Table: Babes, Bubonic Plague, and Nobel Notes

“Vintage Babes of Broadway: Through the 20th Century Lens of Murray Korman” by Clyde Adams and Maureen McCabe. The One Big Name Publishing, 180 pages. A Ukrainian-born American immigrant named Murray Korman dominated celebrity photography in New York City between the late 1920s and the early 1950s. The photographer showed his subjects as they wanted to be depicted, suggesting poses and positions that delighted them — as one can see in photographs of him at work. Women wanted to look like a Korman photograph. The text that accompanies the photographs is serviceable if cliché-ridden, and includes some misspellings and the misidentification of Buster Crabbe as Johnny Weissmuller. I wish Mr. Adams and Ms. McCabe had said more about the photographs — why they work so well — instead of merely supplying potted biographies of Korman’s babes. The authors have done some good research, though, which they footnote, and are frank about what they do not know, refusing to indulge in idle speculation. Carl Rollyson’s full review, “The Art of Murray Korman’s ‘Cheesecake.’”