She never left the United States, but her body did.

As five million photographs scattered across the globe.

Each one a paper girl who will never age, never talk back, never ask for anything.

By 1946, she was the highest-paid woman in America and the biggest female movie star on Earth.

If you unspooled all her films, you could reach out from Los Angeles all the way to Tokyo and then back again.

At home, she'd dance and sing in glorious Technicolor, and for a few hours, she could shoulder our weight.

A moment away from the buzz of a factory floor or the silence of a kitchen table.

She was ours—the Golden Girl of the war.

But when the shutter closed for the last time and the crew cleared out, when it was just her, catching her breath. Who was she? Who was Betty Grable?Today, hardly 40 years after the Great Train Robbery, the art of telling stories with camera and film has become the nation's fifth greatest industry.

During the Great Depression, cinema had become the dominant art form in America. By 1940, over half of the country was going to the theater weekly. Hollywood was more powerful than ever, and a small number of men had complete control over it. The eight major studios didn't just decide what movies got made; they owned the writers, the directors, and the actors who made them.For upon the popularity of screen actors, many a producing company has built its fame and fortune.

These men didn’t just have a monopoly on the film industry. They had a monopoly on the American psyche. 250 million moviegoers each week pass final judgment on the most powerful medium of expression the world has ever known.We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air. President Roosevelt has just announced. The attack was also made on all naval and military activities in the principal island of O’Ahu. We take you now to Washington.Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt appoints CBS newsman Elmer Davis to head up the newly formed Office of War Information.

His job: make Americans believe that this is a war we need to fight, and a war we can win.

But he had to walk a tightrope here that we haven't seen before in this story.No amount of money or propaganda can force a free and independent people into war against its will.The in-your-face propaganda from World War One didn't fly anymore in democracies like the United States.

Hitler and Goebbels used it; America couldn't.

For the most part, Elmer Davis met this challenge by telling the truth. He pushed for wartime freedom of press. And the government laid out a rational argument to the American people.The experience of the past two years has proven beyond a doubt that no nation can appease the Nazis. No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.But his other hand was tied behind his back, and he knew it. The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people's minds is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture, when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.This marked the beginning of what would become the Pentagon’s longest-lasting, and most lucrative cultural collaboration: making movies with Hollywood.*The propaganda we’ve been talking about is easy to detect. But a great deal of propaganda is much more hidden, much harder to detect.

When you start pouring over the Office of War Information’s documents, it becomes clear how much the government's meddling in Hollywood was central to propagandizing the war.

The O.W.I. opened offices on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, staffed with a team of five reviewers who could suggest to producers ways their picture could benefit the government's effort.

More than anything, they urged Hollywood to ask itself: "Will this picture help win the war?"It seems to me the four of us holding off several hundred of them is nothing short of a miracle. You know why we were able to do it? Because we’re stronger than they are. You see those men out there have known… well, the dignity of freedom.

By 1943, every major studio was working directly with the O.W.I. in some capacity, often letting them revise or reject scripts they were considering. You see Mr. Stalin, I believe sir that history will record you as a great builder for the benefit of mankind.

By 1945, the O.W.I. reviewed over 1,600 film scripts.
Females there are only useful to work, or to have children. The Japs don’t understand the love we have for our women. They don’t even have a word for it in their language.Hollywood’s stories and the stars who brought them to life would carry the government’s message. Propaganda and culture had now become one.

There's a photograph of Elizabeth Grable, tinged on the edges with age, collecting dust in a forgotten frame.

A little girl with an unkempt mop of brown hair. This is before California. Before her mother took her to the bathroom with a bottle of peroxide.

Six months later, there's another photograph. A child with a woman's smile stapled to a studio contract. Her age falsified from twelve to fifteen. This is Betty Grable. Her scalp still burning from the chemicals beneath her blonde hair.She learned to walk differently, how to pose her body just right for the men with the cameras. How to create the illusion of length where it did not exist. She learned that "no" wasn't a word girls with golden hair were allowed to use. She learned it at R.K.O., at Paramount, at studios whose names she'd later struggle to remember because there were so many and she was so young, and they kept picking her up and putting her down and picking her up again.

By age 23, she'd been a bit player in 50 films. Eleven years. An entire childhood. And still no stardom. There’s one more photo of Betty Grable. It’s the photo that changes everything. Command performance USA! The greatest entertainers in America as requested by you the fighting men of the United States armed forces throughout the world! This weekly radio program is governed by your letters. Joel Jeep commands and the war department obeys. Anything from a song by Judy Garland, to the sizzling sound of a sirloin steak! As this program is being performed in a Hollywood studio, a master recording is made from which transcripts will be shipped to army and government operations all over the world. Strictly for you men overseas, no matter how small your outfit!

Hollywood quickly realized that the movie stars who brought their stories to life possessed a unique social power. Celebrities could carry the government's message beyond the films, into the real world. This would spawn the next evolution in the military using women’s bodies as a form of troop morale. Pin ups, risque images of white American women carried by soldiers.  Hello! I suppose some of you are wondering what I'm doing here. Well you see, some of you fellas have written to me and requested a real good pinup picture of me in nothing but a bathing suit. So… here I am!

Leveraging its relationship with major Hollywood studios, the government would produce and distribute millions of pinups of movie stars.

Stars like Rita Hayworth…Hello again, fellas, and many thanks for those swell letters.Marlene Dietrich...I like that dress you're practically wearing. Thank you, I bought it in Paris.Veronica Lake...That’s for making fun of a poor girl who only tried to help you, you big faker!And Jane Randolph.Each one gave their bodies to the wartime effort, pending permission from the studios they were under  contract with. But one celebrity would reign supreme… Hi, fellas! This is Betty Grable doing skirt patrol duty on Command Performance. Skirt patrol, that's army slang. It means looking for feminine companionship.Betty's photo was so popular, in fact, that despite 20th Century Fox and the military's own coordinated efforts to distribute it, her publicity office still received upwards of 20,000 requests a month In times like these, what else is there to do? Even by the pin-up standards of the time, Betty's photo was quite tame. Far more risqué images of movie stars were readily available.So why did Betty Grable's fairly conservative photo define the war? Why did she become the face soldiers were fighting for?

As a celebrity, she symbolized more than just a sexual ideal; she was an emotional ideal. A girl you could bring home to your parents. She was the all-American girl.Yes sir its Betty Grable, the nations number one musical comedy star and pin up girl, in the picture millions have voted only Betty can play!

For countless young men, Grable may have been the only woman they ever felt a deep romantic connection with. She was a surrogate in between what could have been if the war had never happened, and what could happen if they made it through.

The first issue of The Yank, the wartime magazine distributed to G.I.s, featured a multi-page foldout of Jane Randolph, primed for soldiers to tear out and pin up above their bunk. The title of issue number one was "Why We Fight." It's an evolution of how women's bodies are used—from a focus in World War I on sexual frustration as a means of boosting morale, to a new policy of sexual access.

She's yours for tonight, fellas! Miss Betty Grable!During this time, appeals start to become far less focused on collectivist ideals. Instead, stories, characters, and symbols often served as a reminder of what America afforded you: your family, your quality of life, and of course, American women.

Corporal Jones, I’ve decided you don’t know what the war is about. We’re free people, fighting for the right to remain free. To work, and to be married, and to raise a family in a fine and decent country! Oh, Eileen honey… I know that.As the conflict continued, the pin-ups being distributed by the military became a culture in itself for the American soldier.
Pin-ups were plastered in bunks and barracks, in ships and submarines. They were carried in cockpits and pockets and helmets. They graced playing cards, calendars, matchbooks, postcards.

Then they started to make it their own: tattoos of naked women painted onto their bodies; re-creations of famous pin-ups painted on the walls of P.O.W. camps, on tanks, on airplanes, on bombs. American women dwarfed the American flag.

In the eyes of the government, sexualizing women was a way to accomplish a goal; it was just a means to an end.

But for the soldiers who had consumed their art, and their stories, it had become something more. 87 ships take positions three miles off Bikini to suffer the shattering impact of the fifth atomic bomb. Here will be tested the capacity of modern armament to withstand the crushing shock of compressed water traveling a mile per second. The evacuated ruler of Bikini, King Juda…

The 167 residents of the Bikini Atoll are beginning their exodus to a new home. A new island.

As they packed their belongings, they watched as the horizon swells with ships.
42,000 humans, 5,000 rats, half of the world's supply of motion picture film— all of it converging on their two mile corner of the world.

On July 1st, 1946, a bomb nicknamed Gilda is loaded onto the undercarriage of a B-29 bomber. Against the rising sun, she begins to taxi along the runway. As the wheels lift, and Gilda ascends into the sky, if you look closely, you can just make out a painting against her rounded steel curves.  It’s Rita Hayworth. A life-sized pin-up of her hand-painted onto the bomb. And now, five seconds to go!At 9:00 AM, the metallic claws holding Gilda in place release.

In the afternoon, their children would play in ash falling from the sky—the remnants of Rita Hayworth, whose stardom briefly matched the brightness of the sun.*I want my daughter to be able to tell her daughter that Grandmother's picture was on the last atom bomb ever to explode.She appeared at military bases, thousands of identically dressed men sprinting towards her, each one gripping a tiny copy of her in their hands.

At war bond rallies, her stockings held up for men to bid on. Thousands of dollars for the fabric that had touched her skin.

Every Sunday spent writing replies to the soldiers who wrote her letters, until her hands cramped in place from gripping the pen.

And of course, she'd bring characters to life for them, slipping from one story to the next.

Her face soft, pleading, waiting for her man to return home from the front; or hardened and defiant, doing her part in the effort.

Throughout the war, Betty starred in a dozen films. Piece by piece, she gave herself away, and we loved her for it.

But now the war is over, and Betty's tired. Tired of being the biggest box office draw on Earth but not being able to choose her own roles. She stands in the office of a studio executive telling him all of this. Telling him that all she's asking for is to pick her own parts. He tells her no.

Betty takes out her contract. Pieces of paper just like this one have controlled her life since she was 12. Contracts that told her what she could eat, who she could be with, whether or not she could give birth.

She takes it out, and she tears it up into as many pieces as she can. The studio replaces Betty with a girl they discovered in a munitions factory during the war, Norma Jean. Now with golden hair and a new name, Marilyn Monroe will play the lead in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It's the role that was meant for Betty, and the role that makes Marilyn a superstar.

The studio brings Betty back one last time. They make her stand next to her replacement, make her smile for the lens, make her show us the torch being passed.

Between takes on the soundstage, Betty leans over to Marilyn and tells her: "Go get yours, honey. I've had mine."

One could view this moment as a glimmer of solidarity. But there's another way to interpret it: as a word of warning. "I've given them everything I have. Now it's your turn."
This is the Veterans History Project. Today is August the 23rd, 2005. And this is the beginning of an interview with Greta Z. Friedman.

And this is the beginning of an interview with George Mendoza.

Can you tell us your story? All morning long, people would come in and say there seem to be rumors that the war is ending.

We're in Radio City Music Hall when they stopped the show and they said the war was over.I went straight to Times Square where I saw V-J Day, V-J Day.

We were walking down in Times Square, I saw the nurse.

Suddenly, I was grabbed by a sailor.

Between the excitement of the whole works and probably the few drinks—but most importantly, it was the uniform she had. If that girl did not have a nurse's uniform on, I honestly believe that I never would have grabbed her.

I was a dental assistant, but you did have a white uniform. Well, yes, because we dressed the same way. When he grabbed you and gave you a kiss, what did you feel like?

I felt he was very strong, he was just holding me tight. But it wasn't a romantic event. It was just an event of "thank God the war is over."

I'm sure that many have seen the photo of the kissing sailor, which was taken by the photographer for Life magazine, Alfred Eisenstaedt. The picture was taken, I didn't know for 20 years that the picture existed. Now, back to when you did kiss the nurse. Did you say anything to her? I don't think so. I don't believe I said anything. She—it happened, she went her way and I went mine. Of course, I was with a date.


The warrior and the woman, linked together, frozen in time with the click of a shutter. Somewhere in between a moment of celebration, and an assault. It's the photo that would come to define the end of the war and the start of something new. Every poster, every airplane, every playing card—all reinforced a dangerous idea: women are the spoils of war.Over the years, several men and women have claimed to be the subjects of this photo. That's because sailors were running through Times Square kissing every woman they saw.Did you see any other sailors kissing nurses at the time? Oh yeah, everybody was excited, everybody was in a great mood. There was nothing wrong with kissing people, it was all done in good clean honest fun. … Okay. Overt propaganda may be overtly manipulative, but when it's over, people can recognize it for what it was. They can recognize the things it made them believe as an aberration, like Americans did when they exited World War One.But today the man on the street knows alot more about war than he knew twenty years ago. He knows now that the real end of war is millions of dead men. That the only ones to profit from wars destruction are the men who make its weapons.But that's not how culture works. Once you make a piece of art, it doesn't belong to you anymore; it belongs to your audience. When you mask propaganda as culture, you risk losing control of the symbol you manipulated. Today, we turn to the much older Hugh Hefner as part of our series "The Long View." It's been more than five decades since he first launched Playboy magazine. You were in uniform during World War II, in the army. I wondered, between the two biggest pin-ups of the time, Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth? Betty Grable all the way for me. Yes. The playmate of the month, the centerfold, came directly out of the influences of pin-up photography and art from World War II and before.By the time Vietnam rolls around, the American flag would have new competition on the sides of tanks and helicopters. The Playboy Bunny. I have today ordered to Vietnam the Air Mobile Division. Additional forces will be needed later, and they will be sent as requested.By 1967, The Washington Post declared: "If World War II was a war of Stars and Stripes and Betty Grable, the war in Vietnam is Playboy magazine's war."But Playboy was more than just sexy pictures of American women. It was openly critical of the war in Vietnam.

The Military had lost control. The porn they fed their soldiers was now tainted with countercultural, antiwar journalism. 

G.I. your helicopters fall from the sky like broken birds.But while copies of Playboy flowed from the US into Vietnam, military command began trafficking in its own form of entertainment to keep morale high - real women. Celebrities worked with the U.S.O. to stage elaborate concerts and performances. Young American women recruited from college campuses, staffing U.S.O. clubs. Despite being in an active war zone, they were required to wear perfume, mini-skirts, and a smile at all times.

And if you pushed past the cities, deep into the jungle, you'd find dozens of makeshift tents surrounded by acres of barbed wire, signs reading "Girls with tags are clean, girls without tags are diseased." Sounds of the U.S. psy-op Operation Wandering Soul
An entire sex industry for U.S. troops, facilitated by military leadership and the Vietnamese government. Nearby and often directly on military bases.

America required each girl to obtain a special entertainers card, and a weekly shot of penicillin. And the manager, he's notified that one of the girls have V.D. Now, if he don't go ahead and send her over to the base and get her checked out by a corpsman, the corpsman come over here—automatically off-limits. And then when they're all checked out, they're clean, okay—the bar is put back on limits.However, figuring out where to get the girls, and making sure they got paid, was left in the hands of the Vietnamese.They put her on a bus and the assumption is that when she arrives, there are plenty of good jobs as housekeepers at the American bases. So they put her there and she's going to send the money back to the family. And they are essentially fed dope, and prostituted.

Today, Southeast Asia is among the world's most popular destinations for sex tourism. If you overlay a map of former U.S. military bases with a map of the highest concentration of red light districts, you get the same map. Whether they flew in from the states or were a local resident, women heard the same message. As the executive director of the U.S.O. often said: Your job in Vietnam is to be happy. Never let the men see you cry.Sexual violence and war have likely gone hand-in-hand for all of human history. But in World War I, a new idea was systematically introduced: tease men, sexually frustrate them. They will become better warriors. Sex and violence interlinked, at an institutional level.With each subsequent conflict, each generation of warriors, the idea would mutate, embedding itself more and more deeply into the DNA of the military.

Until the inevitable end conclusion: women's actual bodies as a resource for fueling the war machine.

General Patton put it more bluntly: if they don't fuck, they don't fight.
The platinum blonde that made Betty and Marilyn icons required constant maintenance. Constant peroxide, constant damage to the follicles and the scalp, constant burning. You can't be a blonde like that without burning.

It's 1972, and it starts with a cough. Then comes the diagnosis. Then the hair loss—the real kind. The kind that strips away everything. She wears wigs to her treatments because even now, even at the end, Betty Grable can't appear in public without the golden hair. After the funeral, Betty's daughter opens a safety deposit box looking for something, anything, some reminder of the millions her mother generated. The millions in revenue, the millions of photographs, the millions of feet of film featuring her face and her body and her legs and her smile. There's just a handwritten note: "Sorry, there's nothing more." They say your hair grows back after you die. It's not true, but people believe a lot of things that aren't true about dead women. About women who exist somewhere in between image and human. Women who belong half to themselves and half to us.

Betty Grable was 12 years old when her mother took her to the bathroom with a bottle of peroxide. She was 56 when her hair fell out in the hospital. Between those two moments, five million fragments. And one photograph nobody remembers of a brown-haired girl who might have been anything, might have been anyone—before they made her golden. Before they made her nothing at all.