Yup, that’s Ginger Rogers. And that’s her 1937 Dodge automobile. And dig Ginger’s hair style. Wow!
Hello everybody. Mr. Joe Morella and Mr. Frank Segers here once again. Mrs. Norman Maine is out motoring again on this Motoring Monday.
There’s Ginger is outside Stage 9 on the RKO lot where she made some of her most memorable movies. The actress/singer/dancer, born 1911 in Missouri as Virginia McMath, had become famous as Fred Astaire’s partner in a series of hit films including 1935′s Top Hat and 1936′s Swing Time.
Real movie buffs, however, know Ginger wasn’t Fred’s first partner on screen. That honor belongs to Joan Crawford.
Know which film paired Fred and Joan?
As you are pondering the answer to that question, we’ll report that at the time this car-plus-star photo was taken, Rogers was probably making Shall We Dance with Astaire. The same year, 1937, she branched out in director Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door, costarring Katherine Hepburn and the great Adolphe Menjou as a lecherous theatrical producer.
As for that car, it was manufactured by a company formed in the early 20th Century by the Dodge brothers, Horace and John. By 1920, the Dodge was the second best-selling car in America. In the Thirties, the manufacturer introduced such new fangled gizmos as radios and straight-eight engines, and sold its three-millionth auto by 1935, two years before this photo was taken.
The Dodge shown here is certainly a handsome specimen of a mass-produced car (they really built ‘em back then) but it is by no means as spiffy as some of the star-owned Dusenberg’s we shown on past Motoring Mondays.
Thus Ginger easily outshines her car, which is as it should be.
