Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties

Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties or Sennett Bathing Beauties was a bevy of women performing in bathing costumes assembled by film producer Mack Sennett. They appeared in comedy short subjects, in promotional material, and in promotional events such as Venice Beach beauty contests from 1915 to 1928.


American Arcade Card. Photo: Evans, Los Angeles. Capture: Mack Sennett Comedies.


American Arcade Card. Photo: Evans, Los Angeles. Capture: Mack Sennett Comedies.


American Arcade Card. Photo: Evans, Los Angeles. Capture: Mack Sennett Comedies.

Saturating early Hollywood with slapstick

Mack Sennett was the brilliant founder of the Keystone Studios which saturated early Hollywood with slapstick. Physical comedy could more than compensate for silent films’ lack of dialogue.

Sennett gave Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, and Mabel Normand their first breaks, and was the originator of slapstick routines such as pie-throwing and car-chases, as seen in the Keystone Cops films. The Keystone Cops were a group of wildly incompetent policemen.

Sennett was also responsible for the concept of "Bathing Beauty". Sennett came up with the idea in 1914 when he was desperate for a way to differentiate his Keystone comedies from the rest of the oversaturated laugh market.

About his idea for the Bathing Beauties, Sennett said: "One morning as I went through the Times, in my tub, I noticed a three-column picture on Page One of a pretty girl who had been involved in a minor traffic accident. The picture made the front page for two obvious and attractive reasons. The young lady's knees were showing."

Beginning in 1915, Sennett assembled the original trio of Bathing Beauties assembled which consisted of Evelyn Lynn, Cecile Evans, and Marie Prevost. When the Bathing Beauties made their rounds in Hula-Hula Land (William Campbell, 1917), the mix of outraged letters from moral groups and massive ticket sales told Sennett that he was doing something just right. Over the next decade, hundreds of aspiring starlets paid their dues as Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties, starting at twelve dollars a week.


British postcard in the series "Keystone cards presented with Home Weekly". Photo: Keystone Film. Mabel Normand in The Sea Nymphs (Mack Sennett, 1914). Caption: Mabel as a sea nymph.


French postcard by Cinémagazine Edition. Photo: Mack Sennett Comedies.


French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition. Capture: Mack Sennett Comedies. With her curvy figure and blonde hair, Phyllis Haver (1899-1960) started her career as one of the most popular of Mack Sennett's bathing beauties.


Vintage postcard by Estalante, no. 280. Photo: Mack Sennett Comedies. Collection: Marlene Pilaete. The actress on the left is Gloria Swanson.

Vehemently denying being one of the bathing beauties

Many of the Sennett Bathing Beauties remained nameless. However, not individually featured or named, others ascended to significant careers of their own, including Marie Prevost, Phyllis Haver (the original ‘Roxy’ in the first screen adaption of 'Chicago'), Juanita Hanson, Virginia Fox (wife-to-be of famed Fox producer Daryl F. Zanuck), and Carole Lombard, whom Sennett called “a scamp and a mad-cap.”

Other notable Bathing Beauties include Claire Anderson, Marion Aye, Alice Day, Polly Moran, Madeline Hurlock, Myrtle Lind, Vera Reynolds, Mary Thurman, Thelma Hill, Thelma Parr, Marvel Rea, Harriet Hammond, Evelyn Francisco, Vera Steadman, Josephine Cogdell, Elinor Field, and Ora Carew.

Two of those often named as Bathing Beauties later distanced themselves from the appellation: Mabel Normand and Gloria Swanson. Normand was already a featured player, and her 8-minute film The Water Nymph (Mack Sennett, 1912) may have been the direct inspiration for the Bathing Beauties. Although Gloria Swanson worked for Sennett in 1916 and was photographed in a bathing suit, she was also a star yet and later "vehemently denied" being one of the bathing beauties.

In the 1920s, Sennett's Bathing Beauties remained popular enough to provoke imitators such as the Christie Studios' Bathing Beauties (counting Raquel Torres and Laura La Plante as alumnae) and Fox Film Corporation's "Sunshine Girls" (counting Janet Gaynor as an alumna). Various Sennett Beauties toured the country, putting on “revues” almost wholly composed of Beauties Walking Around While Bathing-Suited, with a little “shimmy dance” to spice it up. The police shut down one Atlanta revue for obscenity.

The Sennett Bathing Beauties continued to appear through 1928. Anne Helen Peterson at Lapham's Quarterly: "As the 1920s drew to a close, the allure of the Bathing Beauty began to fade. Or, more precisely, as the masses slowly began to adopt the Beauties’ mode of dress, both on the beach and off, they became less of a novelty. From the start, the Bathing Beauties had wrapped their breasts “like mummies,” and while their bathing costumes may have shown off their knees, they all had dropped waists. Their costumes may have been for bathing, but they were clear antecedents to the flapper fashions that would soon blaze across the Western World."


American postcard. Photo: Evans, Los Angeles.


American Arcade Card. Photo: Evans. Los Angeles. Capture: Mack Sennett Comedies.


American Arcade Card. Photo: Evans. Los Angeles. Capture: Mack Sennett Comedies.


American Arcade Card. Photo: Evans, Los Angeles. Capture: Mack Sennett Comedies.

Sources: Anne Helen Petersen (Lapham's Quarterly), Wikipedia, and IMDb. And check-out 'Mack Sennetts Bathing-Beauties' at Facebook.