Skip to main content

Did You Once See Stella Plain?

March 2023
1min read

T HE STRIKING pictures of the San Francisco earthquake that appeared in our February/March 1983 issue bear ample witness to the dedication and grit of J. B. Monaco, the local photographer who took them. But this was not the only time in his career that Monaco recorded a San Francisco phenomenon: were it not for his enterprise, the sensation of the 1915 PanamaPacific Exposition would have been forever lost.

Nobody knows quite why Stella made such a hit. As Alfred Heller tells the story in World’s Fair , an attractive quarterly devoted to international expositions (P.O. Box 339, Corte Madera, CA 94925), the painting of the full-blown nude by an artist named Nani had been shown around the country to apathetic audiences for some time before the fair and had come to rest in a St. Louis garret. Her owner, Norman Vaughan, decided to give her one more chance and sent her west to the fair—where she caused an uproar. More than threequarters of a million people paid a dime to see her, and she became the most popular attraction in “the Zone,” the fair’s midway.

She was handsome, to be sure, but as Morton Todd points out in his five-volume history of the exposition, “there were a dozen nudes in the Palace of Fine Arts by some of the greatest modern painters, that could have been seen for nothing.” Whatever the reason—and there is continuing speculation that a bellows hidden behind the canvas was used to animate her generous bosom—Stella clearly had what it took.

Among those who visited her was J. B. Monaco, and he set about getting a picture with the same determination that had spurred him to record the catastrophe that befell his city nine years earlier. With the help of a friend who worked at the fair, he approached Stella’s pavilion under cover of darkness and stealthily drilled a hole through the wall opposite to the one on which she hung. Then, putting his lens to the opening, Monaco made a highly illegal time exposure. He took it home and developed it: no good. So he tried again the next night. This time everything worked perfectly, and Monaco made off with the handsome image shown here.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "August/september 1983"

Authored by: William A. Nolen

“A wound in the heart is mortal,” Hippocrates said two thousand years ago. Until very recently he was right.

Authored by: The Editors

A HERITAGE PRESERVED
The brief mid-nineteenth-century popularity of eight-sided houses has left us a strange and delightful architectural legacy

Authored by: Phyllis C. Robinson

They could hardly have been more temperamentally incompatible, but the Midwestern writer Willa Cather and the crusading editor S. S. McClure enjoyed a splendid working relationship for six years and a lifetime of mutual respect

Authored by: Peter Andrews

“I don’t want this thing often,” one soldier said of his .45 automatic pistol, “but when I do, I want it damned bad.”

Authored by: Robert Friedman

In the underpinnings of our cities, in desolate swampland, beneath coastal waters—wherever the early settlers left traces of their lives—a new generation of archaeologists is uncovering a lost world

Authored by: Robert Bendiner

This century’s most powerful Secretary of State talks about the strengths and weaknesses of the Foreign Service, the role of the CIA, the rights of journalists, the contrast between meddlers and statesmen—and about the continuing struggle for a coherent foreign policy

Authored by: The Editors

Using the same bold colors that drew the rubes in to see the Giant Rat of Sumatra and the Three-Headed Calf, he painted a fanciful record of his world

Authored by: Edmund S. Morgan

Did the fifty-five statesmen meeting in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention know that a witch-hunt was taking place while they deliberated? Did they care?

How the novelty item of 1920 became the world-straddling colossus of 1940

Authored by: Delma K. Romines

One of America’s least-known and most curious folk arts

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.