We welcome a real June to our website today, though actually that was her middle name, as she was born Winifred June Vlasek. Our card says that she was also born in June, June the 5th, 1915, but modern records state she was born on May the 5th, 1917. I think that may be her film star records, where starlets were well known to shave a few years off hither and yon as they aged. Both the card and her online records agree on her place of birth, Minneapolis, USA.
Who knows, if she had stayed in Minneapolis she may never have been a movie star, but chance took the family off to Los Angeles, and she discovered the delights of dance and theatre. Our card tells us that she "was a dancer and entertainer in Clubs. Appeared in prologues to musical comedies, and played in revues." Then it adds something very intriguing, and that is that she "began [her] screen career in Christie Comedies". If that is true, then it is unlikely, as modern records say, that she was only sixteen when Fox took her on, asking "only" that she straightened her teeth and changed her name, making her drop the Winifred and change the Vlasek to Lang. And we also know that she appears as June Vlasek on many cards, including Abdulla`s "Stage and Film Stars", and Godfrey Phillips` "Stage and Cinema Beauties", both almost identical cards, and both issued in 1935, where it states that her "first screen engagement was a comedy role at the Christie Studio" - though in the same year she appears in the German sets of "Bunte Filmbilder" as June Lang.
Everyone agrees that she made her film debut in 1931, in a film called "Young Sinners", made for Fox, which hardly lived up to its title, as it was about someone who regains the joy of living by meeting a man and woman who had experienced the ups and downs of life. Our girl was unbilled, and we don`t even know what she did, though we do know, thanks to our card, that she had "fair hair, blue eyes [and was] 5 ft 3 1.2 ins".
She remained in the background for three films, and maybe more, until she was cast as Betty Lou Regent in a film called "Chandhu the Magician", which was based on a radio show. Its chiefly remembered for the fact that Bela Lugosi was in it, as the mad kidnapper, desperate to get his hands on a death ray so he can control the world, or half of it anyway, as the death ray is billed as having beams that reach half way round the world, not sure why it falls short, maybe just the curvature of the earth.... In fact he was also in a later serialised version, but stepped up to play the leading role of Chandhu the Magician.
Probably the best role that our girl ever got was in "Bonnie Scotland", released in 1935, a Laurel and Hardy film, set in British India, where she played Stan Laurel`s wife. That was her last film for Fox, and yet she is recorded as being still with them on the reverse of our card, issued in 1939. Mind you, she is also recorded as June Vlasek on the 1937 series of Carreras "Film Stars" and on several British American Tobacco sets that were issued later still.
Her last film was in 1947, "Lighthouse", rather a pot boiler, where she falls in love with a lighthouse keeper who turns out to be married, so she marries the other lighthouse keeper and all three live together. Of course the original man then turns out to be in love with her, and schemes lots of ways to make her his, but by then she has realised she loves her now-husband more. The only thing is that they seem to forget the wife that led to the marriage, she is not anywhere to be seen in the lighthouse, and she`s not in the credits either, so maybe the now-husband was also a bit of a schemer and only invented her to turn our girl towards him. All too convoluted for me!
Between those two films she was married, in real life, to her agent, Victor Orsatti, but it was short lived, they married at the end of May 1937 and divorced at the beginning of August 1937. Then in 1939 she married an Italian union man, John Roselli, also known as Filippo Sacco, and "Handsome Johnny", who was a friend of Al Capone, and was also reputedly recruited by the C.I.A. to assassinate Fidel Castro, but she said she never knew anything about that until after they divorced in 1943, though in the same year he was sent to prison for extortion, involving several Hollywood stars and filmmakers, and later on he would be mixed up with the shooting of John F. Kennedy.
Three years after that she married again, to a man called John Morgan, and they had a daughter, but they divorced in 1952. She never remarried, and died in May 2005 at the age of eighty-eight.
This set first appears in our original World Tobacco Issues Index, as part of the penultimate cartophilic output of this firm, who were founded in 1810 and first issued cards in 1901. It is catalogued as :
ISSUES 1929 - 31
- BATHING BELLES. Sm. 68 x 38. Black and white halftones. Nd. (40). See Ha.592 ... M164-42
Curiously, there is another set directly above, namely "Bathing Beauties", slightly differently shaped cards at 62 x 40 m/m, and a set of twenty-two real photos. In fact all the sets in this section but one contain some form of female form, the one being "Types of Aeroplanes". Now you might think that to be the latest set, in preparing for war way, but actually it was issued in 1929, the same year as all the rest (save "Dancing Girls", which I don`t seem to have a date for), and ten years before our "Bathing Beauties" slithered suggestively from their wraps.
Then cards abruptly halted, until 1939, when they discovered the allure of the sea, and gave us "Steam Ships" (1939) and "The Story of Ships" (1940). And then they were gone forever.
As far as the "H" code, that takes us to the Handbook, which at that time was published by the London Cigarette Card Company, and it tells us the following :
- Ha.592. BATHING BELLES. (titled series). Front in black and white. Numbered.
Murray - Series of 40
United Services - Series of 50.
Now both of these were issued in the same year, 1939, but the retail prices in the accompanying catalogue tell a tale, for our version is priced at 1d. a card or 1/6 a set (and we are told that they are cheaper in the Abridged Catalogue), whereas the cards of the United Services Manufacturing Co., Ltd, London, retailed at 6d. a card and sets cost 30/-
In our updated World Tobacco Issues Index the text is pretty much the same but it does have a new card code, of
- BATHING BELLES. Sm. 68 x 38. Black and white halftones. Nd. (40). See H.592 ... M970-620
Now I do have a list of these cards, which is as follows :
- Dolores Casey
- Franciska Gaal
- Blanca Vischer
- Gladys Swarthout
- Jane Hamilton
- Marian Marsh
- Muriel Evans
- Ann Sheridan
- June Knight
- Maxine Jennings
- Toby Wing
- Frances Drake
- Jane Hamilton
- Irene Ware
- Ann Dvorak
- Sheila Darcy
- Jean Chatburn
- Kitty Carlisle
- Anne Shirley
- Maxine Reiner
- Judith Barrett
- Eleanor Whitney
- Grace Bradley
- Mary Carlisle
- June Lang
- Mildred Stone
- Jean Parker
- Maxine Reiner
- Iris Adrian
- Gwen Kenyon
- Mary Howard
- Eleanor Hansen and Frances Robinson
- Linda Parker
- Gwen Lee
- Rosalind Keith
- Ida Lupino
- Frances Gifford
- Cecilia Parker
- Gertrude Michael
- Arline Judge
But I`m not sure what the extra ten cards were that were issued by United Services. Not yet, anyway....