Kobal Foundation celebrity photos capture eternal glamour

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  George Hurrell / Santa Barbara Museum of Art

SANTA BARBARA — FROM THE time he was a schoolboy, John Kobal was in love with Hollywood. He longed to become a part of it, and eventually he did -- by befriending faded movie stars and forgotten photographers, enchanting them with his sincerity and his hungry memory, and collecting photographs. By the time he died in 1991, at 51, he had amassed thousands of anecdotes and a million photographic images.

Kobal set up a photo agency to profit from all this material, but he kept the best for himself, including original prints and negatives from such famed studio photographers as Clarence Sinclair Bull, George Hurrell, Ruth Harriet Louise, Eugene Robert Richee and Ernest Bachrach. Their subjects included Garbo, Dietrich, Harlow, Crawford, Gable and Grant -- captured in Olympian beauty and crowned by halos of light. As Kobal once wrote, "Each image reveals a coming together of the flesh and the spirit to create an ideal to which others aspired."

That romantic vision pervades the exhibition "Made in Hollywood: Photographs From the John Kobal Foundation," at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through Oct. 5. Its co-curators -- Karen Sinsheimer, the museum's curator of photography, and film historian Robert Dance -- visited the foundation in London and sifted through thousands of vintage prints and negatives to select just over 90 images by 50 photographers. The result is a virtual tour through four decades of glitz and glamour, starting in the 1920s. "These are the most vivid records we possess of the Golden Age of Hollywood," says Dance.

The photographs come from a special era, agrees Simon Crocker, chairman of the Kobal Foundation.

"What was unique about Hollywood photography is that the stars would work with the same photographers over and over again," Crocker said during a recent visit to Santa Barbara. "There was a trust. They knew that the studio's only job was to make them look fabulous."

That fabulousness mesmerized Kobal. Born in Austria and raised in Canada, he eventually settled in London but made frequent visits to the United States to pursue his Hollywood obsession. In New York, he befriended actress Tallulah Bankhead, who called up her pal director George Cukor when Kobal was headed to Los Angeles for the first time in 1964. Cukor, in turn, introduced him to a panoply of actresses and actors. His entree was further enhanced by his credentials in journalism, a trade he plied for years, contributing stories to BBC Radio and various British magazines. Ultimately, though, he found his real calling.