George Petty and the Petty Girl 🎨 From Esquire's First Issue to the Memphis Belle

🎨 Before Playboy, before the Varga Girl, before anybody had a word for "centerfold," there was a girl on the telephone. She was long in the leg, small in the head, rendered in airbrush so smooth her clothes looked painted on. America called her the Petty Girl, and the man who drew her was a Louisiana-born Chicago retoucher named George Petty.

I love this story because it runs through so many corners of American life at once. A Depression-era magazine, a cigarette campaign, a swimsuit company, a bomber over Germany, a car's hood ornament, even a Cold War computer. And in the 1990s a small card company out of Royal Oak, Michigan, gathered it all back up into boxes of trading cards that I still keep on the shelf.

🖌️ Who was George Petty?

George Brown Petty IV was born on April 27, 1894, in Abbeville, Louisiana. His father, George Brown Petty III, was a photographer, and shortly before 1900 he moved the family to Chicago.

Young George was not much of a student, but he was the staff artist for his high school paper and took evening art classes. The real schooling happened in his father's photo shop. That is where he learned the airbrush, a tool that in those days was used for retouching photographs, not for making art.

After high school he went to Paris and studied at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens. The school's alumni included John Singer Sargent, Alphonse Mucha and J.C. Leyendecker. World War I ended his time there in 1916, when Americans in France were ordered home.

Back in Chicago his father died, and George, now head of the family, closed the studio. He went to work retouching for printers and ad agencies. His first published work was an ice skater on the cover of the 1920 Marshall Field catalog. He opened his own studio in 1926.

🏆 How did an ad-agency retoucher become famous?

He turned the retoucher's tool into a painter's tool. Petty started using the airbrush in his own drawings, which almost nobody was doing, and the results were stunning. In 1933 his airbrushed poster won first prize in the Chicago World's Fair poster contest, the Century of Progress.

That same year, in the depths of the Depression, a new men's magazine called Esquire launched at 50 cents. That was ten times the price of The Saturday Evening Post. The first issue sold out anyway, with a print run of 100,000, and George Petty was in it.

What he contributed was a cartoon. He was not really a cartoonist, so the magazine supplied the gags and he supplied the girl. Editor Arnold Gingrich paid him $25 for it. His cartoons ran in seven of Esquire's first dozen issues, and readers quickly started calling her the Petty Girl.

📞 Very often she was on the telephone. The phone became his trademark. The 1994 Petty Girl box carries one of those gag lines right on the back panel: "I want to report this phone out of order - I haven't had a call all evening."

📰 Did George Petty invent the centerfold?

He is the man most credited with it. In the words of his Wikipedia biography, his Esquire gatefolds "originated and popularized the magazine device of centerfold spreads."

The date matters, though. The early Petty Girls were single pages. The big moment came in the Christmas 1939 issue of Esquire, when one of the magazine's fold-outs was given over to the largest Petty Girl yet, fully 30 inches long. The modern pin-up was born, and Esquire's circulation soared again.

He was a phenomenon by then. From 1936 to 1941 he sat as a celebrity judge at the Miss America pageant. And in 1939, students at Princeton voted him their favorite artist. Rembrandt came in second.

🚬 What did the Petty Girl sell besides magazines?

Just about everything. Within two years of that first Esquire issue he was painting monthly ads for Old Gold cigarettes and Jantzen swimwear, often in the same issues as his cartoons.

The Old Gold campaign started appearing in Esquire in February 1935. He was paid $600 for one-time use of each painting, and he kept his copyright. That last part tells you a lot about George Petty.

👙 Jantzen was the Portland, Oregon, knitting company that became one of the great American swimsuit names, with its famous red Diving Girl trademark. Petty's girls started showing up in Jantzen ads in 1934. When his son posed for the male figure the next year, men's swimsuit sales tripled. In 1940 Jantzen brought out a "Petty Girl" swimsuit.

He was a sharp businessman all the way. Petty insisted on keeping the secondary rights to his images and getting his original paintings back. He licensed his girls onto playing cards, drinking glasses and more. In a 1943 ad in The American Weekly, $2 mailed straight to Petty got you a set of four 12 by 18 inch posters printed in six colors.

💔 Why did Petty leave Esquire?

Money, mostly. As his advertising work took off, the money Esquire paid bought less and less of his time, and tensions grew between the artist and the magazine.

Esquire brought in a Peruvian-born painter named Alberto Vargas as a replacement during the negotiations. After about a year of uneasy coexistence, Petty finished his last twelve Esquire girls in 1941, and by 1942 the Petty Girl had made way for the Varga Girl.

Petty did not slow down. From January 1945 to December 1947 he painted 35 Petty Girls for True magazine, and that three-year run helped True double its circulation. He also painted six pictures for MGM's Ziegfeld Follies, which opened in 1946.

✈️ What is the Memphis Belle's connection to George Petty?

This is my favorite part of the whole story. During World War II, military artists copied Petty Girls onto the noses of warplanes far and wide. The most famous of them all rode on the B-17 Memphis Belle.

Pilot Robert K. Morgan named the bomber for his sweetheart, Margaret Polk of Memphis, Tennessee. He contacted Esquire for the Petty artwork, which came from the magazine's April 1941 issue. Corporal Tony Starcer, the 91st Bomb Group's artist, copied the Petty Girl onto both sides of the forward fuselage. In the version on the Belle, she is talking on the phone.

The crew completed its 25th mission on May 19, 1943, over Kiel, Germany. The Memphis Belle has been on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force near Dayton, Ohio, since May 2018, with George Petty's girl still riding on the nose.

🃏 That exact April 1941 Esquire image is card #79 in the 1995 Petty Girl II set, and its card back tells how the Petty Girl "earned her stripes" in the war. If you want to hold the Memphis Belle's girl in your hand, it is in this box: The Petty Girl II, 1995 sealed factory set.

🚗 What did Petty do after the war?

He kept on working, and his girl kept turning up in unexpected places.

• 🔧 Ridge Tool calendars. The Ridge Tool Company was founded in 1923 in North Ridgeville, Ohio, and moved to Elyria in 1943. Its RIDGID pin-up calendar ran from 1949 until 2016, and the early editions were George Petty's. Heritage Auctions has handled his Ridgid calendar art from around 1952 to 1953.
• 🚘 The Nash "Flying Lady." In the early 1950s his daughter Marjorie, his favorite model since she was 15, was the model for an optional hood ornament on Nash automobiles.
• 📅 Back at Esquire. He returned for the Esquire calendars of 1955 and 1956.
• 🖥️ A Cold War computer. In 1959 a Petty Girl taken from that 1956 Esquire calendar was drawn in vector lines on a SAGE air-defense computer during diagnostics. It is claimed as the earliest known figurative computer art.
• 🎬 Hollywood. In 1950 Columbia made a movie called The Petty Girl, with Robert Cummings playing him. It was Tippi Hedren's film debut, in an uncredited part as "Miss Ice Box," more than a decade before Hitchcock cast her in The Birds.
• ⛸️ The Ice Capades. He painted program covers for the annual Ice Capades revue, starting in the early 1940s and coming back to it in the early 1960s. Fitting for a man whose first published work was an ice skater.

🎵 Two Petty Girls even turned up in the crowd on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In 1973 he painted a new pin-up for Esquire's 40th anniversary issue. George Petty died on July 21, 1975, in San Pedro, California. In 2017 the Society of Illustrators inducted him into its Hall of Fame.

📦 How did the Petty Girl end up on 1990s trading cards?

In the early 1990s, non-sport trading cards boomed. A Royal Oak, Michigan, company called 21st Century Archives carved out its own corner of that boom with sets of classic American pin-up art, and they did it right. The card backs were written by Reid Stewart Austin, who spent about twenty years as a Playboy art director and was Alberto Vargas's editor there.

Austin was the man for the job. He co-wrote the 1978 book Vargas with the artist himself, later wrote Varga: The Esquire Years, and in 1997 published Petty: The Classic Pin-Up Art of George Petty, with an introduction by Marjorie Petty and a foreword by Hugh Hefner. Hefner had worked as a copywriter at Esquire before he started Playboy, so the line from Petty to the Playboy centerfold runs right through that book.

🐰 The Petty Girl, 1994

The first Petty set, cards 1 through 50, came out in 1994, "produced under license from the Petty Family." The box says the art spans the 1930s, '40s and '50s, with card backs by Reid Stewart Austin, and promises "one-of-five Ridgid Tool special cards randomly inserted in the sets."

Those Ridgid insert cards are not some random tie-in. They are Petty's own Ridge Tool calendar art, from the pin-up calendar Ridgid kept printing until 2016. The box back even makes the bold claim that the whole idea of a pin-up inside a magazine was his: "Prior to the Petty Girl, there had been the girl on the magazine cover, but never the girl in the magazine."

👉 The Petty Girl, 1994 sealed 50-card factory set

👙 The Petty Girl II, 1995

The second series picks up at card 51, and it reads like a walk through his career. Card #51 is his 1933 Chicago World's Fair poster, the prize winner. Cards #52 through #78 are Esquire gag pages from 1934 to 1941. Card #79 is the Memphis Belle's April 1941 girl. Then come his True magazine years, three cards of Ridge Tool calendar art, and, closing the set, his 1956 Esquire calendar.

This time the special cards are Jantzen cards, five of them, built on his swimsuit advertising work, and the published checklist shows the factory set was packed with one of the five. The box is marked "©1995 The Petty Family," and its back panel says it best: "Within a year of her appearance in the first issue of Esquire in Depression dark 1933, the Petty Girl began her heady climb, stepping serenely over the worshipping forms of college boy and corporate head alike."

👉 The Petty Girl II, 1995 sealed factory set

🎁 And if you want the whole run, all 100 cards from the World's Fair poster to the 1956 calendar, I keep the two sealed boxes together as a pair: The Petty Girl I and II, 1994-1995 sealed sets.

🌸 What about the Varga Girl who replaced her?

Alberto Vargas was born on February 9, 1896, in Arequipa, Peru, the son of photographer Max T. Vargas. Notice that both great Esquire pin-up artists were photographers' sons. Vargas studied in Zurich and Geneva, came to the United States in 1916, and worked for the Ziegfeld Follies and the Hollywood studios.

From 1940 to 1946 he painted 180 pictures for Esquire. The magazine changed his credit from "Vargas" to "Varga," and when the partnership broke down he took Esquire to court. He lost. In 1947 a federal appeals court ruled that his contract gave Esquire the rights. He went on to paint 152 pictures for Playboy over 16 years starting in 1959, and the cover for the Cars' album Candy-O in 1979. He died in Los Angeles on December 30, 1982, at 86.

21st Century Archives actually started its pin-up line with him. Their first Vargas set came out in 1992, and the box of the 1993 follow-up says the first series was named "Non-Sport Card Design of the Year." Pin-Up Girls II carries cards 51 through 100, one Prizm card per set, and backs by Reid Stewart Austin.

📜 Look at the edge of the box and you'll find "© 1944, 1993 The Hearst Corporation." Hearst bought Esquire at the end of 1986, so that line is Esquire's own 1944 copyright on the painting, carried onto the cards nearly fifty years later.

👉 Pin-Up Girls II, 1993 Vargas sealed card set

🎬 Where do Petty and Vargas meet Hollywood?

In the 1994 Hollywood Pinups set, "Movie Stars as seen through the eyes of the Masters - artists such as Vargas, Petty, Elvgren, Moran, Mozert, Armstrong, and others." The published checklist credits 19 artists across its 50 cards, including Bradshaw Crandell, Earl Christy, Zoë Mozert and Rolf Armstrong. Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable turn up again and again, the two favorite pin-ups of the GIs in World War II.

💋 Every factory set was packed with one of five special Marilyn cards painted by Earl Moran. Moran, a Brown & Bigelow calendar artist, moved to Hollywood in 1946 and soon met a young model named Norma Jeane Dougherty. She posed for him for the next four years, and the two became friends. Those five cards are his paintings of her from 1946 to 1950, before the world knew her as Marilyn Monroe.

👉 Hollywood Pinups, 1994 sealed card set

❓ Quick answers

When did the Petty Girl first appear? In a cartoon in the first issue of Esquire, in 1933.

When was the first Petty Girl gatefold? Esquire's Christmas 1939 issue, a fold-out 30 inches long.

Which Petty Girl is on the Memphis Belle? The one from the April 1941 Esquire, copied onto the B-17 by Corporal Tony Starcer.

Who wrote the card backs on the 21st Century Archives pin-up sets? Reid Stewart Austin, longtime Playboy art director and author of books on both Vargas and Petty.

Which Petty Girl set has the Memphis Belle card? The Petty Girl II, 1995, card #79.

🙂 There is something I really like about these boxes. Petty fought his whole life to keep his pictures his own, and fifty years later his family licensed them onto cards with the history written by the man who knew the work best. Sealed since the 1990s, they are a little piece of that whole long American story, from the Chicago World's Fair to the nose of the Memphis Belle.