Holywood Rides A Bike, Steven Rea (2012)

Tinsel town’s talent take to two wheels

Angel City Press 1883318637 18 cm x 24 cm 160pp £14.99

Looking for a shot of celebrity endorsement – then Steven Rea’s Holywood Rides A Bike provides a potent fix. Its a simple formula, the book comprises a huge collection of photographs of actors riding bicycles. And only those with an unusual detachment from mainstream culture could fail to feel their pulse quicken at the sight of such stars in two-wheeled transit.

Drawn largely from the 1930s to the 1960s, it includes an impressive roll call of silver-screen royalty – Fred Astaire, Lauren Bacall, Brigette Bardot, Warren Beatty, Humphry Bogart and Gary Cooper among them (and that’s a small selection from the first three letters of the alphabet).

The pictures include staged studio shots, film stills and snatched pictures as the stars actually go about their business by bike. There is a snap, for example, of Jimmy Stewart giving Grace Kelly a ride on his crossbar between shots during the filming of Rear Window in 1954. Glenn Ford chooses a rather safer tandem with which to ride with Rita Hayworth in 1940. In one of the funny and informative captions, Rea tells us that the machine is a French Griffon.

There is Doris Day on a Schwinn Stingray (apparently she was an avid cyclist and even appeared in Schwinn advertisements), Tony Perkins playing bicycle polo and, an assuredly suave Sean Connery giving us an idea of what a Dutch 007 might have looked like.
Film studios no longer rely on fleets of bicycles to transport stars between sound stages – that task is now performed by golf buggies. Happily, most of today’s crop film A-listers can almost all be found riding bikes at one time or another – among them Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Johnny Depp and Julia Roberts. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before the talent persuades the studios to revive the back-lot bike pools?

TD Oct 12

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I spoke with Steven Rea around the time that his book was first published and he told me that his interest in stars on bikes dates back to a family heirloom. “By chance, my great, great uncle took a photograph of Shirley Temple cycling in Palm Springs, when she was eight. It was 1936, and he was staying in the same hotel as the curly-coiffed child star”, he said. “The picture found its way into my family’s photo album and I looked at it over and over as a child. Maybe subliminally that is where my passion started.”

Rea, who grew up in the United States, but to British parents, became an avid cyclist in adult life and earns his living as a movie critic – currently with the Philadelphia Enquirer. “I started to collect prints of film actors cycling – some publicity shots, some candid shots from around the studios and some film stills. It takes a lot of hunting, and I have paid up to $200 for one or two prints, but it has become an obsession. ” He started posing pictures up on his blog, Rides A Bike, in November 2010 and then earlier this year came the book, followed more recently by an iPad app.

“Among my favourite pictures is one of Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford astride an absolutely gorgeous French-built tandem, from the film The Lady in Question. They’re dressed like they’re off on a tweed ride, and the fenders of the Griffon tandem are glinting in the sun.

The photograph of Jeanne Moreau, smiling, the wind blowing her hair, as she rides her bike down a country lane in the company of the two men in her life, from Truffaut’s classic Jules and Jim is fantastic too.”

Rea’s favourite, however, is that of Susan Peters. She’s stopped on her bike on the Palisades in Santa Monica. “It’s this heart-stopping image; Peters is lovely, and so is the setting, and she’s looking off to sea as if to suggest a rich future ahead of her. But this is a sad photo, too: Peters was Oscar-nominated for Random Harvest (1942), and being groomed by MGM for stardom, but then had a terrible accident. She was shot on a hunting trip with her husband, paralysed from the waist down, tried to continue her career in a wheelchair, but ended up severely depressed and anorexic, dead at 31. So this exquisite photo has a patina of tragedy about it.”

Studios are not the only place that the stars can be seen awheel, either. “Quite a few movie stars biked in their everyday life as well, both Hepburns, Katharine and Audrey were really keen cyclists – there are loads of pictures of them; in films, in the studios and around their homes cycling. And I have a picture of Robert Mitchum on a Carlton – a classic British club bike, which must have been his.”

Rea likes classics when he rides too. “I ride to and from work, and to movie screenings, just about every day, on a mid-1970s Raleigh DL-1 rod brake bike (a British “postman’s bike”). I also do longer rides early in the morning and on weekends on either my 1950s Bates, my 1970s Mercian, or one of two Raleigh Lenton Grand Prix models from the 1950s. Bikes are a bit more expensive to collect, though, so perhaps my photos obsession is just as well.”

TD Oct 12