A Study in Mona Gray
Publicity sells. It’s a redundant phrase, but it rings true, especially when the ghosts of copywriters ninety years down the line are still very much capable of getting goats with accolades like ‘nationally famous magazine cover girl and billboard beauty’ above portraits of women you’ve never seen before. The particular woman in question was called Mona Gray, and it was not one, but five portraits that captured my gaze and commanded my attention to this apparently overlooked celebrity. Two of them were simply of her hands and legs, given they are as important to a model as the nose on her face.
I was obviously supposed to have already heard of Mona Gray, so I Googled her, and found nothing. This ‘billboard beauty’ might not be nationally famous in the present day, after all, but it didn’t take much work to uncover her true identity.
A 1941 marriage announcement reveals a certain bride by the name of Shirley Rose Grossman, aged twenty, was also a ‘well known magazine model’ who had appeared in ‘motion pictures’ under the name of Mona Gray.
This Shirley Rose was found to have been born into a Russian-Jewish family in Chicago, Illinois, on December 18, 1920. Her father, Louis, an area attorney, married her mother Eva in 1917. She had a comparatively quiet youth, and the only mention of a ‘Shirley Grossman’ that comes up in searches of available Illinois newspapers is one who received her high school diploma in Chicago, June 1938.
