Her name was Virginia Ruth Egnor. Then Virginia Lewis. Then Jennie Lewis. Eventually Bubbles and then Dagmar. She got to New York City from Huntington, West Virginia. She was born in Yawkey, 38 miles southeast, and went home in her last years to Ceredo, seven miles southwest.
She had married Angelo Lewis, who then got stationed at Navy Ferry Command on Long Island, and in no time she was on Broadway as a chorus girl named Bubbles with the comedian Bert Lahr (playing the lion on The Wizard of Oz in 1939 would make him famous) and by 1950 she had been in her last Broadway show, Ladies Night in a Turkish Bath, and moved on to a late-night TV show on NBC called Broadway Open House with Jerry Lester. He decided she should be Dagmar.
That’s how I remember her…as Dagmar.
She was instructed by Lester, according to boobpedia dot com, to “wear a low-cut gown and sit on a stool and play the role of a stereotypical dumb blonde.” She became, it says on boobpedia, “one of the leading personalities of early 1950s live television.” She became so well-known that she actually made it to the cover of Life magazine on July 16, 1951. Her portrait was taken by the famous photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt.
I did not know there was a site called ‘boobpedia”. I found it by typing in “Dagmar large breasts.”
That’s pretty much how I remember her: “Dagmar large breasts.”
I can still see her sitting on her stool, perched somewhat precariously because of the heavy chest load she was carrying. In my mind I associate her with The Jack Paar Show, which is where I think my mother first saw her, but I can’t be sure.
She played well the role Jerry Lester had invented for her, the “stereotypical dumb blonde.” She clearly was not dumb at all, but she acted well, and had a good sense of what it took to be an entertainer. She’d done burlesque. The reason I remember Dagmar, with some sense of poignancy, is that my mother was quite taken with her. My mother, serious and determined, a small-town farm girl who made it to the big city (Detroit), always focused on her children’s educations and her modest bank balance and my father’s business decisions (mostly he consulted her first, but sometimes he didn’t) and where we lived (it was important that we children not have to cross any busy streets to get to school), would have had no patience for dumb blondes.
But she, for some reason, was entranced by Dagmar and her breasts.
This was before breast enlargement came into being, so I don’t know if my mother would have considered doing such a thing. But I wonder now if she might have considered it. She had what I would call normal-sized breasts, but she considered them small.
Her desire for large breasts was not contagious. We three girls, her daughters, all have normal-sized breasts, and none of us every wished they were bigger, so far as I know.
I don’t know where her yearning came from (did my father not like her breasts?), but I do know it was real, it was earnest. It seems like something that could be a joke — the mother from Detroit who wants Dagmar’s breasts — but it wasn’t funny at all.
Her issues of self — we’re talking 70-plus years ago — seem sadly contemporary. She was an attractive woman, thin and lithe, who had a well-developed sense of fashion, and could put herself together in a most attractive way without spending a lot of money. But she never felt quite good enough — her hair wasn’t dark enough or thick enough, her feet were too big, her breasts were too small.
Interestingly, I don’t remember Dagmar being a joke or trying to be a joke, although her role was indeed comedic. She had a strong sense of purpose, I would say. Having breasts as enormous as hers would not have been physically easy. Did she have back problems of the kind Dolly Parton has complained about over the years? Taking advantage of her physical attributes in the 1950s, when women weren’t expected to display their intelligence or hope to ever be rewarded for it, was not dumb.
Naming her Dagmar, as Jerry Lester did, probably wasn’t a bad marketing idea either.
It kind of fit who she was, or who she was supposed to be.
How things have changed. Now we can enhance various body parts that no one dreamed would be possible a couple of generations ago. Dagmar would be amazed. My mother, too. Or you can go the other way, and make things smaller.
And now small and flat breasts are in. Just look at the photos of the gymnast Simone Biles in Vanity Fair magazine this month (February 2024).
And we still have women like Da’Vine Joy Randolph (she won a Golden Globe this year) and Sonya Yoncheva (she’s in a Rolex ad in the same Vanity Fair magazine) who, if they perched on a stool as Dagmar did, would have to be very careful not to topple over.
Dagmar would also be impressed by the advances in adhesive technology that allow women, with the help of breast lift tape, to wear gowns that defy gravity in ways that can make you gasp.
A sobering thought: not a single person on the planet today would be here if our ancestor-mothers hadn’t had breasts. Think of that. Size, I think, didn’t matter.
A visiting public health nurse in Dearborn, Michigan, once told me angrily in my own living room that I was jeopardizing my baby’s health by breastfeeding her. Why? I couldn’t measure the milk.
I wonder if she had ever watched The Jack Paar Show. I wonder if she ever thought about how she got here. I’m pretty sure she didn’t love Dagmar.
Dagmar, a meditation on breasts, mothers and what both mean to others. Love it. I need to head to boobpedia now!