The Online Photographer

Who was this handsome couple, anyone know?

No cheating, now!

A more or less period photo of the studio where the picture was made can be seen here. (Thanks to Calvin Amari for that).

Mike

UPDATE Monday morning: First three comments that came in:

WJW: "Teddy Roosevelt?"

Craig Yuill: "Winston Churchill’s parents? (Mother was American if I recall correctly.)"

Bruce Hedge: "Your grandparents? Make that great-grandparents...but neither would have come up if I'd 'cheated' (I suspect they're well known), so neither is correct, I reckon."

Mike adds: Correct. But kudos to all three of you for not cheating. Speed noted, "The truly amazing thing (for us old people) is that it takes less than a second for Google (and others I suppose) to find the answer when I paste just the image into their search engine."

Stephen Jenner and some others knew the answer. The man is Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, better known as the Sundance Kid, one of the most famous outlaws of the Old West and one of the two titular subjects of arguably the best "bromance" movie ever made (or that I've ever seen, anyway), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), written by William Goldman and directed by George Roy Hill. Paul Newman starred as Robert LeRoy Parker, alias "Butch Cassidy," and Robert Redford played the Sundance Kid. Goldman won an Oscar for the movie, as did the cinematographer, Conrad L. Hall. It was the top-grossing film released in the U.S. in 1969 (and No. 8 in France); it eventually earned ~$100m, a lot of money in those days. Neither Longabaugh nor Parker were gunfighters or psychopathic killers, but they seemed addicted to robbing banks. In real life, they fled to Argentina (in the movie it was Bolivia), where they lived for eight years, becoming even more notorious there than they had been in the United States. But they eventually robbed one bank too many, and were hunted down and cornered, either killing themselves or being killed by the authorities in the standoff. Goldman had a hard time selling the screenplay because studios didn't like the South American ending. One studio head refused to buy it unless Goldman changed it, and when Goldman protested that it had really happened that way, the mogul reportedly replied, "I don't give a shit. All I know is John Wayne don't run away." The South American episode was what had attracted Goldman to the story in the first place, because it contradicted F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous dictum that there are no second acts in American lives.

The woman is Etta—more likely Ethel*—Place, and the "Place" is in doubt as well, as it was Longabaugh's mother's maiden name and thus probably an alias**. A lot of things are known about her, including that she was the first woman granted land in Argentina under an 1884 law that had previously excluded women. But a lot is not known about her, too. She is vaguely believed to have been a schoolteacher or a prostitute, or even both. But William Goldman, who also wrote The Princess Bride—the book as well as the screenplay—and All the President's Men, which also starred Redford, didn't buy the prostitute story. He argued that exceptionally beautiful women seldom were prostitutes in the old West, and that the life, which was grueling, tended to age women prematurely and show in their appearances. Place, if that was her name, was played in the movie by Katherine Ross, who had been one of the stars of The Graduate in 1967 and later starred in The Stepford Wives. Cinematographer Conrad L. Hall became the third of Ross's five husbands after they met during the filming of Butch. She also worked with Redford in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, in the same year they made Butch together.

Mostly, what isn't known about Etta or Ethel Place is where she had come from...and where she went. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, a private law enforcement agency that was a sort of precursor of the Secret Service among other things, became uninterested in chasing her after Longabaugh's and Parker's deaths, and she fades from view and disappears. Interest in her fate among aficionados of the Wild West has been intense, and a welter of theories and claims have been put forward, all on the shoulders of slender evidence and ardent speculation. The truth is that no one really knows. After appearing in history rather distinctly during her years with the two outlaws—as distinctly as she appears in this photograph, one might say—she managed to disappear back into the mists of anonymity from whence she had come. No one knows how long she lived, or where, or how, or under what name.

So even though some of you knew who this photograph depicts, it still remains a mystery anyway—and doubtless always will.

*"Etta" is approximately what the Spanish speakers of Argentina might have said when trying to pronounce "Ethel."

**Although it's also plausible they were cousins. Worldwide, more than 10% of marriages are between first or second cousins to this day, despite the fact that the practice is outlawed in some countries. A Mennonite woman I talked to once, explaining the fact that her husband was five years younger than herself, said, "he was the most distant cousin to me we could find."

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Featured Comments from:

robert e: "William Goldman once used the variant spelling 'Harry Longbaugh' as a pseudonym. In his 20s, he'd already started his eight years of research on Butch and Sundance when he got a fat advance for a long literary novel, his fourth. But 300 pages in, he was blocked, so he took two weeks off to write a thriller based on the Boston Strangler murders (No Way to Treat a Lady). His editor feared for his reputation so they borrowed Longabaugh's name. It turned out to be Goldman's most successful book to that point and led to his screenwriting career. (That longer book, Boys and Girls Together, became a best seller.) He was sharing a New York apartment with his screenwriter brother James (The Lion In Winter) and the broadway composer John Kanter (Cabaret, Chicago). All three went on to win Academy Awards. 'I [don't] like my writing. I wrote a movie called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and I wrote a novel called The Princess Bride and those are the only two things I've ever written, not that I'm proud of, but that I can look at without humiliation.' A fascinating person, life, and career."