Heroine of the Month: Adele Jergens
Like many models, Adele Jergens parlayed her crowning as 1939’s Miss World’s Fairest into an acting c areer. Signed by Columbia in the mid-forties, Jergens was cast in the serial Black Arrow (1944), helping the title character track down the carpetbaggers who killed his father, a Navajo chief. In the same Hollywood cop out that marred the ending of the studio’s earlier White Eagle (1941), it is revealled at the end that Black Arrow was really the son of the white Indian agent so that he and Jergens can be together at the end (amazing how even children’s entertainment reenforced racist sterotypes back them).
From there Jergens embarked on a fifteen year career playing blonde bombshells in comedy films like The Fuller Brush Man (1946), Blondie’s Anniversary (1947), Blues Busters (1950), Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) and Ladies of the Chorus (1949) where in one of those strange casting decisions only made in Hollywood, Jergens played the mother of a young Marilyn Monroe even though Jergens was only five years older than Monroe. Later films included The Cobweb (1955), The Day the World Ended (1956) and Runaway Daughters (1957).
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