Sabrina's Got What It Takes

Sir! September 1959

by James Connolley

SIR! Readers Want Sabrina to Come to America

IT'S WHAT'S UP FRONT that counts, and anybody who looks at this page and thinks we're talking about cigarettes has been smoking something else.

The subject under discussion is not a stick of tobacco but a stack of womanhood out of the Mother Country named Sabrina, who is often called Britain's answer to Marilyn Monroe.

Sabrina, Marilyn Monroe have lots in common, though Sabby at 41 inches has 5 on MM in the dairy department.

Judging by pure statistics, we have to say that Sabby is more like an answer and a half. While she and Marilyn are closely matched down back, Sabrina is way ahead up front, as proved by scads of independent testing laboratories, as well as the pictures accompanying this article.

Torch singer Sabrina was barred from British TV BBS as there was no way of concealing scale of her upper assets.

Speaking of down back, that anatomical area provides only one of an amazing number of parallels between the young ladies formerly known as Norma Sykes (Sabrina) and Norma Jean Baker (Marilyn). The identical first name is a second parallel.

Third, early in her career Sabrina fearlessly told the press: "I refuse to wiggle my hips and stay dumb." Like Marilyn, she was as good as her word. She kept right on wiggling her hips (and various other things) and got to the top.

Another similarity between the two Normas is, of course, the fact that both were models before they made it in show biz, and both occasionally posed in costumes consisting entirely of bare skin. Furthermore, when the pelt pictures were brought to public attention, each girl had the same ready excuse for having slipped out of her scanties: "I was broke and I needed the money."

Being a friend of the working girl from way back, we're always sorry to hear that one is without funds, but if some of them had to be driven to peeled pinups, we have to confess we're kind of glad Marilyn and Sabrina were included.

There was a slight difference in the way the two girls reacted when the facts about their nude behavior came to light. Marilyn made no attempt to do anything about her full color calendar pictures, but just laughed all the way to the bank.

Sabrina, on the other hand, got into a bit of a snit and tried to buy up all the prints of her birthday suit shots. Maybe she was disappointed because they were done in unflattering black and white.

In any case, her attempt was doomed to failure. Red-blooded Limeys from Kent to Kensington had salted copies away in locked drawers. One set was even said to be in the private archives of an elderly Cabinet minister.

Sabrina gets VIP treatment from a British innkeeper. She enjoys at least ten hours sleep each night.

Evidently the head of the BBC was not among the collectors, because shortly after that he had Sabby barred from further appearances on the government TV channel. It wasn't that he objected to the publicity about the purple pictures. It was just that there's no way of concealing the scale of Sabrina's upper assets without putting her into a windowless isolation booth -- assuming that she could get through the door in the first place.

No matter how modestly our heroine tried to dress for her TV guest shots, there was no obscuring the fact that she had a balcony like the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.

For more about the 'Sabrina Slept Here' phenomenon, see Sir! September 1957
and the Thoresby Hall page.

Getting back to Marilyn - as who wouldn't if he could - we have similarities between her and Sabrina that we haven’t even used yet. Both girls, for example, are notoriously late for appointments. Mrs. Miller's habit of keeping everybody from the movie moguls to the Rockefellers waiting for her is too well known to require elaboration. Sabby's pretty much the same.

On a recent trip to Australia she was scheduled to make a TV appearance at 8:15 a.m. Great precautions were taken to make sure she was out of bed by 7:40. (An assignment, incidentally, for which we would gladly have volunteered.) Preparations for the show were going along fine when the clock showed 8:12. Then the director looked at Sabrina and was horrified to note that she was fast asleep. After the show started the MC asked Sabby: "How do you feel?"
"Awful," she replied. "It's the middle of the night!"
Sabrina, by the way, enjoys at least ten hours sleep each night.

Of course there are some differences between the two Normas, apart from the fact that Sabrina, at 41 inches, has at least 5 inches on Marilyn in the dairy department. Sabby's a lot younger, for one thing.

She was born in a slum tenement in London's swinging Soho district on Feb. 2, 1936.
[Actually, it was in Stockport, Cheshire, UK, on May 19, 1936 - Ed]

She might have grown up to be a shop girl or a stenographer like most of the other chicks in the neighborhood if it hadn't been for the fact that she grew faster than the others and further out in front. The blonde British blockbuster was still in her teens when she did the undraped photos, plus a lot of others that caught the public eye.

Before long she was out of modeling and into singing, dancing and the movies. After a while she was also in a kind of off-and-on mystery romance with Hollywood tough guy actor Steve Cochran. Every now and then Steve would fly to Britain for a fast whirl with the local architectural landmark, while the London tabloids buzzed with rumors about what was going on.

Lately Sabby has been spreading her charms more generously around the Empire, and as this it written she's touring Australia in a stage show called "The Pleasures of Paris." She was tentatively scheduled to make a movie called "The Hood" in Hollywood, but turned it down to continue her fabulously successful trek around the Antipodes. Apparently the folks Down Under truly appreciate what Sabby has Up Top.

We' d like to close this little anatomical travelogue with one more anecdote about the resemblance between Sabrina and Marilyn Monroe. You probably remember that when MM first got on her intellectual kick, there was a lot of publicity about her interest in reading the works of the great Russian novelist Fedor Dostoevski. Well, shortly after that the British put out a movie comedy [ Blue Murder at St Trinians ] in which Sabrina appeared in only one brief scene. The film was set in a private school full of funny little girls in dowdy uniforms and pigtails. But in one scene the camera moved slowly across a dormitory room, and in one of the beds was the highly incongruous figure of Sabrina, clad in a frilly white negligee.

She was reading a big book and on the cover was printed one word: "Dostoevski."

Pic from the Blue Murder At St Trinians page

THE END