You would not think that Life magazine would have a backlog of
unpublished nudes, especially from the 1940s, but I guess upper case Life was as
full of surprises as lower case life. Noel Toy was a fan dancer in the 40s, and
quite a famous one at that. She was known as the Chinese Sally Rand, and
performed to packed audiences in New York and San Francisco. You can get all the
info you need from
her obit in the S.F. Examiner. I guess she was famous enough and deeply
engrained enough in pop culture that Life sent out a photographer to record her
act for posterity. You can tell from the final picture below that their
pictorial was shot during an actual performance.
They must have known that they couldn't publish these pictures in
the forties, but I don't know the full story behind the gallery. Perhaps they
did an article on her and snapped hundreds of pics but but only used the most
modest ones.
Anyway, the nude pics from the pictorial do exist,
and here they are:
