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They married in Las Vegas barely over a week after their first meeting. So I started photographing them.” In December of that year, he married Alice, who would become a partner in what he now knew would be his life’s work. “At that time I lived three blocks from the Hollywood Studio Club, where 95 girls-mostly starlets and models-were living for $60 a month.

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At the movie studio, he snapped candid shots of his fellow actors on the set at every opportunity.īy 1941, Peter had a thriving part-time portrait business. While his friends acted in school plays, he was the head electrician on the stage crew. Since high school, Peter had tinkered with cameras and sought to learn what happens behind the scenes. It wasn’t a tragedy, however, as Gowland had set another course for himself. I didn’t like putting on make up or waiting around all day.” A career on the screen seemed to be the inevitable next step, given his background, good looks, and six-foot-three stature, but three unsuccessful screen tests convinced him otherwise. “In films before World War II, I usually played either German or British youths. While attending Hollywood High, Peter worked part time in movies as an unbilled bit player later, he served as a double for Joel McCrea, Walter Huston, and Ronald Reagan.

“Every Friday at assembly, Judy would sing with her sisters,” he remembers.

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So we rarely had a lot of money.” Jo Anne Aehle, 1954Īt Lawlor Professional School, Peter’s classmates included Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. After my father did a film, he wouldn’t work for the next six months. “I hated the insecure nature of the business. “My father loved acting, but he really couldn’t do anything else,” Peter reflects. Later I went to Hollywood Military Academy.” “My mother didn’t like the way my father was raising me, so she went to court, and the judge ordered joint custody.

“My parents divorced when I was two,” he says. His mother was an actress and writer, and Peter was in one of her plays when he was, six weeks old. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Erich Von Stroheim (who directed him in the 1923 classic Greed). in 1914 and worked with the era’s legendary figures, including D.W. His British-born father Gibson Gowland was a silent-screen actor who came to the U.S. Peter and Alice are virtually unique in this group for their complete absence of pretense or ego an easy, casual friendliness is just as central to the Gowlands as great picture-taking. In the process of working on my book Va Va Voom covering the Glamour queens of the ’50s, I’ve had the honor of meeting many unforgettable personalities, the vast majority of whom I came to like as well as admire. But a petty emotion such as envy seems out of place, with two people as utterly charming as Peter and Alice Gowland There would be much to envy in a man who has built a remarkable career out of shooting beautiful women on the beaches of Southern California, working side by side with a lovely wife who has contributed greatly to his success. His career has covered virtually every aspect of the business, from Playboy centerfolds, calendar and commercial work, to the invention of original camera designs (where the inspiration he derived from Tom Swift was especially pertinent). A young man named Peter Gowland eagerly read all of the Tom Swift tales while growing up, little knowing that he would later apply much of the same zest and creativity in building a career that would forge his own legend.įor more than 40 years, the name of Peter Gowland has been synonymous with Glamour photography of the highest order. He offered readers the conviction that with enough imagination and energy, anything was possible. For generations of American boys during the era from 1910 to the 1940s, the literary character of Tom Swift served as a shining role model for his brilliant inventions and bold sense of adventure.