At a Christmas dinner 100 years ago the young Hollywood artist and photographer George Hurrell was introduced to Florence Barnes (born 1901), he immediately liked her. From a wealthy family, Florence married a church minister and had a son but the marriage was under stress. The sporty and spirited Mrs Barnes, independently wealthy, was headstrong.

‘In 1927 she impulsively donned men’s clothing and signed up as crew on a boat bound for Peru,’ writes Mark A Viera in a monograph on Hurrell. ‘The ship was running guns to revolutionaries.’ Barnes and her companions were held hostage before making good their escape.

Back home in California’s Laguna Beach in the 1920s she hosted pool parties attended by folk on the fringes of Hollywood. When a film crew turned up in the neighbourhood to make a pirate movie with the Mexican silent star and heartthrob Ramon Novarro, she went out of her way to meet him. They were instant pals and she made sure to introduce Ramon to her photographer friend George.

Barnes loved to fly and she got George Hurrell to take the photo she needed for her licence. He made her look tough and able, engine oil under her fingernails. Women flyers were often ridiculed by their male compatriots even at a time when aviatrix heroines like Amy Johnson, Beryl Markham and Amelia Earhart were international celebrities.

She soon divorced her husband and changed her name to the more rugged-sounding Pancho. But chum Ramon’s film career was in danger. If sound pictures came in he would be out, notably because of his thick Mexican accent. He planned an opera career but needed publicity pictures. Pancho suggested George Hurrell. The results were a revelation. Hurrell used ‘bounce light’ to give his sitters an unworldly, glamorous sheen. Their hair, eyes and lips gleamed.

Novarro loved the results and so did everyone else, from the MGM publicity department to Norma Shearer, movie star wife of studio boss Irving Thalberg.

As Hurrell became a hugely in demand portrait photographer, Barnes had her own brush with fame. In 1929 Howard Hughes the millionaire oil and film tycoon made Hell’s Angels (just rereleased on Blu-ray by Criterion) about WW1 air aces. The movie, co-directed by Hughes and James ‘Frankenstein’ Whale featured some of the most spectacular stunt flying ever filmed and Barnes was one of the pilots.

Just as the movie was nearing completion, however, it was clear that talking pictures was no passing fad and the film had to be rapidly revised. Footage with the Norwegian leading lady were ditched and reshot with a young starlet called Jean Harlow, the original Platinum Blonde. As the love interest of one of the pilots she appeared in backless and low-cut dresses that bordered on the lewd. At one point she turned to her paramour and uttered the immortal line, ‘Would it shock you if I changed into something more comfortable?’

Hughes was determined to make the film a hit. He claimed it was the most expensive film ever made (it wasn’t, it was Ramon Novarro’s 1925 Ben Hur). The Hollywood premier was a spectacular affair. Much was made of Harlow’s cleavage and the lusty kissing between pilots and French bar girls. These were things that the emerging campaign for film censorship had in its sights and which the Hay’s Code would restrict over the coming decades. The film cost over $2m but, despite everything, box office receipts covered the cost without much profit.

Barnes lost her fortune in the Wall Street Crash as share prices plummeted. With her money gone she set up business in the Mojave Desert near a military base (later to become the Edwards Air Force Base). The Happy Bottom Riding Club was part inn, part flying club, part dude ranch (where city folks could play cowboys).

When the USAF took over the base it wanted Barnes’s land. She refused and a legal battle ensued. Finally, in the early 1950s, she relented and received $500,000 (a huge sum) and started again. She died 20 years later at the age of 75. Her son scattered her ashes over the site of the Happy Bottom Ranch. From an aircraft, of course.

There’s a great exhibition on early aerial photographer Alfred Buckman at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until 19 April 2026

Bluesky: @kenwilson84.bsky.social