Jinx Allen Craig

Jinx Allen Craig Obituary

Young American who was the subject of a famous photograph when she was gallivanting in Italy in 1951

Jinx Allen, as she was then called, was captured walking through Florence’s Piazza della Repubblica and drawing the admiring gaze of crowds of men by the American photographer Ruth Orkin in 1951

RUTH ORKIN PHOTO ARCHIVE

On the hottest day of the year in Florence in August 1951 a young woman travelling alone in Europe came across a fellow American in a cheap hotel. Jinx Allen, a teacher with a love of art, was 23. Ruth Orkin, 29, was a photographer and asked Allen to accompany her around the city as she shot pictures that she hoped to sell to the Herald Tribune newspaper. In the event, Orkin failed in that ambition, but one of the images that she took still defines the era 67 years on.

Most of the photographs from that morning have all the innocence of Roman Holiday, the Audrey Hepburn comedy filmed the next year that would make her a star. Orkin’s brief was to capture the experiences of the modern girl abroad and she depicted Allen reading a book by a fountain, chatting to a young man in a café and thrilled by a spin in an MG.

One of the pictures was strikingly different. When the two women reached the central Piazza della Repubblica there was a cluster of about a dozen men lounging about beneath its shady awnings and loitering in its deep doorways.

As the 6ft-tall Allen — “beautiful and luminescent”, Orkin recalled — passed through their midst, wearing an orange shawl and clutching a jute bag, the men’s gaze consumed her with all the avidity an Italian child reserves for gelato. Noticing their reaction, Orkin asked her to walk by a second time.

The image ultimately appeared in a photo essay for Cosmopolitan in 1952. The article with which it ran encouraged women to travel by themselves and had tips on “money, men and morals to see you through a gay trip and a safe one”.

This was progressive for the time, although a censorious hand concealed the traditional gesture being made by one of the men as he touched himself for good luck.

Entitled An American Girl in Italy, the photograph became Orkin’s best-known work. As a poster from the 1970s onwards it took on a life of its own on the walls of countless bars and student bedsits.

However, in recent years a younger generation have claimed that the photograph is a totemic example of male privilege and harassment. Last year, in the wake of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein, a restaurant in Philadelphia removed its copy of the picture after customers began to complain that it was sexist.

Yet for the subject of the photograph, such a reading was wide of the mark. “This image has been interpreted in a sinister way,” she said in 2015, “but it was quite the opposite.”

She and Orkin, Allen pointed out, had at the time been two young, carefree women revelling in their independence and spirit of adventure, emphatically not letting themselves be cowed by the male glance.

She had not wanted to encourage men, she said, but she had understood that “this was very much Italy then . . . I was admired, but personally I don’t see anything wrong with an appreciative whistle.

“My expression is not one of distress. I saw myself as Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy. You had to walk with complete assurance and maintain a dignity at all times . . . They were having fun and so was I.”

Orkin was accused by some of having staged the picture (much as Robert Doisneau had paid his famous couple to kiss). She denied doing more than requesting the two men on the scooter not to look at the lens and asking Allen to repeat her passeggiata, which she was happy to do. “Women look at that picture and feel indignant, angry,” Allen said. However, she claimed that it was really “a symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!”

“If someone goes, ‘Wow!’ it makes me walk a little taller,” she concluded. “I think it’s much ado about nothing — there’s enough in the world to really protest.”

She was born Ninalee Allen in 1927 in Indianapolis, Indiana, where her father was the head of personnel in a department store. Nicknaming herself Jinx “because it sounded exciting”, she studied art history at Sarah Lawrence, the prestigious women’s college, before training as a nursery teacher and working at a school in Manhattan. On her return from her European tour she settled in New York and for six years worked as a copywriter for J Walter Thompson, the advertising firm.

She once saw the photograph in which she featured looming over Grand Central Station as publicity for Kodak. “It horrified my father,” she said. “He had no idea that I was walking around Italy that way.”

In 1959 she married Achille Passi, an Italian count and widower, and, living in a family villa near Treviso, became the stepmother to his young son, Alex. A few years later, however, the photograph of her was used in a book about Italy, giving her name and scandalising her mother-in-law. This was not least because the man on the scooter with the appraising gaze was a cousin of her husband.

After divorcing Passi she again worked in New York as a copywriter in the 1970s, before marrying for a second time. Ross Craig was a Canadian in the steel industry and, as it turned out, his Italian business partner was the very same scooter rider. She and Craig, who already had two sons and a daughter, were married for 18 years, until his death in 1996.

Thereafter she moved into Toronto from the country, busying herself collecting Chinese and Inuit art and antique baby rattles. To the end she remained a life-enhancing force who was ever curious.

“I wouldn’t say the picture has changed my life,” she reflected latterly, “but I’ve had so much amusement from it over the years. And more free meals at Italian restaurants than you’ll ever know.”

Jinx Allen Craig, American Girl in Italy, was born on November 6, 1927. She died of lung cancer on May 1, 2018, aged 90