New on Archive.org, Magazine of Horror, Winter 1965. With “Memories of H.P.L.” by Muriel E. Eddy. Very short, but with one seemingly still-vivid memory of Lovecraft’s appearance when they first met in 1923…
“We met H.P.L. as he liked to be called, in August, 1923, after months of correspondence. He was immaculate, though conservatively dressed. He wore a neat gray suit, white shirt, black necktie, and a Panama straw hat. His hair was as dark as a raven’s wing, and meticulously parted on the side. He wore spectacles, and behind them his eyes were gentle and brown. He extended lean white fingers in a typical Lovecraftian gesture, we shook hands…”
Looking through Selected Letters III I came across a letter from HPL to Robert E. Howard, dated 6 August 1931 (page 393) where he gives a description of his appearance: ‘… Actually, we must both have a slice of Mediterranean; for my maternal grandfather’s line if black of hair and eye, though three of my grandparents were blue or grey-eyed, and I was blue-eyed and yellow-haired myself till about 5 years old. Or rather, I was blue and violet eyed till 2½, and yellow-haired till 5. My hair darkened steadily till I was 20 or more — and then began to acquire a sprinkling of grey at 26. But my complexion has always remained chalk-white, since I have not been constantly in the open air. I burn easily, but tan only with great difficulty — and even the deepest and hardest-won coat of tan is soon lost. The best coat of tan I ever had was during this recent trip, when Key West and Miami added to the acquisitions of St. Augustine and Dunedin. I might have put up a bluff at being Cuban if I had had the lingo — but it took only about a fortnight in the north to peel the whole business off!…’
The only other violet-eyed celebrity I can think of is Elizabeth Taylor. HPL briefly mentioned that he was born with yellow hair and blue eyes in a letter to Frank Belknap Long (3 May 1923, pub. in SLI, p. 227), and the description by Muriel E. Eddy cited in this entry was the only one other than L. Sprague de Camp’s biography (pg. 69) that I knew of before.