"He wanted them to appear to be human beings. He would approach them and they were approachable back to him," says Howard, the nattier half of the 30-year-old Mutti-Mewse duo, cutting a matinee-idol figure in tweed jacket, silk ascot and Burberry socks. "We'd heard he'd taken some pretty racy pictures, but he pretty obviously had destroyed them," chimes in Austin, who cultivates a more bohemian edge (soul patch, spiky hair) than his sibling. What's left of Worth's prodigious output may not be racy, but it's still a far cry from the highly posed publicity portraits of movie stars you'd find in the fanzines of his era. Possessed with a knack for being in the right place at the right time, Worth caught Joan Crawford puckering up for the cameras, Jane Russell being mobbed by men in cowboy hats, Marlon Brando and Bob Hope wrestling and mugging over an Oscar statue. His friendships with the likes of Dean, Frank Sinatra, James Cagney and Pat O'Brien gained him access to places normally off-limits to photographers. As for the opposite sex, the twins say that actress Mamie Van Doren -- no slouch herself in the va-va-voom department -- described Worth as "like catnip to women." Frustrated in his dreams of becoming a movie director, Worth decided that if he couldn't engage with actors on the big screen, he'd settle for a smaller scale. Self-made and self-taught as a photographer, he used to spend hours at New York's Grand Central Station, customized Kodak Brownie in hand, waiting for the Hollywood Express to arrive so he could catch stars disembarking. After moving to Los Angeles in the late 1930s, he joined the Hollywood Photographers Guild and spent the next quarter-century, from 1939 to 1964, snapping away. "The whole of Hollywood is encapsulated in that collection," says Howard Mutti-Mewse.

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