 He would've wanted me to find happiness. Maybe not this often, but hey, a girl’s gotta live, right? 
How long is a proper mourning period? Not very long, apparently. Above is an excellent piece of cover art from Charles Copeland for Rick Holmes’ 1963 Beacon-Signal sleaze novel New Widow, about a woman whose husband of six years dies in an automobile accident, and who suddenly finds that four men she thought were friends now just want to get into her panties.
 I think I finally understand why you only paint gigantic ears. 
Above, the cover of Studio Lovers by Lee Jaquin for Knickerbocker Publications' imprint Regular Books, 1946. In general we've found that women enjoy being kissed on the ear, but digging for truffles is a whole different ballgame. Remember guys, never go down the ear canal unless explicitly asked.
 There's a whole lotta woman going on. 
From Hillman Publications, a company better known for publishing paperbacks as Hillman Books, but whose execs were smart enough to know a good non-paperback thing when they saw it, comes this life-sized poster of Jayne Mansfield. This is another of the door panel pin-ups we've shown you over the years. Maybe now would be a good time to review a few of those. We've shown you ultra rare posters of Raquel Welch, Sophia Loren, five stars of The Silencers, the Bond girls of Goldfinger, the women of the Bond spoof Casino Royale, and more. We'll have additional posters of this type later. The above example is from 1956.
 She wanted fame and found it in the worst way. 
Above is a photograph of actress Jean Spangler superimposed over an image of Fern Dell, which is a wooded area of Griffith Park in Los Angeles. Generally, this is labeled a vintage photo, but to our eyes it looks like the Fern Dell section is a contemporary shot, possibly even a digital one. Well, even if a blogger made this composite it's one of the most interesting Spangler images to be found. Today in 1949 the aspiring actress left her home to go to work on a movie set, stopped in a grocery store, and disappeared, never to be seen again. Her purse was later found in Fern Dell with a note inside: “Kirk: Can't wait any longer. Going to see Dr. Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away."
Spangler had just finished working on the film Young Man with a Horn with Kirk Douglas, so the note led to speculation about her relationship to the actor. Douglas was in Palm Springs at the time of the disappearance, and he was never a suspect, but Hollywood gossip centered around Spangler possibly having had an affair with him, getting pregnant, seeking an abortion, and dying during the procedure. Since none of the film studios had any record of Spangler being  scheduled to work the night of her disappearance, it was clear she was going someplace in secret. In this telling the abortionists disposed of her body, though why they'd leave her purse in Griffith Park is a mystery.
Another theory had her running away with the gangster Davy Ogul. She had met him while working as a dancer at Florentine Gardens and had been seen in his company away from the club. He was under indictment and possibly facing prison time, so when he disappeared two days after Spangler, theorists put them together fleeing to Mexico or beyond. The problem with this idea is that Spangler had family and a five-year-old daughter in Los Angeles, which makes her simply running away forever, with no attempts to make contact, unlikely. It also fails to explain the purse and note.
The case stayed hot for a while, but after reward offers, thousands of police hours expended, speculative tabloid articles, and claimed sightings in California, Arizona, and Mexico City, authorities were baffled. In Texas a hotel clerk who claimed he'd seen Ogul with a mystery woman identified Spangler from a photo, but her photo had been in every paper in the U.S. by then. There were no firm answers anywhere. In the end Spangler's disappearance was never solved, leaving her another atmospheric Hollywood tale, and another cold case in the files of the LAPD. 
 Whoops, wrong room. Unless you're the one who wanted the kilo of blow. 
Sometimes when you're a cop crime comes right to you, such as on this cover for Lady Cop by J. T. Pritchard. This was a fast read. Basically, when her father's death is ruled a suicide, a woman comes to believe it was murder and joins the police force with the ultimate goal of finding the killer or killers. Pritchard has zero inclination to make a true mystery of this, so he takes the easy route of having the killer come to the heroine. Then, having put her in hot water, he again takes the easy route by having someone else save her ass. The provocative cover by Eddie Chan doesn't actually reflect a scene in the narrative. Lady cop is smart enough to lock her door. Conversely, girl wrestlers are not—the art came from 1952's Loves of a Girl Wrestler, below. See another cover for that at this link. Copyright on Lady Cop is 1955.
 No wonder divorce rates are sky high. 
Did we mention that the Pulp Intl. girlfriends are out of town? No? Well, they are, so it's time to screen the craziest shit vintage cinema has to offer—’70s roman porno. We don't truly understand the films, but we try. What we do understand is that on some level the previous decades' restraint in Japanese cinema was being challenged by filmmakers given almost total artistic control, as long as the films had four sex scenes per hour. So what you get is a lot of daring explorations of previously untouchable themes, and a lot of visual artistry designed to titillate without violating censorship restrictions. Japan's oldest studio, Nikkatsu, made these films, and many were hits with both audiences and critics (who we suspect in both cases were preponderantly male).
The above poster was made to promote Dan Oniroku hanayome ningyo, aka Bridal Doll, which is based on the writings of acclaimed author Oniroku Dan, and stars Asako Kurayoshi in her cinematic debut as a woman who's sold to a man as a bdsm sex slave. It's pretty twisted. Not only does he dress her as a bride, but he has a glass walled bathroom so he can watch her do her business, and at one point literally has her shackled to a ball and chain. But his idyllic set-up goes awry when a neighbor learns what's going on and decides to save Asako. He does this by kidnapping the sadist's wife, who's played by the luminous Izumi Shima, putting her through similar ordeals, then proposing a swap.
Does this swap go as planned? Well, we won't tell you that. We will, however, remind you that there are three true outcomes in roman porno: irony, tragedy, and ambiguity. Nobody ever gets out happy. At least not often. They're always transformed by their ordeals, one way or another. As always, not being Japanese and lacking the lifetime of cultural knowledge that would bring, we know there's more going on here than we can discern. But we still can't recommend this one as anything other than Shima eye candy. And you get that by looking below. So maybe save the seventy-one minutes for a walk in the sunshine. Dan Oniroku hanayome ningyo premiered in Japan today in 1979.                   
 Hellooooo! Anybody out there got a couple of bananas? 
Above is an amazing poster for the obscure Japanese film Jōyoku no dōkutsu, known in English as Desire in Cavern, Cave of Desire, and Cave of Lust. That's star Aki Ema, aka Minami Numajiri on the art letting out a great big yell, which you'd probably do too if you had a monkey on your back. The movie premiered in Japan this month in 1963.
 I know we just get married this morning but I think we should see other people. 
Half angel, half devil? This poster sure turned out to be ironic, considering Diana Dors, star of The Unholy Wife, was a sexual predator who set up her house so she could spy on guests while they were boning in her spare bedrooms. They just don't make stars like her anymore. Er, we mean, how depraved and utterly terrible. Right, we'll just quit while we're ahead. The Unholy Wife premiered in the U.S. this month in 1957. Read more about it and see the French promo poster here, and read more about Dirty D's private life here.
 Theft is what little people do, my dear. In politics we call it privatizing public assets. 
Above, a cover for Paul Gallico's Thief Is an Ugly Word. The scan makes it look like a novel, but Dell's 10¢ books were really story length offerings bound as pamphlets. Dell's edition, all sixty-four pages of it, came out after the tale had already appeared in a May 1944 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. The above edition is from a little later, 1951, with art by Barye Phillips.
 She captures your attention from the first sentence of the first paragraph. 
She was born Donna Mae Tjaden, but launched her show business career as Janis Paige, and under that name appeared in films like Of Human Bondage and Fugitive Lady, before transitioning almost exclusively to television around 1953. The above photo is credited as being from the “1950s,” which seems a bit broad to us. We can do better. The back tells us it's a Warner Brothers promo, and as we mentioned, Paige moved into television in 1953. We think the photo is most likely from 1950. Paige starred in the Warner crime drama This Side of the Law that year.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1939—Batman Debuts
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise starring Michael Keaton, then George Clooney, and finally Christian Bale. 1953—Crick and Watson Publish DNA Results
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves. 1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule's main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule's descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot.
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