Above is a January 1957 Confidential with Joan Crawford in the spotlight and Elvis in the wings. The Crawford story involves her playing cougar with a boytoy bartender. She’d call, or have an assistant call, and he’d drop everything, scurry over to her house, and be seen leaving the next morning. Pretty salacious claim, but of course, the bartender is never named and so the story is impossible to prove. The Elvis article is in a similar vein. Basically, Presley signed an autograph on a girl’s bare skin, and she ended up going home with him. The next morning the girl called a friend to have the signature photographed before she showered it off. You can get a sense from these two pieces just how extensive Confidential’s network of spies was, and who they were—cabbies, switchboard operators, busboys, mailmen, and doormen. You can also, if you imagine yourself as a movie star, get a sense of how paranoid Hollywood players must have been. Every misstep—no matter how small—was splashed across Confidential’s pages. For a while, the stars simply hoped against hope they could stay under the radar, but eventually they went on the offensive and ran Confidential into the ground with lawsuits. But in 1957, the magazine was still at the height of its power, selling millions of copies and being read secondhand by millions more who were too prim to be seen buying a scandal sheet. Confidential’s actual circulation may have been quadruple its sales figures. Humphrey Bogart said it best: “Everybody reads it but they say the cook brought it into the house.” 

The thing about Midnight is that they didn’t need much to build an issue. A couple of phony, sex-oriented stories, some outraged letters to the editor, their monthly “Hollywood Confidential” column, a bunch of sleazy little ads for the back pages, and they were good to go. In this issue from forty-three years ago today we learn that a UC Berkeley co-ed is earning enough credits to graduate by performing a “first hand” survey of American sex practices. For that, she needs volunteers. Lots of them. Another story, written by Element J. Pussypimple (seriously) discusses a Sheffield, England sex school that teaches teens to get it on without getting pregnant. But the real gem in each issue of Midnight was John Wilson’s column “Hollywood Confidential,” which was as libelous an effort as ever appeared in an American tabloid. In this issue alone, Wilson claims Elvis Presley placed an emergency call to his plastic surgeon because his new nose was sagging, Chris Noel ditched her date Richard Boone at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go and ran out the back door with Tom Tryon, Jack Lemmon hit a man over the head with a brass ashtray, and Barbara Stanwyck resorted to paying tabloids to arrange trysts for her with young men. Wow! Spinning a web of lies that vast is no easy feat, but it's go big or go home at Midnight. Check out more issues by clicking keyword "Midnight" below. See you Monday. 

Anyway, the bit that really caught our attention was not the alleged Elvis-Carmen-Sinatra triangle, but the story about Ingo Johansson being doped. Ingemar “Ingo” Johansson was a world champion boxer who had won the heavyweight crown from Floyd Patterson a year earlier. In the March 1960 rematch, Patterson put Johansson’s lights out with a blow so vicious that Johansson was left twitching on the canvas. It was a definitive victory, just as Johansson’s earlier win over Patterson had been, but in 1960 white-black boxing matches were overtly racially divisive, and so Top Secret took advantage by suggesting that perhaps Patterson’s camp managed to slip the Swede a mickey. That question was answered in the March 1961 third match between the two, when Patterson again knocked Johansson out.

After their careers were over, Johansson and Patterson became good friends and even flew to visit each other in their native countries every year. Top Secret could well have done a story on that, but of course harmony doesn’t sell magazines. So while in the U.S. civil rights strife raged through the rest of the sixties and into the seventies, two guys who once made a living beating the living shit out of each other quietly proved that, given a chance to see each other’s similarities rather than differences, people tend to get along just fine.     

Gunard Hjertstedt wrote six books before he decided people weren’t digging his name. So he chose the pseudonym Day Keene and went on to publish some of the most entertaining novels of pulp’s golden age. Hjertstedt also wrote as William Richards, but it was the Day Keene moniker that he parlayed into international fame, writing titles like My Flesh Is Sweet, If the Coffin Fits, and Dead Dolls Don’t Talk. Several of Keene’s novels were adapted to film, including 1960’s Chautauqua (written with Dwight Vincent), which was transformed into the Elvis Presley vehicle The Trouble with Girls. But don’t let that deter you—Keene’s novels are hard, fast and well worth the read. The complete text of 1954’s Sleep with the Devil is available here on Scribd.com.