We’re reaching a bit farther back than usual for a femme fatale with this great Alfred Cheney Johnston image of Jacqueline Schalley, aka Jacqueline Schally, a Folies Bergère and Ziegfeld dancer who was once chosen the “Fairest Girl in France.” Based on that distinction she was sent to the U.S. to do a nationwide publicity tour before competing in New York City in an international beauty pageant. No word on whether she won, but then again, the judges probably never saw her like this. Photo is from 1927.

Above is a nice little artifact from the Jazz Age, a cover of Paris Plaisirs, numbered 88 and published in October 1929, the month disaster struck when a massive speculative bubble that had built up within the lightly regulated New York Stock Exchange burst and led to a collapse that dragged the world into a global depression. The background pattern here looks like superimposed bar charts, but since it comes about thirty days before the actual crash, we’ll just go ahead call the graphic coincidental. But how eerie. The cover star is a Folies Bergère dancer known only as Eva, and inside you get the usual assortment of flappers, showgirls, art, and photography from Studio Manassé.

Another entry from that gift that keeps on giving—a book of tabloid covers we bought three years ago—this issue of Midnight hit the streets 45 years ago today, promising the lowdown on where to purchase love slaves. The cover star, who does not seem to have been available for purchase, is a German born Folies Bergère showgirl named Birgit Bergen. We’d never heard of her, but with hair that enormous she must have been a star, and in fact it turns out she was quite famous in her day. In addition to dancing in Paris, she appeared in about twenty films, including 1958’s Nackt, wie Gott sie schuf, aka, Naked, As God Intended, and 1972’s Laß jucken, Kumpel, aka Let’s Itch, Mate, which was a big hit in Germany. We located a couple of photos of Bergen at the height of her beauty and fame (her hair's still pretty high too, but not to the extent it was on Midnight), and we’ve posted those below.

Hush-Hush magazine goes for broke in this issue from August 1963, offering up a slate of tales narrated in their usual breathless style. First, they tell us how Roddy McDowall took nude photographs of Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra and tried to sell them, but was thwarted when she “erupted like Mount Vesuvius”. They then demonstrate the limits of their imaginations by telling us that Italian singer Silvana Blasi reacted like “an uncontrollable Mount Vesuvius” when an African-American dancer was hired at the Folies Bergère. Two volcano similes in one issue is bad enough, but the same mountain?

For investigative journalism, Hush-Hush shows us photographs of a dead Carole Landis and an unconscious Susan Hayward, and concludes that sleeping pills are bad. And finally, the magazine stokes the fires of paranoia with two stories: in the first, they explain how Fidel Castro plans to conquer America with heroin, which he’s growing with the help of two-thousand Chinese advisors; in the second, they reveal that the second wife of Dr. Sam Sheppard is a Nazi who plans to revive the Third Reich, and that she’s being helped by—you guessed it—Fidel Castro, who is somehow a communist and a Nazi. Neat trick that.

As we’ve mentioned before, though these stories are laughable, people actually believed them, and believed them by the millions, as evidenced by Hush-Hush’s sales figures. The lesson is clear: the choice between popularity and truth is really no choice at all.