It wasn’t until after adopting the pseudonym Lili St. Cyr over her unusual birth name that her career began to blossom. She scored a job in Montreal at the Gaiety Burlesque House, and worked there for seven years, eventually earning $1500 a week. It was during that time that shedeveloped some of her trademark techniques, including working with a cockatiel, and having her g-string snatched off by a fishing line that was invisible to the audience. Burlesque crowds were usually raucous, but St. Cyr, with her sheer grace and insistence upon infusing balletic movements into her routines, more often awed audiences into silence.

At the height of her fame in the mid-1950s, St. Cyr was reportedly earning more than $100,000 a year. With the fame came famous suitors such as Howard Hughes and Vic Damone, but she seems to have married only for love, if one is to judge by the fact that none of her six husbands werecelebrities. With the fame also came the moral watchdogs, those desperate to stop consenting adults from doing what they wished with their own time, and the arrests followed. She was making enough money to afford top legal representation, and she chose the best—Jerry Giesler, who we discussed last June.

As much as the public loved St. Cyr, it was her enemies that seemed to control the direction of her life. Her legal troubles continued, and another marriage went by the wayside. But St. Cyr was nothing if not persistent. By the time she finally retired from burlesque after thirty years, she hadachieved a longstanding goal of establishing herself in another industry by opening a mail order lingerie business similar to Frederick’s of Hollywood. It was called The Undie World of Lili St. Cyr, and her garments were geared toward a male clientele—the idea being that prodding men to give lingerie as gifts was more profitable than trying to appeal to women. St. Cyr was right, and her business became wildly successful, hawking its wares in colorful catalogues that remain collectibles even today. After St. Cyr sold controlling interest in the business, she drifted into a quiet twilight, but, like former nudie queen Bettie Page, experienced a revival during the 1990s. But unlike Page, St. Cyr didn’t appear at conventions and signings—she stayed in her little apartment with her cats.

Most of the sites we visited looking for information on St. Cyr discuss those years of seclusion as if they were an anomaly. But in that 1957 Mike Wallace interview, she confessed that she hated having people look at her. Wallace seemed baffled by this, and for some reason didn’t seem to make the connection that $100,000 a year will go a long way toward helping someone battle stage fright. The idea that she might actually beshy instead took him into a line of questioning during which he flat-out said: “You don’t like yourself very much, do you?” And St. Cyr replied, “No, I don’t.” Asked why, she says, “Perhaps because of what I do.” So it seems clear that St. Cyr was always destined to spend her last years avoiding the limelight. And while it’s safe to say the world certainly missed her, it’s equally safe to say that she probably never missed the world.     

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.” 

Below is a photo of Italian actress Pier Angeli on the cover on France’s Ciné-Révélation. She was originally Anna Pierangeli, but she split her surname, thus giving herself the last name “angels.” A truer pseudonym has yet to be invented. But for as much excitement as attended her arrival onto the Italian movie scene, her career never quite reached the expected heights once she made the leap to Hollywood. She worked steadily in a series of unimpressive films, and had a few love affairs, including one with James Dean that was reportedly nixed by her mother. After twenty years in movies, and two divorces, she died at age 39 of a barbiturate overdose. Though she was depressed during her final years, it is impossible to know for sure whether her death was an accident or suicide. You see her here at the apex of her fame and beauty, January 1958. 

Paris-Hollywood was a cinema and cheesecake magazine published every two weeks in France from 1947 to 1973. Its first issue featured Rita Hayworth on the cover, and over the years dozens more movie stars, as well as scores of unknown models, graced its cover. This issue, from 1952, features not just a provocative cover shot, but one of the magazine’s favorite interior treats—a centerfold that strips. It’s ingeniously simple. The centerspread is a piece of semi-transparent white paper inked in such a way as to strategically block portions of the pages beneath. In this case, a silhouette of black ink creates the image of a woman in a catsuit. But lift the white paper and you see the same figure nude. The coolness of this trick can only be described using the word on the magazine’s cover: “espièglerie”—the state of being mischievous or frolicsome. Take a look below and see if we aren’t right. 

The publishers of The Lowdown went for titillation overload on this screamingly bright November 1961 cover, managing to hit several of the hot button issues of the day, from birth control to lesbianism. Frank Sinatra gets the star treatment here, and The Lowdown actually gets one right—Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe (bottom left) were involved in 1961, around the same time her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio (second from left) was growing concerned about the people around her and asked her to remarry him in hopes of stabilizing her life. Was Sinatra one of the people DiMaggio distrusted? Perhaps, but Monroe said no to Joe's proposal and was dead the next year. As for Sinatra and Brigitte Bardot (bottom right), we can’t find any references to the two being involved, but they did meet during 1959 to discuss co-starring in a film to be helmed by Bardot’s ex-husband Roger Vadim (second from right). After the three of them talked about the project for a couple of days the idea fell through because Bardot didn’t want to work in Hollywood and Sinatra didn’t want to work in Paris. Did Sinatra and Bardot manage to sneak off for some international relations? We tend to doubt it—in addition to traveling with her ex-husband Vadim (who surely would have frowned on her cheating), she was married to actor/producer Jacques Charrier. Still, you can’t really put anything past Sinatra. But short of reading every Hollywood tell-all ever published, we just can’t say whether he and Bardot got together. The Lowdown hints yes, but take it for what it’s worth.  

Screen icon Lauren Bacall, circa 1952. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave her an honorary Academy Award yesterday during a private ceremony at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles. Other deserving honorees included B-movie legend Roger Corman, and cinematographer Gordon Willis.

Today we’re back to the top dog of classic tabloids, the always-titillating Confidential. The above issue is from fifty-five years ago this month, July 1954, and as always the cover promises scandalous inside scoop—this time on champs, presidents, and filthy rich heiresses. But it’s the unassuming banner on the Rubirosa murder case that interests us, because it refers to none other than Porfirio Rubirosa, and if you’ve never heard of him, then prepare yourself to meet (cue grandiose flamenco chords) The Most Interesting Man in the World.

Rubirosa had developed passions for polo, racing, gambling, and other expensive upper crust pursuits. He excelled at all of them. Perhaps the only thing he wasn’t good at was fidelity, which led to his divorce from Flor in 1937. But his sheer magnetism—or perhaps the fact that he was a valuable hired gun—kept him in dictator dad’s good graces, and he continued to receive diplomatic posts. When World War II swept across Europe, Rubirosa made a stack of money selling Dominican exit visas to fleeing Jews. At some point the Gestapo imprisoned him, but he was released after six months. After that, he was allegedly recruited as a political assassin.

By now there were open questions about Rubirosa’s racial background. He was very dark, and was often described as “nut brown.” Rumors spread that he was part black—a devastating accusation in the 1940s, and one still used very effectively as a smear even in today’s supposedly post-racial age. But Rubirosa handled the gossip with the panache you’d expectfrom The Most Interesting Man in the World—he never addressed it all, at least not in public. His silence basically amounted to: “So what if I am?” And if the rumors bothered him, he surely derived ample compensation from the fact that legions of female admirers who’d heard about that pepper grinder of his didn’t care.

By now he was a professional celebrity. He was friendly with Joe Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis, Jr. One night in Paris, after teaching Davis how to properly kiss a woman's hand, the two went out to perfect the technique by flirting with women on the Champs-Élysées. Frank Sinatra once asked Rubirosa, “Rubi, have you ever held a full-timejob?” Rubirosa reportedly answered, “Women are my full-time job.” At some point he met Ian Fleming, and the novice writer came up with the great idea of basing a character on Rubirosa—a certain spy named James Bond.

In 1965 Rubirosa was part of a team that won the Coupe de France polo cup. He spent the night of the victory celebrating at a Paris nightspot called Jimmy’s, then headed home in his Ferrari. The roads were wet, andhe was a little drunk. He lost control of the car and died in a fiery crash. The Most Interesting Man in the World was gone—literally burning out rather than fading away. He never finished his memoirs, and today the closest the world has to a Porfirio Rubirosa is a fictional character in a Dos Equis commercial.

More than almost any man of his era, Porfirio Rubirosa represents the lost glamour and mystery of a time that can never be reclaimed. He was the product of a more innocent and refined—yet also crueler—age. Reading about his life is like reading about an event you’d give anything to have witnessed, even if it would have been dangerous to be there. Rumor has it a few Rubirosa-based scripts are floating around Hollywood. Supposedly Antonio Banderas has rights to one, and wants to play the lead role. Maybe it’s a lack of imagination on our part, but we don’t see it. There is no shortage of legends in history, but we can’t think of one whose shoes would be more difficult to fill. As much as we’d like to see a Rubirosa biopic, our advice is this: if it’s better to burn out than to fade away, maybe it’s also better to never try and rekindle the flame.     

It’s amazing how few people these days know Elizabeth Taylor is a highly regarded two-time Oscar winner who ruled Tinseltown for twenty solid years. Though she's certainly well-known, the reasons for her fame are beginning to fade from popular memory. But she was a once-in-a-generation talent who scored four Oscar nominations in her career, notching her two wins for Butterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She was also the most highly paid performer in the world, and one of the first true tabloid queens, with paparazzi dogging her every step from Hollywood to Rome. Looking at this Life cover from sixty-two years ago today, we get a glimpse of the beauty that fueled the worldwide Taylor obsession.