 La Muse de l’existentialisme et Miles. 
 This striking music brochure promo art for French singer Juliette Gréco and Disques Fontana (a subsidiary of the Dutch label Philips Records) was created by the famous illustrator O’Kley in 1956. The art was reused for record covers, as you see below.
Gréco, an actress as well as singer, was a fixture in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris, and her acquaintanceships with such figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty earned her the nickname La Muse de l’existentialisme—the existentialists’ muse. She was also, according to Miles Davis, one of the great loves of his life, and the feeling was reciprocated, so that wins major points right there because Miles was the bomb.
Moving on to the art, O’Kley was a pseudonym for Nantes-born Pierre Gilardeau, the man behind some of the most collectable Folies Bergère posters. He also illustrated many book covers and movie posters, and after a long career died in 2007. We’ve seen some good examples of his art, so we’ll try to get back to him a bit later—but we make no guarantees. You can see another Fontana post here.
 
 Tracy and Castle try to avoid a watery grave in low budget crime thriller. 
Above is a rare poster for the 1947 drama High Tide, which starred Lee Tracy and Don Castle as an editor of a fictional Los Angeles newspaper and a private investigator who crash while driving on what is presumably the Pacific Coast Highway, and find themselves immobilized in the wreckage. Trapped and thinking they're doomed to drown when the sea rises, they discuss the events leading up to their mishap. It's a b-movie all the way, a mere seventy minutes long, with stock footage, day-for-night shooting, and mise-en-scène on the more static end of the spectrum, but the story is interesting and the film noir flourishes are fun.
Some of the dialogue scores too: “He's having a slight attack of rigor mortis right in the middle of my living room floor.” That's not bad. We know, of course, that Tracy and Castle didn't just drive off the PCH but crashed for a pivotal reason. No spoiler there. It's an assumption you'll have made just reading the film's synopsis. We can't recommend High Tide strongly because it's too bottom bin to be really exciting, but it might give you intermittent pleasures anyway. It's certainly instructive in terms of making a workable movie with very little money. It premiered today in 1947.  I've spotted him. He's in front of that rear projection of the main lobby of Union Station.
 Hey, that's strange. That looks like our rear projection, only reversed.
 The rear projection of Los Angeles is lovely tonight. But not as lovely as you, my dear.
 Driver, step on it. We've got to outrun that projectionist.
 Tabloid offers pills, thrills, and various painful aches.                    
Above: assorted pages from an issue of National Close-Up published today in 1968, with sex pills called vitogen, sexual perversion, sex parties, and sex swingers, then conversely, mass suicides, a monster baby, an acid burn victim, car crash deaths, and all that is terrible and painful in the world. Somewhere between those extremes are celebrities, including Julie Christie, Bing Crosby, Donna Marlowe again (seems she was a tabloid staple in ’68), Playboy centerfold Sue Williams (in the advertisement for strip poker cards), and, just above, the lovely June Palmer.
 It was the Whisper heard from coast to coast. 
Above is a cover of the tabloid Whisper from January 1965, with actress Carroll Baker, convicted murderer Winston Moseley, and New York judge J. Irwin Shapiro starring on the front. But before we get into the magazine, we want to share the good news that our longtime scanning problems are fixed. We didn't get a new scanner, though. We got a new computer—a Mac Studio with plenty under the hood. It's quicker than the old Mac, but it also changed the functionality of the scanning interface. The whole process runs differently, and is about three times faster now. So you'll be seeing more magazines in the future. Turning back to Whisper, Winston Moseley—who editors call William for some reason—was America's villain of the moment for the murder of Catherine Genovese, who he stalked, stabbed with a hunting knife, then found again where she had taken refuge in a building, and finished her off. Additionally, Moseley was a necrophiliac. He raped his victims—of which there were three total—post-mortem. Of the trio of victims Genovese is the one that's remembered today because her murder sparked a national reckoning about the relationship between citizens and the police, as well as life in big cities, because the press reported that thirty-eight people had seen the crime happening but had done nothing. As it turned out, that number was wildly inaccurate, but never let the truth get in the way of perfectly cooked, juicy tabloid outrage. A quote appeared in nearly every story about the murder: “I didn't want to get involved.” New York City—where the crime occurred—and other metropolitan centers were criticized as uncaring places. Author Harlan Ellison, who at that time was writing urban crime fiction, weighed in, saying, “not one of [the witnesses] made the slightest effort to save her, to scream at the killer, or even to call the police.” Peak outrage was achieved by New York State Supreme Court Justice J. Irwin Shapiro when he expressed a desire to execute Moseley himself. In the end, Moseley wasn't executed at all. He died in prison in 2016 at age eighty-one.
Elsewhere in Whisper, you'll notice that the magazine is—unsurprisingly, given the time period and nature of the publication—antagonistic toward gay men, as demonstrated by the panel with the blaring text: “Who's Queer Asked the Peer?” But what is a surprise is that later in the issue the editors run a detailed piece on transvestites and transsexuals, and the approach is very different than the contempt shown toward homosexuality. As we've pointed out many times before, mid-century tabloids had a deep interest in trans issues. The story is titled, “A Doctor Answers What Everyone Wants To Know About Sex Change Operations.” The tone is as follows:
The condition he referred to was the common plight of all male transsexuals. Physically he was a man, but emotionally and personality-wise he was a woman, a condition that made it difficult to find successful employment, and to live at all happily. Fortunately, in his case, he had a lawyer and a wise judge who were able to help him in his wish to go to Europe for a sex change operation so that his body could be brought into greater harmony with his mind, and enable him to work and live with a degree of happiness he had never known before.
That's respectful—if not even compassionate—for a 1965 publication considered lowbrow by sophisticated readers. Is it a paradox that the magazine could be so evil toward gay men, yet so civil toward transsexuals? We think so, and we'd love to know the thought process behind it. While we're puzzling that out, you may want to move on to Whisper's slate of celebrity news. Everyone from Romy Schneider to Ernest Borgnine get their due exposure. We've uploaded the magazine's “Behind the Whispers” feature, so you can get the dish on a few Hollywood stars. Please enjoy.
                          
 She's small but she has enormous appetites. 
What would ’70s erotic cinema be without Swedish movies? And more importantly, without Swedish actresses? Above is a Japanese poster for the softcore film Justine och Juliette, known in English as Justine and Juliette, or sometimes Swedish Minx, and it starred the small wonder known as Marie Forså, who pound for pound was probably the best performer to come out of Swedish sexploitation cinema. That's what we think, anyway. We talked about the movie last year, so all we're doing today is showing you this eye-catching piece of art. Oh, and the rare image of Forså below. Let's not forget about that. We also have the rear of the poster. In addition, you can see a colorful Japanese promo for Forså's movie Butterflies here, and a very, erm, interesting one for her movie Bibi here.
 
 In show business the camera never sleeps. 
Night and Day, for which you see the cover of an issue—its very first issue, actually—that was published this month in 1948, billed itself as America's Picture Magazine of Entertainment. It was launched in New York City by Alho Publishing, and as you'll see it came out of the gate swinging for the fences with its visual content, from its bisected cover featuring burlesque dancer Lili St. Cyr and actress Ramsey Ames, to its tongue-in-cheek feature on the twenty-seven types of kisses, to its approving look at George White's Scandals revue at Hollywood's Florentine Gardens. Interesting side note on Scandals—Wikipedia says it ended in 1939. Well, obviously not quite. Elsewhere Night and Day touches on college hazing, professional football, and the Greenwich Village art scene. In total, it's a gold mine for vintage photos.
Our favorite offering in the magazine is its quiz on Hollywood stars and their stand-ins. You just have to take a good look at twenty performers, and try to determine which twenty random people are their stand-ins. To score well on such a quiz you'd have to be either the biggest Hollywood head in history or someone who has the opposite of face blindness, whatever that would be. Face unforgettability, maybe. Even though we don't expect many people to try the quiz, we worked hard to put it into internet-usable form. In the magazine the photos were five-across on the page, which made them too small for the column width of our website. So we rearranged them to be two-across, and thus enlarged, they're clear, though you have to do a lot of scrolling. Nevertheless, it's there if you want, along with fifty other panels to eat your time with marvelous efficiency. Please enjoy.                                                   The Hollywood movie star stand-in quiz begins below. First you get twenty famous actors and actresses: And below are their twenty stand-ins. If you get more than half of these right you're a human face recognition algorithm. Quit your day job immediately and report to the FBI. Below are the answers.
 If it feels good just do it. 
This rare and striking poster was made for the Japanese run of the French softcore flick Je suis une nymphomane, known in English as Libido: The Urge to Love, and I Am a Nymphomaniac. The Japanese text here, 色情日記, translates as “lust diary.” Filmed in Paris and Antibes, in the story Sandra Julien falls down an elevator shaft and the accident changes her personality from prim and proper to sexually insatiable. She hates her new urges, but has no control and proceeds to have relations with everyone around her, from her boss's slimy nephew to co-star Janine Reynaud. She also poses for dirty photos, has a threesome with a pair of carny workers, and even commits sexual assault. Possibly her low point comes when she seeks answers by enrolling in philosophy classes. You have to be really far gone to do that. In the end the answer to her problem is deceptively simple: find someone who likes her for more than her body. We can't count ourselves among that group, because other than Julien's nakedness, we don't feel there's much that's worthwhile here, but we'll give it points for being artsy. Je suis une nymphomane had its Japanese premiere today in 1971.                     
 The sweetest fruit is the type that peels itself. 
A while back we learned about Dutch illustrator J.H. Moriën through his re-imagining of a famed Paul Rader cover, and here he is again doing good work on the front of Verboden Vruchten, an Erosex-Pocket paperback published in the Netherlands and written by Linda Michaels. We assume that's a pseudonym, but we can't find more info. We stumbled across the cover in a Flickr collection, so thanks to the original uploader. The title translates as “forbidden fruits,” although this particular fruit gets eaten plenty as the story deals with a stripper named Sophie and her various assignations, including with a horny judge named Johnson and an abuser named Leander. We don't know the copyright on this, but Moriën was working in this mode during the mid-1960s. We have other pieces from him that we'll show you later.
Update: We're now thinking this author is Joan Ellis, aka Julie Ellis, who sometimes used Linda Michaels as her pseudonym. After searching everwhere for info, you know where we learned that? Right here.
 Inside Story goes where other tabloids tread—then claims not to have gone there. 
It's been a few years since we posted an issue of Inside Story, but we don't run out of tabloids, we just run out of time to scan them. Today, though, there's time aplenty, so above you see an issue that appeared this month in 1963 with a cover touting a feature on the new generation of young actresses in Hollywood taking over from Brigitte Bardot, Kim Novak, and Marilyn Monroe. At the time, Bardot was twenty-nine and Novak was thirty-five. Those aren't exactly geriatric years for actresses, even back then, but Inside Story said there was a young new guard: Angie Dickinson, Ann-Margret, Jane Fonda, Connie Stevens, Tuesday Weld, and Julie Newmar. Dickinson was actually older than both Bardot and Novak, but we get the general point.
Later in the issue there's a story dedicated to Monroe that describes her fans as a death cult. The interesting aspect of this is that the author Kevin Flaherty accuses people of obsessing over Monroe—while himself obsessing over Monroe. The gist of his article is that a cottage industry of films, books, and magazine articles were cashing in on her suicide, which had occurred the previous August. This was, of course, shaky ground for any tabloid to tread upon, as they all made their profits via unauthorized articles about various celebrities, which one could define as exploitative by nature. But never let the facts get in the way of a good story angle.
Flaherty tells readers that Monroe's life was marred by abandonment, depression, and rape, and suggests that if she had been given a little peace by constantly clamoring fans and intrusive reporters she might not have taken that fatal dose of pills. We think it's just as valid to conclude that without stardom she wouldn't have lasted as long as she did. Since she isn't around anymore to speak for herself (she'd be ninety-six this year), we view her on the terms she chose. She started as a model and worked hard to become an actress, and we think those achievements are far more important than what she had no control over. But there will always be debate over Monroe's legacy, and Inside Story shows that the discussion was already in full swing. Twenty-plus scans below.
                           
 They have appetites big enough for the entire room. 
Above is an interesting production photo made during the filming of Gendai poruno-den: Sentensei inpu, aka Modern Porno Tale: Inherited Sex Mania, aka The Insatiable. It's a wider angle of a promo image we shared back in 2015, and if you were ever curious how many people are on set for a sex scene, in this case there are five visible, aside from the performers, plus at least one more shooting the photo. Probably there are even a few more. Here's some full disclosure for you: when PSGP worked at Playboy he was asked to help out on the set of a softcore movie titled Call Girl Wives. He saw shot two sex scenes shot, and there were at least ten people around for each. Later he was asked by a porn producer if he wanted to perform in an actual xxx film. Long story short: he declined. Just another interesting PSGP aside.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1927—Mae West Sentenced to Jail
American actress and playwright Mae West is sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity for the content of her play Sex. The trial occurred even though the play had run for a year and had been seen by 325,000 people. However West's considerable popularity, already based on her risque image, only increased due to the controversy. 1971—Manson Sentenced to Death
In the U.S, cult leader Charles Manson is sentenced to death for inciting the murders of Sharon Tate and several other people. Three accomplices, who had actually done the killing, were also sentenced to death, but the state of California abolished capital punishment in 1972 and neither they nor Manson were ever actually executed. 1923—Yankee Stadium Opens
In New York City, Yankee Stadium, home of Major League Baseball's New York Yankees, opens with the Yankees beating their eternal rivals the Boston Red Sox 4 to 1. The stadium, which is nicknamed The House that Ruth Built, sees the Yankees become the most successful franchise in baseball history. It is eventually replaced by a new Yankee Stadium and closes in September 2008. 1961—Bay of Pigs Invasion Is Launched
A group of CIA financed and trained Cuban refugees lands at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro. However, the invasion fails badly and the result is embarrassment for U.S. president John F. Kennedy and a major boost in popularity for Fidel Castro, and also has the effect of pushing him toward the Soviet Union for protection.
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