When it comes to vintage magazines, the range of prices is incredible. We’ve been seeing issues of Man’s Life online for $168.00. We will go out on a limb and say that nobody will ever pay that price. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we got this issue published January of 1959 for $4.00. The front is a bit mangled but the interior is fine, and includes some nice art, excellent fiction, and four pages on October 1954 Playboy centerfold Madeline Castle. The cover art for Thomas Halloran’s 1930s-era tale “Attacked by the Girl Pirates of the Yangtze” is by Will Hulsey, and the other spreads are by Geoffrey Biggs, Lou Marchetti, Bruce Minney, and Bruce Minnie (he does two and gets his name spelled two different ways). The Madeline Castle photo feature is uncredited. We’ll have more from Man’s Life a bit later.

Above, a poster for Tatsumi Kumashiro’s 1968 sexploitation flick Kaburitsuki jinsei, aka Front Row Life, aka Life of a Striptease Love, et. al. This was Kumashiro’s first directorial effort, and it didn’t do well. Afterward, he was banished back to screenwriting and assistant directing, which is where he’d been toiling for years, but in 1972, when he was forty-five, Nikkatsu gave him a second chance and he helmed the hit roman porno Nureta kuchibiru, aka Wet Lips. Kumashiro went on to direct many successful Nikkatsu productions. Interestingly, he married his Front Row Life leading lady, Hatsue Tonooka, but they divorced after a few months. 

 

The story probably fueled ten million fantasies. Marilyn Monroe had stripped naked on the set of her last movie Something’s Got To Give. Monroe was eventually fired, the production was scrapped, and the footage was archived, but if it had been released, she would have been the first Hollywood actress to appear unclothed onscreen since the 1920s. It’s interesting, isn’t it, to reflect upon the effect a minority of prudes had on Hollywood? Because of them, Monroe’s unreleased scene, and Jayne Mansfield’s later nude scene in 1963’s Promises, Promises, merely brought American cinema back to where it had already been four decades earlier.

Hush-Hush was not the first magazine to break the story of Monroe’s peel down. Life had done that in June 1962, accompanied by a couple of titillating photos. By the time Hush-Hush told the tale Monroe was two months dead. The blurb MM—Even In The Nude They Didn’t Want Her wasn’t strictly true. The production company Twentieth Century Fox most certainly did want her. A hospital stint prior to production had caused her to shed twenty-five pounds, bringing her to a weight she had never reached in her adult life, despite exercise and dieting. The newly svelte Monroe looked good and Fox was getting her cheap—$100,000.

This issue of The Lowdown from September 1957 has three stories of particular note, we think. First, readers learn about Diana Barrymore’s fast, out-of-control life, which she had shared with the world earlier that year in an autobiography entitled Too Much, Too Soon. She had just gotten out of a long stint in rehab, and the book was a sort of catharsis, as well as an attempt to let the show business world know that she was cleaned up and ready to work again. But the revelations in the book were of a sort that had never before been encountered by the American public in an autobiography, and the controversy never really faded. Even Mike Wallace asked Barrymore in a televised interview if, like the title of her book, it all wasn’t a bit much. Three years later, at age 38, Barrymore died from an oh-so-familiar lethal Hollywood combo of booze and sleeping pills.   

Readers are also told about a brawl at the house of Peruvian singer Yma Sumac. She had just filed from divorce from her husband Moisés Vivanco and had gone by to pick up a few items. In no time at all, she, singers Esmila Zevallos and Benigno Farfan, and private detective Fred Otash got into a hair-pulling scuffle, with the family dog at the center, to boot. Even the L.A. Times covered the fight. It seemed no couple could be more in need of a permanent split than Vivanco and Sumac, but the divorce didn’t take—they remarried later the same year.

And finally Lowdown takes Life magazine to task for not having the guts to publish racy photos of Sophia Loren from her 1957 romance Boy on a Dolphin, about a woman in the Greek Isles who while diving for sponges discovers a potentially valuable, ancient gold statue of a boy on a dolphin. We’re talking Sophia Loren in wet clothes. And really, that brings us to the entire reason we’re featuring Lowdown today—so we have an excuse to publish one of the photos in question. There it is below, and now your Friday has gotten that much brighter, right? More from Lowdown soon.

Update: a great color photo from the film just showed up online. We've added that at bottom.

Above, the cover of Clouded Passion by Arthur A. Howe, aka Sanford Aday, for Fabian Books, 1962, with Bill Edwards cover art of a country girl chugging booze like a Zeta Tau Alpha. Sanford Aday didn't just write, but also owned Fabian, along with Vega Books and Saber Books. He was a constant target of various morality groups, including Citizens for Decent Literature, which was headed by that paragon of virtue Charles H. Keating. Aday was eventually convicted of obscenity, along with his associate Wallace de Ortega Maxey, for shipping a single copy of the book Sex Life of a Cop to Michigan. Aday got twenty-five years, but the conviction was overturned by a Supreme Court decision. The novels from Adey’s three publishing houses are somewhat collectible today, and most of the covers were exactly like this one—amusing but low quality. If you’re interested, you can see a collection here. 

This National Enquirer published today in 1967 features cover star Hedy Lemarr promoting her 1967 autobiography Ecstasy and Me: My Life As a Woman. The title is taken from the 1933 Austrian film Ekstase, in which she appeared nude, shocking audiences of the time. Enquirer describes her book as shocking, as well, and indeed there are some surprising revelations. An example: while still living in her native Austria, she ran away from her husband and hid in an empty room in a brothel. A man came into the room and she had sex with him rather than let her husband find her. Lamarr claims to have had hundreds of lovers, male and female, and depicts herself variously as both a nymphomaniac and a kleptomaniac. But all of this comes with a caveat—her ghostwriter, the notorious Leo Guild, wrote various celeb biographies that played fast and loose with the truth. That said, even Guild was not imaginative enough to have fabricated everything in Ecstasy and Me.

As a side note, we should mention that Lamarr, along with George Anthiel, invented and patented an advanced frequency switching system that they envisioned for usage guiding torpedoes (the constant switching of frequencies would make them difficult to jam, thus more likely to reach their targets). Now, if you read other websites, most of them praise Lamarr as a military genius, and it’s true she had a highly developed technical mind, but the system she helped pioneer actually grew out of an idea to remotely control player pianos. In fact, the guidance system used eighty-eight frequencies, which is of course the number of keys on a standard piano. We think knowing that she applied a musical idea to military usage gives a somewhat fuller appreciation of how ingenious she actually was, rather than just picturing her as some kind of Oppenheimer type.

Ingenious or not, the U.S. Navy declined to purchase Lamarr and Anthiel’s system, but the moment the patent expired two decades later the military was all over it. We can’t discern with our limited resources whether this sudden decision to use the technology was coincidental or not, but certainly the result was that Lamarr got screwed out of probably millions of dollars. Or perhaps even more, when you consider that her and Anthiel’s frequency switching is closely related to that used today for global positioning systems and Bluetooth. Since Lamarr claimed in her book to have blown through more than thirty million dollars in her life, the fun and creative ways she might have spent a massive military windfall makes the mind boggle. We’ll get back to Hedy Lamarr a bit later, because she certainly deserves a more detailed treatment. 

Paris Life, of which you see a cover above, was a quarterly magazine published not in France, but in Derby, Connecticut, yet which nonetheless purported to give readers the scoop on Parisian nightlife. Connecticut is not exactly the nerve center of international reporting, but the magazine seems to have had someone working for them across the pond, because there are scores of photos—far too many to be simple handouts. Probably, the Connecticut base was only in name—for tax reasons—and the actual mag was headquartered in NYC. But that's only a guess. Anyway, the cover star here is French-Canadian actress/model/singer Simone Auger, the centerfold is German dancer Dorothea Schneider, aka Dodo, and besides those two you get all kinds of showgirl photos, printed poorly on cheap paper, which is why our scans are a bit rough. We're certain there's a way to avoid those Moiré patterns you'll see on the images, but whatever that method is, we aren't going to explore it on on a Friday, when a bottle of fine red wine is breathing in the other room. Maybe we'll re-scan this one down the line, though that may prove difficult, considering the magazine partially disintegrated as we handled it. Just for the sake of preserving as much of this pile of brittle paper as we could, we made twenty-five scans instead of the usual five or six. Also, if you're curious, we located the photo from which the cover was made, and you can see that here. 

Japanese cinema loves its nuns, whether clothed or naked, dominant or submissive, or sometimes just copping a squat in the woods. So today for your enjoyment we have six sexploitation posters featuring these figures, spanning the years 1968 through 1980. Remember, just looking isn't a sin. Title and star info appears at bottom.

From top to bottom: Nun’s Prohibited Night with Yuki Nohira, Tattooed Nun’s Dissolute Life with Jun Kosugi, Nunnery Confidential with Junko Fuji, A Nun’s Rope Hell with Naomi Oka, Humiliated Nun with Mihoko Kuga, and Black Clothed Nun’s Pain with Eri Kanuma. As you know by now, these films had no Western release, which means the English titles we’ve given are approximate, at best.