 All the fame, none of the fortune. 
National Enquirer from the week of July 24 to 30, 1960, with cover star Jean Seberg sporting the pixie look that helped make her an international phenomenon. Seberg is a person we haven’t written about yet, but it’s no stretch to say her story is one of the most interesting in cinema history, involving J. Edgar Hoover, the Black Panthers, and suicide. We’ll be spending a lot of time on her tragic story down the line.
 Battery will get you everywhere. 
Cover of the National Enquirer published today in 1966, with a feature on Adam West, who was banking serious dollars on television’s campy superhero series Batman. By the way, we often see West referred to as the original Batman, but that isn’t true. This guy is the original Batman.
 Reaping the whirlwind. 
National Enquirer published this week in 1964, with a story about Frank Sinatra and his anger issues. The Enquirer, in detailing instances when Sinatra lost his temper, had numerous examples from which to choose—he once beat Frederick Weisman with a telephone, dumped hot coffee on a casino manager, and shoved a woman through a plate glass window. Except for getting his front teeth knocked out on one occasion, Sinatra suffered no consequences from his behavior—he was simply too powerful, and nobody wanted to get on his bad side. Generoso Pope, Jr., who owned the Enquirer, was an exception. Sinatra hated the Enquirer, of course, and eventually sued it for libel. But that would be years later. The tales the paper published in this particular issue were all true.
 Audrey Hepburn demonstrates the first extreme makeover. 
We could hardly claim to be the go-to site for vintage tabloids if we didn’t include the National Enquirer. This actually isn’t a stretch, because the Enquirer first began publishing during the heyday of vintage tabs in the early fifties, and had published under another name for decades before that. The Enquirer’s paper stock was cheap, its printing low rent, and its use of color rare to non-existent, but the formula worked. Where the expensive tabs dazzled with their kaleidoscopes of color, the Enquirer offered single ideas paired with large, bold images. The formula set the paper apart, and it is the only vintage tabloid that survives today. This issue, with Belgian-born superstar Audrey Hepburn, was published March 3, 1963.
 Tabloid had Tiger Woods by the tail two years ago but buried the story. 
Until now, the Tiger Woods scandal has lacked that element of pulp sordidness that interests us. Sure, there were multiple dalliances with a porn actress, but no grand scams or hidden bodies. All that changed yesterday when The Wall Street Journal published an article claiming that The National Enquirer had photographic proof of Tiger Woods’ infidelity back in 2007 and traded it for an exclusive interview for its sister publication Men’s Fitness. This is simply not the way a true tabloid is supposed to behave. A true tabloid would publish a story about Woods being an alien hybrid who became great at golf from playing in zero gravity, so quashing a blockbuster about history’s greatest golfer tomcattin’ around is a major transgression of tabloid ethic— uh, ethiclessness— er, of a tabloid’s presumed (and indeed required) ethical bankruptcy. We’re all used to the failings of the mainstream press, but when muckraking tabloids can’t live up to even nonexistent ethical requirements the end times are truly near. We suppose this sad failure by The National Enquirer is a testament to the sheer power of Tiger Woods. After all, The Enquirer cheerfully outed John Edwards’ affair as blithely as if reporting another celebrity wedding. We’re talking about a U.S. Senator who could have presumably had Homeland Security put the entire Enquirer editorial staff on a barge to Guantánamo. But these hardnosed news hawks were cowed by a golfer. We said earlier in the week that the (now failed) Copenhagen talks should be helmed by prostitutes. We take that back. With the kind of power Tiger has, we should have sent him into the negotiating chamber with a sand wedge. Right now ice shelves would be unfracturing, snows would be reaccumulating on Kilimanjaro, and we’d all be hearing a loud hissing noise from excess CO2 venting into space. We’d love to be that powerful for a day. Know what we’d do? After stopping global warming and putting a curse on the Boston Red Sox, we’d give the power away to a lowly assistant whose only job would be to periodically remind us that, in this day and age, recognizable and respected people who fuck around will always get caught. And by “remind,” we mean he’d wear a Bill Clinton mask and squeeze our nuts with vice grips while slapping us in the face.
 Bye bye Miss American Pie.  
Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger and Steven Parent were murdered forty years ago today in Los Angeles, California. The killings took place just after midnight, and the bodies were discovered in the morning. Popular wisdom tells us this event brought a bloody end to the Summer of Love. As a rule, we don’t buy such easy labeling, but there’s no argument Tate was unusually lovely and her slaying while eight months pregnant was shocking, cruel and almost cosmically unfair. Her death also marked the beginning of the Sharon Tate and Charles Manson celebrity cults. The Tate cult consists of internet sites that rhapsodize over her beauty and talent, along with real-world victim advocacy groups determined to see that the Manson killers, and murderers in general, remain behind bars. And at the opposite end of the spectrum are the Manson fetishists, who mainly think he was innocent and who operate at least a few well-trafficked websites where crime scene photos are picked apart for supposed inconsistencies, and assorted straw man arguments are constructed and torn down. We were particularly fascinated by one forum dominated by a person who kept urging others to read up on the facts of “rigamortis.” Our view: if you posture as an expert on a subject, at least learn to spell it correctly. Below we offer up a selection of Manson/Tate images, a couple of which we borrowed from here.
          
U.S.A., Inside Detective, National Examiner, True Detective, Screenplay, Official Detective, National Enquirer, Charles Manson, Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Steven Parent, tabloid, true crime magazine, murder
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1956—Elvis Shakes Up Ed Sullivan
Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, performing his hit song "Don't Be Cruel." Ironically, a car accident prevented Sullivan from being present that night, and the show was guest-hosted by British actor Charles Laughton. 1966—Star Trek Airs for First Time
Star Trek, an American television series set in the twenty-third century and promoting socialist utopian ideals, premieres on NBC. The series is cancelled after three seasons without much fanfare, but in syndication becomes one of the most beloved television shows of all time. 1974—Ford Pardons Nixon
U.S. President Gerald Ford pardons former President Richard Nixon for any crimes Nixon may have committed while in office, which coincidentally happen to include all those associated with the Watergate scandal. 1978—Giorgi Markov Assassinated
Bulgarian dissident Giorgi Markov is assassinated in a scene right out of a spy novel. As he's waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge in London, he's jabbed in the calf with an umbrella. The man holding the umbrella apologizes and walks away, but he is in reality a Bulgarian hired killer who has just injected a ricin pellet into Markov, who develops a high fever and dies three days later.
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