And as long as we’re at it, here’s a cover of the continually provocative National Star Chronicle, from today in 1967, with a story about an undertaker/rapist. Are you sensing a theme? Is this cover and the one in the post above not a case of two pigs feeding at the same trough? These stories represent the diametric extremes of ’60s sleaze tabloids—woman as ravaged sex victim/ravenous sex beast, which is a slight variation on Freud’s Madonna/whore complex, the twist here being that the Madonna loses her purity at the hands of a rapist. At least that’s how it seems to us. But what do we know? A psychologist or sociologist might have something useful to say, but in school we majored in vodka, so our insights are probably limited. Maybe we’ll get back to this after we consult our resident experts on the evils of men—our girlfriends. More tabloids coming soon. 

Here’s more from the National Star Chronicle with a cover from today in 1964. Just FYI, ammonia boils at –28 Fahrenheit, which means it’s pretty difficult to handle as a liquid, and is a gas at room temperature. True science, untrue story. 

Above is a cover of National Star Chronicle which appeared this month in 1964 with a story about a twenty-year-old Argentine woman named Margarita Andrade, who we’re told was kidnapped and forced to take part in an orgy. “I was compelled to perform sexual acts that I had never heard of before,” she says. “I’m too ashamed to describe what I had to do—and what was done to me.” And then she goes on to describe it. Short version—she was stripped and shoved into a room filled with naked men and women engaged in unnatural sex acts. Which raises the question—if they had enough consenting perverts to fill a room why did they need someone who would scream, scratch, and kick various fat dudes in the nuts? And considering the severity of the crimes, why did they later take her "to a deserted spot near the town of Monte Grande and shove her out of the car," thus allowing her to be a witness and make it onto the cover of national newspapers? Mystifying, no? But this story may not be a complete fabrication. National Star Chronicle was mostly fiction, but it was often mixed with a speck of truth, kind of like here. So in the end we'll never know. That's the trick of tabloid journalism—just when you think you can write it off, they throw something (semi) real at you.

Above, a cover of the New York City-based National Star Chronicle published today 1965. This is a page from our big book of tabloid covers, which means we don’t have the inside and can’t tell you which illness these cattle supposedly had. Mad cow disease maybe? Well if they were mad before, they must be furious now. Bada bing! 

National Star Chronicle devotes its cover from today, 1965, to the story of Micaela Ramirez, a pregnant wife stabbed to death by her husband of twenty years. Apparently, the extremely jealous and very drunk Vidal Ramirez expected his wife Micaela home at 4 pm, but she arrived at 4:13, so he deliberately stabbed her thirteen times to match the amount of her tardiness, then kicked around her corpse a bit for good measure. Vidal’s daughter ran from the house screaming, alerting neighbors. When the neighbors arrived and found Micaela and her unborn child dead, the rescue party transformed into a lynching party, forcing Vidal to barricade himself in a bedroom. Police finally arrived, calmed the neighbors, and carted Vidal to jail. The cover photo shows Micaela Ramirez after she’s been carried outside by the coroner. Lawrence Block once memorably wrote that there are eight million ways to die. Dying due to jealousy is surely one of the most banal. According to the Chronicle, Vidal Ramirez showed no remorse during his booking. He explained simply, “She had a lover. It was my duty to punish her.” 

This National Star Chronicle published today in 1965 forgoes its usual cheesecake cover in favor of screaming text about a torturer. The person in question is Alfred Poettinger, who indeed tied a nude woman to his bed and tortured her the last three days of December 1964 in the village of Studl-Paura, Austria. The torture took the form of whippings, followed by insertions of red hot needles. It’s at this juncture that the Chronicle’s account veers into pure fiction. In the real world, the woman, Monika Einoeder, managed to slip her bonds and flee naked to an adjacent house, where she called the police. Cops arrived at Poettinger’s only to find that he had hanged himself. But in Chronicle world, Poettinger didn’t die, but rather was trundled off to jail, where Chronicle house scribe Ernst Brookman allegedly scored an interview. The point of such a blatant lie, we presume, was to convince readers that the Chronicle had a network of intrepid reporters blanketing the world. It probably worked, too, but then this little thing called the internet came along and now we can look up articles from Jan 2 1965 and read for ourselves over and over that Poettinger was swinging from the rafters when police found him. So much for the Chronicle’s motto: True Stories About True People. Well, at least they got half of it right, and to their credit the editors didn’t forget the cheesecake entirely. Inside, it takes the form of Evi Marandi, Pilar Pellicer, Janis Paige, and Paola Penni, all of whom you see below. More from National Star Chronicle later. 

Glancing at this cover of National Star Chronicle from today in 1966, most guys’ reaction is probably to assume "love slave" is a pretty good gig. Just remember that sometimes when a woman says “love” what she means is “back rub”. That’s not a knock. Sometimes when men say “love” what they mean is “fellatio”. So it’s an all around case of that Mars/Venus thing. See more from National Star Chronicle by clicking its keywords below. 

We debated whether to post this, but like we always do when we get hold of crude material, we decided to share it anyway. So here you have a cover from the National Star Chronicle published today in 1966 that is intended, we are pretty sure, to be satirical. As we’ve mentioned before, except for a few bizarro news stories, nearly everything these bottom tier tabloids printed was fabricated to match photos that were already on hand. So when you’ve got the two photos above, a back-to-Africa story is an almost inevitable result. What would really make this cover brilliant, and a lot less obvious, is if they had also printed an inset photo of a Native American at the bottom of the page: "And inspired by white bigot, Indian reveals plan to ship white men to Europe.”