Vintage Pulp | Aug 24 2015 |
This issue of Paris Magazine features a beautiful Louis-Charles Royer cover of Ziegfeld star Claire Luce, one of the most popular celebrities of her time. Her heyday was the 1920s and ’30s, a period during which—though this is little remarked upon today—substantially more women began to have sex before marriage. By the time the first surveys took place in the 1940s about 50% of women admitted to having pre-marital sex. Anecdotally, during the 1920s probably at least one in four women had sex as singles. Claire Luce was a pioneer of the female right to choose. A mere eight-year span of her diary describes sixty lovers.
Of course, there are many factors behind any social shift, but rapid change typically derives from chaos. Ask any neo-con or disaster capitalist. The primary effect of war or warlike events upon society is to alter how it views life, death, and personal freedom. In the past, the spectre of death made people want more freedom to live as they saw fit; in our present era, traumatic events have resulted in people agreeing to sacrifice their personal freedom (thanks to powerful suggestions and hard work by opportunistic governments).
Anyway, just an interesting digression concerning Paris Magazine’s cover star. Like predecessors such as Dorothy Parker, and peers like Tallulah Bankhead, she was a sexual trendsetter, a new type of woman for a radically reordered Western world. She’s also about as pulp as it gets. We may get back to Claire Luce a bit later, but in the meantime we have a bunch of interior scans from Paris Magazine below, and more issues available at the click of a mouse. This edition, number 34, appeared in 1934.
Vintage Pulp | Apr 20 2015 |
Cover and scans from an April 1933 issue of Paris Magazine, with the usual art photography from Studio Manassé and other sources, plus humor and goings-on around town. The cover star is showgirl Lilian Daugherty.
Vintage Pulp | Jun 22 2014 |
Vintage Pulp | Sep 10 2012 |
Above, French vintage of the best kind—scans from Paris Magazine #27, November 1933, with platinum-coiffed cover star Mary Carlisle, who was born in 1912, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and is still alive today. You also get photography from Schall, Zielke, Jean Moral, Studio Manassé, and art from Yves Brayer.
Vintage Pulp | May 27 2011 |
We managed to locate another issue of Paris Magazine today, this one from May 1935 with a bright-eyed photo-illustration of American movie star Jean Parker, née Lois Greene, on the cover. Inside, you get art by Julien Tavernier, and photographs of yesteryear’s showgirls, models and society women by Braig, Albin, and others. In the last two panels you get possibly the last photographs ever taken of the German actress and singer Edith Mera, who had died a few months earlier at age thirty of septicemia (a blood infection) caused by poor treatment of an abscess in her mouth. It’s a bittersweet footnote, but then when you’re looking at magazines this old it’s always bittersweet because everyone you’re seeing at the height of beauty and youth is now dead. Or as Shakespeare so eloquently wrote: Golden lads and all girls must, as chimney-sweepers come to dust. Now there’s a cheery thought for Friday! But hopefully it inspires you to really enjoy this spring weekend—you only get so many. Anyway, bittersweet or not, we love Paris Magazine and recently acquired about a dozen, so you’ll be seeing more soon. Check out our other issue, with its excellent Man Ray art here.
Vintage Pulp | Jan 31 2011 |
Above is the cover and several interior pages from Paris Magazine, an erotic and art publication from France. This one was published in January 1935 and features the work of the legendary photographer Man Ray in panels three, four and five. Man Ray spent most of his adult life in Paris, specifically the Montparnasse district where he had a home, but he was actually American, born Emmanuel Radnitzky in the U.S. in 1890. He moved overseas when he was thirty-one, relocated to L.A. when World War II broke out, but returned to Paris in 1951 and lived there until his death in 1976.