Andress gets picturesque in wine country. This photo of Swiss actress Ursula Andress in an autumnal vineyard appeared on an issue of Paris Match magazine published in September 1964. Fewer than two years removed from her role in Dr. No it's fair to say she was at this moment one the biggest stars in the world. For the most part, the roles she played didn't make splashes as big as that made by Dr. No, but there's little doubt she's one of the more fondly remembered stars of her era.
Bardot finds herself trapped in a very un-private affair. This scan from last month’s issue of Paris Match shows that stardom isn’t all foie gras and champagne. Brigitte Bardot is trapped in a huge crowd of fans as a few gendarmes try to clear a path for her. The text at lower right reads: “In 1962 before the camera of Louis Malle, Brigitte Bardot takes her role in the cinema of life—the harassed star.” The photo was made while Bardot was filming A Very Private Affair.
All she wants to do is dance. Though it doesn’t fit strictly into the idea of pulp, we picked up this issue of Paris Match published this month in 1949 because we liked the colorful cover. Actually, that’s not true. We picked it up because one of the Pulp girlfriends saw it and said, “Oooh, ballet!” This was in Bayonne, France back in September. When we knew we’d be in the vicinity one of the Pulp boys (BB) said “Oooh, duck hearts!” So there’s your Mars/Venus moment for today: we popped by Bayonne craving sautéed duck hearts as only the French can make, and got Paris Match for two euros. The cover star is French ballerina Yvette Chauviré, who was born in 1917, rose to become the lead dancer of l'Opéra de Paris, and later ascended to its directorship. Inside you get more photos of her, plus shots of American boxer Robert Charron, and shots of his wife (referred to only as Mme. Charron) in a ringside seat watching her husband fight. Take note guys—this is what your girlfriend/wife looks like when you’re getting the living shit kicked out of you. Also inside are photos of actress Cécile Aubry and conservative politician Paul Reynaud. All for you. Enjoy.
Miss France runs into a world of problems.
Beauty pageants are sexual events. Let’s not debate it. Despite claims by many that they’re merely a celebration of health, beauty, and talent, they provoke a subtly sexual reaction, a bit like the foot rubs in the film Pulp Fiction. To quote Vincent Vega: “We act like they don’t, but they do. There’s a sensuous thing going on where you don’t talk about it, but you know it.” Isabelle Chaudieu certainly must have known it. She won the title of Miss France today in 1984, four days before her eighteenth birthday. Unfortunately for pageant organizers, she had already posed nude for a professional photographer. The French magazine Lui bought the photos, paired them with shots of Chaudieu in her pageant regalia, and splashed them inside its February 1985 issue. In France as elsewhere magazines hit the newsstands a bit earlier than their official publication date, which led to Chaudieu being stripped of her title on the 31st of January 1985 and being replaced by runner-up Carole Tredille. Beauty pageants are falling out of favor. There's no doubt of that. More people are beginning to understand our original point that they’re basically sexual in nature. This isn’t because such people have dirty minds. Reasonably speaking, when people see a woman parade up and down in a bathing suit they aren’t imagining her swimming the 200 meter butterfly—they’re imagining her peeling out of the suit and performing the Venus butterfly. Sex is the reason every one of us came into being and is the main goal, biologically speaking, of all our lives. It’s just plain silly to expect people not to be reminded of it. And pageant organizers know their product does exactly that, which is why they punish women like Chaudieu, Vanessa Williams, and others for displaying themselves as sexual beings. It’s toweringly hypocritical, but also understandable in the sense that they’re desperate to protect a highly profitable product. The photo we’ve shared below of Chaudieu showing off her body as well as her 10,000 megawatt smile didn’t come from her Lui layout but rather from one of the many later sessions she did after deciding to make a career of glamour modeling. She wasn’t the first Miss France to be dethroned because of nude pictures. In 1983 Isabelle Turpaultwas defrocked for photos published by Paris Match. And interestingly, Chaudieu’s replacement performed in hardcore porn under the name Tenessy after her reign as Miss France. Chaudieu had cinematic ambitions as well, but of the mainstream variety. She appeared in Gwendoline, aka The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak, but that was her only screen credit. After a few years posing for men’s magazines she disappeared from the public eye, and today a person who was once the most famous—or notorious—in France, doesn’t even have a French Wikipedia page.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot. 1912—Pravda Is Founded
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country's leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid. 1983—Hitler's Diaries Found
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison. 1918—The Red Baron Is Shot Down
German WWI fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, better known as The Red Baron, sustains a fatal wound while flying over Vaux sur Somme in France. Von Richthofen, shot through the heart, manages a hasty emergency landing before dying in the cockpit of his plane. His last word, according to one witness, is "Kaputt." The Red Baron was the most successful flying ace during the war, having shot down at least 80 enemy airplanes. 1964—Satellite Spreads Radioactivity
An American-made Transit satellite, which had been designed to track submarines, fails to reach orbit after launch and disperses its highly radioactive two pound plutonium power source over a wide area as it breaks up re-entering the atmosphere.
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