Hollywoodland | Oct 31 2016 |
Uncensored gives readers the lowdown on all the Hollywood trysts and splits in this issue published this month in 1962. José Ferrer and Rosemary Clooney apparently broke up—after eight years and five children—over Ferrer's insistence on carrying on extramarital affairs, as was his natural right. At least that's what he thought: “Since the beginning of our marriage he has engaged in a series of affairs with other women,” Clooney is quoted. “I discussed this with him prior to our separation, but he said he couldn't change his way of life.” Apparently the Puerto Rican born Ferrer was old school with the whole machismo thing. But all was not lost between him and Clooney. They married again in 1964 and managed to stay together another three years.
Hollywoodland | Apr 17 2013 |
“Love in France isn’t what it used to be,” says French singer, dancer, and actress Leslie Caron. At least if National Enquirer is to be believed. This cover featuring an enchanting photo of Caron in a pixieish mode she made famous appeared today in 1960 when she was finishing work near Paris on the Napoleonic drama Austerlitz. At the time, she was having difficulties with her husband, actor Peter Hall. Caron wrote about the period in her autobiography Thank Heaven: “Temptations to have affairs were sometimes avoided, sometimes not.” In that context, this cover takes on added meaning. Would her husband have seen her words as reassuring or upsetting? In the end it didn’t matter. Filming 1961’s Fanny in Marseilles, Caron had an affair with cinematographer Jack Cardiff. So while love in France might not have been what it used to be, it was still good enough, seemingly. Caron’s subsequent whirlwind affair with Warren Beatty triggered a separation, and by 1965 she and Peter Hall divorced.
Vintage Pulp | May 27 2011 |
Sexual slander is a time-honored propaganda technique, and today we have two examples, both aimed at Fidel Castro. Confidential, at top, suggests that Castro raped a teenaged girl, while Whisper goes a slightly different route and tells readers he’s afraid of women. Both offer up a version of Castro as less than a man, and during that time of communist hysteria it would have been quite pleasing for people to believe. The really clever element of fabrications like these is that if anyone had called bullshit on the writers it would have been seen as a de facto defense of Castro politically, and thus called into question their patriotism. We would suggest that the same dynamic holds true today.
But just how influential were these magazines? By 1957 Confidential was the biggest selling newsstand publication of any type in the U.S. Its circulation had reached 4 million per issue, but Confidential editors claimed—and there is reason to believe they were right—that every purchased issue of the magazine was actually read by an additional ten people. Confidential’s circulation had declined somewhat by 1960, but it was still a powerhouse, and Whisper wasn’t doing terribly either (though it's circulation too had been declining for a few years). These two issues, from May 1960 and May 1962, span a period when Castromania had reached a fever pitch—at least until the Cuban Missile Crisis came along. We have other tabloid covers with amusing Castro stories here and here, and we’ll compile an aggregate post of others a little later.
Vintage Pulp | Mar 5 2009 |
We'll just get right to the point. Black Shampoo is a monument of gratuitous skin and gunplay almost unequaled in the annals of blaxploitation. The film was a take on the Warren Beatty flick Shampoo, but done on the cheap, with burly John Daniels in the lead as a womanizing hair salon proprietor who runs afoul of the mob. You get every stereotype in the book here, and they’re all good for a laugh. Even Tanya Boyd's copious nudity is pushed to an unintentionally comical extreme, as she is at one point forced to flee for her life wearing nothing but a man’s dress shirt fastened by a single button, making the whole long chase over the hills and through the woods a game of peek-a-bush. In another scene she stares down at her own naked body as if thinking, "My God, I am so hot even I have to look." No argument there. We just love this movie. Social relevance—uh, not really. Entertainment value—extremely high. Black Shampoo opened in the U.S. today in 1976.