Hollywoodland | Vintage Pulp May 24 2013
A CRAVING FOR CANDY
Precisely when it’s scarcest is when you want it the most.


Jayne Mansfield, Mickey Hargitay, Elvis Presley, Eartha Kitt, and more. This issue of Whisper published this month in 1965 tells tales about some of the most popular stars of the day. And then there’s Hayley Mills, former child star who was trying to make a full-grown career for herself where breaking from type often involves shocking the public. In Mills’ case, she planned to star in the film Candy, which was to be an adaptation of the banned satirical novel Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg had based on Voltaire’s Candide. Considered one of the sexier novels of the time, it touched on homosexuality, masturbation, interracial relations, and seemed like a disastrous choice for wholesome Hayley Mills. But if she actually wanted to change that image what could do it? Candy could. Whisper warns Mills away from the role: “We’ll bet her fans—and the moviegoing public at large—won’t buy it.” Dire words, indeed. But in the end, Mills never got the role. It went instead to Swedish actress Ewa Aulin.

Whisper also discusses the infamous relationship between Sammy Davis, Jr. and Kim Novak, and ponders whether Novak is still carrying a torch for Davis. Journalist Pete Wallace doesn’t interview Novak, but manages to score quotes from many acquaintances—or so he claims. The upshot? Novak’s life has been a shambles ever since the relationship ended, but Wallace, trying to reason from afar with Novak, explains that Sammy dropped her for both their sakes because of the forces—studio, family, the American public, and eventually the Mafia—that were arrayed against them. But Wallace also sympathizes. He writes: “If the one man she ever really loved walked out on her (never mind that it was for the best of reasons) how can she trust herself to anyone less?” Who could ruin you for other men forever? The Candyman could. We have nineteen scans below of all that and more, and many more issues of Whisper to come.

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Vintage Pulp May 21 2013
CONSIDER YOURSELF INFORMED
Everything you thought you knew is wrong.

This issue of the crazed American tabloid National Informer published today in 1972 is the thirteenth we’ve shared, and inside the editors impart reams of shocking knowledge. Readers learn that birth control pills impair girls’ growth, dominant women emasculate men, disposable clothes are about to become the rage, men can get popped for paternity even if a woman gives birth more than a year after they had sex, and weather affects sexual moods. We think only the last bit is correct. By far our favorite item from this issue is on the cover, where we learn we can fight pollution by buying National Informer because it’s printed on recycled paper. Did Informer readers fail to realize that buying the paper contributed to pollution no matter what it was printed on? The way to really fight pollution would have been to not buy it at all, but it’s a good thing that didn’t happen—we’d have nothing to scan and share with you. As it is we’re already running low on these—only five more issues before they’re gone.

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Vintage Pulp May 20 2013
POLICE EMERGENCY
America’s oldest magazine shows signs of advanced age.

Oh, the poor National Police Gazette. By 1974 it was impossible for the editors to keep claiming Hitler was still alive and hiding out in Argentina. If he’d ever been there he was long dead. Castro was still around, of course, but it was pointless to keep pretending the U.S. was going to send an armada to take back Cuba. Mao was a useful foil for a few years, but somehow he just didn’t resonate the same way for readers. So the magazine turned its focus to pettier intrigues, dogging the Kennedy clan and hoping to move issues by featuring bikini models on its covers. How the mighty had fallen. Launched all the way back in 1845, the oldest magazine in America was now uninspired and out-of-touch with 1970s readers. In this entire issue only a few pages were even worth scanning. Teddy Kennedy, Susan Shaw, Felicity Devonshire, Sliwka… and killer catfish, all below.

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Vintage Pulp May 9 2013
WISH YOU WERE BEER
You and your stories. Bart’s a vampire. Beer causes heart attacks.

Yeah, there’s a girl on the cover of this Midnight published today in 1969 demanding $15,000 for her virginity, but she’s not important right now. Does beer really cause heart attacks? Doctors tell us that FAEEs (fatty acid ethyl esters) are synthesized at high rates in the heart, and because ethanol in alcohol is a toxic agent that affects the metabolism of fatty acids—which are the sole energy source for the heart—there’s a plausible link between the ingestion of alcohol and observed cardiac damage. But fuck those doctors. Let’s turn to noted beer drinker Plato. He once said that it was a wise man who invented beer. Sizzle. And what would the Mahatma say? Nothing, because he was too busy breaking a blood vessel in his eye tossing his cookies after a long binge one night at Samaldas College. In short, we don’t need no stinking doctors—if the best minds in history drank beer, it’s good enough for us.

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Vintage Pulp | Politique Diabolique May 7 2013
THE GUNMAN IN HIS LABYRINTH
Police Gazette gets readers up to date with Ava Gardner but it’s their Castro story that leads someplace interesting.

Above are a couple of scans from an issue of The National Police Gazette published this month in 1963 with cover star Ava Gardner. Gardner had been living in Spain and hadn’t been in a movie in three years, but was about to appear in the historical war drama 55 Days at Peking with Charleton Heston and David Niven. The Gazette discusses how she’d gotten fed up with the U.S.—particularly the American press. She had been particularly annoyed by the rumor that she was involved with Sammy Davis, Jr., a story that took flight after several magazines published photos of the two holding hands. When asked why she was returning to Hollywood after being out of circulation for so long, Gardner, in typically blunt fashion, replied, “I need the money.”

Moving on, we’ve pointed out that the Gazette made a longstanding habit of using Adolf Hitler on its covers, but his wasn’t the only face that moved magazines. After Fidel Castro assumed leadership of Cuba, the Gazette regularly wrote scathing stories about him. We’ve already learned that he let Viet Cong killer squads train in Cuba, and that he planned to “arm southern Negroes” in order to foment revolution in the U.S. Well, now we learn he was also a rapist. Figures, right? He might have been supreme leader of an island filled with beautiful women, but people always want what they can’t have—in this case, a teenaged ship captain’s daughter named Lisa. Gazette writer Bob Hartford cranks up the melodrama:
 
Castro laughed drunkenly as he weaved his way into Lisa’s sitting room.
 
“Have you changed your mind, my pet?” he demanded.
 
“No,” replied the brave but frightened girl.
 
All Castro needs at that point is a Lacoste sweater and a fraternity paddle and his transformation into pure evil would be complete. But as fanciful as the story seems, Lisa really did exist. Her real name was Marita Lorenz and she was Castro’s live-in mistress for several months in 1959. While Lorenz herself never suggested she was ever raped by Castro, the two did have a falling out around the issue of her unplanned pregnancy, which was terminated in its sixth month. Lorenz later said the abortion was forced on her while she was drugged; Castro’s associates claim that she wanted it. Lorenz went on to join anti-Castro activists in the U.S., and on a fundraising visit with the deposed Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, became involved with him. She was still traveling to and from Cuba, and was recruited by the CIA for a Castro assassination attempt. But instead of poisoning his food, like she’d been instructed, she abandoned the plot, supposedly because she still felt strongly for him. Lorenz later wrote about all this in two autobiographies.
 
In 1977, Lorenz told the New York Daily News that she met Lee Harvey Oswald in autumn 1963 at a CIA safe house in Miami. She claimed she met him again weeks later along with a group of anti-Castro Cubans and they had Dallas street maps. We all know what happened next. Lorenz eventually testified about this before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, but her story was deemed unreliable. We suppose bouncing between two dictators and acting as a double agent will tend toraise a red flag with American congressmen, though these things have no bearing on whether she was telling the truth. It’s interesting though, isn’t it? You’d think that if a single man of his own accord assassinated another man the surrounding circumstances wouldn’t be so… labyrinthine. Yet lurking near the supposed black swan event of the Kennedy killing were double-agents like Lorenz, spooks like E. Howard Hunt, underworld figures like Eladio Ceferino del Valle and others. Just saying. In any case, we’ll have more from the Police Gazette and more on Fidel Castro soon.

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Vintage Pulp | Sex Files May 6 2013
SHOCK THE CASBAH
Give a monkey a banana and he’ll be your friend for life.


Rampage is not the most visual of tabloids, but the stories are colorful enough to make up for it. Of those, there’s one clear winner in this issue published today in 1973. It deals with a live sex show in “the Casbah,” presumably Morocco, in which a girl teaches a monkey oral sex by shoving a banana inside her vagina. Once the chimp reaches third base, it’s only a matter of time before he slides into home. We’ll let Rampage scribe Casey Coozer (uh, right) describe the climax, so to speak, of the story: “Now came the best part of the show. As the audience watched these monkeyshines on stage, a troupe of Casbah whores took each man in the crowd and [snip] started blowing us right there. The ape is balling, the chicks are blowing, and at the end it seemed like everyone came at the same time. God, the fucking noise was unbelievable. [snip] The whore onstage is going absolutely bananas, the monkey is screaming like he just woke up with a leopard’s jaws around his head, and everybody, I mean everybody, is creaming!”

Nothing much we can say about that except we never saw anything of the sort during our trip to Morocco. Would we actually want to see chimp on human sex? Well no, but we still have to wonder if it might be preferable to having a knife-scarred maniac utter these words to us: “You talk big now, but next time I see you I’m going to kill you.” Monkeysex or murder threat? Hmm, tough call. Elsewhere in Rampage there’s an amusing story about sexual promiscuity in the Greek isles, more bestial action involving a woman and a cocker spaniel (accompanied by a nice shot of British glamour model and actress Sylvia Bayo, aka Lucienne Camille), and the tale of a woman held captive in a Haitian sex camp. A while back we posted an issue of Rampage from 1969 and said the paper promised but didn’t deliver. Amazing what four years and a loosening of American obscenity laws can do. This Rampage delivers all the madness and mayhem anyone could want. Of course, another change from 1969 is that the paper now bears a slogan: “America’s top satire and humor weekly.” In other words, the stories are made up—as if the fact that they used Bayo to illustrate their shaggy dog story didn't give it away. But what imaginations these guys had. Ten scans below.


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Vintage Pulp Apr 30 2013
THE MIAMI CONNECTION
National Enquirer digs into JFK’s assassination.


Above is a cover of National Enquirer published today in 1967 with a headline informing readers that three days after identifying the photo of an alleged conspirator in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a man named Eladio Ceferino del Valle was found dead in Miami. Good thing his photo is from a distance, because he had been severely beaten and shot in the chest, and his head had been chopped open. He died the same day another alleged Kennedy conspirator named David Ferrie died in New Orleans. Ferrie had two suicide notes next to him, but a coroner ruled the cause of death to be a naturally occurring aneurysm.
 
Enquirer scribe Charles Golden perhaps goes off the rails a bit in trying to tie Kennedy’s assassination to Fidel Castro. He brands del Valle a Castro double agent who pretended to flee Cuba just before the revolution, but who was working for Fidel the entire time. Golden then claims that “key investigators feel Castro’s higher-ups used homosexuals for the assassination,” the significance being that David Ferrie was gay and del Valle was bi-sexual. Golden tosses off this doozy on page two of his story: Sexual deviation is taking on special importance as new evidence comes to light in the assassination probe.”
 
But even though Golden seems to let his own prejudices color his reporting, he does cite some interesting facts. Eladio del Valle’s and David Ferrie’s deaths occurred just as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who was investigating Kennedy’s assassination, was planning to drag them into his probe. Eladio del Valle died three days after being contacted by Garrison, and Ferrie’s death came just days before Garrison planned to arrest him as part of his investigation. If all this sounds like the plot of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, that’s because it basically is. But if any of it sounds untrue, it isn’t—it’s all public record. And if any of it sounds a bit crackpot, well, let’s just flip that term on its head, shall we?

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Vintage Pulp Apr 28 2013
IN THE LIMELIGHT
Tabloid journalism is all about finding the quickest way from A to B.

We’ve never seen this one before. It’s the American tabloid Limelight, published today in 1966, with someone who looks quite a bit like famed nude model Margaret Nolan on the cover posing as the title story’s jilted lover. This is an example of what we like to think of as editorial economy—i.e., the process of getting from raw material to end story in the most concise way possible. You have a photo of a woman wearing a man’s suit jacket and—voilà!—you write a story that the jacket is all she has left of a boyfriend who (this is where “tabloid” comes in) changed his sex. Ingenious, really. Actually, it might have been even more economical to write that the woman used to be a man and wears the jacket out of sadness and nostalgia: Woman Who Was Once Man Says Sex Change Was a Mistake. We have a feeling sleaze publisher nonpareil Myron Fass was behind this newspaper. Limelight is not listed anywhere as one of his publications, but we doubt those lists are complete. We’ll dig for more info. 

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Vintage Pulp Apr 22 2013
AN UNCENSORED WORLD
Uncensored takes readers from New York City to Spain to Havana in search of dirt.


Uncensored returns to Pulp Intl. for the first time in over a year with an issue published this month in 1955. The story of Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra’s tumultuous relationship (and the Spanish bullfighter who helped ruin it) has been covered numerous times, so no need to get into it again just now, but the photos are certainly worth a look. Uncensored shares other nice images as well. There’s Eartha Kitt (described as not much to look at “unlike such Negro beauties as Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne”), Sarita Montiel (who in Mexico was allegedly on the receiving end of a horsewhipping by Miguel Aleman’s jealous wife), and Marlene Dietrich (seen both onstage performing and offstage fulfilling a G.I.’s request for a kiss). The latter photo, from 1945, appeared in Life and many other magazines and remains one of the most famous Dietrich images. So Hollywood starlets take note: if you want millions of dollars in free publicity, no need to get arrested or leak nude photos—just kiss a fan.

Uncensored readers also meet Father Divine, (who we wrote about here), his alleged rival Prophet Jones, get a glimpse of nightlife in the so-called Bohemia of NYC’s Greenwich Village, and are introduced to “The World’s Hottest Hot Spot,” Havana, Cuba. Readers see photos of an actual drug deal taking place on some backstreet and learn that the city is “Babylonian bedlam,” where “one can buy marijuana, cocaine, forbidden wormwood liquor, illegal bon bons, or just oblivion.” There’s a photo of a woman outside a revolving repository at Havana’s Orfanato Beneficia (Beneficia Orphanage) where mothers could leave their unwanted babies as easily as mailing a postcard. The caption on the photo? “Despite its bawdiness, Havana has a heart.” A baby depository? Is it any wonder there was a revolution? Twenty-four scans below for your enjoyment.

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Vintage Pulp Apr 19 2013
HER NEW BEST FIEND
But with fiends like these who needs enemies?

National Star Chronicle generally didn’t bother with fluff or humor. That was for other tabloids. Chronicle’s thing was torture, gore, murder, rape, incest, and tragedy, and if you couldn’t handle it that was your own damn problem. On this cover from today in 1965 readers learn that a little girl forgave the fiend who imprisoned her and shot out her eye. Amazing, considering most people won’t even forgive the guy who forgot to hold the pickles last time they ordered a sub at Quizno’s. But is the story true? We doubt it. As always, we’re amazed people actually bought this tabloid, considering the competition offered nudity, celebrity gossip, and humor, but there’s no accounting for taste. More Chronicle to come.

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Featured Pulp
FEBRUARY 1933 BEAUTE MAGAZINE
JULY 1937 BEAUTES MAGAZINE
JANUARY 1935 PARIS MAGAZINE
JANUARY 1935 POUR LIRE A DEUX
OCTOBER 1929 PARIS PLAISIRS
NOVEMBER 1933 PARIS MAGAZINE
MAY 1935 PARIS MAGAZINE
History Rewind
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
May 25
1938—Alicante Is Bombed
During the Spanish Civil War, a squadron of Italian bombers sent by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini to support the insurgent Spanish Nationalists, bombs the town of Alicante, killing more than three-hundred people. Although less remembered internationally than the infamous Nazi bombing of Guernica the previous year, the death toll in Alicante is similar, if not higher.
1977—Star Wars Opens
George Lucas's sci-fi epic Star Wars premiers in the Unites States to rave reviews and packed movie houses. Produced on a budget of $11 million, the film goes on to earn $460 million in the U.S. and $337 million overseas, while spawning a franchise that would eventually earn billions and make Lucas a Hollywood icon.
May 24
1930—Amy Johnson Flies from England to Australia
English aviatrix Amy Johnson lands in Darwin, Northern Territory, becoming the first woman to fly from England to Australia. She had departed from Croydon on May 5 and flown 11,000 miles to complete the feat. Her storied career ends in January 1941 when, while flying a secret mission for Britain, she either bails out into the Thames estuary and drowns, or is mistakenly shot down by British fighter planes. The facts of her death remain clouded today.
May 23
1934—Bonnie and Clyde Are Shot To Death
Outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who traveled the central United States during the Great Depression robbing banks, stores and gas stations, are ambushed and shot to death in Louisiana by a posse of six law officers. Officially, the autopsy report lists seventeen separate entrance wounds on Barrow and twenty-six on Parker, including several head shots on each. So numerous are the bullet holes that an undertaker claims to have difficulty embalming the bodies because they won't hold the embalming fluid.

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