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Pulp International - Hollywoodland
Hollywoodland Feb 9 2023
OPENING SENTENCE
This is your cell, Mitchum. You'll survive fine. Miss Leeds, yours is in the other wing and I'm sorry to say it's the last anyone'll ever hear of you.


In this press photo, a Los Angeles police deputy named Marjorie Kellog, in black, escorts Lila Leeds and Robert Mitchum to jail after their sentencing for marijuana related charges today in 1949. They'd been arrested the previous August after a police sting operation and been sentenced to a year behind bars, but the judge suspended the sentence and gave them two years probation, sixty days of which were to take place in Los Angeles County Jail. Mitchum had fretted that his acting career was over, but he emerged from his stint in lock-up more popular than ever, and law enforcement axe grinders learned an important lesson—arresting stars in hopes of ruining their careers risked making them appealing as rebels.

Leeds, however, wasn't a star. She was a fledgeling actress who'd accumulated nine film appearances, six of them uncredited. It's possible to argue that, had she been a big star her career would have been severely damaged because she was a woman. But on the other hand Lana Turner went through the scandal of her daughter's killing of Johnny Stompanato, was exposed as a mobster's mistress, yet her subsequent movie was one of her biggest hits. But Turner was seen by the public as someone led astray by a bad man. So in the end it's difficult to say if Leeds got a raw deal because she was a woman. Probably. It's usually a safe bet. We can only say for sure that with no earnings record and no power, her dreams of stardom died. 

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Hollywoodland Feb 6 2023
THE LIVING IS EASY
Sommer photos paint a portrait of relaxation.

These photos show German actress Elke Sommer painting in the yard of her Los Angeles home. They're obviously staged, because we don't think she'd choose a hard tile surface to sit on while doing her work, but the shots are nice. We don't have a date on them, but if we had to guess we'd say they're from the late 1960s. Sommer began painting when she was young, and continued throughout her film career and afterward. She once told an interviewer, “I am really closest to me being myself with paint. I paint anyplace. When I am at home I paint outside, in the nude, for up to eight hours at a stretch. I paint with acrylics, so when I'm finished I just jump in the pool.” In 1984 Sommer published a book titled Painting with Elke Sommer, and had a television show of the same title during the 1980s, on which she wore clothes, sadly. So, what does Elke paint? See an example below.

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Hollywoodland | The Naked City Jan 20 2023
DEAFENINGLY QUIET
It was the Whisper heard from coast to coast.

Above is a cover of the tabloid Whisper from January 1965, with actress Carroll Baker, convicted murderer Winston Moseley, and New York judge J. Irwin Shapiro starring on the front. But before we get into the magazine, we want to share the good news that our longtime scanning problems are fixed. We didn't get a new scanner, though. We got a new computer—a Mac Studio with plenty under the hood. It's quicker than the old Mac, but it also changed the functionality of the scanning interface. The whole process runs differently, and is about three times faster now. So you'll be seeing more magazines in the future.

Turning back to Whisper, Winston Moseley—who editors call William for some reason—was America's villain of the moment for the murder of Catherine Genovese, who he stalked, stabbed with a hunting knife, then found again where she had taken refuge in a building, and finished her off. Additionally, Moseley was a necrophiliac. He raped his victims—of which there were three total—post-mortem. Of the trio of victims Genovese is the one that's remembered today because her murder sparked a national reckoning about the relationship between citizens and the police, as well as life in big cities, because the press reported that thirty-eight people had seen the crime happening but had done nothing.

As it turned out, that number was wildly inaccurate, but never let the truth get in the way of perfectly cooked, juicy tabloid outrage. A quote appeared in nearly every story about the murder: “I didn't want to get involved.” New York City—where the crime occurred—and other metropolitan centers were criticized as uncaring places. Author Harlan Ellison, who at that time was writing urban crime fiction, weighed in, saying, “not one of [the witnesses] made the slightest effort to save her, to scream at the killer, or even to call the police.” Peak outrage was achieved by New York State Supreme Court Justice J. Irwin Shapiro when he expressed a desire to execute Moseley himself. In the end, Moseley wasn't executed at all. He died in prison in 2016 at age eighty-one.

Elsewhere in Whisper, you'll notice that the magazine is—unsurprisingly, given the time period and nature of the publication—antagonistic toward gay men, as demonstrated by the panel with the blaring text: “Who's Queer Asked the Peer? But what is a surprise is that later in the issue the editors run a detailed piece on transvestites and transsexuals, and the approach is very different than the contempt shown toward homosexuality. As we've pointed out many times before, mid-century tabloids had a deep interest in trans issues. The story is titled, “A Doctor Answers What Everyone Wants To Know About Sex Change Operations.” The tone is as follows:

The condition he referred to was the common plight of all male transsexuals. Physically he was a man, but emotionally and personality-wise he was a woman, a condition that made it difficult to find successful employment, and to live at all happily. Fortunately, in his case, he had a lawyer and a wise judge who were able to help him in his wish to go to Europe for a sex change operation so that his body could be brought into greater harmony with his mind, and enable him to work and live with a degree of happiness he had never known before.

That's respectful—if not even compassionate—for a 1965 publication considered lowbrow by sophisticated readers. Is it a paradox that the magazine could be so evil toward gay men, yet so civil toward transsexuals? We think so, and we'd love to know the thought process behind it. While we're puzzling that out, you may want to move on to Whisper's slate of celebrity news. Everyone from Romy Schneider to Ernest Borgnine get their due exposure. We've uploaded the magazine's “Behind the Whispers” feature, so you can get the dish on a few Hollywood stars. Please enjoy.
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Hollywoodland Jan 1 2023
MAKING HAYWORTH NEWS
When you're a movie star you can't simply have a bad day.


When you're a celebrity, even in professional decline or retirement, you can always make news with a public misstep. Such was the case with Rita Hayworth when she was helped from a TWA flight after it landed in London today in 1976. Hayworth had caused a disruption by directing an angry outburst at a flight attendant. The press was on hand at the airport, so Hayworth was photographed from arrival terminal to limousine looking as tired as if she'd walked instead of flown to London.

It was bad day for Hayworth, but it was only the latest in a long run of them. She had been deeply affected by both her brothers dying within a week in March 1974, had been drinking heavily since then, and in fact was allegedly intoxicated on the flight. When news of the disturbance hit the papers she took a public relations beating and, of course, back then the press wasn't circumspect about attacking a woman's looks.

It wasn't until several years later that Hayworth was diagnosed with the still largely unknown ailment Alzheimer's disease, which helped explain her increasingly erratic behavior. Aging is difficult, there's little doubt. Aging as a sex symbol must be incredibly hard. Some would say growing old in public is back payment for fame, fortune, and undeserved adoration, and that may be so, but to us it seems like a mighty high price. We have a few more photos below.
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Hollywoodland Dec 26 2022
OUT IN AFRICA
Everybody, listen up! Grace is having a nap, so I guess the whole production has to grind to a halt until she's done.


Online you see this photo captioned something like, “Grace Kelly has a nap in Africa on the set of the 1953 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie Mogambo." It's clear, though, that the shot is staged. See all those footprints around Kelly's mattress? Grips, best boys, production assistants, and other species of cinematic wildlife have been constantly trekking through there lugging heavy gear. If she were really in need of a catnap we feel she'd be off to the side, somewhere under shelter from the brutal African sun, for example in a tent reserved for her, so we suspect she and the good folks at MGM chose this spot for a quick photo op. But it's a fun shot. In Africa or out of it, Kelly was hella hot. 

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Hollywoodland Dec 5 2022
HOLIER THAN THOU
Fragility goes back a long, long way.


This famous image appears around the internet, but usually in blurry condition. Today we have a nice, sharp version. It was made by Hollywood photographer Whitey Shafer to satirize the Hays Code censorship regime that came to the motion picture industry like an unwanted guest, and determined what could be shown on movie screens. A reactionary minority believed Americans were too fragile of character to see certain depictions in cinema. Schafer, in his image, chose ten of those no-nos and squeezed them all into one frame. He needed to overlay the machine gun, but it looks like he composed the other nine elements at the same time.

Many websites give the date on this as 1934. The Hays Code began strict enforcement that year, but Schafer didn't create his photographic provocation until 1940. He unveiled it at the inaugural Hollywood Studios Still Show in 1941, which had been put together by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize outstanding still photography. Shafer was threatened with a $2,000 fine, which we suspect didn't surprise him. He escaped the penalty, but the photo was banned until turning up in a newspaper decades later—posthumously, since Schafer died in 1951. But his image is remembered. It isn't just razor sharp commentary. It's an amazing creation. We'd be interested to know who the model is, but that information, unfortunately, seems lost.
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Hollywoodland Nov 15 2022
CANDY GIRL
Fresh from the factory.


The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair brought eighty nations, almost fifty corporations, and a hundred restaurants together to occupy one hundred and forty pavilions built across more than six hundred acres in the borough of Queens. To say that sounds fun is an understatement. We'd love to have been there, especially to see the New York City of that era, but nobody has invented a time machine yet. If we could have gone to the Fair, though, we'd have made sure to run across U.S. actress, model, and singer Joi Lansing, above, who made a publicity appearance as the Queen of Candy outside the Chunky Candy Pavilion.

By the fall of 1964, which is when she posed for the photo, she was a longtime celebrity who had never quite made it big. That's easy to guess, because a big star wouldn't have been slogging through New York's autumn rain trying drum up publicity for herself and a candy brand. Lansing had started in movies in 1947 when she was eighteen, and bounced between cinema and television, with many stops in the pages of tabloids. She never quite became a movie star, but she did forge a major television presence, and was eventually honored for her contributions to that medium by receiving a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

We find her interesting because she had an unconventional sort of beauty, and she seems to pop up all the time in the materials we accumulate. Sadly, she died of cancer in 1972 when she was only forty-three. We have a fair amount of material on her in the website, including some interesting bikini shots here made when she was thirty-seven but looking twenty-five, an interesting paperback cover she appeared on here, a movie poster for one of her starring roles here, and a brilliant promo image showing her at her very best here.

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Hollywoodland Nov 11 2022
JIMMY IN THE MIDDLE
Life sure was nice before the prudes came along.


This promo photo was made for the 1933 pre-Code musical Footlight Parade, which, as the image suggests, contained some fairly racy scenes. James Cagney is in the center here, with Ruby Keeler at left, two actresses we can't identify, and Lorraine Marshall at right. Movies made in 1933 and before are generally considered pre-Code, but the Hays Code censorship regime actually was created in increments beginning in 1927 before reaching something like final form in 1930. Few people had any interest in enforcing it right away, so it didn't become rigid until 1934, at which point it successfully shackled cinematic expression for thirty years, until Hollywood was driven to imitate the envelope pushing films coming out of Europe. The Code covered anything and everything: drugs, profanity, ridicule of the clergy, defeat of the law, and more, but of course it was primarily designed to block sexual material, which means that in practical terms, Cagney never got to be the center of a sandwich like this in a photo again. 

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Hollywoodland Oct 28 2022
EXIT LINE
Tell, my agent *cough* that in my next film *gurgle* I want to play the lead.


William Bendix was one of the top character actors of his generation. When you hear the term “character actor,” it means he died a lot and almost never got the girl, but if it's possible to reach the heights of Hollywood by always finishing anywhere from second to last onscreen, Bendix achieved it by appearing in more than sixty films during his career. Above, he makes an early exit from the 1952 adventure Macao. The silver lining is he got to die in Robert Mitchum's arms, for which millions envied him. You can read a bit about Macao here.

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Hollywoodland Sep 10 2022
OLD NEWS
Geez. They're all about me again.


Philippe Halsman shot this sly commentary on fame featuring one of the most famous women in America, Marilyn Monroe, as his subject. She checks out a newspaper, and next to her you can see machines for the afternoon tabloids Mirror, Daily News, and Herald-Express, the latter of which is a publication we've mined often for historical crime photos. In that issue the front page says, “Fight Grows to Keep Chaplin Out of U.S.,” a headline that dates the photo to sometime in late 1952. Why was there a fight? People had been led to believe Chaplin was a communist theat to America for saying things like he wanted every person to have a roof over their heads. He wouldn't return to the U.S. for twenty years. So, the tabloids weren't all about Marilyn every issue. Just mostly. Even gossips need a little variety.

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History Rewind
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
March 29
1951—The Rosenbergs Are Convicted of Espionage
Americans Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage as a result of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. While declassified documents seem to confirm Julius Rosenberg's role as a spy, Ethel Rosenberg's involvement is still a matter of dispute. Both Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953.
March 28
1910—First Seaplane Takes Flight
Frenchman Henri Fabre, who had studied airplane and propeller designs and had also patented a system of flotation devices, accomplishes the first take-off from water at Martinque, France, in a plane he called Le Canard, or "the duck."
1953—Jim Thorpe Dies
American athlete Jim Thorpe, who was one of the most prolific sportsmen ever and won Olympic gold medals in the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon, played American football at the collegiate and professional levels, and also played professional baseball and basketball, dies of a heart attack.
March 27
1958—Khrushchev Becomes Premier
Nikita Khrushchev becomes premier of the Soviet Union. During his time in power he is responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, and presides over the rise of the early Soviet space program, but his many policy failures lead to him being deposed in October 1964. After his removal he is pensioned off and lives quietly the rest of his life, eventually dying of heart disease in 1971.
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