“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. 

This cover of National Enquirer appeared today in 1968 and features cover star Donna Douglas, who at the time was in the midst of a nine-year run as Elly May Clampett on the smash American television series The Beverly Hillbillies. Despite the headline here, Douglas was never wild in either her portrayals or her personal life, although some sources seem to think that during the filming of 1966’s Frankie and Johnny she had an affair with co-star and noted freak Elvis Presley. That’s untrue, as far as we can tell, but since Frankie and Johnny turned out to be Douglas’ only starring role in cinema, maybe she should have hooked up with the Pelvis—he went on to star in many more smash movies opposite such forgettables as Dodie Marshall and Annette Day.

This National Enquirer published today in 1967 features cover star Hedy Lemarr promoting her 1967 autobiography Ecstasy and Me: My Life As a Woman. The title is taken from the 1933 Czech film Ekstase, in which she appeared nude, shocking audiences of the time. Enquirer describes her book as shocking, as well, and indeed there are some surprising revelations. An example: while still living in her native Austria, she ran away from her husband and hid in an empty room in a brothel. A man came into the room and she had sex with him rather than let her husband find her. Lamarr claims to have had hundreds of lovers, male and female, and depicts herself variously as both a nymphomaniac and a kleptomaniac. But all of this comes with a caveat—her ghostwriter, the notorious Leo Guild, wrote various celeb biographies that played fast and loose with the truth. That said, even Guild was not imaginative enough to have fabricated everything in Ecstasy and Me.

As a side note, we should mention that Lamarr, along with George Anthiel, invented and patented an advanced frequency switching system that they envisioned for usage guiding torpedoes (the constant switching of frequencies would make them difficult to jam, thus more likely to reach their targets). Now, if you read other websites, most of them praise Lamarr as a military genius, and it’s true she had a highly developed technical mind, but the system she helped pioneer actually grew out of an idea to remotely control player pianos. In fact, the guidance system used eighty-eight frequencies, which is of course the number of keys on a standard piano. We think knowing that she applied a musical idea to military usage gives a somewhat fuller appreciation of how ingenious she actually was, rather than just picturing her as some kind of Oppenheimer type.

Ingenious or not, the U.S. Navy declined to purchase Lamarr and Anthiel’s system, but the moment the patent expired two decades later the military was all over it. We can’t discern with our limited resources whether this sudden decision to use the technology was coincidental or not, but certainly the result was that Lamarr got screwed out of probably millions of dollars. Or perhaps even more, when you consider that her and Anthiel’s frequency switching is closely related to that used today for global positioning systems and Bluetooth. Since Lamarr claimed in her book to have blown through more than thirty million dollars in her life, the fun and creative ways she might have spent a massive military windfall makes the mind boggle. We’ll get back to Hedy Lamarr a bit later, because she certainly deserves a more detailed treatment. 

In January 1967, the German news magazine Stern (Star) wrote that deceased U.S. president John F. Kennedy had suffered from a potentially fatal disease. The above cover of National Enquirer from today in 1967 echoes that famous Stern story. The illness JFK had is known as Addison’s disease, and is a withering of the adrenal glands. Rumors about the sickness sprang up early in Kennedy’s political career, but he denied having any health problems, thinking (correctly, we can assume) that Americans would not elect a sick man to the presidency.

In the end, Kennedy managed the disease by taking cortisone, though one side effect was puffiness in his face. The disease had historical side effects, as well. After JFK’s death, his family requested that the autopsy report be kept secret, and to confuse matters even more, the coroner destroyed the examination notes. This created yet another layer of mystery around Kennedy's death. Both Jackie Kennedy and Robert Kennedy documentably believed JFK had been murdered as the result of a conspiracy, which means that in their desire for privacy they perhaps rashly made a decision that hampered their later search for the truth.

But perhaps not. It's very possible the autopsy notes would not have settled any issues around the assassination. We say this because, though a majority of Americans have always doubted the lone gunman theory (the first survey taken just weeks after the assassination showed that 52% believed there was a conspiracy), the Kennedy narrative has always favored a minority of backers of the official story. That favoritism is not deliberate, in our opinion. It's more a matter of journalistic laziness. We discussed that a while back, so click over that post to see an example of what we mean. We'll have more from National Enquirer and much more on JFK later.

Above is a National Enquirer published today in 1965 with Italian actress and sex symbol Sophia Loren on the cover and her husband, film producer Carlo Ponti, in the upper left inset. Ponti claims he married the perfect female animal, which is interesting considering the marriage was not recognized in his home country. The problem was Ponti had married Giuliana Fiastri back in 1946, and divorce was illegal in Italy. Undeterred, he and Loren were married by proxy in Mexico in 1957 (i.e., two lawyers stood in for the couple, who were still back in Italy). When Pope John XXIII found out, he threatened Ponti and Loren with excommunication, eternal damnation, and so forth. This drama actually played out across the reigns of two Popes, because John XXIII exited from the scene via stomach cancer in 1963, giving way to Paul VI, who reiterated the whole excommunication/flaming pit/blood rain thing. In the end, Ponti and Loren became French citizens and—voilà—married in France. It was quite a lot of trouble to go through for a spouse, so you’d expect nothing less than for Ponti to call Loren a perfect female. But was she? Well, we only have visual evidence. See below and decide for yourself. 

This National Enquirer from today in 1964 tells readers the story of Marie Tippit, the widow of J.D. Tippit, the Dallas police officer shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald the morning of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In the year since, Mrs. Tippit had received a lot of money. The cover text might make you think she's referring to life insurance benefits, but actually she’s talking about cash donated to her by sympathetic Americans. The total was $647,579, which would be about $5 million in today’s money. $25,000 of that came from Abraham Zapruder, the man who filmed JFK’s assassination. The amount he gave was almost 15% of what he received for selling the film. If you find it hard to imagine this non-cynical outpouring of generosity today, join the club. But thanks to National Enquirer, we’re reminded of an earlier America, and given an interesting historical footnote to the events of that day in Dallas. 

National Enquirer published today, 1964. The headline is unsettling, but even worse, if it’s the same guy from this tabloid published just a month later, then everyone missed his clear cry for help. 

Above is a cover of National Examiner from today, 1972. Examiner was so downmarket it didn’t even bother with a masthead, and despite its colorful cover managed a mere twenty pages of bare bones content, none of it interesting, and little of it accompanied by the striking art so often seen in ’70s tabloids. We have no way of knowing whether this is the same Examiner that survives today, because its pages don’t list a publishing company, but if it is, that means it was owned by National Enquirer publisher Generoso Pope, Jr., and sold off to American Media, Inc. when he died in 1988. We have a few more scans below, and another Examiner cover here. 

Even the artistically indifferent National Enquirer sometimes hit on a great cover, and this effort of theirs from fifty years ago today fits the bill. True, all they did was print a handout photo of sex goddess Mamie Van Doren, but sometimes the smartest move is to change nothing. We are scouring the planet for a high resolution version of this image, so far to no avail. But we'll keep looking.