Above, a July 4 1965 issue of National Enquirer with Barbra Streisand on the cover and a lamentation inside on the hollowness of fame and fortune. Streisand was discovered singing in a Greenwich Village gay bar in 1960 and made her first appearance on television the next year on Jack Paar’s show. In 1964 she scored a Broadway hit playing Fanny Brice in the rags to riches musical Funny Girl, and her career took off from there. We don’t know if she ever actually claimed she was happier before her fame. If she did, all we can say is that into everyone’s life some rain must fall. And if that rain happens to be in the form of millions and millions of dollars, well, you just have to deal. 

Linda Darnell, once named one of the four most beautiful actresses in Hollywood, died in April 1965 after being critically burned in a fire. A few weeks later National Enquirer splashed a prescient quote they attributed to her across their front page. Did Darnell actually say this? Perhaps—an actress is interviewed quite a bit during her career and out of the thousands of answers she gave, a phrase like this could probably be plucked. In any case, part of being “the world’s liveliest paper” is exploiting death, and here Enquirer shows how to become top of the tabloid heap. See a stunning image of Darnell in her prime here, and read about her best movie here. 

Here’s an interesting National Enquirer cover from today in 1966, with a scrunched Ursula Andress and a quote from her husband John Derek, who never actually had a problem sharing her, or for that matter any of his spouses—at least artistically. He shot and published nude series of second wife Andress, third wife Linda Evans, and fourth wife Bo Derek, and directed Derek in the softcore bomb Bolero, which contained a sex scene that had filmgoers asking at the time if maybe Bo and her partner went beyond mere acting. John Derek is actually worthy of a separate discussion sometime, so maybe we’ll get back to him. He was also eerily consistent—Andress, Evans and Derek are virtually clones of one another. See below.

Above, an issue of National Enquirer from the week April 9 through 15, 1961, with British actress Joan Collins and a story about how she's supposedly crazy when she's in love. And if you're going to write about her being crazy—even if metaphorically—you might as well use the craziest looking shot of her you can find. And you wonder why celebrities hate these magazines. This was one of Collins' early appearances on the cover of a tabloid, but by no means her last—over the course of her forty-nine year career, she has appeared on thousands. 

Above are the cover and seven interior pages from a National Police Gazette published in March 1974, two years before the century-old magazine folded. In retrospect it’s easy to see one of the problems the Gazette was having: while the graphics, printing, photo quality and paper stock had all improved over the years, the magazine had lost its visual impact. At the time, editors must have thought they had made the magazine more attractive, but can the above cover really compare to this one, or this one, or this one? Successful competitors like National Enquirer featured little or no color, but the immediacy of their covers was hard to resist.

Part of the rationale behind the Gazette’s change may have had to do with its decades-long circulation decline, prompting them to do away with photo-illustrated covers in favor of cheaper promo shots. Or perhaps their longtime cover artisans simply aged and retired, taking their singular talents with them. Or perhaps new editors came aboard and decided to modernize—the default move of managers who have no aesthetic clue. Who knows? We just know that the results speak for themselves. But we’ll keep collecting even these late-period Gazettes because they’re useful in presenting a complete record of the publication. We’re going to go out a limb and say that we now have the largest compendium of Gazette pages on the internet. See them by clicking keywords “Police Gazette” below. 

Above is a National Enquirer from the week November 12—18, 1961, with cover star Sal Mineo. Mineo had been a major Hollywood presence who had scored two Academy Award nominations, one of which was for his bravura performance as Plato in Rebel without a Cause. But by 1961 the roles had dried up. The problem was his boyish appearance: he had made his reputation playing volatile youths, but now he was older and studios didn’t believe he could play other types of roles. At the time of the Enquirer cover, Mineo hadn’t worked for eighteen months. The article was simply another variation on the troubled youth theme, riffing on how Mineo had the world at his feet but had no real friends and nobody he could trust.

Soon it became clear Mineo did not have the world at his feet. He languished on the fringes of Hollywood, managing only eight roles—some of them mere bit parts—in the next ten years. However, by 1971 he had begun to make a mark on stage, starring in the gay-themed Fortune and Men’s Eyes with a young Don Johnson, and in 1976’s P.S. Your Cat Is Dead. Both plays were well-reviewed, for the most part, and Mineo seemed to have reached a point where he might vault back into the Hollywood mainstream. But his comeback was cut short when he was murdered behind his L.A. home in February 1976, stabbed in the heart. We looked  for a better version of the above shot of Mineo on a Vespa, to no avail. But we’ll keep our eyes open—it’s out there somewhere. 

What do you do when you’ve got no art? Make the type even bolder. We've only seen one other scandal sheet publish a cover completely devoid of art, but National Enquirer did it not just on this issue from today in 1965, but all the time. Which makes us wonder how in the hell they managed to eventually take over an entire tabloid marketplace that thrived on splashy cover art. As of now, we don’t know. Probably it was just luck—i.e., the other tabs simply collapsed as the market depressed and Enquirer, because it was cheaply run, was one of the last mags standing. But we’ll keep researching that question. 

National Enquirer from the week of July 24 to 30, 1960, with cover star Jean Seberg sporting the pixie look that helped make her an international phenomenon. Seberg is a person we haven’t written about yet, but it’s no stretch to say her story is one of the most interesting in cinema history, involving J. Edgar Hoover, the Black Panthers, and suicide. We’ll be spending a lot of time on her tragic story down the line. 

Cover of the National Enquirer published today in 1966, with a feature on Adam West, who was banking serious dollars on television’s campy superhero series Batman. By the way, we often see West referred to as the original Batman, but that isn’t true. This guy is the original Batman. 

National Enquirer published this week in 1964, with a story about Frank Sinatra and his anger issues. The Enquirer, in detailing instances when Sinatra lost his temper, had numerous examples from which to choose—he once beat Frederick Weisman with a telephone, dumped hot coffee on a casino manager, and shoved a woman through a plate glass window. Except for getting his front teeth knocked out on one occasion, Sinatra suffered no consequences from his behavior—he was simply too powerful, and nobody wanted to get on his bad side. Generoso Pope, Jr., who owned the Enquirer, was an exception. Sinatra hated the Enquirer, of course, and eventually sued it for libel. But that would be years later. The tales the paper published in this particular issue were all true.