This Inside Story from November 1963 features cover star Christine Keeler and the people in her life, while the left of the page has insets with Mamie Van Doren and Anthony Quinn. We’ve covered Keeler. Hers was one of the most flogged scandals of the 1960s, and Inside Story editors are well aware of that, which is why they claim to have new information. But it’s nothing new—just rehash on Keeler, a background on Czech call girl Maria Stella Novotny, who was well known by this time as one of Keeler’s colleagues, and standard red scare stuff about motel rooms set up with microphones and two-way mirrors. We will get back to Novotny, however—her tale offers some interesting twists and turns.

Inside Story shares stories about Mamie Van Doren, Jackie Gleason, Peter O’Toole, Ava Gardner and a nervous tailor who measured her for a suit, and how perfume makes men go wild. Editors also decry the injustice of a Harlem restaurant refusing to serve a white woman—this, mind you, during an era when literally hundreds of thousands of U.S. enclaves, from restaurants to schools to country clubs to sectors of the military, were whites-only. False equivalence, thy name is Inside Story. But interestingly, a subsequent piece about the world’s sexiest nightclubs tells readers chic Harlem bars are frequented by white Hollywood stars. And so it goes…

More fun sleaze today, a cover for Myron Kosloff’s 1964 opus Dial “P” for Pleasure, from First Niter, a subsidiary of Connoisseur Publications, with Eric Stanton cover art. You get sexual hijinks at the Hotel Park-Ritz, with swapping, bondage, lesbianism, and all the other fun things in life. This was, if you can believe, made into a porn movie of the same name in 1978 starring Susan Wong and Sharon Mitchell. 

Marta Kristen, who was born Birgit Annalisa Rusanen in Oslo, Norway, acted in a handful of movies and many television shows, but is best known for the sci-fi series Lost in Space. The show was young adult fare, and it had some of the same elements that make people nostalgic about the more mature series Star Trek—imaginative adventures set on far distant planets, wildly costumed aliens and monsters, and sound stage landscapes dotted with Styrofoam boulders and psychedelic plastic foliage. It premiered in 1965 but we caught it in reruns on cable when we were kids and it still warms the heart to think about the show. Marta Kristen probably warmed hearts and other body parts. She played Judy Robinson, the twenty-something elder daughter of the Robinson clan. This gravity-defying image shows her during the early 1960s.

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. 

Above, a fantastic poster for the 1969 western 100 Rifles with Raquel Welch superimposed over a stylized U.S. currency background. It was made for the film’s 1971 stint in what was then Czechoslovakia. Amazingly, we saw it listed on a foreign poster specialty site for $275.00, and then saw the exact same piece on a big retail site for $13.99. The lesson there is to shop wisely. See our recent write-up on 100 Rifles here.