Elizabeth Taylor nude! Those sneaks at Whisper raised the hopes of millions of readers who bought this March 1965 issue, but inside revealed that the whited-out silhouette on the cover with Richard Burton is in reality a wooden statue of Taylor made to promote her role in The Sandpiper. It was to be unveiled at a party aboard the Queen Mary, but producer Joseph E. Levine connived a way for the sculpture to be stowed below decks so his star Carroll Baker wouldn’t be upstaged. In the end, nobody at the party saw the Taylor statue and Carroll Baker—once again wearing that amazing dress, by the way—ruled the day.

Above are two Japanese door length posters for 1971’s Les pétroleuses, aka Frenchie King, which starred French sex symbol Brigitte Bardot and Italian counterpart Claudia Cardinale in what was considered a dream paring. Bardot had said that Cardinale was the one actress in the world that was destined to replace her. She even made a quip of it, saying, “After B.B. comes C.C., no?” Both were well established by the time they appeared in Les pétroleuses, both thirty something, both looking good. Many of the reviews we read said that Cardinale was not the same class of beauty as Bardot. Gotta say, we think those people are blind. Cardinale has an earthy, smoldering thing going on that works particularly well in this sweaty, shot-in-Spain production. She and Bardot play rivals in the old west, with B.B. as the leader of a gang of nomadic girl bandits, and C.C. as a townie with a quartet of virile brothers. Bardot ends up gaining ownership of a local ranch, but Cardinale learns that there’s a fortune in oil under the land. Scheming, slapstick and shootouts ensue, as they ride a lot, glare a lot, Cardinale sings a terrible song, Bardot bares her opposite-of-terrible backside, and the two have a bodice ripping fistfight. But dream pairing or no, the movie received tepid reviews, and deservedly so. It’s intermittently funny but mostly clumsy. On the other hand, we could look at Cardinale all day, so that’s something.

The West German magazine Hamburg-Hollywood-Paris willingly surrenders to the one-woman French army known as Brigitte Bardot. Oh, the humanity. A big chunk of the issue—number 14, 1960—is devoted to her. Nothing much to do but let the images speak for themselves. 

We ran across some issues of a German language magazine called Das Schweizer, which means “The Swiss,” and indeed, the publication originates from Switzerland. We thought only the French, Germans and Dutch produced magazines during the 1940s and 1950s that combined celebrity, photography, fine art, and eroticism. We stand corrected. Above is the cover of Das Schweizer #139, circa 1954, with Yvonne De Carlo, and interior pages featuring Brigitte Bardot looking especially hot, plus Joan Collins, Romy Schneider and others. You also get the great art of Paul Peter, and just for good measure we pulled a couple of scans from another Das Schweizer that had the cover and most of the photo pages cut out, but two more Peter art pieces left behind. Apparently whoever mutilated that issue didn’t see the value in his work. Hah! Philistines. Anyway, since we can’t make a decent post of that one, we added its Peters below (that just sounds wrong, doesn't it?). We can’t tell you anything about Paul Peter because his name is pretty much ungoogleable, if that’s even a word, however we’ll keep digging for facts on him and eventually something will turn up. It always does. 

Are they pulp? Well, not exactly, but they’re fun! Below are several cut-out dolls of various celebs of the 1970s. These used to appear regularly in Swedish magazines, where they were called klippdockan or klipprutan, and pretty much any personality you can imagine was reproduced at some point or another. Below are David Bowie, Françoise Hardy, Christina Lindberg, Donovan, Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin. 

The National Police Gazette reveals on this cover from today in 1960 that Hollywood said no to Brigitte Bardot. The accompanying story quotes an unnamed independent producer, who says that the problem is that Bardot's deficient acting skills limited her to sex kitten roles, but American censorship meant Hollywood couldn't make those kinds of movies. He adds that, at $150,000 salary per project, Bardot is too expensive for Hollywood. A second “well-informed source” tells Gazette that studios are afraid of Bardot’s unbridled sexuality, claiming that her image is “so sexually devastating, that [Hollywood] quivers in fear before the slight, curvaceous French girl with the moist, pouted lips.” So, basically two of three reasons Police Gazette gives for Bardot not featuring in Hollywood films have to do with the influence of legions of American prudes. So maybe it wasn’t really a case of Hollywood saying no to Bardot as much as it was saying yes to sexual repressives. Bardot, it should be noted, simply continued on as the biggest star in the world. Elsewhere in this issue you get the plot-of-the-month attributed to Fidel Castro, tales of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, Jack Paar’s fears, and a nice portrait of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Scans of all that below, and more Gazette coming soon. 

Mid-century scandal rag Hush-Hush gets all riled up in this September 1961 issue featuring cover star Elizabeth Taylor. Inside, readers are treated to exposés of Taylor, Eddie Fisher, Brigitte Bardot, Sonny Liston, and Beverly Aadland, as well as shocking tales about goings-on in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Baumholder, Germany, but it’s in the article on bodybuilding magazines that Hush-Hush truly gets out the knives. Because erotic publications openly catering to gay males would have caused a legal firestorm in the early 1960s, various enterprising capitalists published gay content in the guise of bodybuilding magazines, using health and fitness as a cover for imagery designed to sexually titillate. Hush-Hush journo Sidney Reed jumps all over this practice in his article, informing readers about the existence of these magazines in terms so abusive we’ve never seen their equivalent in print anywhere. He uses phrases like “sex sick creepsters” and “lunatic depravity”, and there are many more insults, so colorful, so vicious, and piled so high that it begins to feel like satire. But Reed is 100% serious, perhaps even obsessed. He finds, in one of the magazines he located, an ad for nude photographs of a fourteen-year-old boy, then tars all gay men with that brush, while of course sparing heterosexuals from the same treatment even though the trade in pre-pubescent girls was well-established and well-documented by that time. It’s worth pointing out once again that Hush-Hush wasn’t a fringe publication—it sold millions of copies a month. And so you get a sense of some very prevalent attitudes about homosexuality in the early ’60s. We have many scans below, and more issues of Hush-Hush coming later. 

The French magazine V is probably one of the most visually pleasing and collectible periodicals ever published. The early issues featured photo-illustrations of movie stars, but starting in the 1950s V began to showcase provocative pin-up style cover paintings from a succession of three artists—Georges Pichard, René Caille and Jean David. All were geniuses; none are well known outside collectors circles and France, where they lived and worked. But popularity is never a true measure of value—Pichard, Caille and David Vs can go at auction for thirty, forty, or even fifty dollars. We've seen them listed for even more, though those went unsold as far as we can tell. Vs with Pierre-Laurent Brenot covers are also highly regarded. This one, V Sélections 57, with a Pichard cover and Brigitte Bardot, Christine Carère and Marilyn Monroe inside, dates from winter 1957. We have a couple more of these we’ll share in their entirety as soon as we get in the mood to do the scanning. Meantime see some 1940s V covers here and here. 

This lovely Japanese promo poster is for Brigitte Bardot’s screwball romantic comedy Cette sacrée gamine, also known as Mam’zelle Pigalle and The Naughty Girl. Bardot plays a precocious young woman whose forger father must flee the cops and leaves her in the care of a nightclub performer. She promptly wrecks her new guardian’s engagement and generally turns his life into a shambles, but irresistibly so, which of course leads to love. It’s probably Bardot’s cutest movie, which means it’s well worth a viewing. It premiered in Japan today in 1958.