The old tabloids really savaged politicians. Liberals and conservatives alike got their turn and in this issue of Confidential from March 1967, Ronald Reagan gets roasted. The story by Roger Baldwin brands Reagan an “ex-pinko,” whispers about his “hushed-up divorce,” notes that a portion of his following is a “nut fringe,” and mentions “race-hate rumors” that surround him. There’s a line in all caps: Ronald Reagan Elected President. It’s a neat little trick, because he’d just been sworn in as Governor of California two months earlier, but the writer is actually referencing Reagan’s 1946 election to the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild, and using that event to hint at his 1968 White House ambitions (which, by the way, are derided as “a passion for power”). We won’t comment on the veracity of Baldwin’s claims, but his portrayal of Reagan does make us think of something that isn’t mentioned about Hollywood actors very often, if ever. Consider—none of them would make even a fraction of the money they do without their strong trade union, which means they owe what they have to the liberal ideal of worker solidarity. And yet many actors (and for that matter many athletes, also made fantastically rich largely thanks to unionization) are conservatives. It’s a bit of a paradox, don’t you think? In any case, Reagan survived Confidential’s scathing attack and made that all-caps line—Ronald Reagan Elected President—come true, not in 1968, but twelve years later.

This photo shows a woman named Ruby M. Reed at the Long Beach, California police station taking a sobriety test. This was probably the most important test she ever took, because not only was she suspected of driving while intoxicated, but she had also struck and killed a pedestrian. Reed failed the test and was booked on charges of felony drunk driving and manslaughter. That was 29 February 1952. By the way, if you don’t know the reference in our subhead, then watch one of the funniest scenes ever put on celluloid here. Photo courtesy of the USC digital archives. 

Above is a photo of Manhattan, New York City, in the year 1947, looking from Battery Park toward midtown. Here you see everything—the Staten Island Ferry Building at bottom, Wall Street to the right, the 59th Street Bridge crossing Welfare Island at upper right, and in the hazy distance, the Empire State Building—at that time arguably America’s most recognized symbol. In the aftermath of a war that had destroyed Europe’s and Japan’s industrial capacity, the U.S. was the unquestioned power on the planet, with massive economic might, a military that had taken up permanent residence in dozens of countries, and a growing stock of nuclear weapons. Two years later the Soviets would detonate their first nuclear bomb, shaking the American edifice to its core. Meanwhile, all around the world, the seeds of change were taking root. Below is a look at the world as it was in 1947.

Firemen try to extinguish a blaze in Ballantyne’s Department Store in Christchurch, New Zealand.

American singer Lena Horne performs in Paris.

The hustle and bustle of Hong Kong, and the aftermath of the execution of Hisakazu Tanaka, who was the Japanese governor of occupied Hong Kong during World War II.

Sunbathers enjoy Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, and a military procession rumbles along Rua Catumbi.

Assorted Los Angeles Dodgers and manager Leo Durocher (shirtless in the foreground) relax at Havana, Cuba’s Estadio La Tropical, where they were holding spring training that year. Second photo, Cuban players for the Habana Leones celebrate the first home run hit at Havana’s newly built Estadio Latinoamericano.

Thousands of Muslims kneel toward Mecca during prayer time in Karachi, Pakistan.

A snarl of traffic near St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

The city hall of Cape Town, South Africa is lit up to celebrate the visit of the British Royal Family. Second photo, during the same South African trip, the royals are welcomed to Grahamstown.

A wrecked fighter plane rusts in front of Berlin’s burned and abandoned parliament building, the Reichstag. Second photo, a shot of ruins in Berlin’s Tiergarten quarter, near Rousseau Island.

A crowd in Tel Aviv celebrates a United Nations vote in favor of partitioning Palestine.

Men and bulls run through the streets of Pamplona, Spain during the yearly Festival of San Fermin.

Fog rolls across the Embarcadero in San Francisco; a worker descends from a tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Detectives study the body of a woman found murdered in Long Beach, California. Two P-51 Mustang fighters fly above Los Angeles.

Danish women from Snoghøj Gymnastics School practice in Odense.

Tens of thousands of protesters in Cairo demonstrate against the United Nations vote in favor of partitioning Palestine.

A beauty queen draped with a sash that reads “Modern 1947” is lifted high above the boardwalk in Coney Island, New York.

A woman in Barbados holds atop her head a basket filled with fibers meant for burning as fuel.

Mahatma Gandhi, his bald head barely visible at upper center, arrives through a large crowd for a prayer meeting on the Calcutta Maidan, India.

Major League Baseball player Jackie Robinson is hounded for autographs in the dugout during a Brooklyn Dodgers game.

Above is a random shot from the USC digital photo archive of a man hanged, either by his hand or others, from a Los Angeles underpass located at West First and North Figueroa. At left in the image you a see a detective using an official LAPD pokin’ stick to turn the corpse for a better look. Except it actually kind of looks like he’s sizing up a piñata purchased from the world’s least festive party supply store, and we can be sure that if he gave it a good whack it wasn’t candy that came out. Meanwhile, the cop below must be thinking that the detective’s exam might not be so hard to pass after all. This happened today in 1951. 

Today we’re back to the mid-century tabloid Exposed, with a cover from this month 1957 featuring Harry Belafonte, Joan Fontaine, Yul Brenner, Sid Caesar and Rita Hayworth. In the middle of the cover, you see a shot of a bruised and worried Marie McDonald. The photo was taken just after she was found on January 4 wandering in the desert near Indio, California. The tale soon spread across Hollywood like wildfire—that she had been abducted at gunpoint from her home the night of January 3 by two swarthy men who demanded her rings, her money, and her body. The last demand had a certain resonance. McDonald had gotten famous using the nickname “The Body.” The possibility that two swarthy men—one black and one Mexican—had defiled it was, in 1957, simply incendiary.

McDonald’s story began to fall apart immediately. She claimed rape, but doctors found no evidence. The note left by kidnappers at her house was made up of words clipped from newspapers found in the fireplace. To the cops, it seemed unlikely that kidnappers would, under the circumstances,take the time to make a note from paper and glue. They also learned that McDonald had made three phone calls during the time she was missing—none to police.

But McDonald was in a battered state, with scrapes, bruises, and two broken crowns. And she stuck to her story—nighttime, bedtime, a noise in her yard, a lean out the window, and a man lurking right there with a sawed-off. The noise had been made by a second man to draw her to the window. McDonald said the men took half an hour to make a note and discuss their plans, then bundled her into a car. About the phone calls, she said she barely managed to sneak to the phone and was disoriented and had no idea who to call. When the kidnappers heard the mounting news coverage about the crime, they decided she was “too hot” to keep and dumped her in the desert, sending her tumbling down a 25-foot embankment. And then there was the matter of the unidentified males who had called people close to McDonald with threats.

By January 5, McDonald’s ex-husband Harry Karl was offering up some juicy quotes to the press. Among them: “Marie is a very sick woman. I believe she left of her own accord.” He had received one of the calls from the kidnappers, but wasn’t buying it for a minute. He said, “She has done some very strange things in the past.” Police soon learned that the kidnap tale resembled the plot of Sylvia Tate's comedic novel The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown, which happened to be among the books McDonald had in her home. There was little doubt now in the minds of authorities that the whole situation was an elaborate hoax, but McDonald was a celebrity and so the police dutifully arrested suspects, continued investigating, and by January 17 sent the whole messy affair to a grand jury.

The day McDonald arrived to give her testimony she said, “I’m not looking forward to this. I don’t see how I can convince 19 men if I can’t convince the police.” She was right. The grand jury decided there wasn’t enough evidence of a crime and the matter was dropped. In retrospect, McDonald was probably lucky not to have been prosecuted herself. Perhaps the fact that she had retained Hollywood super lawyer Jerry Giesler helped her there. In any case, the Marie McDonald kidnapping went into the history books as yet another Hollywood conundrum.

McDonald’s career as a popular performer had been more or less finished for ten years, but she had remained on the fringes of the news thanks to her marriages—seven of them—and her many famous friends. The eventsof 1957 had put her front and center again, but it was the last time, until she died of an accidental Seconal overdose—or was it suicide?—in 1965. Two months later, her husband Donald F. Taylor, overdosed in the same room, using the same bottle of pills.

We found a few interesting shots from the USC Film Library and thought we’d share them. The four photo sequence above shows the aftermath of a suicide attempt in Santa Monica, California. The woman leapt from a well-known bluff in Palisades Park and landed on the Pacific Coast Highway about forty feet below. It was a serious attempt, as you can see from the woman’s battered state, but she survived. That was today, 1951. 

Above, an excellent pulp style promo poster for the West German thriller Der Satan lockt mit Liebe. The film’s title was translated literally into Satan Tempts with Love for some of its English language releases, but it became better known internationally as Devil’s Choice. In the former Yugoslavia, where this piece originates, it was called Davo mami s ljubavju. The movie starred the beautiful British actress Belinda Lee, who died almost exactly one year later in a horrific car accident while traveling from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Lee wasn’t driving. She and two other passengers had left that duty to Alet Nino Falenza, who was racing along at approximately 100 mph when the car suffered a blowout. It skidded nine-hundred feet before finally flipping, sending Lee, who had not worn a seat belt, sailing more than 60 feet from the wreck. She was the only fatality. The shot of her below dates from 1955. Der Satan lockt mit Liebe premiered in West Germany today in 1960. 

December 1949’s Front Page Detective offers up numerous tales of vice and murder. Each story begins with an art spread, some photographic and some hand drawn. We thought they were nice, so we posted several below. The playgirl referred to on the cover is Eddis Mae Reed, a Long Beach 40-year-old who was murdered in a shack on Seaside Avenue. The cover model, with her cigarette holder and fur wrap, is nothing like the Eddis Mae Reed described in the story. That Eddis Mae was a working class woman who liked the rough hewn men that populated Long Beach, back then a seemingly endless landscape of oil derricks. After she was found strangled, beaten, and with a bra stuffed down her throat, detectives questioned oilworkers, longshoremen, and dockworkers, as well as the bartenders and cooks in the waterfront saloons she frequented, before finally focusing their attention on a sailor named William Dryman. When police picked him up he confessed right away to killing Reed. His motive? Jealousy. Even though he was at sea for months at a time, and he knew Reed was not a one-man woman, he became obsessed with her. When he visited her shack unannounced one night he heard her entertaining another man and became furious. He didn’t confront her then, though. He came back the next day, when she was alone and unprotected. He told police: “I told her what I’d do if I caught her cheating. I’d do it all over again.” Front Page Detective attributes Reed’s death to “too many men.” Well, that’s one way to look at it. The judge, on the other hand, blamed the killer, not the victim, and sent William Dryman down for five-to-life.

This shot of an Aqua Maiden in the pool of L.A.’s Town House Hotel, circa 1951, certainly evokes an era that has vanished in the mists of time. For tens of millions of Americans the ’50s were nothing to romanticize, but for some it looked like this. The Town House was once considered one of the finest hotels in California, if not the entire U.S., and was well known not just for the Aqua Maidens paid to entertain guests with their watery frolicking, but for its bar/club The Zebra Room. The hotel and the surrounding neighborhood eventually fell into disrepair, and for a while the Town House was used as subsidized housing. Today the structure is on the National Register of Historic Buildings, but the Maidens and the famed Zebra Room are long gone. 

More from the USC digital photo archive. It looks like just another black Cadillac, but no, this one belonged to mobster par excellence Mickey Cohen and it’s parked outside the L.A. eatery Sherry’s, where he was the target an assassination attempt in July 1949. A couple of hired guns for rival mobster Jack Dragna shot Cohen in the shoulder (or arm, depending on the telling), fatally wounded one of his friends, and managed to hit journalist Florabel Muir in the ass with a non-penetrating ricochet. Having learned a lesson, Cohen had his next Cadillac bulletproofed (bombproofed as well, by some accounts). Below are a couple of photos of that car and the two-inch-thick glass that was installed (all well and good to be sealed inside an armored hotbox, unless your driver ate broccoli with dinner). Anyway, Cohen sold the Caddy in 1951 for $12,000, supposedly because it wasn’t street legal. But he never needed it, apparently—he died of natural causes in 1976.