Vintage Pulp | Sex Files May 13 2013
TOMORROW PEOPLE
1950s male fitness magazine features a surprising guest star.

Today we’re back to the bodybuilding publication Tomorrow’s Man. The content of TM was health focused, but in the same way that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is about swimwear. We’ll let a contemporary from the period say it: “When I was a closeted teenager Tomorrow’s Man was my favorite guilty pleasure magazine. I was so impressed that in 1965 I mentioned Tomorrow’s Man specifically in my first novel What They Did to the Kid.” That’s from award winning author Jack Fritscher. So you had a health and fitness publication that—for some customers—also served as a sexual outlet, exactly like Sports Illustrated. One difference here, though, is that underaged boys were often featured in TM’s pages, and that holds true for this issue as well, in which a fifteen-year-old boy named Steve Jano poses in the woods wearing a thong and holding a spear. Of course, back then there were nudist publications that published photos of entire families—including completely naked pre-pubescent girls—so there’s nothing going on with TM that heterosexuals weren’t doing too, probably long earlier and doubtless in far greater numbers. None of that is the reason we wanted to share this issue, but as we’ve said before, sometimes to get where we want we have to first address the elephant in the room. Okay, done. What actually struck us about this issue from May 1956 is the inclusion of Marilyn Monroe. We thought we’d seen Monroe everywhere, but no—here she is in a male bodybuilding publication. There seems to be no limit to her range. But we do think she needs to bump up the weight she’s lifting just a bit. You can check out more TM covers here.

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Vintage Pulp Apr 26 2013
FILMSKI HISTORY
Yugoslavia may be gone but Marilyn Monroe helps it be remembered.

Above, Marilyn Monroe on four covers of Filmski Vjesnik, or Film Journal, a Croatian language magazine from the former Yugoslavia. You may remember we showed you a great ex-yu Monroe film poster a couple of years ago. Items from Yugoslavia are highly collectible these days, so much so that a couple of these magazines were priced at $250.00. That’s a lot for a publication of any vintage, even ones from dissolved nations, but when it comes to nostalgia you can never predict what people will pay. We’ve seen similar items sell at that price. These date from 1958, 1957, 1953 and 1953, top to bottom.

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Vintage Pulp Apr 4 2013
TO BE LIKE MARILYN
Sounds good except for the dying young part.

Above is a rather nice poster for the Japanese comedy Monro no youna onna, aka A Woman Like Monroe, which was released in 1964. It was adapted from Funahashi Seiichi’s novel of the same name, directed by Minoru Shibuya, and starred Akemi Mari, Keiji Sada, and Chishû Ryû. We haven’t seen the film, but we gather it’s about a young woman who decides to become a model and deals with various conflicts related to that, including the pressure of whether to pose nude. Not much info, we know, but that’s all we got. We will say, though, that the movie is yet another indication of Marilyn Monroe’s unparalleled global fame. We often hear how popular she was, and the confirmation is everywhere in the form of her films, interviews, biographies, and thousands upon thousands of photos, yet we’re still capable of being surprised that her name was borrowed for the title of a Japanese novel, and subsequently a movie. And speaking of titles, while poking around online we found a frame of the film’s unusual main title sequence. See below. In the meantime we’ll try to locate a copy of Monro no youna onna and get back to you on it.

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Femmes Fatales Apr 4 2013
KNOWING LOOKS
There’s something about Marilyn.

And as long as we’re on the subject, here’s Marilyn Monroe, giving a nice array of expressions in three shots by acclaimed photographer Bob Beerman. These are from 1950.

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Vintage Pulp Mar 5 2013
MONROE SPOTTED
Looking at Marilyn from a French Point de Vue.

Above, a very cool polka-dotted cover of the French weekly Point de Vue, published 3 March 1956, with Marilyn Monroe. An interesting detail about the magazine is that it launched in March 1945, while World War II was still raging, and less than a month (if we have our history right) after the last of the German army had been driven from French territory. Maybe that level of advance planning explains why the magazine is still around today.

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Vintage Pulp Dec 11 2012
FINAL APPEARANCE
First time we’ve seen it, but hopefully not the last.


Above is the cover of an issue of Final, a publication we had never heard of before, but which is certainly big budget and hit the streets this month in 1950 courtesy of Gambit Publishing out of New York City. The cover star is model Joy Niven, who we also had never heard of, but who was photographed by famed Marilyn Monroe lensman Earl Leaf. This Final has taken a bit of wear over the last six decades, but kudos to the Denver Book Fair for acquiring it, sealing it so its deterioration stopped, and selling it to us cheap. Now we’ve carried it across an ocean, opened it, and exposed it to the elements, but all in an effort to scan it for posterity. For as we discussed before, if it isn’t digital and accessible to the masses, does it really exist at all?

Final is basically a tabloid, with a bit of crime, a bit of politics, a bit of sports, and a lot of celebrity dish. There are quite a few interesting items inside. In the Picture of the Month you see Canadian actor Rod Cameron with Portuguese model Angela Alves-Lico. They had just met earlier on the beach and, according to Final, she was driving home, and Cameronwas following in his car, when she had an auto accident. Our first thought, because they’d just met and “following her home” sounds a bit stalkerish to us, is that maybe she crashed because she was trying to get away from him. But perhaps not—Cameron and Alves-Lico soon married each other.
 
Later on you get an investigative report from inside Major League Baseball. What’s being investigated? Whether baseball is still prejudiced against Negroes. Short answer—yes. The reason Final was asking was because Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby and others had been playing in the Majors for a few years, prompting certain elements of the punditry to pronounce prejudice in baseball beaten. Of course that was ludicrous to even suggest, and Final’s report singles out the Philadelphia Phillies, St. Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds, and Chicago Cubs as clubs that would not under any circumstances employ a black baseballer. Of those, the Phillies held out longest, employing their first African American baseball player a full ten years after Jackie Robinson had arrived with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
 
Probably the highlight of the issue, for us at least, is an article asking nineteen prominent ministers if they think the use of a nuclear bomb by the U.S. in Korea could be justified. Of the nineteen, only three unambiguously say it would be wrong. Most of the others echo theopinion of the compassionate Rev. B. W. Hancock: “If our military feels that it would establish peace, then I would favor it.” Truly, Hancock must have spent a lot of time with his cock in his han to come up with that one. It makes us think of the famous Tacitus quote: “Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.” Or, “And where they make a desert, they call it peace.” Yes! Three years of high school Latin and we finally worked that shit into a post. Nice! Anyway, for various reasons, the U.S. never nuked Korea, so we hope the ministers weren’t too disappointed.
 
Elsewhere in Final you get Australian nudists, Parisian white slavers, professional seers, forced sterilization, Ava Gardner in the Mediterranean, Patrice Wymore and more. We don’t know if we’ll ever run across another issue of Final, but we will certainly be looking. And in the meantime this one will go back in its plastic and—who knows?—with a little luck, it might survive another sixty years. More scans below.

Update: Pamela writes in and says, "The best part about that Rod Cameron/Angela Alves-Lico story is that after ten years of marriage, Cameron divorced her. And married her mother. Yep...the woman on the right in that photo.

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Vintage Pulp Nov 8 2012
FULL COURT SUPPRESSED
Suppressed was in rare form in November 1955.


Above is the cover of the NYC based tabloid Suppressed from this month in 1955. This issue shows Suppressed in full bloom—bold, brash, fearless. Within the next two years a series of Hollywood lawsuits against scandal magazines would begin to make editors wary of being dragged into court for committing libel and slander, but 1955 was still the heyday for celeb bashing, and Supressed engaged in what might be best described as open warfare against film stars. Here’s a small sampling of some of the gut punches in this magazine:

Marlon Brando: silly.
 
Anita Ekberg: egocentric, a martyr.
 
Rita Gam: the all-time fizzle of 1955, a bad actress, with a figure that leaves something to be desired.
 
Judy Holliday: pudgy.
 
Marilyn Monroe: childishly immature, with an inferiority complex.
 
Debbie Reynolds: inane.
 
Gloria Vanderbilt: unable to think of anyone besides herself; has more neuroses than acting talents.
 
Robert Wagner: pompous, unintelligent.
 
We could go on, but you get the point. We’ve written many times on this website that nothing in media is truly new, and this is yet another example. Click over to any muckraking celebrity blog right now and you’d think journalism, as well as simple grammar, went down the toilet around the year 2000. But no, they were always in the toilet. Remember, Suppressed and its brethren Confidential, Whisper, On the QT, Hush-Hush, et.al., were not fringe. By itself Confidential was the biggest newsstand sellerin the U.S. These publications were powerful. Like modern American cable news, they assumed leading roles in making the public swallow false political memes—a commie under every bed, a black man in every bed, and the loose women who made it all possible.
 
But unlike today’s fawning cable news, Suppressed was generally scornful toward the rich. For instance, this issue discusses millionaires’ secret playgrounds while parking quotation marks around words like “classy,” and “the right people.” The actual playgrounds are described as “last stand” resorts, where the rich can feel safe from the rabble of middle class America. A few pages later the editors decry nepotism in Hollywood, naming a dozen famous actors and actresses who allegedly got their start because of mommy and daddy’s money. All in all, Suppressed is a head spinning mixture, and at the end of each issue a typical reader was probably convinced of one thing—the only good people in the world were those who were exactly like him.

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Hollywoodland | Vintage Pulp Nov 2 2012
GIVING HER ALL
Hush-Hush says they didn’t want her even in the nude, but is that true?


The story probably fueled ten million fantasies. Marilyn Monroe had stripped naked on the set of her last movie Something’s Got To Give. Monroe was eventually fired, the production was scrapped, and the footage was archived, but if it had been released, she would have been the first Hollywood actress to appear unclothed onscreen since the 1920s. It’s interesting, isn’t it, to reflect upon the effect a minority of prudes had on Hollywood? Because of them, Monroe’s unreleased scene, and Jayne Mansfield’s later nude scene in 1963’s Promises, Promises, merely brought American cinema back to where it had already been four decades earlier.

In the movie Monroe’s character is in a pool and calls up to a window where Dean Martin resides. Martin is married and Monroe is disrupting his life, so when he sees her, he tells her to get out of the water. She complies and Martin realizes she’s nude. It's a standard sex comedy oops moment. Monroe began the filming of the scene in a body stocking, then removed that and wore a flesh-colored bikini bottom. After the scene she posed for some publicity shots for several surprised photographers, and during that period removed even the bottoms. Some sources say she also shot the scene nude, but most say the bottoms came off afterward.
 
Hush-Hush was not the first magazine to break the story of Monroe’s peel down. Life had done that in June 1962, accompanied by a couple of titillating photos. By the time Hush-Hush told the tale Monroe was two months dead. The blurb MM—Even In The Nude They Didn’t Want Her wasn’t strictly true. The production company Twentieth Century Fox most certainly did want her. A hospital stint prior to production had caused her to shed twenty-five pounds, bringing her to a weight she had never reached in her adult life, despite exercise and dieting. The newly svelte Monroe looked good and Fox was getting her cheap—$100,000.
 
By most accounts, Monroe knew her career was in trouble. She was making one tenth one what Elizabeth Taylor was making at the time, and was determined to remind people they were still dealing with possibly the biggest sex symbol who had ever lived. She knew that if she stripped she might be falling into the same old trap of making it easy for people to not take her seriously, but if her career really was finished she was determined to go down swinging. In the end her stunt was irrelevant. Her health problems had made her thin, but they lingered and caused numerous costly production delays, causing Fox to finally give up and pull the plug. That was June 1962. Two months later she was gone.

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Vintage Pulp Aug 13 2012
CLEAR SKIES
Sometimes success comes from out of the blue.

Marilyn Monroe was still largely unknown when her image, along with the descriptive “Cloudless,” was selected for the cover of this Picture Post, an immensely popular British photo magazine published from 1938 to 1957. Monroe had scored only one credited film role so far—in Ladies of the Chorus—and went the entire next year without appearing on a movie screen. It was during this time, having gone back to full-time modeling, that she posed for her famous nude set. The next year she landed a part in the hit drama The Asphalt Jungle and she was on her way. This issue of Picture Post appeared today in 1949.

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Vintage Pulp Aug 1 2012
WHAT HE SAID
He really appreciates the wilder side of life.

Last year we posted the front and back covers of an issue of He magazine. As usual, it’s taken us longer than we intended, but today we’re back with more. The above cover appeared this month in 1953 and features a masked model shot at New York City’s annual Artists Equity Ball, which, according to He, pretty much turned into an orgy. We don’t know about that, but the photos do reveal a rather racy scene. You also get shots of (we think) Rocky Marciano knocking out someone or other and lightweight champ Jimmy Carter mashing some hapless opponent’s face, photos of Laurie Anders, Lili St. Cyr, Lilly Christine, Daniele Lamar, and other celebs of the day, an amazing still of Julie Newmar, aka Julie Newmeyer, dancing in Slaves of Babylon, plus a back cover featuring highly touted but ultimately underachieving actress Mara Corday. We don’t have to bother too much with a description today, because these digest-sized magazines have text that scans large enough to be read even on small computers. So read and enjoy. 

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Next Page
Featured Pulp
FEBRUARY 1933 BEAUTE MAGAZINE
JULY 1937 BEAUTES MAGAZINE
JANUARY 1935 PARIS MAGAZINE
JANUARY 1935 POUR LIRE A DEUX
OCTOBER 1929 PARIS PLAISIRS
NOVEMBER 1933 PARIS MAGAZINE
MAY 1935 PARIS MAGAZINE
History Rewind
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
May 23
1934—Bonnie and Clyde Are Shot To Death
Outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who traveled the central United States during the Great Depression robbing banks, stores and gas stations, are ambushed and shot to death in Louisiana by a posse of six law officers. Officially, the autopsy report lists seventeen separate entrance wounds on Barrow and twenty-six on Parker, including several head shots on each. So numerous are the bullet holes that an undertaker claims to have difficulty embalming the bodies because they won't hold the embalming fluid.
May 22
1942—Ted Williams Enlists
Baseball player Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox enlists in the United States Marine Corps, where he undergoes flight training and eventually serves as a flight instructor in Pensacola, Florida. The years he lost to World War II (and later another year to the Korean War) considerably diminished his career baseball statistics, but even so, he is indisputably one of greatest players in the history of the sport.
May 21
1924—Leopold and Loeb Murder Bobby Franks
Two wealthy University of Chicago students named Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr. murder 14-year-old Bobby Franks, motivated by no other reason than to prove their intellectual superiority by committing a perfect crime. But the duo are caught and sentenced to life in prison. Their crime becomes known as a "thrill killing", and their story later inspires various works of art, including the 1929 play Rope by Patrick Hamilton, and Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film of the same name.

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