An interesting report came out of Great Britain earlier today about John Profumo, the disgraced Secretary of State for War who resigned in 1963 after it emerged that he was having an affair with Christine Keeler, who also had sexual ties to a Russian intelligence officer. When authorities learned of the potential security threat, Profumo was interrogated, at which point he denied involvement with Keeler. When his denial was found to be false, he resigned amid the spiraling scandal.

Now MI5 files have revealed that Profumo had a previous affair with a Nazi spy who may have tried to blackmail him. The woman was named Gisela Klein, and she and Profumo met at Oxford University in 1936 when he was an undergrad. During World War II she began working for Nazi intelligence, and after the war was imprisoned as a spy. However the American in charge of her jail got her released and married her. As Gisela Winegard she maintained contact with Profumo after he entered politics, and he allegedly wrote letters to her on House of Commons stationery.

There's no evidence Profumo knew about his old flame's Nazi connections, but he may have learned of her blackmail schemes by becoming a target. In 1951 Winegard was living in Tangier with her husband when she applied for a visa to visit Britain and listed “Jack Profumo MP” as a reference.

Observers are speculating whether Profumo may have been under pressure to help push her application through. But the visa was eventually refused because of Winegard's Nazi past, with the head of British intelligence in Tangier also noting: “We have good reason to believe Mr. and Mrs. Winegard have recently engaged in blackmailing activities and now think it is possible their intended visit to the UK may be connected with this affair.”

Since we've mentioned the Profumo Affair several times, we found this to be an interesting footnote, especially in light of the ongoing U.S. Justice Department investigation into White House connections to Russian operatives. It's curious that Profumo's affairs would twice send him orbiting so close to spies of adversarial countries, but it doesn't seem as if the Klein/Winegard connection will produce any real smoking gun in terms of improper favors. As for Trump and Russia, that remains to be seen. You can read some previous posts on the infamous Profumo Affair here, here, and here.

We have a strong affinity for Morocco after our adventures there a few years ago, so any movie that references that strange and wonderful country is one we must seek out. The Woman from Tangier, starring Adele Jergens, is basically another attempt to catch Casablanca lightning in a bottle. The story deals with a dancer in trouble with the law trying to flee from Morocco to Gibraltar, but being sidetracked when the ship she's sailing on has its safe robbed and its purser murdered. Detective work follows, conducted by insurance investigator and love interest Stephen Dunne. Together he and Jergens tackle the mystery. We were unable to locate a copy of this, but as always we'll keep at it.

As a side note, we're fascinated by how outward looking Hollywood was during the 1940s. Though most of the productions never left Southern California, the action was set in dozens of countries. In the thriller/film noir category alone we've seen Gilda and Cornered (Argentina), The Shanghai Gesture, Bermuda Mystery, To Have and Have Not (Martinique), Temptation (Egypt), Sundown (Sénégal), Appointment in Honduras, and The Mask of Dimitrios (Turkey), not to mentions dozens of others set wholly or partly in France, England, Spain, and Mexico. The Woman from Tangier, then, was part of a well established trend. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1948. 

Above, top notch cover art by Jacques Thibésart, aka Mik, for Jo Claver’s Bombe atomique à Port-Lyautey, which was published by Éditions Le Globe and Éditions Le Trotteur in 1956. Claver was aka Georges Claver-Peyre, and this particular book is Cold War intrigue and romance set in Morocco. See more fine Thibésart here and here.

French actress Nathalie Delon was born in Oudja, Morocco as Francine Canovas, during the period when the North African country was occupied by France. She appeared in more than thirty films, including Bluebeard, Sex Shop, and Un sussurro nel buio, aka A Whisper in the Dark, and she also wrote, directed, and recorded music. We love this photo because not only was it shot in the world’s swankiest bar, but because it looks like it was photographed from the perspective of someone who got drunk and fell off his stool. No beer goggles here, though—Delon is a celebrated beauty. The shot is from 1977. 

On this Confidential from February 1965 the publishers give their cut-and-paste artists a month off and grace the cover with a simple portrait of Brigitte Bardot and her famed pout. Inside the editors air out her love life in a way that today would be called slut shaming—pretty much stock-in-trade for Confidential. The suggestion is she won’t come to the U.S. to act because she’s busy Morockin’ around the clock with Moroccan-born producer Bob Zaguri. Elsewhere in the issue you get Romy Schneider, Jean Harlow, Alain Delon, Peter O’Toole, love behind the Iron Curtain, and an outraged report on pharmaceutical companies marking up medicines 200%, 500%, even 7,000%. Yes, medicines cost too much in the U.S. even back then. But don’t take our word for it. Take Confidential’s—their story ends by declaring that drug companies have Americans by the balls and the only way to avoid the drug price racket is to not get sick.

But moving on, as we mentioned last week, we wanted to look at tabloid attitudes toward  gay culture, and this issue has two articles along those lines. The first involves gay cruises off the Florida coast, an activity Confidential informs readers was devised as a way to avoid Dade County vice cops. Once the boats were in international waters therewas no law, local or federal, which could be applied against shipboard activities. We’ll come back to that in a sec. The other story involves what Confidential describes as the middlesex—i.e. people who lack strong masculine or feminine characteristics. The story is concerned with this only as a social issue and makes no mention of physically intersex persons who genetically are neither male nor female.

The story on gay cruises is a bit more typical of mid-century tabloids—it’s just a takedown piece. Gay men are blithely described as “lavender lads,” “minces,” and other words we wouldn’t dare dirty our website with. The effusiveness of the magazine’s hateful and sneerful terminology suggestsjust how certain Confidential editors were that homosexuality was completely beyond the pale. And yet, nearly every issue harped on the subject, either directly or indirectly. For instance, here we get full reportage on a maritime cabaret show featuring drag queens, followed by detailed descriptions of music, dancing, and gambling. You’d almost think the writer Gaye Bird—nice, right?—was actually there.

Rampage is not the most visual of tabloids, but the stories are colorful enough to make up for it. Of those, there’s one clear winner in this issue published today in 1973. It deals with a live sex show in “the Casbah,” presumably Morocco, in which a girl teaches a monkey oral sex by shoving a banana inside her vagina. Once the chimp reaches third base, it’s only a matter of time before he slides into home. We’ll let Rampage scribe Casey Coozer (uh, right) describe the climax, so to speak, of the story: “Now came the best part of the show. As the audience watched these monkeyshines on stage, a troupe of Casbah whores took each man in the crowd and [snip] started blowing us right there. The ape is balling, the chicks are blowing, and at the end it seemed like everyone came at the same time. God, the fucking noise was unbelievable. [snip] The whore onstage is going absolutely bananas, the monkey is screaming like he just woke up with a leopard’s jaws around his head, and everybody, I mean everybody, is creaming!”

Nothing much we can say about that except we never saw anything of the sort during our trip to Morocco. Would we actually want to see chimp on human sex? Well no, but we still have to wonder if it might be preferable to having a knife-scarred maniac utter these words to us: “You talk big now, but next time I see you I’m going to kill you.” Monkeysex or murder threat? Hmm, tough call. Elsewhere in Rampage there’s an amusing story about sexual promiscuity in the Greek isles, more bestial action involving a woman and a cocker spaniel, and the tale of a woman held captive in a Haitian sex camp. A while back we posted an issue of Rampage from 1969 and said the paper promised but didn’t deliver. Amazing what four years and a loosening of American obscenity laws can do. This Rampage delivers all the madness and mayhem anyone could want. Of course, another change from 1969 is that the paper now bears a slogan: “America’s top satire and humor weekly.” In other words, the stories are made up. But what imaginations these guys had. Ten scans below.

We’re back. Morocco did not produce any pulp, sadly. Some countries just don’t do it. During our drive through Tangier, Assilah, Rabat, Marrakech, and Fes we did find an abundance of printed matter in several languages, but we saw nothing with illustrated covers that was specifically Moroccan or Arabic in style. Interestingly, our little remark about hoping North Africa didn’t hit back almost came true when a Marrakech hustler, infuriated when we refused to pay him forty euros (accepted all over Morocco) for “guiding” us to a riad, stripped down to his underwear to show us his many knife fighting scars, then promised that if we saw him again he would kill us. Possibly we provoked this reaction a bit when we told him and his four henchmen that the only way he was getting that much money out of us was if he could take it from us (actually, I’ll drop the collective “we” at this point and say that it was I, PSGP, who did the challenging, and BB was not there). To make matters worse, I actually took all my money out of my pocket and laid it on the ground—three hundred euros. They did not get the money. I felt proud of backing down this crowd of extortionists, but strangely, when I told PI-1, her reaction was: “Are you crazy? I let you out of my sight for one week and you challenge some thug in an alley to a fistfight?” Darling, it was a knife fight. His promise was to stab me. What can I say? Shit happens. Anyway, above are a few shots of random Marrakech market stalls where we found no books, but plenty of other amazing items. 

So turns out the Morocco thing is going to happen, which means we’ll probably be incommunicado for ten days. As we said, it’s a bit of a spontaneous deal—we have a hotel room in Tangier and that’s all. The rest we’ll improvise. Of course, we’ll be checking out the ancient souks, and perhaps we’ll find some pulpworthy items. If that happens, and we can find a way to post them, we’ll do it. Otherwise we’ll share our findings when we return. And all you Goodtime Weekly Calendar fans don’t worry. We’ll post the missing weeks as soon as we’re back.

Above are the covers of Jack Baynes’, aka Bertram B. Fowler’s, four Morocco Jones thrillers, which we’re posting for two reasons—one, we like them; two, it’s possible we may end up in Tangier on Friday. Total fly-by-night situation, which means we won’t know if it’s going to happen for another day, but if so it will bring about a brief hiatus here at Pulp Intl. Ten days max, if all goes according to plan. In any case, these covers are all by Barye Phillips and the books were published 1957-1959. And thanks to Bish’s Beat, where we got one of these images.