The National Police Gazette hits all bases in this vibrant September 1959 issue, telling us about Billie Holiday’s heroin woes, Carmen Basilio’s feud with Sugar Ray Robinson, Mickey Mantle’s lack of respect from his employers, and Debbie Reynolds' divorce. But we’re focused on the John F. Kennedy article. Just fifty years ago Americans were suspicious enough of Catholics that Kennedy’s opponents were able to exploit his religion during his campaign for president. The far right Aryan Knights are quoted from a press release: The Romanist church organization insolently pretends to temporal authority over various governments and people of the world, including our own United States. The League goes on to claim that Rome wants Catholicism established as America’s state religion, and that those who refuse to conform will be prosecuted or destroyed. The leaders of a religion based across the sea want to take over America using the President as a Trojan Horse? Hmm. Why does that ring a bell? Merrill J. Fox, head of the Federal Party, said: “Kennedy is bound to carry his religion over into politics. He does it now, subconsciously. Kennedy wouldn’t be good for our country because he isn’t his own boss.” Interesting, no? These fearmongers are basically forgotten today, consigned to that copious dustbin of history which is home to some of the most odious loudmouths who ever emerged from the woodwork. But at the time these guys made a fine living. And when you revisit some of their laughable assertions, it becomes clear that green—not red, white and blue—was their focus. Put another way, you'll never go broke telling people what to be afraid of. With regard to our current era, there’s an old saying that applies: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

You’d never put blue, orange and yellow together in an outfit, but those colors coordinate nicely on this Uncensored from August 1971. The magazine had launched in 1953 and become a heavy hitter in the tabloid market by the end of the decade, but by now was running on fumes. However, that didn’t stop it from taking swipes at big targets—in this case England’s royal family in the person of Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon. Born Margaret Rose, the princess had a rebellious spirit and had married late—at age twenty-nine—to a commoner named Anthony Armstrong-Jones. Jones was a photographer, and if you’re going to slander a photographer, of course you call him a pornographer. There’s no evidence Jones—who became Lord Snowdon—was head of a smut ring, as Uncensored claims, but he did shoot his share of nudes, like the image of Gloria Higdon below, dating from 1959. His marriage to Princess Margaret was known to be shaky, and by the time the above cover appeared, the couple were leading separate lives. Margaret had a series of indiscreet affairs, and had unconfirmed liaisons with the likes of Mick Jagger, David Niven, and Peter Sellers. Snowdon, on the other hand, became a royal favorite, shooting official portraits for the Queen and other family members. Lord Snowdon and his wife finally divorced in 1978, and Princess Margaret died at the relatively early age of seventy-two after many years of drinking and consuming prescription drugs. Maybe we’ll revisit her at some point—her life reads like a melodrama. 

Hush-Hush magazine goes for broke in this issue from August 1963, offering up a slate of tales narrated in their usual breathless style. First, they tell us how Roddy McDowall took nude photographs of Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra and tried to sell them, but was thwarted when she “erupted like Mount Vesuvius”. They then demonstrate the limits of their imaginations by telling us that Italian singer Silvana Blasi reacted like “an uncontrollable Mount Vesuvius” when an African-American dancer was hired at the Folies Bergère. Two volcano similes in one issue is bad enough, but the same mountain? For investigative journalism, Hush-Hush shows us photographs of a dead Carole Landis and an unconscious Susan Hayward, and concludes that sleeping pills are bad. And finally, the magazine stokes the fires of paranoia with two stories: in the first, they explain how Fidel Castro plans to conquer America with heroin, which he’s growing with the help of two-thousand Chinese advisors; in the second, they reveal that the second wife of Dr. Sam Sheppard is a Nazi who plans to revive the Third Reich, and that she’s being helped by—you guessed it—Fidel Castro, who is somehow a communist and a Nazi. Neat trick that. As we’ve mentioned before, though these stories are laughable, people actually believed them, and believed them by the millions, as evidenced by Hush-Hush’s sales figures. The lesson is clear: the choice between popularity and truth is really no choice at all. 

This golden issue of Confidential from August 1961 contains an article about the one and only Coccinelle, who was a French transsexual performer, almost forgotten outside her home country, but who set the world on fire fifty years ago. Born as Jacques Charles Dufresnoy, he adopted the stage name Coccinelle—Ladybird—in 1953 when he debuted at the nightclub Chez Madame Arthur. At the outset of his career, Coccinelle was a male cross-dresser, but in 1958 he underwent sex change surgery in Morocco with spectacular results, and her re-emergence onto the stage as a woman made her world famous. Adopting the persona of blonde bombshells like Mansfield and Monroe, she was able to parlay her status into film roles, and was also featured in a few shockumentaries, but it was on the stage that she shone, performing at some of France’s most exclusive clubs, including Le Carrousel and Paris Olympia.

Her fame was a controversial subject of course, if not a public obsession, and her marriages caused epic scandals, but also prompted the French government to legalize unions between trans- gendered participants. By 1989 Coccinelle had moved to Marseilles, where she headlined at the Cabaret Spitz. She was still performing there in April 2006 when she had a stroke. She died after three months of hospitalization, but over forty years she had carved out a successful career, made a difference politically and, at the forefront of her own small sexual revolution, helped scores of people in her exact circumstances. We’ll look for more information on the fascinating Coccinelle at our usual French sources and perhaps report back on her later. 

National Enquirer from the week of July 24 to 30, 1960, with cover star Jean Seberg sporting the pixie look that helped make her an international phenomenon. Seberg is a person we haven’t written about yet, but it’s no stretch to say her story is one of the most interesting in cinema history, involving J. Edgar Hoover, the Black Panthers, and suicide. We’ll be spending a lot of time on her tragic story down the line. 

Above is another boxing-themed issue of The National Police Gazette, from July 1950, with cover stars Jack Dempsey, Joey Maxim, Eddie Cantor, Jane Russell, and Ralph Kiner, along with calendar girl Patty Fredericks. For the record, Joey Maxim was a good fighter, but his manager Jack Kearns was never able to make him into a new version of Jack Dempsey, as he promised. And Ralph Kiner, who had hit 50-plus homers in 1947 and 1949, did not break babe Ruth’s single season home run record, though he was not shy about discussing the possibility. 

Doubling up on the tabloids, we have an issue of the low-rent Candid Press, published yesterday in 1968. The centerpiece story about “Marlene” tells how she got pregnant after a year of having sex with her brother. Incest was a popular subject in the tabs around this time, but we’ve learned that there’s an inverse relationship between the number of exclamation marks in a story and its level of truthfulness. This sentence alone tells us Marlene is pure fiction: “Incest has reached a point where a pregnant girl does not know who fathered her baby—her boyfriend or her dad!” That's journalism, people. 

Above is an On the Q.T. from July 1962 with cover stars Elizabeth Taylor, Juliet Prowse and Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was about to marry Prowse, a South African dancer and actress who he had met while both were filming the musical Can-Can. There was just one snag, though—Sinatra didn’t want Prowse to work once they were wed. Asked about the subject, Prowse, pictured below, said that if Sinatra asked her to quit dancing she “would probably yield.” But she didn’t, and the marriage never happened. But what interests us more about this cover is the shot of Liz Taylor and her tracheotomy scar. During the filming of Cleopatra in 1961 she picked up a case of double pneumonia and a surgeon saved her life by inserting a breathing tube through an incision into her windpipe. Taylor’s physical ailments were already the stuff of legend by that point, but her troubles hadn’t even reached their peak yet—to date she has had more than one hundred surgeries. 

Cover of the National Enquirer published today in 1966, with a feature on Adam West, who was banking serious dollars on television’s campy superhero series Batman. By the way, we often see West referred to as the original Batman, but that isn’t true. This guy is the original Batman.