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.

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 (accompanied by a nice shot of British glamour model and actress Sylvia Bayo, aka Lucienne Camille), 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—as if the fact that they used Bayo to illustrate their shaggy dog story didn't give it away. But what imaginations these guys had. Ten scans below.

Sometimes we get a little lazy with our scanning. You already know that. A couple of years ago we shared the cover and two pages from an issue of The Lowdown and discussed the murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard. In that issue were some other interesting pages, particularly of German actress Elke Sommer. We had made her our very first femme fatale way back, so we always thought she was amazing, but we gained a new appreciation for her after watching her in Deadlier than the Male. Really, scientists should double-check that global warming didn’t start in 1967, because that’s how hot she is in that movie. Anyway, we realized The Lowdown’s photos of Sommer might not have appeared online before, so we decided to take care of that today. What are those naughty secrets about her, you ask? The Lowdown says she was a swinger before she got married.

And speaking of global warming, we also wanted to share a couple of pages in which The Lowdown tries to cast doubt on the cancer causing properties of cigarettes. Reading the article, we’d venture to say that the debate was at about the same place as that over global warming today. Here’s a choice line from the piece: “Air pollution by gasoline vehicles and industrial gasses are a more likely cause of lung cancer." Here'sanother one: “Blaming lung cancer on cigarettes may actually be retarding research into the real causes of the disease.” And what the heck, here’s one more: “Smoking shows no statistical link to the rates of still birth, abortion and birth complications.” So there you have it—conclusive proof. The alarmists were wrong then, and they’re wrong now.

We’re jumping right into our treasure trove of newly arrived tabloids today with a glance at this issue of The Lowdown published in March 1965. On the cover you see Jean Harlow, Carroll Baker, and Ed Sullivan. We talked about Baker recently and there she is in that crazy gown again (below)—or is she? No, on close examination this is yet another version of the dress. Clearly, the photo was shot on a different night than all the others because her hair and jewelry are different. But the actual dress also looks slightly different from both the Oleg Cassini and Pierre Balmain iterations. A reference in the story clears things up at least a little: “Transparency gowns are another of her big passions and she often wears them.” There you have it. Half naked was a fairly standard look for Carroll Baker. They just don’t make stars like they used to.

You might be curious what the article is about. On the cover the header reads: “The Night Carroll Baker Played a Call Girl,” but on the inside, it says: “The Night Carroll Baker Played a Harlot!” The story goes that she wanted to research her role as a prostitute in the movie Sylvia, so sheventured down to Tijuana, Mexico, toured a few brothels, and somehow disappeared alone for two hours: “We don’t know what happened in the house in Mexico or what sights she could have barged in on, but that is bouncy Miss Baker’s bit.” Lost in a Mexican whorehouse. The mind reels. Do we buy it? Not for a minute.

In the wee hours of the morning, Jean’s agent [Arthur] Landau received a frantic call from her asking that he come and get her immediately. When [they] got to Landau’s home, according to the agent, Jean stripped off her filmy wedding nightgown to reveal her beautiful body a mass of welts and bruises. “Her back and buttocks were covered with bruises. There was oneespecially bad bruise directly over her kidneys.” The implication here is because Harlow died several years later of kidney failure that she incurred the fatal damage during that wedding night beating. It gets weirder—brace yourselves. Landau goes to Paul Bern’s house, geared for a confrontation:

Paul had prepared himself for death by removing all his clothing and stood before the dressing room mirror. [snip] And, staring at his tormented body, he pulled the trigger. The nudity added a sexual element to his suicide that encouraged a spectrum of interpretations of his farewell note:

What was the comedy? Harlow said nothing to the press. But according to Arthur Landau, she told him Paul Bern had spent $200 on a device to increase his manhood. Wearing the contraption he had entered their bedroom intent on finally consummating their marriage. This hope was doomed from the start and the whole plan turned into such a tragic farce that both he and Jean finally gave way to hysterical laughter. That’s probably one of the sadder stories you’ll ever hear. Is it true? It appeared in a biography about Harlow, but we can never know. We can, however, at least answer the question posed by The Lowdown’s story header. No—Jean Harlow’s sex life was not hot at all.

The cheapie American tabloid National Informer warns on this cover from today in 1968 that too much sex can drive you insane. We would think the opposite is true, but the article quotes the eminent (or perhaps entirely fictional) Dr. Frans Hersen, head of the renowned (or fictional) American Sex Institute: We visited mental hospitals looking for sex problems related to a totally different study and suddenly noticed that many of the cases in the various institutions were all related to TOO MUCH SEX (emphasis theirs). So there you go—the science is clear. We have plenty more National Bulletin tucked away inside Pulp Intl. and you can see those by starting here.

There’s an interesting item making the rounds today, not strictly pulp, but worth a mention. Apparently a 1684 sex manual entitled Aristotle’s Compleat Master Piece will be offered for sale by Lyon and Turnbull auctioneers in Edinburgh, Scotland. The book, which was written in English and published there but banned until the 1960s, is part reference guide, part medical manual, and part anti-sex screed. For example, while the text offers suggestions for sexual enjoyment, and contains medical style drawings, it also warns couples what can happen if children are conceived in sin—namely that it would be born covered with hair or that Siamese twins would result. The author of the Compleat Master Piece is not known, but it's clear nothing Aristotle wrote made it into the text. Which could be considered a good thing. Great thinker and all, certainly smarter than we’ll ever be, but nobody’s perfect, and he whiffed badly a few times when it came to sex. Like for instance, he believed testicles were merely weights, and semen was produced from blood via body heat, with the best stuff coming from the area around the eyes. Given the choice, maybe we’ll take our sex advice from the anonymous hack. Auctioneers expect the book to fetch up to $650.

New Year’s Eve is always a time of revelry, partying, and cringeworthy attempts to turn friendly midnight kisses into full blown sexual escapades, so what better day of the year to share this vintage 1931 condom box from Sheik? The Sheik company was founded by a half-paralyzed German immigrant named Julius Schmid, who arrived in New York City in 1884 at age seventeen and whose first job was as a—wait for it—sausage maker. Inspired by stuffing meat into animal intestines, he used the same principle to create his first condoms.

At first he sold exclusively from his apartment, and because all contraception was illegal in the U.S. at the time, he billed his skins as “French goods and medicines.” They were incredibly popular, because childbirth was dangerous and forcing women to be baby factories had serious impacts on their longevity. By the time condoms were made legal in 1918 Schmid was uniquely positioned to dominate the market. He became the official condom supplier to the U.S. military, launched the Ramses condom brand, and by the 1930s was sitting on a multi-million dollar fortune.

We were surprised to see similar Sheik condom tins online with fifty-dollar asking prices, but then a little spin around the interwebs informed us that these prices are driven by collectors. Yes, people actually collect these things. Presumably, they make great conversation pieces. With this one you really get your money’s worth, because it contains one unused, still-in-its-wrapper Sheik condom, as reliable and efficacious as the day it was manufactured. Okay, maybe not.

Happy 2013, pulpsters. We have plenty of lovely surprises planned for the upcoming year, so please keep dropping by. Our traffic has just about recovered from the erasure of our database earlier this year by the domain-company-that-shall-not-be-named, and each and every one of your visits is truly appeciated. Tomorrow, assuming we aren't hung over, we'll get back to posting pages from the Goodtime Weekly Calendar, so look forward to that. Okay, guess that's it for now. Have fun tonight, be safe in every way, and remember, when it comes time for that midnight kiss, fortune favors the bold.

Pulp, sleaze, sexploitation, porn—they’re all related. Ginger Lynn Allen falls unambiguously into the latter category. She began her adult film career in 1983, dropping her last name and becoming simply Ginger Lynn. She quickly became the biggest star in porn. No surprise there—she was skinny, had a wild blonde mane perfect for the hair metal era, and was pretty, not just for porn, but in any milieu. In a donut shop. In a dorm room. In a convertible. On a beach. She fit everywhere. Her enthusiastic performances were a bonus. The above poster was made for 1984’s I Want It All. The movie didn’t make it to Japan until 1990, but the fact that it made it at all shows the scope of Ginger Lynn’s fame. She was born fifty years ago today.

The National Insider was a second tier tabloid, but even it sometimes got the facts correct. The headline on this cover is true—Diana Dors did have a two-way mirror in the bedroom ceiling of her house in Maidenhead, just outside London. Insider didn’t break the story. Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World had done that six years earlier and had shared all the tawdry details with British readers in a heavy breathing 12-week serial. But a good sex story can always be reprised, so Insider decided to dredge the details up again for American readers today in 1964.

At age nineteen Diana Dors had married a man named Dennis Hamilton, who turned out to be a paranoid, violent, and domineering louse who smacked her around and took over the management of her career. Professionally, he steered her away from serious drama into fluff cinema, while privately he initiated her into a life of sex parties and voyeurism. In addition to the two-way mirror in the bedroom ceiling, there were also assorted 8mm motion picture cameras scattered around the house so they could film their bacchanals and later review the action in their leisure time.

Hamilton, who you see with Dors at bottom on their wedding day, died in 1959. An autopsy revealed that he had been suffering from tertiary syphilis. This terrrible affliction may have contributed to his erratic behavior, but it’s equally possible that his type of bad simply came straight from the core, and his need to hurt and control was a character trait, not a symptom. In any case, The National Insider replayed all the tawdry details of the marriage, and the issue must have simply flown off the newsstands, because the paper ran with the story again the very next week, at right. The interest is understandable. Dors was glamorous and very beautiful, and tabloid readers love nothing more than seeing a goddess in the muck.

So there you have it. Whether Dennis Hamilton unleashed something in Diana Dors or she was always a voyeur party animal we don’t know. Or maybe it was a little of both, exacerbated by her reaching the height of fame as the prim fifties gave way to the swinging sixties. Interestingly, most of the information about the wild parties came from Dors herself at first. It wasn’t until after she died of cancer at age 52 that other people spoke up. But they were often kind with respect to Dors. That could be for many reasons, but we like to think of it this way: they must have had an awfully good time at those parties.

So, here’s the Robert Mitchum booklet cited in the July 1957 Hush-Hush in the above post. The article describes it as the lowest form of filth and its maker or makers as degenerate profiteers. Pretty hard to argue with that. Consider it a warning. It’s called Goof Butts, and it references Mitchum’s arrest for marijuana possession in 1948. Assuming the creators of the book wanted to strike while the iron was hot, so to speak, they probably published it around the same time. Enjoy.