vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: Charles Copeland cover art for Charles Gorham’s Make Me an Offer. Originally published in 1948 as The Gilded Hearse, this Berkley edition is from 1959. The story is about an up-and-comer in NYC’s publishing industry, and whether he’ll lose his soul chasing success. Seems like we’ve read many such novels, but this one is pretty well regarded. Maybe we’ll check it out one day.
Above: a photo of U.S. actress Evelyn Keyes as she joins the Pulp Intl. gymnastics team along with Brigitte Bardot, Joey Heatherton, and others. When you consider that male stars during the mid-century era mainly just had to wear suits and look stern for their promo images, there’s social commentary to made about all the body wracking shots of actresses. But let’s not look that deep—it might spoil the fun. And we’re all about fun here. This photo is circa 1940. To see our entire gymnastics squad, click here and follow the other links.
This is an alternate poster for Laura Gemser’s sexploitation flick Emanuelle – Perché violenza alle donne?, known in English as Emanuelle Around the World. Officially, Gemser starred as Emanuelle in nine films, but she headlined others titled Emanuelle-something playing characters not named Emanuelle. For example, in Emmanuelle 2: La antivirgen, Sylvia Kristel played Emanuelle, while Gemser was a masseuse. Another example: 1976’s Velluto nero was known as Black Emmanuelle, White Emmanuelle in the U.S., but Gemser played a character named Laura. Some people count these among Gemser’s Emanuelle films. The point is, the number can vary depending on who you ask. There were a lot—that’s all we know.
We discussed Emanuelle – Perché violenza alle donne? last year, so we want to pivot to the art today. This poster is similar to the other one, but the secondary elements are different. It looks a bit like the work of Sandro Symeoni (we didn’t mention it previously, but we thought so then too). Symeoni painted in several distinct styles, but take a look here and here, and see if we don’t have a point. However, this will remain unattributed until someone with more expertise than us weighs in, which generally happens sooner or later. Below, Gemser weighs in first. Verdict: about a hundred pounds. Emanuelle – Perché violenza alle donne? premiered today in 1977.
Above: the cover and selected interior scans from Australia’s Adam magazine published this month in 1962, with art by Jack Waugh, Hart Amos, and others. As always, we have more from this publication to come.
We’re kind of into the famed golf trickster and b-movie actress Jeanne Carmen, so we’ve featured her a few times. Here she is once more, in a promo image riffing on the theme of bad luck. She does everything she can to court disaster: she’s under a ladder, with an open umbrella indoors, near a broken mirror, and a black cat (which she later ate). But we don’t think she brought bad luck on herself—she was already there, in terms of her acting career. She began in b-movies and basically stayed there, along the way making some real dogs (which she later ate). But you’ve got to love a woman who could drive a golf ball with a left-to-right fade. If we assume she posed for this photo the same year there was a Friday the 13th, which makes sense, then we can pinpoint it as from 1957. See another Carmen here.
We’re back to sleaze digests today with 1951’s They Call Her “Easy” by Gwen Lyons, which is from Ecstasy Novel Magazine with Al Rossi cover art, and posed photos in the interior, as you’ll see below. Lyons tells the story of young Betty Crockett, who leverages her incomparable beauty to make her way from her hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, where she’s a War Department stenographer, to New York City, where she becomes a shoe model, and later to Paris, where she lives on a rich man’s generosity. The rich man sees her more as a daughter, and is actually trying to set her up with his son, who he worries has been hanging with dirty French intellectuals too much and has forgotten family values. The book is light as can be, with only a minor conflict having to do with Betty posing for a few bikini photos only to see her head pasted onto a nude body and sold as a postcard. It costs her her job, but leads to all her later adventures, which struck us as a fair deal. The book was a fair deal too. Only ten dollars for something that may not have been great, but was certainly readable.
We last saw Bill Randall’s art on the cover of Ed Lacy’s 1951 novel The Woman Aroused, and mentioned then that he was better known as one of the major pin-up artists of his era. In case you haven’t sought out his copious work in that field, above and below we have for you one of his popular pin-up calendars. This one, Bill Randall’s Date Book, is from 1955 and is one of many he published during the 1950s bearing that title. In fact, we’ve seen Date Book calendars for every year of the decade except 1950, and he continued publishing them into the 1960s. All the while he painted illustrations for magazines such as Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, and Collier’s, and worked extensively in advertising. Hopefully we’ll revisit this top notch talent in the future.
Above: a 1954 Australian edition from Star Books for 1953’s excellent smalltown thriller Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams. This uncredited cover isn’t especially wonderful, but we love the scene. Does anyone actually go down a staircase in the story? Well… we wouldn’t want to spoil it, but yeah, someone goes down the stairs and rolls all the way into the living room. But don’t worry. It isn’t the main character. Read more about the book here.
The 16th annual Venice Film Festival ended today in 1955, and one of its highlights occurred when British star Diana Dors was paddled out into the Canalazzo, or Grand Canal, in one of the city’s gondolas. Dors didn’t have a film in competition, which was probably all the more reason to try and steal the show. To that end she wore a fur bikini and posed for eager photographers. The swimsuit was a bit diapery in terms of fit, but Dors, as you see, still looked fine. Next stop: free publicity.
We’ve featured Playboy model and aspiring but unfulfilled actress Marilyn Waltz, aka Margaret Scott, a few times, and here’s yet another striking photo, dating from 1959. Waltz has been good to us. We were the first to make the Waltz-Marilyn Walk connection a decade ago, and seven years ago we dug up a rare Technicolor lithograph of her published by C. Moss that was very good for website traffic. We have other shots of her, but there are many other obscure celebrities to upload, and only so much time. If we don’t see Waltz again, this was a good shot to go out on.
On the subject of traffic, the recent outages, 404 errors, and general lack of posting here the last two weeks has been because of a tricky refurbishment and rehosting. We first began having problems with our website back in 2011 and had been promising a revamp ever since. Hey, sometimes things don’t happen when you want them to. But it’s done now, save for formatting aspects of several hundred posts. We’ll have to deal with that bit by bit going forward. It will take some time. Probably several months to get everything in the same shape as Ms. Waltz.
We can’t complain, though. This has been one of our better years. Our many travels took us to Lisbon and Marrakech, we moved into a big old stone pile of a house on the warm Atlantic coast of Spain, our jobs have been smooth, we’ve maintained extremely active social lives, our best friends have visited, and thanks to a very good developer we got the new website we wanted. We’ve also purchased a lot of pulp matter and have many new items to scan and upload. V.2 of Pulp Intl. will hopefully function properly for some years, and, knock on wood, so will we. We’re happy to be back.
Fritz Pollard becomes the first African-American to play professional football for a major team, the Akron Pros. Though Pollard is forgotten today, famed sportswriter Walter Camp ranked him as “one of the greatest runners these eyes have ever seen.” In another barrier-breaking historical achievement, Pollard later became the co-head coach of the Pros, while still maintaining his roster position as running back.
Actress Peg Entwistle commits suicide by jumping from the letter “H” in the Hollywood sign. Her body lay in the ravine below for two days, until it was found by a detective and two radio car officers. She remained unidentified until her uncle connected the description and the initials “P.E.” on the suicide note in the newspapers with his niece’s two-day absence.
The plane built by Wilbur and Orville Wright, The Wright Flyer, crashes with Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge aboard as a passenger. The accident kills Selfridge, and he becomes the first airplane fatality in history.
Vanessa Williams becomes the first African American Miss America. She later loses her crown when lesbian-themed nude photographs of her are published by Penthouse magazine.
At 12:01 p.m. a bomb loaded into a horse-drawn wagon explodes in front of the J.P.Morgan building in New York City. 38 people are killed and 400 injured. Italian anarchists are thought to be the perpetrators, but after years of investigation no one is ever brought to justice.
Nikita Khrushchev becomes the first Soviet leader to visit the United States. The two week stay includes talks with U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, as well as a visit to a farm and a Hollywood movie set, and a tour of a “typical” American neighborhood, upper middle class Granada Hills, California.
