RED VELVET VARIATIONS

Monroe’s famous photo changes like a chameleon.

We’ve shown you a couple of Technicolor lithographs with overlays. Before we get off the subject for a while we want to show you one more item. This lithograph featuring Marilyn Monroe isn’t technically an overlay because the nightgown is printed on the paper, but it’s a smiliar idea. The image is best known as the centerfold of the debut issue of Playboy from December 1953, but it originally hit the market as part of a 1952 calendar, which means it went on sale in late 1951.

The only text featured on those original calendars was the title “Golden Dreams,” but the above litho has both a title and Monroe’s name because it was a re-release designed to take advantage of her growing fame. That fame had waned since a favorably received role in 1948’s Ladies of the Chorus, but had been rekindled when she admitted to newspapers in early 1953 that she had posed nude.

The Playboy centerfold further turbocharged her ascent, and the famous velvet photo kept appearing over and over again, mainly as calendar shots in 1955, 1956, and 1958, and at least three times with different types of obscuring overlays. In all those images, as well as the one above, Monroe is facing the opposite direction from the photo that appeared in Playboy. However, the Playboy centerfold is reversed from the original calendar shot, so it was Hugh Hefner who flip-flopped her. But from whichever direction you look at her, and in whatever garb she appears, Monroe is still exquisitely Monroe.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1933—Franklin Roosevelt Survives Assassination Attempt

In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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