FAROUKING AROUND

It's good to be the king—just don't overdo it.

Here’s a July 1962 issue of the tabloid Vice Squad, with several interesting items on the cover. Cadillac girls—self explanatory, very smooth ride. Sexual cripples—ditto, very rough going. Same with sex roulette (bad odds), perversion unlimited (sticky ends), and the phobic feature on “lesbians and homos.” But, aha, the story on Farouk’s $400,000 libel suit against a Miami cathouse operator is well worth detailing.

In brief, Ruth Barnes, a Miami madame who went by the nom de directeur Sherry, published an autobiography—ghost-written by veteran sleaze author Bob Tralins—called Pleasure Was My Business. The book named a raft of celebrity clients, including the ex-king of Egypt, Farouk I. Furthermore, it claimed he was not only a regular client, but that in 1952 he once snuck into the U.S. via some helpful port authority folks and rented Madame Sherry’s entire house for a night of fun and games. Quite an incendiary claim.

When Farouk learned he’d been outed, he flipped out and sued for libel, specifically claiming he was never in the U.S. at the time in question and he was outraged and infuriated and humiliated and so forth. The suit was not for $400,000 but rather $750,000, which was a fortune at the time, something in the area of five million in today’s dollars. Long story short—Farouk lost. Not only had he entered the U.S., he’d indeed entered Madame Sherry’s house and followed that up by entering a few of her employees.

The epilogue on this guy is so fascinating. Always a bit of a gourmand, he started life thin, and remained so through his heyday, but as middle age approached the eating caught up with him and by age forty he was tipping the scales at nearly three-hundred pounds. One night, after gorging himself as usual, he collapsed and died. He was 45. We’ve taken the lesson to heart here at Pulp Intl., and we’re cutting back on the fatty foods and getting more exercise. But we’re never, ever giving up the hookers so don’t even ask.     

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

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.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

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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