 American singer gets booked for special engagement Down Under. 
We love documenting the appropriations of celebrities by Horwitz Publications. This time the company snares U.S. nightingale Abbe Lane for its 1955 edition of Carter Brown's Swan Song for a Siren. You see the original photo they worked with below, which also features Lane's husband Xavier Cugat in the left background, erased by Horwitz's graphics guru and replaced by a man with a gun. The company would reprint this title in 1958 with Senta Berger on the cover, because once you get a taste for kidnapping celebrities you never stop. You can see that edition here. And if you want to see more examples of celebrity theft click the Horwitz keywords below.
 Crime magazine gives readers the gifts of death and mayhem. 
Produced by the J.B. Publishing Corp. of New York City, Reward was a true crime magazine, another imprint designed to slake the American public's thirst for death and mayhem. Inside this May 1954 issue the editors offer up mafia hits, Hollywood suicides, domestic murder, plus some cheesecake to soothe readers' frazzled nerves, and more. The cover features a posed photo of actress Lili Dawn, who was starring at the time in a film noir called Violated. It turned out to be her only film. In fact, it turned out to be the only film ever acted in by top billed co-star William Holland, as well as supporting cast members Vicki Carlson, Fred Lambert, William Mishkin, and Jason Niles. It must have been some kind of spectacularly bad movie to cut short all those careers, but we haven't watched it. It's available for the moment on YouTube, though, and we may just take a gander later. Because Reward is a pocket sized magazine the page scans are easily readable, so rather than comment further we'll let you have a look yourself.                             
 Abbe Lane wiggles it just a little bit. 
When we saw this National Enquirer cover our first thought was: “She was famous for wiggling?” We did a search and found that famed singer Abbe Lane was indeed known for her shimmy, which inflamed imaginations to dangerous levels back in February 1962, when this Enquirer hit newsstands. Check out this bit from the Gil Brewer pulp thiller Wild: She turned and walked into the house, through the doors. [snip] Her walk was lusciously lazy from behind, mindful of Abbe Lane crossing the platform for a bit of cha-cha-cha. So yes, she was famous for her moves. And thanks to the magic of technology we found footage of her in action. It's pretty sedate by today's standards, but still worth watching. We have more nice Lane photos you can see, if you're interested. Full disclosure: they don't wiggle, but they still look nice.
 Yesterday seems so very far away. 
American singer Abbe Lane, née Abigail Francine Lassman, lurks in shadow and light in this very noirish photo made during the 1950s when she was at the height of her fame. She became a star while only twenty or so and is still around today at the tender age of eighty-three. We recently shared several fun album covers featuring her and her husband Xavier Cugat and you can see those here.
 Musically talented but not particularly handsome? No worries. Put your hot wife on your album covers. Spanish bandleader Xavier Cugat and his wife, singer Abbe Lane, were one of the most famous musical couples in the world during the 1950s and early 1960s, performing live together and releasing albums. These four Cugat album sleeves featuring Lane as the cover model evoke pulp fiction and film noir rather nicely, we think. Also, they kinda make us want to dance.
 Who were the people behind this magazine? They don't offer many clues. 
Top Secret fashioned itself a top tier tabloid, but one thing we’ve never liked about it is an inferior printing process that makes its interior images look like cheap dot matrix. We can’t tell you who to blame for that, though, because Top Secret was so secret it didn’t bother with masthead credits. At least not in the issues we’ve bought. Writers get by-lines, but editors and publishers do not so much as give a hint of their identities. Hell, our issues don’t even have publication dates, but we've discerned this one is from November 1964. Well, the backers might have been incognito but the methods were nothing unusual. One writer digs up dirt on Xavier Cugat and Abbe Lane, another tells the story of mass killer Jose Rosario Ramirez Camacho, another contributor delves into Tuesday Weld’s personal life, and a U.S. “heroin epidemic” is pinned on Chinese plotting to undermine democracy. Of special note, there’s a photo of Pamela Green (panel 18), whose weird transformation into Princess Sonmar-Harriks we shared a while back. Also, the photo of French actress Astrid Caron (in the bikini) looks familiar. That’s because we saw it in a different tabloid—this issue of Inside Story—unattributed and used for a piece about suntan lotions. It shows how these magazines used handout photos for whatever purposes they saw fit. Also, Top Secret publishes an open letter to America entitled A Homosexual Pleads—Why Don’t You Leave Us Alone! You’d be forgiven for expecting something ridiculous from a mid-century tabloid, but this piece credited to an anonymous writer is smart and serious. It enumerates the injustices gay men face, from housing discrimination to military disenfranchisement, and feels like it could have been written yesterday. Scans below.                      
 Everybody who was anybody was there. 
This photo made today in 1954 shows American singer/actress Abbe Lane posing outside Ciro’s nightclub in West Hollywood, California. Lane had begun in show business as a child actress, but became world famous after she married bandleader Xavier Cugat and began fronting his group as a singer. Although this is a famous photo, one you can find elsewhere on the internet, we thought it was worth posting anyway, not just because of Lane, but because supper clubs like Ciro’s really don’t exist anymore. Ciro’s, which by the way was unrelated to the many famous Ciro’s that existed in Europe during the Jazz Age, from its opening in 1940 to its closing in 1957 was a favorite spot of screen personalities, singers, producers, and writers, a place where the night’s meet-ups and trysts were reported in the next day’s gossip columns. Below you see Lane and Cugat, Charlie Chaplin with Paulette Goddard, Lane onstage fronting Cugat’s rumba band, Cary Grant with Betsy Drake, Lucille Ball with Desi Arnaz, Jr., and others.          
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1933—Capone Sentenced to Prison
Chicago organized crime boss Al Capone is convicted of income tax evasion after all other attempts to tie him to an assortment of crimes, from the mass murder of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre to widespread violations of the Volstead Act, fail. He is sentenced to eleven years in federal prison and, cut off from the outside world while on Alcatraz Island, his power is finally broken. 1964—China Detonates Nuke
At the Lop Nur test site located between the Taklamakan and Kuruktag deserts, the People's Republic of China detonates its first nuclear weapon, codenamed 596 after the month of June 1959, which is when the program was initiated. 1996—Handgun Ban in the UK
In response to a mass shooting in Dunblane, Scotland that kills 16 children, the British Conservative government announces a law to ban all handguns, with the exception .22 caliber target pistols. When Labor takes power several months later, they extend the ban to all handguns. 1945—Laval Executed
Pierre Laval, who was the premier of Vichy, France, which had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, is shot by a firing squad for treason. In subsequent years it emerges that Laval may have considered himself a patriot whose goal was to publicly submit to the Germans while doing everything possible behind the scenes to thwart them. In at least one respect he may have succeeded: fifty percent of French Jews survived the war, whereas in other territories about ninety percent perished. 1966—Black Panthers Form
In the U.S., in Oakland, California, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale form the Black Panther political party. The Panthers are active in American politics throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but eventually legal troubles combined with a schism over the direction of the party lead to its dissolution.
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