 Hard facts and grim fairy tales. 
Above is the cover of a December 1963 Uncensored, with Ava Gardner, Richard Burton, Carroll Baker and Steve McQueen. Inside, you get them, plus Suzy Parker, Elizabeth Taylor, Gemel Abdel Nasser, Cary Grant, Marlon Brando, Ursula Andress, Sean Connery, and the great Jean Seberg. And as a bonus, you can learn about hypnotism. We did it, and it really works. *wiggling fingers* Yooou will retuuurn to our website eeeevery daaaay. See all of our Uncensored posts here.                          
 If you can’t be factual, at least be popular. 
Hush-Hush magazine goes for broke in this issue from August 1963, offering up a slate of tales narrated in their usual breathless style. First, they tell us how Roddy McDowall took nude photographs of Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra and tried to sell them, but was thwarted when she “erupted like Mount Vesuvius”. They then demonstrate the limits of their imaginations by telling us that Italian singer Silvana Blasi reacted like “an uncontrollable Mount Vesuvius” when an African-American dancer was hired at the Folies Bergère. Two volcano similes in one issue is bad enough, but the same mountain? For investigative journalism, Hush-Hush shows us photographs of a dead Carole Landis and an unconscious Susan Hayward, and concludes that sleeping pills are bad. And finally, the magazine stokes the fires of paranoia with two stories: in the first, they explain how Fidel Castro plans to conquer America with heroin, which he’s growing with the help of two-thousand Chinese advisors; in the second, they reveal that the second wife of Dr. Sam Sheppard is a Nazi who plans to revive the Third Reich, and that she’s being helped by—you guessed it—Fidel Castro, who is somehow a communist and a Nazi. Neat trick that. As we’ve mentioned before, though these stories are laughable, people actually believed them, and believed them by the millions, as evidenced by Hush-Hush’s sales figures. The lesson is clear: the choice between popularity and truth is really no choice at all.
                  
 Every scar tells a story. 
Above is an On the Q.T. from July 1962 with cover stars Elizabeth Taylor, Juliet Prowse and Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was about to marry Prowse, a South African dancer and actress who he had met while both were filming the musical Can-Can. There was just one snag, though—Sinatra didn’t want Prowse to work once they were wed. Asked about the subject, Prowse, pictured below, said that if Sinatra asked her to quit dancing she “would probably yield.” But she didn’t, and the marriage never happened. But what interests us more about this cover is the shot of Liz Taylor and her tracheotomy scar. During the filming of Cleopatra in 1961 she picked up a case of double pneumonia and a surgeon saved her life by inserting a breathing tube through an incision into her windpipe. Taylor’s physical ailments were already the stuff of legend by that point, but her troubles hadn’t even reached their peak yet—to date she has had more than one hundred surgeries.
 Police Gazette tries to draw correlation between meat and murder—of humans. 
The good folks at the National Police Gazette are in rare form on this December 1973 cover. For instance, the teaser “The Truth About Liz and Dick” carries a rather interesting double meaning. Taylor was always bashed in the tabloid press for being a bit of a harlot, however, leaving aside the obvious sexism of the sentiment, her reputation was probably undeserved. Her fifth husband Richard Burton pointed out, during the height of the furor over their affair and marriage, that Taylor had loved only five men in her life and married them all, whereas certain actresses who had never been married might as well have had yield signs outside their bedrooms to deal with all the traffic. We’re paraphrasing. He was just trying to point out the chasm between perception and reality. Of course, the press didn’t care about that and dutifully continued to portray Taylor as a dragon lady. But that isn’t the story that interests us—we’ve talked about Taylor here and here, and that’s enough for this year. Check the text in the blue box. The editors pair a teaser about some murders in the Houston, Texas area with one suggesting chemicals in meat can turn you gay. You’re probably gay before you eat the meat, but that point notwithstanding, this is one of the most insidious pieces of gay-bashing you’re ever likely to find, because the murders to which Gazette editors are referring are none other than the Corll/Brooks/Henley killings of 1970-1973. They became known simply as the Houston Mass Murders, and they were the worst serial killings in American history at the time. We mean worst in terms of numbers—twenty-seven confirmed dead. And the sexual nature of the crimes had anti-gay forces ready to take to the streets.  The story is stranger than anything we could invent—it involves a man, two boys, and an unholy pact between the three. When Elmer Wayne Henley met Dean Corll and David Brooks in 1970, Corll and Brooks had already killed nine Houston teenagers, including two boys Henley knew. Corll, pictured at left, was the leader, with the younger Brooks functioning as more of an assistant whose job was to lure attractive teenaged victims. Henley, who was fifteen at the time, was supposed to be just another victim, but Corll took a particular liking to him and recruited him. How he knew Henley would be amenable to the arrangement is one of those eternal mysteries. Henley could have simply appeased Corll long enough to get out of his clutches, then called the police. But in yet another validation of unerring serial killer instinct, Henley actually did join in the crimes. Like Brooks, his job was to lure fresh victims. For every boy he delivered, Corll paid two-hundred dollars. The arrangement worked fine until one night in mid-1973, when Henley brought his girlfriend and a male acquaintance to Corll’s house. We’re a little fuzzy on why that happened. It may have had something to do with the girlfriend deciding that night to run away from home, and Henley being somewhat baffled as to where to take her. At any rate, it’s clear he didn’t plan for Corll to harm her. However, Corll was enraged that Henley had brought two friends over. Keeping a low profile was crucial. After an argument, he seemed to calm down and began to drink and socialize. The teenagers got plastered and passed out—and awoke tied up. Corll screamed that he was going to torture and kill them all, but a desperate Henley convinced Corll he was still a loyal accomplice and would rape and kill his girlfriend while Corll dealt with the other boy. Corll agreed, but once untied, Henley got his hands on Corll’s pistol and shot him six times, leaving him in the very dead state you see below. By the time the December Police Gazette hit the streets, all of America was in an uproar over the murders. Corll had shot some boys, strangled others, and tortured them all in the most painful ways, including shoving glass rods up their urethras. All had been raped. And this meant Corll’s sexuality became central. So, taking all that into consideration, you can see that the Gazette is really being quite inflammatory on their cover. It would have been equally valid to discuss whether it is heterosexuality that leads to murder—after all, in terms of sheer numbers, straight folks have gay folks beat all to hell in the killing department. But as we’ve pointed out before, reason doesn’t sell tabloids, so the Police Gazette gleefully tarred an entire community in pursuit of profits. Now, as far as how they tie all this to chemicals in meat, well, that’s just too silly to get into today. Maybe some other time. Above: investigators unearth the skull of one of Corll's victims.
 In 1962 Hollywood actresses began showing skin for the first time in more than thirty years. Today we have a Confidential from October 1962, featuring a rundown of nude scenes by the biggest actresses of the time. The Natalie Wood shot in the little collage they’ve put together is from Gypsy, her biopic of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, where she showed her back, but did not in fact appear nude. Likewise, Liz Taylor never appeared nude in a film. Ditto Kim Novak, although she posed quite provocatively for many photographers, including wearing only soapsuds in a Life magazine bio, and in a rumored set of explicit youthful nudes. You can find those on the trusty interweb, but the identity of the woman in the shots is certainly open to debate. Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe were two entirely different cases, though. The Mansfield image above is from 1962’s It Happened in Athens, in which she went skimpy, but not naked. But the next year she went fully topless in Promises! Promises! and triggered a national firestorm, including a ban of the film in several cities. She was the first mainstream American actress to go topless, not counting the several who bared it before the introduction of the Hayes Code back in 1930. In late 1963, Promises! Promises! stills were featured in Playboy, and those too caused a problem, because they showed that Mansfield had actually been fully nude on the set. An obscenity trial for Hugh Hefner followed, but he was acquitted. In any case, Promises! Promises! was a hit. It wasn’t a very good film. But the scenes with Mansfield are indeed extraordinarily sexy. The Monroe story is equally fascinating. When she was making the film Something’s Got To Give, she was supposed to appear in a swimming scene wearing the usual flesh-colored body stocking to conceal her lady parts. Monroe had caused problems on many sets by then, and her reputation was in tatters. When the time came to shoot the scene, she allegedly did it fully nude, with publicity photographers and crew present. The event caused a sensation, and seemed to signal a renewed focus from Marilyn to reclaim her status as America’s top sex symbol. Sadly, it was the last splash she ever made—she was fired and the film was never finished. But a precedent had been reestablished—for the first time since the Hayes Code, actresses were showing skin. Soon, Hollywood males would be doing the same. In less than a decade the human body would be fully uncovered on film, and there was no putting it back under wraps.
 The Roman fling of Mrs. Taylor. 
Founded in 1845 by George Wilkes, the National Police Gazette published through 1982, making it one of America’s longest running magazines. It began with a focus on police related matters, and over the years evolved (or devolved, depending on your point of view) into a pure tabloid that sometimes skirted the edge of obscenity. The issue above is from September 1963, the year Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton met and began an affair while filming Cleopatra. At the time Taylor was married to Eddie Fisher, who was one of the most popular singers in America. Taylor had already gotten bad press when Fisher fell for her and divorced American sweetheart Debbie Reynolds as a result. When news broke that she had cuckolded Fisher while filming in Italy, Taylor’s reputation was damaged yet again. She was a scarlet lady squared. Paparazzi chased her and Burton all over Rome in one of the first examples of what today is a standard ordeal for even the least important movie stars. There’s a lot to the Cleopatra story—a runaway budget, an emergency tracheotomy, a strike by female extras, and more. We hope to get to it in the future, as well as post the stack of magazines we have that are devoted to the Taylor/Burton/Fisher triangle.
 Liz Taylor may be the last big star who came out of Hollywood’s old studio system. 
It’s amazing how few people these days know Elizabeth Taylor is a highly regarded two-time Oscar winner who ruled Tinseltown for twenty solid years. Though she's certainly well-known, the reasons for her fame are beginning to fade from popular memory. But she was a once-in-a-generation talent who scored four Oscar nominations in her career, notching her two wins for Butterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She was also the most highly paid performer in the world, and one of the first true tabloid queens, with paparazzi dogging her every step from Hollywood to Rome. Looking at this Life cover from sixty-two years ago today, we get a glimpse of the beauty that fueled the worldwide Taylor obsession.
 Every star who mattered made an appearance. 
Assorted Festival magazines, published in France, circa 1940s, 1950s. Cover stars from top left are: Arlette Poirier, Susan Hayward, Yvonne de Carlo, Magali Noel, Jaqueline Brion, Alida Valli, Jane Russell, Victoria Shaw, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Bates, Marilyn Monroe, Micheline Francey, and Barbara Stanwyck.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1953—Hemingway Wins Pulitzer
American author Ernest Hemingway, who had already written such literary classics as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novella The Old Man and the Sea, the story of an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. 1970—Mass Shooting at Kent State
In the U.S., Ohio National Guard troops, who had been sent to Kent State University after disturbances in the city of Kent the weekend before, open fire on a group of unarmed students, killing four and wounding nine. Some of the students had been protesting the United States' invasion of Cambodia, but others had been walking nearby or observing from a distance. The incident triggered a mass protest of four million college students nationwide, and eight of the guardsmen were indicted by a grand jury, but charges against all of them were eventually dismissed. 2003—Suzy Parker Dies
American model and actress Suzy Parker, who appeared the films Funny Face and Kiss Them for Me, was the first model to earn more than $100,000 a year, and who was a favorite target of the mid-century tabloids, dies at home in Montecito, California, surrounded by family friends, after electing to discontinue dialysis treatments. 1920—Negro National Baseball League Debuts
The first game of Negro National League baseball is played in Indianapolis, Indiana. The league, one of several that would be formed, was composed of The Chicago American Giants, The Detroit Stars, The Kansas City Monarchs, The Indianapolis ABCs, The St. Louis Giants, The Cuban Stars, The Dayton Marcos, and The Chicago Giants. 1955—Williams Wins Pulitzer
American playwright Tennessee Williams wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his controversial play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which tells the story of a southern family in crisis, explicitly deals with alcoholism, and contains a veiled subtext concerning homosexuality in southern society. In 1958 the play becomes a motion picture starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman.
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