A PUBLIC DISPLAY

Lindberg unveils more than just her movie for the Cannes press corps.

The above image shot today in 1971 shows Swedish star Christina Lindberg in Cannes, France, where she was promoting her movie Exponerad at the Cannes Film Festival. She was also at the prestigious event in 1973 to promote Thriller – en grym film, aka Thriller: A Cruel Picture, so you have to give her production companies Olympic Film and BAV points for effort, even though Lindberg’s movies are just arthouse sleaze when boiled down to their essence. And when your movies are not of particular merit what better way to bring attention to them than with random nudity? Shedding clothing was a go-to gimmick for Cannes starlets back when the line between mainstream and erotic film was blurrier than today.

In the first photo Lindberg is on the patio of a Cannes bar, and from her perch atop a table she stripped off everything except her panties while dozens of photographer captured her likeness and bystanders gawped at the spectacle. You can see some of assembled press in the fuzzy reverse angle at right. A bit later, on the terrace of the Majestic Hotel where she was staying, her clothes hit the tiles again, as you see below.

She wasn’t remotely finished. Here’s her memory of a publicity stunt that set Cannes ablaze: “I was going to meet the press out on a pier over the water. After having signed about a thousand invitations, which were given out to select people, I was lowered down from a rented helicopter to the pier topless. There were hundreds of photographers.”

We find it amazing that so few photos of such an event seem to survive today. There must have been thousands of frames shot of that helicopter stunt. Lindberg’s recollection of so many photographers shows you the sheer volume of imagery that’s lost to time. Luckily, she’s well documented anyway thanks to the photo sessions she made for various international magazines and her 1973 photo book. A few of our favorites are herehere, and here. She’ll return to Pulp Intl. soon.

Lindberg gets in touch with her outdoorsy side.

Somewhere in the Swedish woods in 1971 international sex symbol Christina Lindberg posed for a photo that became this beautiful pin-up poster, now faded after nearly half a century, but still in good form. This was made to promote her sexploitation flick Exponerad, aka Exposed, aka Diary of a Rape. Probably sexploitation isn’t the right word to describe the film. Its makers had serious intentions—we just aren’t sure they were achieved. Read what we mean here.

She didn't make it to the top of Hollywood just to accept being second banana in Monaco.


Yes, people were stupidly fawning over the rich long before 2021, as this issue of the tabloid Exposed published this month in 1957 proves. There are stories on one percenters ranging from Princess Grace of Monaco on down. Of course, there’s an aspirational innocence to these old stories, because very few people, if any, begrudged the rich anything in this era. Those times have gone. Companies make hundreds of billions now and pay zero taxes. The rich have a thousand ways to hide their income, to the tune of 40 trillion dollars in cash hidden in tax havens around the world.

Something else different about the rich of yesterday—they didn’t have dick-shaped rocket ships. Instead they had dick shaped yachts. And that’s what the feud hinted at on the cover between Grace Kelly and Tina Onassis was about—in part at least. It was also about who threw the best parties, who had the richest and most influential friends, who had the best designer clothes, and who was the greatest beauty. Of course, Kelly was legendarily lovely, but because beauty marries money even when the money is as butt-ugly as Aristotle Onassis, Tina was no slouch.

Exposed tells us of one competitive episode the night Kelly was celebrating the birth of her daughter Caroline, which had happened a day earlier. Kelly lived in Grimaldi Palace, overlooking Monaco harbor, where Aristotle Onassis lived on an 1,800 ton former Canadian navy destroyer retrofitted as a luxury yacht. The night of Kelly’s celebration Onassis left his boat totally dark in the harbor, then at one point flipped a switch that illuminated hundreds of light bulbs strung from prow to stern. Kelly’s clan took it as an attempt to show her up. Sounds petty, right? Well, Exposed was a tabloid, and its readers absolutely devoured stories showing that they and the next door neighbor they hated weren’t so very different from the one percent.

After that boat episode, according to Exposed, Kelly and Onassis barely saw each other in tiny Monaco, such was their determination to avoid each other. Again, the half-century old public obsession with these two seems quaint compared to people’s interest in the Musks and Bransons of today. There are opinions and facts, and here is a fact—the U.S. is falling apart and miniscule taxes on the rich and corporations are the reason. During the year this issue of Exposed was published, a year many people now cast their misty eyes toward with longing and nostalgia, the tax rate for top income earners was 91%. No wonder things functioned so well, eh? High taxes kept the government flush and the rich weak.

But the highlight of the issue as far as we’re concerned is Vikki Dougan, who we told you would return to Pulp Intl. soon, and who shows up at a party thrown by Hollywood astrologer Carroll Righter wearing one of her infamous buttcrack baring backless dresses. Exposed indeed. Since this is about as low as her gowns went, we zoomed in a bit so you can get a good look at the San Fernando Valley. Dougan by the way, is still around at age 92. Elsewhere in Exposed you get Joan Collins and her romances, restaurateur Mike Romanoff and his legal troubles, Paulette Goddard and her love of money, and vice in New York City. Thirty scans below.
Lindberg gets full exposure in Japan.


This is a very interesting Japanese poster for the Swedish sexploitation flick Exponerad, which premiered in Japan today in 1972 as 露出 or Roshutsu, which both mean “exposure.” The film was known in English speaking countries as Exposed and (misleadingly) Diary of a Rape. There are some scans of this piece online, but not of this quality. We talked about the movie last year. Check here.

And as a bonus, because Exponerad is a movie that deals with daydreams, we have below all of our most dreamlike images of Lindberg. No surprise, right? If you visit our site often, you know she’s a mainstay, so today we’re just adding to what was already a substantial treasure trove. All of these ethereal shots are Exponerad promos, and all are striking. We have many more Lindberg rarities, and you can bank on us sharing those down the line.

What was the must-have possession of 1971? Christina Lindberg.

Here you see a couple of French posters for the 1971 Swedish sexploitation movie Possédée, which means “possessed,” but which was originally titled Exponerad, and was known in the U.S. as Exposed and Diary of a Rape. There’s no known release date for the movie in France, but it worked its way across Europe in 1972, so figure it opened in France sometime in the middle of the year. The top poster is one you see often online, but the second promo, in black and white and showing star Christina Lindberg clutched by a male hand, is rare.

We’ve posted a lot a material on Exponerad. Our continual focus on this is not because the movie is especially worthwhile, but because its promotional materials are great. As an example, below is a shot of Lindberg made to publicize the film, and which appeared in the Japanese magazine Young • Idol • Now. More photos from the session appeared in other Japanese magazines, but this rare shot is by far our favorite. Feel free to check out our other posts on this film by clicking keyword “Exponerad” at bottom.

Christina Lindberg flick expounds upon reality, fantasy, and a woman's struggle in a sexualized world.

The sexploitation flick Exponerad, which premiered in Sweden today in 1971 and is known in English as Exposed and Diary of a Rape, is an exceedingly serious movie considering its genre. That would normally be a sin in our book, but this stars Christina Lindberg, so we figured okay, it’s worth a gander. Lindberg, in one of her earliest roles, plays Lena, a high school girl torn between her twerp of a boyfriend Jan and an older, depraved sociopath named Helge. She prefers Jan, but Helge has taken nude photos of her and is using them to blackmail her into servicing guests at his wild parties.

When Jan learns that Lena has been sharing her fuzzy favors, his caveman side comes out and he slaps her. Lena promptly runs away to the country. Here we learn that the wall between reality and fantasy is a thin one for her, and she crosses between it multiple times. She’s raped by a stranger, tries to seduce a man who picks her up hitchhiking, dies in a fiery automobile crash, and has other imaginings the audience only knows are in her head once the movie leaps back to the point where those scenes began.

If we consider these fantasies closely it’s possible Lena is coming to grips with her sexuality and her place in a sexualized world. A particularly insightful review we read suggested that all of these waking dreams represent the male gaze, which is why they’re creepy and violent. It’s a theory we like, but we aren’t sure if it actually holds up—unless daydreams can leave physical artifacts behind. We know we’re being vague. This is when that no spoilers promise we made a while back is inconvenient.

In any case, what the filmmakers wanted to do here was make thought-provoking erotica, and they definitely accomplished that. We picture the producer shaking hands with director Gustav Wiklund and saying, “Well done, lad. Despite all the nudity there’s no possibility anyone will get a boner.” Whether the film makes any sense is a different issue. We recommend that if you watch Exponerad, you watch with full attention or you’ll get lost long before the double twist ending that’ll make you say either, “Aha!” or “Huh?” Fans of ambitious sexploitation, this movie is your jam. We have some promo images beow, and you can see more here and here.

New tabloid serves up Russell, Monroe, and others.


Jane Russell, wedged into an outfit that turns her boobs into footballs, graces the cover of the debut issue of Exposed, a high budget tabloid launched by Fawcett Publications in 1955. It arrived on a crowded newsstand already occupied by Confidential—then arguably the most circulated magazine in the U.S.—as well as Whisper, Hush-Hush, Uncensored, and similar publications. The get-up Russell is wearing is a costume from her starring role in 1954’s The French Line, and we sort of assumed the shot had been at least slightly doctored, and we seem to be correct. Judge for yourself at right. At least her boob punishment was offset by the fact that her outfit was too flimsy to include one of the deadly corsets that sometimes made their way around stars’ waists.
 
Russell is in Exposed to illustrate a story about sex in cinema, but she isn’t the most exposed occupant of the magazine. That would be Marilyn Monroe, whose famous Playboy nude is reprinted for a story about hustlers reprinting her photos. We’ll just assume Exposed licensed their Monroe shot. Apparently, though, those other miscreants were selling her likeness by the thousands without permission and without compensating Monroe. Exposed shows her in court testifying for prosecutors. The prosecution may have won its case in 1955, but in the here and now Monroe is sold from Tegucigalpa to Manila, unlicensed all of it. Which just goes to show the more things change the more they stay the same.
 
Probably the highlight of the issue is a long story about detectives who make their living catching cheating couples in action. Exposed offers up numerous photos of these pairs caught in the act in motel rooms and secluded homes. Are these photos real? Well, we have our doubts. Even the most cleverly posed action shots have those intangibles that mark them as fakes, but that’s just our opinion. Judge for yourself. Elsewhere in Exposed you get “Sophie” Loren, Errol Flynn, Marguerite Chapman, Franchot Tone, and other big time celebs.
 
We’re pretty proud of this acquisition. It wasn’t terribly expensive, but we’ve seen it priced much higher than what we paid. Maybe down the line we’ll flip ours for a tidy profit. But that’s what we always say. Much to the Pulp Intl. girlfriends’ chagrin, our office just piles higher and higher with mid-century ephemera and we haven’t sold a single piece yet. Exposed goes to the top of the precariously tottering pyramid. We have about thirty-five scans below, and plenty more tabloids on the way.


Bold McDonald spun a yarn.

Today we’re back to the mid-century tabloid Exposed, with a cover from this month 1957 featuring Harry Belafonte, Joan Fontaine, Yul Brenner, Sid Caesar and Rita Hayworth. In the middle of the cover, you see a shot of a bruised and worried Marie McDonald. The photo was taken just after she was found on January 4 wandering in the desert near Indio, California. The tale soon spread across Hollywood like wildfire—that she had been abducted at gunpoint from her home the night of January 3 by two swarthy men who demanded her rings, her money, and her body. The last demand had a certain resonance. McDonald had gotten famous using the nickname “The Body.” The possibility that two swarthy men—one black and one Mexican—had defiled it was, in 1957, simply incendiary.

McDonald’s story began to fall apart immediately. She claimed rape, but doctors found no evidence. The note left by kidnappers at her house was made up of words clipped from newspapers found in the fireplace. To the cops, it seemed unlikely that kidnappers would, under the circumstances,take the time to make a note from paper and glue. They also learned that McDonald had made three phone calls during the time she was missing—none to police.

But McDonald was in a battered state, with scrapes, bruises, and two broken crowns. And she stuck to her story—nighttime, bedtime, a noise in her yard, a lean out the window, and a man lurking right there with a sawed-off. The noise had been made by a second man to draw her to the window. McDonald said the men took half an hour to make a note and discuss their plans, then bundled her into a car. About the phone calls, she said she barely managed to sneak to the phone and was disoriented and had no idea who to call. When the kidnappers heard the mounting news coverage about the crime, they decided she was “too hot” to keep and dumped her in the desert, sending her tumbling down a 25-foot embankment. And then there was the matter of the unidentified males who had called people close to McDonald with threats.

By January 5, McDonald’s ex-husband Harry Karl was offering up some juicy quotes to the press. Among them: “Marie is a very sick woman. I believe she left of her own accord.” He had received one of the calls from the kidnappers, but wasn’t buying it for a minute. He said, “She has done some very strange things in the past.” Police soon learned that the kidnap tale resembled the plot of Sylvia Tate’s comedic novel The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown, which happened to be among the books McDonald had in her home. There was little doubt now in the minds of authorities that the whole situation was an elaborate hoax, but McDonald was a celebrity and so the police dutifully arrested suspects, continued investigating, and by January 17 sent the whole messy affair to a grand jury.

The day McDonald arrived to give her testimony she said, “I’m not looking forward to this. I don’t see how I can convince 19 men if I can’t convince the police.” She was right. The grand jury decided there wasn’t enough evidence of a crime and the matter was dropped. In retrospect, McDonald was probably lucky not to have been prosecuted herself. Perhaps the fact that she had retained Hollywood super lawyer Jerry Giesler helped her there. In any case, the Marie McDonald kidnapping went into the history books as yet another Hollywood conundrum.

McDonald’s career as a popular performer had been more or less finished for ten years, but she had remained on the fringes of the news thanks to her marriages—seven of them—and her many famous friends.The events of 1957 had put her front and center again, but it was the last time, until she died of an accidental Seconal overdose—or was it suicide?—in 1965. Two months later, her husband Donald F. Taylor, overdosed in the same room, using the same bottle of pills.

Tinseltown proves fatal to yet another celebrity marriage.

This issue of the tabloid Exposed, with cover stars Anita Ekberg, Tony Steel, Edward G. Robinson, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor, has a rather pleasing color scheme, but the usual rumor-mongering and innuendo inside. The “true story” of Anita Ekberg’s sudden wedding to Tony Steel isn’t really all that scintillating. Steel had met Ekberg when they worked together on the British motion picture Storm Over the Nile, which was filmed in 1955 and released the last week of December. Steel was smitten from the moment he saw Ekberg. In fact, he was so in love with her that he decided to break his contract with the film production company The Rank Organisation and follow her to Hollywood. They married in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy, on 22 May, 1956, in a civil ceremony that was open to the public (the couple had asked the city government to bar spectators from the event but the request had been denied).

The press, however were restricted to a roped area just outside, which happened to be near a famous statue of David. According to several of the reporters present, when Ekberg passed by the nude sculpture after the ceremony she glanced up at its endowment and quipped, “My! Almost as big as Frank Sinatra’s.” You just knew Sinatra was involved in this somewhere, right? It’s like there were six or seven of him wandering around during the 1950s, so often does he pop up in other people’s personal business. Anyway, that statue of David—which is a copy of Michelangelo’s original masterpiece that stands in the Galleria dell’Accademiahas an incredibly small penis proportionate to the eighteen-foot-high body. At least, it seems small to us. Ahem. But we can assume Ekberg’s comment meant just the opposite, and concerned the non-proportionate size of the organ—i.e., quite a handful, taken on its own merits.

Now, should a bride really start married life with a public comment about another man’s dick? We think not, but we’re old-fashioned that way. Ekberg and Steel jetted off to Hollywood, where both hoped to expand their film careers. For Ekberg, that’s exactly what happened. But Steel struggled, possibly because of vitriol emanating from The Rank Organisation. He did find some work, but never attained the stature hecraved. In short order, his marriage to Ekberg was in trouble, their domestic woes either exacerbated by or rooted in his career problems. Either that or he never forgave her for that Sinatra comment. We kid, of course. Steel and Ekberg had serious difficulties, but Frankie wasn’t one of them. In any case, in 1959 the couple divorced, and Tony Steel was pretty much yesterday’s news. Life goes on, after all, in the tabloids and in the world. 

Sabrina slips her top in London and Ava replaces her Spanish bullfighter with an Italian actor.

This issue of Exposed from October 1957 gives top billing to British sex symbol Sabrina, aka Norma Ann Sykes, and tells us she lost her dress in the street and caused a riot. How did it happen? During a public appearance in London someone supposedly stepped on the hem of her dress. The garment came off, the Brits went bonkers over her 41-inch bare bust, and Sabrina was so distressed that she fainted, so we’re told. Is this story true? We tend to think so, because Exposed goes on to ponder whether the whole fiasco was a publicity stunt. Their ruminations lend the tale just the right element of verisimilitude, so we’re going to say yes, it probably happened. Also on the cover of Exposed, like clockwork, appears Ava Gardner. Readers are told she’s doing the dirty with Italian actor Walter Chiari. This would have been after splitting with Frank Sinatra but before the official divorce. But wait—didn’t we just write about her seeing Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín while also still married to Frankie? Come on people—that was so 1956. Sometimes you have to wonder how Gardner had time for all these affairs, but let’s just say that if she liked a man she always found a way to squeeze him in.  

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1954—Joseph McCarthy Disciplined by Senate

In the United States, after standing idly by during years of communist witch hunts in Hollywood and beyond, the U.S. Senate votes 65 to 22 to condemn Joseph McCarthy for conduct bringing the Senate into dishonor and disrepute. The vote ruined McCarthy’s career.

1955—Rosa Parks Sparks Bus Boycott

In the U.S., in Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott resulted in a crippling financial deficit for the Montgomery public transit system, because the city’s African-American population were the bulk of the system’s ridership.

1936—Crystal Palace Gutted by Fire

In London, the landmark structure Crystal Palace, a 900,000 square foot glass and steel exhibition hall erected in 1851, is destroyed by fire. The Palace had been moved once and fallen into disrepair, and at the time of the fire was not in use. Two water towers survived the blaze, but these were later demolished, leaving no remnants of the original structure.

1963—Warren Commission Formed

U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson establishes the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. However the long report that is finally issued does little to settle questions about the assassination, and today surveys show that only a small minority of Americans agree with the Commission’s conclusions.

Barye Phillips cover art for Street of No Return by David Goodis.
Assorted paperback covers featuring hot rods and race cars.
A collection of red paperback covers from Dutch publisher De Vrije Pers.

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