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Pulp International - Hush-Hush
Intl. Notebook Jan 26 2023
THE TABLOID THAT ROARED
It was a good thing for its readers Hush-Hush didn't know the meaning of the term.


No, we're not going to get into teen-age rapist story that dominates this cover of Hush-Hush published back in January 1965. Though based on a real occurrence, the article is titillation disguised as crime reporting, written during an era when many men thought of rape in one of three ways: vandalization of personal property if the victim was his wife or girlfriend; an attack on the family castle if she was a relative; and she asked for it, which was reserved for most other women. We stress “many men,” not all. From what we gather the majority properly saw it as a heinous attack on the woman. Of course, the vicious nature of it didn't stop it from being widely used as a cinematic and literary device, but that's another discussion, one we've already had and doubtless will again.

Elsewhere on the cover you get photographic proof that topless bathing suits really did exist during the 1960s. There are only a few photos of the things, but Hush-Hush adds to the library of visual confirmation. Now we need proof of the existence of David Dodge's completely backless cache-sexe that made women look nude when viewed from the rear. He says they were worn on the French Riviera during the 1950s, but we have a feeling proof won't be forthcoming anytime soon, absent a time machine and careful coordinates. Lastly, the cover's bottom banner touts wife swapping. How popular was this practice? We can't know. We suggest asking your grandma. But first compliment her cooking: “This casserole is delicious, gram-gram. Did you and paw-paw ever screw other married couples for kicks? Can I have more peas?”

The next article we want to call attention to is, “How Do Tahitian Beauties Drive Men Wild?” Vintage novels that waxed pornographic about the sexual attitudes of Pacific Islanders were almost an official sub-genre, so this story was a must-read for us. And for you too, which can do below. At least mostly. We couldn't upload the entire thing. It's too long, but there's enough to give you the gist. And the gist is simply that Tahitians apparently had no taboos concerning sex, partners, and privacy. The story is framed around alleged trysts with various Hollywood stars, and how Hush-Hush avoided lawsuits from those stars is really a mystery. You'll be entertained. We will say, though, that it's rather unfortunate that the story is couched in insulting terms toward Tahitian women.

As a final note, Hush-Hush used a cheaper printing process and lower quality paper than other publications from the same rank. Those two aspects of the magazine worsened as time passed. By 1965, it was barely a step above the National Informers of the world in terms of technical values. Because of that our scans aren't great. The cheap printing resulted in a scanner moiré pattern on most of the black and white content (though the color came out fine). It's actually fixable in Photoshop or Gimp, so we hear, and we have both programs, but do we want to do all that work for cheap-ass Hush-Hush? We decided we didn't. Therefore, what you see is what you get—twenty-plus scans below.
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Intl. Notebook Mar 12 2013
MAIL MODEL
We take back everything we said—the postal service rocks.

Well it worked again. We’re definitely feeling total confidence in the postal system now. Why that first issue of Adam disappeared a while back we’ll never know, but after that little mishap we successfully received one shipment, so this time we decided to go for broke. Above is the result of that experiment—forty-four American tabloids. Even with postage in the $40 range, these came out to about two dollars apiece. Very exciting, and since the collection consists of all the heavyweights—Whisper, Hush-Hush, On the QT, Confidential, Uncensored, The Lowdown, et al.—we’re pretty much set for the foreseeable future. You want mid-century tabloids? This is where to find them. Accept no substitutes. On a side note, remember we said we were refinishing a 150-year-old desk? There it is above in final form. Note that the legs are topped by carved demon heads. We haven’t yet figured out who he’s supposed to be, but he emanates a palpable aura of evil that’s a bit… Hang on a sec. Did you hear that noise? Probably the wind, but we better go check anyway. Be right ba—

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Vintage Pulp Jan 18 2013
GOLDEN FLEECE
You wouldn’t mind terribly if we steal your nickname?


Today we have a January 1961 issue of Confidential for you, with cover stars Sammy Davis, Jr. and May Britt. Since we’ve already discussed Sammy and May of late, and even made her a recent femme fatale, we’ll skip past them and focus on another interesting story—the tale of Diane Harris, who shot to notoriety as a witness in the infamous Minot Jelke pimping trial of 1952. We wrote about it back in 2009—Jelke was an oleomargarine heir who was cut off from his trust fund and decided to turn his girlfriend Patricia Ward into a prostitute in order to make ends meet. Ward became known as the “Golden Girl of Vice” and “The Golden Girl of Café Society,” which is why it’s interesting that Confidential calls Diane Harris “The Golden Prostitute.” Apparently Jelke had the Midas touch.

Confidential wastes no time in its article. It begins: She gave herself a title… Lady Diana Harrington. The New York D.A. gave her another… the Golden Girl of Café Society. Houston police gave her a third, less flamboyant title… prostitute. Uh oh—the New York District Attorney’s nickname for Harris is identical to Patricia Ward’s nickname. After a few more paragraphs of reading, it becomes clear that Confidentialbelieves the Golden Girl is Diane Harris—not Patricia Ward. While it’s true that Harris did use some aliases, including Lady Diana Harrington and Mary Lou Brew, nowhere is the name Ward mentioned as a pseudonym.

After searching high and low for some idea of whether we were dealing with one woman or two, we finally saw in the IMDB page on the 1995 Jelke biopic Café Society that Patricia Ward and Diana Harris were played by separate actresses—Lara Flynn Boyle and Cynthia Watrous. So was there some confusion in 1961 about who exactly the Golden Girl was? Looking back at our original post on the subject, the photo of the Golden Girl on the cover of Hush-Hush shows a blonde. Confidential has numerous photos of their Golden Girl Diane Harris, and a single photo they identify as Pat Ward. Just plain Pat—no Golden, no nickname at all. And she’s a brunette. So not only does Confidential identify the Golden Girl of Café Society as Diane Harris—turns out so did that March 1961 Hush-Hush. We just didn’t realize it at the time.
 
Our mistake came when we first researched the Jelke trial and found a New York Times movie review that identified Pat Ward as the Golden Girl. From that point we just ran with it and never thought to doublecheck. Until today. Now, based on available evidence, it seems that at some point over the intervening years the historical record got twisted and the label Golden Girl was applied to Patricia Ward, where it stayed even up to thepoint of a Hollywood motion picture misidentifying her. She was indeed Minot Jelke’s girlfriend, whereas Harris was just a fellow high dollar prostie (and corroborating witness), so perhaps some clever scribe, or even the writers of the 1995 movie, decided that such a catchy nickname would be better applied to the girlfriend. At least that’s the way it looks to us.
 
If we’re right, is any of this important? Does it matter that Harris was fleeced of her nickname, or possibly that a movie took liberties and those liberties were later assumed to be facts? Do we expect an award? No, not really, but it’s interesting. Confidential barely recounts the events of the trial. The story is actually about Diane Harris being found dead in a Houston apartment eight years afterward, in September 1960. She was still a prostitute at the time. Confidential tells us: The blonde’s nude body was in bed, a green sheet and a pink blanket covered her. Pictures of herin more glamorous days were on the walls. An autopsy disclosed a large amount of morphine in her body. Police theorize that a combination of drink and drugs killed her.
 
Diane Harris had wanted the best life had to offer, and money meant everything. All her friends and acquaintances knew that about her. According to her maid, even at the end she still bragged about once being able to command fifty dollars per date. An obsessive desire for luxury drove her into the arms of rich, uncaring men, and eventually, in order to maintain her high flying lifestyle, into prostitution. The one piece of her that endured long after she died naked and surrounded by bottles and pills was her famous nickname—The Golden Girl of Café Society. But she eventually lost that too.
 
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Hollywoodland Nov 2 2012
GIVING HER ALL
Hush-Hush says they didn’t want her even in the nude, but is that true?


The story probably fueled ten million fantasies. Marilyn Monroe had stripped naked on the set of her last movie Something’s Got To Give. Monroe was eventually fired, the production was scrapped, and the footage was archived, but if it had been released, she would have been the first Hollywood actress to appear unclothed onscreen since the 1920s. It’s interesting, isn’t it, to reflect upon the effect a minority of prudes had on Hollywood? Because of them, Monroe’s unreleased scene, and Jayne Mansfield’s later nude scene in 1963’s Promises, Promises, merely brought American cinema back to where it had already been four decades earlier.

In the movie Monroe’s character is in a pool and calls up to a window where Dean Martin resides. Martin is married and Monroe is disrupting his life, so when he sees her, he tells her to get out of the water. She complies and Martin realizes she’s nude. It's a standard sex comedy oops moment. Monroe began the filming of the scene in a body stocking, then removed that and wore a flesh-colored bikini bottom. After the scene she posed for some publicity shots for several surprised photographers, and during that period removed even the bottoms. Some sources say she also shot the scene nude, but most say the bottoms came off afterward.
 
Hush-Hush was not the first magazine to break the story of Monroe’s peel down. Life had done that in June 1962, and included a couple of titillating photos. By the time Hush-Hush told the tale Monroe was two months dead. The blurb MM—Even In The Nude They Didn’t Want Her wasn’t strictly true. The production company Twentieth Century Fox most certainly did want her. A hospital stint prior to production had caused her to shed twenty-five pounds, bringing her to a weight she had never reached in her adult life, despite exercise and dieting. The newly svelte Monroe looked good and Fox was getting her cheap—$100,000.
 
By most accounts, Monroe knew her career was in trouble. She was making one tenth one what Elizabeth Taylor was making at the time, and was determined to remind people they were still dealing with possibly the biggest sex symbol who had ever lived. She knew that if she stripped she might be falling into the same old trap of making it easy for people to not take her seriously, but if her career really was finished she was determined to go down swinging. In the end her stunt was irrelevant. Her health problems had made her thin, but they lingered and caused numerous costly production delays, causing Fox to finally give up and pull the plug. That was June 1962. Two months later she was gone.

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Hollywoodland Jul 27 2012
HUSH HOUR
Sleazy tabloid exposes the nationwide trade in even sleazier Tijuana bibles.

It’s been a while since we’ve featured Hush-Hush, but it’s one of our favorite high-end mid-century tabloids, so today we have a newly scanned issue from this month 1957. We learn that Ingrid Bergman called Ed Sullivan a liar for falsely claiming she was booked on his show, and that Phil Silvers was terrified that he would lose his fame, and that Eartha Kitt was destined to forever be lonely because she was interested only in white men.

But the fun story here is the one headed: “Movie Stars Victimized By Smut, Inc.” The article is about Tijuana bibles, and the many celebs who had been unknowingly featured in them. We’ve already posted a few bibles, thus you probably already know that they’re pornographic eight-page comic booklets sold clandestinely in drug stores and soda fountains. Their makers felt free to borrow the likenesses of public figures of the day, and Hush-Hush offers up examples starring Bob Hope, Marie Wilson, Robert Mitchum and others. The article describes them as “unbelievably filthy booklets showing the basest sexual acts and perversions.”

Well, true enough. Their distribution was so worrisome that the FBI got involved, and while the feds did manage to make some arrests, the flow of booklets remained pretty much uninterrupted. We can only assume that Hush-Hush’s exposé made them even more popular, which is kind of how it works with porn, right? Someone gets on their soapbox about it and people walk away thinking, Hmm, I better see one of these with my own eyes. Of course, Hush-Hush didn’t dare reprint the interior pages, but we have no such inhibitions here at Pulp Intl. See the next post, and see here.

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Sex Files Sep 13 2011
ZERO TOLERANCE
Hush-Hush shares its views on homosexuality.

Mid-century scandal rag Hush-Hush gets all riled up in this September 1961 issue featuring cover star Elizabeth Taylor. Inside, readers are treated to exposés of Taylor, Eddie Fisher, Brigitte Bardot, Sonny Liston, and Beverly Aadland, as well as shocking tales about goings-on in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Baumholder, Germany, but it’s in the article on bodybuilding magazines that Hush-Hush truly gets out the knives.

Because erotic publications openly catering to gay males would have caused a legal firestorm in the early 1960s, various enterprising capitalists published gay content in the guise of bodybuilding magazines, using health and fitness as a cover for imagery designed to sexually titillate. Hush-Hush journo Sidney Reed jumps all over this practice in his article, informing readers about the existence of these magazines in terms so abusive we’ve never seen their equivalent in print anywhere. He uses phrases like “sex sick creepsters” and “lunatic depravity”, and there are many more insults, so colorful, so vicious, and piled so high that it begins to feel like satire.

But Reed is 100% serious, perhaps even obsessed. He finds, in one of the magazines he located, an ad for nude photographs of a fourteen-year-old boy, then tars all gay men with that brush, while of course sparing heterosexuals from the same treatment even though the trade in pre-pubescent girls was well-established and well-documented by that time. It’s worth pointing out once again that Hush-Hush wasn’t a fringe publication—it sold millions of copies a month. And so you get a sense of some very prevalent attitudes about homosexuality in the early ’60s. We have many scans below, and more issues of Hush-Hush coming later. 

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Hollywoodland Aug 5 2010
HUSHED CONCLUSIONS
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.

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Intl. Notebook Mar 24 2010
ABSOLUTE HUSH
When Hush comes to shove.
There’s a veritable smorgasbord of sin on the cover of this March 1956 Hush-Hush. The magazine starts by outing former German tennis star Gottfried von Cramm’s affair with actor Manesse Herbst back in the mid-1930s. Von Cramm had already been jailed in Nazi Germany for the Herbst affair, and before that had been blackmailed by Herbst for enough money to relocate to Palestine, so the Hush-Hush story must have felt like having a vulture land on him after he was already picked clean. Luckily, he had just married serial bride Barbara Hutton (who you may remember from our post a while back on the amazing Porfirio Rubirosa), and since she was the richest woman in the world at the time, we doubt von Cramm's social life was seriously crimped by Hush-Hush's homophobic rehash. 
 
The bit on Adlai Stevenson is of similar nature—he was closely monitored by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who periodically leaked false rumors that Stevenson was gay. The Hush-Hush story reads like a smear, but no actual files are produced because, well, they were top secret. It wouldn’t be until 2007 that a declassification of Hoover’s files revealed that FBI agents followed Stevenson for thirty-five years, sometimes even tailing him internationally. In they end they discovered nothing, except perhaps that Hoover was obsessed with homosexuality, for reasons that are yet to be fully determined, but for which there are plenty of interesting theories.
 
Harry Belafonte gets a spotlight as well, but for political reasons. By 1956 he was a leading figure in the American civil rights movement and was highly critical of U.S. domestic and inter-national policy, and so Hush-Hush does what any respectable red-baiting scandal rag would do—suggest he was brainwashed by communists. While the story is pure baloney, it did turn out to be prescient in one sense—Belafonte did begin explicitly endorsing communist ideals, and remains a supporter of Fidel Castro and other leftist leaders today.
 
Moving along, Ann Woodward was a respected New York City socialite who shotgunned her husband dead in the fall of 1955, apparently believing him to be a burglar. There had been a series of robberies in her neighborhood, so her story made sense, but the fact that she had fired twice raised a few eyebrows. Hush-Hush happily throws a little fuel on the fires of suspicion by dredging up some marital strife and implying the shooting wasn’t an accident. But a grand jury felt differently and failed to issue an indictment. Twenty years later, Truman Capote wrote a book about the shooting and minced no words in voicing his suspicions that Woodward was a murderer. Woodward committed suicide soon thereafter, supposedly in despair that her past had been aired out again.
 
As always, there’s plenty more dirt and dish we could discuss, but we’ll stop for now because we already have more tabloids than we’ll probably ever be able to post. In fact we just bought fifteen rare copies of the National Informer from an auction site and they only cost us two dollars apiece. And of course we also have a giant folder of tabloids we’ve downloaded. Probably the only way to use them all would be to launch a tabloids-only site, but who has the time? Not us, sadly. More on Hush-Hush later.     

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Hollywoodland Mar 2 2010
ERROL IN JUDGMENT
Fifty years after his death, people are still telling us who Errol Flynn was.

Above is a Hush-Hush from March 1960 with a spotlight on Errol Flynn’s “perverse fling with his Lolita.” They’re talking about fifteen-year old Beverly Aadland, below, who we’ve mentioned before. The article is the beginning of a long tradition of journalists writing the truth—or at least their version of it—about Flynn. Since his death he’s been tagged as a bisexual, a fascist, and a Nazi spy. As recently as 1988 Aadland offered her truth about Flynn in a People interview, and a 1990 book by biographer Tony Thomas rejected the fascist claims, pointing out instead that Flynn had left-leaning politics, though he had made racist comments in letters and conversation.

Thomas claimed Flynn’s true feelings were evidenced by his support for the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War and his friendship with Fidel Castro. Flynn has also been depicted with assorted personality quirks in films such as 1996’s The Australian, with guy Pearce, and 2004’s The Aviator, with Leonardo DiCaprio. So, suffice it to say that he’s never gone out of style. But as far as whose story to believe concerning who Flynn was, we can’t say. We doubt the conflicting accounts will ever truly be settled—with the passing of Beverly Aadland just last month, all the people who knew Flynn personally are dead.

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Hollywoodland Feb 18 2010
HUSH TO JUDGMENT
First rule of tabloid publishing—promise the readers sex even when there isn’t any.

February 1964 Hush-Hush with Anita Ekberg and Vivian Malone. Malone was the woman who Alabama Governor George Wallace barred from entering the University of Alabama during the fall of 1963 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional. Wallace had state troopers at his back that morning, but when John F. Kennedy nationalized the Alabama National Guard later that day, they escorted Malone to school and the troopers were forced to step aside. Thanks to the court ruling, and Kennedy’s executive order, Malone earned a degree and worked in the U.S. State Department for thirty-one years.

Interestingly, her brother-in-law is the current U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder. The cover blurb on Malone reads vaguely sexual, but of course the story has nothing to do with that. The Ekberg story is similarly smoke sans fire. You also get a feature on Frank Sinatra and Jill St. John. The two worked together in Come Blow Your Horn in 1963 and Tony Rome in 1967, but most sources say their brief involvement didn’t commence until 1971. However St. John was part of Sinatra’s “in-crowd” for years, and to be seen palling around with Frank was to be accused of waking up in his bed.

Every actress in Hollywood knew that, and few seemed terribly concerned. Finally, after making readers think about sex for most of the issue, Hush-Hush makes them afraid to do it themselves with a story on America’s syphilis epidemic. The mid-century tabs were very much like slasher movies in that way—in the end, sex must always be punished. We found a nice shot on Ebay of Sinatra and St. John together on the set of Tony Rome, and we've posted it below. Our next trick will be to try and find a tabloid that doesn't have Sinatra inside. We think we have our work cut out for us.

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Next Page
History Rewind
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
March 28
1910—First Seaplane Takes Flight
Frenchman Henri Fabre, who had studied airplane and propeller designs and had also patented a system of flotation devices, accomplishes the first take-off from water at Martinque, France, in a plane he called Le Canard, or "the duck."
1953—Jim Thorpe Dies
American athlete Jim Thorpe, who was one of the most prolific sportsmen ever and won Olympic gold medals in the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon, played American football at the collegiate and professional levels, and also played professional baseball and basketball, dies of a heart attack.
March 27
1958—Khrushchev Becomes Premier
Nikita Khrushchev becomes premier of the Soviet Union. During his time in power he is responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, and presides over the rise of the early Soviet space program, but his many policy failures lead to him being deposed in October 1964. After his removal he is pensioned off and lives quietly the rest of his life, eventually dying of heart disease in 1971.
March 26
1997—Heaven's Gate Cult Members Found Dead
In San Diego, thirty-nine members of a cult called Heaven's Gate are found dead after committing suicide in the belief that a UFO hidden in tail of the Hale-Bopp comet was a signal that it was time to leave Earth for a higher plane of existence. The cult members killed themselves by ingesting pudding and applesauce laced with poison.
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