Keep your hands up. Good. Back up. Very good. Your life depends on this next part. I wanna see you shake that ass. To paraphrase Clint Eastwood, “In this world there are two kinds of people—those with loaded guns, and those who dance.” Or something like that. The guy on the cover of this issue of Adam from June 1958 better work it like he's at the club if he hopes to survive. We can't believe how long it's been since we shared an issue of this magazine. It's been since November. At this rate we'll never get the rest uploaded. Well, today is a step in the right direction, although this issue was so brittle we couldn't scan it extensively without risking its destruction. For other magazines we consider that a sacrifice for the greater good of digital proliferation, but not with Adam. We never let Adam get harmed. Which is more than Eve could say. This is a different era of Adam than we usually post, one that predates the nudity and more freewheeling fictional content of the ’70s, but it's still quite nice. Inside are plenty of models, including Italian actress Marisa Allasio, wearing the same handkerchief bikini as in these photos we shared a while back. There's also a feature on beauty in sports, and a fun tale about looking for gold in South America. Speaking of looking for gold in foreign countries, we've got our hooks into the motherlode of Adam magazines. We have more than twenty on the way. That'll up our stash to forty-plus issues, assuming they don't vanish into the magazine vortex that seems to hover between here and Australia. Send good vibes. But no matter what, we'll have another issue soon.
Marisa Allasio’s bikini created unforeseen fallout—of the judicial kind.
Here’s a new tabloid in our collection—Pic, which like Whisper and a few other publications evolved from a pin-up magazine into a scandal sheet during the 1950s. The cover star on this November 1958 issue is Marisa Allasio, and the photo is one that originally appeared in the Italian magazine Il Borghesi and landed the publishers in court on obscenity charges. As anyone who has ever been to a beach can attest, there is a big difference between almost falling out of a bikini and actually doing it, and that difference is where all the fun lies. But the shot was nonetheless deemed too sexual by Italy’s moral watchdogs, and all the newsstand copies of Il Borghese were confiscated. In the end, the magazine was able to prove that the image was a promo still from Allasio’s forgettable 1956 film Poveri ma belli, aka Poor but Beautiful. Since Il Borgese was not responsible for the image, charges against the magazine were dropped. If you’d like to read a scathing contemporary review of the film, we found one by Bosley Crowther at the New York Times, and just because it’s Saturday, we have the almost-obscene bikini photo below, in its original unreversed state. We’ll have more from Pic later.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1939—Batman Debuts
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise starring Michael Keaton, then George Clooney, and finally Christian Bale. 1953—Crick and Watson Publish DNA Results
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves. 1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule's main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule's descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot.
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