| Vintage Pulp | Oct 10 2011 |
Sex, celebs, and swindles make up the bulk of this Inside Story from October 1958 with Swedish bombshell Anita Ekberg starring on the cover. All tabloids had a snappy slogan. Inside Story’s is “Tells the facts about people, the news, and the world we live in.” Doesn’t exactly send chills down the spine, does it? Maybe that’s why Inside Story was always strictly a middle-of-the-pack tab, never achieving the rarefied heights of Confidential or Police Gazette. But on to the stories.
In this issue readers are told that a relationship with Anita Ekberg comes at a high cost—not in money, but in frayed nerves due to her demanding behavior, alleged examples of which are detailed from London (caught by police having sex in a parked car) to Rio de Janeiro (abandoned her boyfriend and flew back to Sweden without a goodbye). Inside Story also expounds on Marlon Brando and Anna Kashfi, as well as Gloria de Haven and the unnamed Central American dictator’s son (Ramfis Trujillo, discussed last year) who was so struck by her beauty that he spent a fortune in time and money trying to get her into bed.
Errol Flynn's supposedly inflated reputation as a lover also takes a hit, and both the horse racing industry and restaurant business provide material for insider horror stories. All in all, it’s a nice slate of articles, well worth the twenty-five cent asking price. We have twenty pages of all this for your enjoyment below, including a large scan of Diana Dors, because, well, she’s Diana Dors.
| Vintage Pulp | May 30 2011 |
This issue of the tabloid The National Insider from today in 1965 gives us Lee Harvey Oswald’s military background, Jayne Mansfield’s thoughts on abortion, and Madelyn Murray’s views on religion. But all those pieces are trumped by the excoriating hatchet job on Marlon Brando written by his ex-wife Anna Kashfi. She reveals that Brando slapped her, tried to bully her into giving up her acting career, and never forgave her for being less than forthcoming about her eastern Indian ancestry. She also slams Harry Belafonte for lying to her to cover for the time Brando spent wooing the French actress France Nguyen. Kashfi had a lot to get off her chest, so much that Insider featured her revelations in four consecutive issues, basically turning her into a guest columnist complete with byline and inset photo. She must have really gotten an appetite for this kind of writing, because in 1979 she published the book Brando for Breakfast, which is still regarded as one of the most shocking tell-alls ever written. In that one she claimed Brando had sex with a chicken. For the love of God, cock-a-doodle-don’t.
| Hollywoodland | May 4 2011 |
Promo photo of Marlon Brando seriously invading Mary Murphy’s personal space on the set of The Wild One, 1953. See two more stills from the movie here.
| Vintage Pulp | Dec 23 2010 |
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.
| Vintage Pulp | May 3 2010 |
“Pops, you pick up on this jive, man?"
“What?”
“You pick up on this jive, this crazy music here, man? Did you dig the rebop?”
“What?”
“The rebop, dad! The rebop! He’s a square, man. Don’t you get this at all?”
We’d love to have seen the subtitles, because after that the dialogue gets so crazy even we can’t transcribe it, but that’s The Wild One—a different type of cinema, and a new kind of star in rough and tumble Marlon Brando. Some people think 1955 was the zenith of the American empire. If that’s so, then The Wild One is the proverbial writing on the wall that change was in the wind. Brando and the rest of his Black Rebel Motorcycle Club roared across movie screens in Sweden for the first time today in 1954.
| Vintage Pulp | Apr 6 2010 |
Cover and interior pages of Whisper magazine from April 1955. In addition to some nice shots of Bettie Page, Whisper has a set of Josiane Berenger cheesecake images, which they use to taunt her fiancée Marlon Brando. Berenger had also posed nude at age seventeen for Polish artist Moise Kisling. Brando was aware of that and had offered to buy all Kisling’s negatives, but instead a French department store bought them and displayed the shots in their front window. But Brando got over that and stuck with Berenger, only to have Whisper blindside him a year later. We don’t know if these images were the last straw that ruined Brando and Berenger’s relationship, but we do know that shortly after the images appeared, the couple split.
| Intl. Notebook | Sep 16 2009 |
All very interesting, but then we come to this slightly more obscure reference to Yale and Pig Night parties. Intriguing, no? So, since we have a collegiate theme going today, let’s take a closer look at this. Yale during the 1950s had a thriving frat culture of rich young men sporting well-developed senses of entitlement along with a hair-trigger willingness to party like it was 1999. One house in particular, Delta Kappa Epsilon, was the jock frat. And we all know how sensitive jocks are. Pig Night was an annual ritual in which DKE pledges were sent into New Haven to invite townie girls to a fraternity dance. At midnight, the lucky ladies were gathered and an announcement was made in front of the entire frat. The girls had not been selected because they were beautiful, or interesting, or fun—but because they were the ugliest girls the pledges could find—i.e. “pigs.” Big laughs all around.
The girls invariably stormed out, angry, or humiliated, or tearful, and that made it all the more fun. All this from a frat claiming to seek candidates who “combined in the most equal proportions the gentleman, the scholar, and the jolly good fellow.” We don’t know exactly when DKE’s Pig Nights ended, but we did find references to them continuing while George W. Bush was president of the frat during the mid-’60s. We draw no conclusions from that, although you might. But remember—fucked up as it is, back then Pig Night would have fallen into the category of good clean fun. Not that it was truly harmless—just that the victims were unfairly expected to pretend it was. Today, nobody would tolerate such an event. Which is good, because though we’re vocal here at Pulp about the sad decline of movie, book, and magazine art, we’ve also said before that we think human beings are slowly getting better.
| Hollywoodland | Mar 2 2009 |
A few days ago we alluded to Marlon Brando's weight struggles, so we thought it would be fair to post a reminder of how he looked during that time when he was the top male sex symbol in film, and the face of American rebellion. These two stills are from his seminal biker flick The Wild One, 1953.
| Modern Pulp | Feb 27 2009 |
You know what's curious about Apocalypse Now? That a movie with such a quirky (some would say botched) ending is considered a classic. We are not among those who think Francis Ford Coppola fumbled in the fourth quarter, but even if we were, one viewing of the documentary Hearts of Darkness would dispel that notion, and make us realize the true curiosity of Apocalypse Now is that it was ever finished in the first place. What with the heart attack, and the devastating monsoon, and the capital flight, and Hopper on drugs, and Brando on donuts, it's a mystery how Coppola survived. But there's no mystery why we love this Turkish one sheet—it's a genius piece of promo art that exudes both menace and chaos. Apocalypse Now aka Kiyamet (Turkish for "doomsday") premiered today in Istanbul in 1980.
| Vintage Pulp | Dec 7 2008 |
When Swedes heard about The Big Heat, they said “Gud, tack själv,” because they were all freezing their asses off and thought the movie was a documentary about how to stay warm. But no, it was just top-notch film noir, which generated its own warmth, especially if you looked at Gloria Grahame. The movie was directed by film noir black-belt Fritz Lang, and tough guy Lee Marvin had a great supporting role. Oh, and if you’re wondering, yes, Jocelyn Brando is related to Marlon—she was his older sister. She died in 2005 after a lengthy career acting mostly on the telly. The Big Heat opened today in Stockholm, 1953.
