MIDNIGHT BLUE

Dark on the outside, darker on the inside.
This is the second Canadian tabloid we’ve shared in October, and we have several others upcoming in the next few months. This time we’re back to Minuit, the sister publication of Midnight, published today in 1968 with a cover featuring Susan Boyd. She’s looking a little radioactive, and in unusually dark waters. This could everyone’s fate the way things are going in 2022. We don’t know what Minuit editors were shooting for here. Maybe they had a problem during the printing phase. But in it an odd way it’s actually a nice cover, and Boyd pops up again in the centerfold, looking much healthier.

Elswewhere inside the issue Minuit wastes no time with its efforts to shock. We learn about Vietmanese youngster Bon Ngoc Tho, who editors claim is a demi-homme born with many characteristics of his father—a monkey. We can say a lot about this, but let’s skip most of it and simply note that the 1960s were the tail end, so to speak, of a long-running fascination with supposed human freaks.

Moving on, editors have a curious photo of a model with something unidentifiable in her mouth. We took several guesses what the thing was, and they were all wrong. Turns out it’s a pea shooter—a tire-pois. No, we’d never seen one, but a few of you probably recognized it. Minuit editors claim it can kill a kid, and that hospitals around the U.S. have been treating serious pea shooter injuries, along with wounds inflicted by “blow zappers and Zulu-guns.” The article explains that the injuries come not from shooting the projectiles, but from swallowing them while inhaling to fire the weapon, occasionally piercing arteries in the neck.

There are more stories along those lines, but it isn’t all dark at midnight. Elsewhere in the issue you get men’s fitness, nymphomania, and plenty of celebs, such as Claudia Cardinale, Nai Bonet, and Maureen Arthur, plus Robert Vaughn hawking a 100% legitimate Man from U.N.C.L.E. “plume espion.” That means “spy feather,” which doesn’t help at all in determining exactly what it is. But a careful scan of the text suggests that it’s an x-ray vision device that works on everything from walls to clothes. Right. We’ll take two, and see you at the beach. Twenty-one scans below.
Minuit puts the country's hospitable reputation to the test.


Ever since we discovered a while back that the U.S. tabloid Midnight was actually a spin-off of Montreal based Minuit we’ve been looking around for issues. We finally had some luck. This example hit Canadian newsstands today in 1968, and on the cover is British actress Mollie Peters, or Molly Peters. Inside, various Hollywood stars are spotlighted in unflattering ways. Edy Williams was allegedly attacked by a lesbian; Paul Newman resorted to transcendental meditation to cut down on his drinking; Jason Robards, Jr. broke everything Humphrey Bogart related in Lauren Bacall’s house; Robert Vaughn paid off his extensive gambling debts and cancelled his credit cards; Janet Margolin allegedly ate a pound of ground beef every day for health reasons; and Ursula Andress attacked Anita Ekberg in a Paris restaurant for making eyes at Andress’s boyfriend Jean-Paul Belmondo.

There’s also a note on Babsi Zimmermann, who Minuit claims just refused a nude role in a French film. We noticed the blurb because of her name, which seems too good to be true, and familiar too. We looked her up and she did exist. It turns out she was better known as Barbara Zimmermann. She changed her stage name after the release of her first film, a counter-culture sexploitation romp called Heißer Sand auf Sylt, aka The New Life Style (Just to Be Love). Maybe she wanted a fresh start because the movie was such a stinker. We know it was bad because we wrote about it, which is why her name sounded familiar. She’s naked as a donskoy cat in it, so Minuit‘s claim that she refused the French movie makes sense if she wanted to rebrand herself. The change still has people confused. Currently IMDB has separate entries for Babsi and Barbara.

Minuit reserves special attention for U.S. actor George Hamilton, who had been generally targeted by tabloids for avoiding military service in Vietnam. Why him? We wrote about the reason a long while back, and if you’re curious you can check. Minuit wryly informs readers that, “George Hamilton somehow managed to break his toe the day after he received a notice to report to the U.S. Army recruiting center. This gives him an interesting three-month [deferral]. It’s clever, isn’t it?” Obviously, toes heal. Hamilton eventually received a full deferral for other reasons.

Also in this issue, Minuit editors treat readers to a story about a man cut in half by a train. We feel like it’s urban folklore, but there are photos—for any who might be convinced by those—and a long story explaining how a man named Regerio Estrada caught his wife Lucia in bed with another man, beat him unconscious, and tied him to a train track to await the next express. Do we buy it? Not really. The internet contains only a fraction of all knowledge and history, but we think this tawdry tale is so bizarre that it would have found its way online. There’s nothing. Or maybe we’re just the first to upload it. Anything is possible. We have additional colorful Canadian tabloids we’ll be sharing in the months ahead. You’ll find eighteen scans below.

Your Honor, I swear I didn't kill them. My wife and her lover were on fire well before I walked into the bedroom.


If you rub two sticks together fast enough you can make fire, so why not two people? But the lovers referred to on this cover of Midnight from August 1964 didn’t burst into flames from the sheer intensity of their fucking (though we love that image). They were allegedly doused with gasoline and set ablaze by a Colorado man named Ricardo Anlando, who wasn’t a husband, as we suggested in our subhead, but a spurned admirer. He incinerated his unrequited love because she married another man, which goes to show that hell hath no fury like an incel scorned. They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but if there’s an opportunity to serve it as flambé, some will take it. There’s another fire themed story in this issue about a mother who stuffed her newborn into a furnace. No need to fret, though. The building janitor saved the kid and the mom went to prison. So you get a happy ending to counterbalance the sad one. We bet neither story is true, though. Just a hunch.
Political situation in U.S. critical after radical surgery to transplant corrupt old politics onto fresh new voters.


We wrote a polemical subhead. Heh, sub-head, see what we did there? Because it’s a substitute head and— Anyway, this cover of Midnight published today in 1967 touts a medical miracle, but of course in reality it was beyond the capabilities of science then and remains so today. But one day. And when extra-long lifespans arrive, horrible old ideas will be near impossible to change because the same geezers will be in charge for hundreds of years. You think seventy-something is old too old to be president? Just wait. On another note, you may have noticed we haven’t posted many tabloids lately. Our scanner has developed the habit of placing a bright blue line on our scans, and during the quarantine the electronics store was closed. We’ll wander over that way pretty soon and get to scannin’ again. In the meantime, we have 399 tabloid posts in the website, and if you’re inclined you can access them here

Star light, star bright, first star that really, really wants it tonight.


German actress and glamour model Christiane Schmidtmer claims on the cover of this Midnight published today in 1965 that she’ll do anything to be a star. Back then, that was music to unscrupulous producers’ ears. Today, producers that cross the professional line would run a serious risk of going to jail. Did Schmidtmer ever actually say this? There’s no way to know for sure, but with Midnight you can reasonably suspect that its quotes are fabricated to thrill its preponderantly male readership. As we’ve mentioned numerous times before, this was its m.o.—the provocative cover quote paired with a slinky handout photo, and an interior article bought cheap off a freelance writer who had managed to carve out ten minutes with an actress during a film junket.

So how did Schmidtmer’s career go? The quote requires we ask. Well, she appeared in about a dozen motion pictures and about the same number of parts on television, and she played, among other roles, a passenger in 1963’s Stop Train 349, a flight attendant in 1965’s Boeing, Boeing, a passenger (named Lizzi Spoekenkieker) in 1965’s Ship of Fools, and another passenger in Airport ’75—which weirdly came out in 1974. Unlike in astronomy, in cinema you sometimes have to define the term star for yourself, and we judge that she didn’t quite make it, though it’s an accomplishment of sorts to play roles in or on all the major forms of commercial conveyance—trains, planes and boats. But even if she never attained real stardom, she dazzles below, and we’ll probably see her again a little later because: Lizzi Spoekenkieker. How can we resist?

Midnight cover star urges women to bust out.


None of Midnight magazine’s quotes were real, we’re pretty sure. On this cover from today in 1966 Janet Dane says ban the bra, joining feminists of her day who advocated ditching such restraints. But who’s Janet Dane? Well, we had a heck of a time finding out, because there’s a famous psychic of the same name, but it turns out she was a glamour model who appeared in Fling, Rogue, Tab and other such publications mostly in 1959 and 1960. This Midnight cover would postdate by years any other images of her we saw, but the editors had no qualms about using old material, so we suspect this shot, while published in ’66, is actually a handout dating from around 1960. Below we have a nice color image of her, a rarity we found years ago, and as you can see she’s banned her bra. Thanks to these two shots, the hard-to-find Dane’s internet presence has been greatly augmented. If you’re out there, Janet, you’re welcome. On the other hand, if you wanted your glamour days to be forgotten, we’re terribly sorry.

Vickers tells Midnight readers what's what.


This cover of Midnight dated today in 1965 features Laura Vickers, who is touted as an actress, but who had no credited film roles. In fact, for a while we thought she was a made up person, but that wasn’t Midnight‘s style. The magazine had enough cred to get legit celebrities for its covers. So we kept checking and it turns out Vickers was an obscure glamour model who appeared in super low rent magazines like Flirt ‘n Skirt and Black Nylons. Midnight was probably the closest she ever came to mainstream recognition—which is to say, not very close. So what’s the score? As usual with this tabloid it’s about sex. A man who knows the score knows what women want. But we don’t need Midnight to know what that is. The Pulp Intl. girlfriends keep us well informed what women want: it all. 

Sophia Loren applies personal experience to her ideas about marriage.

Above is a cover of Midnight with a nice photo of Italian superstar Sophia Loren, and a header suggesting trial marriages for couples over twenty-one. Did she say it? Quite possibly. Her marriage to film producer Carlo Ponti was an international scandal thanks to popes and others sticking their noses into her private business. But back then they thought it was their right—actually, their holy duty—because divorce wasn’t legal in Italy and Ponti was still married. He and his wife had split and had nothing to do with each other, but the Catholic church assured Loren she’d go to hell if she married Ponti. Well, she did it anyway by proxy in 1957 and officially in 1966. So in August 1970, when this issue of Midnight appeared, we think it quite likely that she had some well formed ideas about marriage. In any case, nice cover.

Rumors of her demise were greatly exaggerated.


We’ve featured the Canadian tabloid Midnight numerous times. This one appeared on newsstands today in 1968. On the cover readers get a headline referring to Robert F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated the previous month. His name is accompanied by a prediction that his killer, Jordanian nationalist Sirhan Sirhan, would in turn be assassinated. It wasn’t an outrageous prediction—during the late 1960s newsworthy figures were being dropped like three foot putts. Sirhan was never murdered, though, and he’s still around today, languishing at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County, California.

Sirhan is an interesting character, but it’s the story on Susan Denberg we’re interested in today. Denberg, née Dietlinde Zechner, is a German born beauty who became a Playboy Playmate of the Year and screen actress, was a desired Hollywood party girl who, acording to sources, had relationships with Hugh Hefner and Jim Brown. She was generally regarded as one of the major sex symbols of her time, but she also became a drug addict. After making the 1968 film Frankenstein Created Woman Denberg returned to Europe and shunned the movie business. In fact, she kept such a low profile that for years sources incorrectly reported that she had died.

Midnight journo John Wilson claims to have visited Denberg in a Vienna mental hospital near the beginning of her self-imposed exile, and his article is basically a recounting of his chat with her. He describes her depressing surroundings and portrays her as a sort of broken bird, quoting her as saying, “I was a real party girl, going out every night, dating one man after another, running around doing wild things like getting drunk and dancing nude at parties. And then someone got me started on LSD and it made everything seem so clear. It was wonderful. Only I couldn’t keep away from it, and after a while that was all I was doing, staying in my room and dropping LSD.”

In 1971 Denberg had a child, and by 1972 was making her living on the nudie bar circuit, working as a topless server at the adult cinema Rondell in Vienna, and later dancing fully nude at another Vienna nightspot called Renz. She also worked elsewhere in Europe, including Geneva, where in 1974 she tried to commit suicide by swallowing a reported 200 sleeping pills, an amount that surely would have been fatal had she not been quickly found and sped to a hospital. In 1976 she became a mother again and retired from nude dancing. Today she lives quietly in Vienna.

Denberg’s story is filled with twists and turns, and yet it isn’t unique in a place like Hollywood. As she makes clear, once enough power brokers, modeling agents, and studio types tell a woman she’s special she’s probably going to believe them, but once she believes them it’s hard for her to keep her head on straight. She sums up her journey to Midnight, “They told me I was beautiful enough to go all the way to the top. They told me about all the fun up there, the kicks. They never told me about the booze and the drugs, the long slide down.” 
In other news child leave bill passes Congress with broad bi-partisan support.


The saying goes that if guys had to have children humans would go extinct, but what would really happen is we men would immediately confer upon ourselves every possible birth related advantage. We’re talking sixteen weeks paternity leave, laws that hold our jobs for us while we’re away, Planned Parenthood clinics everywhere like Taco Bells, completely unfettered access to birth control, Father’s Day a three-day weekend holiday in the summer, the whole nine. And childbirth would become macho: “Dude, when I gave birth I was like, fuck the epidural. I wanna feel this shit. Seriously, what kind of girly-man uses anesthesia? I had a friend, he did it without painkillers, he said when the contractions got bad he bit down on a bullet. Me, I had my buddies there and they were all screaming, “Crown motherfucker! Crown motherfucker!” I was like, “Yo Doc, am I delivering a baby or a basketball?” But when it really started to hurt I just headlocked the neonatologist and choked him out.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1935—Parker Brothers Buys Monopoly

The board game company Parker Brothers acquires the forerunner patents for Monopoly from Elizabeth Magie, who had designed the game (originally called The Landlord’s Game) to demonstrate the economic ill effects of land monopolism and the use of land value tax as a remedy for them. Parker Brothers quickly turns Monopoly into the biggest selling board game in America.

1991—Gene Tierney Passes Away

American actress Gene Tierney, one of the great beauties in Hollywood history and star of the seminal film noir Laura, dies in Houston, Texas of emphysema. Tierney had begun smoking while young as a way to help lower her high voice, and was hooked on cigarettes the rest of her life.

1937—Hitler Reveals His Plans for Lebensraum

Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting with Nazi officials and states his intention to acquire “lebensraum,” or living space for Germany. An old German concept that dated from 1901, Hitler had written of it in Mein Kampf, and now possessed the power to implement it. Basically the idea, as Hitler saw it, was for the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Russian and other Slavic populations to the east, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate those lands with a Germanic upper class.

1991—Fred MacMurray Dies

American actor Fred MacMurray dies of pneumonia related to leukemia. While most remember him as a television actor, earlier in his career he starred in 1944’s Double Indemnity, one of the greatest films noir ever made.

1955—Cy Young Dies

American baseball player Cy Young, who had amassed 511 wins pitching for five different teams from 1890 to 1911, dies at the age of 88. Today Major League Baseball’s yearly award given to the best pitcher of each season is named after Young.

1970—Feral Child Found in Los Angeles

A thirteen year-old child who had been kept locked in a room for her entire life is found in the Los Angeles house of her parents. The child, named Genie, could only speak twenty words and was not able even to walk normally because she had spent her life strapped to a potty chair during the day and bound in a sleeping bag at night. Genie ended up in a series of foster homes and was given language training but after years of effort by various benefactors never reached a point where she could interact normally in society.

1957—Soviets Launch Dog into Space

The Soviet Union launches the first ever living creature into the cosmos when it blasts a stray dog named Laika into orbit aboard the capsule Sputnik II. Laika is fitted with various monitoring devices that provide information about the effects of launch and weightlessness on a living creature. Urban myth has it that Laika starved to death after a few days in space, but she actually died of heat stress just a few hours into the journey.

Uncredited cover art for Lesbian Gym by Peggy Swenson, who was in reality Richard Geis.
T’as triché marquise by George Maxwell, published in 1953 with art by Jacques Thibésart, also known as Nik.

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