 Infancy, adulthood, and death in twenty-four years. 
This issue of Man's Magazine hit newsstands this month in 1963 with Mel Crair cover art we suspect is cropped from a larger piece. In the past the magazine had featured paintings that occupied its entire front, but by this time it was experimenting with a tabloid look, giving more space to blocked text with sensational messaging, and reducing the dimensions of art acquired from Crair and others. More cover changes would come. From fully painted fronts, to the tabloid style you see here, it shifted to photo covers, which happened in 1969 and saw cheesecake and adventure imagery alternating, until the early ’70s when cheesecake took over and adventure was relegated entirely to the interior. Man's Magazine was by that point publishing nude and semi-nude women on all its covers. Other men's adventure magazines were doing the same.
This shift happened quickly, but had been in the wind for a long time. Private publications had crossed all red lines much earlier, though they hadn't been openly available. Producing and selling them was to risk prison. But it was understood that men wanted more eroticism, wanted it at high quality, and would buy it even if it wasn't behind the fig leaves of art and literature. However, art and literature were needed in above-ground publications because they helped avoid obscenity convictions. Otherwise, erotic content had no “redeeming qualities,” and legal troubles were guaranteed. Mainstream men's publications were largely articles, fiction, and cartoons for that reason—and to attract advertisers.
Man's Magazine had launched in 1952 and operated in reasonable health for at least fifteen years. But by the mid-1960s social repression and censorship were in retreat. Language was changing. Racier novels could be published without legal concerns, and more revealing cinematic content was possible. In the magazine realm, brands that foregrounded women's nudity more than previously were prospering. The erotic but coy Modern Man had launched in 1951. Playboy had arrived in 1954 and been willing to push the standards of what was possible. Penthouse arrived in the UK in 1965, in the U.S. in 1969, and began to show pubic hair. When Hustler arrived in 1974 the floodgates weren't just open, suddenly, but gaping.
Man's Magazine is a classic example of a publication that was swept away by all that change, but refused to go down without a fight. Its attempts to adapt failed and it folded in 1976. Interestingly, by the end, during the latter half of that year, it moved to personality covers. Cover stars included Richard M. Nixon, Muhammad Ali, and even Paul McCartney and Larry Csonka. We don't know what prompted that move—a final attempt to appear more highbrow, perhaps? We haven't bought any of those last gasp issues to seek clues, but nothing could help Man's Magazine retain market share in a landscape that featured publications with more nudity and gloss.
But it wasn't only explicitness and printing quality that pushed Man's Magazine and its ilk slowly off newsstands. With their tighter operating budgets when compared with Playboy and cohort, they generally had lower quality fiction, profiles, essays, and cartoons. By contrast Playboy would eventually interview some of the most important people in the world, and its fiction would feature the most acclaimed authors. Man's Magazine never had a prayer of keeping pace. But today's issue appeared before the decline. There's fiction from the well known Richard Deming, non-fiction by the respected Richard Hardwick, and many excellent illustrations. All of that and more are below.                          
 Gloria Grahame is a bad mamma scamma. 
We had to watch Mama's Dirty Girls, not because it's a 1970's grindhouse movie (though that helped), but because none other than 1950s femme fatale Gloria Grahame got snared in this low budget affair. Sometimes the bills simply need to be paid. Or maybe she thought the script was dynamite. Either way, she gets top billing in this drive-in quality drama that premiered today in 1974, which tells the story of a scam artist mother and her three daughters who are honeytrap serial killers dispatching men for their money.
When Grahame gets another rich man on the hook, she foolishly poses as a well-to-do widow without realizing that her target is likewise seeking to kill someone for their money. This twist is ironic, and the mutual murder attempts that follow can be read as black comedy if you peer deeply between the lines, but in our opinion Mama's Dirty Girls doesn't have enough brainpower to be satire. Grahame probably wished it were, though—then she'd have had an excuse for starring in it. Sadly, it's just an amusingly bad movie. Everyone is terrible in it—even Grahame. And there isn't near enough eroticism to save it.
But you may want to watch it anyway. The cast is beautiful, particularly Currie, and there's an interesting value-added co-star too. Fifteen minutes into the movie's running time you'll see an actress that'll make you go, “Who is that?” You'll be reacting to the radiant beauty of bit player Annika Di Lorenzo, née Marjorie Lee Thoreson, who was a Penthouse centerfold in 1973 and later carved out a career in b-cinema. Besides Mama's Dirty Girls she appeared in such films as 1974's Act of Vengeance and The Centerfold Girls, 1980's Dressed To Kill, and 1979's big budget porn epic Caligula.
She later sued Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, claiming that he forced her to have sex with business associates, and tricked her into the infamous Caligula orgy. She won a $4 million punitive judgement, but lost it in an appeal. Guccione took revenge by publishing a lesbian pictorial of Di Lorenzo. Afterward, she stepped away from the limelight, but in 2011 hit newspapers again when she washed up dead on Camp Pendleton Beach in San Diego under baffling circumstances. Police suggested suicide, but her family contended that it was foul play, possibly perpetrated by someone from the military base. In the end, her case was closed as unsolved, and today remains another Hollywood mystery.               
 She’s finally going to make her mark on Broadway. 
The comic book-like art isn’t of good quality, but we had to share this because it fits into the collection of falling covers we put together a while back. The Penthouse Killings was written by Horace Brown for Toronto based Newsstand Library in 1950. If you actually want to know why this ballerina is tossed off a building, check the detailed review here.
 They say once we cross it the end is near. 
Today on Britain’s respected Guardian webpage, writer Mariella Frostrup muses about the prevalence of pornography in modern society and asks whether it’s harmful. At Pulp Intl., with few exceptions, our nude images are merely quaint, which raises the questions of whether they were ever considered harmful, and if so, why and when they came to be seen as artful. We are well aware that the airbrushing away of womens’ genitalia—something that was general practice at the time these images appeared—was seen by many rights advocates as a type of violence against women. After all, what was so dirty about female genitalia? Didn’t their erasure peel back the mask from a male-dominated society’s desperate efforts to control female sexuality? Then along came Playboy, which challenged archaic laws designed to prevent mass production and mass mailing of pornography. Compared to what you see here today, Playboy represented a quantum leap. Its women looked less like Renaissance paintings and more like real human beings. By increments it beat back legal challenges, and eventually Penthouse, Playboy, and other newsstand magazines began to   show pubic hair, and then actual sex organs. Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner was hailed as a First Amendment hero as well as a defender of womens' right to control their own sexuality. But pretty soon it was clear that women had won only the right to sell their sexuality—the control remained exclusively male. Mariella Frostrup’s Guardian piece is like others written before. It suggests, like all those articles from earlier decades, that there’s a bright white line in erotica that has been crossed and that society is suffering for it. We can’t comment on the harm aspect, but we do see a line. Basically, old porn, because of its paper format, depended upon the labor of dozens of outside people—printers, film developers, pre-press personnel, postal workers, newsstand owners—and required such an investment of capital that 95% of its producers served the middle ground of taste and depicted acts that, with perhaps the added twist of one or two extra participants, were taking place in private anyway. The internet changed all that. So if there’s a bright line, it lies where the internet atomized porn and turned much of it into a performance art, a sideshow that somehow has taken over center stage with acts that are most certainly not already occurring in private. Call us crazy, but even though these images were produced before we were born we     prefer them to the new stuff. They don’t depict merely bodies or an act, but an entire lifestyle of beaches and gardens and all the warm thoughts and simple desires such places entail. This issue of Folies de Paris et de Hollywood appeared today in 1966. If it was ever offensive or harmful it isn’t anymore, so enjoy it as an artifact of an earlier age—not a better one by any means, but certainly a more artful one.           
 Where do we go from hair? 
The amazing woman you see in this unabashed frontal nude photo is Camella Donner, also known as Camella Thomas, a popular glamour model of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She appeared in Mayfair and other magazines, and managed one movie role, a blink-and-you-miss-her moment in 1983’s Octopussy. It was an effort the producers didn’t even bother to credit. But we give her all the credit in the world—if her loosely curled afro isn’t history’s best hair it sure comes close.
 I see your Bond girl and raise you a Penthouse cut-out.   
Hello guys. When I saw your Ursula Andress doll last week I remembered I had this laying around and scanned it for you. This actually isn’t mine. It’s something my father had in a box in his garage. It’s a Penthouse “livin’ doll”, which is a cardboard woman you dress up in a variety of outfits, and she even has six different faces, like my ex-wife. Anyway, the outside of the cardboard sleeve it came in is labeled “booby prize”, so maybe it was something my dad won in a contest or something back in the 1960s. I’m not actually to going to say it’s better than your Ursula Andress doll, but you have to admit she’s pretty great. Submitted by Kurt W. She's lovely, Kurt. If your cardboard cutie is based on an actual centerfold, we'd be curious to know who she is. For those who missed the Andress doll he's talking about, check here.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
2003—Hope Dies
Film legend Bob Hope dies of pneumonia two months after celebrating his 100th birthday. 1945—Churchill Given the Sack
In spite of admiring Winston Churchill as a great wartime leader, Britons elect
Clement Attlee the nation's new prime minister in a sweeping victory for the Labour Party over the Conservatives. 1952—Evita Peron Dies
Eva Duarte de Peron, aka Evita, wife of the president of the Argentine Republic, dies from cancer at age 33. Evita had brought the working classes into a position of political power never witnessed before, but was hated by the nation's powerful military class. She is lain to rest in Milan, Italy in a secret grave under a nun's name, but is eventually returned to Argentina for reburial beside her husband in 1974. 1943—Mussolini Calls It Quits
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini steps down as head of the armed forces and the government. It soon becomes clear that Il Duce did not relinquish power voluntarily, but was forced to resign after former Fascist colleagues turned against him. He is later installed by Germany as leader of the Italian Social Republic in the north of the country, but is killed by partisans in 1945.
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