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.

So, here’s the Robert Mitchum booklet cited in the July 1957 Hush-Hush in the above post. The article describes it as the lowest form of filth and its maker or makers as degenerate profiteers. Pretty hard to argue with that. Consider it a warning. It’s called Goof Butts, and it references Mitchum’s arrest for marijuana possession in 1948. Assuming the creators of the book wanted to strike while the iron was hot, so to speak, they probably published it around the same time. Enjoy.

The infamous Profumo Affair exploded onto British front pages during the spring and summer of 1963, outing Secratary of State for War John Profumo’s affair with the call girl Christine Keeler, and leading directly to his humiliation and resignation. More than a year later the other call girl at the center of the scandal—Mandy Rice-Davies—was promoting a tell-all book about her time in the sex trade. It was called The Mandy Report and on the cover of Confidential from May 1964, we see Rice-Davies holding the book and looking pretty darn pleased with herself.

The Mandy Report was actually rather cleverly formatted as a tabloid-style magazine, and between the covers Rice-Davies claimed to have spent quality time between the sheets with the likes of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Robert Mitchum, Bob Hope, George Hamilton and many other household names. Mostly, the men denied it, of course, but to paraphrase Rice-Davies herself: “Well, they would, wouldn’t they?”

Call us prejudiced, but we tend to believe women about situations like these, even when they happen to be trying to drum up sales—and especially when they aren't. In pulp novels women publicly lie about this stuff all the time, and as a fictional device it's fun, but in the real world there's a lot of potential for danger and social loss that makes us think falsehoods in this area are relatively rare. But that's just us.

We don't know how many copies The Mandy Report eventually sold, but the fact that it's still widely available online might be an indication that it did okay. Later in life, Rice-Davies stayed in the spotlight, acting in film and television. That’s her below, relaxing on a beach on Majorca circa 1963, and if you're curious you can read a bit more about the Profumo Affair at an earlier post, here.

Director J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear, for which you see a rare lobby card above, isn’t just a great film. Embedded in its tale of an ex-convict terrorizing a family is an examination of American attitudes toward civil liberties. And if we contrast Cape Fear with modern thrillers like Edge of Darkness or Taken, what we begin to ask is whether America has crested the hill of its own belief in high principles and is now steadily rolling down the other side. Where Cape Fear presents the legal concept of due process as inviolable, and builds tension by asking if star Gregory Peck will resort to vigilantism to protect his family from a murderous Robert Mitchum, in Liam Neeson’s Taken, the hero intentionally shoots his friend’s wife in the arm with no more worry than stepping on a bug, and zero moral hesitation at making an innocent woman collateral damage in his holy war against the villains. Of course, movies are not real life. But they can be a reflection of it, and Cape Fear shows just how much attitudes toward legal protections may have changed in America in the last fifty years. We strongly recommend this film—as both entertainment and a historical study. It opened in the U.S. today in 1962.

During the summer of 1948 actor Robert Mitchum was busted for marijuana possession and sentenced to a brief stint in jail. He served part of his time doing hard labor making cinderblocks at Sheriff’s Honor Farm, north of Los Angeles in the town of Castaic, and in the above photo is being transferred to L.A. County Jail to finish his sentence in a cell. That was today in 1949.

Note: Wikipedia and other sources seemingly get Mitchum’s jail chronology backwards. They say Mitchum served his county time first, which means he would have been slaving under a hot sun in Castaic on this day. But he wasn’t—at least, not according to the photo’s label, which is contemporaneous with the shot. 

Is it possible to get tired of Marilyn Monroe? We doubt it, especially when so many of the images featuring her are so arresting. Here’s a good example—it’s a Japanese promo poster for her 1954 western River of No Return, a Cinemascope production with Robert Mitchum at her side and Otto Preminger behind the lens. Unfortunately, Monroe and Preminger didn’t hit it off and the movie may have suffered a bit as a result, but it remains a solid effort and even if the story doesn’t rouse you, the Canadian scenery and Monroe’s saloon-singer costumes will. We should issue one warning though—the poster conveys a light-hearted mood, but the film is actually a straight adventure-drama. Still, anything with Monroe or Mitchum is worth a look. Incidentally, we saw this poster for sale at a couple of different websites, but be forewarned before you spend your hard-earned coin that the legit vintage version is double-sided. We’ve posted the reverse below.

Robert Mitchum was considered one of the coolest guys in cinema, but he didn’t take his craft very seriously. He said that stage passed around the time he “made a film with Greer Garson and she took 125 takes to say no.” Perhaps that disdain toward his chosen craft is why Mitchum didn’t hesitate to branch out and risk his image releasing two albums of whimsical music. His first, 1957’s Calypso Is Like So, offers up the normally baritone-voiced Mitchum singing in a lilting Caribbean accent. The album charted a modest hit in the countrified galloper “The Ballad of Thunder Road,” and also contains the ditty “From a Logical Point of View,” in which he comically shares a recipe for marital happiness:

But if you make an ugly woman your wife,
you can be sure you will be happy in all your life.
She will never do things in a funny way,
to allow the neighbor to have things to say.
She wouldn't disregard the husband at all,
by exhibiting herself too bitter and cold.
Man, from a logical point of view,
better marry a woman uglier than you.

Mitchum’s second record, entitled That Man Sings, aka That Man, was recorded in 1967. This one was mostly country music, and charted two singles. As time passed, the calypso album became the more renowned of Mitchum’s platters, probably because of its unrepentant cheese factor, but we think album two is far superior to the first. It’s less of a novelty album, and has what we think is his best song, a version of the Bobby Hebb classic “Sunny.” We have a feeling it'll brighten up your Monday.

American actress Laraine Day, who starred in The Locket with Robert Mitchum and in Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, seen here circa early ’40s.

We've been on the road this week, and right now we're in Sitges, Spain, which is a Mediterranean resort town not far south of Barcelona. To us, it was famous for being the location of the very first Pacha nightclub, but this morning we discovered this awesome photo of Robert Mitchum from 1950, standing on a spot we've walked on probably ten times a day since being here. We don't know who shot it, where it originally appeared, or whether we're risking a cease and desist order, but we just had to post it.