This issue of the New York based tabloid Private Affairs appeared in June 1962, and features cover stars Kim Novak and American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell rendered by an uncredited artist. Inside the issue Affairs rehashes Novak’s various relationships, recounting how mafia goons threatened to kill Sammy Davis Jr. if he didn’t stop meeting Novak across the color line, how she accepted an expensive sports car as a gift from Ramfis Trujillo even though his hands were “bathed in the blood of executed political prisoners,” and how she shot down a smitten Charles Boyer by asking him in bewilderment, “How could you have thought I loved you?” The overarching concern is Novak’s longstanding unmarried status, wedlock of course being the default state for any normal woman. Novak was only twenty-nine at the time—but that was spinster age by tabloid standards. She eventually did wed when she was thirty-two, and it’s a wonder she made it down the aisle without the aid of a wheelchair. 

Artist William Rose produced this great cover for Doris Miles Disney’s reverse mystery Dead Stop, aka Dark Road, in 1946. Doris Disney was a major writer who produced dozens of novels, many of which were made into movies, including the above (retitled Fugitive Lady), Family Skeleton, (retitled Stella), and Straw Man. This particular novel is about a woman named Hazel Clement who has a comfortable marriage to a boring man and decides that if she had a hammer, she’d hammer in the morning, hammer in the evening, all over his head. No spoiler there—the cover gives it away. The success of the book prompted Disney to write five more starring Jeff DiMarco, the insurance investigator tasked with unraveling Dead Stop’s mystery. We’ve read a couple of Disney books, and we can tell you she penned some pleasingly dark novels that are well worth the time. And in case you’re wondering, she’s unrelated to you-know-who.

Above is a Japanese promo poster for the Swedish sexploitation classic Anita, aka Anita: Swedish Nymphet, which is the story of a young nymphomaniac. Let’s just say up front that we’re aware many people think nymphomania doesn’t exist, and is rather just a term coined by alarmed men to label women who didn’t obey their gender roles. Twenty-three-year-old Christina Lindberg plays a sixteen-year-old title character who fails to do exactly that, throwing convention aside and bedding everyone in sight, from friendly acquaintances to unknown, smudge-covered vagrants. Most of the encounters that don’t take place in an actual bed occur in a dirty tent she’s discovered near a downtown construction site. We loved these seductions in particular, because the set-ups were exactly the same as you’d find in a serial killer movie, with the guys casting a worried eye toward her tent and saying nervously, “Er, you want to do it in there?”

Anyway, poor Anita has a dozen or so sexual encounters, all unfulfilling, and even gets run out of one town, perhaps undeservedly, before finally meeting a doctor who thinks he may be able to help. The doctor is played by an unrecognizably young Stellan Skarsgård—Alexander Skarsgard’s father, for you fans of True Blood—but who we prefer to think of as the villain from the 1998 Robert DeNiro actioner Ronin, a movie that for the first 100 of its 122 minutes is among the best spy thrillers ever made. Anita is much the same—the first 80 minutes or so are excellent and exceedingly serious sexploitation, but its inevitable path toward redemption for the lead character tries the patience just a bit. In the remake, if there ever is one, we suggest Anita dismember some guys in her tent. Considering their age and her obvious youth, they’d deserve it. Anita premiered in Sweden in 1973 and finally made its way to Japan today in 1976. 

Assorted issues of the Turkish pop culture newspaper Hayat, circa late ’50s, 1960s and 1970s, with cover stars Stella Stevens, Barbara Bouchet, Mavis Kuhn, Belinda Lee, Ajda Pekkan, and Claudia Cardinale.