 They always get the best seat in the house. Below, a collection of film stars, in Hollywood and other places, looking large and in charge while seated in director's chairs. In panel three the actress in the “Bonanza's guest” chair is Karen Sharpe. We don't expect you'll need help with the others, but if so our keywords list them in order.
 The dancers of the chorus line request your attention. 
This is the fifth issue of Cancans de Paris we've shared. The magazine is fast becoming a favorite. It has that mix we like—celebs, showgirls, and cartoons. It's similar to magazines such as Paris Hollywood and Gondel, but with a simpler layout and all black-and-white photography. This issue is from July 1966 and features Gila Golan on the cover, and inside are Julie London, Mireille Darc, and others from the acting profession. You also get Sally Ann Scoth, Karin Brault, Juanita Sanchez, and other colleagues from the dancer side of show business. The entire issue appears below in thirty panels, and you can see the other issues by clicking the appropriate keywords at bottom.                              
 The best laid plans of singers and musicians often go awry. 
This is an unusually nice promo poster we think. It was made for the Susan Hayward vehicle Smash-Up, sometimes referred to as Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman. It premiered this month in 1947 and involves nightclub chanteuse Hayward and her crooner husband, played by Lee Bowman. Hayward has talent but values love over career; her husband has less talent but endless ambition. When their careers go in different directions the strain begins to tear the marriage apart. Whose career goes which direction? We won't tell you that, though the audience learns in the first scene, a framing device featuring the downfallen character bandaged and delirious in a hospital bed. Even though the story's ending is sacrificed for an intro Smash-Up is a pretty good if melodramatic movie, with some strong film noir elements, Hayward in an Oscar nominated performance, and solid support from Eddie Albert as Bowman's composer partner. Worth a look—as long as you can deal with all the crooning.   
 She doesn't come with a cup holder but all her other features are top notch. 
Above, a beautiful promo image of U.S. actress Susan Hayward made to publicize the 1952 RKO western The Lusty Men, about cowboys on the dangerous rodeo circuit, and their fretful wives. They have plenty of reason to fret, as the movie progresses. This image appeared in a Japanese magazine called Roadshow much later than the 1952 film, around 1972. You can see a previous image of Hayward here.
 No matter how far she ran dissatisfaction followed close behind. 
This gold colored June 1963 cover for Confidential magazine is entirely given over to actress Barbara Payton, whose self-penned hard-luck story appears inside and details her life troubles. The tale is well known and is one we’ve touched upon before—early marriage and early motherhood, followed by stardom, romances, and riches, followed by booze, drugs, divorces and crime. Confidential being Confidential, the editors neglect to mention that the story here is not an exclusive, but rather is excerpted from I Am Not Ashamed, Payton’s painfully revealing autobiography. I Am Not Ashamed did not sell especially well, and was pretty much forgotten a few years after its release. But it reappeared by chance two decades later when Jack Nicholson famously lent a rare copy to Jessica Lange to help her prepare for her femme fatale role in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Today the book is widely available. Just a few seconds reading Payton’s words conjures the suspicion she had a ghostwriter, and indeed, it was the king of lowbrow literature Leo Guild who gave shape to the prose, which reads like gutter level sleaze fiction. For example: “He hated what I had been [but] loved me for what I was. He tortured himself. Every part of my body reminded him of another man.” And this bit: “I had a body when I was a young kid that raised temperatures wherever I went. Today I have three long knife wounds on my solid frame. One extends from my buttocks down my thigh and needed I don’t remember how many stitches.” Payton’s anecdotes are cringe worthy, but they read like she’d gotten a grip on her life. No such luck. After four more long years of drugs, drink, and disaster she was found dead on her bathroom floor in 1967. Payton post-mortems usually describe her problems as self-induced, but that’s simplistic. In the 1950s famous men did anything they wished, but women had to be careful not to be seen doing the same. Still do today. That’s the part Payton had problems with. Even so, she had several happy periods during her life. One of those was the stretch she spent in Mexico married to a young fisherman. About this time she says, “We fished and I caught big ones, and we loved and for a couple of years it was beautiful. My big problems were what to cook for dinner. But it was inevitable the ants in my pants would start crawling again.” We like that passage, because nearly all the stories about Payton declare, or at least suggest, that everything that happened after Hollywood stardom was part of a terminal plummet. That’s pretty much the default setting in American journalism—anything other than wealth and fame is by definition failure. It’s an idiotic conceit, even a harmful one, and Payton reveals that in Mexico she landed someplace solid and safe, and got along fine without money or recognition. Two years of happiness is nothing to take lightly. But she just couldn’t sit still—not because of where she was, but because of who she was. And the spiral continued—cheaper and cheaper forms of prostitution, physical confrontations that resulted in her getting some of her teeth knocked out, and more. In all of these tales there’s a recurrent theme of lowly types taking advantage of her, but we can’t help noting that she was paid a mere $1,000 for her autobiography, an absurdly deficient amount for a former top star with a crazy story to tell, which suggests to us that guys in office suites take as much advantage—or more—of a person’s hard luck as guys in alleys. We have some scans below, and Payton will undoubtedly appear here again.
          
 Brunettes and blondes put aside centuries of bitter warfare to reach historic detente.  
If brunettes and blondes can get along, all of us can. That’s the message we’re taking from these photos of American actresses Susan Hayward, brunette, and Virginia Dale, blonde, made just for today. Our plan is to emulate not only their peaceable attitudes, but to enjoy copious amounts of sun, sand, and fun, but with the added element of many icy cold beverages. Hope you have a similar plan. Enjoy the holiday.
 Occasionally she gets into a reflective mood. 
Above, a Paramount promo photo shot by the legendary George Hurrell of American actress Susan Hayward and her famous profile from both sides. Hayward was signed with Paramount from 1938 to 1943, which helps bracket this photo, and the costuming leads us to believe it was probably shot for the film noir Among the Living, which was released in 1941. But we could be wrong. Anyone with better info please feel free to drop us a line. Well, that was fast. We got an e-mail like fifteen minutes after posting this informing us this photo was shot in 1937. We took a look around the internet using the year as a search term, and sure enough, other photos that appear to be from this session popped up, indeed dated 1937. But, hmmm, we aren't too sure about that. Hayward wasn't signed to Paramount until 1938, and then only to a $200 a week bit player contract. Up to that point she'd had no credited roles at all. Also, from doing this website we've learned how incorrect information can spread across the internet because, well, journalists are lazy. One website gets something wrong and it's wrong everywhere you look for eternity. So we're going to stick with 1941 on this until someone has truly definitive info.
 If you can’t be factual, at least be popular. 
Hush-Hush magazine goes for broke in this issue from August 1963, offering up a slate of tales narrated in their usual breathless style. First, they tell us how Roddy McDowall took nude photographs of Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra and tried to sell them, but was thwarted when she “erupted like Mount Vesuvius”. They then demonstrate the limits of their imaginations by telling us that Italian singer Silvana Blasi reacted like “an uncontrollable Mount Vesuvius” when an African-American dancer was hired at the Folies Bergère. Two volcano similes in one issue is bad enough, but the same mountain? For investigative journalism, Hush-Hush shows us photographs of a dead Carole Landis and an unconscious Susan Hayward, and concludes that sleeping pills are bad. And finally, the magazine stokes the fires of paranoia with two stories: in the first, they explain how Fidel Castro plans to conquer America with heroin, which he’s growing with the help of two-thousand Chinese advisors; in the second, they reveal that the second wife of Dr. Sam Sheppard is a Nazi who plans to revive the Third Reich, and that she’s being helped by—you guessed it—Fidel Castro, who is somehow a communist and a Nazi. Neat trick that. As we’ve mentioned before, though these stories are laughable, people actually believed them, and believed them by the millions, as evidenced by Hush-Hush’s sales figures. The lesson is clear: the choice between popularity and truth is really no choice at all.
                  
 France’s V gave us some of the great covers of the pulp era. 
V is one of our favorite vintage publications. This one was published sixty-two years ago today, and features cover star Susan Hayward. V was basically a celebrity and culture magazine, but also emphasized sexuality by publishing artful nude photos. If we’re reading this cover correctly, the magazine launched in 1943—curious, since there was a little thing called World War II raging then. We have a hard time believing a Nazi or Vichy-approved V is the same as the one we’re seeing here, but we’ll look into that. Whatever transition the magazine made from the war to post-war years, in the fifties it changed again from handtinted covers featuring film celebs, to pin-ups conjured from the airbrushes of some of France’s best illustrators, such as the image from René Caillé below. One wonders if these are two distinct magazines with the same name. We'll look into that too. Anyway, Caillé isn’t as well known as pin-up masters like Vargas or Bolles, but as you can see he was a singular talent. We located a few more V covers, and we’ll show you those later. 

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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1934—Queen Mary Launched
The RMS Queen Mary, three-and-a-half years in the making, launches from Clydebank, Scotland. The steamship enters passenger service in May 1936 and sails the North Atlantic Ocean until 1967. Today she is a museum and tourist attraction anchored in Long Beach, U.S.A. 1983—Nuclear Holocaust Averted
Soviet military officer Stanislav Petrov, whose job involves detection of enemy missiles, is warned by Soviet computers that the United States has launched a nuclear missile at Russia. Petrov deviates from procedure, and, instead of informing superiors, decides the detection is a glitch. When the computer warns of four more inbound missiles he decides, under much greater pressure this time, that the detections are also false. Soviet doctrine at the time dictates an immediate and full retaliatory strike, so Petrov's decision to leave his superiors out of the loop very possibly prevents humanity's obliteration. Petrov's actions remain a secret until 1988, but ultimately he is honored at the United Nations. 2002—Mystery Space Object Crashes in Russia
In an occurrence known as the Vitim Event, an object crashes to the Earth in Siberia and explodes with a force estimated at 4 to 5 kilotons by Russian scientists. An expedition to the site finds the landscape leveled and the soil contaminated by high levels of radioactivity. It is thought that the object was a comet nucleus with a diameter of 50 to 100 meters. 1992—Sci Fi Channel Launches
In the U.S., the cable network USA debuts the Sci Fi Channel, specializing in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and paranormal programming. After a slow start, it built its audience and is now a top ten ranked network for male viewers aged 18–54, and women aged 25–54.
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