Intl. Notebook

September 29 2020

BURLESQUE HUMORESQUE

This is the best Laff you'll have all day.

We’ve posted three issues of Laff magazine over the years, and we return to that publication today with an example from this month in 1946 featuring starlets, showgirls, and burlesque dancers of the highest order. You get Jane Russell, Adele Mara, Vera Ellen, and Myrna Dell, amongst others, but the winner in these pages is Acquanetta, aka the Venezuelan Volcano, who gets a striking tropical themed centerfold photo. In addition, you get a bit of sports coverage—specifically baseball, which is appropriate with the MLB playoffs starting tonight—as well as numerous cartoons.

These cartoons—the laffs in Laff magazine—tend to be sexist by today’s standards, but then so is this entire website, really, which is an unavoidable side effect of focusing on vintage fiction, art, and photography. We hope the historical significance of the material overshadows all else. In any case, we included the cartoons despite their mostly lame humor, due to the fact that they’re high quality illustrations well worth seeing. All that and more appears here in forty-plus scans and zooms, and you can see the other issues of Laff by clicking its keywords below.

Laff, Adele Mara, Acquanetta, Jane Russell, Myrna Dell, Vera Ellen, Joy Skylar, Harry Danning, Doreen DeMos, Doris Dean, Pat Hutto, Virginia Dew, magazine art, burlesque, baseball

Femmes Fatales

December 16 2017

ON DANCER, ON PRANCER

Vera to the right, Vera to the left, Vera all over the place.

You often see U.S. born Vera-Ellen’s name spelled without the hyphen, but it needs to be there. She was born Vera-Ellen Westmeier Rohe. She had another hyphen too—she was an actress-dancer, working both on Broadway and in Hollywood. Some of her films: On the Town, Let’s Be Happy, The Kid from Brooklyn and Carnival in Costa Rica. The above photo was made for 1954’s White Christmas, and just for fun there are more below. If you weren’t already in the holiday spirit, we hope you are now.

White Christmas, On the Town, Let's Be Happy, Carnival in Costa Rica, The Kid from Brooklyn, Vera-Ellen Westmeier Rohe

Vintage Pulp

June 8 2014

TAKE YOUR PIC

All celebrities great and small.

We’ve featured Pic magazine only once before, but not because it was an unimportant publication. Quite the opposite—we’ve seen issues as early as 1936 and as late as 1958, making it both a Depression and World War II survivor, presumably no easy feat and certainly a run indicative of sustained popularity. Early issues seemed focused on sports, but it soon broadened to include celebrities. It was launched by Wagner Publications of New York City, and this issue appeared in June 1952 with a cover featuring actress Suzan Ball placing a crown on the head of Akton Miller, a man Pic had chosen as its Hot Rod King. Inside you get a raft of Hollywood stars, including photos of Yvonne De Carlo in Uruguay, Marilyn Monroe, Janet Leigh, and Joan Vohs, shots of New York Giants manager Leo Durocher and his beautiful actress wife Laraine Day, and some nice boxing pictures. There’s also an interesting feature on the day’s top vocalists (with African-Americans notably excluded), and a profile of crooner Tony Bennett.

But it’s Suzan Ball’s story we’re interested in today. Her path to show business was so typical of the period as to be almost banal—she was spotted in a Santa Maria, California newspaper after winning a cake baking contest. Universal-International scouts thought she looked a bit like Jane Russell, so they swept her up, shuttled her down Highway 101, signed her to a contract and began selling her as a hot new Tinseltown commodity, proclaiming her the New Cinderella Girl of ’52. Soon the influential columnist Hedda Hopper took up the refrain, naming her one of the most important new stars of 1953, thus ensuring that year would belong to Ball.

It was then that her train to stardom jumped the tracks. She injured her leg performing a dance number in East of Sumatra, and later in the year had a car accident and hurt the leg again. Treatment for those two injuries led to the discovery of a cancerous tumor. Soon afterward she fell and broke the limb, and when doctors decided they couldn’t remove the tumor they instead took the entire the leg. That was in January 1954. Ball soldiered on in her show business career with an artificial leg, starring in Chief Crazy Horse, though she lost fifteen pounds during the production, and later playing nightclub dates and appearing on television shows. In July 1955 she collapsed while rehearsing for the show Climax, whereupon doctors discovered the cancer had metastasized and spread to her lungs. A month later she died at age twenty-one. We have about fifty scans below.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

June 13

1971—First of the Pentagon Papers Are Published

The New York Times begins publication of the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret U.S. Department of Defense history of the country’s political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The papers reveal that the U.S. had deliberately expanded its war with carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks, and that four presidential administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had deliberately misled the public regarding their intentions toward Vietnam.

June 12

1978—Son of Sam Goes to Prison

David Berkowitz, the New York City serial killer known as Son of Sam, is sentenced to 365 years in prison for six killings. Berkowitz had acquired his nickname from letters addressed to the NYPD and columnist Jimmy Breslin. He is eventually caught when a chain of events beginning with a parking ticket leads to his car being searched and police discovering ammunition and maps of crime scenes.

June 11

1963—Buddhist Monk Immolates Himself

In South Vietnam, Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burns to death after dousing himself with gasoline and lighting a match. He does it to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the Ngô Đình Diệm led government, choosing a busy Saigon intersection for his protest. An image of the monk being consumed by flames as he sits crosslegged on the pavement, shot by Malcolm Browne, wins a Pulitzer Prize and becomes one of the most shocking and recognizable photos ever published.

June 10

1935—AA Founded

In New York City, Dr. Robert Smith and William Griffith Wilson, who were both recovering alcoholics, establish the organization Alcoholics Anonymous, which pioneers a 12-step rehabilitation program that is so helpful and popular it eventually spreads to every corner of the globe.

June 10

1973—John Paul Getty III Is Kidnapped

John Paul Getty III, grandson of billionaire oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, is kidnapped in Rome, Italy. The elder Getty ignores a ransom demand for $17 million, thinking it is a joke. When John Paul’s ear later arrives in the mail along with a note promising further mutilation, he negotiates the ransom down to $2.9 million, which he pays only on the condition that John Paul repay him at four percent interest. Getty’s kidnappers are never caught.

TIT FOR TAT

Swapping literature was a major subset of midcentury publishing. Ten years ago we shared a good-sized collection of swapping paperbacks from assorted authors.

DIAL A FOR ASSASSINA