vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above, a January 1935 cover of the French art/cinema magazine Pour Lire a Deux with cover stars James Cagney and Ruby Keeler from the 1933 Warner Brothers musical Footlight Parade, which opened in France in 1934. Inside you get lots and lots of artsy photos, most of them nude, and most of them great. See ten scans below.
We managed to locate another issue of Paris Magazine today, this one from May 1935 with a bright-eyed photo-illustration of American movie star Jean Parker, née Lois Greene, on the cover. Inside, you get art by Julien Tavernier, and photographs of yesteryear’s showgirls, models and society women by Braig, Albin, and others. In the last two panels you get possibly the last photographs ever taken of the German actress and singer Edith Mera, who had died a few months earlier at age thirty of septicemia (a blood infection) caused by poor treatment of an abscess in her mouth.
It’s a bittersweet footnote, but then when you’re looking at magazines this old it’s always bittersweet because everyone you’re seeing at the height of beauty and youth is now dead. Or as Shakespeare so eloquently wrote: Golden lads and all girls must, as chimney sweepers come to dust. Now there’s a cheery thought for Friday! But hopefully it inspires you to really enjoy this spring weekend—you only get so many. Anyway, bittersweet or not, we love Paris Magazine and recently acquired about a dozen, so you’ll be seeing more soon. Check out our other issue, with its excellent Man Ray art here.
The Human Be-In takes place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with between 20,000 to 30,000 people in attendance, their purpose being to promote their ideals of personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological preservation, and higher consciousness. The event is considered the beginning of the famed counterculture Summer of Love.
Johnny Cash performs live at Folsom State Prison in Folson, California, where he records a live album that includes a version of his 1955 hit “Folsom Prison Blues.” Cash had always been interested in performing at a prison, but was unable to until personnel changes at his record company brought in people who were amenable to the idea. The Folsom album was Cash’s biggest commercial success for years, reaching number 1 on the country music charts.
British serial killer Harold Shipman is found dead in his prison cell, after hanging himself with a bedsheet. Shipman, a former doctor who preyed on his patients, was one of the most prolific serial killers in history, with two-hundred and eighteen murders positively attributed to him, and another two-hundred of which he is suspected.
English novelist Nevil Shute, who wrote the books A Town Like Alice and The Pied Piper, dies in Melbourne, Australia at age sixty-one. Seven of his novels were adapted to film, but his most famous was the cautionary post-nuclear war classic On the Beach.
Dr. James Bedford, a University of California psychology professor, becomes the first person to be cryonically preserved with intent of future resuscitation. Bedford had kidney cancer that had metastasized to his lungs and was untreatable. His body was maintained for years by his family before being moved to Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona.
Jack Gilbert Graham is executed in Colorado, U.S.A., for killing 44 people by planting a dynamite bomb in a suitcase that was subsequently loaded aboard United Airlines Flight 629. The flight took off from Denver and exploded in mid-air. Graham was executed by means of poison gas in the Colorado State Penitentiary, in Cañon City.
