As usual there’s plenty happening inside this issue of Hush-Hush, which was published in May 1963. We’re mainly interested in Porfirio Rubirosa, who we haven’t written about in a long while. A quick refresher: Rubirosa was a Dominican born jet-setter, playboy, race car driver, and polo player who married a succession of wealthy women, came away richer each time, and left behind a trail of unbelievable stories. Hush-Hush gleefully tells readers that the one percenters, ex-lovers, and betrayed husbands in Rubirosa’s extensive circle are all terrified because he’s rumored to be publishing a memoir. This bare-all would supposedly expose never-before-heard secrets of the rich, famous, and powerful.
Hush-Hush then goes through the list of Rubirosa’s wives and affairs, offering no new information but padding the article with typically circular tabloid language, before concluding: One of Rubi’s biggest assets is certainly discretion. So relax, ladies. In other words, the memoir would share the facts, but no names. That doesn’t sound fun at all. But the book, if it was ever planned, was never written, as far as we know, and Rubirosa took his secrets with him when he exited this existence two years later by crashing his Ferrari into a chestnut tree in Paris.
Elsewhere Hush-Hush rails against Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s anti-war novel Fail-Safe, calling it a propaganda victory for communists—a standard attack in the U.S. still used today when sensible people warn of the lunacy of choosing war over dialogue. The magazine also exploits the deceased Marilyn Monroe by writing an article about how others are exploiting the deceased Marilyn Monroe. And need we say it? Cynically pretending to defend others for various types of gain is also a trick that still works today.
Moving on, Anthony Perkins gets the treatment by being called effeminate, which is as close as a tabloid could get after the lawsuits of earlier years to saying an actor was gay. Also in the area of sexuality, Helen Gurley Brown’s bestselling book Sex and the Single Girl is called, “the final blow in the decline of the American virgin.” Others who get their turn on the rack include Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, and Arlene Dahl, about whom the magazine asks, “Why did Arlene Dahl pose in the nude?” We’d say she posed nudish, not nude, but in any case she was beautiful, so it was a gift to the world.
We have almost thirty scans below, and note: the moiré patterns on the images are due to the lower quality printing used by Hush-Hush. There may be a way to avoid them in scanning, but we don’t know how.
