vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Actually, referring to Ava Gardner as a man eater is a bit sexist, but the term matched her outfit, so we went with it. It’s fairer to say that she went after what she wanted. She wanted and got Frank Sinatra, Howard Hughes, Artie Shaw, Luis Miguel Dominguín, and a string of lucky others stretching from Hollywood to Madrid. This shot, from a famous session that produced many images, dates from the mid-1950s.
This issue of Exposed from October 1957 gives top billing to British sex symbol Sabrina, aka Norma Ann Sykes, and tells us she lost her dress in the street and caused a riot. How did it happen? During a public appearance in London someone supposedly stepped on the hem of her dress. The garment came off, the Brits went bonkers over her 41-inch bare bust, and Sabrina was so distressed that she fainted, so we’re told. Is this story true? We tend to think so, because Exposed goes on to ponder whether the whole fiasco was a publicity stunt. Their ruminations lend the tale just the right element of verisimilitude, so we’re going to say yes, it probably happened. Also on the cover of Exposed, like clockwork, appears Ava Gardner. Readers are told she’s doing the dirty with Italian actor Walter Chiari. This would have been after splitting with Frank Sinatra but before the official divorce. But wait—didn’t we just write about her seeing Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín while also still married to Frankie? Come on people—that was so 1956. Sometimes you have to wonder how Gardner had time for all these affairs, but let’s just say that if she liked a man she always found a way to squeeze him in.
The cover of this December 1956 issue of the American tabloid Exposed offers teasers on Kim Novak, Laurence Olivier, and Hollywood bad boy William Holden, but it’s Ava Gardner who’s front and center as readers learn about her mingling with Spanish bullfighters. Gardner had been introduced to the spectacle of the plaza de toros several years earlier by Ernest Hemingway, and she became a fixture at both the fights and on the Madrid social circuit. Since she was married to Frank Sinatra, this was of great interest to U.S. readers, not to mention Sinatra himself, and all the tabloids were reporting on it. The publicity didn’t help what was already a stormy marriage. Gardner eventually pursued and bedded matador Luis Miguel Dominguín, and not very discreetly. Everyone knew. Sinatra knew, and it tortured him. His buddy Humphrey Bogart rebuked Gardner, telling her, “Half the world’s female population would throw themselves at Frank’s feet and you are flouncing around with guys who wear capes and ballerina slippers.” Sinatra knew he was losing the love of his life, and he wasn’t about to let it happen without a fight. He flew to Spain in a desperate bid to win his wife back, but it was no use—seven months after this Exposed hit newsstands, he and Gardner were divorced.
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise starring Michael Keaton, then George Clooney, and finally Christian Bale.
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves.
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule’s main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule’s descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission.
Austro-Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray’s fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King’s killing, but with Ray’s death such questions became moot.
The newspaper Pravda, or “Truth”, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country’s leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid.
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler’s diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess’s flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison.
