We’re back to sleaze digests today with 1951’s They Call Her “Easy” by Gwen Lyons, which is from Ecstasy Novel Magazine with Al Rossi cover art, and posed photos in the interior, as you’ll see below. Lyons tells the story of young Betty Crockett, who leverages her incomparable beauty to make her way from her hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, where she’s a War Department stenographer, to New York City, where she becomes a shoe model, and later to Paris, where she lives on a rich man’s generosity. The rich man sees her more as a daughter, and is actually trying to set her up with his son, who he worries has been hanging with dirty French intellectuals too much and has forgotten family values. The book is light as can be, with only a minor conflict having to do with Betty posing for a few bikini photos only to see her head pasted onto a nude body and sold as a postcard. It costs her her job, but leads to all her later adventures, which struck us as a fair deal. The book was a fair deal too. Only ten dollars for something that may not have been great, but was certainly readable.
Edit: Vintage movies are excellent windows into bygone customs and practices. There’s a great moment in this one. Rhonda Fleming and James Craig are chatting in her apartment late one night when the doorbell unexpectedly buzzes. They look at each other confused for a second, then Fleming says, “It’s probably the drugstore. That was the last bottle of Scotch.”
