vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Anne Francis, née Anne Marvak, was born in the prison town of Ossining, New York—location of Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Once she made her escape to Hollywood she became known for her role opposite Leslie Nielsen in the sci-fi film Forbidden Planet, but other notable credits include Bad Day at Black Rock, Rogue Cop, and the television series Honey West, all of which are well worth a gander. This dynamic shot is from the early 1950s.
No, you’re not seeing double. Yesterday’s tabloid was Close-Up Extra; today’s is Spotlite Extra. Both were published in July 1973, and both were the product of Beta Publications of New Rochelle, New York. Tabloid publishing must have been a veritable gold mine back in the early ’70s. How else to explain all these bizarre imprints? In fact, as low-rent as this paper seems, this issue is from its second volume, according to the cover info. The format is basically the same as Close-Up Extra, complete with a model pulling double duty on the cover and in the centerfold. This time it’s Ina Skole, who, though she has a name that sounds like it could belong to a European b-movie actress, leaves no trail in the historical record. Another similarity between the two publications is the cover slogan—Close-Up was “sexsational” whereas Spotlite is “sexciting.” Neither of those words appears in the dictionary, sadly, but we’re going to say sexsational is a bit better than sexciting. There’s no need to go into detail about the contents of Spotlite Extra —just take what we wrote about its sister publication and apply it to this one. We have twenty-something scans below, and many more tabloids to come.
The tabloids keep on coming with the self-described “sexsational” Close-Up Extra from Beta Publications of New Rochelle, New York. On the cover, in the centerfold, and in the rear of this issue published exactly forty years ago appears Cher McGee, who was a… Actually, we have no idea. The editors tell readers she “just wants to be a good woman to some man.”
That’s nice and everything, but we checked to see if she had appeared in any movies or television shows, or whether she was a glamour model, but no, her only appearance in mass media seems to have been in Close-Up Extra. Well, if she’s somewhere out there and needed evidence she was once the darling of a low rent tabloid, here’s the proof. Conversely, if she hoped nobody would ever know, we’re sorry to have outed her.
Elsewhere in Close-Up Extra we learn that carrot juice is an aphrodisiac, lesbianism is exploding, and one of the best places for summer sex is at camping orgies. So go ahead—dig out that bug repellent. Below, twenty scans, and if you want to see some of the other hundreds of tabloids we have, start here, and be prepared to do lots of scrolling.
We’re reaching a bit farther back than usual for a femme fatale with this great Alfred Cheney Johnston image of Jacqueline Schalley, aka Jacqueline Schally, a Folies Bergère and Ziegfeld dancer who was once chosen the “Fairest Girl in France.” Based on that distinction she was sent to the U.S. to do a nationwide publicity tour before competing in New York City in an international beauty pageant. No word on whether she won, but then again, the judges probably never saw her like this. Photo is from 1927.
Above is a photo of Manhattan, New York City, in the year 1947, looking from Battery Park toward midtown. Here you see everything—the Staten Island Ferry Building at bottom, Wall Street to the right, the 59th Street Bridge crossing Welfare Island at upper right, and in the hazy distance, the Empire State Building—at that time arguably America’s most recognized symbol. In the aftermath of a war that had destroyed Europe’s and Japan’s industrial capacity, the U.S. was the unquestioned power on the planet, with massive economic might, a military that had taken up permanent residence in dozens of countries, and a growing stock of nuclear weapons. Two years later the Soviets would detonate their first nuclear bomb, shaking the American edifice to its foundation. Meanwhile, all around the world, the seeds of change were taking root. Below is a look at the world as it was in 1947.
We received an email a couple of days ago from a reader named Joe R., who pointed us toward an item about Norton Records, a New York City based vintage vinyl dealer whose Brooklyn warehouse was hit pretty hard by Hurricane Sandy. Above you see a photo taken of the building just after the storm, and you can see that the street is flooded and water has gotten into the facility.
According to Norton’s website, most of their catalog stock was destroyed by floodwaters. No surprise, seeing the photo. But they’re still selling what’s on hand, and a purchase at this time would help with recovery costs. Like many vintage vinyl dealers, they also have 
a pretty nice stack of sleaze fiction, so you collectors out there might want to take a look at their selection. We’ve uploaded a few covers, including Dale Koby’s Sin Lens (art by Paul Rader), Milton Geller’s Don’t Like Me—Love Me!, and Frank Gavin’s Crossfire.
The prices are lower than you would typically find on, for instance, Ebay (where we came across a couple of items from Norton’s catalog going for over $30, which is more than double what they charge). If you bought something you’d be supporting a business at a time of struggle, plus it’s officially holiday season again, and nothing says Christmas quite like a dirty paperback under the tree. Thanks, Joe, for sending this item over.
Norton Records warehouse photo by Nick Cope
It’s been a while since we’ve had any Bettie Page on the site, so we were pleasantly surprised yesterday to have found some shots of her in a 1953 issue of Carnival magazine. Actually, there were about forty great images of various people, but rather than try to scan all of them, we decided to break the issue into two or more posts. So today, we’re uploading only the below shots of Page demonstrating for readers the various legal constraints on disrobement for strippers in different states, with Kansas being the most conservative and Louisiana being the least. We’ll have more from Carnival later.
Update: We’ve posted more images from the magazine here.
This cover scan of Archie Joscelyn’s 1950 western Border Wolves was sent over from National Road Books, which is good timing, because the art is by George Gross and we featured one of his very best pieces back in October and said we’d get back to him. Gross (who should not be mixed up with German painter George Grosz) was a prolific artist who, as we mentioned in that previous post, was incredibly diverse, producing covers for Argosy, Baseball Stories, Bulls Eye Detective, Northwest Romances, Wings, Fight Stories, Saga, and many others. He was born in 1909 in Brooklyn, New York, began painting pulp covers in the 1930s and worked steadily through the 1980s, dying at the ripe age of ninety-four. You would suspect, looking at the shooting technique of the cowboy on the cover of Border Wolves, that Gross didn’t know much about guns. While that’s possible, we think the weird shooting position is a result of wanting to fit the cowboy’s entire arm on the cover. But he must have liked the result, because he used this awkward stance twice (see below). There are quite a few web archives of Gross art, so if you want to see more, let your fingers do the walking.
This Whisper from October 1955 examines Ava Gardner’s love life, Ernest Hemingway’s courage, and Marilyn Monroe’s mole, all of which, while worthwhile subjects, are less interesting to us than the piece on Father Divine.
Who was Father Divine? Well, he was a preacher who claimed to be God and had as many as two million followers during his heyday in the 1930s. Of course, that number depends on where you do your research. Some sources try to distinguish between “true followers” and sympathizers who attended his rallies, but that’s like saying seventy percent of the people at a rock concert aren’t true fans. Attendance at events is an accepted method for determining popularity, and considering the fact that Father Divine had verifiable rallies in places as far away as Switzerland and Australia, we think the two million figure is accurate.
Why was he so popular? Hard to say. Charisma and an imaginative doctrine are givens. But it was national exposure that really helped swell the ranks of his followers. From the point of view of a typical magazine editor, you eventually can’t resist writing at least a blurb about a person who claims to be God. When that person proves to be polished and intelligent, and his belief system more nuanced than suspected, the article becomes its own public relations.
Thanks to steady press coverage, what started as a local congregation in Brooklyn, New York eventually spread to become a multi-ethnic and pan-national movement. But with popularity came scandals. The most notorious of these was when a Divine follower named John Hunt, a California millionaire who had dubbed himself John the Revelator, kidnapped a 17-year-old girl named Delight Jewett and repeatedly had sex with her, either before or after brainwashing her into thinking she was to be the “mother of the new redeemer of the world,” i.e., a new Virgin Mary.
Father Divine’s ministry survived the Hunt scandal and others, and in fact only began to shrink as Divine himself aged and became less active. The cover of Whisper asks if he is dead. Fair question—he was pushing eighty by then and hadn’t been seen in public for months. But he would resurface weeks later in a flurry of press coverage, pronouncing himself
“healthy in every organ, muscle, sinew, joint, limb, vein and bone, and even in every atom, fiber and cell of my bodily form.” But Divine was in fact in declining health and had been for some time. Ten years later he died of natural causes at the age of (because his exact birth date is unknown) eighty-nine or ninety. Or he left behind his corporeal form and permanently inhabited his spiritual one. Depending on whom you ask.
At the Hollywood Athletic Club in Los Angeles, California, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences presents the first Emmy Awards. The name Emmy was chosen as a feminization of “immy”, a nickname used for the image orthicon tubes that were common in early television cameras.
Charles Manson and three female members of his “family” are found guilty of the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, which Manson orchestrated in hopes of bringing about Helter Skelter, an apocalyptic war he believed would arise between blacks and whites.
A B-52 Stratofortress carrying two H-bombs experiences trouble during a refueling operation, and in the midst of an emergency descent breaks up in mid-air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. Five of the six arming devices on one of the bombs somehow activate before it lands via parachute in a wooded region where it is later recovered. The other bomb does not deploy its chute and crashes into muddy ground at 700 mph, disintegrating while driving its radioactive core fifty feet into the earth.
The International Opium Convention is signed at The Hague, Netherlands, and is the first international drug control treaty. The agreement was signed by Germany, the U.S., China, France, the UK, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, and Siam.
U.S. president Harry S. Truman establishes the Central Intelligence Group or CIG, an interim authority that lasts until the Central Intelligence Agency is established in September of 1947.
The New York City “Mad Bomber,” a man named George P. Metesky, is arrested in Waterbury, Connecticut and charged with planting more than 30 bombs. Metesky was angry about events surrounding a workplace injury suffered years earlier. Of the thirty-three known bombs he planted, twenty-two exploded, injuring fifteen people. He was apprehended based on an early use of offender profiling and because of clues given in letters he wrote to a newspaper. At trial he was found legally insane and committed to a state mental hospital.
