I'm ready for story time. Make sure it doesn't put me to sleep, make sure it's sexy, and make sure it's participatory.
There are probabilities and there are inevitabilities. It was an inevitablility that we’d eventually post this stunner of a shot made in 1975 featuring U.S. actress/singer/dancer Joey Heatherton, a member of our Mount Rushmore of sixties/seventies sex symbols. A true honor, with the small caveat that our Mount Rushmore of sixties/seventies sex symbols has like twelve to fifteen heads on it. But Heatherton’s is one of them.
It’s amazing that she became so famous, considering she made fewer than ten films, but she cannily exploited the smaller medium of television, appearing on variety series such as The Jerry Lewis Show and The Jackie Gleason Show, as well as a couple of the most popular series of the time, I Spy and Love American Style. In addition she starred onstage in Las Vegas, made commercials, and, obviously, occasionally posed nude.
Heatherton also had a private life that was more interesting than usual. In 1971 her husband was arrested for indecent exposure to a ten-year-old girl, which led to the revelation that it was an ongoing problem. Heatherton divorced him, but later had a few newsworthy incidents of her own, including when she stabbed her manager in the hand with a steak knife during an argument. Not an ideal way to handle anger, perhaps, but take another look and ask yourself: What’s one stabbing more or less?
Did we just say to quit with the roman pornos while we’re ahead? Well, we failed. We watched a second movie from the genre, and as it’s our third film of the day you might be wondering why this sudden surplus of screening time has arisen. It’s because the girls are out of town. Into that gap we’ve been plugging every flick we can find that premiered this week, including this one that opened today in 1978—Toruko 110-ban: Monzetsu kurage. Known in English as Bathhouse 911: Jellyfish Bliss, it starred Etsuko Hara, Yuko Katagiri, and Yuki Yoshizawa, and right off the bat we’ll tell you it wasn’t as good as Hirusagari no joji: Uramado. But it wasn’t bad either. Huh? Two decent roman pornos in a row? Two in a row without sexual torture? It really happened. Though we should caution—there’s an enema. But a guy takes it, and it’s played for laughs. So… fine then.
In addition to avoiding too much extreme content, this movie is fantastically shot. It bursts with color, and is largely a clinic in composition in that way specific to roman porno where directors suggested explicitness but weren’t legally allowed to show even a single pubic hair. The story deals with a smalltime pimp who picks up Etsuko Hara on the street and turns her into a prostitute in a bathhouse. When the yakuza move in on his operation and take Etsuko away he suffers in the throes what he’s realized is love. But there’s little he can do, save vividly fantasize about revenge. Will he actually screw up the courage to fight for Etsuko’s freedom? We’d recommend getting a new profession, one where the competition isn’t tattooed guys with katanas, but if the odds weren’t long it wouldn’t be a movie worth watching. Feel free to do so. There’s hope for this genre yet.
The line between the ravager and the ravaged gets pretty thin.
This Japanese poster was made for Dany la ravageuse, a French sexploitation movie known in English as Dany the Ravager, which premiered in Japan today in 1972. Is it just us, or does Dany the Ravager sound like the name of a Marvel character? Well, Sandra Julien as the titular Dany certainly has a super effect on those around her. She hitchhikes from Paris to the Côte d’Azur and gets into a series of adventures. In one, a driver fantasizes about getting naked and netting butterflies in the woods with her (we have some brilliant production photos of that below). In another, she spends quality naked time lakeside with another woman. In the next she’s picked up by two fugitive gangsters who soon turn on each other over her. And in yet another she meets a couple of hustlers in Monaco who pull the ole switcheroo in the dark so Julien ends up in bed with the wrong guy. It’s played for laughs, but still, it’s rapey.
Overall, the movie is brainless sexploitation, but not of the most pleasant variety, exemplified by a backseat sexual assault in the fugitives episode that turns into mutual attraction. It’s always jarring to experience cinema made before any form of social change took hold, whether change around what consitutued rape, or changes around portraying people of color, or changes around humor and ableism. Our favorite movies from the sexploitation genre feature women in control of their fictional adventures. However, on the opposite side of the social change coin, Dany la ravageuse is unflinching in its approach to male frontal nudity, so in that respect it was well ahead of its time. We think it’s worthy of deeper discussion academically, but as pure entertainment, unless you adore Julien or want to see a lot of French countryside, you can take a pass.
We’ve featured Playboy model and aspiring but unfulfilled actress Marilyn Waltz, aka Margaret Scott, a few times, and here’s yet another striking photo, dating from 1959. Waltz has been good to us. We were the first to make the Waltz-Marilyn Walk connection a decade ago, and seven years ago we dug up a rare Technicolor lithograph of her published by C. Moss that was very good for website traffic. We have other shots of her, but there are many other obscure celebrities to upload, and only so much time. If we don’t see Waltz again, this was a good shot to go out on.
On the subject of traffic, the recent outages, 404 errors, and general lack of posting here the last two weeks has been because of a tricky refurbishment and rehosting. We first began having problems with our website back in 2011 and had been promising a revamp ever since. Hey, sometimes things don’t happen when you want them to. But it’s done now, save for formatting aspects of several hundred posts. We’ll have to deal with that bit by bit going forward. It will take some time. Probably several months to get everything in the same shape as Ms. Waltz.
We can’t complain, though. This has been one of our better years. Our many travels took us to Lisbon and Marrakech, we moved into a big old stone pile of a house on the warm Atlantic coast of Spain, our jobs have been smooth, we’ve maintained extremely active social lives, our best friends have visited, and thanks to a very good developer we got the new website we wanted. We’ve also purchased a lot of pulp matter and have many new items to scan and upload. V.2 of Pulp Intl. will hopefully function properly for some years, and, knock on wood, so will we. We’re happy to be back.
We have a tremendous amount of material on burlesque in Pulp Intl., yet it’s been eight years since we put together a full collection of mid-century burlesque dancers, go-go girls, and strippers. That day has arrived again. Above and below you see some of the better shots we’ve run across of late, featuring the famous and the obscure, the restrained and the explicit, the domestic and the foreign, and the blonde, red, brown, and brunette. Where possible we’ve identified the performer, such as above—that’s Carol Ryva, sometimes known as Carol Riva, Carole von Ryva, Cara Rive, et al, a French dancer who rose to fame during the early 1960s. Other familiar faces you’ll see are Lilly Christine, Maria Tuxedo, Gay Dawn, Yvonne Ménard, and Virginia Bell.
Occasionally, when we post something that contains nudity, we feel, in this age of new puritanism that we should comment about it. We saw a survey recently indicating that a large percentage of Gen Z’ers think nudity in movies is unnecessary in all circumstances, especially sex scenes. And we’re like, really? The wonderful thing that virtually every person does, or which practically everyone wants to do, and which is how nearly all of us came to be here on the planet, is somehow taboo, but the horrible thing that virtually none of us do—kill—must be part of nearly every film, book, and television show? Programming works. If you sell sexual shame unceasingly new generations will absorb it, and believe they’ve come to their views organically.
The reality is that sex and nudity are freeing. Burlesque and erotic dance are valuable because they take our DNA driven sexual desire and package it as an art form, fit for public consumption and contemplation. Moving one’s body rhythmically feels good, and watching those who work so very hard but make look so easy the pushing of their physical limits within the realm of such expression is pleasing to the eye and psyche. That’s why we love erotic dance. Our two previous burlesque collections, “Infinite Jest,” and “Dancers Gotta Dance,” are here and here, and we have some notable smaller burlesque forays here, here, and here. But if you want to kill some time for real, instead click the keyword “burlesque” at bottom, then scroll, scroll, scroll. Make sure you pack a lunch.
Japanese actress Noriko Yamamoto was a minor player onscreen, but she’s a major player on this log in a photo published in a 1980 issue of Heibon Punch. It’s a nice image, part of an essay shot in Alaska, of all places. Here’s what she said about it (so claimed the editors): “The clock is pointing to 11 PM, but the red sun is bright and beautiful. Anxiety crossed my mind as to whether I would be able to survive in this great outdoors. Fishing with a lure for the first time after setting up the tent. And the feeling of a king salmon coming into my hand. A river as wide as a lake. I don’t know when bears will come out, making my heart flutter.” Despite her fears she survived, there were no bears, and most importantly she suffered no splinters. Bonus: she got to hold a humungous fish.
Nice for the camera but very hard on the circulation.
Every time Miki Sugimoto stars in a promo photo we can barely believe our eyes. Here the cult action actress is squeezing her frame—or part of it anyway—into a tight space to get this wonderful shot. Wonderful for who? Certainly not her. She played some difficult roles, but this may have been her hardest. By the time she finished riding the rails for this image we bet she felt like her bottom was full of novocaine. Sometimes, though, you have to go above and beyond in the pursuit of art. Click her keywords below to see amazing promo shots and movie posters.
Get outta the frickin' way you lunatic! Are you out of your goddamned— Oh. I mean... need a lift?
We’re going back-to-back with Adam magazine. We posted one yesterday, but we have another because, despite the fact that this is the eighty-sixth issue we’re sharing, we have a stack yay high we still need to get to. At this point we’ll make the claim—without any proof whatsoever, but hey, that just means we’re in step with the times—that we have more copies of Adam under our roof than any other place in the world. Prove us wrong. It’s all the more impressive considering we don’t live in Australia, where the magazine originates, and have needed to ship them wherever we were living at the time, currently (and permanently?) Spain.
Today’s issue from this month in 1977 has the slightly more streamlined look the magazine moved toward as it approached its mid-1978 dissolution. The cover illustrates Jay Ruth’s story “The Third Run.” We were eager to learn why the femme fatale crossed the road. It wasn’t to get to the other side. She was trying to keep from being flattened, and not in the road as we assumed, but in a warehouse. In the story, she’s part of a truck hijacking ring, and to her misfortune, she chooses as her newest victim an undercover operative posing as a truck driver. He’d been out there hoping to lure the hijackers, and on his third run he did. It’s a pretty good story.
It wouldn’t be an issue of Adam without models, and you get plenty here. By 1977 it was go full frontal to survive in the men’s mag market or quit, and Adam quit—though resisting the shift to porn was probably only one of many considerations (moving to color and glossy page stock were probably others) However, though Adam never went all the way, one of the models wearing a bikini shows a bit of overflow bush and a treasure trail. Many times with later issues of Adam we’re able to identify a model or two, but all the ones here are unknown to us. We’re especially intrigued by the woman on the title page, with her short-shorts, superhero boots, and spectacular hair. Seems like, given the crucial masthead position, we should know who she is, but no such luck.
As a side note, we got an e-mail about our scans recently, another request for larger dimensions. We don’t have the capability to do that easily, do to our website’s design. We did offer a large scan once, a while back, for something special, but it was one image, not dozens. We couldn’t even begin to do it for multiple images. Really, we’re glad it’s beyond the realm of practicality to change our scan sizes—for reasons already stated. But hey, at least we have a lot of them. Forty-plus panels worth, below. Please enjoy.
Edit: the mystery woman is Minah Bird, a Nigerian born model and bit-part actress, whose onscreen credits include The Stud, Old Dracula andFour Dimensions of Greta.
Get the right two people together and the heat can set the world on fire.
Above: an issue of Adam magazine with another beautiful cover by Jack Waugh or Phil Belbin, illustrating C.H. Christie’s story, “Deal of Death.” It’s about a man named Grover Singer who’s in debt and fakes his own death for $50,000 in insurance money (about $325,000 today). He does it by crashing his car with another man inside, but his wife knows right away the body isn’t his. She doesn’t tell the police, though, because she’s been having an affair and recognizes the opportunity to run away with her lover and the cash. All that needs to happens is for someone to kill Grover for real. That’s what lovers are for.
Also of note is the factual story “Doctor in Disguise.” The illustration give the disguise away. It’s about a nineteenth century doctor named James Barry who practiced for forty years and upon death was revealed to be a woman. The long subterfuge involved everything from pretending to shave every morning in order to explain her smooth face to surviving a duel. In 2024, as women’s rights remain under sustained attack, there’s an opportunity built into this story for extensive commentary, but you know where we’d go, so pretend we went there and we’ll let you get on with your Saturday. More from Adam soon.
She can't help it—every time she goes out it's in a Blaze of glory.
Above: a fun shot of strawberry eating burlesque dancer, nudist, actress, and all around public figure Blaze Starr, made by Bunny Yeager on the set of Blaze Starr Goes Nudist. It dates from 1962.
Mexican actress Lupe Velez, who was considered one of the great beauties of her day, commits suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. In her note, Velez says she did it to avoid bringing shame on her unborn child by giving birth to him out of wedlock, but many Hollywood historians believe bipolar disorder was the actual cause. The event inspired a 1965 Andy Warhol film entitled Lupe.
1958—Gordo the Monkey Lost After Space Flight
After a fifteen minute flight into space on a Jupiter AM-13 rocket, a monkey named Gordo splashes down in the South Pacific but is lost after his capsule sinks. The incident sparks angry protests from the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, but NASA says animals are needed for such tests.
1968—Tallulah Bankhead Dies
American actress, talk show host, and party girl Tallulah Bankhead, who was fond of turning cartwheels in a dress without underwear and once made an entrance to a party without a stitch of clothing on, dies in St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City of double pneumonia complicated by emphysema.
1962—Canada Has Last Execution
The last executions in Canada occur when Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin, both of whom are Americans who had been extradited north after committing separate murders in Canada, are hanged at Don Jail in Toronto. When Turpin is told that he and Lucas will probably be the last people hanged in Canada, he replies, “Some consolation.â€
1964—Guevara Speaks at U.N.
Ernesto “Che” Guevara, representing the nation of Cuba, speaks at the 19th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York City. His speech calls for wholesale changes in policies between rich nations and poor ones, as well as five demands of the United States, none of which are met.
2008—Legendary Pin-Up Bettie Page Dies
After suffering a heart attack several days before, erotic model Bettie Page, who in the 1950s became known as the Queen of Pin-ups, dies when she is removed from life support machinery. Thanks to the unique style she displayed in thousands of photos and film loops, Page is considered one of the most influential beauties who ever lived.
1935—Downtown Athletic Club Awards First Trophy
The Downtown Athletic Club in New York City awards its first trophy for athletic achievement to University of Chicago halfback Jay Berwanger. The prize is later renamed the Heisman Trophy, and becomes the most prestigious award in college athletics.
