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Sex, misfortune, and murder all rendezvous in Le Rendez-Vous.

Today we have an issue of the French Canadian tabloid Le Rendez-Vous published today in 1969 with cover star Rosa Dolmai, who’s also known as Rosa Domaille, but is probably most famous as Eve Eden. Under all three names she carved out a career as a glamour model, appearing in scores of publications ranging from Folies de Paris et de Hollywood to Gala. Occasionally she posed explicitly, which positions her well ahead of most of her peers in that regard. She also made at least one nudie loop, and branched out and landed small parts in twenty-seven films from 1961 to 1968. She’s been featured here on Pulp Intl. several times, including in the adventure magazine Adam and the tabloid Minuit, and last spring memorably appeared—branching out again, in a way—as a blonde up a tree. You can see that here.

There’s interesting material beyond the Dolmai cover. If you read French there’s good gossip under the bowler hat logo in “Pour hommes seulment.” Then the editors do it again under the header “Panora-Monde,” because one good round of gossip deserves another. Meanwhile, Frenchwoman Theresa St. John declares that sex is her religion, and to make the point crystal clear Le Rendez-Vous presents her with nuns in the background. It’s not as weird as it seems—vintage cinema has taught us that nuns are the horniest species of penguin. Musician and actress Rina Berti, who released one album and appeared in the 1974 sex comedy C’est jeune et ça sait tout!, puts in an appearance, nude behind a guitar. And the beautiful Christiane Schmidtmer, who we’ve featured in Le Rendez-Vous‘ sister publication Midnight and who appeared in the women-in-prison movie The Big Doll House, gets the centerspread.

Le Rendez-Vous also leans heavily into gore. Who knew Canada could be so violent? Maybe it really should be part of the United States. Then a closer reading reveals that in order to fill its blood quotient, Le Rendez-Vous features mostly crimes from other countries. There’s a two page spread, “de la vie l’americaine”—American life. Elsewhere an Indiana man shotguns his wife, and in Boston a fifteen-year-old boy cuts off his fingers and mails them to his girlfriend. The Brits get a spotlight dance too, as a woman is raped and killed on a London street. So in the end there’s not enough violence in Canada to fill an issue of one of its leading tabloids. It can’t join the U.S. after all.

Hold that smile. And remember, a model's job is hard, but not nearly as hard as thinking up interesting poses.

That would be Eve Eden perched on a branch in the above image. She could be pretty high off the ground—the girth of the branch indicates that. We guess she climbed a ladder, or maybe even a scaffold. The photo made the Pulp Intl. girlfriends smile. Verbatim: “No guy ever has to climb a fucking tree for a picture.” Fair point. Eden probably had the same thought waiting for the photographer to say he’d gotten the shot he wanted. You’ve probably never heard of her. During a nine-year cinema career she appeared in nearly twenty films, including 1959’s Naked Fury and 1960’s So Evil, So Young, but most of those roles were tiny or uncredited. However she was also a popular magazine model under her name and others, and may be better remembered for her work in that medium. We saw her in a 1969 issue of Adam last year, but this is a much better shot. You have to applaud her effort. 

To the inexperienced eye she looks unarmed, but her moral outrage and certainty that men are always wrong will prevail.

This cover of Adam magazine dates from July 1969, and as always there’s conflict depicted. The art illustrates Ted Schurmann’s story, “Deadly Efficient,” which is about a disgruntled secretary who helps rob her employer. What’s she disgruntled about? Well, it’s a story from a 1969 men’s magazine, so what do you think the problem would be? That’s right—her boss doesn’t love her. But the very hour after the robbery, the boss calls up the secretary (not knowing yet that his office has been ransacked) and admits he has feelings for her, which leaves her to try to undo the theft before it’s discovered. That effort backfires in the expected ways, leaving the corpse of her accomplice and a lot of questions behind. It’s a decent story, so we weren’t surprised Schurmann also published a couple of novels. But it looks as if Adam may have given him his first shot. Its role as a platform for new writers is yet another reason it was one of the best men’s magazine around. We have twenty-five scans below, including a shot of British model/actress Eve Eden (aka Rosa Domai and Rosa Domaille) in panel twelve.
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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1933—Franklin Roosevelt Survives Assassination Attempt

In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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