vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: pages from a June 1954 issue of Uncensored entirely devoted to the art of burlesque, with legendary dancers Lili St. Cyr on the cover and in panels eleven and twenty, Chile Pepper in panel seven, Lilly Christine in panels eight through ten, and Tempest Storm in panel fourteen. Finding this magazine reminds us that we’ve collected quite a few vintage images of burlesque shows, so since sooner is better than later, look for us to post the entire hoard in the next few days.
This May 1958 cover of Uncensored features the usual dose of innuendo, exaggeration, and pseudo-science, mixed with a few facts. One truthful story here involves Mario Lanza, who did indeed blow five million dollars. He earned about that amount on his 1951 film The Great Caruso, but was bankrupt by 1954. His tendency to spend money frivolously may have contributed to his death. In 1959, already in poor health from a lifetime of overeating and crash diets, he underwent a radical weight loss program known as Twilight Sleep Treatment, which involved being kept immobilized and sedated for prolonged periods. Immediately after finishing the program he suffered a pulmonary embolism and died, aged thirty-eight.
April 1970 issue of Uncensored, with a different look from the 1950s version we posted previously. FYI, Alicia Purdom was the wife of British actor Edmund Purdom. She claimed she had an affair with JFK in 1951, while they were both still single, and would have married him had not Joseph Kennedy stepped in and nixed their plans.
March 1957 issue of Uncensored magazine, with James Dean, Xavier Cugat (Cugie), Mrs. Bruce Cabot (Adrienne Ames) and a pretty funny juxtaposition at lower right that makes Winston (Churchill) appear to leer at Ethel Barrymore.
In the U.S., in Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott resulted in a crippling financial deficit for the Montgomery public transit system, because the city’s African-American population were the bulk of the system’s ridership.
In London, the landmark structure Crystal Palace, a 900,000 square foot glass and steel exhibition hall erected in 1851, is destroyed by fire. The Palace had been moved once and fallen into disrepair, and at the time of the fire was not in use. Two water towers survived the blaze, but these were later demolished, leaving no remnants of the original structure.
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson establishes the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. However the long report that is finally issued does little to settle questions about the assassination, and today surveys show that only a small minority of Americans agree with the Commission’s conclusions.
In Boston, Massachusetts, a fire in the fashionable Cocoanut Grove nightclub kills 492 people. Patrons were unable to escape when the fire began because the exits immediately became blocked with panicked people, and other possible exits were welded shut or boarded up. The fire led to a reform of fire codes and safety standards across the country, and the club’s owner, Barney Welansky, who had boasted of his ties to the Mafia and to Boston Mayor Maurice J. Tobin, was eventually found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
