has forgone the usual lurid photos in favor of a mostly-text presentation that makes the month’s scandalous offerings that much more glaring. So let’s take it from the top. Did Sammy Davis, Jr. marry his southern belle? Short answer—no. Though he had many down-low relationships with white women, including what must have been a heavenly fling with the angel Kim Novak, the southern belle faded into history and Sammy’s first marriage was to a woman of his own race in 1958. The whole thing was forcibly arranged by the Mafia, but hey, no marriage is 100% perfect. Moving on to Doris Day, yes, she did change her name, but mainly because her real last name was Kappelhoff, and that simply wasn’t going to play in the sticks back then. As for Brando, there’s no reportage required there. Just do a Google image search on “Brando” and “oral” and you’ll see that he wasn’t working extremely hard trying to keep his bisexuality a secret, even in 1950s America. In our opinion, that speaks well of him.
All very interesting, but then we come to this slightly more obscure reference to Yale and Pig Night parties. Intriguing, no? So, since we have a collegiate theme going today, let’s take a closer look at this. Yale during the 1950s had a thriving frat culture of rich young men sporting well-developed senses of entitlement along with a hair-trigger willingness to party like it was 1999. One house in particular, Delta Kappa Epsilon, was the jock frat. And we all know how sensitive jocks are. Pig Night was an annual ritual in which DKE pledges were sent into New Haven to invite townie girls to a fraternity dance. At midnight, the lucky ladies were gathered and an announcement was made in front of the entire frat. The girls had not been selected because they were beautiful, or interesting, or fun—but because they were the ugliest girls the pledges could find—i.e. “pigs.” Big laughs all around.
The girls invariably stormed out, angry, or humiliated, or tearful, and that made it all the more fun. All this from a frat claiming to seek candidates who “combined in the most equal proportions the gentleman, the scholar, and the jolly good fellow.” We don’t know exactly when DKE’s Pig Nights ended, but we did find references to them continuing while George W. Bush was president of the frat during the mid-’60s. We draw no conclusions from that, although you might. But remember—fucked up as it is, back then Pig Night would have fallen into the category of good clean fun. Not that it was truly harmless—just that the victims were unfairly expected to pretend it was. Today, nobody would tolerate such an event. Which is good, because though we’re vocal here at Pulp about the sad decline of movie, book, and magazine art, we’ve also said before that we think human beings are slowly getting better.
