vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
This rather threatening photo shows U.S. pre-Code actress and former Ziegfeld Girl Jeanne Eagels seeming to gleefully aim for the gonads. She goes way back, having made her first screen appearances in 1913. She also died very young, of the oldest of Hollywood bugaboos, an overdose, a year after this photo was made. It was shot as promo for her drama The Letter in 1929.
Anastasia Reilly began her show business career tap dancing in New York City at age fourteen, by seventeen was nationally famous as a Ziegfeld Girl, and in this Strauss-Peyton (Benjamin R. Strauss and Homer Peyton) image is on top of the world in a $50,000 string of pearls. That would be about $680,000 today, which sounds like a lot until you learn some pearl necklaces top $2 million, including an $11 million ruby-studded collar that once belonged to Elizabeth Taylor. The above shot was made when Reilly was appearing in the Ziegfeld musical Louie the 14th, which ran for more than three-hundred performances at the Cosmopolitan Theatre through most of 1925. Her role was minor, but we daresay her visual impact was major, even in costume.
This issue of Paris Magazine features a beautiful Louis-Charles Royer cover of Ziegfeld star Claire Luce, one of the most popular celebrities of her time. Her heyday was the 1920s and ’30s, a period during which—though this is little remarked upon today—substantially more women began to have sex before marriage. By the time the first surveys took place in the 1940s about 50% of women admitted to having pre-marital sex. Anecdotally, during the 1920s probably at least one in four women had sex as singles. Claire Luce was a pioneer of the female right to choose. A mere eight-year span of her diary describes sixty lovers.
Comedian W.C. Fields, née William Claude Dukenfield, jokes around with chorus girls Helen Ellsworth, Helene Sheldon, Cricket Wooten, and Margy Martyn during a rehearsal for Florenz Ziegfeld’s Ziegfeld Follies revues. Fields was a Follies cast member off and on from 1915 until 1925. He was known from the beginning of his career for having a large nose, and it reddened and grew over time due to rosacea and rhinophyma. This shot is from today, 1925.
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.
With the help of the CIA, General Augusto Pinochet topples democratically elected President Salvador Allende in Chile. Pinochet’s regime serves as a testing ground for Chicago School of Economics radical pro-business policies that later are applied to other countries, including the United States.
The attacks that would become known as 9-11 take place in the United States. Airplane hijackings lead to catastrophic crashes resulting in the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City, the destruction of a portion of The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and a passenger airliner crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Approximately 36% of Americans doubt the official 9-11 story.
Governor of Louisiana Huey Long, one of the few truly leftist politicians in American history, is shot by Carl Austin Weiss in Baton Rouge. Long dies after two days in the hospital.
Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, performing his hit song “Don’t Be Cruel.” Ironically, a car accident prevented Sullivan from being present that night, and the show was guest-hosted by British actor Charles Laughton.
Star Trek, an American television series set in the twenty-third century and promoting socialist utopian ideals, premieres on NBC. The series is cancelled after three seasons without much fanfare, but in syndication becomes one of the most beloved television shows of all time.
U.S. President Gerald Ford pardons former President Richard Nixon for any crimes Nixon may have committed while in office, which coincidentally happen to include all those associated with the Watergate scandal.
