This photo popped up online a while back. It shows five showgirls from the Minsky Carnival in New York City competing in a 1949 spaghetti eating contest, which is itself not necessarily notable. But as writers we’re always interested in new vocabulary, so we were struck by the fact that the process of sucking up spaghetti using only one’s face, lips, and tongue was called “swooshing.” It’s a word the Pulp Intl. girlfriends adopted immediately. PI-1: “So then swooshing is how you eat everything.” PI-2: “Yeah, they totally swooshed those steaks last night.” Hah hah—very funny. Of additional note, the middle contestant is this person. More swooshing, different swooshers, below.
What says summer better than this? The photo above and its crop show two bathing suit clad women giving a stately Ford sedan a rinse and buff on a warm day. There’s no copyright date, but the car has a 1938 California license plate, so the photo was made close to that year. In more conservative cities it’s possible women were still getting into trouble for wearing suits this brief, but in L.A.—where this was assuredly shot—the rules were different. Thank goodness.
This issue of Private Lives from June 1956 with its cover story about Joey Fay teaches us the basic facts of plausible deniability as it works in the political arena. Fay was vice president of the A.F.L. International Union of Operating Engineers based in New York, and in 1945 he was hit with an eighteen-year sentence in Sing Sing Prison for extortion. Within months rumors sprang up that even though he was behind bars he was still running rackets in New York City.
A second scandal involving Fay’s involvement in crooked horse racing finally prompted some clever reporter, curious who was relaying directives between Sing Sing and NYC, to come up with the genius idea of requesting a list of his visitors. That list turned out to be pure dynamite—it was a roster of practically every prominent east coast politician and official within a two-hundred mile radius. We’re talking the majority leader in the state senate, acting lieutenant governor Arthur Wicks, a former state supreme court justice, state senator William Condon, the mayor of Jersey City, the former mayor of Newark, and on and on. Eighty-seven callers in total, whose visits comprise the “affairs” Private Lives speaks of on its cover.
The embarrassing revelation produced three results. First, the politicians and officials who had visited Fay were forced to concoct highly improbable excuses that the public nevertheless had to accept because nobody knew the exact content of their conversations. Wicks explained his visit this way: “I never consulted or talked with Joseph Fay about anything else but labor conditions in the counties I represent.” See how that plausible deniability stuff works? The second result of the scandal was that Fay was transferred 250 miles upstate to Clinton Prison in Dannemora, NY, where conditions were not nearly as nice as at Sing Sing and he was considerably harder to visit. And third, public officials nationwide stopped visiting criminals in prison. Go and figure.
And if there was a fourth result, possibly it was this: a generation of New York voters were forced to re-learn what previous generations of voters always had to re-learn too—politicians are exactly as corrupt as lack of scrutiny allows them to be. Oversight exists for a reason. But sadly, that looks to have changed. Today, a large swath of the voting public is so bereft of civic ethics and the understanding that graft ultimately hurts everyone who isn’t rich, that politicians can be now be openly corrupt.
Enquirer tries to turn a little smoke into a lot of fire.
National Enquirer gets way up in French star Brigitte Bardot’s business in this issue published today in 1960, with its claim that the “man in Bardot’s life” left his wife for her, but “she won’t even talk to him.” The editors are referring to Irish actor Stephen Boyd, who you may know from the 1959 epic Ben Hur.
How did such a rumor get started? After Bardot had become an international sensation in 1956’s And God Created Woman she was allowed to choose her next leading man and fingered Boyd. Their steamy scenes in the resulting film, 1958’s Les bijoutiers du clair de lune, aka The Night Heaven Fell, stimulated tabloid musings.
Bardot and Boyd’s first encounter had been epic. According to Boyd, “When I arrived in Paris, Brigitte’s husband (Roger Vadim) picked me up at the airport, and took me directly to their apartment to meet my new leading lady. When we got there, he asked me to be patient a moment while he told his wife I had arrived. A few minutes later, Brigitte, wearing nothing but what nature had endowed her with, stormed into the room, threw her arms around me and told me how delighted she would be to work with me.”
As minor pranks go, that’s a fun one. Bardot naked for a stranger? Love it. Well, they weren’t strangers after that. By the end of Les bijoutiers du clair de lune they had become good friends. Boyd later said in an interview that Bardot asked him to marry her: “I don’t know if she was joking, but I said no. I did not explain that I couldn’t marry an actress who could never be faithful to me. Or at least try. Like I would at least try for the first year or two.”
With various stories circulating, the tabloids had all the fuel they needed to flog rumors of Bardot/Boyd sexual involvement. We don’t think Boyd really divorced his wife, theatrical agent Mariella di Sarzana, to be with Bardot. He had been with di Sarzana since summer 1958, while Bardot had divorced Roger Vadim in April 1957, and married Jacques Charrier in 1959. It’s easy to think in terms of free time between marriages, but in reality an affair could have happened at any point.
Ultimately the public will never know, and interest wanes year by year as a function of human mortality. Bardot, aged ninety, has outlived many of her formerly obsessed fans, while Boyd died way back in 1977 and isn’t well known today. But if you’re curious about him and Bardot, there’s an interesting and detailed blog about his life and career. It’s the type of site many vintage film stars probably deserve, but only a lucky few get. You can find it at this link.
This item has the look of a movie promo, but it’s actually a 1963 advertising poster for Kyoto based Kizakura sake. Kizakura was founded in 1925 and still exists today, brewing both sake and beer. The model going a bit Mona Lisa with her smile is Fumiko Miura, who would later appear in several movies for the studios Toho and Shochiku. We may get back to her later.
Welcome back, friends, to the show that never ends.
A live auction of numerous vintage carnival, circus, and sideshow posters begins today at 5:00 p.m. on the site Potter Auctions. We like all things carnival related, so we thought we’d share some of the many items that will be on sale. The posters come from numerous western countries. Among the selection here are examples from France (Gustave Saury, poster #1, and Jacques Faria, at bottom), Italy (Mauro Colizzi, #2, and Renato Casaro, #3), Germany, Portugal, Poland, and of course the U.S. These are expensive, but all are frameworthy. We have other items in this vein on the website. Here, for example, are more posters made to promote circuses and carnivals, and if you click through from there you’ll find a collection of posters from magicians and magic shows. We’ll return to this subject later.
No need to teach an old tabloid new tricks. The standard ones worked just fine.
As usual there’s plenty happening inside this issue of Hush-Hush, which was published in May 1963. We’re mainly interested in Porfirio Rubirosa, who we haven’t written about in a long while. A quick refresher: Rubirosa was a Dominican born jet-setter, playboy, race car driver, and polo player who married a succession of wealthy women, came away richer each time, and left behind a trail of unbelievable stories. Hush-Hush gleefully tells readers that the one percenters, ex-lovers, and betrayed husbands in Rubirosa’s extensive circle are all terrified because he’s rumored to be publishing a memoir. This bare-all would supposedly expose never-before-heard secrets of the rich, famous, and powerful.
Hush-Hush then goes through the list of Rubirosa’s wives and affairs, offering no new information but padding the article with typically circular tabloid language, before concluding: One of Rubi’s biggest assets is certainly discretion. So relax, ladies. In other words, the memoir would share the facts, but no names. That doesn’t sound fun at all. But the book, if it was ever planned, was never written, as far as we know, and Rubirosa took his secrets with him when he exited this existence two years later by crashing his Ferrari into a chestnut tree in Paris.
Elsewhere Hush-Hush rails against Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s anti-war novel Fail-Safe, calling it a propaganda victory for communists—a standard attack in the U.S. still used today when sensible people warn of the lunacy of choosing war over dialogue. The magazine also exploits the deceased Marilyn Monroe by writing an article about how others are exploiting the deceased Marilyn Monroe. And need we say it? Cynically pretending to defend others for various types of gain is also a trick that still works today.
Moving on, Anthony Perkins gets the treatment by being called effeminate, which is as close as a tabloid could get after the lawsuits of earlier years to saying an actor was gay. Also in the area of sexuality, Helen Gurley Brown’s bestselling book Sex and the Single Girl is called, “the final blow in the decline of the American virgin.” Others who get their turn on the rack include Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, and Arlene Dahl, about whom the magazine asks, “Why did Arlene Dahl pose in the nude?” We’d say she posed nudish, not nude, but in any case she was beautiful, so it was a gift to the world.
We have almost thirty scans below, and note: the moiré patterns on the images are due to the lower quality printing used by Hush-Hush. There may be a way to avoid them in scanning, but we don’t know how.
Real Raquel and reproduction Raquel compete for press attention.
Above is another shot from a past Cannes Film Festival, which is going on for a second week in the famed seaside enclave. This one shows Raquel Welch at the 1968 fest promoting her movie The Biggest Bundle of Them All, which was not in competition. The double pistol image may look familiar to Pulp Intl. visitors. We shared a similar shot last year and related a funny story about one of our many experiences with guns. We’ve done a lot on Biggest Bundle, such as here and here, but not because it’s a good movie. It’s because Welch was so wildly popular that promo material on her was abundantly produced and highly collectible, even back then. For that reason a lot of it survives all these decades later. We have a few rarities from Japan we’ll get around to posting in the future.
The real Dors and a facimile Peck enjoy the sands at Cannes.
This photo and zoom, made today in 1956, show British actress Diana Dors reclining with a cardboard version of U.S. actor Gregory Peck during the Cannes Film Festival, the 2025 version of which begins in a few days. The photo op occurred because Dors had commented to the press that Peck was her favorite actor. He was there to promote his film The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, while Dors was pushing Yield to the Night. Did the two ever meet in the flesh—assuming they hadn’t already? With all the parties, pressers, and mixers at film festivals, you’d have to think so. At which point Dors probably said, “I had you flat on your back and totally stiff. It was fun!”
We’re circling back to Frans Mettes today, a Dutch illustrator whose cover work we featured not long ago. He was a commercial artist as well as dust jacket illustrator, and above you see a beautiful poster he painted for Vereenigde Nederlandsche Scheepvaartmaatschappij’s (United Dutch Shipping Company’s) regular Holland to West Africa liner service. The art is from 1958, but the VNS line debuted in April 1920, with ships stopping in the Canary Islands before heading onward to ports in French West Africa (now Senegal), Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), and Angola. The piece is a frameable wonder from a more elegant era of travel advertising.
The amusement park Disneyland opens in Orange County, California for 6,000 invitation-only guests, before opening to the general public the following day.
1959—Holiday Dies Broke
Legendary singer Billie Holiday, who possessed one of the most unique voices in the history of jazz, dies in the hospital of cirrhosis of the liver. She had lost her earnings to swindlers over the years, and upon her death her bank account contains seventy cents.
1941—DiMaggio Hit Streak Reaches 56
New York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio gets a hit in his fifty-sixth consecutive game. The streak would end the next game, against the Cleveland Indians, but the mark DiMaggio set still stands, and in fact has never been seriously threatened. It is generally thought to be one of the few truly unbreakable baseball records.
1939—Adams Completes Around-the-World Air Journey
American Clara Adams becomes the first woman passenger to complete an around the world air journey. Her voyage began and ended in New York City, with stops in Lisbon, Marseilles, Leipzig, Athens, Basra, Jodhpur, Rangoon, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Wake Island, Honolulu, and San Francisco.
1955—Nobel Prize Winners Unite Against Nukes
Eighteen Nobel laureates sign the Mainau Declaration against nuclear weapons, which reads in part: “We think it is a delusion if governments believe that they can avoid war for a long time through the fear of [nuclear] weapons. Fear and tension have often engendered wars. Similarly it seems to us a delusion to believe that small conflicts could in the future always be decided by traditional weapons. In extreme danger no nation will deny itself the use of any weapon that scientific technology can produce.”
1921—Sacco & Vanzetti Convicted
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are convicted in Dedham, Massachusetts of killing their shoe company’s paymaster. Even at the time there are serious questions about their guilt, and whether they are being railroaded because of their Italian ethnicity and anarchist political beliefs.
Argentine publishers Malinca Debora reprinted numerous English language crime thrillers in Spanish. This example uses George Gross art borrowed from U.S. imprint Rainbow Books.
