INFORMERLY KNOWN AS

The paper that never published a truthful word.


Speaking of gonzo newspapers, here’s an issue of National Informer published today in 1972, with its “truthful news of all the facts of life.” That in itself is a higher level of satire than yesterday’s competitor Rampage ever managed. This issue of Informer is all sex, with wonder pills, wonder drugs, hookers, and bedroom variations galore, including dominant women—and men whose egos can’t handle it. There’s a photo of a model captioned: “If you want your little to girl to grow up to be a big girl don’t let her start taking birth control until seventeen.” We had to read it twice. Is that some sort of incest quip? There’s nothing these tabloid editors wouldn’t print.

Informer also once more welcomes resident seer Mark Travis. We remember when he took over for the (not so) Great Criswell. Of the two, we liked Criswell better. Plus he had a better handle. Travis predicts the rise of disposable clothing, a massive outpouring of U.S. budget on artificial lakes, and a sudden trend of home rifle ranges. These seers were early versions of modern day cable pundits—they could constantly be wrong and still keep their jobs. But once we accept these papers as satire, then it’s clear that the predictions were supposed to be wrong. It’s excellent work if you can get it. Twenty-plus scans below.
They slurp, you slurp, we all slurp in Rampage.

It’s always fun to see which direction Rampage goes in each ridiculous centerspread, and in an issue published today in 1973 they highlight a mother and daughter who lick houseguests. This stuff is priceless. It’s reported by “Karl Peabody,” who visits a Los Angeles businessman who runs his home “Burmese style,” whatever that is, with a compliant wife and daughter required to entertain guests. Soon comes the licking, and we bet you can guess which part of this pseudonymous reporter gets licked. Rampage claims on its front cover that it’s America’s “top satire and humor weekly.” We’re not so sure about the humor part of the formula, but the satire is certainly there.

We often wonder why people who bought Rampage didn’t just go full porn and buy Playboy or whatever. But maybe Rampage and its ilk were displayed more openly at newsstands, and possibly as checkout line items in drugstores and the like, leading to impulse purchases. We figure the average buyer would read the paper twice—once out of curiosity, and again to make sure it was as dumb as it seemed the first time. With tens of millions of newsstand browsers every week, even a miniscule purchase rate would probably keep a tabloid afloat. Of course, we’ve bought dozens of these gonzo newspapers, so who are we to talk? Therefore we humbly submit for your perusal a selection of choice Rampage imagery.
Complete satisfaction resides within these pages.


Above: the front and rear covers of two paperbacks from South Asia with interesting color illustrations. The first is from Malaysia, published in 1964, and the second is from Singapore, published in 1966. These aren’t fiction. They’re actually both “educational” books about anatomy and sex, but there’s nothing explicit inside unless you count medical drawings. We thought the comic style art made these appropriate to share. In any case, they’re certainly eye-catching. Do you happen to remember some of the other items we’ve shared from Malaysia? It was a long time ago. Check here, here, and here for a reminder. You’ll be amazed. 

No matter how many it took Lynn and Donovan would get you there.

Digging into our collection of Japanese promo posters for American porn movies once again, we found this one for 1984’s Too Good To Be True, which was headlined by Ginger Lynn and Stacey Donovan. Other performers included… well, all the performers that were usually in such films. The Japanese title—花唇の相続—translates to something along the lines of, “inheritance of flower lips.” Needless to say, we absolutely love that. Japanese distributors were really good with retitles of U.S. adult movies. The final results tended to be poetic, yet there was never any doubt that what was being offered was smut. Of course, it was censored in Japan—no flower lips shown, but even so, what a fun title. As we’ve mentioned before, because it was the videocassette age movies such as these didn’t have official premieres in the U.S., however they apparently did in Japan, and that was today in 1989.

There's never a cop around to perform a cavity search when you need one.

You probably suspect at a glance that this is a Japanese poster for an x-rated movie, and you’d be right. It was made for Trinity Brown, starring Sharon Kelly, aka Colleen Brennan, who’s backed by a supporting cast of stalwart porn studs and b-level starlets. This is the fourth movie of Kelly’s we’ve looked at, after Love, Lust and ViolenceGosh!Scream in the Streets, and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks. Do we have a special affinity for her? Not really. But the Japanese did, apparently. We’ve found Japanese posters for many of her flicks. They’ve retitled this one 弾を握る女, which means “woman holding a bullet.” Or possibly they’ve retitled it SEXリボルバー, which means “sex revolver.” The rest says, “Right now, a miraculous comeback, Sharon Kelly. A trap of terrifying passion, the scent of lavender drifting in the cloudy darkness. A man never forgets the smell of Sharon.” Indeed.

You can always expect a plotline with vintage porn, and in this case Kelly plays a tough L.A. cop partnered with John Leslie, who she also happens to be banging off-duty. The two are assigned a murder case in which a strip club owner is thought to have shot a local gangster. Brennan and Leslie delve into the world of exotic dancers and show business to unravel the mystery. It isn’t much of a mystery—psst the gangster’s girl set him up—but getting to the end is reasonably fun.

Generally vintage porn features realistic sexual performances, without a lot of asinine screaming and backbreaking positions. It was made before the medium became festishistic performance art, and takes itself seriously as erotica for normal people. This particular flick was made without any of the most inspiring porn beauties from the era (Ginger LynnAngelShauna Grant, Jody Swafford, Annette Haven, et al), so it’s possible some viewers might be aesthetically nonplussed by Kelly and company, but everything is real, rather than silicone, and that’s worth something. We’ll discuss some of those top stars again, and Kelly will be back too, on yet another Japanese poster we have. Trinity Brown premiered in the U.S. in 1984 and reached Japan today in 1986.

Supply and demand in the unfree market.


Oh no! It’s another National Informer. You’re thinking, “Three days in a row? How many of these rags do they have?” Well, more than several, clearly, since we always post them on their publication dates and these ended up being consecutive. This issue, which hit newsstands today in 1973, offers a report on the so-called sex slave markets, which according to Informer were in existence in Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, and Ghana. This is not exactly a newsflash. Just recently, the Credite Suisse leak, which we wrote about, revealed that sex traffickers were using Swiss banks to stash funds. Shockingly—and we know this will knock you for a loop—it’s extremely difficult to eradicate anything that generates enough profits to interest the international banking sector. Business, real estate, oil, weapons, human trafficking, drugs—it’s all of a piece to the banks.

To go along with its sex slave reporting Informer offers up a side helping of bdsm content, including a blurb on Bella Silverman, who was allegedly Miss Nude Dominant Female of 1973. You see her just below, complete with a terrifying mask that doesn’t exactly scream erotic thrills. Or is that just us? We looked up Bella, but there was no info at all. Maybe she’s a banker now. Elsewhere Informer tells readers that age is no barrier to sex, nudist camps really swing, and foreign diplomats are sex maniacs. And lastly, resident psychic Mark Travis makes a set of surprisingly prosaic predictions, including about future shoe fashion, breakthroughs in spray paint, and the California housing market. We suppose even psychics get tired of talking about Bigfoot and UFOs. Well, here’s a prediction: there will be no National Informer tomorrow. Enjoy the scans.
Notable show business encounters: the Pelvis meets the Throat.


Issues of National Informer on back-to-back days? Sure, why not? The above example, published today in 1974, is five years older than yesterday’s, and in the intervening timeframe the editors seem to have stopped woman bashing. They’re still treating them as complete sex objects, but that’s what Informer was all about. They’ve also replaced the (not so) Great Criswell with new psychic Mark Travis. We’re still curious who actually bought these mags (we do it for scientific purposes, so we don’t count), and exactly how seriously they took it. Our guess is not very.

The main attraction in this issue is the story on swivel-hipped musical star Elvis Presley and Linda Lovelace, centerpiece of the xxx smash Deep Throat. Lovelace, who was purportedly involved—at least for a few hours at a time—with such aging stars as Richard Burton, Rex Harrison, Bob Hope, Dean Martin, and (of course) Frank Sinatra, as well as young Hollywood rebels Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, and Dennis Hopper, is alleged to have met up with Presley in Las Vegas. You could be forgiven for assuming that nature took its course, but it didn’t. At least, according to reports.

What on Earth could have stopped these two sex elementals from joining forces? Presley allegedly told Lovelace he was temporarily hors de combat because he had hurt himself having sex with Natalie Wood the previous week. Hey, we just relay this stuff. We make no claim that any of it is true. And we thought Natalie was so sweet. Well, you should never judge a book by its cover. Tabloids, on the other hand, you can safely evaluate at a glance. Informer is just as down and dirty as it looks. 
Everybody wants a piece.


Radley Metzger was the director of perhaps the most stylish films from the golden era of porn, so it’s no surprise his output reached Japan. This poster was made for his 1978 film Maraschino Cherry, which in Japan was known as Marasukîno cherî: Musei. Annette Haven, Gloria Leonard, Leslie Bovee, the lovely Constance Money, and Eric Edwards star, and there’s an actual plot, as Manhattan brothel madame Maraschino Cherry, played by Leonard, indoctrinates her hick sister Jenny Baxter into the business. Little sis takes to it like a fish to water, so much so that at the end she’s left in charge while Leonard heads off to open another cathouse.

Metzer directed this under the pseudonym Henry Paris, which he used because he directed non-xxx features under his own name. So once again we see the blurry line between adult and non-adult entertainment back in the day. Among Metzger’s mainstream movies were Camille 2000, Little Mother, aka Woman of the Year, and The Lickerish Quartet, which we talked about several years ago. His most famous xxx effort is probably The Opening of Misty Beethoven, but Maraschino Cherry, with its goofy comedy (“Would you like to be eaten while you wait?” “Oh, no thanks. I’m not hungry.”) also seems well remembered.

Below we have images of the film’s female cast, excepting Jenny Baxter, who we couldn’t find. Top to bottom you see Leonard, Haven, Money, and Bovee. We’ve uploaded these for a couple of reasons. First, they’re beautiful shots. Second, the Pulp Intl. girlfriends are Stateside and when they’re gone we tend to post more nude images, possibly because we get a bit lonely. Without their influence we also come up with ideas like “everybody wants a piece.” If they were here one of them would have said, “Really?” And we’d have rethought it. But it could have been worse. We almost went with the header “Fruit Cock Tale.” So there you are, girls. Hurry back before we bury ourselves under an avalanche of crudeness.

Sometimes you want your house to be a little dirty.


The thing about Japanese promos for U.S. adult films—and we’ve mentioned this before—is that they usually have rare images of the lead actresses. Such is the case with the above item, made for Trashy Lady, featuring x-rated legend Ginger Lynn alluringly wrapped in a silk or satin sheet. In Japan the movie was titled ジンジャー・リンの赤い唇, which means, “Ginger Lynn’s red lips.”
 
The plot is simple—Harry Reems, playing a big city crime kingpin, decides to make smalltown Ginger his girlfriend, but since she’s too innocent, he needs her to be retrained into the type of woman he prefers—a trashy lady. You know, of course, what sort of activities the makeover involves.

It’s cute when porn folks try to make a period movie, and this one, which is set during the Great Depression, comes complete with fancy costumes, a couple of nice sets, and even a high quality opening credit sequence. In the end it’s still sort of like low rent community theater with oral sex, but it’s all in good fun. As a side note, every website you look at says Reems plays real-life gangster Dutch Schultz, but guess what? We actually watch these flicks, and the character he plays is the fictional Dutch Seigel, not Dutch Schultz. Who cares, right? Well, we do. Originally released in 1985, Trashy Lady opened in Japan today in 1987.
Just a little something to help pass the time.


Above is the cover of an issue of National Informer Reader published today in 1974. Some people will tell you that the trans community is a new thing, but it isn’t, and we know because vintage tabloids have been obsessed with the subject for more than sixty years. If you don’t believe us check here, here, here, here, and here. Reader visits the topic with a story on trans entertainer Jennifer Fox. In cheap tabloids the stories were often made up, but Fox existed. She underwent gender reassignment in 1968 and became a burlesque dancer in Las Vegas. In other stories she’s noted that once knowledge of her change became widely known, interest in her exploded and she became a star attraction. The only thing is, we don’t think the photo Reader printed is Fox. Her face looks wrong, Fox was usually blonde, and not many burlesque dancers posed frontally nude after becoming famous—it would have devalued the moneymaker. Probably Reader never actually spoke to Fox. The editors simply knew a useful story when they saw it, and used a handout photo that looked good. When it comes to tabloids in this tier almost nothing is 100% accurate. Scans below.

Femme Fatale Image

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1935—Huey Long Assassinated

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.

1956—Elvis Shakes Up Ed Sullivan

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.

1966—Star Trek Airs for First Time

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.

1974—Ford Pardons Nixon

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.

1978—Giorgi Markov Assassinated

Bulgarian dissident Giorgi Markov is assassinated in a scene right out of a spy novel. As he’s waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge in London, he’s jabbed in the calf with an umbrella. The man holding the umbrella apologizes and walks away, but he is in reality a Bulgarian hired killer who has just injected a ricin pellet into Markov, who develops a high fever and dies three days later.

This awesome cover art is by Tommy Shoemaker, a new talent to us, but not to more experienced paperback illustration aficionados.
Ten covers from the popular French thriller series Les aventures de Zodiaque.
Sam Peffer cover art for Jonathan Latimer's Solomon's Vineyard, originally published in 1941.

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