Inside MAN’S MAGAZINE, Feb. 1954 – Part 2: Burlesque, bull running, idiotic divorce laws and other cultural traditions...

My last post provided a look at some of the wild stories and photos in the February 1954 issue of MAN’S MAGAZINE, the legendary painting vs. photo issue mentioned in the Taschen book MEN'S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES.

Today’s post features more articles from that issue that I find particularly interesting from a historical and cultural perspective.

One is “I Censor Burlesque.”

It was written by Humbert Satriano, a New York City inspector whose probably thankless but enjoyable job was to watch burlesque shows.

It was his duty to determine if the shows conformed to the city’s current indecency regulations, which were actually more prudish in 1950s than they were prior to World War II.

Humbert explains that in the mid-1940s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia had imposed stricter rules for burlesque shows performed anywhere in The Big Apple.

Chief among those rules were these three:

      “(1) No female shall be permitted on a stage in any scene, sketch or act with breasts or the
lower part of the torso uncovered, or so thinly covered or draped as to appear uncovered.
      (2) Scenes, sketches or acts whenever a female appears originally fully or partially clothed and gradually disrobes shall conform to the above rule.
      (3) No vulgar, obscene or indecent language or conduct offensive to decency or propriety shall be
indulged in by performers.”

To enforce these rules, poor Humbert had to attend hundreds of burlesque shows and watch thousands of strippers do their acts, including some of the great Burlesque Queens such as Lili St. Cyr and Gypsy Rose Lee.

Humbert viewed the pioneering pros like Cyr and Lee as true artists compared to the newer crop of striptease performers he was seeing in 1954.

“The truth is, nothing bores me more than watching modern burlesque,” he opined. “Today’s strippers —  described by the Minsky Brothers as ‘hip-heavers, tossers and breast-bouncers’ and by author H. L. Mencken with the elegant Greek term ‘ecdysiasts’ — are terribly lacking in imagination. They’re in the dumps. Compared with the old-time ‘exotic dancers,’ the new breed of burlesque ‘artists’ are utterly devoid of any semblance of artistry.”

Humbert would probably be happy to know that classic burlesque techniques are being revived by today’s “neo-burlesque” shows. (Some of the best of which are hosted by my fellow vintage men’s magazine aficionado Jason “Java” Croft, creator of Java’s Bachelor Pad.)

There are some other less attractive mid-20th century cultural traditions featured in articles in the February 1954 issue of MAN’S MAGAZINE.

They include: running with the bulls in Pamplona (“Running Wild!”), portraying all sharks as killers that should themselves be killed without compunction (“Killer Sharks of Raraka”) and fraternity hazing rituals at American high schools and colleges (“Field Day for Sadists”).

For bitter divorced guys and those contemplating or facing divorce, there’s also a sympathetic article about how strict and “unfair” the divorce laws were in the 1950s, titled “It’s the Man Who Pays.”

The indignant subhead sneers: “Condemning husbands before trial makes a mockery of our divorce courts and leads to the biggest racket of all — alimony.”

One of the fascinating parts of this article is a full-page sidebar that lists the grounds for divorce in all of the U.S. states and territories at the time.

Back in the Fifties, divorce was still frowned upon culturally and legally.

You needed to have — or at least claim to have — a reason that met the letter of law to get unhitched.

In some states, there were relatively few valid grounds for divorce.

For example, according the the list published in MAN’S MAGAZINE, there were only three legal grounds for divorce in New Jersey: adultery, desertion or “extreme cruelty.” (Apparently, mild cruelty wasn’t a good enough reason.)

South Carolina was a little better. It allowed divorce for four basic reasons: adultery, desertion, physical cruelty or habitual drunkenness.

In some states, you had more options.

Under Kentucky law, for instance, the grounds for divorce included:

“Impotence, adultery, desertion (1), conviction for felony, habitual drunkenness (1), idiocy or insanity (5), wife pregnant at time of marriage, violent temper or behavior, husband and wife living apart (5), non-support by husband, extreme cruelty, willful neglect, fraud, force or duress, venereal disease, attempt on life of other, wife’s unchastity, indignities, leprosy or other loathsome disease. Also for malformation preventing sexual intercourse and for joining sect believing cohabitation unlawful.”

By the way, according to a note about the list of state divorce laws: “The numeral in parentheses indicate the number of years the particular condition must have existed in order to constitute grounds for divorce.”

In other words, in Kentucky you had to prove your spouse had exhibited “idiocy or insanity” for at least five years if you were trying to use one of those conditions as a reason to get a divorce. You were stuck with the idiot or psycho you married until their mental problem hit the five year mark.

Ah yes, the Fifties. The good old days, right?

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NOW AVAILABLE AS A DIGITAL DOWNLOAD The February 1954 issue of MAN’S, with the painting and photo covers and all interior pages, in high-resolution, PDF format, for only $2.99. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

Related reading and viewing:

Inside MAN’S MAGAZINE, February 1954 – Part 1: Savages, Sex and Severed Limbs…

As I explained in the previous post here, the February 1954 issue of MAN’S MAGAZINE is the legendary painting vs. photo market test issue mentioned in the Taschen book MEN'S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES.

The editors of MAN’S wanted to find out if readers would prefer the magazine to continue using action/adventure paintings on its covers or switch to girlie cheesecake cover photos.

So, half of the copies printed featured an exotic cover painting of an iconic white explorer wearing khakis and pith helmet being threatened by a group of savage “Australian Bushmen.” (They look African but are apparently supposed to represent the aborigines featured in the lead story inside).

The cover on the other half of the print run for that issue had a photo of Eve Meyer, the glamour model and wife of photographer and filmmaker Russ Meyer.

Initially, the photo cover seemed like the winner and photos of models were used on the April and June covers.

In the June 1954 issue of MAN’S the editors reported:

“Mail on the action cover vs. the girl cover shows that approximately 75% of our readers prefer glamour, 25% prefer adventure.”

However, by August of 1954 MAN’S went back to painted covers and continued using them throughout the Fifties and Sixties, as did most other men’s pulp adventure periodicals.

From what I can gather, there were several reasons. One is that anti-pornography activist groups were less likely to try to get magazines with adventure cover paintings banned from local newsstands than magazines with sexy cover photos. Magazines with painted covers were also less apt to draw attention from Post Office censors.

Moreover, wild action and adventure cover paintings were simply a better fit with the types of stories published by men’s adventure magazines like MAN’S — and with the interests of most of their readers.

Regular readers of men’s adventure magazines were generally less affluent, less well-educated and less urban than the readers targeted by PLAYBOY and its imitators.

They liked cheesecake photos of women as much as any hetero man. But they had little or no interest reading in egghead fiction stories or articles about the latest men’s fashions. 

They tended to be blue-collar workers who enjoyed hunting and fishing. A high percentage were veterans (typically regular enlisted men, not officers).

They were guys who enjoyed action, adventure and war stories, gritty crime stories and outdoor sports articles. They also liked exposés and articles about sex-related topics.

MAN’S MAGAZINE and other men’s pulp mags gave them what they wanted.

For example, the first story in the February 1954 issue of MAN’S, after the regular “The Outdoor Man” news briefs section, is a purportedly true adventure yarn about an encounter with some aborigines in a remote area of Australia.

It’s titled “Naked Devils and Black Magic.”

A quote printed in boldface type on the first page hypes the action and danger to come: “The bushmen came at me, spears poised, boomerangs ready. I had one chance to stop fifty howling savages!”

By today’s standards, this story is clearly racist and ethnocentric (like most things in the American media were throughout the past two centuries).

It starts out with a local pilot giving this sneering description of the surviving members of Australia’s indigenous population:

“Bloody, good-for-nothing mob...They build nothing, grow nothing, and wear nothing — just Nature Boys!...They eat snakes, grub worms, kill an occasional kangaroo-and believe in ‘dream time,’ when the earth began.”

However, the story is interesting to read and it’s illustrated with some great photos.

I especially love the nighttime photo of a group of Aborigine men wearing body paint that seems luminescent in the flash of the camera (something that plays a role in the plot).

And, from a literary perspective, the story is actually noteworthy.

It was written by Harry Roskolenko (1907-1980), a prolific American writer poet, novelist and travel writer who also worked as a critic for the New York Times Book Review.

He was famous enough in the U.S. that a collection of his papers is kept in the special collections section of the Syracuse University library.
 
According to an article about him in a 2004 National Library of Australia newsletter, Roskolenko was also something of a literary celebrity in Australia. He made a splash in Australia’s local modernist poetry scene while stationed there during World War II and returned frequently after the war. 

Several books of Roskolenko’s poems were published. None were major commercial or critical successes. (The more famous American poet William Carlos Williams called one of them “so bad, that by its very depravity it is impressive”).

Roskolenko seems to have made more of his income as a self-described “hack writer” of travelogue books like WHITE MAN GO!, pulpy novels like BLACK IS A MAN (“Yesterday he was a white man – today he is a Negro!”) and travel and adventure stories like “Naked Devils and Black Magic.”

Roskolenko’s Australian adventure story in MAN’S is followed by a mild cheesecake photo spread of Eve Meyer.

Nudity was rare in men’s adventure mags in the 1950s — unless, of course, the women were “natives.” Under the unspoken “National Geographic Rule,” it was OK to show photos of native women topless.

The title of the next story, “A New Way to a Happy Sex Life,” sounds like it would be one of the usual hyped-up sex advice or sexposé stories often found in men’s pulp mags. And, one of the photos used for it is a bit risqué.

But this story is actually a serious and historically interesting nonfiction article about “a modern form of mental healing called group psychotherapy.”

It was written by Frank Rasky, a journalist who wrote various types of nonfiction articles for both men’s magazines and mainstream magazines in the 1950s. (For example, here’s a link to a profile he wrote about actress Judy Holliday for NEW LIBERTY magazine in 1952.)

The story following Rasky’s urges “Bring Back the 6-Day Bike Race!”

You probably didn’t even know 6-day bike races came and went. I didn’t until reading this article. But apparently indoor bike race marathons, like dance marathons, were a popular form of entertainment before World War II.

Next comes a story which reflects the fact that part of the DNA of men’s adventure magazines came from the often gruesome true crime and detective magazines that were popular with male readers in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

It’s a fact-based story about a psycho janitor named Ludwig Lee. Back in 1927, Lee murdered and dismembered two women in New York.

The story was penned by Frank Mullady, a former New York cop who became a magazine writer and book author. The title, “54 Cans of Lye,” refers to a telltale clue that led to the indictment and execution of Lee.

One of the photographs used in this piece shows a police detective holding up the severed arm of one of Lee’s victims.

It’s a shocking photo that wouldn’t be shown by any mainstream magazine then or now.

In fact, I won’t even show that one here. But if you’re curious to see how grisly some of the true crime photos were in vintage men’s adventure magazines, you can download a digital copy of the February 1954 of MAN’S MAGAZINE at the link below.

In the next post, I’ll discuss some of the other stories from this legendary issue.

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Comments? Corrections? Post them in the Men’s Adventure Magazines Facebook Group.

NOW AVAILABLE AS A DIGITAL DOWNLOAD The February 1954 issue of MAN’S, with the painting and photo covers and all interior pages, in high-resolution, PDF format, for only $2.99. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

MAN MAGAZINE, February 1954 – the legendary “painting vs. photo” market test...

Cool cover paintings are one of the defining characteristics of the men’s adventure magazines that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s — and a primary reason why they are popular collectors’ items today.

Of course, painted covers were common on all types of magazines prior to 1950. But during the Fifties most switched to using photos on their covers.

There are several reasons why men’s adventure magazines held out against that trend until the late Sixties.

For one thing, like the vintage science fiction pulp magazines pulp magazines of the same era, which are also known for their great painted covers, men’s pulp mags featured wild fiction stories and equally over-the-top “true” stories that were best illustrated (or could only be illustrated) with imaginative artwork.

Trying to create photos of scenes in many of those stories would be impossible or end up looking totally lame compared to the images talented pulp artists could create.

In addition, despite how politically incorrect some men’s adventure cover paintings seem now (think scantily-clad damsels being shredded by vicious killer creatures or bound and tortured by non-white natives or demented Nazis) they were generally of less concern to official and self-appointed censors of the Fifties and Sixties than (gasp!) nude photos on or in men’s magazines.

The Taschen book MEN’S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES notes:

“Illustrations had always had more leeway than photographs, because classical painters and sculptors had depicted nudes; thus, a painting of a bound woman in panties being whipped by a Nazi on the cover of REAL MEN was deemed less offensive than a nude centerfold.”

That ironic observation comes from the first chapter, an excellent historical overview of the genre aptly titled “Blood, Sweat, and Tits.”

In that chapter there’s also a mention of an interesting market test that happened in 1954.

The test revealed one other simple reason why the classic men’s adventure magazines used painted covers: most of the men who bought men’s pulp mags preferred them.

As explained in the Taschen book:

“IMPACT and some other magazines ran occasional photo covers, but an experiment by STAG competitor MAN’S MAGAZINE in 1954 put an end to that. It produced its February issue with two covers: one a painting of an explorer confronting a tribe of Australian bushmen, the other a pinup photo of Eve Meyer (pneumatic bride of photographer and filmmaker Russ Meyer). Strangely enough, the explorer outsold the lovely Eve, and most he-man magazine publishers stuck to cover paintings for nearly two decades.”

Until recently, I only owned the Eve Meyer version of the February 1954 issue of MAN’S.

But a while ago, during my visit with the renowned men’s pulp art collector Rich Oberg at his home in Tennessee, Rich graciously gave me a copy of the painted cover version. (I returned the favor by giving Rich a MensPulpMags.com t-shirt that features one of the awesome John Duillo cover paintings he owns.)

MAN’S MAGAZINE was one of the earliest and longest-lasting men’s adventure magazines. It was first published in October 1952 and ran until October 1976 (though in its final years it was more a soft-core porn mag than an adventure mag).

Initially MAN’S was published bimonthly in an oversize 10" x 13.25" format. All of the first eight issues published in 1952 and 1953 had painted covers. 

MAN’S was reasonably successful during its first year-and-a-half. But by 1954 the editors wanted to find out if showing “cheesecake” photos of female models and actresses on the cover might attract more readers.

I suspect that question arose due to the recent popularity of pin-up magazines like MODERN MAN, which also began publication in 1952, and the huge splash made by the premiere issue of PLAYBOY in December of 1953.

On the contents page of MAN’S February 1954 issue, the editors explained the painting vs. photo market test this way:

“WHAT KIND of a cover does a man like to see on Man’s Magazine — a stirring adventure scene painted in vivid colors or a true-to-life photograph of a bewitching woman? That’s a question that’s been giving us grey hair for a year, and now we’re putting the decision up to you. In order to determine your preference, we’re publishing this February 1954 issue with not one but two covers! Half the press run bears an exciting painting in full color illustrating the story Naked Devils and Black Magic, which starts on page 10. The other half of this issue has a terrific Kodachrome cover of luscious Eve Meyer of San Francisco (see photo left). She’s the second in our series on America's Unpublicized Beauties, and you’ll find Frisco's Marilyn Monroe in three fetching dimensions on page 13. You'll find photographs of both covers above the contents on the right. Which cover do you like best? How about dropping us a line (a postcard is fine!) casting your vote for your favorite and telling us the type of cover you’d like to see on future issues of Man’s Magazine.”

It took a while for the results to become clear to the editors. They appear to have mistakenly assumed that the photo version would sell better and be more popular with MAN’S readers, since the April and June 1954 issues of MAN’S had a photo of a shapely woman on the cover.

But by the summer of 1954, feedback from readers convinced the MAN’S editors to go back to cover paintings.

The August 1954 features a terrific action painting of a man in a special firefighting suit engulfed in flames, as he combats a raging oil well fire. From then until 1969, MAN’S featured paintings on its covers.

By the late 1960s, PLAYBOY-style magazines and harder-core porn mags were dominating the men’s magazine market. At that point, MAN’S and most other men’s adventure magazines that were still being published stopped using cover paintings and switched to sexy photo covers and increasingly-explicit inside photo spreads to try to stay in business.

However, this simply turned them into copycat porn mags and delayed their demise for a few more years. By the mid-Seventies, the men’s adventure magazine genre had essentially disappeared.

In the next post, I’ll give you a closer look at the stories inside the legendary February 1954 issue of MAN’S MAGAZINE.

By the way, I recently added a complete, high resolution PDF copy of that issue in my Payloadz store. You can download it for $2.99. Your purchase will give you a virtual copy of a men’s adventure magazine issue that is very hard to find in print — and it will also help keep this blog alive.

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Comments? Corrections? Post them in the Men’s Adventure Magazines Facebook Group.

NOW AVAILABLE AS A DIGITAL DOWNLOAD The February 1954 issue of MAN’S MAGAZINE, with both the painting and photo covers and all interior pages, in high-resolution, searchable PDF format, for only $2.99. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD