'What in Hell's Happening to Marriage?'

 

This is the last issue of Whisper, from June 1973.  The publication dated all the way back to 1946, when it was published in a pulp style format, complete with cover paintings and offering the 'inside story' on Hollywood, celebrities and then current news stories, (the more salacious, the better).  Not so much a 'scandal rag' like Confidential and its clones, but more of a gossip paper.  In late 1953 it switched to a tabloid format, with photo covers, much in the style of the scandal mags but, as ever, offering a milder form of gossip and 'inside stories'.  By the seventies the style had become somewhat more lurid, but the content, by and large, stayed much the same.  The resulting publication somewhat resembled a toned down version of a men's magazine, minus the lurid war and sex stories.

This final issue is firmly fixated on movie celebrities, flaunting the names of Doris Day, Micheal Caine, Charles Bronson and Peter Sellers on the cover.  Of these, only the Doris Day story looks to be styled as some kind of sensational expose: 'The Black Men in Doris Day's Life'.  It's interesting that, as late as 1973, it is clearly playing on the idea of miscegenation, (as the racists would call it), as something still scandalous and outrageous enough to sell copies.  A couple of the non-celebrity headlines look like men's magazine cast offs: 'What in Hell's Happening to Marriage', hinting at all manner of tales of infidelity, swinging, threesomes, wife-swapping and the like, and 'The Vitamin E Rip Off', which sounds like the sort of bogus health story the men's magazines were fond of.  As for Charles Bronson's declaration that 'I'd Never Play a Nude Role', well, I think that we should all be thankful for that.