Well that's because they shut his girlie magazine down.
CBA: What happened with After Hours?
Jim: Again, I learned a lot. I learned the hard way about Teamsters, truckers, loading docks, slowdowns at printing plants, and bankers who welsh on you.
But with the fourth issue, something good happened: A guy named Forrey Ackerman came into my life. Forrey was a Hollywood literary agent. Forrey, who was reading every men's magazine in existence as part of his agency work, saw a new one called After Hours and he contacted me through the mail. He wrote that he had some stories to offer me for my magazine. I liked what he submitted and ran it. We were featuring "Girls of Amsterdam," "Girls of Las Vegas," "Girls of Singapore," etc., and he came up with the idea, "Girls from Science-Fiction Movies." He sent 8"x10" stills with it and wrote it himself. I saw his writing and thought it had an interesting, offbeat style. The more I read it, the better it became because nobody can write fantasy movie features like Forrey Ackerman. Nobody. He is the best specialty writer on the face of the Earth, bar none—a writer who is so head and shoulders above all other writers for our genre, that nobody will compare with him 100 years from now.
However, after four issues, After Hours folded.
CBA: Weren't you prosecuted for the magazine?
Jim: [laughs] Oh, you found out about that?
CBA: Was Philadelphia a puritanical city?
Jim: Philadelphia wasn't puritanical; it was political. At the time, we had a District Attorney who was running for office. The story goes that he had heard about another District Attorney (also running for office) who was behind in the polls and had no chance of winning, but went out and made an arrest of a guy who was publishing a Playboy imitation. The local newspapers came out with a big headline: "Pornographer Arrested by Crusading D.A.!" And he won that election with the help of all that publicity. Our man in Philadelphia decided to do the same thing. "How can I get my name in the papers for a full month, every day? I'm going to arrest and indict all the publishers from Playboy on down—anything that was distributed in Philadelphia." Hefner was indicted and guess who the D.A. really zeroed in on because he didn't have to go out of state to extradite? There was only one guy publishing a Playboy imitation in Philadelphia. Guess who that was? "We're going to rid the city of pornography! We'll start by arresting the publisher of After Hours."
Gloria: Wasn't there one woman who was bare-breasted in that issue?
Jim: I asked the police, "On what basis am I under arrest?" One of the cops pointed to Bettie Page, bare-breasted in the centerfold. I said, "But that's not obscene! The Venus de Milo is bare-breasted and she's on display in an art museum!" He said, "I know obscenity when I see it." And I was indicted for pornography. The next morning the Philadelphia Inquirer, in giant headline type, announced the arrest of the editor/publisher of After Hours magazine. My name was up there.
CBA: It said "pornographer"?
Jim: "Porn Merchant Arrested with Million-Dollar Business." At the time I think I had $45 in our bank account—but it did exactly what the D.A. wanted it to do: It got him headlines in the paper for two weeks. Everyone was indicted! Even Reader's Digest because they had printed an article on sex education, or some such. He became known as the crusading D.A. who is going to rid the newsstands of this filth and slime which is corrupting our children! Shades of Dr. Wertham.
The D.A. knew it was all a sham but he didn't care. He got his headlines. My father came to me and said, "I'm going with you to City Hall when they book you. I'm going to stand right next to you. Don't worry." I wasn't scared as much as I was ashamed. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I was afraid people would think that I was publishing the worst X-rated stuff in the world, when all I had shown was Bettie Page with bare breasts—and she wasn't even on the cover; it was just the centerfold; and the stories had no pornography in them—they were mildly tittilating (I should use a different word here). The official police charge was, "bare-breasted women depicted in lascivious fashion."
While I was being booked, the press photographers had a field day. Flashbulbs were going off everywhere.
CBA: Wow. The humiliation...!
Jim: Yes. I was ashamed for my family. I was ashamed the cops would come to the house and search it. I knew what cops could do.
News about our crusading District Attorney appeared in the paper and stayed there long enough for him to be re-elected. What hurt more than anything else was that people who I thought were my friends wouldn't take my calls. "We don't want anything to do with him. Porn merchant. Yuk. I don't want to be seen talking to this guy." It hurt.
A month or so later I appeared in front of a judge on the first day of the proceedings. The judge looks at the magazines (there must have been 25 different ones on the table). All the lawyers were there with their clients. "What's this?" the judge asks. "This is the pornography." The judge sees Bettie Page with the bare breasts and said, "Case dismissed!" But it was too late; the D.A. had already won the election. Every single case was thrown out; it was all over. It appeared in the newspaper the next day on the bottom of page 27 and nobody saw it—but I learned about the power of the press and the power of the police state and the power of unscrupulous men.
Gloria: And politics.
Jim: And politics. It was one of the low points of my life. I was dead broke, I had no job, I had no magazine. I didn't want to go back to Caloric. I was only 27 years old. The kids I had grown up with were all out of medical school and starting to practice; most were established, married, and had children—they were living a normal, healthy life and there I was, 27 and no money and no job, labeled a pornographer. A failure.
CBA: When did you see the French magazine, Cinema 57?
Jim: Late in 1957 I arranged to meet Forrey in New York City. We had spoken on the phone many times, but had never met. At that first meeting, we looked at each other and it was instant good chemistry. He showed me a French magazine, Cinema 57, and this issue had been devoted to horror films. I looked through the magazine and it brought me immediately back to my Saturday afternoons; here was something I loved—the Frankenstein monster, director James Whale, Karloff, Lugosi, Lon Chaney. (They can make any bloody horror movie they want in Technicolor with all that sophisticated computer imaging, but nothing touches those great b-&-w horror movies made in the '30s.) As I'm looking at these pictures, I'm thinking, "My God! I'm at the movies, it's Saturday afternoon, and my mother's coming to get me at 5 p.m. to drag me out!
CBA: [laughs] "Jimmy!"
Jim: Right! So there I was, in a small hotel room in New York, with a man who looks like Vincent Price's twin brother, studying movie stills of old monster and horror movies.
Let's interrupt this part to bring you some digression: Something was taking place on late-night television. I had been watching it for months. Universal Pictures had collected all their classic horror films, packaged them for TV syndication, and was selling this "Shock Theatre" package to TV stations throughout this great land of ours. These old movies (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolfman, etc.) were being shown usually late on Friday nights. Each TV station had its own "ghoul-like" host or hostess who generally spoofed the film being shown and provided some live, low-budget comedy relief. Kids were watching these shows, not adults; and these kids were rooting for the monster—not for the townspeople with the pitchforks and crude torches. A switch had taken place. When these films had been shown in movie theaters during the '30s and '40s, the monster was the bad guy. Now it was reversed. These 10-year-old kids saw the monster on their TV sets and embraced him as the protagonist. The townspeople chasing the monster had become the antagonist (authority figure). The kids were cheering for the monster—the anti-hero—to win. This was something different; something new. A magazine version of the TV show, carefully crafted to spoof the monsters and yet treat them as "heroes" made sense to me. The adults wouldn't buy it, but the kids—those millions of Baby Boomers—would. A few weeks later I was in Forrey Ackerman's living room in California, choosing the photos and article content for a one-shot magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland.
It was a tongue-in-cheek pictorial history of past and present horror-monster movies, printed in b-&-w on newsprint. The cover was in color—showing me wearing a Frankenstein monster mask. We went on sale in February during a snowstorm that covered the Eastern seaboard. The magazine sold out within days—and the rest, as they say, is publishing history.
They will send you an email that it has been shipped, to find the tracking you need to go to completed orders, then click status. There should be a link that says Shipped, it will go to the tracking.
