Word: smuts
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...heels of a California state senate investigation aimed at keeping Hollywood smut out of the scandal magazines (TIME, March 11), a federal grand jury in Chicago last week struck at the nation's best-selling scandal magazine for putting smut in the mail. In a six-count indictment, New York-based Confidential and its Mount Morris (Ill.) distributing agency, the Kable Printing Co., were charged with mailing "nonmailable matter . . . which gives . . . information on how and by what means abortion may be produced." What prompted the indictment was an article in the March 1956 issue of Confidential headed: "The Pill...
...Smut. The most significant tattle of the week came, however, straight out of journalism's dirty glass house. In Los Angeles, a parade of witnesses told a state senate investigating committee how Confidential magazine and its competitors (TIME, July 11, 1955) perform the keyhole-peeping routine that makes a heap of money out of homebreaking...
...libel and distribution of lewd material. There was good reason to doubt that the klieg-lit legislators would effectively police bedroom journalism, or indeed should. In fact, by emphasizing the zeal with which the leer-and-smear brigade sifts its dirt, the senate hearings lent some support to the smut-peddlers' argument that scurrility can be justified if it is accurate. Nevertheless, few responsible editors could agree with Publisher Harrison that "the truth never smears anybody." The issue that was largely ignored last week is whether truth a la Confidential is defensible in terms of the instincts it gratifies...
...necessary on newsstands? Most U.S. citizens are content to leave the problem to the courts. But many an outraged parent is not inclined to wait for the slow-grinding mills of the law to protect his children from cheap and easy smut. The result may be a well-intentioned pressure group that tries to boycott and bully all available reading matter down to a soap-opera level. Writing in the current issue of Harper's, Editor John Fischer thinks he has found just that in what he calls "a little band of Catholics . . . conducting a shocking attack...
Miller's fame rests on Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, jubilantly riotous narratives whose sometimes hilarious smut made them contraband barracks-bag souvenirs of France for countless G.I.s. Tropic of Cancer went off like a time bomb in the literary world of 1934. A generation wearied of polite fiction was offered great gobs of something called Life. Just as history seemed to be jostling Europe to a new war, the author of Tropic offered to abolish history. The book displayed life as a perpetual riot of gabble and rut in which Narrator Miller kept a bouncer...