Thy Neighbor's Wife by Gay Talese Page A

such firms in other cities, its warehouse was located on a remote side street and had bricked-up windows so that snoopers on the sidewalk could not see what was stored within. An arriving driver with a truckload of new magazines from the printing plant, before gaining entrance to the warehouse, had to first ring a buzzer at the side door and identify himself through the intercom; then the big sliding door was elevated, the truck entered the warehouse, and, after the door had been lowered and locked shut, the shipping clerks helped the driver unload the merchandise along the interior docking area. The cartons of magazines were counted and checked against the invoice. Some of these cartons had been sent from such distant points as Los Angeles and New York, being transported by carriers who traveled the secondary routes through America, dropping off cartons along the way in places like Denver and Des Moines, Cleveland and Columbus. After the big truck had left the Chicago warehouse, smaller panel trucks owned by Capitol would deliver within the city prearranged numbers of magazines to specific news dealers, some of whom would sell the magazines under the counter or in plain brown wrappers.
    Although Capitol’s merchandise was transported as cautiously as was bootleg whiskey in an earlier era, and was perhaps driven by some of the same drivers, not all of the cartons handled in the Capitol warehouse contained sexual publications. Capitol also distributed a few academic and literary magazines, such as The Partisan Review , that did not sell well enough in Chicago to interest the primary distributor. Also in the Capitol warehouse were certain political publications that were offensive to Chicago’s municipal and religious leaders, such as the Communist Daily Worker . And Capitol handled all the black publications— Ebony magazine, The Negro Digest, Tan , as well as the newspaper the Chicago Daily Defender .
    The Capitol News Agency was founded in the mid-1930s by a Chicago horseplayer named Henry Steinborn, who in the beginning circulated mostly tip sheets, but he also included in his truck a few magazines then considered indecorous or obscene— Sunshine & Health, The Police Gazette, The Hobo News , film fanmagazines featuring “starlets” in swimsuits, and certain women’s confessional magazines. Although no erotic photographs appeared in the confessional magazines, many priests in Chicago and around the country believed that their sin-centered content and private disclosures aroused lustful thoughts, and parishioners were urged to avoid reading these magazines. (Interestingly, the historic case of 1868 in England that first defined obscenity—known among lawyers as the Hicklin decision—evolved out of the prosecution of a pamphlet describing how priests were often so sexually aroused while hearing women’s confessions that they sometimes masturbated and even copulated with their repentant subjects in the confessional.)
    With the popularity of the girlie magazines during World War II, Capitol’s business, along with that of other secondaries around the country, greatly increased. Capitol circulated within Chicago the Robert Harrison publications ( Wink, Flirt, Whisper, Eyefull ) and also those of another New York publisher named Adrian Lopez ( Cutie, Giggles, Sir, Hit ). After the war, when paper rationing was lifted, there were newer magazines like Night and Day, Gala , and Focus , all of which featured a tall, blond California bathing beauty named Irish McCalla and an attractive somewhat devilish, dominant high-heeled brunet from Florida named Bettie Page. These two women, more than any other photo models, were the masturbatory mistresses for many thousands of men during the postwar years, and they remained popular through the 1950s as Diane Webber emerged, increasingly nude, in Sunshine & Health and the Von Rosen magazines.
    As Von Rosen’s publications became more daring, revealing everything but pubic hair, Henry