Pageant Magazine

Articles from Pageant Magazine

Humphrey Bogart and his Feud with the Hollywood Press
(Pageant Magazine, 1956)

There was a time, Humphrey Bogart maintains, when he saw all interviewers and tried to answer all questions put to him…

But I can’t take it anymore, I’ve had to cut the fan magazines off my list entirely. Just the sheer smell of them drives me crazy. They smell of milk. The interviewers themselves treat you like a two-year-old child with their will-Debbie-marry-Eddie and can-Lance-Fuller-live-without-a-wife kind of idiocy. You know the whole sorry groove of the thing.


You can read about David Niven HERE

Levittown: The Birth of the Modern Suburb
(Pageant Magazine, 1952)

When the Second World War ended in 1945 the Europeans began shoveling themselves out of the rubble while simultaneously erecting their respective nanny-states. By contrast, the Americans set out on a shopping-spree that has yet to be matched in history. Never before had so many people been able to purchase so many affordable consumer products, and never before had there ever been such a variety; aided by the G.I. Bill, housing was a big part of this binge – and binge they did! The apple of their collective eyes involved a style of prefabricated housing that was called Ranch House, Cape Cod and Early American. Millions of them were built all across the country – and the financial model for these real estate developers came from a Long Island, New York man named William J. Levitt.


Attached is an article titled 15 Minutes with Levitt of Levittown.

The Last Photographs of Hitler
(Pageant Magazine, 1952)

In July of 1945 LIFE MAGAZINE photographer William Vandivert (1912 – 1989) was on assignment in Berlin documenting the earliest days of the Allied occupation of that city. He snapped pictures of Hitler’s bunker, starving Berliners and jubilant Cossacks; his images of the vanquished capital will live forever more – but in this article that he penned for the editors of PAGEANT, he remembered how he came upon a trove of some of the most famous pictures of W.W. II.

The Largest Abortion Mill
(Pageant Magazine, 1973)

On July 1, 1970, the New York State legislature ruled that all females, regardless of marital status, age or residency, might have an abortion within the state provided she was no more than 24 weeks pregnant. Less than a year later the largest industrial-strength abortion plant in the world opened up in New York City.

Tony Randall: Movie Star
(Pageant Magazine,1964)

In this early Sixties article, celebrity epistolarianne Cyndi Adams recalled her first two encounters with the man who would be Felix Unger:


‘I am definitely neurotic and psychotic,’ cheerily announced Tony Randall (1920 – 2004) the first time we met – ‘he’s an actor-comedian of remarkable skills…he unconsciously reflects, in the way he plays his rolls, so much of the neurotic age we live in…’.


The New York Times would pursue this point to a further degree in their 2004 obituary of the actor:

That’s the force Tony Randall embodied: he represented, in his neurotic grandeur, our national will to unhappiness. Or if not our will, at least our right, which in the 50’s we were only beginning to realize we could exercise.

W.W. I and American Women
(Pageant Magazine, 1951)

Here is a segment from a longer article published in 1951 by an anonymous American woman who wished to be known to her readers only as a women who had grown up with the Century (born in 1900). In this column she insisted that it was the First World War that served as the proving ground where American women showed that they were just as capable as their brothers – and thus deserving of a voice in government.

Warm Recollections of Marilyn
(Pageant Magazine, 1971)

Nine years after Marilyn Monroe’s death, Hollywood reporter James Henaghan remembered his friendship with the star and their warm, unguarded moments together:

I guess I had known it all the time. I knew that I belonged to the public and to the world. The public was the only family, the only Prince Charming, and the only home I ever had dreamed about.

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