Writing for Bleeding Cool, Mark Siefert takes a closer look at one of Marilyn’s more unusual magazine covers from January 1953, which sold for $1,320 this weekend as part of a vintage romance comics sale at Heritage Auctions.
While the cover shows Marilyn in a clinch with actor Richard Widmark, the film they made together was not a love story but a Noir thriller.
And in the same month that Sweethearts hit newsstands Marilyn also graced another title from the same publisher. ‘Wolves I Have Known,’ her op-ed on sexual harassment in the movie business, has been described as a precursor to the #MeToo era.
“1952 was a year that helped make Marilyn Monroe an icon. Early that year, she began a romance with New York Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio. In March, with her studio film career taking off, photos taken of her for a nude calendar in 1949 became public knowledge, and she leaned into the scandal by admitting to it and saying she had simply needed the money at the time. The resultant publicity sent her career into overdrive, and she was featured on the cover of Life Magazine while three of her films were rushed to release to take advantage of the furore. One of these films was Don’t Bother to Knock, co-starring Richard Widmark … It’s a solid performance by Monroe, and a photo that seems to be a publicity shot from the film of her and Widmark appears on the cover of Fawcett’s romance comic book Sweethearts #119 later that year.
Sweathearts was the first monthly romance comic book on American newsstands, released about a year after Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s genre-defining Young Romance, which was initially a bi-monthly. The title, touted as the industry’s best-selling romance comic by 1949, featured photo covers throughout its run at Fawcett Publications. While these photo covers typically featured uncredited models and photographers in what was essentially the stock photography of the era, Fawcett seemed to be trying something different by the end of the title’s run. In addition to the Don’t Bother to Knock promotion on Sweethearts #119, issue #121 features a photo of Elizabeth Taylor and Fernando Lamas from the 1953 film The Girl Who Had Everything.
Fawcett had established an ongoing presence among the film media by that time …. In 1952, Motion Picture Magazine was being rebranded as Motion Picture and Television Magazine with wide cross-promotion in Fawcett’s comic book line late that year. Unsurprisingly, Motion Picture and Television Magazine featured a Marilyn Monroe cover story at the same time that Sweethearts #119 hit the newsstands.
Unfortunately, the stories of Sweethearts #119 have nothing to do with the plot of Don’t Bother to Knock, and the contents of the final few issues of the title, which included a Hollywood news feature, suggest that the publisher may have already known that its comic book party was over and was trying to entice those readers into trying out the rest of its magazine line. As for Monroe, her star power had risen considerably since her only prior comic book appearance on the cover of St. John’s Teen-Age Diary Secrets #6 in 1949 with a photo by Bruno Bernard, and of course she’s now a legend — which has made Sweethearts #119 the most sought-after issue of that run.”
The Marilyn Report 