In January 2009, an agreement was reached between Bert Stern, the photographer who lensed Marilyn Monroe’s last photo shoot (six weeks before her death in 1962), and three photographers who claimed to have found lost transparencies from the shoot in the trash.
According to news reports, Bert Stern shot legendary images of Monroe in L.A. in 1962, which were intended for Vogue magazine. Apparently Stern “loaned” images from the shoot to “the now defunct Eros magazine.” Such a brief description minimizes Eros’ role in the erotic pantheon. Eros’ publisher, Ralph Ginzburg, is a hero of the First Amendment and a pioneer (perhaps even martyr) of erotic publishing in the 1960s—without whom the “golden age” of softcore and hardcore porn in the 1970s would not have been possible.
Ginzburg decided in 1962 that a “really good magazine about love and sex” was needed in America, in part to replace what he perceived as sleazy, trashy pulp paperbacks and dime magazines that sensationalized sex, then common in the U.S. He founded Eros magazine in 1962 as a quarterly journal devoted to the mysteries and joys of sex. The first of only four issues consisted of a hardback, oversized book with a cover featuring a naughty playing card on a field of ochre. It was published on Valentine’s Day, 1962.
Eros immediately caused apoplexy in popular culture, partially because it was advertised and distributed via mail order and thus could potentially fall into the hands of minors. Nonetheless, it was apparently quite popular: in the second issue (Summer 1962), Ginzburg reprinted numerous letters sent to him by alternately appreciative/outraged subscribers.
Target of the Justice Department
The third issue (Fall 1962) featured the outtakes from Stern’s photo session with Monroe on the cover and as the centerfold. The iconic, semi-nude shots—recently replicated by New York Magazine and Lindsay Lohan in 2007—caught the attention of then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, brother of then-president John F. Kennedy, who was rumored to have had an affair with Monroe. Discomfort ensued, but seemingly not enough to persuade Ginzburg to cease publishing Eros. In fact, he probably relished he notoriety.
Despite the threat of federal prosecution—and Kennedy ultimately followed up with his threat—Ginzburg published his fourth issue of Eros in Winter 1962. This issue contained a photo essay by literary critic Ralph Hattersley, Jr., depicting a black man and white woman cavorting chastely in a nudist photo spread.
The interracial photo essay was the last straw as far as the Department of Justice was concerned. In Ginzburg v. United States in 1966, the Supreme Court found Ginzburg guilty of violating the Comstock Law, an 1873 statute that forbid the mailing of erotic material. Ginzburg appealed and lost. In February 1972, almost 10 years to the day since his first issue of Eros was released, Ginzburg began serving a five-year sentence in a federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
Citizen Ginzburg
Ginzburg was released after serving eighth months and paying a hefty fine, and he was not at all cowed by his experience as a prisoner. He read a prepared statement to the media upon his release. “My work has been defiled. My publications have been suppressed. My family has been tormented…for what? What is the hideous crime for which I have been so mercilessly flogged and declared an enemy of the people?” he asked. “In this supposedly civilized, professedly free society, [I] was manacled and muzzled for trying to tell the truth about sex.”
