Sleaze Merchants

Once a decision is made to be tasteful and risk-free,
sleaze goes right out the window.

— Cintra Wilson

Cover by Al Rossi

My first exposure to sleaze—I was age eight—was the paperback tower at the front of our corner drug store.

 

It was six or seven feet tall—dwarfing me—and pentagonal and would rotate unsteadily on a hidden axle when you gave it a whirl. 

Top heavy from its burden of potboilers, the tower always threatened to fall on me when I spun it. At the very first squeak, my inattentive mother would glance up from her shopping and siss at me, "Robert, leave that alone."

The book tower's presence in the drug store suggested to my eight-year-old mind that its weird offerings must somehow relate to grownups' healthcare (although I would soon discover a comparable rack of sulfurous paperbacks in the confectioner's store down the street—where absolutely nothing healthy was sold).

Although I had no clue at the time, three of the artists who created the covers for many of the books on display were among the finest illustrators of the day, rivals of the famous Norman Rockwell.

They were Norman Rockwell's lurid twins.

Al Rossi was a prolific magazine illustrator and a masterful merchant of paperback sleaze. He was the original cover artist for Junkie, a 1953 novel by beat writer William Burroughs (published under the pen name William Lee). The Bronx-born Rossi was a prominent supplier to Balcourt, a New York-based stock house that provided cover art to paperback publishers in the 1950s and '60s. A professional jazz musician until World War II, when he served with the Army in Europe, Rossi was compelled after the war to try his hand at illustration to make ends meet, attending Pratt and the Arts Student League to learn the craft. Before associating with Balcourt, he worked for several publishers of pulp magazines, the forerunners to paperback books. Rossi liked to use his male neighbors and their wives as his models.

Cover by Ben Stahl

Ben Stahl was exposed to fine art in the seventh grade, thanks to a scholarship he received to attend Saturday morning lectures at the Chicago Art Institute. After high school, he landed a job at a commercial art studio in Chicago that provided illustrations almost exclusively to The Saturday Evening Post. His success as a studio artist prompted Stahl to move to New York and go freelance. There, he began illustrating paperback book covers, as well as continuing to supply artwork to The Post (he illustrated more than 750 stories for the magazine during his career). Stahl soon earned a reputation as a serious fine artist and, along with Norman Rockwell and Connecticut illustrator Albert Dorne, co-founded the Famous Artists School, a mail-order course whose graduates include Pat Boone, Tony Curtis and Charlton Heston. In 1965, as his career was reaching its zenith, Stahl painted 15 life-size pictures of the stations of the cross and opened his own museum in Sarasota, Florida, to house them. But the paintings were stolen four years later and never recovered. Stahl was left nearly penniless due to the theft.

Cover by Paul Rader

Paul Rader, at age 16, was one of the youngest artists ever to have an art museum exhibit his paintings. His early mastery of portrait painting earned him awards throughout the '20s and '30s and brought him commissions to paint wealthy judges, lawyers, and businessmen in his hometown of Detroit. Rader switched to illustrating pulp magazines after World War II, finding the work more lucrative, and moved to New York, where he became another leading supplier to Balfour. When painting paperback book covers, Rader liked using professional models and actors, supplied to him by talent agencies. One of his favorite male models, Guy Williams, went on in the mid-1960s to play Dr. John Robinson in the TV show Lost in Space. 

Whether Rossi, Stahl and Rader set the floor of our society's sleaze index, I don't know; but I do know their art depicted truths—truths most Americans, Puritans at heart, wished to deny in the 1950s.

The risks they took in defying mores and good taste and giving free reign to sleaze may not have contributed to the world's trove of art, but these three artists helped millions of Americans remain literate members of the book-buying public, which is a lot more than you can say about today's media consumers.

Above: Cover illustration for The Bump and Grind Murders by Al Rossi. Cover illustration for The Creepers also by Al Rossi.