Steven MikulanWay back in the 1950s, when newspapers would run the names and home addresses of both crime victims and the jurors who'd passed judgment on the accused perpetrators, the Los Angeles Herald had reporters covering a divorce court beat.
Mostly this was a way to get in photographs of pinup-grade girls while
passing the effort off as socially redeeming news coverage.
The
subjects
were almost always “ordinary” women who happened to be young and
attractive, although occasionally a minor actress would show up.
All photos from the L.A. Examiner/USC Digital Collection
At
the time divorce was still a near social taboo and often synonymous
with infidelity, so these photographs might have served to stoke male
readers' purient interests or to set matronly tongues wagging. The obvious posing of the young divorcees
shows that they were in on the gag and probably enjoyed the fleeting
publicity.
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