Detective Pulp Magazine Covers from the other side

	Girl on those Pulp Magazines hates the life she leads New York (UP) — Give her the plain and simple life, Mary Rorrer cried today. No passion, she begged. No sex. "Something dull.” she pleaded. "Like selling ribbons in a department store. A small-town department store." Miss Rorrer is a model for illustrators of those racy, blood- chilling, pulp detective magazines. "Every month,” she moaned, “you can find me on the newsstands. But am I beautiful? Not me! My hair is askew. My face distorted. Usually, I’m backed against a wall, screaming. And my clothes — they’re spoiled and rumpled and ripped in several places — in short. I'm a mess!” "Then, she said, “there’s always a man.” He stands menacingly before her, gun or knife, in hand. “He has something on his mind,” she said. “If my pose is provocative enough the man on the street will be tempted to plunk down a quarter and turn to page 10 to see what it is. That's art." Miss Rorrer, a 23-year-old blonde who earns $25 an hour, said she puts everything into her work but her heart. "What's fame?” she wailed. "What's fortune? I can’t sleep nights, thinking of all those horror scenes I pose for. Nothing but homicide and suicide and attacks on innocent girls.” Her job not only gave her nightmares, she said, but it interfered with her romances. “At first, my boy friends like the idea of my being a model.” she said, “but after they see those illustrations — oh, brother.'“ She said the illustrators always chose her as the siren of the piece because they found her “sexy and sultry.” “I can't help that, can I?” she sniffed. ‘'Nevertheless, I lose more men that way. They always get the wrong idea about me.” Miss Rorrer said she came to New York two years ago, bent on an operatic career. "The critics didn’t think much of my voice,” she said “but the illustrators saw something else in me. And, inasmuch as I was sending a kid brother and sister through school and had to eat, I decided to give it a whirl." But the illustrators will soon have to get along without her, she said. She planned to get into another line of modeling — “shoes, or gloves, something sexless” — or return to her home, Hickory, N. C. “Honestly,” she wept, “I can’t stand it. If I’m murdered in my bed just once more, why — I’ll simply DIE!” [This article originally appeared in the Monday, 8 December, 1949 issue of the North Tonawanda Evening News.]