Here it is! The very first issue of After Dark magazine. Featured on the cover is a photo of Pzazz! '68, the Donn Arden show at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. The photo by Zoran Veljkovic shows dance star Shirley Kirkes.
You can tell by this first issue that the publishers and editors were still trying to get their format down and it would be a few issues before they reached their stride, but this first issue did have some high points. In addition to the feature on Las Vegas, they also spotlighted the work of Spencer Tracy who passed away the year before and was awarded the Oscar for Best Actor posthumously a couple of months before this issue was released for his role in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
His impressive body of work included:
Man's Castle with Marjorie Rambeau and Loretta Young;
Captains Courageous with Lionel Barrymore and Freddie Bartholomew;
Boy's Town with Bobs Watson;
Northwest Passage;
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo;
Cass Timberlane with Lana Turner;
State of the Union with Angela Lansbury and Adolphe Menjou;
Adam's Rib with Judy Holiday, Katharine Hepburn and Eve March;
Father's Little Dividend;
Pat and Mike with Katharine Hepburn;
Bad Day at Black Rock with Ernest Borgnine;
The Desk Set with Katharine Hepburn;
The Old Man and the Sea;
Inherit the Wind with Frederic March;
The Last Hurrah with Edward Brophy, Pat O'Brien, James Gleason and Ricardo Cortez;
and Judgment at Nuremburg.
This issue did have a small (and I mean small) fashion layout. Usually, at least one of the photos would be full page, but the whole fashion layout fit on one page with very small photos:
Artists Yayoi Kusama and Robert Indiana were also spotlighted with their work.
I had never heard of the musical version of Othello called Catch My Soul, until I was looking at the work done by Susan Tyrrell. The cast album featured her singing "Tickle His Fancy", but I've never seen photos from it until this issue arrived in my mailbox.
More on this issue later.
