Do a search for “pulp magazine” in a newspaper archive database and you never know what might turn up.
I was doing just that on Tuesday. Though I was researching another pulp angle, I stumbled across an curious item in a syndicated newspaper column on Hollywood. It was about actor John Payne.
Payne appeared in quite a number of movies from the 1930s through the ’60s (such as the noir classic “Kansas City Confidential,” “Springtime in the Rockies,” “To the Shores of Tripoli” and, most notably, “Miracle on 34th Street”) and a number of anthology series on TV.
In early February 1941, Hollywood gossip columnist Jimmy Fidler makes this throw-away comment:
JOHN PAYNE, JEKYLL-AND-HYDE. Mr. Payne, whose austerity is a Hollywood tradition, finds an outlet for pent-up romanticism by writing pulp magazine stories under the by-line, “Julio Perrona,” about steaming jungles, swarthy villains and lush females.
A bit more searching didn’t turn up any other reference to a pulp writer by the name of “Julio Perrona.” But that doesn’t mean he never had anything published. Though many pulp magazines have been indexed, there are still some (particularly romance pulps) that haven’t.
The Internet Movie Database credits Payne with writing two stories and one script for the TV series “The Restless Gun” in 1957 and 58. It also shows that he wrote or co-wrote the movies “Kansas City Confidential,” “99 River Street” and “Hell’s Island,” though he didn’t get screen credit.
So, I wonder if Fidler’s comment was just publicity fluff, or whether Payne actually was a pulp fictioneer?
