'Parade' Celebrates Valentine's Day With Our Favorite Magazine Covers, From 1943 to 2019
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Parade's cover span the silly to the sweet and enduring loves and romances that didn't last.
With Valentine’s Day here, we took a look at romance through the ages via Parade’s cover vault. It was notable that the sweet, silly covers of the 1940s (hearts and malts and kisses in the hay) soon gave way to more serious examinations of what is love. In fact, the magazine hired no less than controversial author Erica Jong to predict who would be the heartthrob of the '80s. And when it comes to coupledom, the magazine has featured more than a few—from devoted lovers Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner and Princess Grace and Prince Rainier III to many couples who wouldn’t last. Marriage in Hollywood turns out to be quite the challenge.
The two youngsters on this Parade cover were enjoying to the fullest one of those rare thrills that come once in a lifetime—sharing their first kiss. Or, rather, the little girl is giving her first and Freckleface is receiving his, Parade reported. The photograph was snapped by Roy Pinney, who said the kids were unaware they had an audience, back in a time when that wasn't considered to be pervy.
What looks like a charming cover celebrating young sweethearts was not so sweet. The two on the cover had better be home before nine o'clock if they're in any one of hundreds of American towns today, Parade warned in a story inside. "The old-time curfew is making a come-back as a result of wartime juvenile delinquency," Parade reported.
“She was the first girl I had ever taken out steady,” Curtis, then 29, told Parade about Leigh. “She was beautiful—not just on the outside. I knew this was the girl I wanted to marry.” And they did in 1951, after a whirlwind six-month courtship. “We get along well because we like the same things,” Curtis reported. “Especially food. Janet makes the best salami sandwiches you ever ate. Also, we have a firm rule: never criticize each other’s acting!” Curtis and Leigh divorced in 1962 after having two kids (Kelly and Jamie). He went on to marry five more times; Leigh was married a total of four times.
Parade visited with the former Hollywood star on the eve of her fifth anniversary with Prince Rainier. “I want you to put it all on the record,” Kelly told Parade. “I married for love, and I’m still in love.” It was much easier to be a movie star than to be a working royal, the now mother of two said. “People think I lie around on a chaise lounge eating grapes, but my job here is the hardest I’ve had and the most complicated.” If her job is complicated, her marriage is simple: “The Prince is very much the European husband. His word is law. And I think it’s a better matrimonial system than the American partnership idea.”
The lei hanging off this guy’s arm on our Parade cover is the giveaway. He’s a professional “Lei Greeter of Hawaii,” a profession that had seen bachelor Peter S. Fithian smooch more than 38,000 women in the six years he’d been in business. “Those first minutes in Hawaii can be magical if the greeting is properly handled,” he said. “People all over the world have heard of the lei, the kiss, the warm welcome. My job is to see they get it.”
In late 1969, Tiny Tim (Herbert Buckingham Khaury), then 38, made quite the scene. The singer, best known for his ukulele playing, high falsetto and amusing songs like “Tiptoe Through the Tulips With Me,” had gotten married on The Johnny Carson Show in front of 45 million viewers. When Parade questioned his 17-year-old bride “Miss Vicki” about their honeymoon, their agent interrupted and said, “I guarantee that Miss Vicki will be pregnant before the year is out. Beneath his falsetto, Tiny is really a tiger.” Indeed Miss Vicki (Victoria Budinger) gave birth to their daughter Tulip Victoria in 1971. She and Tiny Tim divorced three years later.
Film star Ernest Effron Borgnino (Ernest Borgnine to you and me) was doing promotion for his latest film, The Poseidon Adventure, in 1973. What did the press want to talk about? His recent marriage to his fifth wife. Borgnine may have won an Academy Award for his performance in Marty and was beloved in TV’s McHale’s Navy (1962–66), but to hear his first four wives tell it, he would win a “best husband” award. (He did stay married to his fifth wife until his death in 2012.)
After “the world’s greatest athlete” (according to Parade) won at the 1976 Summer Olympics, life wasn’t the same for the Jenner couple. “Sometimes,” lamented Chrystie, who’d worked as a flight attendant to help support her partner during training, “I would give my eyeteeth to be back where we were” before the win. The father of six children would divorce three wives before coming out as transgender and transitioning to Caitlyn Jenner in 2015.
Erica Jong of Fear of Flying fame (Parade called it “a lusty novel about women’s sexual fantasies”) mused on what the heartthrob of the 1980s would look and act like. John Travolta, JFK, Al Pacino? She predicted he’d be a cross between the '60s beatnik and the '70s New Sensitive Male; “a questioner of authority, yet a staunch supporter of women’s rights. He’ll save the whale, the seal, the child, the family, God and the underdog—at the same time baking his own bread…and making love like the new, sensitive heartthrob that he is.”
Parade asked Mary Morgan, 40, the wife of Dr. Benjamin Spock, 81—author of Baby and Child Care and an untiring political activist—what it is like to be married to a man deeply committed to his causes. “I love to hear Ben speak. I sit in the front row and spring to my feet with a standing ovation. In fact, that’s how I first fell in love with Ben in 1975, in Little Rock, Arkansas. I loved him first as a teacher, then as a lover. He came out on stage, big and tall, speaking with great assurance. He spoke about living cooperatively rather than competitively, of living more simply in brotherly love. His words of hope and compassion were so nurturing to me; it was as if I had been longing to hear those words all my life. I fall in love with him each time I hear him speak.” Spock and Morgan were married for 22 years. When asked about their 41-year age difference, she would say, “We’re both 16!”
Partners in work and life, funnywoman Tomlin and writer Wagner were the stars of Broadway in 1986 with their show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. The duo had paid their dues as struggling actors for years, with Wagner transitioning to writing songs and stories that came to the attention of Tomlin. It all paid off with the one-woman show co-written by Tomlin and Wagner that won Tomlin a Tony for Lead Actress in a Play. Together more than 50 years, Wagner and Tomlin were married in 2013.
L.A. Law was a huge hit in 1987, with Eikenberry and Tucker playing lawyers deep in an opposites-attract romance, when Parade spoke to them. Her character was tall and aggressive and his was short and shy. Married in real life, the actors wanted to set the record straight. “See, I’m not as short as I seem,” the 5 feet 5 ½ inch Tucker told Parade, standing up very straight next to Eikenberry’s 5 feet 7 inches. “On the show, Jill wears very high heels, and they shoot down at us. So I look as if I barely reach her chin.” The show’s romance had re-lit their own, they said. “Not that it was dead before,” Tucker said. “It’s just that we’re given all these wonderful new lines to express what we’ve often felt about each other.”
Academy Award winner Tandy (Driving Miss Daisy, 1990) and Cronyn were celebrating 47 years of marriage when Parade interviewed the acting royalty. “I was in love right away,” Cronyn said. “Well, he grew on me,” Tandy told Parade. “And grew and grew,” he added. They were married in 1942. The secret of their marriage? “Hell, there’s no secret,” Cronyn said. “We genuinely like to be together!” In the past few years, Tandy said, she’d been especially happy. “I love you, and I’m happy to greet the day and be with you. When you’re young, you don’t think like that, because you take it for granted. Oh, it’s so wonderful to be able to feel that now!”
After two failed marriages, the famous host of American Bandstand (for 33 years) found love with his assistant Kari Wigton, whom he married in 1977 after living together for seven years. In 1991, Clark, 61, was still flashing his famous smile and involved in radio shows and TV specials, including Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.
Reynolds, 56, was starring in a CBS series called Evening Shade and had been in a relationship for 11 years with Loni Anderson, then 46, of WKRP in Cincinnati fame. He told Parade that his reputation as a womanizer was very unfair. “I’ve done almost 50 movies—I’ve had relationships with four actresses,” he said somewhat defensively. “And it’s always been one woman at a time!” Anderson and Reynolds pray every night, he said. “We thank the Lord that we have each other and have this beautiful son.” Two years later, they divorced.
Wondering where “tie the knot” came from? In this article about marriage rituals, Parade reported the expression dated back to Roman times, when the bride wore a girdle secured by a knot—which the groom then had the fun of untying.
Murphy at 35 was about to star in The Nutty Professor and was living happily in New Jersey with wife, Nicole Mitchell, 28, a former model whom he married in 1993. They shared three children, Bira, Myles and Shane. “We’re just a boring couple,” Murphy told Parade. “My home life is normal. The only way you can stay in touch with real emotions is to have a real life.” Murphy met Mitchell in 1988 at a lunch where Jesse Jackson was speaking. “We had two kids before we got married,” he said. “I wasn’t ready for marriage. She never pressured me. We both loved the babies and got closer and closer. We got married because we wanted to.” The couple divorced in 2016.
“She was always the woman I loved,” Brooks, then 44, said on this cover of Parade. He and the country star had married that year after nearly 20 years of being married to other people and unrequited love. Brooks had proposed in front of 7,000 fans at Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, California.
Parade breaks down what the Greeks called “the madness of the gods” (otherwise known as love) into chemicals and brainwaves. Finding monogamy difficult (as so many Hollywood couples do)? There’s a reason for that. Need a sure-fire fix for a broken heart? Parade had that figured out too.
What happens when the woman with the highest record IQ marries the man who invented the artificial heart? They go ballroom dancing! That’s the romantic habit of Parade’s resident genius Marilyn vos Savant and her hubs, Robert Jarvik.
In a feature about the popularity of the Hallmark Channel and TV romances, Candace Cameron Bure (then of Hallmark fame; now with GAC), offered some advice for sweethearts. Rule no. 1: “Don’t stuff yourself at dinner so that you’re too full to get physical after (story of my life!).”
“I was a hedonist when I met Megan,” Offerman, 48, told Parade. “I was smoking a lot of tobacco and I was drinking a lot. Just by nature of coexisting with her it was obviously like, ‘Oh, if you want this relationship to last, you really to clean up your act—because your kind of a stinky hog-like human.’ I feel like I was partly looking for this relationship because it saved my life,” he said. “We just said it on the phone the other night," Mullally 60, said. “Love has saved us.” They were married in 2003.
Who doesn’t love Winkler, who at 73 had won an Emmy for his performance in Barry. His love for life shone during this Parade interview. Family is everything to Winkler, who referred to his clan as “very close, a lot of fun, chaotic,” and something that he “can’t breathe without.” He and wife Stacey Weitzman had been married for 40 years. (They met in a clothing store where she was working and Winkler came in to buy a coat.) The secret to their longevity is listening, he said. “I think the center of all relationships is the ear; no other part of the body is as important.”
Their love is a case of opposites attract, the couple told Parade, claiming that in spite of their love, they agree on “almost nothing.” “When we walk down the street and we pass someone, my first thought is, This guy’s gonna try to take my wallet,” Shepard said. “Kristen’s first thought is, That guy might cure cancer.”
The couple who’d been together since 2004, had twins in 2010 and wed in 2014 still had plenty of reasons why they loved each other. “Neil’s sense of humor…also, his eyes are beautiful,” Burtka said. “We really have fun just laughing through life.” Harris’s favorite thing about Burtka was his smile. “Yes, he can cook. And yes, he can throw a party. And yes, he’s an amazing dad. And yes, he can dance…and he can sing better than most. But just look at those pearly whites.”
“I thought she was way out of my league,” astronaut Mark Kelly told Parade about then-congresswoman Gabby Giffords. But a friendship bloomed; they emailed and chatted on the phone. Their first date: Giffords asked Kelly to come with her to see death row at the Arizona State Prison. Giffords was smitten. “I remember Gabby telling me she met this fellow, and then she giggled,” says Robert Reich, former labor secretary and a close family friend who gave a blessing at the couple’s wedding in 2007. “I said, ‘He must be tall and dark and very handsome,’ and she laughed and said, ‘No. He’s short and bald, and I love him.’”
Related: 40 of Our Favorite Parade Covers From the Past 80 Years
